Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope

Ernst Bloch - Who was he and Key Contribution: The Principle of Hope ● Historical materialism and Utopia ● Hope and desire in everyday life ● Not-Yet and Revolution I. Introduction Ernst Bloch is an ambivalent figure in the tradition of critical theory. He was never a member of the Frankfurt School, and his fidelity to the idea of utopia (the dream of an ideal society or a perfect state of humanity), which he doggedly maintained despite the atrocities committed in its name set him apart both politically and philosophically from many of his contemporaries.1 Yet Bloch nevertheless made a bold and original contribution to critical theory in the twentieth century. No other thinker went so far in insisting on the continued importance of hope and optimism in defiance of disaster. When Adorno claimed that Bloch was ‘one of the very few philosophers who does not recoil in fear from the idea of a world without domination and hierarchy’, (cf. Geoghegan, 1996: 162) he acknowledged the courage Bloch showed in defending utopia’s promises despite its many dangers. Adorno was one of many critical thinkers on whom Bloch’s work made a lasting impact. In the 1970s, he claimed that Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (2000 [1918]) had made such a significant impression on him when he read it as a young man, that he had never written anything since then that did not refer to it (Adorno, 1992: 212). Meanwhile, when Walter Benjamin read the book in 1919 he insisted that, despite its deficiencies, it was the sole work by which he could take his own measure philosophically (Benjamin, 1994: 148). In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin maintained that Bloch was the only one of his contemporaries whose work was not ‘derivative and adulterated’, thus acknowledging the extraordinary force and originality that continues to make Bloch a compelling, if sometimes exasperating thinker (ibid.). 1 That Bloch failed to secure a position at the Institute for Social Research during his time in exile in the USA was largely due to irreconcilable political and theoretical differences with Max Horkheimer, for whom he was ‘too communist’, and Theodor Adorno, who objected to what he saw as Bloch’s ‘irresponsible philosophical improvisation’ (Geoghegan, 1996: 19; cf. Schmieder, 2012: 133). 1 This chapter begins by situating Bloch’s life and work in the context of a twentieth century dominated for good and for ill by the pursuit of utopias. It then explores Bloch’s key contribution to critical theory, The Principle of Hope (1986), as an attempt to fuse the twin traditions of utopianism and Marxism more tightly than ever before. It concludes by considering some key criticisms of Bloch, and reflecting on his significance today. The chapter argues that although Bloch was on the margins of the Frankfurt School, his speculative materialism remains central to critical theory’s attempt to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them (cf. Horkheimer, 2008). II. Life and work Until not long before Bloch was born on 8 July, 1885, in the industrial port town of Ludwigshafen am Rhein, the German nation itself had been a utopia: a cultural ideal that existed in the mind but was nowhere to be found on a map. In 1795, Goethe and Schiller, who wrote in high German but spoke disparate dialects and were born as citizens of independent states, were still able to ask, ironically, ‘Germany? But where is it? I know not where to find such a country. Where the learned begins, the political ends’. With the foundation of the German Reich in 1871, increasing German unity at the cultural level was translated into a political reality, and German history became a space in which various attempts to realise utopia would be played out. Bloch lived through much of that history, and his life and work bear witness to the magnificent promises and catastrophic failures of the utopian dream. The world into which Bloch was born was in the grip of rapid change. The rise of industrial capitalism in Imperial Germany had brought prosperity to many, and misery to many more. Nowhere was this contrast more apparent than in the glaring difference in living standards between the workers’ town of Ludwigshafen and the more affluent Mannheim across the bridge. Liberal social reforms had ensured Jewish families like Bloch’s rights and opportunities they had never enjoyed before, but it had come at a price: thorough cultural assimilation, which, however, did nothing to offset 2 increasing anti-Semitism among those resentful of the newly found wealth and social standing of many Jews. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Bloch was disappointed to see German nationalism on display among Jews, including his former teacher Georg Simmel, with whom Bloch broke after Simmel donned the uniform of an imperial reserve officer. Like many of his generation, Bloch believed that an apocalyptic renewal was needed to secure humanity’s salvation from what G.W.F. Hegel (2007: 21), one of Bloch’s most important philosophical influences, once called the slaughter-bench of history. Yet unlike some of his contemporaries, Bloch did not see war as the solution: while in exile in Switzerland after 1917, he moved in pacifist circles and wrote anti-nationalist opinion pieces in the émigré press. Bloch looked to Russia and the promise of socialist revolution as the foundation of a new society, though the utopian future he envisaged was not one cut off from tradition. His first major published work, Spirit of Utopia, combined the romantic force of German expressionism with a brand of Marxism that emphasised Christian values. It advocated a utopian fusion of art and life in order to overcome alienation, though it was an art that valorised craft and ornament over the minimalism of modernist design. If Bloch sought to mobilise folk culture in the service of social emancipation, he nevertheless vehemently opposed the völkisch nationalist ideas that nourished the growth of fascism in Weimar Germany. In his 1919 pamphlet, Vademecum für heutige Demokraten (cf. Bloch, 1985: 475-531), Bloch called to the like-minded among his generation to oppose the reactionary forces that would, he was sure, unleash fresh disaster in Europe if the last vestiges of the agrarian Prussian military regime were not dismantled. He predicted that, failing a ‘social revolution of the heart’ (Bloch, 1985: 404), chimerical notions of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ would be triumphant (527), and advocated the establishment of a ‘fully realised moral world parliament’ to facilitate ‘reconciliation’ between Germany and the rest of the world (521). Bloch’s predictions were prescient. As fascist ideas took hold during the 1920s and 30s, he watched in frustration as the German left seemed 3 capable of talking only in numbers and figures while the fascists appealed to hearts and minds by appropriating the messianic language of Reich and Führer. In Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (1969 [1921]), Bloch sought an example for the modern left in the history of the radical current of the Reformation, an event he saw as representing a foundational split in Germany’s pre-history between revolutionary and reactionary tendencies. Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1985a [1935]) developed this idea further with a critique of National Socialism that explained its rise partly in terms of a fundamental non-synchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) between different sectors of modern society. Bloch identified the Nazis’ uncanny ability to fuse the values and symbols of a traditional, pre-capitalist way of life with those of a modern, technologized industrial society as a defining factor in their appeal. Soon after Hitler came to power, a warrant was issued for Bloch’s arrest, and in 1934 he and his wife, Polish architect Karola Piotrkowska, went into exile. They fled first to Paris, then to Prague, then finally in 1938 to the United States, where they remained for 11 years. It was here that Bloch wrote The Principle of Hope, a phenomenological exploration of what he called our ‘anticipatory consciousness’: an awareness of the possibility of a different, better world, so often the subject of art and religion, but which Bloch also glimpsed in everyday life, from the utopia of romantic love to the pursuit of advances in medicine. The ‘principle of hope’ means seeing in things as seemingly banal as the fairground or the lottery the longing for something more, even if their utopian promise remains abstract. The ‘American Dream’ – ‘To each his chicken in the pot and two cars in the garage’ – was thus for Bloch also a ‘revolutionary dream’ (Bloch, 1985: 35), though it was far from the utopia he sought. ‘In America’, Bloch would later claim, ‘millionaires begin washing dishes, while philosophers finish up doing it’ (cf. Zudeick, 1987: 352), his irony barely concealing a certain contempt for a society which, in his view, mistakenly valued monetary wealth above culture and ideas. Unable to speak English, Bloch led an isolated life in the USA, though his isolation was undoubtedly somewhat cultivated: he longed for the language and traditions of his homeland or Heimat, a figure which was elevated in The Principle of Hope to the utopian symbol par excellence. 4 It was particularly fortuitous, therefore, when in 1949 Bloch was offered a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Leipzig in the newly established East German state. As he reported to the Party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August that year, Bloch was initially full of enthusiasm for the project of building a socialist utopia on German soil. However, the honeymoon period did not last long. Bloch’s choice to teach ‘bourgeois’ philosophy in Leipzig was a political decision in a context in which philosophy itself had become an ideological battleground. Bloch’s insistence on the importance of Marxism’s Hegelian legacy made him a subversive figure. Following the publication of his book Subjekt Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel in 1951 (Bloch, 1969a), a debate erupted that would eventually see him forced to step down from his position. With Bloch accused of revisionism by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht, his students were openly harassed, and his publications blocked. Following his address to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, in which he called on the SED government to abandon the Soviet Union’s Stalinist education policy and promote academic freedom, Bloch’s position as a critic of the GDR regime was beyond doubt. In December 1957 he was summoned before a tribunal where his philosophy was denounced as un-Marxist, and he himself was declared unfit to teach. It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Blochs were visiting West Germany in 1961, and they heard the news that a wall had been erected overnight in Berlin, they decided to seek asylum in the Federal Republic. In his inaugural lecture as honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen, Bloch, now 76, admitted that his hope in the GDR had been ‘disappointed’ (cf. Bloch, 1998: 339-345). Unfettered by the constraints of (self-)censorship, in Tübingen Bloch’s critique of the East became more explicit; later he would claim that ‘those who are now jumping over the wall from East to West Berlin are truly making a leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom’ (Traub and Wieser, 1975: 20). However, the disappointment of hope was not sufficient reason, Bloch argued, to give up on socialist ideals altogether. Until the end of his life, he continued to campaign tirelessly for social justice and freedom of speech, and against fascism and war. With 5 long experience as one of last remaining of the pre-1918 generation, Bloch was active during the student-led unrest of 1968 in Germany, aligned with figures like Rudi Dutschke, and with something of a cult profile himself. Just two weeks before he died at home aged 92 on 4 August, 1977, he wrote a letter to the German anti-nuclear lobby which described the neutron bomb as ‘one of the greatest perversions that human beings have ever created’ (Zudeick, 1987: 310). Bloch never lived to see the ‘end of history’, but even if he had, it is unlikely it would have shaken his faith in utopia: in its critical power to shine a light on the deficiencies of the present state of things, and in its ability to inspire us to fight for something better. III. Key contribution: The Principle of Hope The Principle of Hope is undoubtedly Bloch’s best-known work, in which the fullest expression of his utopianism can be found. Written between 1938 and 1947, and published in three-volumes in 1954, 1955 and 1959, this ‘encyclopaedia of hopes’ (17) attempts to archive the many manifestations of utopian longing, from our efforts at ‘making ourselves more beautiful than we are’ (339), to our religious dreams of everlasting life. Yet this is more than a mere catalogue of wishes great and small. In the spirit of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Voltaire, The Principle of Hope attempts to ‘change the way people think’ about utopia in three main ways: first, Bloch reconceptualises utopia as a drive or tendency within the fabric of reality itself towards the achievement of ultimate perfection. Second, he argues that human culture is both a product of this tendency, and can be used to read and realise the world’s latent potentials. Finally, Bloch maintains that by activating the unfulfilled claims of the past in this way, we can work towards creating a future of peace, plenty, and harmony with nature. Historical materialism and utopia The relationship between historical materialism and utopia is complex and contradictory. In many ways, historical materialism – a theory based on the idea that class conflict is the prime motor of historical change – is the utopian theory par excellence. The materialist conception of history, as its originators Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called it, emerged