Inevitable Utopia
Utopia is the “land with no place”. In Thomas More’s book it is the name of a distant island no-one has ever heard of until it is reported by a Portuguese traveller. Utopia’s constitution guarantees all citizens maximal equality and community. The constitution ensures there is no private property, collective goods are employed for the benefit of all, all are adequately provided for, no-one has to go hungry, there is no excess, no exploitation, no envy, everyone leads a modest, carefree and peaceful life.
The technical term for this type of community is communism. As we know, Friedrich Engels had no objections to its realisation. He did however object to communism as a utopia, as a land with no place living only as a dream in the heads of a few. For Engels, communism – occasionally he spoke of socialism – was much more. It was an indubitable, inevitable reality that could already be read off the dynamics of capitalist society. Since Marx’ analysis of this society it was clearly steering towards its end. In his famous text The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science Engels writes, the “historic mission of the modern proletariat” was to bring about this end in a rational fashion. “The proletariat seizes the public power”, frees “the means of production from their previous capitalist quality, and gives their social character full freedom to assert itself”. This “work of universal emancipation” will owe its driving force not to utopian wishful thinking, but rather to “scientific socialism”, whose task it is, “to impart a consciousness of its own motion to that class that, oppressed to-day, is called upon to do the act”.1
Utopia then fell into the same kind of discredit in the Marxist movement as it did among the class enemy, the bourgeois Realpolitiker and big money. Then came along a young German-Jewish scholar who, under the impression of WWI, broke with the consensus and undertook a rehabilitation of utopia. Ernst Bloch was in his early thirties in 1915/16, as he completed the first draft of his book The Spirit of Utopia. A determined opponent of the war, despondent over capitalism, especially the version embedded in the German Empire, not yet entirely arrived at Marxism, but already driven toward it by everything that deeply filled and moved him: the biblical theme of the Exodus, the espressivo in German-Austrian music, the expressive forces in European poetry, painting and philosophy. They all conspired to make him a Marxist while at the same time preventing him from joining the party line.
Amazingly enough, at a time when a country was preparing to realise socialism for the first time, to make it a “land with a place”, Bloch began to extol utopia and even to enlist Marx for it.
“[T]he same man who drove the fetish character out of production, who believed he had analyzed, exorcised every irrationality from history as merely unexamined, uncomprehended and therefore operatively fateful obscurities of the class situation, who had banished every dream, every operative utopia, every telos circulating in religion from history, plays with his ‘forces of production,’ with the calculus of the ‘process of production’ the same all too constitutive game, the same pantheism, mythicism, upholds for it the same ultimately utilizing, guiding power which Hegel upheld for the ‘Idea,’ indeed which Schopenhauer upheld for his alogical ‘Will’.”2
Is this true? Not entirely. The forces of production – which in the industrial age were increasingly being translated from muscle, nerve and tool power into machine power – were certainly regarded by Marx as motors of human history. Yet motors alone do not equate to higher powers. They are put into operation and also operated by humans. Nevertheless, Marx sees the forces of production at the height of capitalist socialisation attain such a driving power as to give the proletariat no choice but to turn over to state ownership the means of production. This process is inevitable. This conviction consolidates into an integral and tenacious component of the Marxian concept of society. The concept is insofar deterministic. The casual, never revised and never published notice he once made to the effect that “the whole shit” can begin “again from the beginning” doesn’t change this at all.
And yet there are limits to Marx’ historical determinism, he restricts it to a point in the social fermentation process of his own time, pulling short of metaphysical inflation. Yet the world revolution that he saw as unavoidable didn’t happen and socialism ended up getting installed in an economically backward country, despite his contrary prediction, and at a tremendous human price. This awakened an overpowering need for a higher succour and consolation. In Soviet Marxism, the Marxian forces of production were vaulted over with the iron laws of a dialectics that had allegedly always moved nature and history and guaranteed the irresistible advent of socialism.
Such laws do not occur in Marx, though they deserve the epithet “pantheistic” attributed to Marx’ productive forces by Bloch. This attribution is philologically faulted. Exact philology was not Bloch’s forte. But it does strike the Achilles heel. In Marx there is already an historical determinism. The dialectical laws that were first concocted by his followers consolidated and exaggerated an element that was already there. Whenever history is thought as determined, whether in detail or in general, the question arises: What about subjective free will? What drives people to launch a large-scale social revolution: a higher historical law of necessity or their own desire and will? Is their action the effect of such a law or do they in fact effect changes themselves that in hindsight merely resemble such a law?
