Shifting Horizons

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Prefigurative Hope in the 2015 New University Movement

Harriet Bergman 6360513

supervisor Josef Früchtl second reader Karen Vintges

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University:

University of Amsterdam

Assignment:

Thesis

Name Program:

Research Master in Philosophy

Name Candidate:

Harriet Bergman

Student number:

6360513

Email:

harrietmbergman@gmail.com

Name Supervisor:

Dhr. prof. dr. Josef Früchtl

Name Second Reader:

Mw. dr. Karen Vintges

Version:

1.0 (final)

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Introduction

So, what has changed, in the end? The question feels like a judgment, asking me to reconsider, to condemn, to distantiate, to discard, to delegitimize, what has, for me, become a life-changing movement. This always returning question is never answered eloquently enough and is asked over and over again. A family member, someone who was there but wasn't as involved, a journalist, a teacher, a drunk guy I've just met at a birthday party, new friends, old acquaintances: everyone asks the same question, again and again, and again. It now no longer feels as an inquiry. It feels as an accusation. Just interested- has anything changed?

What I believe them to be asking: was it worth it?

When I climb through the window of the occupied Bungehuis, arms reach out to pull me in. It is winter and it is already dark outside. I’ve just entered a university building that I usually only visit on Thursdays, normally through the front door, most of the times to study with a highschool friend, in the library on the third floor. Tonight no trusted highschool friends, no books, no plan. I’m in an office I’ve never been to before. The building is occupied by The New

University. Some tables and chairs, desktop computers, but also wrappers of snacks and an

empty cola bottle, banners, lots of people walking in and out. But most of all a revolutionary feeling in the air.Energy that radiates through everyone, not a hurried frenzy, but a sense of necessity, importance, like this is the moment.

In spring 2015 a group called The New University occupied the Bungehuis, a building of the University of Amsterdam, for ten days. From February the 13th to February the 24th, this former bank was permanently occupied by around forty students and one staff member. Teachers, professors, and students wandered in and out and sometimes stayed for several nights, to help keep the occupation running. People helped with cooking and cleaning, with organizing lectures and workshops, and talked with the media, the mayor, and the university board. Another protest group, Humanities Rally, along with students from the VU, protestors from the beta- faculty, and several individuals from the Law Faculty and Economics and Business faculty joined the occupation. After a week, the university board threatened with a

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Introduction 2

fine of 100.000€ per day per person, and a court case decided that, although this fine was too high, the protestors did have to move out. In the press conference Thursday the 20th, The New

University declared to disagree with the judge and continue their protest. Tuesday morning,

the 24th of February, riot police showed up to evict the building. While the group of people outside of the Bungehuis grew larger and larger, 43 people were dragged out of the building one by one and were jailed for one night. The day after that, a march was planned. Students, teachers, and people who, after watching the eviction live on television had gotten angry, marched from the Bungehuis to the building were the University board resided, the Maagdenhuis. More than a thousand people were gathered on the Spui, the square in front of the Maagdenhuis, and listened to speeches of politicians, union board members, and people active in The New University movement that weren't arrested the day before. Halfway through the last speeches, the occupiers from the Bungehuis were released from jail. It was already dark. One of the teachers who was dragged out of the Bungehuis the day before held an empowering speech. “We are not afraid”, the crowd repeated after him. And they weren’t afraid. Lots of people who were at the Spuistraat the day before, and stood, sat and screamed for hours while one by one all the occupiers were escorted or dragged out of the building. For many, including me, that day had been the first time they saw the ugly face of the police state. Other people had seen the eviction of the day before life broadcasted on local television. There were over a thousand people at the square, and while it was getting darker, they were getting angrier. More and more people gathered on the stairs. Allegedly, a middle-aged lady stood by the door and warned the security. “If you don’t step aside, we have to go through you”.

An hour or so after the last speech, the door of the Maagdenhuis was forced open. After a meeting that involved the members of the university board and the mayor of Amsterdam, an appropriation of six weeks followed. In these six weeks, there was a lot of media attention; teachers joined in the revolutionary spirit by constituting the protest group

Rethink UvA; politicians and musicians came by to entertain the occupiers and give their

support, lectures were given. The people inside planned a Science Festival. The board again threatened eviction, again ran a court case. After negotiations with the board, where they threatened to sue the negotiators personally, and a general assembly that lasted till 03:00 at night, it was decided to leave the building after the festival. On the 11th of April, the Maagdenhuis was empty, behold one person who blockaded himself in the room of the rector magnificus. It was decided that the lectures and workshops would be held on the square in front of the building. Although people weren’t inside the building and weren’t doing anything

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illegal, six people got arrested. Two of them, not willing to identify themselves, were lost in the bureaucratic crypts of foreign detention. On the 13th of April, yet another march took place. The refugees from the We Are Here collective joined the students for a short moment. A week later, the two last students still in detention were released. That same night, one of the board members resigned. That spring in 2015, I was in the middle of these student protests.

This works comes from a frustration with the question “what has changed?”. I use my personal experiences in various social/political movements to support my theoretical analysis. I bring my lived experiences and the things I've witnessed in real life in dialogue with texts. In this way, I am critiquing the texts by “dragging theory back to life” (Ahmed, 10). This method makes this thesis a highly personal story. Showing how a particular kind of hope emerged out of the prefigurative practice that the student protests were, and dealing with a personal frustration with the question ‘what has changed, in the end?’ can not only help me and many other activists, but also gives a new perspective on hope and social change. In this way, this thesis is not only personal investigation, but also aims to make an academic contribution.

Philosophy’s boundaries are contested and defended constantly. What counts as ‘true’ philosophy? To me, it is those theories which helps us “venture beyond”. My aim is to write something that might move people in some sort of way. Next to presenting the research I’ve done and supporting my argument of hope resembling love in several key ways, I wanted, to speak with Ahmed, ‘drag theory back to life’, and incite hope with my writing. Because this thesis tries to explain the role of prefigurative practice in creating hope, it is the medium per excellence to try practice what I’ve investigated. Bloch writes that thinking is venturing beyond – I do so outside of the beaten track. The choice for Bloch’s work itself – although logical as the philosopher of hope- and bringing together theories from different disciplines happened in the same spirit of ‘venturing beyond’. I’ve decided to do something new, resisting the authors already well mined and researched, and, in the words of Munoz, looked for new sites of “theoretical traction” (15).

