Mallol (2010) —ICDHS The «Metaphysics of interiority» and the utopian oracle. Segond Study of Ernst Bloch and Design

7/28/2019 Mallol (2010) ICDHS The Metaphysics of interiority and the utopian oracle. Segond Study of Ernst Bloch and D

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THE METAPHYSICS OF INTERIORITY AND THE UTOPIAN ORACLE

SECOND STUDY OF ERNST BLOCH AND DESIGN *

Miquel Mallol Esquefa

Titulat Professor of The Departament de Disseny i ImatgeUniversitat de Barcelona

(...) the society we lived in was a deception, and the world a machine1

Mark Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, denounces its transformation into absoluteinstrumentalism, indicator of the presumed global coherence of the dominion of nature. The authormentions the image of the young child that innocently asks his father what product is it thatadvertises the moon? a question not so different from the calculations of conquest that grown-ups

have made, based on the logic announced by J.F.Kennedy in his inaugural discourse according towhich the technical challenges to reach our satellite had to be accepted and met.It is not the instrumental character of reason, as practiced by the subject, that reveals the boundariesof its autonomy; this character does not question the utilitarian rationalization of nature and it is,according to Horkheimer, a simple bourgeois romanticism. As long as freedom is established as amere consensus on the technical pragmatism of success, it is necessary to liberate independentthought.I have been unable to elucidate how, according to Horkheimer, the concrete subject-object ties

becomes something capable to put into question the instrumentalism of rational thought. Reasonseems to be defined solely as a function of decision-making, challenged only in its final result, inthe logic of content of cognitive practice. The research herein presented takes as a hypothesis (acommon force in the tradition of theory (in theoretical tradition)?) that design, far from beinganother example of technical pragmatism, finds at the core of its own activity of generatingalternatives and in the fretfulness of decision-making -in the presumed logic of development of the

projects process- the experience born from rational reflection that must be liberated.2 The activityof the project has become indispensable as sole precept to be followed, that of autonomy in

production. But it is unable to resolve this precept only with that which it can control; this activity,always collective, experiences repeatedly its own lack of references, either in its final logic (the

project understood as the content of a technical document) or in the determining of alternativeforms of generation. We have dealt already with some aspects of this link between project and thereflexion on reason: Fichtes idealism, the inversion of technology in defense of technics, and

Brentanos intentio. Here today we follow the texts of Ernst Bloch, particularly early texts upuntil his return from Switzerland after World War II in 1919 and including as a fundamentaldocument the first edition of Geist der Utopie. The concept proposed by Bloch in these youthfultexts of an objective imagination will guide our understanding of this authors work as well as the

possibility to understand the concepts represented by the nexus of experience of reason that is theproject, and how they can imbue design itself with meaning.

Forms in auto-configuration (Gestalt) of the universal reunion of the self3

As has so often been pointed by scholars of Blochs oeuvre, difficulty of reading Geist der Utopie,

in particular the first edition of 1918 which we are using here, forces us to remember thehypothetical sense in which, by its link to design as rediscovery of the project, we place the presenttext. If to the expressionist tone of this work, which Adorno remembered as if it had been written


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by Nostradamus hand, we add our intention of reading it by a design that does not aim totranscribe diagrams of artifact interpretation, the probability of being confused is certainly high.But this work of Blochs is in effect a work, a work of sculpture literally assigned to a specificsculptor (alive at the time of the first edition): a calligram nominated in all the dimensions of

physical materiality. A loving symbiosis between the crafts of philosophy and sculpture, whendestiny did not allow conception by means of its biological automatisms. It is a matter of molding

the potters clay into something that will be fired in the kiln of the concepts. With the spirit (Geist),the impulse, the force generated by that-which-isnt-yet, in that-not-yet-conscient, in utopia.

Intention. And now, what? Thats enough. We must begin. Unto our hands life is given.By itself it has long been sterile (void). It balances up and down without meaning, but wehold our ground, and so we want it to remain in its gaiety (joy) and in its destiny. 4

A clear incipit vita nova, a clear lets begin anew as responsibility and as possibility they set thestarting point of a journey where not even the structure of the discourse is given. And for anomnipresent materialist interpretation, in the sense of the individual life, in the sense of the physicalhorrors of war, of the senselessness of words and arguments based solely on the utilitarism of the

slogan and the falsehood.

A suffocating coercion imposed and tolerated by mediocre people, stupidity protected by thepoliceman, acclaimed by intellectuals that cant muster enough brains but to pronounce merephrases 5

But also in the sense of culture, of stylistic references, after the dispelling of the tacit Jugendstilaccord between isolated specific symbolic needs and petty bourgeois illusions of a return to theorigins of the arts in machine made objects of use.Against the unstoppable globalization of the corporate image, and with messianiccommunitarism, the journey is an inner one. Not towards a new mirage that will function asexemplary seed of culture.It is a matter to depart inwards, to search for the revolutionary destiny inside the block of marble.The metaphysics of interiority to begin the seventh day of creation.The autonomy of projecting, as generative and consequent prescription of prudence, would becommitted to making possible its realization, at the same time conscious and material, and it wouldregain its sense. With the enthusiasm offered by the oracle of utopia and the innocence of believingin the possibility of this inner-bound communal journey.

This schematism of our understanding in regard to phaenomena and their mere form, is an

art, hidden in the depths of the human soul6

The difficult ambivalence of Kant critiques between transcendentalism and the anthropologicalarchetype resonates clearly in the neo-Kantian schools of end of XIX and beginning of XXCenturies. Explicitly Kantian expressions, like human soul, support the possibility of attemptingto enfuse the form of reason with anthropological content.And this fact opens up the debate on the object of human sciences. Psychologism, even pre-

behaviourist psychologism, will be at one extreme of the debate and anti-positivism, or anti-materialism, at the other. Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert , Herman Cohen, Paul Gerhard

Natorp, Ernst Cassirer , Ernst Mach, are some notable thinkers present in Ernst Bloch formativeperiod.

