The Heritage of Our Times by Ernst Bloch

Author:Ernst Bloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

TRANSITION: BERLIN, FUNCTIONS IN HOLLOW SPACE

This place first drew in fresh air again. Worked with borrowed money, filled its patched pocket. Berlin won the war in Germany, the city is right in front in late-bourgeois terms. It has few non-contemporaneous features, in the sense we have come to know; they were only introduced into and foisted upon it at the very last. Berlin seems in fact extraordinarily ‘contemporaneous’, a constantly new city, built hollow, on which not even the lime becomes or is really set. But no matter how far in front a capitalist city is, of course, it is for the present only ‘contemporaneous’ in the limited, indeed inauthentic sense, namely that of being merely up to date.14 Even if the entrepreneur and salesman of such cities feel particularly up to the mark, ‘standing at the centre of practical life’, completely at par with the ‘present’, even the relative contemporaneity of Berlin still has the limitation that for the bourgeois, as Marx says, ‘skill, knowledge, spiritual insight and intellectual resources do not extend any further than his nose.’ He is only in the lead in comparison with older classes and with the provinces, but is himself driven, is himself shackled to a ghostly, thereby reified, movement of goods, to an economy of ‘stationary facts and laws’. Simply because ‘facts and laws’ exist for him at all, namely static or even eternal ones, the bourgeois is not in the genuine present, but only in it as a caput mortuum, namely in the product of its reification. Even the late capitalist who appears in most advanced fashion up to date finds himself that step behind genuine contemporaneity, which separates reification from living tendency, mere exploitation of respective ‘chances’ from real and concrete control of process. In other words: contemporaneity is not such if it is not also super-contemporaneous; it is not the capitalist of the uncontrolled, changeable Today who stands at par with the real present but only the knower and controller of the Tomorrow in the Today together, in short, the active Marxist. So therefore even the contemporaneity of Berlin, despite the tremendous advanced nature and, as it were, unreadiness of its capitalism, seen directly, still has no truth. The spirit forms the right chemical compound, says Burckhardt,15 only with the original source; this is also true in ‘contemporaneous’ Berlin. Even so, seen indirectly and from the point of view of genuine contemporaneity, features of transition (of the Tomorrow against consciousness and will) can be recognized and emphasized particularly actively here. For workers and entrepreneurs are wholly bracketed together in the relative ‘contemporaneity’ of big business: contradiction of the social forces of production to their private capitalist form of appropriation is in a homogeneous field here. Admittedly we have already seen enough dust, diversion and finally intoxication on behalf of big business; we have already attempted to note all these elements of deception and susceptibility as transitional phenomena. But navigation in the up-to-date sea, even if in one of inauthentic or relative contemporaneity, is of course easier, it is indirectly ‘at home’ in it.

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