Utopia one runs away from: theories of cultural crisis and their reflections in the novel "Placebas" by Jurgita Ivanauskaitė

In this article the author explores the utopian nature of the Enlightenment project and highlights some of the project’s cultural contradictions, notably the intense development of material, external culture and its controversial impact upon individual consciousness. These questions surface in the works by J. J. Rousseau, G. Simmel, O. Spenger, J. Ortega y Gasset and many other theorists, yet the fundamental critique of the Enlightenment and its discontents was developed in mid-twentieth century by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school. Th. Adorno, M. Horkheimer and H. Marcuse, among others, have argued that the idea of instrumental rationality, inherited from the Enlightenment, has turned into stupefying, deceptive culture industries and mindless consumerism that inevitably lead to the decline of human subjectivity. Utopia becomes a nightmare; the accompanying fear of inhuman, totalitarian societies where everyone is instrumentally happy was well expressed by A. Huxley in his Brave New World, also A. Burgess’ Mechanical Orange, G. Orwell’s 1984 and other works of literature. Yet in Lithuania, after the collapse of the Soviet system in 1990, the socially constructed utopian vision of the Western world was predominant in both literature and public discourse. “The West” stood as the role model for future development and thus its legacy was hardly questioned. Issues brought to the forefront by some Western critical theorists were not broadly debated in Lithuania. They were, however, invoked and represented by Jurga Ivanauskaitė in the narrative Placebo, in 2003. The fundamental critique of post-industrial consumer society unfolds in this work along lines similar to those of critical theory, touching upon such issues as imperatives of consumption, manipulation of human consciousness, false needs and artificially incited desires. The work highlights new hegemonic forms of domination in a society governed by an unknown rational instrumental force, presumably capital, that offers no possibility of resistance. The book represents a case of belated criticism informed by dramatic experiences: a former utopia, now experienced directly, turns into a disguise