Abstract

The paper examines the precise measure in which Bakhtin's carnivalesque can be said to be on the rise in the present day. It critically examines the way in which modern democracy and consumer-oriented capitalism can be said to »fulfill the utopia« enacted in carnival and compares it to the way, in which great totalitarian systems like Nazism or Stalinism claimed to have been doing precisely that. It concludes arguing for carnival utopia as strictly imaginary, as meant to be lived as a picture, thus waving aside the need for its »social realization« as irrelevant. It also concludes by rooting for a carnivalisation of consciousness that could disperse the divide between the private and the common, determining modern society, as well as the divide between the real and the imaginary, defining modern ontology, and thus form a world of living pictures and a sociality that spans the space occupied by »unofficial popularity« of Bakhtin's conception