Ernst Bloch and Bruce Springsteen on dreams

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

I think Ralph Dumain is quite right to suggest that we cannot look
upon the theorists of the Frankfurt School as "authorities" on our
own culture. Their thinking was only ever partially institutionalised
and its academic appropriation is always going to be plagued by
paradox. Anyone whose cultural frame of refence is exclusively defined by the theorists of the Frankfurt
School - theories which took shape in a decade defined by the
opposition between Fascism and Communism - seems hardly to be a
citizen of our own age.

But I suspect that we are all much more eclectic than that...

And it is not simply a question of setting ourselves up in judgement
on "what is living and what is dead" in the ideas of the Frankfurt
School. Adorno, Bloch and Benjamin all talk of "redeeming" aspects of
the past. Each of them takes seriously the notion of a certain
spiritual or intellectual "charge" still active within the
"dream-elements" sedimented in our collective past. Each wishes to
oppose what they saw as a prevailing decline into irrationalism while
at the same time carrying out a "rescue" of the past analogous to
that of their irrationalist opponents (Heidegger, Klages, the
disciples of Stefan George and so on).

I have formulated this as economically as I can to highlight what I
think these three have in common. But their attitude to dreams is not
exactly the same. Adorno is undoutedly the closest to a traditional
rationalism. He is fairly orthodox-Freudian. Bloch is closest to an
idiosyncratic mysticism. Benjamin's preoccupations are very close to
those of the early surrealists (Aragon and Breton, in particular, although Benjamin had
closer personal ties with Bataille) although Benjamin struggled to
evolve a method that would innoculate his historical researches from
the anarchistic/irrationalistic temptations of surrealism.

Adorno interprets dreams a la Freud. Benjamin uses the dream-state as
a model or metaphor for our everyday culture under late consumer
capitalism and hoped to evolve a methodology of "awakening". Bloch? I
am less sure in my characterisation of Bloch. Perhaps it is not
belittling him to say that he appears to want to keep the dream
alive. Or to keep many important dreams alive.

In the posting to follow this one I wish to quote Bruce Springsteen.
In particular, a song of his called The River. I think Springsteen is
a gifted lyrical poet. Springsteen is not nearly as influential or
important in our time as Baudelaire was in his. (One could though
compare Bob Dylan and Baudelaire as seminal figures.) But I want to
say that we can learn something about cultural analysis from a
songster as articulate (in his music) as Bruce Springsteen in much
the same way that I think Benjamin went to school with Baudelaire and
allowed the poet to instruct him about the 19thC  (and thus about
this own.)


Lloyd Spencer
School of Media