Blochian method?

It struck me the other day that very little has been written about Ernst Bloch’s methodology.

We find a basic narrative about Bloch (found in Jameson’s Marxism and Form and Hudson’s The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, for example) repeated in much of the literature: that he is concerned to find what has “not yet” arrived, and thereby aims to reveal the emerging future in the present.  This narrative presupposes Bloch’s work is to provide an analysis of the world designed to uncover its developmental tendencies.  While that is itself a problematic reading (Bloch’s earlier works—Spirit of Utopia, e.g., have a very different sense of the “future” than something like Principle of Hope, and so something like a single “Blochian” idea is rather more difficult to find than has been presupposed), the related but separate question of how the form of his theory relates to its content and aims has often, as far as I can tell,  been left unexamined.

For instance, a number of major texts on Principle of Hope simply claim it is a kind of “compendium” of hope-traces in history—more an assertion of the lack of method; or scholarship rejects the idea that there is any real method to the text at all.

The problem lies in suggesting that Bloch’s text is “analytical” in the normal sense—that is, that it is mostly designed to show us that history has incomplete “traces” and is processing towards the future.  Such a reading takes its cues from Marx: Capital, for instance, aims to reveal the developing potential, in the clash between forces and relations of production, for a new social structure.  But Bloch’s task is not primarily analysis aimed at such a revelation; reading him in those terms almost inevitably leads to assertions that Bloch is bad at analysis.  Spirit of Utopia, Traces, even Principle of Hope are organized to not simply “reveal” something about history but to provoke something.  They are attempts to deploy from out of the past certain “non-contemporaneous” elements—that is, ideas which cannot entirely fit within existing ideological structures and therefore offer partial means to rupture them.  The ideas in which Bloch is interested are those in which humanity is envisioned in social and productive relations which are less dehumanizing than those prevailing in capital, gathered from out of a great number of sources.  Such elements are, insofar as they potentially contradict the realities of the capitalist present, recalcitrant historical remnants capable of being deployed against capital.  (Of course, this means that Bloch’s work contains a curious historicism: Bloch does not identify a single tendency—“hope”—working its way throughout all of history (as some commentaries have claimed); rather, since he looks at history through the lens of the present, what appears in history to that present are those tendencies which resonate with and threaten it….)  Thus Bloch, reflecting on method in Spirit of Utopia, writes: “[A]ll we can do for the moment is prepare, provide words and concepts, until an identification takes them up and grants equivalence” (Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford Unviersity Press, 2000), 172).  A similar idea saturates Traces and Heritage of Our Times, becoming the leitmotif of Principle of Hope: that the task of theory is the redeployment of non-contemporaneous ideas that hopefully can be taken up in radical praxis somewhere, “grant[ed] equivalence” to the needs of a particular moment, for the purposes of rupturing and reconfiguring the present.  In this way, Bloch’s texts are performances—acts of wild reconfiguration of elements from the past—gesturing towards the need for a further, more radical reconfiguration of the present.

More on this later.