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The Non-Synchronous Heritage
and the Problem of Propaganda
by Oskar Negt
Systematic Aspects in Bloch's Philosophical Biography
Congratulating Ernst Bloch on his ninetieth birthday suggests taking a look
at the concrete utopia of a human life that has taken shape in him, a life
which had an almost unique opportunity, not only to experience more than
six decades of non-synchronous, even catastrophic developments, but also to
give them expression--in a continuity of conceptual analysis whose exertion
cannot be better documented than through the fact that the ruptures are
missing in his thought, that a renunciation of convictions and insights was
never necessary. To be sure, the objective meaning of a systematic theory
cannot be subsumed in its author's biographical background, but it would be
equally wrong to consider philosophy and the structure of personality as
totally indifferent to one another; they are connected in a very specific way.
When Fichte says that the sort of philosophy one has depends upon the sort of
person one is, then he does not mean the chance features of empirical
character, but rather the subject's capability for reflection and experience,
which however, as we know today, is also a product of the history of his
theoretical and political socialization.
Biography and philosophy stand in a necessary relationship to one another
only in so far as experience is the organizing center of reflection; experience
understood this way means primarily historical experience of the present. By
detaching themselves from this frame of reference, as Hans Mayer has justly
and emphatically pointed out in his article on "Three Difficulties with Ernst
Bloch,"' Bloch interpreters are able to gain free rein and to take segments of
his personality out of the context of his copious work as they see fit, to which
they then attach the theory as a whole; in this way Bloch becomes a mystic, a
theologian of hope, a prophet. Bloch's philosophical biography loses its
mystical ideological veil and gains the sobriety of a merely clarifying
description of human traits only under the doubtlessly over-simplified
presupposition that he is primarily concerned with the solution of present-day
problems; that the political-revolutionary substance of his theory is
detectable even in places where he is concerned with seemingly quite abstract
things, such as the "latent essence of world matter" or the "co-productivity of
Nature."
3. Kursbuch 39, 2.
HERITAGE AND PROPAGANDA 49
truth and propaganda, theory and action is posed not only pragmatically or
as a problem of the theory of knowledge, but as a political problem of theory
itself. Considering the tenacity of a prejudice that has been in effect for over
two thousand years, Bloch raises, almost resignedly, the rhetorical question:
"Where did the superstition originate that truth opens up its own path?"4
What Bloch criticizes here as the superstition of left-wing propagandists of
reason and true theory has long since assumed the seemingly clearer, more
material language of the exemplary sacrifice, the practical signal
(Fanal) however, with the conviction corresponding to mere rational
propaganda, that the sacrifice will pay off some day, that some day the
masses, moved from a distance by reason, will wake up and orient themselves
according to the signals and "historicalsigns" that have been set up for them.
In the mid-1960s, the most militant segments of the West German Left
were close to seeing through the abstract dualism of revolution and fascism;
to grasping the ambiguity in every individual interest and need, and by means
of creative political case work bringing them into a political context of
interpretation. If they have once again fallen back upon foreshortened reified
formulas, this is certainly in part the result of the second period of restoration
currently being instituted in the Federal Republic and characterized by the
use of preventive and violent counterrevolutionarymeasures. But at the same
time it is also a product of the antiquated level of development of Marxian
theory. In the same measure as it limits the explanation of fascistic tendencies
in capitalist society to socio-psychological mechanisms, to sociological
dispositions defined at birth and to alliances of economic interests, that is,
ascribes to fascism a clearly limited, basically static realm of reality and
action, the theory alsoformalizes the content of revolutionary processes. The
criteria for success of revolutionary action are derived from the same
standards that were developed by the secret services and the state in their
attempt to find techniques for the suppression of revolution. Corresponding
to the "deficiency of socialist fantasy"is the constant lack of fantasy in the way
in which left-wing groups and parties deal with those powers and needs;
needs which display tendencies toward anticapitalist mentality, but which
cannot be transformed singlehandedly into revolutionary class consciousness
by rational persuasion and examplary action alone.
In one essential point Bloch goes beyond the existing analyses of fascism.
No matter how important socio-psychological dispositions and the dynamics
of human drives (as represented in ethnocentrism and the authoritarian
character structure determined by primary socialization) may be for mass
4. "Sokratesund die Propaganda" in: Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe (Frankfurt am Main,
1972), p. 103.
50 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
practical demand for the realization of the socialist heritage, whose dialectics,
however, is blocked by the fear of really unleashing fantasy as a productive
mode of experience for the masses.