In poetry, there is always more in the text than the literal meaning if the words. Philosophers on the other hand are encouraged to prevent any possible ambiguity. I am writing, however, about that which is more, that which overflows the given demarcations. Wayne Hudson argues that Bloch’s “indirect communication, allegory, symbolism and ‘colorful speech’ are designed to reveal traces of world contents not given in the abstract appearance of capitalism” (2). I wouldn’t want to copy the writing style of this philosopher of

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Introduction 4

hope, but do want to try present and frame my research in such a way that it conveys a glimpse of the experiences of the student protest in 2015. I therefore feel justified in alternating between a clear and concise depiction of the thoughts of others and buildup of my argument and inflammatory inciting hopeful writing about personal experiences that support the philosophical work, but also aim to transport beyond. Früchtl and Scholz write:

“Of course, we can look up a definition of anger, hatred, love, or solidarity in a dictionary, but this ony provides us with a description that remains detached frm our own experiences. A novel, a play, an opera, a movie does not provide us with a definition, but the way it presents a story lends that story a validity that goes beyond the particular case” (Früchtl and Scholz 2015:40).

I try to write in a way that aims to bring across the hopefulness that radiated throughout the student protests. I couldn’t write in a dry academic jargon about events that deserve jubilant and dramatic prose. I don’t try to conceal my standpoint; rather than making me biased, I feel like it lends arguments an extra authority and credibility.

In the Maagdenhuis, we gave tours through the appropriated building. Another student and I invited high school teachers to take their pupils to our social experiment that already lasted four weeks, to get a ‘civil disobedience tour’. The kids could ask questions, were shown around, and were explained why civil disobedience was necessary and justified. Civil disobedience, we explained, is the intentional and non-violent disobeying of a law, because that law is perceived to be unjust. We let them come up with examples of their own, and they came up with examples ranging from Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus to themselves cycling through the Leidsestraat to protest the number of tourists and the way the city was organized not for its inhabitants, but for its consumers. More than twenty teens followed us around in wonder. We walked to the board room on the upper floor, where they sat down to listen to our explanation of our demands, to the room were Jeffrey screened his films, renamed the Virgins bed cinema. We passed by the copy machine on the second floor that formed the protection against security and the noise coming from the stairs, behind which I had put my mattress and sleeping bag. ‘Do you really sleep there? Isn’t it cold?’ Being civilly disobedient wasn’t easy, we explained.

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Social movements, however, are not limited to non-violent means and are also not excluding people who want to do things without breaking laws. Social movements challenge status quo, or protect the things they find worth protecting; they do this both within and outside of existing institutions, and have at least some degree of organization and continuity (Snow and Soule 2010, 6-7; Aronson 2017, 38). Most authors agree that social movements are an organized effort that wants to bring about or impede change. Movements have some sort of structure or binding factor, use unconventional means, share beliefs and solidarity, and try to change the status quo…

Civil resistance promotes group rights and social justice is done outside of conventional political channels, is non-violent and is done collectively (Schock 2015, 1-2). Civil resistance studies is the discipline that researches those practices. Another field of research concerned with movement participation and protest is social movement studies. Social movement studies seek to investigate social movements as an organization, studying the different explanations for successful mobilization (Kadir 2016, 26). The traditional substantive foci of social movement studies are structural sources, social bases, mobilization, political context and framing (Schock, 48). These concern movement participation and the reasons to protest, rather than the subjects civil resistance literature is more likely to be engaged with, like strategy, techniques of action, and mechanisms of – explicitly non-violent- change (Schock, 48). Although civil resistance studies used to be more geared towards practical application than social movement studies, writing not only for academics but also for activists and policymakers, there has been an increase in scholars in social movement studies trying to link theory to practice as well (Schock, 50; Kadir 2016, 26). Both the discipline that concerns civil resistance and social movement studies, deal with mobilization and social change. Whereas civil resistance tends to emphasize agency, scholarship on social movement tends to emphasize structure. When looking at myself and talking to others, we neither focus on agency nor on structure. Fellow occupiers instead point to an emotional component for joining.

The idea that political philosophy should be concerned with more than just rational deliberation and the things that we consider fair behind a veil of ignorance has been winning ground. The assumptions that ground the practice of representational democracy dominant in the western world presupposes that political agents are free and rational citizens making conscious decisions about what they want in life and what society should look like. I do not want to argue in favor of or against deliberative liberalism – it might very well be the ‘least bad

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Introduction 6

option we have . However, the assumption that the governing of any group should be done by ‘citizens,’ and that these citizens are unconstrained and always rational, is something that I happily see contested more and more. Authors like Jacques Ranciere, who challenges the idea of politics as concerned primarily with consensus, Ernest Lauclau and Chantal Mouffe who write about the ‘constitutive outside’ that is always necessary to demarcate a group, Jason Stanley who exposes those things that can prevent rational deliberation from taking place, and Chiara Bottici who discusses the importance of political myths, are some of the names of philosophers who have challenged the idea of politics as an exchange of ideas between free rational actors. This is only the beginning of a further shift away from Jurgen Habermas’ theory of rational deliberation, John Rawls’ theory of justice and economic inspired rational choice theories towards theories of political philosophy that place more emphasis on the role emotions play in political change. The ‘affective turn’ in political studies and a renewed interest in ‘emotional democracy’ might indicate that this is approach is gaining ground. Interest in emotions have furthermore resurfaced as viable research candidates. I want to contribute to this field by investigating why and when the question whether social movement participation was worthwhile fails to do justice to the experience of hope it created. In order to do so, I have decided to focus on the work on the philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch. This thesis is however not (just) a critical evaluation of his thought- although his work is discussed and built upon, it is mainly a build up of my own argument for which I mine his work. I argue that there lies an intrinsic worth in hope that arises out of prefigurative actions.

In the first chapter the work of Ernst Bloch is introduced and evaluated, and the case-study is further introduced. A thesis on hope couldn’t do without the philosopher of hope. Undogmatic Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch is recently reintroduced by influential authors both inside and outside academia. Academics from all kinds of disciplines, like literary scholar Terry Eagleton, political existentialist philosopher Ronald Aronson, political sociologist Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Marxist/anarchist philosopher and sociologist John Holloway and performance scholar and queer theorist Jose Estaban Munoz have taken up Bloch’s work. Outside and inside academia, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, journalist and researcher Naomi Klein and sociologist Alex Khasnabish do not mention Bloch’s name explicitly but are clearly, be it directly or indirectly, informed by his thought.