Since the Spirit of Utopia Bloch had been striding through these questions toward his main aim: liberating Marxism from historical determinism. If Marx’ idea is ever to be realised, the motor of human history must be thought through much more comprehensively than did Marx. Not only the economical forces of production, the muscle and nervous power, together with their deposit in a large machinery but also all the desires, dreams, fantasies and thoughts that have brought humanity forward. More importantly, all the forward-pushing forces that have ever announced themselves in human history, fermenting in the depths, need to be remembered, overtaken and gathered together if the socialist experiment is to succeed. And this would be just the capstone of that great experiment that is the process of the world itself, Experimentum Mundi, to quote the title of a book by Bloch.
The history of the world is for Bloch never merely human history. “Every organism first became on the way toward human form [...]. Individual creatures, perhaps, once become, accommodate to the flora or move exactly to the rhythm that their structure [...]dictates. But of course not even hares could arise through mere adaptation to the environment, to say nothing of lions [...]. Rather there is a free, open, human-seeking quality in the progression from algae to fern to conifer to deciduous tree, [...] in the strange delarvation of worm as reptile as bird as mammal [...].” In all „testing, retaining, rejecting, reusing, erring, reverting, succeeding“ “[t]here is an impulse toward the brightness”. Yet “only in man himself can the movement toward the light, proper to all creatures, become so conscious, or be carried out”.3
The brightness all things are impelled toward is on the one hand the physical light of the sun. For Bloch however it also means figuratively a Vorschein [literally fore-shine, an anticipatory brightness, the precursor of a greater brightness]. Later he will speak of a higher light. This in turn means partly the light of human consciousness, partly a light of which consciousness is merely the anticipation, though a very active anticipation. Having consciousness involves self-anticipation, the capacity to project into the future, to imagine that which is yet to be realised. According to Bloch, such anticipation is already a manifestation of the universal illumination, that will enlighten all the darkness of the world, satiate all dark urging, and bring to final peaceful fruition the process of the world as one permeated and guided by consciousness. Bloch’s utopia is this light, which does not exist, not yet, and yet already announces itself in manifold signs. Utopia is for Bloch not just a country, it is the whole world, but the world in its coming condition, its hopefully coming condition. No hopefulness can guarantee that it will come. The Experimentum Mundi can go wrong.
Whereas for Bloch utopia was not only a land, there existed in his eyes only one land where utopia could contribute to the progress of history: the Soviet Union. The hopes he placed in it were not of the impractical, romantic variety, which had been rejected by Engels and which Bloch himself had referred to as “abstract utopia”. It was given the name “concrete utopia”,4 a society in which capitalist private property had already been abolished. Bloch certainly never regarded the Soviet Union as the Good, but saw it most of his live as the only foundation for the Better, at least in his capacity as a philosopher. As an emigrant from fascist Germany he preferred the USA. From there he at first defended the Moscow show trials staged by Stalin in the thirties, reprimanding those socialists who looked on appalled: “They peel off Stalin’s socialism and attach to the eternal stars of their own fancy and inwardness.”5 When Bloch came out of his US exile after WWII he went to Leipzig, not to West Germany, and as late as 1959 he wrote in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope, “Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem”6: where Lenin’s spirit moves, where the seed of a better social order is just about to burst, there is Jerusalem. Authentic Jewry must also be present there, but not necessarily in Palestine as intended by Zionism. As the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, Bloch found himself in West Germany. He did not return to Leipzig. Although he did not repudiate the social order that had been established in East Germany, he turned his back on the regime administering it, which he had long been at odds with.