These two emigrations were not able to drive Bloch into resignation. After
the debacle of the 1848 revolution (to which proletarian hopes had been tied
to a certain extent) and in view of the upcoming period of restoration and the
time-consuming but useless activity of left-wing sects, Marx spoke in 1851 of
the "necessity for an authentic isolation." With this he certainly did not mean
the disavowal of practice and the desperate retreat to mere theory, but rather
their opposite: the conscious seizing of the historical task of a redefinition of
revolutionary practice, which in any case requires theoretical preliminaries.
Something similar is true for Bloch: the isolation he describes, the indu-
bitably feels at times, is authentic because the theory produced from the
immediate context of a committed intellectual's political work has clung to
two basic principles: to the necessity for practical labor of mediation, and to
the progressive determination of the real teleological content of the
revolutionary process; to the realm of freedom, which does not remain
inconsequentially in the emotional, unoriented darkness.
the future of socialism. The "realm of freedom" is not a finished state at all,
towards which one advances step by step; instead it is a process, which has
motivating power for people by designating the direction of a possibility of
articulating present hopes, interests and needs.
From this foundation in the revolutionary teleological content of socialism,
Bloch conceives of nothing less than the new epochal task of philosophy; it is
first of all related concretely to the socialist construction of the GDR, but the
task is not merely seen in terms of day-to-day politics. Philosophy now
consciously has "the active task of Pre-View (Vor-Schein) and specifically the
Pre-View of an objectively real vision of the world in process, the world of
hope itself... Catching sight of this genesis is the organ of philosophy; the
dialectically directed, systematically open view into matter in the shape of
tendency is its new form."8 By seeking to regain philosophy as a living,
creative productive force of its own type, in accordance with specific laws of
the objective fantasy and the critical appropriation of reality, Bloch frees it
from the deadly embrace of the theory of knowledge, logic and epistemology,
which it also experiences in a Marxism deformed beyond recognition by
functions of legitimation. If one wished to localize philosophy in this sense of
anticipation, one would have to settle it upon the apex between the conditions
of tendency and latency of prehistory and its objectively possible end. "With
this insight (of philosophy) one realizes: Mankind still lives in prehistory
everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine
one. The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only
begins when society and existence become radical, that is, grasp themselves at
the root. The root of history, however, is Man, working, producing,
reforming and surpassingthe givens around him. If he has seized himself and
what is his, without externalization and alienation, founded in real
democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into
everyone's childhood and where no one has yet been: home."9
Bloch ascribed great importance to the images and concepts that aim at the
realm of freedom as a nonalienated place of production; in which, in the
words of Marx "the production of the forms of relation (Verkehrsformen)
themselves"is the primary object of social production; in which therefore not
only other products are produced, but the "development of human
productive forces, that is, the development of the riches of human nature"
counts as an end in itself. In order to understand why this is so, one must
recall how impoverished and anemic the conceptions of the revolution and
the classless society are in the works of his Marxist contemporaries. The
conceptual horizon of some of these contemporaries hardly encompassed
more than the special economical, power-political problems of smashing the
State apparatus and abolishing the capital properties of productive forces,
which had become a fetter, as well as organizational problems of nationali-
zation, planning and socialization; at best (as in the case of Korsch) the
conceptions went so far as to define the function of soviets. In the work of
others, who were yoked into the principle of negative dialectics, especially
adequate to an intellectual mode of production which permits only the deter-
minate negation of domination and repression, the conceptions of a classless
society hardly surpassed the broadly interpretable perspective of a rational
organization of society; a perspective which was without practical orientation
and received its tangibility (Sinnlichkeit) at best from a light dose of
traditional Jewish-mystical anticipations. 10
For Bloch, this process of social production, as he characterized the "realm
of freedom" with its atmosphere of security and belonging to "Home," is not
detached from its economic and political conditions, and the "thorn, the
restlessness of the utopian function" remains in effect, because at least two
contradictions conditioned by matter persevere: the contradiction of the
subject with its objectivations, and that of the "totality of the real, as what has
absolutely not yet come into being, with everything that has become and is
inadequate to it." It is characteristic of this production process, which will by
then have been released from the distorting pressure of ideologies, that it is
filled with continuously effective, constantly changing energies drawn from
the reservoir of cultural surplus deriving from the entire prehistory; the
partisanship with which history is examined is based in this production
process, which remains to be established in full capacity. In such an
encompassing sense Bloch has taken up and developed further the Engelsian
concept of heritage, which for him covers more and other things than the
temporal and systematic predecessors of the Marxian theory referred to by
Engels. To be sure, Engels' programmatic objection to bourgeois historians in
1844, " We reclaim the content of history," already hints at this universalizing
tendency to a deepening and enlargement of the concept of heritage; it
remained, until Bloch, a largely unfilfilled plank in the program of Marxism,
for this "content of history" is nothing other than the history of the unsatisfied
and the unfinished (das Unabgegoltene und Unerledigte), of everything that
constitutes the socialist heritage. "But once again: one cannot think closely
enough of the central content of this fantasy (in the horizon of socialism); for
11. "Hat der Wille keine Grenzen?--Probleme des Reichs der Freiheit" in: Philosophische
Aufsatze (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), p. 179.
