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tendencies. Engels had long ago consigned utopian thinking to the naive
bourgeois prehistory of Marxism. Whatever original inspirational value it
may have had in the early development of socialist thinking, utopian and sci–
entific socialism had become adversaries. For Bloch "the Utopian function" is
of permanent intellectual, imaginative, and political value.
Literature and art constitute the space that anticipates the future .
Phrases like "anticipatory illumination," "not-yet-conscious" and "not-yet-ac–
complished" recur in the essays. Literature and art point to (it would be mis–
leadingly strong to say embody) the realization of the ideals that are often
forgotten in the present struggles for power. They are cautions against the
tendency toward self-betrayal that characterizes revolutionary movements.
Jack Zipes, his editor and translator, locates the revolutionary dream in its
bourgeois origins. As a "product of the
Bildungsburgertum,
the incarnation of
all the bourgeois liberal ideals of the nineteenth century...he sought to
compel [the bourgeois tradition] to live up to [its] promises." In this
perspective, the utopian is not a retrograde naivete, as it was for Engels, but
a continuous exercise against a kind of
real politique
that engenders, for
example, Stalinism.
The opposition between science and utopia in Marxist thought, how–
ever, does not illuminate the question of utopian aesthetic. By utopian Bloch
means to dissociate himself from a realism which is a "reflection of facts"
rather than of processes, a realism, in other words, oriented toward past and
present rather than toward the future. Bloch's "futurism" enabled him to as–
sociate himself with expressionist art, surrealism, the work of Bertolt Brecht,
and put him in opposition to Lukacs. Bloch avoids the didacticism of a teleo–
logical utopianism, by focussing on an indeterminate "surplus" in imaginative
works, which transcends the constraints of the present. This "surplus" is
associated with culture
in
contradistinction to ideology: that is, an hypostatized
"rigid and existing postulated transcendence."
All this is very much at the level of abstraction. What does it mean in
artistic practice? The beginning of the essay "On Fine Arts in the Machine
Age" (1964) is characteristic:
It is certain that we do not suffer any more from plush. Rather we
suffer from a little too much glass and steel and from a little too little of
that which decorates. But whenever there is too much decoration, and
when that occurred too much, much too much was covered over and
made terribly slick and ostentatious. For not only in war but more so in
the lie, the muses are silent. The semblance purchased in this way
always takes shape accordingly. No purchase at all would be more
preferable.
