Ernst Bloch on Jazz, Kitch and Colportage

["L Spencer" <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bloch's few (dismissive) words on Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie and other
jazz fashions have started up a veritable hornet's nest on this list.
But let's try to refrain from trading labels, and worse, trading
insults.

I mentioned Adorno only to distinguish Bloch's approach from Adorno.
Adorno was an accompanished musician and composer, a very serious
musicologist and someone who has profoundly shaped the sociology of
music. His writings on jazz are not his strongest peices of criticism
but they represent a thought-through theoretical response or
analysis. I am defending the position he adopts. It is not one I
agree with. But responding at all intelligently to Adorno requires
that one appreciate the seriousness of the thought that has gone into
his analysis.

Now, the case of Bloch's remarks is somewhat different.

(1) I quoted a few lines which stand alone in the context of Bloch's
treatment of dance, and of Isadora Duncan in particular. This was not
an extended analysis. Simply a vehement throw-away line. Still I am
taken aback by the vehemence of Bloch's attack.

Question: Did Bloch write more extensively on jazz or on jazz-related
phenomena?

[I have looked at his essays on "Art & Utopia", his "Heritage of Our Times" and "The Principle of Hope". I have not
looked at the collection of essays translated as Bloch on music.]

(2) This is not simply under a blanket condemnation of popular art or
music. Bloch wrote extensively on fairytales and folktales, he
attempts to rescue utopian impulses from poplar adventure stories
such as those of Karl May and from the popular romance or exaggerated
tale under the category of "Colportage". In "Heritage of Our Times"
Bloch attacks the what he terms "Kitsch" as strongly as he defends
the utopian dream-impulse within "Colportage. He also writes an
unblinking account of the degradation of the unemployed proletariat
in the dance-marathons of the depression. There is a great deal to be
learnt from Bloch as a committed cultural analyst. But why no hint of
any scintilla of the human within the very physical (dance) responses
to jazz? This is the same Bloch who was so passionate a defender of
Expressionism against the strictures of Lukacs and other cultural
commissars. Mine is a serious question. Not an attack on Bloch. Nor
an attempt to defend my own enthusiasm for dance. I dont feel in the
least threatened in that. Dance and Bloch are both important to me.
That's not schizophrenia. But despite my very great admiration for
Bloch I do not understand his blindness (and anger) in this area.

On "popular" music:
It should of course be remembered that the very geniuses who mean
most to the great intellectuals themselves often felt very close to
and inspired by popular currents in their own field. Mozart's Magic
Flute is pure music hall. Beethoven's music is imbued almost end to
end with themes and melodies taken from popular revolutionary songs
sung by ordinary peasant folk after the Fr Revolution. One could go
on. Some intellectuals sometimes show themselves utterly estranged
from popular culture but few great artists ever do....

(3) Some respondents - Fred v. Gelder, for one - have seen this as an
aspect of Frankfurt School versus "culture industries". But this is
not part of that debate. Bloch was very active in a kind of
hand-to-hand ideological and cultural struggle and his writings from
the 1930s ("Heritage of Our Times" amongst others) are rich in
insights. But he was less interested in the notion of a "culture
industry" than he was in his own exegesis of contents, symbols,
icons, enigmas, tropes etc.

(4) It is more promising, perhaps, to look at those passages where
Bloch talks about SACRED enthusiasm, or ecstasy in relation to
intensity in music. Bloch's discussions of Orpheus, Dionysus and so
on bring out Bloch's music-mysticism. I use that phrase not
dismissively but only because the whole area is too large and
complex for me to explore in detail. Bloch is from first to last a
thinker at home with religious categories, saturated in a religious
way of looking at the world. He is a more thoroughly religious person
than I am. But he is not shy of applying the term mysticism to his
owm most central insights.

It may be that he is offended by the uninhibited enthusiasm within
jazz and the alcohol-induced "Rausch" (ecstasy/intoxication). It may
be that jazz-frenzy is too close a parody of divine madness. I dont
know. I am trying to be kind and to look for a serious way of reading
this difficulty.

For the sake of anyone who missed the original quote from Bloch, it
read:

>"Where everything is disintegrating though, the body also contorts itself eff
ortlessly along with it. Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been s
een than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecil
ity gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak mus
ical accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western coun
tries, not as dance, but as vomiting. Man is to be soiled and his brain emptie
d; he has even less idea amongst his exploiters where he stands, for whom he i
s grafting, what he is being sent off to die for. But turning to real dance...
" (and he goes on to discuss Isadora Duncan]

Lloyd Spencer

School of Media
Trinity and All Saints College
Leeds, England