Paradoxically, Bloch’s most significant period began in the West as he was already approaching his 80thyear. The widespread protest movement among the younger generations which began forming in the sixties perceived him as one of their intellectual leaders. The stormy enthusiasm with which the aged Bloch demanded a new and better society was closer to the angry mood of many young people than, for instance, Adorno’s incisive, analytical thought founded on negativity. And yet a Sturm und Drang type of gesture tends to mould with age. In the 70s and 80s, as the protest movement ebbed and the fundamental interrogation of the political system evaporated from public discussion, it was no accident that interest in Bloch abated much more than did interest in Adorno and Benjamin. Utopia had quietened down. There was a short revival burst around 1990, but this time the message was inverted. At the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union the end of utopia was promptly announced. Bloch was declared dead and with him the entire way of thinking he had set in motion. This applied even moreso to East Germany. There was no appreciation of the fact that The Spirit of Utopia had been an instrument of critique against the regime, since it had also been a critique of capitalism. The order of the day was now to cleanse both East and West of this critical spirit.
Yet this spirit cannot be so easily eradicated. At the most it can be repressed, and the repressed always comes back. Twenty years after the collapse of the Eastern Block, the hope of a global collective without a market economy has come to seem more dubious than ever. Yet Bloch’s concept of utopia contains a so comprehensive theory of culture and nature as to comfortably survive Marxism. The decline of Marxism has not made global capitalism any more bearable. The miseries Marx chronicled long ago have continued unabated since the end of the Eastern Block: the imperative of economic growth, the depletion of labour force and natural resources, the simultaneous generating of wealth and mass unemployment, the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss. The capitalist market economy has expanded to absorb human organs, genes and pollutants. On the other hand, it is precisely this market that points beyond itself. The superabundance of commodities shows that no one actually needs to go hungry. The market economy also has the silver lining of bringing about a sort of equality of all humans as proprietors. And finally there is the exchange of goods itself. Does this not involve much more than just goods changing hands, namely the non-coercive exchange of labour, feelings, favours and ideas? We don’t have to depend on Moscow, since the capitalist market economy already embraces a dimension of “concrete utopia”. Capitalism confounds this utopian trait, but urges toward it. Reactivating Bloch means awakening all our senses to this urging.
If there exists a Blochian method, it is the training of utopian perception. Not the art of painting a fool’s paradise, but rather two-dimensional seeing; gazing hard at things to see them in all their insufficiency while also seeing that they are more than they seem. What is this “more”? Classical idealist philosophy would have said it is the essence beneath the appearance, its indestructible immaterial core. Call it substance, form or monad. Bloch’s definition is practically the reverse. The “more” in things is actually a nothingness and at the same time their most crucial property. For one thing, it is a “not any more”. All natural and cultural entities are deposits of movements. A drive or urge has become objective in them. This also implies that it rigidified, extinguished, and could not move further. When algae, fishes, reptiles and mammals are studied without paying attention to this drive, which is for Bloch a drive toward brightness, toward the light, then the most essential thing, what the organisms actually want to say, is overlooked. Urge always involves the urge to communicate. When Bloch takes in hand an inconspicuous, earthenware pitcher and begins to read the traces of its production and ornamentation, its sediments of taste, smell and liquid, so that a whole chunk of “Rhine-Franconian history” comes back to life, and he, the observer, becomes “formed like the pitcher, [...] and not just mimetically or simply empathetically, but so that I thus become for my part richer, more present, cultivated further toward myself by this artefact that participates in me”,7 then his strange submersion into a lifeless object in fact means perceiving the pitcher unabridged, allying himself with all the wishes and dreams that were taken up into it and came to a halt there, which in turn means revivifying them, driving them onwards. In that moment, the not any more shows itself as the not yet. We, the contemporaries, are called to give to this past the as yet unredeemed future that it desires.
“As the conquered home we go, our grandsons will fare better tomorrow.” Bloch was fond of quoting these closing words from the German peasant revolt because they manifest the turntable aspect of utopian perception. We all have grandchildren to whom we communicate the desire to fight it out better than we did. We are also all grandchildren ourselves who bear the responsibility to continue the fight for what our predecessors failed to attain. Bloch is not only the grandchild of his physical grandparents but also of the old pitcher and of humanity as a whole is not only the contemporary of the plant and animal world but also its grandchild, the inheritor of its collected potential to urge.
