Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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cracks in this surface in order to expose the void. Lukács’s charge that expression-

ism is decadent is in a sense correct. But he is mistaken when he says that it should

be rejected: “So the Expressionists were the ‘vanguard’ of decadence. Should they

instead have tried to plaster over the surface of reality, in the spirit, say, of the Neo-

classicists or the representatives of Neo-objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit] instead of

persisting in their efforts of demolition?”^136

Bloch recognizes expressionism as a form of opposition to capitalism, a form

of criticism that according to him is not present in the New Objectivity. The same

goes for the technique of montage, which also exposes capitalist reality as fissured

and fragmented:

In technical and cultural montage, the coherence of the old surfaces is

broken up and a new one is constructed. A new coherence can emerge

then, because the old order is more and more unmasked as a hollow

sham, one of surfaces that is in fact fissured. While functionalism dis-

tracts one with its glittering appearance, montage often exposes the

chaos under this surface as an attractive or daringly interwoven fabric.

... In this sense montage reveals less the facade and more the back-
ground of the age than does functionalism.^137

Montage, he states, is a technique that the expressionists also made use of. In their

best work, according to Bloch, they apply it in order to back up their personal inten-

tions with fragments drawn from reality, and with archaic and utopian images. Mon-

tage allows one to turn the cultural legacy of the old system to advantage, isolating

the best fragments out of the existing order and deploying them in a new pattern; in

this way they are transformed (umfunktioniert) into elements that are fertile for the

establishing of a new mode of living. Montage is a way of forcing the old to produce

something new:

This method has all the negative features of the void, but indirectly it

also potentially contains something positive: the fragments can be

used in another context to create something that works contrary to the

normal order. In the context of the late bourgeoisie, montage means ex-

posing the empty space of this world, while showing that this space is

filled with flashes and cross-sections of a “history of appearances,” not

the correct one, but a hybrid form of it. It is also a way of assessing the

old culture: from the point of view of journeying and bewilderment and

no longer from the idea of “Bildung.”^138

Bloch, then, was an advocate of two typical aspects of modernism: expres-

sionism and montage. It is all the more remarkable that he distanced himself so de-

cisively from the New Objectivity. His stated reason was that he could not see

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