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I sketch the outlines of Bloch’s Principle of Hope, by introducing and evaluating the key concepts he uses. Doing justice to the whole of Ernst Bloch’s oeuvre is beyond the scope of this thesis. Even sketching the background of the various traditions and disciplines he mines for his insights is a task that can never be done with enough rigor. Instead, I’ll focus on the concepts that are necessary for the buildup of my argument, and try to indicate the philosophical tradition that inspired those concepts. Because he is resting on the shoulders of giants, I will shortly touch upon some of these thinkers that have influenced him in formulating some of the main concepts. Where relevant, I will try to situate his thought in its philosophical context, so I will touch on ideas taken up, adapted, and shamed in contrast to thought of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Freud and Marx. I rely on Jurgen Habermas Ernst Bloch A

Romantic Marxist, Wayne Hudson’s The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, Leszek

Kolakowski’s Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a futuristic gnosis and the excellent introduction by the translators of the 1996 print of The Principle of Hope Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight to do so.

I’ve decided to rely on other interpretations rather than reading the Principle of Hope in its entirety for several reasons. One of them is a practical one, being that it is sadly beyond the time frame of a master thesis to intensively study the more than thousand pages of his work. Instead, I’ve studied the introduction and first chapter intensively, and read excerpts of the other parts of the book where I thought it necessary for understanding the concept’ I found in different interpretative texts that might be necessary foundational work for my argument. I felt justified in this because of the observation of many of his interpreters that his arguments progresses not linear but expanding (Eagleton 93; Kolakowski 460, 466; Hudson 1-2).

In the first chapter, some of the main themes are introduced. We will see that hope needs to be informed and disappointable. Bloch’s ontology is one of the not-yet: the world is a becoming, and humanity can intervene in the course of history. Lastly, I argue it is necessary to replace Bloch’s metaphor of ‘’pushing a frontier’ with ‘shifting horizons’ in order to do away with the religious components and the idea that there will be and end goal towards which the world is reaching.

In the second chapter, I argue for the need to discriminate between different kinds of hope to be able to explain the kind of hope that emerged out of the practices of The New

University. While contrasting different approaches in social movement studies, we see that an

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Introduction 8

Nazima Kadir’s The Autonomous Life is an ethnography of the Amsterdam activist scene. It is an anthropological work that situates itself in contemporary anarchist studies, political studies and sociology. She has done fieldwork and participatory observation in radical left groups and based on her experiences there describes the contradictions within this group: on the one hand opposed to hierarchy and leadership, on the other having strong hierarchy and authority within the movement. From her work I take both part of the method – incorporating experiences with theories – and her introduction to various social movement theories. She brilliantly analyzes that the idea of leaders has become too important within the framing approach of social movement theory. Elizabeth Clemen’s What is Political Sociology gives a clear overview of different approaches in social movement theories. Kurt Schocks’s

Civil Resistance Today is categorized as a civil resistance book within the larger field of

sociology. His presentation of social movement studies/ civil resistance studies is added to that of Kadir and Clemens to guide my own subdivision within the social movement field into the collective behavior approach, resource mobilization approach and the framing approach. Another text that I refer to in the second chapter is the book Hope in times of Darkness by Rebecca Solnit. She makes excellent points in her various essays, and writes in a formidable, hopeful, inspiring way. Reading her work makes you want to act, do something, chant, sing, direct your energy towards the barricades. From her, I got the observation that it is easier to imagine apocalypse than the things that happen after such an event. Karen Vintges book A New Dawn for the Second Sex will not be elaborately discussed, however, the insight that engagement is not an attribute or characteristic of a person, but a practice, is a very necessary within my argumentation (2017; 6). These various authors show that participation within social movements cannot be sufficiently explained by what I dub the ‘rational actor paradigm’. Joining a movement requires the rather nebulous idea of ‘being moved.’We see that activists are not working towards clear end goals, but that the metaphor of an ever shifting horizon fits the real experience of social movement participants.

Contrasting professor of the history of ideas Ronald Aronson and literary scholary Terry Eagleton, I argue for social or collective hope. This kind of hope projects beyond one’s own situation, wishing for a better and more just for everyone, rather than improving one’s own position within a system. I decided to discuss and contrast Eagleton and Aronson because they have written some of the latest and most acclaimed contributions about hope that discuss Bloch’s work as well. Eagleton is used mainly to as a contrast – he has very individualized idea of hope. He is more inspired by anthropologist Jonathan Lear than by Bloch. Aronson on the

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other hand introduces the idea of ‘social hope’. He argues for the need thereof, and how it emerges, but not how it functions. How this social hope can confront questions of value, I will set out in the third chapter.

In the third chapter, we see yet again that bettering your own position within a wrong system is not the way to go- we should aim for much, much more, argues Jose Estaban Munoz. We see how prefigurative practices contest the givenness of reality, and that hope confronts value. I rely on the work of Mathijs van den Sande to give a short summary of the development of the concept prefiguration, first being used as a theological concept to refer to those instances in the old testament in which the new testament was foreshadowed, later being taken over by radical politics and anarchist studies to describe a practice of organizing, interacting and living in a way that brings the utopia one wants to accomplish to the here and now. Jose Estaban Munoz places hope within those queer longings that show a certain surplus: a “more” that we can’t pin down but points towards a future that will be better. In his book

Cruising Utopia he offers us a break from the “totalizing rendering of reality” by using insights

from Bloch’s Principle of Hope as a hermeneutic to look at queer futurity (1, 26). Societal expectations and assumptions about prospects in life can from a straightjacket people can’t imagine a way out of. Munoz argues that in queer art we can see glimpses of a queer futurity outside of this logic of straight time, that break with the ‘here and now’ and promise a brighter future. He indicates two instances of this surplus by analyzing Andy Warhols constant use of exclamations that show his surprise about the world, and by interpreting Frank ‘O Hara’s poem Sharing a Coke with you. These instances of surplus within the here and now form a first step. His treatment of the Thirld World Gay Revolution’s pamphlet What we want, what we

believe in contrasted to the more pragmatic call for marriage equality by gay rights activist

Evan Johnson forms the second. Munoz shows how a ‘we’ can be performed, called into existing. Judith Butler has made similar points about the performativity of a statement about ’we’ in het Notes towards a performative theory of assembly, which are sadly beyond the scope of this thesis. These ideas of a surplus that can’t exactly be pinpointed down and the idea that there can be a performative aspect in projecting your wishes, helps me proceed towards the last step that it is by doing that we perform and excess and project towards the future.