at the end of a process 6 that Bloch called the ‘transformation of the [utopian] topos from space into time’ (Bloch, 1988: 3). During the period from approximately 1750 to 1850, which historian Reinhart Koselleck (2005) has dubbed the Sattelzeit (saddletime), a series of revolutionary changes unsettled the classical European idea that the future would always look more or less like the past. Industrialization, secularization, the French revolution, scientific discovery, and the emergence of a public sphere, by means of which awareness of the cultures of the ‘New World’ also spread, combined to produce the idea of a new time, in which history was moving towards the goal of human perfection. Under the pressure of this historical transformation, the early modern spatial utopias of figures like Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon gave way to temporal utopias, in which a perfect society was no longer imagined as existing on an undiscovered island, but rather in the future. The first example of a futuristic utopia in literature is Louis Sebastian Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, published in 1770, the same year Cook explored the east coast of Australia, heralding the limits of European expansionism. Its nameless protagonist dreams of a future Paris that is spatially continuous with the one Mercier inhabited, but in which the injustices he perceived in his own time have been eradicated. Such visions were mirrored in the progressive philosophies of history that also emerged during the Sattelzeit, of which historical materialism can be seen as perhaps the most encompassing and sophisticated. After all, one of its central claims is that by establishing communism through revolutionary class struggle, human beings can create a society that is equal, just, and free to a far greater extent than is the case in capitalist societies. Yet Marx and Engels explicitly contrasted the materialist conception of history, which they also called ‘scientific socialism’, with the ‘utopian socialism’ of some of their near-contemporaries, reformers such as Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, who, they claimed, attempted to build model societies based on their own abstract, personal visions, rather than the careful analysis of actual conditions and possibilities. In The Communist Manifesto (1976 [1848]), Marx and Engels conceded that 7 because the utopian socialists had perceived class antagonisms and attacked the miserable status quo, many valuable insights were to be gained from them. However, at the time utopian socialism emerged, they argued, the proletariat was not sufficiently developed to be a credible force for social change. This meant that the utopian socialists had confined themselves to small-scale experiments, which ended up reproducing rather than revolutionising oppressive social relations. Marx and Engels aimed to go beyond utopian socialism by providing the critical tools with which to transform society on a grand scale. If the materialist conception of history thus originally contained both utopian and anti-utopian elements, it was above all anti-utopianism that prevailed in its reception in both the Soviet and Western Marxist traditions. Soviet Marxists typically saw themselves as the legitimate heirs to the legacy of scientific socialism, and branded their opponents, Bloch included, pejoratively as utopians. Meanwhile, critical thinkers in the West also maintained that social change could only be brought about by sober critique, and largely rejected utopianism as impractical at best and dangerous at worst. Bloch’s utopianism met with resistance even among his Frankfurt School contemporaries, whose concern with developing a critical theory aimed at the ‘emancipation and […] alteration of society as a whole’ (Horkheimer, 2002: 208), made them largely amenable to the idea of utopia. The relationship between Bloch’s and Adorno’s positions is particularly interesting in this respect. For both thinkers, the ultimate or total perspective characteristic of utopian thinking is in fact implied in all critical thought. In an interview with Adorno in 1964, Bloch explained this idea as follows: ‘every criticism of imperfection […] already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for, a possible perfection’ (Bloch, 1988: 16). Adorno’s claim that Bloch comes close to the ‘ontological proof of God’ here was not a dismissal. Rather, he argues that were there ‘no kind of trace of truth’ in the ontological argument, ‘there could not only be no utopia but there could also not be any thinking’ (ibid.). Like Bloch, Adorno saw utopianism as 8 the outcome of thought’s perpetual adumbration of a totality to which it has no empirical access. The fundamental agreement between Bloch and Adorno that utopia’s key function is its capacity for critique was derived from the shared influence of Jewish messianism on their thinking. As Scholem (1976: 287) acknowledged, Bloch and Adorno were among those ‘ideologists of revolutionary messianism’ in whose work ‘acknowledged or unacknowledged ties to their Jewish heritage’ were evident. Both were what Russell Jacoby (2007: 35) has called ‘iconoclastic utopians’, in the sense that they were influenced by the Jewish prohibition on graven images of a divine, ultimate or highest good, even if they themselves conceived this good in secular terms. Adorno’s commitment to the ban on images of utopia remained more rigorous than Bloch’s, however. For while Adorno argued that ‘[o]ne may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner’, Bloch (1988: 11) insisted on the need to ‘cast a picture’ of utopia, which he saw as partly coming into being through its portrayal. Such an idea was antithetical to Adorno, whose fidelity to the image ban was motivated by his concern to avoid the kind of aberrant politics that has historically followed from ‘blueprint utopianism’ (cf. Jacoby 2007; Truskolaski 2014). It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the one moment in which it becomes possible, perhaps even necessary, for Adorno to cast a picture of utopia is in the context of class struggle. The tipping point is reached at a moment in the discussion with Bloch when the pair discusses the possibility of proletarian revolution (Bloch, 1988: 13), and Adorno finds himself assuming ‘the unexpected role of attorney for the positive’. If the prospect of revolution, Adorno concedes, cannot ‘appear within one’s grasp’, then ‘one basically does not know at all what the actual reason for the totality is, why the entire apparatus has been set in motion’ (ibid.). Here Adorno’s commitment to social transformation comes up against the limits of his relentless negativity. Herbert Marcuse acknowledged this problem explicitly in 1979 when he outlined what he saw as the value of Bloch’s utopianism vis-à-vis Adorno’s 9 negative dialectics. According to Marcuse, Bloch had ‘noticed that mere negation in the present world can lose its critical strength’ (Marcuse, 2014: 421). Marcuse saw Bloch as the ‘real Marxist of the twentieth