Something's Missing

From here (see 'Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing')

I would like to remind us right away that numerous so-called utopian dreams – for example, television, the possibility of travelling to other planets, moving faster than sound – have been fulfilled. However, in so far as these dreams have been realised, they all operate as though the best thing about them had been forgotten - one is not happy about them. As they have been realised, the dreams themselves have assumed a peculiar character of sobriety, of the spirit of positivism, and beyond that, of boredom. It is not simply a matter of presupposing that what really is has limitations as opposed to that which has infinitely imaginable possibilities. Rather I mean something concrete, namely that one sees oneself almost always deceived: the fulfilment of the wish takes something away from the substance of the wishes.

By way of illustration, Adorno draws our attention to those fairy tales where someone has to use the third of three wishes to take back the consequences of the previous ones – the wish was sabotaged by its realisation. If Adorno's right, that the ‘disappointment’ of the wish is not just an instance of the contrast between open-ended possibility and closed actuality, then what is the reason for the seemingly in-built ‘let-down’?

Answers in the comments, please.

Anyway, a brief reflection that may or may not be related to the above. One of the problems with much science fiction, I think, esp. cinematic science fiction, is that it envisages a world which is uniformly New. From the shiny suits to the towering reflective surfaces of the buildings, the white sheen that emanates from updated gadgets and means of transport. Everything - all the way down - has been updated, transformed. It’s as if the future arrives synchronously all at once.

We know different. The newest flat-screen computer perches on a Formica table from the 1970’s; someone on an old bicycle recognisable to Dickens rides to her work at an astrophysics lab; someone surfs the internet in the morning, then darns a sock in the afternoon. The future comes in piecemeal, cheek-by-jowl with what’s been the same for centuries. And not only that. Technology itself gets caught in time. This five year old computer appears practically archaic, as this 5 year old fence obviously doesn’t. Different times co-habit the world. You get something of this, if I recall, in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The space ship is cluttered with aging technology and tattered furniture – this is not the uniformly pristine and transfigured world of the typical sci-fi flick.

So two meagre suggestions regarding Adorno’s point:

1. is it that some of the ‘utopian wishes’ he mentions disappoint because we somehow thought they were signs of or would herald the arrival of the synchronous/ complete future?

2. or is it that these particular dreams, while they were imaginary, were in part inevitably figures - so, for example, the travelling to other planets, while it is imaginary is a figurative expression of something which history makes the category error of interpreting literally