In order to do so, I furthermore look at another author from a very different discipline that talks about prefiguration and excess, rather than performativity and surplus. Ana Cecila Dinerstein is a sociologist that makes an intervention in what she calls the ‘autonomy debate’

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Introduction 10

within her field. The discussion that came up within social movements and by those people studying them, was that of the role of the State for social change. Is the state a necessary actor for change, or, restarted Marxist philosopher and sociologist John Holloway the debate, “Can we change the world without taking power”(3). I look at Dinersteins book The Politics of

Autonomy in Latin America where she uses Bloch to analyze social movements in Latin

America “in the key of hope”. She discriminates four aspects of autonomous organizing, the last one being the creation of ‘excess’ (12). I combine her thoughts on prefiguration with the queer longing that Munoz analyses to make a point about autonomously organized spaces like the Maagdenhuis and the Spinhuis. By prefiguring what they want to see in the world, they create an excess or surplus that moves actors forward. In the experienced and enacted surplus, we can find hope.

The result of my research into hope is that I found an answer to the question why the worth in of the student protests can’t be expressed in the existing parameters of legibility. Out of prefigurative practices a surplus arises that is impossible to capture. Maybe the events of spring 2015 were successful because they lay the foundation for a movement of students for climate justice, adding a more intersectional approach and fewer spelling mistakes to climate activism. Maybe it was successful because it lay the foundation for the University of Color. Maybe it was successful because the foreign detention adventure of two of us led some to a fierce commitment to helping refugees. Maybe it was successful because we've learned people have double agendas.

Maybe it was successful because we've realized the power we have...

A power that is so big, and so dangerous and threatening, that they will send thirteen vans of riot police to an empty building.

Let this thesis be a prefigurative practice. Let us venture beyond.

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Chapter 1. Hope

When two police officers on horses pass me on the bicycle lane, I get off my bike and stop for a moment. I have to. I’m afraid of police horses, they take me back to thirteen vans of riot police and undercover cops standing around a pile of horse shit. It's Monday, the weekend is over, back to work, I was cycling past the Maagdenhuis towards the university library, off to lend even more books that will enable my understanding of Ernst Bloch, philosopher of hope. The Maagdenhuis is so centrally located you have to pass it several times a week at least- also on days when I’m in a hurry when I’m happy when I’m angry when I’m tired when I have no time to stand still.

Two weeks before the Maagdenhuis appropriation, on the 13th of February in 2015, I stood in front of the Bungehuis. There were the familiar faces of teachers and students I saw around the university premises every day and lots of people I could not immediately place, some lost tourists maybe, and students from other departments, alumni, and journalists, all chanting, yelling and protesting together. I looked with amazement at the banners that were dropped from the upper windows, and at the students that hung out of the windows, with flares, inviting us to come in. It was a Friday morning in Amsterdam, in February. It was still cold, but the sun was shining. I felt I was part of something bigger. The Bungehuis, where the board of the Humanities Faculty resided, was the last stop in a short march that, again, wanted to protest the upcoming budget cuts and the unrelenting attitude of the university board. I showed up late - I didn't believe the umpteenth march could help us. I had decided to study and getting up late to drink coffee was a better way to spend my time than showing up at a demonstration yet again. I recognized some of my fellow students in the occupied building. There was security, looking uncomfortable, not sure what to do, protecting the one entrance that didn't seem blocked. Some people tried to push them away, urged by the protestors that were already inside, but the halfhearted attempt of a push from people who weren't prepared for this in no way helped. People needed to take a detour. The main entrance of the Bungehuis

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was in the Spuistraat, a street that used to have a sort of alternative vibe, with a punk bar that served minors, a squatted building with a snake painted on it, a hangout for youth organizations, some prostitutes, bookshops, and several more bars and squats. The street had been changing into something less local, more touristy, with shops that sell waffles with Nutella, and bike-rents. The prostitutes stayed, while the squats and student hang out disappeared. Underground culture used to be a selling point of Amsterdam. Sex and waffles apparently sell better.

People built a tower of books in front of the building, and there was finger-paint, to leave your hand on the building: this is our university. It moved me that one of the students had brought soap and cleaning materials to remove the paint from the parts of the building that wouldn’t be clean after the rain would wash the material away. We cared so much about this university that even a former bank building that looked like a fort, an institute of the Humanities faculty that would be turned into a posh hotel, shouldn't suffer from an occupation. You had to walk through the Paleisstraat to get to the other side of the building. Looking out over the water, located at the Singel, and with many small windows that opened to the offices of the teachers of some of us. No security there yet. I was moved when, after I climbed to get through the window of the occupied university building, a guy I had never met before said: “it's good you're here”. When I had decided that to study and to drink coffee was a better occupation of my time, I was right. Demonstrations suck. Occupying a building works so much better.

The past shows what was possible once. The last occupation before the one in 2015 was ten years earlier, in 2005, to protest the plans to increase the tuition fees and decrease the participation in decision-making of students and staff. The students were evicted within hours. For ten years, the building remained protest-free. It was a big building, with security, with cameras, impossible to enter without permission. The New University, trying to protest upcoming budget cuts, couldn’t dream that the Maagdenhuis could be occupied. In a video, a reporter asks, “Why are you here, in the Bungehuis, and not in the Maagdenhuis?” A student answers “The Maagdenhuis is impossible to take.” It was not. I know that something I thought wasn’t possible, actually was possible. I now know that as a collective, we can do much more than we thought was possible.

Often I cycle past the Maagdenhuis without pausing. Sometimes I stop and remember the desperation and desolation I felt the day we were ‘evicted.’ But sometimes I pause and

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Hope 14

remember the feeling of powerfulness when the solid, stable door couldn’t stop us. Although there is police, today is such a day.

Today I’m hanging in the past.

A solid door can be forced open, no matter how impossible it is take the building. It is just a push. A philosopher who builds on this premise is Ernst Bloch. I look at his Principle of Hope to formulate the characteristics of hope that this influential philosopher has set out, and discuss his ontology of the not-yet. I end with a critical evaluation of the persuasiveness of his thought.

So, although the cops are still there, I park my bike and get a coffee at the café nearby. The sun is shining. I take my coffee up the stairs of the Maagdenhuis and start sipping. Amsterdam is my home. The Maagdenhuis is my appropriated space.

I can survive a scary looking police officer: I’ve seen worse. I continue to advance.