century’ precisely because he ‘could see in Marxism more than political orientation’, and more than only ruthless critique (422). For Bloch, utopia was essential to historical materialism as a theory that ‘posits the transformation of the world from within itself’ (1986: 267). As he writes in The Principle of Hope, historical materialism allows us to envisage the real, historical possibility of creating ‘another world beyond hardship’ (267), a ‘real democracy’, ‘beyond expropriation and alienation’, in which human beings can live in harmony with each other, and with their environment (1376). To achieve this, Bloch believed that more than analysis and critique were needed. He distinguished between what he called the ‘cold stream’ of Marxism, concerned with the ‘unmasking of ideologies’ and the ‘disenchantment of metaphysical illusion’, and the warm stream, which he described as the ‘liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken’ (209). Bloch saw both analysis and vision as necessary for social and political emancipation, but argued that the warm stream of Marxism had been historically neglected. He saw utopianism as belonging to that warm stream, and set himself the task of revitalizing it. Yet Bloch’s understanding of utopia also went much further than anything to be found in Marx. Indeed, Bloch saw utopian theory and revolutionary action as manifestations of a more encompassing phenomenon: a drive within the world itself towards the realisation of utopia on a cosmic scale. The scope and substance of Bloch’s vision prompted Jürgen Habermas (1969) to describe him in a critical review of The Principle of Hope as a ‘Marxist Schelling’, and not entirely without cause: what Habermas dubbed Bloch’s ‘speculative materialism’ (323) combines a Romantic philosophy of nature with Aristotelian categories of possibility and Hegelian dialectics in a theory 10 whose central premise is that the ‘world-process itself is a utopian function with the matter of the objectively Possible as its substance’ (177).2 For Bloch, material reality is utopian in the sense of being literally not (yet) ‘there’ in a finished form. Drawing on Schelling’s concept of the ‘eternal urge and primal ground of all creation’ (1988: 273), which paradoxically unites nature and freedom, Bloch (306) posits the ontological incompleteness of a reality produced by a ‘Not with which everything starts up and begins, around which every Something is still built’ (cf. Žižek 2012). As both a ‘lack of Something and also escape from this lack’, the Not initiates a ‘driving towards what is missing’, or what is ‘not yet’ in the world. ‘Not-yetness’ thus becomes for Bloch the motive force of a materialist process ontology in which matter is no ‘mechanical lump’ (1371), but rather a dynamic material process that tends towards the realization of possibilities latent in its capacity. Bloch’s concept of matter derives its dynamism from its dialectical construction. Like Hegel and Marx, Bloch understood dialectics as the method of development through contradiction. Yet if for Hegel dialectics described a process that takes place primarily at the logical or discursive level, and for Marx at the socio-historical level, Bloch followed Engels in conceiving of the material world itself as dialectically constructed. He drew on Aristotelian categories of possibility and entelechy to develop a concept of matter with two complementary and contradictory aspects. On the one hand, Bloch’s matter is ‘What-Is-in-possibility, i.e. the real substratum of possibility in the dialectical process’; this is the subjective factor in matter, something akin to Schelling’s ‘subject of nature’, an unconscious yet constitutive driving force that generates, produces, and creates. On the other hand, his matter is ‘What-Is-according-to possibility, i.e. that which is defined in terms of conditions by what is in each case capable of appearing historically’ (1371). This corresponds to the limits or conditions matter creates for itself in the process of its self-realization. Bloch’s concept thus maps onto the Spinozist 2 Habermas’ article was originally published as ‘Ein marxistischer Schelling: Zu Ernst Blochs spekulativem Materialismus’ in Merkur (1960), Vol. 153, 1078-1091. 11 distinction between subjective and objective nature, or natura naturans and natura naturata, which Schelling would later take up in his nature philosophy (cf. Schelling 1988: 50). Bloch conceptualized human subjectivity, and the historical struggle for freedom and equality, as emerging from this dialectical struggle within unstable matter towards a state of possible self-identity. He thus integrates the Marxist project to create a classless society into a much more comprehensive cosmology, in which the potential goal is what the young Marx once described as the ‘naturalization of man and humanization of nature’ (cf. Bloch, 1986: 313). Bloch captures this enigmatic idea in the figure of Heimat, in which The Principle of Hope culminates (1376). Heimat is a complex concept, which also underwent radical change during the Sattelzeit (cf. Bastian, 1995). Originally referring to a person’s place of origin, or to an inheritable estate, under the pressure of industrialization and dislocation in the Germanspeaking territories during the nineteenth century, Heimat began to connote an idealized past of childhood innocence and rural idyll. Romantic writers, such as Novalis and Hölderlin, projected fantasies of an unalienated premodernity onto the idea of Heimat, creating a complex that would (in convoluted ways and jettisoning the constituent irony the image enjoyed among the Romantics) be taken up via the völkisch movement into the blood and soil ideology of National Socialism (cf. Blickle, 2002). What distinguishes Bloch’s utopian Heimat from the völkisch myth is that he recognised that the origins we seek in nostalgic images of the past were never really there in the first place. For those who would see in Bloch an uncomplicated teleology, his use of irony here is instructive. The Principle of Hope begins with a series of questions – ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us?’ – and ends with a single word: Heimat. If there were any doubt that the meaning of the text resides in its last word, the key sentence, which stands out because it is italicised, draws our attention to the fact: ‘True genesis is 12 not at the beginning, but at the end’ (1376). Yet precisely as genesis, Heimat connotes a search for origins that have never yet truly existed. The childhood of Heimat is one in which ‘no one has yet been’, since ‘all and everything still stands before the creation of the world as a right world’ (ibid.). Thus the semantic content of the word returns us to the opening questions in a manner that recalls Austrian satirist Karl Kraus’ aphorism ‘Origin is the goal’. Bloch’s text performs both linear and cyclical movements at the formal level, puncturing any premature illusion of totality or achieved finality. Rather the ‘goal’ of origin is created in the process of working towards it. The purpose of history, according to Bloch, is to create a world in which human beings are at home in the way in which they frequently, but erroneously, imagine themselves to have been in the past. He claims this utopian dream is materially possible, not only through human practice, but because its very possibility resides in matter itself. Bloch’s vision of utopia was thus infused with the spirit of revolutionary Romanticism (cf. Löwy and Sayre, 2001), particularly in its emphasis on a possible ultimate identity between human subjects and the ‘hypothetical’ subject of nature (255). Bloch speculates that this destination can be reached because the ‘human house not only stands in history and on the foundation of human activity, it also stands above all on the foundation of a mediated natural subject [Natursubjekt] and on the building site of nature’ (290). Unlike the Romantics, however, for whom the process of history could only ever be an ‘infinite approximation’ [unendliche Annäherung] of utopia, Bloch’s Marxism encouraged him to hold open the possibility of creating a utopian Heimat in the finite realm of human history (cf. Hölderlin, 1946-1977: 558). For ‘the opposite of the infinite approximation is not in fact sheer presence’, he claims, ‘but rather [it is] the finiteness of the process and of the consequently at least surveyable anticipated distance from the goal’ (188). 3 Nevertheless, the achievement of ultimate victory remained a ‘task’ for Bloch, and thus ‘the happy present is simultaneously grasped as pledge for the future’ (ibid.). 3 Cf. Bloch 1985b: 126, where he refers to the ‘Phantom bloßer unendlicher Annäherung ans Ideal’. 13 Revolutionary politics, and cultural production and analysis, are the main means by which Bloch sees this pledge best pursued. Hope and desire in everyday life Bloch’s understanding of human history as continuous with natural history allowed him to read cultural products as the concretisation of desires that exist within the material world itself (at least insofar as they exist within us as material beings). He thus maintained a certain transitivity between the structure of matter as a creative striving organised around a central lack, and the creative subjectivity of human beings, organised around what he called the ‘darkness of the lived moment’. Already in Spirit of Utopia, Bloch articulated a theory of experience according to which human beings exist in this the darkness. ‘[W]e live [leben] ourselves’, he writes, ‘but we do not ‘experience’ [erleben] ourselves’ (191). Only through processes of memory, anticipation, and the confrontation with products of human creativity does the ‘self-encounter’ take place (7). Like Freud, Bloch believed that human culture is the result of a process through which our unconscious desires are diverted and captured (cf. Freud 1961). However, Bloch resisted the privileged place memory and repression enjoy in Freudian theory. He argued that another ‘edge’ of our unconscious becomes visible in art, which he called the not-yet-conscious in opposition to the ‘no-longer-conscious’ of psychoanalysis. The not-yet-conscious is ‘the preconscious of what is to come, the psychological birthplace of the new’ (116). However, since human consciousness and its products are part of the material world, Bloch claimed that the ‘not-yet-conscious’ desires of human beings correspond to the not-yet-realised utopian contents of the world process itself. The ‘Not-Yet-Conscious in man’, Bloch writes in The Principle of Hope, ‘belongs completely to the Not-Yet-Become, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, Manifested-Out in the world. Not-Yet-Conscious interacts and reciprocates with Not-Yet-Become, more specifically with what is approaching in history and in the world’ (13). 14 If art is the product of not-yet-conscious (as well as no-longer-conscious) desires, according to Bloch, it is also always produced under specific sociohistorical circumstances. When it came to the relation between art and society, Bloch broadly agreed with Marx’s basic insight in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, that it is ‘not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, 2010a: 263). Insofar as art is a product of social labour, which has always been divided according to interests, Bloch saw in it, too, the manifestation of ideology. Yet he resisted the reductionist reading of culture, prevalent among Soviet Marxists, according to which art and other ‘superstructural’ elements simply reflect a specific form of social relations or mode of production. Instead, Bloch understood the ‘being that conditions consciousness, and the consciousness that processes being […] ultimately only out of that and in that from which and towards which it tends’ (Bloch, 1986: 18). In other words, both social reality itself and the cultural products of that reality always contain more than simply oppression, violence, exploitation and their expression. The ‘blossoms of art, science, philosophy’, Bloch writes, ‘always denote something more than the false consciousness which each society, bound to its own position, had of itself and used for its own embellishment’ (155). Bloch calls this ‘more’ culture’s ‘utopian surplus’, and he sees it as at bottom always the same: an expression of the still unfulfilled desire for utopia, and the anticipatory consciousness of its possibility. It is thus primarily through art and culture that, according to Bloch, human beings can become conscious of that which Marx once said the world has long dreamed of possessing, even if something more than art is needed to realise that dream. In this respect, Bloch’s view of Schiller’s political aesthetics can be seen to apply equally well to his own: ‘It is utopian to wish to overcome humanity’s social fragmentation, and to restore its wholeness, by no other means than aesthetic consciousness. Yet nevertheless there is utopia, even if it is somewhat high-flown, in this idealism, and not just resignation, not just ethereal unworldliness’ (1998: 89). 