THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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even if the shabbiest, that of acquisition, is abolished; neediness remains enough which presses for information and for the five thousand years of the history of
civilization, as a single, unfinished, continuing day. But the more society is economically in accord, and the slighter its antagonisms stemming from this source are, the
more exactly the genuine discordances of existence then emerge, those worthy of human beings, for the illumination of which culture in fact has its plan of campaign, and
will have it more than ever. It was often rounded but never closed, never a sum of finished products; precisely the great educational works prove their continuing
surplus over the submerged ideology within which they arose. The art of hearing singing in the air then no longer appears as an escape or even as an interested
deification of something poorly available; it no longer appears as a hasty solution of social contradictions in a shining game, but the pre­appearance of what is right
emerges with a continuing effect, alone with a continuing effect. This is the afterripening of every great work after it has been plucked from the tree of its age and this
tree itself has long disappeared; kingdoms pass away, a good verse remains and says what — lies ahead. This pre­appearance so little suited to be a staple commodity
will therefore operate all the more when the inauthentic other reflection, that of mere class ideology, is taken from it. As far as this very preappearance is concerned, as
joy and doctrine of a true dopo lavoro, it was said above, on the problem of the encounter of the utopian function with ideology, with itself pre­appearing significance:
‘Thus it is always only the shaping dream­force towards a better world which is culture­creative, or the utopian function as one which ventures beyond. This function
posits in ideology for the first time what can be named without cliché and hypocrisy, and without property, illusion and superstition, and it alone forms the substratum for
the cultural legacy’.* And: ‘The parasitic enjoyment of culture reaches an end through insight into the more and more adequate trend towards our becoming identical
and through commitment to this; cultural works open up strategically …They are now, from the point of view of the philosophical concept of utopia, not an ideological
prank of a higher kind, but the attempted path and content of known hope’ (cf. Vol. I, p. 153ff.). And if there is still a part of man which is not or not wholly sold, this is
also the same one which has not yet become free for itself. It therefore
* Though this quotation is similar to the content of the section in Volume I ‘Encounter of the utopian function with ideology’, it is not directly quoted verbatim. It may be
a quotation from an earlier draft of the book which was not emended during Bloch's revisions.