Ernst Bloch, Philosopher of Hope

Ernst Bloch builds on the idea that facts that seem solid do not determine the future, and that the past does not dictate what will be. His Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) is a Marxist cultural anthropological project about hope and dreams. The theme of the dream is a recurring one throughout the book. Bloch intended to publish his book in America under the title Dreams of a

Better Life, rather than as The Principle of Hope (Plaice, Plaice and Knight 1996, xxiv). In more

than thousand pages of philosophical arguments and cultural references to almost everything, this book combines a projection of a better life and future not with the determinism of economic forces, but with a subjective and objective hope. It demonstrates man’s wish and need, but also capacity of transcending the given world. Whatever we find in the world is not fixed and solid, but can be different. Bloch once suggested that his thought could be summarized by his motto “S is not yet P” (McLelland 2006, 179). Below, I will set out the broad lines of Bloch’s principle of hope based on The Principle of Hope and Can Hope be disappointed.

In the first part, I will argue that hope is not passively accepting the given world and not mere escapism (Bloch, 3). Reaching utopia starts with dreaming. These dreams can be informed or can be empty promises. I will first discuss the tendency of people to dream, which for Bloch forms proof that hope has always existed and can never be banned. Then, we see that Bloch

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discriminates between different kinds of hope, and argues for docta spes, informed hope1. I will rehash that it is in Marxism that we find informed hope, and that another characteristic of hope is that it is disappointable. Bloch’s concept of facts as ‘reified moments of a process’ informs us that the world is always a becoming, and thus much more is possible than we think. Although much more is possible than we might think, there are no guarantees that we will reach whatever we’re fighting for – if we even know what it is what we’re aiming towards.

In the second part, I will set out Bloch’s ontology of the not-yet and sketch the historical background of this argument. We will see how his ‘futuristic gnosis,’ knowledge of the future, is contrasted both with Plato’s conception of knowledge as anamnesia and Freud's idea of a no-longer-conscious. Furthermore, I will point out that Bloch’s ontology is inspired by Aristotle’s concept of ‘entelechy,’ creative matter, and conceptualization of matter as being in actuality but containing potentiality. That hope is justified because of an eschaton will be disputed. I argue that it is in contradiction with the openness of a system and that the metaphor of the Front and the idea of an eschaton are western imperialist concepts. I propose to replace this with a depiction of an ever-shifting horizon.

Informed, disappointable Hope and Dreams of a better Life

“Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exist, does not accept renunciation” (3). Bloch is influenced by subjective idealism, but in contrast to the romanticism of Schiller and Fichte, his theory contains a possibility of development within the object as well. The idea of such a possibility he got, according to Plaice, Plaice, and Knight, from a letter of Marx to Ruge, where Marx mentions that the world possesses “a dream of the matter”(xxviii). The ‘real’ state of the world has not yet become manifest. Until Marx, writes Bloch, “expectation and what is expected, the former in the subject, the latter in the object, the oncoming as a whole did not take on a global dimension in which it could find a place, let alone a central one” (6).

Bloch starts his seminal work with the statement that everybody has daydreams, and daydreams have always existed (7). He begins his analysis with ‘little waking dreams,’ and meanders through castles-in-the-air to the ‘One thing that is outstanding and needful’(11). These

1_{Interpreters and translators translate this concept in different ways, using, among other terms,} ‘educated hope’ (Habermas), knowing concrete hope, informed hope, or learned hope.

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Hope 16

daydreams show something, as do religious messianic messages and the world's cultural corpus: that we always dream of something better (11). But also in art, we see “appearances which are driven to become symbols of perfection, to a utopianly essential end” (14). In almost all our expression, humanity shows a longing for something better and something more. That we always hope and that we are always ‘not yet’ is visible not only in uprisings and acts of rebellion but also in the smaller things and less dangerous acts. Also in the dreams we have and in works of art, people show that they hope. Even religion is interpreted by Bloch as hope, as an expression of the wish for liberation, for something better, for something not here yet. Humankind is thus always forward-looking. This can be both private, individual wishes, like the wish for eternal youth or the return of a lover, or longing for a world where everyone is better off. It is part of our being human that we look beyond the current day. However, “the work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” (Bloch, 3). Hope seems to move us to do something, rather than wait. We have actively to throw ourselves into becoming. Hope, writes Bloch, “will not tolerate a dog’s life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is” (3). Instead, it will project better possibilities and dreams of a better life. These daydreams are everywhere, but there are different kinds of dreams. Provocative daydreams are the ones with hope at its core. Daydreams have to be known deeper, need to be nourished and educated, trained to “what is right” (3). Because people need hope, it “is preached from every pulpit,” however, not all these preachers can deliver what they promise (5). Hope is necessary to survive, but not all hope is justified. Not all preachers of a better life can fulfill their promise. According to Bloch, “fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race” (5). People thus have always had hope, but should be aware what sort of hope they are embracing. Bloch explains that it is “knowing-concrete hope”, together with informed discontent which belongs to it, which “leads most efficiently towards the radical termination of the contents of fear” and towards a better world(5).

For Bloch, Marxism is both subjective and objective: its hope flows both from a ‘warm stream’ of personal fantasies, and from a ‘cold stream’ that projects concrete real-world possibilities (Aronson, 12; Plaice, Plaice and Night, xxvi; Bloch, 209). The cold stream represents Marxism’s “undeceived critical rigour, the other its idealistic and imaginative receptivity” (Plaice, Plaice and Knight 1996, xxvi). The warm stream of Marxism entails emotions, the cultural expressions, the things in the mind, the creation of subjects, everything that is subjective. To the cold stream

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belong Marxist science, rigorous analysis, the cold stream is the objective side. The hope Bloch calls for is a learned, or knowing hope and takes both into account.

The group that was concerned enough to start protesting had been growing for years, but at the same time seemed to erupt suddenly. From all kinds of forgotten corners, people emerged who had been part of some student organization or protest movement for years already. It all came together in one place. I had been in the student union's board, and in the student-faculty board, for a year. I had seriously considered the Opleidings Commissie. I had been at department meetings, on some committees. And then, in the year 2014, I wasn't in any official position to do something about the disastrous budget cuts coming up.

But people were mad.

At the philosophy students local hangout, the budget cuts, the number of teachers who might lose their job, the lack of transparency about the process, was discussed again and again. The basis for the protest was the realization that the anger and shock we all individually experienced was a widely shared emotion. Already existing social connections brought the knowledge that we were in something together, based on projects from the past, combined with the trust we already built.

At the Humanities Faculty, the first impulse was the meeting of the Amsterdam Philosophy

Platform. Other students and activists remember the squatting of the Spinhuis, the first protests of

the beta faculty, or the occupation of the upper floor of the VU as decisive moments. Within the university, there was lots of experience with protest, and an enormous knowledge about the bureaucratic functioning of the institution, and about actions from the past. We made information sheets, did lots of research, and made plans.

