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314 CRITICAL MEME READER II

‘THEN WE COULD EXPLORE SPACE, TOGETHER,

FOREVER’: ON HOPE AND MEMES

SAVRIËL DILLINGH

Many of us are looking for hope, nowadays—myself included. And although I suspect no
one considers The Principle of Hope an easy read, Ernst Bloch’s magnum opus has inspired
more than a few revolutionaries over the past century. So, it’s no surprise that his work
on hope has recently seen reinvigorated interest. Young progressive activists leaf through
Bloch’s pages in search of something helpful, very much hoping that Bloch had seen
something that we, at the end of the early 21st century, have not. A way out, or perhaps
even a way forward—but at the very least a way towards an alternative. Really, though, The
Principle of Hope is esoteric to the point of being unreadable—either a work of genius or of
particular insanity (I suspect a little bit of both)—but its message seems to resonate with
revolutionaries of any generation. According to Bloch, hope is born from looking ‘beyond
the day which has become’.1 Hope requires daring, imagination, belief, even. Hope, says
Bloch, requires a vision of a homeland ‘still unbecome, still unachieved’.2 Unfortunately
for us, the reason for his resurgence seems to be that we live in an especially hopeless age,
in which Bloch’s homeland is difficult to imagine and seems terribly far off.

I’m certainly not immune to this modern brand of hopelessness. The climate crisis weighs
heavy in the back of my mind, always; and astronomical economic inequalities leave me
fearful we won’t be able to stop a resurgence of fascism. Even on good days, I find it difficult
to imagine alternative ways of living together. Yet Bloch’s characterization of hope offers us
something completely counter to the received wisdoms of ‘traditional’ progressive praxis.
That, and it can tell us something about how to use memes.

What Hope Isn’t

His recent resurgence notwithstanding, Bloch’s very specific conception of hope really
doesn’t gel with the way even revolutionary progressives have done politics in the past
couple of decades. Perhaps most indicative of the modern progressive method is the work
of the great G.A. Cohen, Oxford philosophy professor and co-founder of the September
Group. Cohen managed to modernize Marxism, a change that was sorely needed,
especially in the years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Revolutionary thought had,
understandably, somewhat diminished in popularity. So, while Margaret Thatcher was
popularizing the idea that ‘there is no alternative’, Cohen set out to formulate a new kind
of Marxism that included the same techniques used by economists working for Thatcher’s
government. In his brilliant book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Cohen most

1 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 9.
2 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 9.