The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art 0745699901, 9780745699905

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The Aesthetic Imperative

Peter Sloterdijk The Aesthetic Imperative Writings on Art

Edited and with an Afterword by Peter Weibel Translated by Karen Margolis

polity

First published in German as Der ästhetische Imperativ – Schriften zur Kunst © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2014 This English edition © Polity Press, 2017 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9986-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9987-5 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author. Title: The aesthetic imperative : writings on art / Peter Sloterdijk. Other titles: Äesthetische Imperativ. English Description: English edition. | Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039423 (print) | LCCN 2016040495 (ebook) | ISBN   9780745699868 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745699875 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745699899   (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745699905 (Epub) Subjects: LCSH: Arts, Modern--21st century. | Art--Philosophy. Classification: LCC NX460 .S5913 2017 (print) | LCC NX460 (ebook) | DDC  709.05--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039423 Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Times by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com ‘One A.M.’ and ‘The Crowd’ from Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose. © 2009 by Keith Waldrop. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. ‘My Dead Body’ by Patrick McGrath. Published by Brooklyn Museum, 1998. Copyright © Patrick McGrath. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, UK.

Contents

I  WORLD OF SOUND La musique retrouvée 3 Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 15 Where Are We When We Hear Music? 27 II  IN THE LIGHT Clearing and Illumination: Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism and Politics of Light Illumination in the Black Box: On the History of Opacity

49 61

III DESIGN The Right Tool for Power: Observations on Design as the Modernization of Competence On the Charisma of Symbols For a Philosophy of Play

83 97 100

IV  CITY AND ARCHITECTURE The City and Its Negation: An Outline of Negative Political Theory 113 Architects Do Nothing But ‘Inside Theory’: Peter Sloterdijk in Conversation with Sabine Kraft and Nikolaus Kuhnert 141 For a Participatory Architecture: Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with Reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry 174

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Contents

V  CONDITIO HUMANA Essay on the Life of the Artist: Heretics * Wastrels * Falls/ Cases * Inhabitants Confessions of a Loser Minima Cosmetica: An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement

185 192 197

VI MUSEUM The Museum: School of Disconcertment World Museum and World’s Fair

221 231

VII  ART SYSTEM ‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in one’ 249 Art is Folding into Itself 253 Emissaries of Violence: On the Metaphysics of Action Cinema 265 Good-for-Nothing Returns Home or The End of an Alibi – and a Theory of the End of Art 280 Afterword: Sloterdijk and the Question of Aesthetics Peter Weibel 304 Notes 320 Publication Sources 334

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WORLD OF SOUND

LA MUSIQUE RETROUVÉE

Demonic Territory Ladies and gentlemen,1 abundant attempts have been made to define the essence of music. Some people have described it as structured time or as a synthesis of calculated order and mysterious caprice, while others have seen its higher manifestations as the meeting between rigorous form and the gestures of free self-expression, or simply as passion colliding with the world of numbers. Yet none of these statements can match the famous dictum of Thomas Mann in his novel Doctor Faustus. Inspired by Kierkegaard, Mann reached the conclusion that ‘Music is demonic territory.’ This phrase, which has since become a mantra for musicologists, is notable for several reasons; moreover, it increasingly requires comment. When it first appeared in 1947 it merely aimed at illuminating the murky secrets of German culture, an area where, it was said, musicality and bestiality had become confusingly intertwined. At the same time, Mann’s dictum was supposed to indicate how, on the ground of modernism, artistically beautiful things could change into things that are artistically evil, and how diabolical guile could transform the best forces of a high civilization into their opposite. From today’s perspective, Mann’s statement has a special impact in that it replaces a definition with a warning – as if the author wanted to admit that it is impossible for some topics to lead to objective theory because they do not remain still while they are being worked on by theory. Instead, sleeping lurking monsters rouse from their slumbers and rear their heads as soon as we talk about them. According to the author of Doctor Faustus, musicologists would be well advised to study the conclusion of Christian ­demonologists that demons are