It is not an injustice to call Bloch a Sturm und Drang philosopher. He used the epithet himself in reference to The Spirit of Utopia.8 He spent most of the sixty years afterwards elaborating with undiminished vigour this brilliant early work, enriching it with an unprecedented abundance of similar material to give needed centrifugal mass to that drive toward brightness it was intended to further. The result was a philosophical building of grand proportions. It could be considered Bloch’s version of the World as Will and Presentation. An Anti-Schopenhauer. What bothered him about Schopenhauer was not the dark urge of a universal will, but rather its lack of direction. When something really urges it urges toward something. Nietzsche had also noticed this, countering that the world will is not bare willing but will to power. Bloch amends that it is will to light. It is by reason alone of its driving toward light, both physically and metaphorically, that the will can be the bearer of hope, or, as Bloch will say later, the principle of hope. This goes beyond the mere human resolution to not give up. It has the cosmic meaning that the world itself as a totality is hopeful. It is pregnant with the luminous creature to come and the only doubt can be whether it will be a successful birth.
However, Bloch never really revealed how hope can be a principle. But since the principium is cosmic, the first cause, the primal ground, Bloch must have meant that the urge to light is the primal urge of the world, an urge that unceasingly objectifies itself, creating its own housing and deposits, in which it stagnates while at the same time urging onward again, with the issue remaining uncertain. Where there is an urge there must also be something in which it urges. The notion of a pure urge creating its own matter and forms is pure hypostasis, pure metaphysics, albeit a dynamic and open one, not so predetermined as Greco-Christian idealism with its unmoved mover at the beginning of a world culminating in a predestined end.
Yet it was no accident that a theology of hope soon developed out of the Principle of Hope. This theology met with Bloch’s benevolence though not his unreserved agreement. While it was open to the principle of hope it performed the regression in the surreptitious or mere alleged theological certitude from which Bloch had just exodused. Bloch’s notion is that God is a promise and whether he exists or his kingdom will come is beside the point. That God makes promises is a Moltmann sort of notion. For Moltmann God is taken in advance as a sure thing and his promises as certificates of warranty. Thy kingdom come, as they say. The happy conclusion is a rock-solid inevitability, only the way is not drawn out in detail. There can be no serious consideration of an open course of history here. The return to a final historical determinism by means of a principle of hope developed precisely to counteract Marxist historical determinism was not in harmony with Bloch’s intent.
Bloch himself had prepared the return of hope to theology by stretching it to the status of a principle. Is it even true that the will to light is the primal urge? Newborn babies want to return to the protective darkness and they provide a fairly good indication of the real object of urge and drive in physiological terms: the abatement of stimulus [Reiz], the attainment of non-sensation [Reizlosigkeit]. This state of affairs has a utopian drift in a different sense to Bloch. Not because it always already strives toward the light but because it strives toward something fundamentally paradoxical. It wants to be insensate and wants to feel it. But this is impossible. Total non-sensation is not liveable, it is death. Assuaging urge is only enjoyable as long as it is approaching non-sensation. This makes it provisional. It strives toward an impossible place, a Utopos, and the fact this place does not exist in no way prevents desire from striving to get there. As a result, the desire for assuagement of desire is incorrigible and therefore indestructible.
The assumption of a will of the world and its original urge toward the light inevitably overstrains itself. Easier to accept is the notion that the life of the libido has a utopian drift, limited not just to homo sapiens where it first becomes conscious and rationally directed. In the light of this insight it seems ridiculous to announce the end of utopia. How could utopia end? As long as human beings are creatures of desire utopia is unavoidable. To fail to recognise the utopian dimension of desire means to not know what desire really is. Even if we got what we desire, the lover, the job, the recognition, the fulfilment always lags a little behind what the desire had in mind. Even the happiest event does not render happiness perfect. There is a utopian surplus in desiring that actions cannot reach, nor can words. The idea of having three wishes left is terrible because we know that none of them will capture the “best of all”, as the fairy tale calls it, because the magic word is missing. At the same time, alone the surplus invests desire with the intensity to spill over into action. The overflow is the superstructure [Genius] of desire.
