Wish Images and Wishful Images: Benjamin and Bloch

Abstract

Beginning with a discussion of the richly experiential and historically interventionist music of Matana Roberts’s COIN COIN project, as well as a consideration of the collective potential of the music streaming service, Beats Music, this second chapter introduces the methodology of the book. Central to this examination of Benjamin’s wish images and Bloch’s wishful images are the key ideas of the unspent and unredeemed utopian energies that gather around technological innovations, as envisioned by Benjamin, and of music’s unique capacity to venture beyond the limits of articulation and to attach to unrealized possibilities, in a world, as theorized by Bloch, whose future is still radically up for grabs.