It is this kind of hope, informed hope; docta spes, that alongside “militant optimism” can change the world for the better. In the world, we find undecided material; those facts that are merely reified moments of a process. Work and action can influence those facts. “The attitude towards this undecided material, which can, however, be decided through work and concretely mediated action, is called militant optimism” (Bloch, 199). The attitude that reflects the hope and trust that actions can change the world is militant optimism. To mind comes Antonio Gramsci, who urges us for optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Bloch argues that it is not any kind of hope though, but only comprehended, educated, or informed hope which has this possibility.

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Hope 18

Informed hope is not the dreams that are pitched from anywhere, but that kind of hope that can find some support. Although, even with support, informed hope can be disappointed.

Hope that was disappointed- that is what the protest looks like for some people who weren’t there. Now, after more than two years, people ask if anything has changed. They urge me to look at the short-term outcome, the concrete policy changes, the gained material resources, the changed positions: would it be rational to do it again? Was it worth the extra times spent on tuition fees? The year delay before you started your master thesis? Do you think you can get a job now that you’re associated with this radical movement? Was it worth your good name, some friends, your trust in the system? Was it worth the trauma of seeing a state you've never doubted seriously show up with thirteen vans of riot police to hit you away from an empty square?

I don't want to answer the question if things have changed because it feels like I have to defend something. The thing I have to defend I take to be one of the most worthwhile endeavors of my life so far.

According to Bloch, the aim of human hope is the realization of utopia, and utopia is legitimized because it is the end goal towards which these hopes reach. The utopian vision finds it’s legitimation in becoming real. For Bloch, utopia is not an impossible ideal, but “a real and concrete final state which can be achieved politically” (Plaice, Plaice and Knight 1996, xxviii). Because these hopes are taking into account real possibilities, it is “informed hope,” therefore, “militant optimism” is justified (Commer 1980, 150). Informed hope is concerned with what is possible; it is hoping for that which could come into existence when tendencies and latencies that reside within the material world and humanity's capacity interesect. Something is possible or concrete, interprets Commer, when the conditions to realize it are partially within reach (153, 155). A utopia is concrete when it is realistic. Utopia and hope should thus be grounded in some way in reality. Realistic, not in the sense of resigning and accepting what is, but in the sense of actively taking into accounts the existing conditions for its transformation (Van den Enden1980, 14). In this, I follow van den Enden rather Kolakowski, who dismisses Bloch by saying that that concrete for Bloch means we cant say something about its content (471). According to Habermas, Bloch doesn't explain how utopia will come about, “he simply assumes it as accomplished through Historical Materialism" (312). However, the hope Bloch is arguing for, is grounded in reality- albeit a reality that is possible, that is not yet here. We can’t say what it will be. This is not a bad thing – it means that the future is open. This is the necessary result of believing that

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humanity has an influence on the course of history, rather than thinking the course of history is the result of external processes.

It seemed ridiculous to imagine a group of angry students would push through the door on the 24th of February. But although the door was solid and sturdy, we managed to push through. After the Bungehuis, yet another building that looked like a fortress that we conquered nonetheless. The day before the Maagdenhuis occupation they tried to take away our negation leverage that helped us shape the future of the university in a less managerial direction. Riot police had to evict 43 people, dragging some of them by their hair. Batons and a brute show of force were used to hit history back to its rightful course: budget cuts, lack of transparency, little participation in decision processes. But the first eviction didn’t stop us. The future can unfold in all kind of directions, but human intervention can push it towards visions impossible to imagine yet.

Another essential element of hope is that it can be disappointed. Bloch’s 1961 inaugural lecture at the University of Tübingen carried the title “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” Formulating a “question of particular relevance,” Bloch asks, “can hope, or more precisely, can every kind and every degree of hope be disappointed?” (340). Hope must be disappointable; if it weren’t, it would not be hope (Bloch 1961, 340). Because hope is “open in a forward direction”, it is oriented towards the future (304). It thus is not concerned with what already exists, but with what is new (1961, 304). Because it is concerned with what is not-yet here, we can’t be sure that it will succeed. Secondly, hope must be disappointable because “even when concretely mediated, it can never be mediated by solid facts” (304). Although hope can be informed, it is informed by a world that is always in potentiality, never truly actualized. The information which makes hope informed does not rely on given truths. As mentioned earlier, facts are “merely subjectively reified moments or objectively reified stoppages within a historical course of events” (304). Facts are not static. Bloch states that hope stands “too close to the indeterminacy of the historical process, of the world-process that, indeed, has not yet been defeated, but likewise has not yet won” (304). Although we have informed hope, and although much more is possible then it seems, it is characteristic of hope that it may not be fulfilled.

Venturing Beyond:, Pushing the Frontier or Shifting Horizons?

Above we saw that hope should be informed, rather than an empty promise, and be disappointable. We can’t be sure things will work out. We read that Bloch summarized his

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Hope 20

philosophy as “S is not yet P.” The not yet can be realized by human intervention pushing and guiding towards a better a world. There is an end-goal that the world-process is aiming towards, the creative matter being governed and driven forward by human actions. In Blochian jargon, we could say that the Front is pushed towards the Novum, which finds fulfillment in the Eschaton, so that we’ve reached our Heimat. These terms all have roughly the same meaning or function in Bloch’s work (Kolakowski 468, Hudson 18). I will shortly discuss these terms and evaluate them, and then propose a different metaphor for this pushing of the frontier.

Before Marx, laments Bloch, philosophers “posited the Authentic as already ontically existing” which resulted in closing off the “seriousness of the Front and Novum” (18). He means that the world was considered as finished and stable, rather than in constant development.

Hudson explains that it is the Novum that “designates the radical new which has never yet been” (Hudson 1982, 117). It is not a prediction of the evolution of the world if we would leave it to the forces and processes that exist and dictate it now. Instead, it is the ongoing speculation of a wished for evolution that takes the possibilities and limitations into account but is driven by human hope (Enden, 1980, 13). Bloch argued that the true task of philosophy lies in its commitment to the future: “philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge” (Bloch 1996, 7). He laments that Plato’s theory of knowledge as anamnesis, knowledge of what was, has been continually reproduced (Bloch as quoted in Kolakowski, 469). Knowing, summarizes Habermas Bloch’s argument, was understood “from Plato’s anamnesis down to Freud’s analysis” as a return of memory, while “in fact it refers to something expected, something that objectively is only in potential” (312). Kolakowski contrasts the platonic view of knowledge as recollection with Bloch’s ‘futuristic gnosis,’ a knowledge concerned with the future, rather than the past. The actualized was always posited at the beginning, rather than at the front of history (Kolakowski, 469). Hope has always been conceptualized as a return to a lost paradise, rather than building a new one.