12. Das Materialismusproblem (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), p. 412.
13. Ibid., p. 416.
56 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
has long since faded away. This synthetic remainder, to which no substance is
added even by the most apt derivations, does not disappear even when the
dialectic of form and content immanent in the worksin question is carried out
and its inner consistency elevated to a standard and norm worthy of
imitation; at best, classicistic renaissances result from this.
Engels in his later years already had to struggle against the euphoria for
derivation; Bloch by no means disputes the necessity of economic investi-
gations; on the contrary, he considers them indispensable. But the problem
of a Marxist philosophy that has recognized the connection between Engels'
concept of heritage and the Marxian allusion to the nonsynchronous
development of economic basis and cultural superstructureonly begins when
the path of analytical knowledge has been pursued to its end. Scientific
knowledge begins for Marx only where it can be demonstrated how the
production of ideological products of the superstructure arise as something
necessaryand synthetic from the contradictory conditions of society, from the
inner strife of existence itself; that is, where, in Kantian terms, judgements of
extension and not mere judgements of explication emerge. Consequently,
difficulties of derivation and understanding do not lie in the fact "that Greek
art and the Greek epic are connected to certain forms of social development."
For Marx, the real difficulty lies in establishing how production relations as
legal relations enter into an indifferent development with respect to one
another. In this way the civil law formed under the conditions of
slave-holding society in Rome can be utilized almost completely for the
governmentally sanctioned regulatory functions of modern commodity--
producing society. To give a more specific example, which is at the same time
more general because it is related to the more mediated, creative processes
involved in the production of the wealth of cultural forms: how can Greek art
and epics "still provide us with aesthetic pleasure and be considered, in a
certain sense, as norms and unattainable models"?15 This difficulty can
hardly be removed by Marx's allusion to the wish to remember a society
grown old, succumbing again and again to the "eternal attraction" of the
historical childhood of mankind, which will never return. The difficulty
concerns the entire cultural surplus, the Unsatisfied of the whole of
prehistory.
By thematizing the differentiations alluded to by Marx in the concept of
progress, Bloch moves the complex labor of mediation between economic
genesis and cultural validity into the center: "... the observer is overcome by
a sublime feeling when he enters the halls of art and wisdom, and not without
15. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Berlin, 1953), p. 31.
58 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
reason, and this feeling marks the difference in height, the difference in
mediation between Athens as a trading center and as the location of the
Parthenon, which grew up like Athens in a festive peace. This difference in
mediation is also the reason why demonstrating the economic basis of sonatas,
tragedies, temples and so forth is particularly shocking to the idealist and
particularly pleasing to the materialist; for the first wishes to hear nothing of
mediation, while the second wants to understand it from top to bottom and
from bottom to top. Now it is true that the problem of this mediation,
ultimately the problem of the production of culture, is least suited to being
treated dualistically... The attempts to conceive of the production of culture
from the basis of isolated economism call to mind the equally dualized
perplexity with which people in the Baroque sought transitions between the
'substances' body and soul, extensio and cogitatio, spatiality and
consciousness."16
The materialist dialectics that sublates the abstract dualism between
economy and production of culture in the concrete development of genesis
and validity is the same one that criticizes the fragmentation of the
components of time and space as much as the quantifying, formal logical
connection of the two. The unity of world matter, which includes history,
requires for the establishment of its inner connection neither teleological
principles, such as Schelling's substances, nor a philosophic-historical
"natural motive force," which from time to time calls people's attention to the
unsatisfied, unfinished aspects of history, and motivates them to new solutions
of old tasks.
For this contradictory unity of the world in the process of constituting itself
is at first something secular-materialistic: namely, the unity of prehistory,
where it has always been seen to that the roof would collapse above man's
head, where it was assured that the utopian contents of tendency and the
goal, no matter how harmonious, perfect and finished they presented
themselves in the richness of their formation, would collide again and again
with the objective power of existing conditions, would shatter in part from
this and would frequently be fragmented.
