Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), disability, inclusion and the education of hope

He recognised to what degree hope is a permanent force in everyone, a driving power as long as one lives. - Paul Tillich of Ernst Bloch (Tillich 1990, 182)

Abstract and concrete forms of utopia

‘Physically they may be healthy and mature. But to a large extent the retarded, even as adults, remain forever “children”’ (Pines 1957, 8).

Atwater (1957, 886) comments:

Although it is written for the general public, professional persons dealing with mental retardation, constantly or only occasionally, will enjoy its refreshing enthusiasm and the profuse and magnificent illustrations. It will renew their faith that “Retarded Children Can Be Helped.”

Abstract and concrete forms of utopia

‘No symbol of disability is more beloved by Americans than the cute and courageous poster child’, notes Shapiro (1994, 12), before adding: ‘or more loathed by people with disabilities themselves’.

Abstract and concrete forms of utopiaBloch writes of Marx:

Even in regard to misery Marx sees more than just misery, unlike all the abstract sympathizers and especially the abstract utopians. For him, the explosive factor in poverty really becomes a dynamic, explosive force, directed against the cause of that misery, which, once it realizes its causes, itself becomes the lever of revolution. (Bloch 1971, 21)

 In Marx, Bloch sees a person capable of

transforming what might have been a private and detached emotion, a merely abstract and sentimental sympathy, into a judgement for what is better in the world.

Abstract and concrete forms of utopia

How, then, are we to distinguish views of the disabled and their participation that amount to nothing more than what Bloch calls ‘random and abstract escapism’ (Bloch 1986, 16), from views which contribute to what he (1986, 17) names ‘the practice of concrete utopian’?

Abstract and concrete forms of utopiaNobody has ever lived without daydreams,

but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right. (Bloch 1986, 3)

 What is required, Bloch contends, is both

sobriety and enthusiasm and ‘the permanent interplay of both aspects united in a responsibly educated perspective’ (emphasis added, 1971, 35).  

Hence, ‘hope is not taken only as emotion …, but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind …’ (original emphasis, Bloch 1986, 12).

The debt to MarxMarx connects directly general participation in

productive activity with useful labour, with, that is, ‘labour whose utility is represented by the use-value of its product, or by the fact that its product is a use-value’ (Marx 1990, 132).

The value of such concrete participation is always plural and qualitatively appraised in relation to the multitude of distinct uses of its products.

However, abstract participation in labour is valued from the singular standpoint of quantity, determined by the ‘quantitative exchange-relation’ (Marx 1990, 182).

The debt to Marx

When useful and concrete, ‘qualitatively different forms of labour’ disappear in the abstraction of labour, concern for the goods that human hands have produced comes to be demarcated by those outcomes that may easily be quantified (Marx 1990, 132).

Questions from Marx

Might it be that individualised practices in special education conform to their own exchange-relation, in which the only needs that matter are those which can be easily quantified, managed, and met?

As the exchange market regulates what constitutes legitimate modes of productive labour, so in special education, do quantitative and individualised plans or programmes also determine what is or is not an appropriate educational and, indeed, life ‘outcome’?

Questions from Marx

In the same way that ‘the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from … use-values’ (Marx 1990, 127), so also, might participation in an individualised and specialist education be abstracted from a plurality of qualitative and concrete images of what may be useful for the young and their communities?

The Not-Yet Consciousness

Bloch’s (1986) account of a ‘utopian consciousness’ or an ‘anticipatory consciousness’, which ‘operates in the field of hope’ (Bloch 1986, 12).

This is a form of consciousness that contains awareness of what Bloch names the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’, which he defines as ‘solely the preconscious of what is to come, the psychological birth place of the New’ (Bloch 1986, 116).

The Not-Yet Consciousness

Anticipatory, utopian consciousness, aware of its own Not Yet, its incompleteness, is thus constantly open to its own possibilities.

However, when the intent and stretch of consciousness is enclosed by narrow targets detailed in Individualised Plans or Programmes, is it then, alienated from its own Not-Yet-Consciousness of what Bloch (1986, 142) calls the ‘Not-Yet-Being’ of the world?

The Real-Possible

Bloch draws a significant distinction between ‘the merely cognitively or objectively Possible’ from ‘the Real-Possible’ (Bloch 1986, 196).