Bloch introduces the neologism ‘front’ on the other hand “in an attempt to overcome the bias of static though against the new, and in favor of the already become” (Hudson 1982, 115-116). The front is that which we push forward by our human actions and interventions. It is always that which we find ‘in front of us’ now. Bloch uses the term to refer different kinds of ‘fronts.’ The front of the world process, ”where matter is ‘in ferment’ and driving forward to the new”; the

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temporal front, which is always this moment, now, where we can act and intervene in the future; the projected front, which is the open space toward which we are reaching; and the human front, “in the sense of space into which men project themselves forward in order to survey the present and plan ahead” (Hudson 1982, 116). The front relates to Bloch’s view that the moment of potentiality that surpasses into actuality always opens up opportunities for action (Bloeser & Stahl, spring 2017). In other words, something that was first only possible is now happening in actuality, new opportunities for action are created – new things are possible, that might become actual. We push forward, making new things possible with every step. Thus, the anticipatory conscious ventures beyond is at the front of history and aids people in pushing history in the wished-for direction.

In the later parts of his magnum opus, Bloch speaks about the summum bonum or eschaton (Bloch, 173, 300). The concrete utopias are progressive anticipations of an eventual historical eschaton, a summum bonum, that must form the completion of that which is still only sketched but already intended in the historical emancipation process (Van den Enden, 14-15).This end goal –eschaton- is what gives hope a meaningful fundament (15). The hope for a final historical reconciliation of human and nature with each other and in itself makes the praxis of anticipatory consciousness possible.

Thinking, Bloch writes, “is venturing beyond” (5). We look forward to something we do

not know. Bloch’s account of the unconscious, what I call his psychoanalytic argument, holds that

this ‘venturing beyond’ is possible through our anticipatory consciousness. Knowing isn’t only concerned with the past, but also with the future. By thinking, we venture beyond, rather than look back. Like we saw in the last paragraph, “hope is not merely a subjective combination of desires and beliefs about probabilities and facts, but a reflection of metaphysical possibilities in the world”, and allows us to relate to what is not yet here, but “which is already prefigured in the objective potentials of reality” (Bloeser & Stahl, spring 2017). In anticipating hope lies the human capacity for transgression beyond what is given, beyond what is realized (Van den Enden, 1980, 16). Bloch borrows his ideas about the unconsciousness from psychoanalysis (Bloch, 56). Again the theme of knowledge as anamnesis, rather than as futuristic gnosis, pops up when he writes that “the unconscious of psychoanalysis is, therefore, as we can see, never a Not-Yet-Conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions” (56). In addition to the Freudian idea of a subconscious, i.e., that things from the past can still play a role in our lives, Bloch adds the

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not-Hope 22

yet conscious that we might not be explicitly aware of. Just as the past can be repressed – pushed into the realm of the unconscious because it was not allowed to be realized- the future can also be repressed. The idea of a not-yet-conscious is formulated in opposition to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who wrongly confined the unconscious to the past (Plaice, Plaice and Knight 1996, xxix). Bloch thus turns it around: what is in our unconscious is not only that which we do not consciously remember from the past but also what we do not consciously know about the future. Something that is there, but that is not actively encouraged to be realized. Our anticipatory consciousness is thus a not-yet-conscious rather than something forgotten (Bloch, Can Hope be disappointed, 1998).

In Bloch’s words, “from the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet” (Bloch, 15). The ontology of the Not-Yet poses that the things that are in the world are never ‘static.’ Bloch understands reality as an open process, the world as unclosed and unfinished (Dinerstein, 2015, 24, Commer, 1980, 152, Habermas 318). He writes that it is “only with the farewell to the closed, static concept of being does the real dimension of hope open ” (Bloch, 18). The general substratum of the world process is matter, for “real possibility is nothing but dialectical matter” (Bloch quoted by Habermas 318). The subjective potential in matter reacts to the objective potential, but always through mediation: “first, through the objective tendencies of social development; then through that which nature, though not comprehended yet, makes possible or impossible” (Habermas, 319). Marx was the first, according to Bloch, who didn’t reify the present and thereby allowed for a conception of the world where matter is not closed and humans can intervene. Marxism allows for something radically new. Within the facts we find, always also lie the alternative possibilities.

We have to look at Bloch’s take-up of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy to understand this (Plaice, Plaice and Knight 1996, xxvii). The idea of entelechy, in Aristotle’s time a neologism composed of the word ‘to have’ and ‘goal’ or ‘end,’ functions to distinguish form and matter. In Aristotle’s philosophy, matter is potentiality, form actuality. Matters needs a form or essence to be complete. Although we can distinguish form from matter, they can’t be separated. In De Anima Aristotle discusses that it is rational activity that distinguishes man from animal- humanity has reason as it’s entelechy. Whereas for Aristotle, entelechy was the potential of matter that could be actualized, for Bloch the entelechy of matter itself “is dialectically developing in the process” (Hudson, 137). Bloch writes that “matter as a whole…is still uncompleted entelechy” (Bloch

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quoted in Hudson, 137). The ontology of the not yet considers matter in the world to be undetermined: the ‘facts’ in the world do not dictate any specific outcome. “Expectation, hope,” or, writes Bloch, “intention towards possibility that has still not become: this is not only a basic feature of human consciousness but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (1959/80, 7). Intention towards possibility is a fundamental determination of objective reality. It is hope which can show us this.

Different subjective wills together form something objective because they can change the material condition. The eschaton, the end goal towards which hope is justified in reaching, is reconciliation between humanity and nature. Reaching this is possible, according to Bloch. Therefore, “hope is not merely a subjective combination of desires and beliefs about probabilities and facts, but a reflection of metaphysical possibilities in the world”, and allows us to relate to what is not yet here, but “which is already prefigured in the objective potentials of reality” (Bloeser & Stahl, spring 2017). Hope thus finds legitimacy in the idea that, one day, we will reach our final goal. According to Bloch, intention towards possibility is a basic determination of objective reality 7). Not only we humans reach towards something, but objective reality as a whole is going into a direction: that of the end goal. Final reconciliation is thus necessary, for this argument, to ground the principle of hope.