15 Bloch’s interest in Schiller reflected his broader interest in the question of why some works of art speak down the ages, allowing themselves to be reinterpreted anew. For Bloch, this was not merely a matter of culture being infused with ruling-class ideas. As his friend and contemporary Walter Benjamin (2006: 392) would later put it, ‘there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’, and indeed, since utopia has never existed, all culture up to now must be understood as the product of exploitative social relations. In Bloch’s view, however, this does not prevent us from perceiving in it a utopian trace, to a degree roughly commensurate with that to which the work in question can be seen to embody the potential for the radical novelty that utopia represents. Thus although the Acropolis ‘belongs to slave-owning society, Strasbourg cathedral to feudal society’, Bloch writes, ‘as we know, they did not disappear with their social base, and they carry with them nothing deplorable, in contrast to the base, in contrast to the conditions of production at the time’ (155). What becomes visible in such artworks is not only a will-to-utopia executed by the labour of the oppressed; precisely by confronting the product of that labour, we can recognise the possibility of utopia’s very achievement. This is what makes an artwork valuable, makes it a classic, for Bloch. As he writes in The Principle of Hope, ‘[t]he classical element in every classicism…stands before each age as revolutionary Romanticism, i.e. as a task that points the way forward and as a solution that approaches from the future, not from the past, and, itself still full of future, speaks, addresses, calls us on’ (ibid.). This remains the case even in works ostensibly created by a single individual ‘genius’, since the potential achieved by one individual under circumstances favourable to their development only gives cause to wonder what would be possible if the free development of each were truly the condition for the free development of all. As Bloch puts it in the context of a discussion of the notyet-conscious, ‘Mastery in the work of genius, a mastery which is foreign to what has normally become, is also comprehensible only as a phenomenon of the 16 Novum. Every great work of art thus still remains, except for its manifest character, impelled towards the latency of the other side, i.e. towards the contents of a future which had not yet appeared in its own time, if not towards the contents of an as yet unknown final state. For this reason alone great works have something to say to all ages, a Novum pointing onward in fact, which the previous age had not yet noticed’ (127). Yet Bloch was far from seeing ‘high art’ as the exclusive province of the utopian trace. Anticipating the work of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, he also took everyday life seriously as a space worthy of consideration and critique, though unlike Lefebvre (1991), Bloch resisted the idea that the everyday has been entirely colonized by capitalism. Instead, by analysing everyday practices and objects, he sought to decode the utopian desire that can still be seen to reside there despite the dynamics of commodification. The daydream is Bloch’s point of departure for his analysis of the utopian everyday (Bloch, 1986, 77-113). Here again, he conceives of his insight into the character of the daydream as a complement to Freud’s theory of the night dream. Whereas Freud focused on the libido as the primary drive behind the nocturnal dream, Bloch sees the daydream as driven by hunger and the arising expectant emotions, including hope. Contrary to Freud, for whom the ‘night-dream is basically nothing other than a daydream which has become serviceable through the nocturnal freedom of the impulses, and distorted by the form of mental activity’, according to Bloch, daydreams ‘always come from a feeling of something lacking and they want to stop it, they are all dreams of a better life’ (87). He discerns five key features of the daydream that distinguish it from the Freudian night-dream: an active ego, manifested among other things in the ability to daydream by choice, are its first and second characteristics, the desire for world-improvement its third. The fourth characteristic of the daydream according to Bloch is the drive for completion, as opposed to the often scattered, fragmented character of the night-dream. Unlike ‘the spooks of the night’, Bloch claims, the daydream ‘has a goal and makes progress towards it’ (99). To be sure, Bloch’s 17 distinction between day and night dreams is heuristic rather than scientific: it seeks to highlight the aspects of the unconscious overlooked in Freud’s theory of dreams as expressing repressed, mostly taboo, desires. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch finds the daydream assume ‘symbolic form’ in everything from fashion to fairy tales (333). If for Marx human beings ‘begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence’, so Bloch would perpetually emphasise the significance of the creative dimension of human labour (Marx, 2010a: 31). ‘Clothes which can be chosen distinguish men from animals’, he writes, and jewellery is even older than these clothes, it sets them off even today by standing out’ (341). Even the fetishized commodity is not without its utopian promise for Bloch, for it ‘always still needs a label which praises it’, and advertising not only makes products ‘shine in the shop window’ (343), it also ‘transforms man into the most sacred thing next to private property, into the consumer’ (344). Despite his irony, Bloch’s insight reminds that even commercial products can hold out, and occasionally partly keep, a utopian promise. One might think of the way in which the mass availability of household appliances in 1950s America did in fact contribute to emancipating women from the domestic sphere, even if the tropes used to market them now appear hopelessly retrograde. If Bloch sees a kernel of utopia almost everywhere, he nevertheless distinguishes between what he calls abstract utopia – dreams that either do not truly challenge the status quo, or are mere fantasy divorced from any sense of how to realise them – and concrete utopia as those dreams that are mediated by objective possibility. Thus for Bloch the sense of premonition encapsulated in the French Revolutionary song ‘Ça ira!’ articulates the desire for a concrete utopia, because the ‘driving images’ of revolution it contains ‘were attracted and illuminated by a real future place: by the realm of freedom’ (143). Meanwhile, ‘the so-called power to foresee deaths or even winning lottery numbers is obviously of a less productive order’, precisely because the ‘happy end’ it envisages remains abstract and purely contingent (ibid.). Yet Bloch defends the happy end motif even in what he sees as its 18 most corrupted and corruptible everyday forms, identifying in it the desire for more than the mere appearance of utopia, in whose interest it is co-opted. ‘The deceivability of the happy end drive’, he claims, ‘merely says something against the state of its reason […]. The deception represents the good end as if it were attainable in an unchanged Today of society or even the Today itself. […] More than once the fiction of a happy end, when it seized the will, when the will had learnt both through mistakes and in fact through hope as well, and when reality did not stand in too harsh contradiction to it, reformed a bit of the world; that is: an initial fiction was made real’ (443). Not-yet and revolution There can be little doubt that Bloch was committed to the significance of aesthetic practice in attempting to realise utopia, yet he also knew that something more than art is required to achieve this task. Wishful images in themselves ‘do nothing’, he conceded. Rather they ‘depict and retain with particular fidelity what must be done’ (47). It is in this sense that Bloch (1988: 11) saw utopia as already partly achieved when it is portrayed in a book: not that utopia is realised through its mere representation, but rather that the images of the past