The Real-PossibleThe ‘objectively Possible’ represents all that is

factually predicable, it encompasses all that ‘is scientifically to be expected, or at least cannot be discounted’ (Bloch 1986, 196).

In contrast, the Real-Possible cannot be delimited within the scope of scientific speculation and cannot be the subject of mere quantitative calculations.

The Real-Possible is ‘everything whose conditions in the sphere of the object itself are not fully assembled; whether because they are still maturing, or above all because new conditions – though mediated with the existing ones – arise from the entry of a new Real’ (original emphasis, Bloch 1986, 196).

The Real-Possible

The Real-Possible of the child cannot, for example, be reduced to the realisation of certain observable potentialities in the child’s current being.

What are the critical implications of the concept of the Real-Possible for the correspondence approach to learner needs?

Two types of reasoning

Bloch describes as a ‘merely contemplative reason which takes things as they are and as they stand,’ (Bloch 1986, 4), a reason that can give rise only to ‘overwhelmingly static thinking’ (Bloch 1986, 6).

This, in turn, brings forth ‘contemplative knowledge’, which is ‘by definition solely knowledge of what can be contemplated, namely the past, and it bends an arch of closed form-contents out of Becomeness over the Unbecome’ (Bloch 1986, 6).

In contrast, he says there is ‘a participating reason’, one which addresses present moments ‘as they go, and therefore also as they could go better’ (Bloch 1986, 4).

Two types of reasoningAgain the influence of Marx: ‘Marx was the first

to posit … theory which does not resign itself to contemplation and interpretation’ (Bloch 1986, 8).

Barton (2001, 3) begins to illustrate the significance of the critical function of hope when he writes:

Hope is essential in the struggle for change. It involves a recognition of the unacceptable nature of the present conditions and relations, a desire to be in a different situation and a conviction that this is possible.

Participatory reason, Not-Yet-Consciousness and Not-Yet-Participating

Hope’s Not, which is always a Not-Yet, and ‘Not as Not-Yet passes straight through Becomeness and beyond it;’ it aims at the ‘Front of an unfinished world’ (original emphasis, Bloch 1986, 308-9).

Bloch (1986, 444) writes: ‘Every barrier, when it is felt as such, is at the same time crossed. For just coming up against it presupposes a movement which goes beyond it and contains this in embryo’.

Participatory reason, Not-Yet-Consciousness and Not-Yet-Participating

To face the barriers that restrict the participation of persons with impairments with a reason that is actively attuned to a world as it becomes, and with an ‘anticipatory consciousness’ that stretches out to what is Not-Yet, is to be aware of disabling social forces and environmental features, not merely as restrictions on the participation of the disabled, but, more significantly, as evidence that the disabled as persons who are Not-Yet-Participating.

Participatory reason, Not-Yet-Consciousness and Not-Yet-ParticipatingThe contention that the disabled are Not-Yet-

Participating stands in stark opposition to assertion that the disabled Can-Not-Participate.

Participatory reason, Not-Yet-Consciousness and Not-Yet-Participating

It is Bloch’s view that ‘the only kind of education which is utopian in the good sense’ is that which ‘grasps and learns the old from the new, and not vice versa’, for here ‘being oneself’ is inseparable from ‘communal being,’ so that ‘pupils and teacher live ahead, on a continually advancing frontier’ (Bloch 1986, 930).

The restricted participation of some diminishes everyone.

Participatory reason, Not-Yet-Consciousness and Not-Yet-Participating

All the more students with impairments are subjected to exclusionary forms of education, all the more is the community, which they might contribute to and enrich through that contribution, estranged from the realisation of its Not-Yet enhanced state.

ABSTRACT HOPE CONCRETE HOPE 

Contemplative reason and consciousness: We attend to and consider only what is

Participatory reason and consciousness: We attend to and consider what might be in what is  

Contemplative knowledge – knowledge of what has been 

Participatory knowledge 

‘contemplative knowledge can only refer by definition to What Has Become’ (Bloch 1986, 8)

the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious – is connected with how the world might be changed – the ‘Not-Yet-Become’ (Bloch, 1986) 

‘objectively Possible’ Being is what has been

The ‘Real-Possible’Being is becoming 

Can-Not- Participate Not-Yet-Participating