I recently mentioned Stephen Duncombe’s book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy in a post about Carrotmob. I noted that Dream considers lessons that progressives can glean from mass culture and commercial spectacles, including video games, Las Vegas, and celebrity-dominated media, but I didn’t give much of a sense of Duncombe’s book. Fortunately, Joe sent me a link to a video that he found in which Duncombe presents some of the key points of Dream and responds to questions about his ideas. I found Dream to be an eye-opener when I read it several months ago, as it took progressive values and studies of mass culture and narrative in exciting new directions. A number of my colleagues at the Rockridge Institute also found it to be full of promise.

Duncombe’s presentation begins at around the 4 minute mark and ends at around 31 minutes. The production quality of this video is, er, lacking, just about the polar opposite of the Muhammad Yunus video that Joe posted yesterday. There is a lot of background noise at times, but I still found it well worth watching.

An important part of Duncombe’s presentation is about finding spectacle and myths in unexpected places. At around the 11 minute mark, Duncombe considers the narrative of a McDonald’s ad and the fantasies it evokes. Duncombe argues that progressives should think about what commercial spectacle speaks to and find meaningful ways to speak to the same desires. The McDonald’s ad shows a father taking his daughter out for a perfect day at the zoo. In order to sell burgers, the ad evokes a parental fantasy of having plenty of leisure time to spend with one’s child in a beautiful setting. But Duncombe argues that progressives are the ones who are really able to realize such dreams through policies that promote a better quality of life with greater rights for workers and investments in public spaces that all can enjoy. McDonald’s sells the dream, while progressives typically devote much of their efforts to demanding a restoration of what conservative policies have taken away. As Duncombe notes in his book, progressives often do this in a rationalist way that presents facts without explicit values, emotional appeals, or compelling narratives.

I would argue that much of Duncombe’s thinking also applies to community entrepreneurship. When I listen to Green 960 in San Francisco, some of the commercials I hear are for businesses that tout their support of progressive causes, but still delineate their benefits through rationalist appeals. (”Slash your energy bills by X% with new windows/solar panels/appliances today!”) McDonald’s didn’t build one of the world’s most recognized brands by simply telling consumers how much time and money they could save by eating there; they did it largely by selling dreams. Progressives can do this with more legitimacy when our endeavors are designed to help realize the dreams that people share, such as fostering a clean, secure environment, instead of selling cheap hamburgers.

Toward the end of his presentation, Duncombe adds an important caveat about the power of dreams. At approximately the 29 minute mark, he argues that the most powerful dreams are those that cannot be realized. Dreams that can be attained face three troubling possibilities:

1. They can be attained (leading to the end of a movement or other endeavor).
2. They can falsely be alleged to have been attained.
3. They can lead to disillusionment when there is a failure to attain what had seemed readily achievable.

As an example, Duncombe gives Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Reverend Billy engages in a transparent spectacle that promotes an unrealizable dream. The spectacle is transparent because it is ultimately evident to all that “Reverend Billy” is not really a minister — he’s a performer and activist named Bill Talen who adopted the persona in part to challenge the dominance of chain stores. The dream he presents of no longer succumbing to the lure of commercial culture is unattainable, if we take it as an absolute injunction. (Duncombe notes that Bill Talen himself sells merchandise on his website.) But this unattainable dream can lead us to challenge ourselves to do more, for instance, asking for fair trade products and favoring local alternatives to the multinational chains. To Duncombe, a dream that can never be attained has the power to endure as a goal to be pursued.

Evan

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