collectively constitute a repository of cultural surpluses that can be activated and mobilised in the pursuit of utopia. Thus Bloch understands cultural tradition as in part the archive of a revolutionary tradition concerned with attempting to realise the not-yet. Bloch’s insistence on the importance of cultural heritage for social and political struggle went against a certain tendency within the Marxist tradition to reject what Marx in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte referred to as the poetry of the past (cf. Marx, 2010b: 106). For Marx, whereas ‘former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content’, proletarian revolution could not ‘begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past’ (ibid.). Of course, Marx was speaking of the ‘social revolution of the nineteenth century’, which had failed to materialise in its hoped-for form by the time Bloch was writing The 19 Principle of Hope. Nevertheless, orthodox Marxists largely maintained that entirely new forms of art, culture and thought were required to express the desires of the workers of the world. This was one reason why Bloch’s (9) definition of ‘Marxist philosophy’ as ‘that of the future, therefore also of the future in the past’ was explicitly rejected by the GDR regime. In the tribunal held to denounce Bloch in December 1957, the Secretary of the Central Committee Kurt Hager stated in no uncertain terms that Bloch’s philosophy was judged to be a ‘non-Marxist philosophy’ (cf. Bloch, 1991: 2). Extracts from Rugard Otto Gropp’s damning indictment of The Principle of Hope were marshalled against Bloch, with Gropp condemning his philosophy as ‘a mystical-irrationalistic conglomeration of components of all possible idealist systems from Antiquity to the most recent present’ (20). The ‘particularly strong impact of the Romantic school’ on Bloch was found to be just as damning as that of ‘existentialism’ (ibid.). Most ‘un-Marxist’ of all, though, was deemed to be Bloch’s inheritance of religious thought. Indeed, Gropp found that the ‘basic themes of Bloch’s philosophy are of a religious nature’. To be sure, Bloch’s fondness for religious language, and his insistence on the emancipatory power of religious images may seem perplexing given that he himself was an avowed atheist. In an interview from 1974, just three years before he died, Bloch was frustrated by the suggestion that his ideas had enjoyed their most extensive reception among theologians, because, as he put it simply, he himself was not a theologian (cf. Bloch 1974). Yet Bloch, whom Oskar Negt once called the ‘German philosopher of the October Revolution’, (1975) also claimed in no uncertain terms that religious messianism is the ‘red secret of every revolutionary’ (2009: 1). If we consider that Bloch’s work, as Eduardo Mendieta (2005: 12) has noted, ‘was determinant for the development of the Frankfurt School’s thinking about religion’, then it is all the more pressing to grasp the meaning of his complex reception of religious, and particularly messianic, thought. Benjamin’s 1930 fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’ provides a useful insight into the context in which he, like Bloch and other messianic Marxists, repurposed theological concepts for political ends. Benjamin argues that in 20 modern societies, capitalism itself has become a religion, even as it has eroded traditional forms of faith largely by assimilating them. Capitalism is a ‘purely cultic religion’ Benjamin claims, ‘without dogma’ in which ‘everything only has meaning in relation to the cult’ (2002: 288). In such a context, the language of religion proper can be seen to become a kind of weapon with which to critique that totality from within. This insight was key to Benjamin’s late work, which refunctioned concepts of messianic time for a philosophy of history that demands justice for the oppressed. It is also at the heart of Adorno’s negative theology, which sought to adumbrate the possibility of utopia without imagining it in positive or programmatic terms. Yet it is also central to the way in which Bloch reclaimed religious ideas in the service of his own social critique. ‘The best thing about religion’ according to Bloch, ‘is that it makes for heretics’ (2009: viii). When the religion is secular capitalism, however, the heretic must become a prophet. Insofar as religion expresses desires for universal freedom and eternal peace, Bloch saw it as perhaps the oldest and most widespread form of utopianism, albeit one which had frequently been enlisted in the service of oppression rather than of liberation. ‘Religion’, Bloch argues, ‘is superstition wherever it is not what in terms of its valid intention-content it has increasingly come to mean in its historical manifestations: the most unconditional utopia, utopia of the absolute’ (2000). In other words, the truth of religion as Bloch sees it is the desire for another world than the one of violence, death, suffering, and exploitation that we inhabit. ‘Certainly’, Bloch argued in The Principle of Hope, ‘the wishful image in all religions, and even more powerfully in those of the messianic invocation of homeland, is that of feeling at home in existence’ (1196). Its only mistake, he claims, is to project the image of a new world into a transcendent beyond, rather than recognize the need to realize it historically. Seeing the material world as hopelessly flawed beyond normal powers of human correction, the Jewish and Christian messianic traditions posit divine intervention through a specially selected human being. According to Bloch, Marxism inherits this messianic impulse, immanentizing the eschaton to 21 envisage a ‘utopia of kingdom’ that ‘destroys the fiction of a creator-god and the hypostasis of a heavenly god, but not the end-space in which ens perfectissimum contains the unfathomed depth of its still unthwarted latency’. Thus it is through Marxism as a form of atheism that, paradoxically, the messianic idea can be realized: ‘without atheism messianism has no place’ (188). ‘Non-existence, non-becomeness is the real fundamental definition of the ens perfectissimum’, Bloch argues, but he also posits that historical struggle and political revolution bring us closer to realizing this age-old longing (ibid.).4 ‘Revolutions realize the oldest hopes of mankind,’ he writes, and ‘for this very reason they imply, demand the ever more precise concretion of what is intended as the realm of freedom and of the unfinished journey towards it’ (ibid.). According to Bloch, the same thing is attempted again and again in every revolution, namely the pursuit of utopia. For that reason, the ‘good New is never that completely new’ (7). The fight for freedom and equality binds each successive revolution to the last, creating not only a sense of spatial solidarity among contemporaries struggling alongside one another, but ‘most especially temporal solidarity as well, extending most presently to the victims of the past, to the victors of the future’ (1174). This revolutionary consciousness, Bloch argues ‘means that the immortal element in the individual is the immortal element in his best intentions and contents’ (ibid.). Revolutionary practice activates the not-yet fulfilled demands of the past not only out of a sense of debt to those who have gone before; it is also motivated by the hope that the ‘men of the future for whom the hero sacrifices himself will have far easier deaths’, that their lives will be ‘no longer violently cut short’, and that ‘the fear of life itself, insofar as the ruling class caused it, not least and most comprehensively through war’, will finally be ‘dead and gone’ (ibid.). 