Blochs doctoral thesis under the tutelage of M. Oswald Klpe, (University of Wrzbourg, 1908),can be considered as a synthesis of these influences. 7


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Keeping in mind that in this present work we are in the process of constructing hypothesis, it isinteresting to point out three aspects of this thesis that open up the possibility of understanding oncemore the weight that the action of the project assumes in philosophical texts as link between

productive action and the principle of reason. It is, to our understanding: 1) an expression ofenthusiasm for the localization in the internal and individual construction of the movement thatopens itself to every possibility of culture; 2) but also, and at the same time, the naivete of thinking

about the ethical integrity of this origin; 3) all of which could be the foundation for a research onthe logic of the direction of development of the project, of each project as construction of a trulyhumanistic productivity, when it does not take for granted this direction in a tacit acceptation of themechanicist articulation of culture.If the purpose is to infuse archetypal reason with human content, starting from Kantstranscendentalism, it is necessary to infuse this humanization with everything that constituteshuman culture, not only that which fits the rules of physical science. The original task, then, is theobscurity of the origin as it is experienced and lived.

and it will adopt as problematic-theoretical methodology the inner path of cosmic life 8

The project, as project-link between reason and production, can also encompass this force ofobjective imagination, since they are no longer the models separated from a reality assumed asinitial, it is the result of the dialectics between that which is imagined and that which is represented

before being known, the not-yet-conscient. Itexperiences it in the imaginative projection, rightafter the witty occurrence of representing itself for the later control of consciousness. The problemof the project -and of design, as preserver of such problem- is not between the black box and thetransparent box, between the problem and the solution, where the creative jump is alwaysmarginal. It is the will to start from the contents of this creative jump as a totality, as a unity withits own representation towards the absolute. Like the schematism of Kants critique (the image isa product of the empirical ability of productive imagination), the Alexanders constructivediagrams or Patterns -or as a matter of fact, all theories of design- we will also have this sense ofkeeping the possibility as such, of keeping, in its original spark, the effort towards is non-contemporaneous coherence, to be something else that is born and experienced in the lived presentof the objective imagination, that is to say in its own form of reality, in the most truly humanreality.Any theory of design that does not keep this mysterious birth as a material birth of new force isreduced to mere positivism, surrender to the forces of the structure predetermined by convention. Itlooses the precept of the project as liberty, utopia; even worse, it looses utopias spirit, its hope, itshumanity.

I was hardly there when I was conceived9

It is necessary to fight the dependence on the present as dehumanization. Reason in nature is notdependent on a calculation of dominion but on the enthusiastic impulse of that-which-is-not-yet astrue ontology.Design as reencounter of the project as messianic oracle, this is the liberation of the independentthought. None of this is strange to the better known writings on the role of the project in design, ofMaldonado (La Speranza progettuale), Agran (Progetto e destino), Aicher (Die Welt alsEntwurf), Jorge-Nstor Bozzano (Proyecto: razn y esperanza), etc. Even more, messianic andnave enthusiasm: the metaphysics of interiority of objective imagination in the representative circleof projectual activity, towards a utopian oracle.

There are those who live in a reality shaped by the bounds of social networks and by the forms ofmass control towards the single destiny of the I+D+I; they believe that reality is limited to stirringup the pot of immediacy , of that which is financially useful.


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With the enthusiasm and innocence of Blochs first writings, and with a somewhat Kantian tone, wemight recall what Claire Lejeune taught us:

"Prsence au monde est dbordement de prsence soi" 10

As well as overflowing of the utopian spirit, that which pushes from the burning oracle of the

stoves, from the project, towards the ever distant horizon of that-which-is-not-yet.

* Translation from Catalan : Francesc Burgos1 Bloch, Ernst (1930-1969): Spuren. Ed. Paul Cassirer Verlag/Suhrkamp Verlag.Berlin/Frankfurt am Main. Trad. Eng. Anthony A. Nassar (of 1969 germ.ed.): Traces. Ed. StanfordUniversity Press. Stanford. P. 46.2 Following the path already coursed in this research, we differentiate between the twoexpressions to design and to project. We understand that to design is a particular case of themore general to project. It is a case defined historically in the debates of John Ruskin, W. Morris,

etc. In this case the activity of the project strictly respects cultures complexity and historicity.This respect is radical to the point that it might even put into question the possibility of coherenceof the project.3 Bloch, Ernst (1918): Geist der Utopie. (Erste Fassung). Ed. Duncker und Humblodt. Mnchenund Leipzig. P. 22-23. I have been unable to find a printed English translation of the first 1919edition of Geist der Utopie. The Catalan translation is my own.4 Ibid P. 9.5 Ibid P. 9.6 Kant, Immanuel (1781 - 1787): Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Ed. Johann Friedrich Hartknoch.Riga. Translated from the german By J.M.D. Meikelejohn. London: George Bell nad sons, YorkStreet, Coven Garden. 1887. P. 109-110.7 Bloch, Ernst (1908): Kritische Errterungen ber Rickert und das Problem der modernen

Erkenntnistheorie. Ludwigshafen a. Rh., Baur, 1909.8 das innere Begehen des kosmischen Weges zur problemtheoretischen Methode werden lt(p 72)9 Bloch, Ernst (1930-1969): Eng. P. 22.10 Lejeune, Claire (1992):Le livre de la sur. Ed. ditions de lHexagone. Montral (Qubec).P. 10.

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Mallol (2010) —ICDHS The «Metaphysics of interiority» and the utopian oracle. Segond Study of Ernst Bloch and Design