By seeking to wrest themselves free from the gravitational force of material
conditions, from the negative invariance of history as it were, such as
domination, exploitation, concealment and deceit, the utopian teleological
contents represent something twofold: they anticipate a state in which the
latent essence of nature and history will be freely determinable, without the
constant danger of interruption by crises and catastrophes. Because of pre-
instead the same utopia, 'calm,' which as such gave the feudal ideology its
cultural surplus, will and must permit the forming of a Pre-View that does
not permit one to rest and, let it be understood, is absolutely
unreactionary."18
It can never be abstractly determined which aspects of the past enter into
the socialist heritage, for example, under the plausible but frequently fore-
shortened point of view of topicality. On the contrary, concrete
decipherability is required. Thus, in a time of disappearing ornamentation,
Bloch distinguishes in the chapter on ornament in Spirit of Utopia lines of
functional form and of multiple expression with the obvious secondary motive
of rehabilitating a bit of Egypt, contrary to the "logical" progress of
ornamentation: "the expressive constructedness and immanence in stone,
dictated not by efforts at stylization, but by the spirit of the material itself."'19
But connections also result whose direct political urgency is obvious. Socialist
heritage includes as well the unsatisfied, pre-capitalist neutral scenery, in
which a piece of "unsold nature" is represented: Bloch considers as
intolerable and wrong the idea that objective nature should be so constructed
that it exactly corresponds to the commodity form, the calculating abstract
thought of the bourgeois class, that it should have its only correlate of
perception and knowledge in this thought. In just this sense of a real ecology,
of a "constitutive connection between an inner household of plants and
animals and a landscape adequate to it,"20 there is a material heritage of
earlier natural scenery, directed towardsperception of the object itself, which
preserves mimetic qualities, contained in mythologies, symbolism and
animistic magic.
country, not under the formal sociological aspect of backwardness, but under
the political aspect of nonsynchronicity, of a contradiction in process between
social being and consciousness, Bloch seeks to make those "irrational"
contents and emotional drives (which by themselves are not dead-ends but
rather "fog spots" of specific social contradictions as well as of theory)
discernible for the socialist heritage and utilizable for revolutionary practice.
Nonsynchronicity is a critical category that points out fractures in the
relationship between being and consciousness; it is the vigorous criticism of
the idea that consciousness is the direct, adequate, mechanical product of
conditions of existence, that proletarian consciousness must follow from the
proletarian being of peasants and the petty bourgeoisie, if not immediately,
then surely from educational efforts to make them conscious of their
alienation. If Bloch still says in 1974 that the "category 'provinces' must be
merged into the hypersynchronicity" of socialism,24 this does not arise from a
romantic mourning for what is threatened with consumption by capital;
rather it is the result of the insight that, especially in Germany, "world history
was by no means always urban history." 25
Fascism comprehended very accurately and exploited propagandistically
the ambivalence and contradictoriness inherent in the late bourgeoisie
towards the city, that prototype for the bourgeois form of organization of
social emancipation, which is no less discernible in the utopian idea of the
"kingdom" than in St. Augustine's notion of civitas (a utopia that only
became reality once in recent history, for a few moments and under a quite
different aegis: in the days of the Paris Commune). On the one hand, the
urban forms of socialization, the possibilities of public communication, of a
seemingly total egalitarian margin of movement for each citizen, and the
means of sensual representation of programs, mythologies and history are
utilized with extreme technical efficiency as parades and national party
conventions, radio addresses and athletic events, colossal train stations and
expressways show. On the other hand, fascism lives from anti-urban feelings,
it attempts to oppose organic growth and ties to the soil to circulating capital;
"the Nazi loves what has become, not what has been made; in this way he
need not intervene in what has been made, to wit, the capitalist economy...
peasant blood is supposed to create health ab ovo, even if it is weakened by
incest and other damage, in contrast to the sporting types in the big cities.
Cities are considered...to be destroyers of the people's strength..."26
30. Marx, The Class Struggles in France (Moscow, 1952), pp. 125-6.
HERITAGE AND PROPAGANDA 69
the North Italian class struggles, LIP and protest movements (which in other
respects seem so different) have in common is, first of all, that here the zones
of conflict and struggle are determined by the collision of different modes of
producing experience; it is this form of nonsynchronicity in the capitalist
countries which is gaining ever greater importance for the genesis of revo-
lutionary actions and the articulation of needs and political demands, even as
regards to the class-conscious parts of the proletariat.
31. "Kritik der Propaganda" in: Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe, p. 197.