From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk>
Date:          Thu, 13 May 1999 16:30:31 +0000
Subject:       Ernst Bloch and Bruce Springsteen on dreams


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