Ernst Bloch � The Utopian Functon of Art and Literature � translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg Fourth printng, 1996 © 1988 Massachusets Insttute of Technology. Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Functon of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Studies in contemporary German social thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. NOTE: page numbers mark the end of each page; proofreading is incomplete. Contents Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination, Jack Zipes Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964) Art and Society Ideas as Transformed Material in Human Minds, or Problems of an Ideological Superstructure (Cultural Heritage) (1972) The Wish-Landscape Perspective in Aesthetics: The Order of Art Materials According to the Dimension of Their Profundity and Hope (1959) Art and Utopia The Creation of the Ornament (1973) The Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-Yet-Conscious, the Utopian Function (1959) The Artistic Illusion as the Visible Anticipatory Illumination (1959) Marxism and Poetry (1935) The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time (1930) Better Castles in the Sky at the Country Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage (1959) Building in Empty Spaces (1959) On Fine Arts in the Machine Age (1964) On the Present in Literature (1956) The Stage Regarded as a Paradigmatic Institution and the Decision within It (1959) A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel (1965) A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist (1965) The Representation of Wish-Landscapes in Painting, Opera, and Poetry (1959) Selected Bibliography Introducton: � Toward a Realizaton of Antcipatory Illuminaton � Jack Zipes Ernst Bloch’s disturbing contradictions have always made it difficult to write about this philosopher of Marxist humanism and revolutionary utopianism. Bloch assumed many roles and positions during his long life. He was consistently unconventional, unpredictable, and provocative. His curiosity and thirst for knowledge were insatiable, and it seemed like he was always in motion, always searching for clues to a lost world that anticipated the future. He retained everything he read, heard, or observed. He was as passionate about Karl May’s westerns, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the Arabian Nights, and the comic strips of the Boston Globe as about the works of Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Keller, Kafka, and Brecht. He could play and recite entire operas and could discourse with authority on physics, architecture, psychology, theater, sociology, and, of course, philosophy. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was a “perfect” product of the Bildungsburgertum, the incarnation of all the bourgeois liberal ideals of the nineteenth century, and in fact he placed great stock in those ideals. But at the same time, he sought to break out of this bourgeois tradition, to turn it inside out and compel it to live up to the promises made by those revolutionary movements that had established the rule of the middle classes. It was against the domination of the middle classes and the ossification of bourgeois idealism that Bloch rebelled, and he sought to ground his rebellious urges by postulating the possibility of a life without oppression and enslavement. At first he sought to develop this possibility from his study of phenomenology and German idealism mixed with a blend of anarchist, pacifist, and mystical notions. After World War I it was Marxism that became the ground of all his page_xi thoughts, and his disturbing contradictions cannot be unraveled unless one understands that Bloch sought to revitalize Marxism without totally abandoning his bourgeois heritage and that he believed in the necessity of establishing a real communist society in order to bring about a genuine democracy and humanitarianism. Unfortunately, Bloch often used the terms Marxism, socialism, and communism crudely in opposition to fascism, capitalism, and imperialism, and he made many mistakes and unmeditated assertions in his political analyses. Aware of his own shortcomings, though never apologetic, Bloch dealt with his contradictions and those of his time by continuously trying to locate the basic needs of oppressed groups and elaborating a Marxist critique of alienation and exploitation. In the process he maintained his optimistic belief in the potential of art to provide not only hope for a better future but also illumination toward the realization of this goal. In a 1968 interview Bloch stated: In every age two threads intertwine: first, “the cultural heritage” [Engels], that is, religion, art, and philosophy; and second, ideology. Ideology is just a coloration of the awareness that stands and falls with the ruling class power. “The dominant ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class” [Marx]. The Bible is made an excuse for its cheap imports; preservation of the purity of communism is a pretext for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Nothing has changed. The slogans and alibis circulating in the Soviet Union today are pure ideology, and the best that can come from them is the warning: This is not the way to act. What has cultural value expresses more than the goal of one age or one class: It speaks for the future. Any significant philosophical or artistic work contributes to future maturity. Therefore great achievements in the superstructure no longer belong completely to their age. The Parthenon cannot be written off just because it was built by a slaveholding society. Its social mission at the time is no longer the important thing. What interests us now is its meaning for later generations living under a changed general situation. Only progress and the progression of time therefore bring out the full value of the past heritage – and that never completely. The 18th century had no eye for Gothic art; we understand it because the parallax is greater from where we stand. But in the future we will see yet more. The receptive subject of culture grows with socialism; his entire richness will flourish only in socialist society.1 Bloch’s own growth as a “receptive subject of culture” came through his intense concern with questions of aesthetics and the cultural heritage and against the grain of institutionalized bourgeois aesthetics and ideology in practically every phase of his life. Thus it is important to place Bloch historically, to consider how he developed page_xii his disturbing political and personal contradictions, because his notions about the Utopian function of art and literature were in part an endeavor to resolve them. Aesthetics was a way of life for Bloch, which meant that he had no interest in becoming a disinterested spectator of culture. In fact, Bloch intervened in almost all the crucial philosophical and aesthetic debates of his time, and his interventions left scars that need tracing if we are to realize their value for a critique of contemporary cultural developments. I Ernst Bloch was born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen.2 His parents were assimilated, well-to-do Jews who had clear but narrow expectations for their son. His father was a senior official of the Imperial Railways and treated his son with a firm hand. For the most part he seemed concerned more with respectability than with helping the boy develop his talents. Bloch in turn felt his parents’ imposition of stultifying regulations as a direct impingement on his personal freedom. In his rare remarks about his youth, Bloch always stressed his desire to break away, and he hardly mentioned his parents in his later years. Nor was Ludwigshafen itself conducive to his childhood dreams and desires. At the end of the 19th century, the city was a dreary industrial center in which the living conditions of the workers were decrepit and the life style of the bourgeoisie was boring and predictable. Compared with the neighboring city of Mannheim, which was more affluent and had a more varied cultural life, Ludwigshafen, the “proletarian” city, stood as a constant reminder to the young Bloch of the social and political inequities that would disturb him throughout his life. To a certain extent, it was the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim that gave rise to Bloch’s early political consciousness. Here was a clear instance of what he would call nonsynchronism: Mannheim was a modern society (Gesellschaft) moving with the times toward secularization and cosmopolitanism, while Ludwigshafen was still underdeveloped and harbored strong 19th-century notions of community (Gemeinschaft). The nonsynchronous breach between the cities later helped Bloch grasp why fascism, which paid heed to the basic yearnings and customs of the lower classes and did not dismiss them as communism did, had such great appeal for the German people. page_xiii In his youth, however, Bloch was more bothered by the void in his own life, which he came to realize was also connected to the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. That is, his home was characterized by what he called “mush,” dreariness, and lack of love, understanding, and stimulation. He filled the void as he could with daydreams, voracious reading, music, theater, letter-writing to eminent philosophers, rebellion against traditional schooling, and concern for social democratic politics. Bloch left Ludwigshafen in 1905 to study philosophy and German literature at the University of Munich; he then moved on to the University of Wiirzburg, where he studied experimental psychology, physics, and music and took an interest in the Cabbala and Jewish mysticism. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1908 with a dissertation on Heinrich Rickert under the direction of Hermann Cohen, he moved to Berlin to study under the renowned sociologist Georg Simmel. It was in Simmel’s seminar that he met Georg Lukács, who became one of his best friends and later one of his foremost philosophical antagonists. Bloch studied with Simmel until 1911 and was strongly influenced by Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, which stressed the “lived moment” and the impossibility of knowing the immediate.