Why is there such a willingness to avoid the surplus today, because it invokes associations with socialism? What moved Michel Foucault to discard utopias, replacing them with “heterotopias”, i.e. with “contre-emplacements”, “emplacements absolument autres”? His paradigms for heterotopias are temples, gardens and libraries, places of solemn, celebratory calm, pause, submersion and edification. Such spaces offering respite from workaday stress and bustle should no doubt be cultivated and multiplied, since they are rare enough. But their aura and solemnity is drawn from the fact they stand for more than they are. The most beautiful temples and gardens don’t actually provide the peace they represent but rather an anticipatory taste of it, the fore-shine. They are not “concretely realised utopias” as Foucault thinks,9 but rather “concrete utopias” in the exact meaning intended by Bloch. It is the same with those historical incidents in which the usual course of events seems to have been suspended by some turnaround, an upheaval, a new alliance or a gush of laughter. Why call them, with Roland Barthes, atopia instead of utopia, perceiving them as figures of deviation that have no place in the general progress of things and yet take place? Their significance is not as isolated anomalies, but as openers of new spaces of possibility, as harbingers of some unfulfilled promise. In 1989, as refugees from the GDR were told at the West German embassy in Prague that they could enter the FRG this meant for them that the GDR system was no longer in effect. The cry of elation drowning out Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s announcement gave vent to a tension that had been mounting over months. But it also released the exuberance of hopes soon proving to be hopelessly overloaded. The West turned out not to be the Promised Land. It harboured bitter disappointments. The jubilation from Prague signalled real rescue but was filled with a longing for more than what became reality.
The idea of a worldwide socialist society is one form of utopia that has certainly lost its credibility. But this has not halted the production of the utopian urge. Utopian energies simply flow into other canals. They are especially diverted into the advertisement world, which has become the all-shining utopia of today. No one is immune to its images. Not even the most enlightened of us is capable of perceiving themselves as they really are. The self-image, more than any other image, is an idealised image, wishful thinking. As psychoanalysis has shown, the I can only begin to develop at all in the slipstream of an ideal self-image, an ideal of the I. But today, the cumulative power of the mass media inserts an advertisement ideal into this process of the development of self. The imperatives to be hygienic, slim, to eat properly, dress well and adopt the right kind of lifestyle have so much become the fermentation of individuals’ desires as to be indistinguishable from their own.
This is the effect of the advertisement world at close range. But it also performs action at a distance. Across the entire northern half of Africa, people are willing to take on the strain and danger of being dragged by cheating smugglers across the Sahara, straying about the shores of the Mediterranean waiting to get on unseaworthy boats to arrive at the end of their strength in Spain or Italy and be put into refugee camps or escape into illegality. This could not happen if these people did not have advertisement images from Europe in their heads capable of unleashing sufficient utopian energies to make them immune to all the information they may get on their real chances in Europe. Another misrouting of utopian energy is one of the big signs of the times. With the collapse of the Eastern Block religious fundamentalism, especially the Islamist variety, has increased so dramatically that talk of the threat from the East now means them and no longer communism. Fundamentalism results from the attempt to hold on to a society’s fundament when it has already begun to break away. When doctrines and rites have manifestly lost their place in a modernised world, they are celebrated all the more fanatically. Fundamentalism is backward-looking utopianism.
The danger is not the end of utopia but rather its regression to the flat and primitive forms that have started cropping up since the socialist utopia lost its power. A circumspect debate on utopia needs above all to address the misrouting and regression of utopia into shallowness and archaism. Not in order to abolish utopia. That would be in any case a futile attempt. Instead, in order to redirect the utopian energy away from the illusory images of the advertisement world and fundamentalism and toward the neuralgic point where the current state of the world is already motioning, urging beyond itself toward a better world. Some such neuralgic points are blaringly obvious, others are inconspicuous, and they are distributed all over the globe. They are the enclaves of concrete utopia and we need to discover their whereabouts.
Christoph Türcke
1 Friedrich Engels, The Development of Socialism From Utopia to Science.Transl. Daniel De Leon, p. 34. http://www.slp.org/pdf/marx/dev_soc.pdf
2 Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia. Stanford, California, 2000, p. 242.
4 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt/M. 1959, p. 179. Transl. SB.
5 Ernst Bloch, Feuchtwangers »Moskau 1937«. In: idem, Vom Hazard zur Katastrophe. Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934-39. Frankfurt/M. 1972, p. 234 f. Transl. SB.
6 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. l. c., p. 711.
7 Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia. Stanford, California, 2000, p. 242.
8Ibid., Afterword (1963), p. 279 – 282.
9 Michel Foucault, Des Espace Autres. In: Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), p. 46-49.