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 Imatge Universitat de Barcelona

(...) the society we lived in was a deception, and the world a machine 1 Mark Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, denounces its transformation into absolute instrumentalism, indicator of the presumed global coherence of the dominion of nature. The author mentions the image of the young child that innocently asks his father what product is it that advertises 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 to which 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 boundaries of 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 a mere consensus on the technical pragmatism of success, it is necessary to liberate independent thought. 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. Reason seems to be defined solely as a function of decision-making, challenged only in its final result, in the logic of content of cognitive practice. The research herein presented takes as a hypothesis (a common force in the tradition of theory (in theoretical tradition)?) that design, far from being another example of technical pragmatism, finds at the core of its own activity of generating alternatives 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 activity of 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 alternative forms of generation. We have dealt already with some aspects of this link between project and the reflexion 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 up until his return from Switzerland after World War II in 1919 and including as a fundamental document the first edition of Geist der Utopie. The concept proposed by Bloch in these youthful texts 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 the project, and how they can imbue design itself with meaning. Forms in auto-configuration (Gestalt) of the universal reunion of the self 3 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 the hypothetical sense in which, by its link to design as rediscovery of the project, we place the present text. If to the expressionist tone of this work, which Adorno remembered as if it had been written

by Nostradamus hand, we add our intention of reading it by a design that does not aim to transcribe 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 specific sculptor (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, when destiny 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 we hold 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 the starting point of a journey where not even the structure of the discourse is given. And for an omnipresent materialist interpretation, in the sense of the individual life, in the sense of the physical horrors 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 the policeman, acclaimed by intellectuals that cant muster enough brains but to pronounce mere phrases 5 But also in the sense of culture, of stylistic references, after the dispelling of the tacit Jugendstil accord between isolated specific symbolic needs and petty bourgeois illusions of a return to the origins of the arts in machine made objects of use. Against the unstoppable globalization of the corporate image, and with messianic communitarism, the journey is an inner one. Not towards a new mirage that will function as exemplary 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 be committed to making possible its realization, at the same time conscious and material, and it would regain its sense. With the enthusiasm offered by the oracle of utopia and the innocence of believing in 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 soul 6 The difficult ambivalence of Kant critiques between transcendentalism and the anthropological archetype resonates clearly in the neo-Kantian schools of end of XIX and beginning of XX Centuries. Explicitly Kantian expressions, like human soul, support the possibility of attempting to enfuse the form of reason with anthropological content. And this fact opens up the debate on the object of human sciences. Psychologism, even prebehaviourist psychologism, will be at one extreme of the debate and anti-positivism, or antimaterialism, at the other. Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert , Herman Cohen, Paul Gerhard Natorp, Ernst Cassirer , Ernst Mach, are some notable thinkers present in Ernst Bloch formative period. Blochs doctoral thesis under the tutelage of M. Oswald Klpe, (University of Wrzbourg, 1908), can be considered as a synthesis of these influences. 7

Keeping in mind that in this present work we are in the process of constructing hypothesis, it is interesting to point out three aspects of this thesis that open up the possibility of understanding once more 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 of enthusiasm for the localization in the internal and individual construction of the movement that opens 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 on the logic of the direction of development of the project, of each project as construction of a truly humanistic productivity, when it does not take for granted this direction in a tacit acceptation of the mechanicist articulation of culture. If the purpose is to infuse archetypal reason with human content, starting from Kants transcendentalism, it is necessary to infuse this humanization with everything that constitutes human culture, not only that which fits the rules of physical science. The original task, then, is the obscurity 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 of objective imagination, since they are no longer the models separated from a reality assumed as initial, it is the result of the dialectics between that which is imagined and that which is represented before being known, the not-yet-conscient. It experiences it in the imaginative projection, right after the witty occurrence of representing itself for the later control of consciousness. The problem of the project -and of design, as preserver of such problem- is not between the black box and the transparent box, between the problem and the solution, where the creative jump is always marginal. It is the will to start from the contents of this creative jump as a totality, as a unity with its own representation towards the absolute. Like the schematism of Kants critique (the image is a product of the empirical ability of productive imagination), the Alexanders constructive diagrams or Patterns -or as a matter of fact, all theories of design- we will also have this sense of keeping the possibility as such, of keeping, in its original spark, the effort towards is noncontemporaneous coherence, to be something else that is born and experienced in the lived present of the objective imagination, that is to say in its own form of reality, in the most truly human reality. Any theory of design that does not keep this mysterious birth as a material birth of new force is reduced to mere positivism, surrender to the forces of the structure predetermined by convention. It looses the precept of the project as liberty, utopia; even worse, it looses utopias spirit, its hope, its humanity. I was hardly there when I was conceived 9 It is necessary to fight the dependence on the present as dehumanization. Reason in nature is not dependent on a calculation of dominion but on the enthusiastic impulse of that-which-is-not-yet as true ontology. Design as reencounter of the project as messianic oracle, this is the liberation of the independent thought. None of this is strange to the better known writings on the role of the project in design, of Maldonado (La Speranza progettuale), Agran (Progetto e destino), Aicher (Die Welt als Entwurf), Jorge-Nstor Bozzano (Proyecto: razn y esperanza), etc. Even more, messianic and nave enthusiasm: the metaphysics of interiority of objective imagination in the representative circle of 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 of mass control towards the single destiny of the I+D+I; they believe that reality is limited to stirring up the pot of immediacy , of that which is financially useful.

With the enthusiasm and innocence of Blochs first writings, and with a somewhat Kantian tone, we might 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 Burgos 1 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. Stanford University Press. Stanford. P. 46. 2 Following the path already coursed in this research, we differentiate between the two expressions to design and to project. We understand that to design is a particular case of the more 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 coherence of the project. 3 Bloch, Ernst (1918): Geist der Utopie. (Erste Fassung). Ed. Duncker und Humblodt. Mnchen und Leipzig. P. 22-23. I have been unable to find a printed English translation of the first 1919 edition 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, York Street, 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.