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At once advocate and critic of modernist functionalism, Bloch acknowl–
edges and regrets the necessity of the disappearance of the ornamental.
Decoration mystifies the truth , but its absence impoverishes it. Bloch discerns,
or wishes to discern , tendencies toward a new decorativeness, or better, a
new heterogeneity ofform that will express the organic richness oflife. In a
somewhat ambivalent, but essentially admiring gesture toward Ruskin Bloch
writes:
The well-furnished machine aims to perform those tasks in a
reduced amount of time whose artistic honor emanated from their
difficulties, their size-as Ruskin taught us in his enchantingly senti–
mental way-and from the expression endowed in it by human hands.
There will never be any expressionist houses built if one attaches
great importance to unified form.
Elsewhere in the essay he refers to the "dismal. .. new houses" of
"glass and steel," which make things pale instead of causing them to flourish.
Bloch may have discerned the need for the baroque element in
postmodernist architecture that stands as a reproach to the characterlessness
ofinternational modernism.
.
Openness, possibility, diversity: Bloch's aesthetic eclectically draws
upon Schiller, Kant, Goethe, on those utopian anticipations in their work of
spontaneity of will, sensuous exuberance, "a world...not satisfied by the
mechanistic experience of existence." In an excursus in the essay, "Art and
Utopia" (1918) Bloch prefers allegory for its "wealth of impression" to the
symbol that repressively asserts
"Unitas
of a meaning." In the formal ex–
periments of Renaissance art Bloch comes upon utopian meaning. Perspective
represents the discovery of the world as "infinite," the wish-landscape as
open distance. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Bloch is an unremitting critic of
the mechanico-materialist side of the Enlightenment. There is something
almost mystical in his feeling for the animistic, organic side oflife, which
however, he always seeks to reconcile with reason.
Bloch's valuing of utopianism allows him a tolerant view of what
Marxist thinkers regard as most reprehensible, "false consciousness."
"Without the utopian function it is impossible to explain the intellectual surplus
that went beyond the status quo and that which had been accomplished, even
if
that surplus is filled with illusion instead of anticipatory illumination." Illusion
or false consciousness is a necessary by-product of human aspiration. Bloch
here is in the camp of freedom against the Enforcers of Truth-that is, the
