Bloch on the New

[Jeffrey]

I have not done much reading into Bloch's aesthetics.  I've really only
read an essay titled "Discussing Expressionism" published with essays by
Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs and Brecht in a book called _Aesthetics and
Politics_.

Bloch's essay contains both an answer to L's attack on Expressionism and a
counter-attack to L's preference for realism.  On page 22 Bloch writes,
"Any art which strives to exploit the real fissures in surface
inter-relations and to discover the new in their crevices, appears in
[Lukacs'] eyes merely as a wilful act of destruction."  Apparently,
according to Bloch, there is something behind or below the surface of
things that is more authentic.  There is, in this sense, the possibility of
something other, something new, something utopian.  Lukacs, on the other
hand, citing Marx, argues that the Bloch has misread reality: If there
seems to be fissures they are just an illusion; any other reality behind or
below is not new and utopian, but is rather the true, unified capitalist
reality.  (I honestly haven't figured out yet where to get the new out of
Lukacs' aesthetics.)

One way to thematize the question of the new is in terms of the new vs.
kitsch -- kitsch being art that is subsumed by capitalist reality, and new
art which resists.  Bloch claims that Expressionism avoided kitsch because
of its connection with folklore.  Through the fissures peeks some kind of
archaic -- yes, Utopian -- other reality.

While I don't know exactly how to sort through Bloch and Benjamin and the
differences between allegory and symbol (symbol contains both idea and
form, while allegory has its idea separate from itself?), I think Bloch and
Benjamin may have been working with two different conceptions of the new.
The new in Benjamin may have been more like in Adorno, where the new is
never outside emperical reality.  The new is essentially the aesthetic
counterpart of the idea of novelty in consumer driven society.  The new
sustains interest and really has no radical revolutionary possibilities.
(Although I haven't figured out what does have radical possibilities in
Adorno.)  The new quickly becomes kitsch, always.  In a sense, Adorno's
view seems to be Lukacs' as well;  the new's impotence simply renders it a
non-issue.  However, in Bloch the new, as said above, is radical; it's not
based on empirical reality.  Or to the extent that its is based on emp.
reality, on a past, it is not a reality we can access and make profane.
For Bloch Expressionism provided "human expressions of the incognito."
Strangely, both real (in that its human) and unreal or mystereous, the
expressionist work of art opens up for us the possibility of Utopia.

Warren, does allegory not contain any sense of the past?  If it does, then
can we simply say that Bloch and Benjamin each have a different sense of
the new -- one that's radical, one that's not?  I don't know enough about
Benjamin to know whether or not he sustained any sense of radical Utopia.
It seems conceivable that Benjamin had no need for the new.  What would a
profane new be anyway?

jeffrey


>Dear Jeffrey,
>
>Your work on Lukacs, Bloch, and Adorno to a certain extent
>overlaps with my own on Benjamin and Bloch's mixture of
>Judeo-Christian Messianism and Marxism.  One the chapters I am
>working on is on their aesthetic theory.
>
>>From Bloch's perspective (in Heritage of Our Times), Lukacs' attack
>on expressionism is because he considers it to be "bourgeois art."
>Bloch, on the other hand (and not entirely disagreeing), views it as sort
>of a bourgeois self-critique.
>
>What is central in Bloch's aesthetic theory is the utopian aspects of art
>(particularly of music).  Art is an "pre-appearance" of utopia; it contains
>"not yet-conscious" knowledge of future possibilities.  It represents the
>New.  However, Bloch also writes that art is allegorical whereas religion
>is based on symbol (Experimentum Mundi, pp. 206-207).  This seems to
>contradict Benjamin who writes that allegory is sacred and unredeemed
>while symbol is profane and represents the New (Origin of the German
>Tragedy, pp. 161, 183).  If art is allegorical, in Bloch's view, how can it
>contain the New?  Would it not rather be based on a fragmented and
>unredeemed past?  Any utopian elements of art always have their
>models in the past (like Bloch in the Principle of Hope derives his utopian
>models from the past).  Any attempt to create something new, must
>always be based on something old.
>
>I would be very interested to hear more of your take on Bloch's aesthetic
>theory.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Warren Goldstein