Commer notes the discrepancy that, while Bloch argues for an open socialist society, he uses the concept ‘eschaton’ to justify the praxis of emancipation (149). Why does Bloch use an end-goal to justify hope when the society he argues for is open-ended? Commer wants to do away with the religious component of Bloch’s atheism and argues that by making socialism a metaphysical issue, Bloch makes it less, rather than more likely to be obtained (150). He is not the only one – Kolakowski warns us that Bloch cannot describe what a perfect world would look like, couldn’t tell us how it could be accomplished.

Furthermore, Commer points out that the argument to make the eschaton the justification for hope is circular. We can’t take an end goal that may or may not be in our reach the reason we should have hope, for we can’t oversee all of this (159). An eschaton justifies the praxis and hope required to reach this eschaton - we can only find when we hope and act as if this eschaton exists. This is a leap of faith, rather than a justification. I share Commer’s doubts about Bloch’s eschatological argument for hope. For two reasons. The first being that an end goal is difficult to function as a legitimation of action before it is there. A similar logic is that ‘the end justifies the

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Hope 24

means’- but what if you don’t know what the end is? What if you don’t think the end is within reach? Are you justified to use whatever means you deem necessary? And can you convince yourself that there will be such an end? When I look at the movements I am a part of; I see this is not the case. It is not that now, looking back at the protests, the discarding of the N+1 rule or the extra money for the language studies makes the protests more legitimate or our hopes justified. The second reason that I think the eschaton is in contradiction with the openness of the world.

To remain the openness of the world - maintaining the Aristotelian idea that facts are things in potentiality, but discarding his idea that they have a ‘telos’ towards which they are reaching, I want to replace the metaphor of the frontier with a picture of an ever-shifting horizon. In Bloch’s philosophy, a frontier is clear – although we don’t know where we're going, we will know once were there, once we have it all. We are reaching towards an eschaton that justifies our venturing beyond. With a spatial front, it is clear that at a certain point you can’t venture further. The new frontier can no longer be pushed further when the whole world is colonized. Horizons, however, will always continue to shift. No matter how far we’ve gone, and how good the world is, there is still something more to wish for. Our work is never done. This again mirrors my experiences: it is not that, now the board of the University has been replaced, we are done. I might not even be pleased if education would be free. I don’t know what the desired result was when I joined the student movement in 2014. To stop something, to prevent something from happening maybe. I don’t know what I expected when I joined my fellow students in their occupation of the Bungehuis. I don’t know what result I wanted to come about when I returned to an appropriated Maagdenhuis. Not that I would be afraid of police, or horses, from then on. Not that the advisory board would step down a year later, and not that one of the board members would step down immediately. Not just that a small amount of money would save some language studies. And also not the end of ‘rendementsdenken’, or, why not aim high, the end of capitalist exploitation. The horizon is always shifting. An eschaton that justifies hope, or revolutionary praxis, does no justice to the fact that what we aim for is ever changing.

I follow Eduardo Galeano's poetic line horizon shifting:

“Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps.

If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead.

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No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.” (Galeano, 1995)

Conclusion

I couldn't stay the first day, I didn't come during the weekend, but on Monday night, I re-entered again. Again through a window, but this time using a ladder. I had brought a sleeping bag, clean clothes, a pack of sultanas and stitching needles with me. People had already warned me about the long meetings, and I had promised my boyfriend a hand-knitted scarf. This could be the best opportunity to combine my crafty nature, keep my promises, and unleash the revolutionary temperament. Enter the night long meetings about a university board that didn't want to talk. The office that was easiest to reach from the street was renamed ‘info desk.‘ Everyone entering the building had to come through this room. If you wanted to stay anonymous, you could leave all the stuff that could identify you there, which would be brought to a location nearby. You got a number, so that the arrest group could locate you later, and put number and name together. I was number 172. The movement was growing quickly.

Hope, we’ve seen, is not merely having faith that things will be all right in the end. From Bloch, we’ve seen that hope should be informed. We also saw that we don’t have to accept the world as it is passively, it is within our capabilities to change the world for the better. To set this out, Bloch introduced us to terms of ‘the novum,’ ‘the front,’ the not-yet and informed hope. He argued that everyone has daydreams, but that we can discriminate between the kinds of hope people have. Hope must be informed- docta spes. However, hope must also always be disappointable. I’ve argued that we should do away with the eschaton to justify his worldview and that a metaphor of a shifting horizon can be a better depiction of Bloch’s ontology of the not yet. No matter how far we go, we can never reach it.

The first days of the Bungehuis Occupation, we didn't have mattresses. The initial occupiers didn't bring too much stuff, thinking they'd be evicted within several hours, or at least after a day or so. The last time the Maagdenhuis was occupied, it was evicted immediately, everyone was arrested, even the 15-year-old girl who only joined her older sister had a track record now. It wouldn't be smart to make yourself too comfortable already. But during the days that followed, even more people joined, and others helped out by offering materials and time, or

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Hope 26

only moral support. An elderly lady who had lived opposite of the Bungehuis for more than 50 years, came to our window. “I’m so proud of you! Keep up the good work!” She brought a mattress with her that she no longer needed, and a bag of apples, “’cause we students needed vitamins.” Whatever my hope was when I joined The New University, it was some sort of hope for a better, collectively shared future. It was something that had me in its grip, but also something I had, practiced and did. Hope is not a noun; it is something you can do, practice, train, strengthen. It is not something you can gain or lose. Like trust, hope cannot be true or false.

From the past, I think, we see that so much has changed for the better, and so much more was possible than we imagined. I’ve been practicing hope, and I think it is informed and grounded. I see a better world, just around the corner and it is rising, and my hope is strengthened with all the things I see around me. Maybe the events that spring were successful because it lay the foundation for a movement of students for climate justice, adding a more intersectional approach and fewer spelling mistakes to climate activism. Maybe it was successful because it lay the foundation for the University of Color. Maybe it was successful because the foreign detention adventure of two of us led some to a fierce commitment to helping refugees. Maybe it was successful because we've learned people have double agendas. Maybe it was successful because we found hope in our prefigurative practice because we’ve realized what power we have. We have lived and experienced another way of organizing, felt solidarity, community, and felt the power we had as a collective. A power that is so big, and so dangerous and threatening, that they will send thirteen vans of riot police to an empty building, and still arrest people.

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Shifting Horizons - Prefigurative Hope in the 2015 New University Movement