“We Have Studdenly Become Severe’ Ernst Bloch as a Critic of odern Architecture Matthew Rampley | Edinburgh College of Aris, UK perhaps am living in 1908, but my neighbour is living in i900, and the man across the way in 1880. Tei unfor- ‘tunate fora state when the culture ofits inhabitants s spread over such a great period of time. The peasants of Kalsareliving inthe 12" century, and there were peoples taking part in the jubilee parade ofthe Emperor Franz ‘Joseph who would have been considered backward even during the barbarian migrations. Happy the land that has no such stragglers and marauders. Happy America! (Loos, 2000: 290) Thus the Austrian critic and architect Adolf Loos declared war in 1910 on the unmodern, the non-simultaneous in the name of the absolute present. He thereby exemplified the ideology of history and progress we now recognise to have become central to the modern movement in architecture from the second decade of the twentieth-century through to the 1960s Such @ concern with contemporaneity was based not only on a moral con- demnation of the backward, on the barbaric, but also on a utopianism of the future. Indeed, the modernist ideology sustaining the discourse of Loos and others was the manifestation of a widespread shift in the character of utopian longing. Utopia was no longer another piace (ancient Greece, Atlantis, Xanadu}, it was here, but in another time, namely the future. And this utopian attachment to futurity came to be central bath to madern- ist and avant-garde practice and to popular cultural forms. In the early twentieth century much of the basis of this utopia was provided by the technological now and its unlimited, sublime possibilities. Technological efficiency and order would remave the frictions and obstacles inhibiting the bourgeois fantasies of absolute self-determination and freedom. The absolute transparency of the technological present and its sublime futures offered a compensation for the failure of the bourgeois subject to overcome its own self-intransparency. In this anrespect Loos’ technological subject is the dialectical counterpart of that of his Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud, whose bourgeois patients persisted in remaining in the murky depths of the id. Much of this is familiar, and | do not intend to dwell on it any further, for the time being, It does serve to introduce, however, the main topic of my paper, which is the writings of Ernst Bloch. In comparison with his contemporaries Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse or Walter Benjamin, Bloch is a fairly margin- al figure. He is best known as a defender of Expressionism and as the author of The Principle of Hope, a work whose immense scope stands in inverse relation to its impact on critical and cultural theory. In this paper | wish to examine in particular Bloch’s peculiar and specific response to the challenge of modern- ist architectural practice. Where the latter is often seen as having ‘ailed for its naively utopian commitments, Bloch’s critique concerns both its attachment to the wrong utopian impulses and, paradoxically not being utopian enough Lavatoriality | would like to start with a quotation from Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, first pub- lished in 1918: It knew, the machine, how to make everything as lifeless and subhuman on a small scale as our newer urban developments are on a larger scale. Its real objective is the bathroom and the toilet (...) just as Rococo furniture and Gothic cathedrals represent structures that define every other art object of their respective epochs. Now lavatoriality dominates; somehow, water runs from every wall, and even the most expensive products of our age's industrial diligence now partake of the wizardry of modern sanitation, the a priori of the finished industrial product. (Bloch, 200011) It is highly unlikely that Bloch was even aware of Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, but there is something remarkably prescient about his notion of the toilet as definitive of the twentieth-century avant-garde. In fact the principal target of his sarcastic comments is functionalism in design and architecture which, al- though still an ernergent phenomenon, was nevertheless widely enough dis- seminated to attract Bloch’s attention. In The Spirit of Utopia functionalism is attacked as part of a defence of ornament and thus in one important respect Bloch’s essay is the antithesis of Loos’ musings of a decade earlier. In particu- lar, Bloch critiques modernist architecture for its lifelessness, for its imitation of what he terms the “Egyptian will to become stone" (Bloch, 2000: 20} At the same time, however, he is not entirely critical of functionalism; while he censures its visual hygiene, its technological fetishism and its stripping away of "style," he also recognises that it enabled a freeing of art, design and archi- tecture from “obsolete” style and from empty ornamentation, For Bloch the Biedermeier culture of the 1820s and 1830s was the last moment when what he calls the “stylistic minimum” was operative. Since then visual culture was caught between two opposing tendencies, either technological production dic- tated a minimisation and stripping away of excess aesthetic form or “style” or ormament was added to mask the technological base, resulting in, for example, the luxuriant forms of beaux arts architecture and design. Bloch's solution to this antithesis or even impasse within modern architec- ture is @ reinvigoration of Gothic, whose linear organic structures satisfy basic human cravings: “only the essentially adventurous, farsighted functional Gothic line is complete life, the finally pure kingdom above functional form; the free spirit of the very movement of expression (...)" (Bloch, 2000: 24). The Blind Spot of the Self So far Bloch seems to offer litle more than a typical expressionist polemic, and his espousal of the Gothic was a commonplace in the first two decades of the twen- tieth- century, both in theoretical writing (e.g. Worringer, 1953) and in architectural practice. In The Principle of Hope of some thirty years later Bloch persisted in this valorisation of the Gothic and it is notable that he expressed a marked sympathy for the Gathicism of William Morris and John Ruskin (Bloch, 1995: 613ff), Where Spirit of Utopia deserves closer attention, however, is in its formulation of the basis for the utopian urge Bloch sees as satisfied by Gothic form. Specifically, the second half of his book presents a philosophy of the subject; in a section entitled “On the Metaphysics of our Darkness” for example, he foregrounds the subject's self-intransparency. The self is a dark shadow, a point of blindness to itself. There is no interior monologue of intimate self-knowledge, but only seif-alienation. To quote Bloch, "I cannot even experience and occupy myself (...) only immediately after- ward can | easily hold [my self], turn it before me, so to speak” (Bloch, 2000: 187). And later he adds, “only just after it passes can what was experienced be held up in front of oneself (...) in the intuited flow of its simultaneity |...) half still just experien- tially real and half already a juxtaposition of inactive contents" (idem, 199}. The self is always trying to catch up with the deterred meanings of its experiences which at the point of the now remain a point of dark indeterminacy. This notion draws heavily on German romantic philosophy and on the herme- neutics of Saren Kierkegaard; self-consciousness only comes through reflection, and since reflection is always retrospective, so self-consciousness is always trying 173