4 Cf. Quentin Meillassoux’s thesis on ‘divine inexistence’, that it is only because God does not yet exist that we should believe in him (Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 22 As Bloch (1988: 17) admits, ‘Hope is not confidence’, and ‘Nothing and All are still in no way decided as utopian characters’ (1986: 12) – in other words, it is difficult to say from the perspective of the present what a historically redeemed future would look like. Yet the knowledge that our present struggles for freedom, justice and equality are part of a larger history is a powerful motivation for action. Bloch puts his case eloquently when he says that ‘we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness’ of the present as the concrete moment when historical change can begin (ibid.). IV. Conclusion: Utopia now The reception of Bloch’s work has shifted according to the changing fortunes of utopianism, and for that matter of Marxism. David Kaufmann’s (1997: 35) criticism that there ‘is perhaps too much Schelling in The Principle of Hope, and far too much Stalin’, is rather insufficiently nuanced, but nevertheless raises some important questions concerning what use Bloch’s thought might be for us today. Isn’t Bloch’s ‘speculative materialism’, drawing as it does on what Habermas (1969: 325) called the ‘great breath of German Idealism’, not hopelessly outdated in our ‘post-metaphysical’ age? Moreover, given the historical failures of communism, isn’t utopianism as such, with its universalist, teleological intimations, ‘totalitarian’? Perhaps the first step in a response must stem from the observation that, despite the most confident expectations and assertions, the kinds of metaphysical questions Bloch poses in The Principle of Hope – Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? – refuse to disappear. Indeed, there is a certain paradox in the fact that the apparent triumph of ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ heralded by Habermas (1992) has been accompanied almost everywhere by the expansion of a post-secular order in which questions about the purpose of existence are once again, or still, or increasingly, being met with religious answers. Even in parts of the world where Marxism-Leninism appears to have done its ideological work most successfully, such as the former GDR, a spirituality that once appeared thoroughly undermined is resurfacing (cf. Pollack and Pickel 2000). The 23 reasons for this are undoubtedly far too complex to be addressed adequately here. Bloch certainly believed that religious longing had to be grasped as a ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’, and that to transcend our present, inadequate socio-historical horizon ‘without transcendence’ of the religious variety was humanity’s true hope (Bloch, 2009: 57). Yet he also understood that the persistence of metaphysical questions, and therefore of the kind of utopian thinking that seeks answers to them, has to do with the limits of human knowledge. Immanuel Kant argued that metaphysical speculation would continue even if the other sciences ‘were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism’ (1999: 1) if only because we have no ‘experience’ of the future, and therefore cannot know it in the scientific sense of the word. That does not mean, however, that we do not have any relation to the future at all. Indeed, there is always a weakly teleological expectation that there will be future generations of human beings to pursue emancipatory goals not yet achieved. Just because the Kantian definition of knowledge ‘destroys rotten optimism’, as Bloch puts it, ‘it does not also destroy urgent hope for a good end. For this hope is too indestructibly grounded in the human drive for happiness, and it has always been too clearly a motor of history. It has been so as expectation and incitement of a positively visible goal, for which it is important to fight and which sends a Forwards into barrenly continuing time’ (443). Bloch makes an implicit distinction here between the ‘barrenly continuing time’ of cosmic chronology, and the historical time of human life from which the goal or ‘forwards’ is derived and in and through which it has meaning. To be sure, Bloch speculates when he claims that the darkness of the lived moment reveals and brings us into contact with the constitutive lack at the heart of reality itself. Yet as Marx revealed, what we speculate has implications for questions of a social and political nature, a fact that is not to be dismissed easily if we accept that knowledge has limits beyond which speculation cannot be avoided. This is not only the case when it comes to 24 ‘world views’ in the classical sense. At this level, Marx showed how Hegel’s mistake as a philosophical idealist was to believe that the existence of the concept of universal freedom at the level of historical institutions meant that universal freedom had actually been achieved, when it was and still is plain to see that unfreedom is everywhere. Yet thinkers such as Hayden White (2014) have shown how the root metaphors we use all the time to interpret and describe reality have implications in the social and political spheres. Writing about the use of root metaphors in the life sciences, Kaoru Yamamoto (2007: 92) has claimed that ‘life will look very differently to a person whose root metaphor is that of a ruthless, gladiatorial combat to the bitter end than to another who perceives an aspen grove in which each tree grows individually while sustained by a common network of roots’. Bloch’s root metaphor – of matter as the ‘selfbearing womb’ of a historical process of alienation in which human beings are capable of realizing a dream of identity latent within their power – may be speculative, but as Bloch and Adorno, taking their lead from Hegel, recognised, all thought necessarily has a speculative element. In light of such considerations as these, I argue Bloch’s legacy is best served today by interpreting his work as a politically engaged form of skepticism. We do not know whether utopia of the scale and nature Bloch envisages is achievable, but that is not entirely the point. Rather, in a situation in which people clearly still do need theories that can help orient our questioning about who we are and how we should live, Bloch’s speculative materialism is one among many, but, crucially, one that is concerned to underpin a progressive and emancipatory politics. 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