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not neutral. Instead of being model objects that can be investigated at a safe distance, they are a power that responds to invocation. Anyone who calls the dark spirit by name has already invoked him, and the invoking person should be aware that he can be confronted with an authority that will be stronger than he is. That is why folk tales say of Doctor Faust: If you know something, keep it quiet. Let us briefly look at which kind of demonic possession is involved when we enter the territory of music – assuming that this is about a ‘territory’ that can be entered like a ground or terrain. We must seek the answer in the acoustic anthropology that has acquainted us with a large number of inspiring new findings on human hearing in recent decades. They have taught us that among members of Homo sapiens, like other mammals or creatures that bear live offspring, and even among many birds, hearing is an ability that is acquired very early, actually in prenatal space. The ear is indisputably the leading organ of human contact with the world, and this is already the case at a point in the organism’s development when the individual as such is not yet ‘there’ – to the extent that the adverb ‘there’ indicates the possibility that a person is at a sufficient distance from things to be able to point to an object or circumstance. Even in adults, hearing is not so much an effect the subject experiences in relation to a source of sound, but occurs rather as immersion of the sensitive organ and its owner in an acoustic field. This applies even more strongly to the hearing of the unborn child. If the first auditory experience signifies a foetal prelude to the mature use of the acoustic sense, it is mainly because at that moment the feature of floating in a total environment is at its purest. The first hearing experience inherently resembles a pre-school of cosmopolitanism, literally of world openness – yet we attend this school, effectively the école maternelle, at a stage of life when we ourselves are still completely worldless and pre-worldly. The individual-to-be persists as far as possible in its intimate reserve, enclosed in a warm misty night, yet still listening behind the door of existence. But it would be confusing to describe the hearing foetus merely as an eavesdropper behind the door. The primal hearer’s way of being is defined from the very beginning by its embedding in an internal sonorous continuum dominated by two emanations from its maternal surroundings: first, the sounds of the mother’s heart that set the existential beat like a constant repetitive rhythm; and, second, her voice producing free prose that impregnates the foetal ear with a melodic dialect. These two universal factors of the formation of intra-uterine hearing, the cardiac basso continuo and the mother’s soprano speaking voice, create the outline of the utopian continent of proto-music or endo-music, and we first have to overcome the almost constant presence of these two factors



La musique retrouvée 5

to reach a horizon within which more unfamiliar, more intense and more distant sonic events communicate a kind of acoustic summer lightning coming from the world. In the future we have to take these relationships into account when repeating the phrase about music as demonic territory. The nature of the demonic musical phenomenon will be easier to understand when we accept that once the auditory relation to the world becomes musical, we are in a position to address the register of deep regressions. From this it follows that, even in the case of adult subjects filled with harsh reality, music can still evoke their intimate prehistories. It recalls a phase of their development when they were not yet accustomed to being free to take their distance from things and situations, but still, the environment with its lively sounds transported them into a mode of conflict-free encirclement. At the same time, music, wherever it activates registers of intensity, can render the dynamic of earlier struggles to break through and find new openings as acoustic patterns. This locates music as the place where the transition from confrontation to immersion is continually articulated in a new way. The musical ear is the organ that participates in the reality of sound and tonal events exclusively in the mode of immersion. In fact, immersion as such is the topic of a more audacious kind of Enlightenment. If you know something, then you should talk about it nonetheless. This is probably what Nietzsche had in mind when he added the hazardous name of Dionysus to the vocabulary of musicology. We still have to explain the ways and means by which the ear becomes a musical ear. Musicality in the narrow sense of the word assumes that the adult ear can occasionally take a holiday from the trivial work of hearing and be lured away from everyday noise by select sounds. We generally experience the world as a place completely removed from music. It is the noises of our surroundings that dominate in this world – and, above all, the inescapable chatter of our fellow human beings, which the media amplify to the maximum nowadays, and then the daily noise profile with the acoustic signatures of our households, our workplaces and our traffic systems. As a result the human ear is a slavish, servile and secretarial organ because, to begin with, it can only bow to the authority of the first available sounds around it. Unmusicality is the voice of the Lord, and the reality of things tells us to understand in an unmusical tone of command. Music, by contrast, has the intrinsic effect of carrying us away. It invites us to start over again with a different kind of response – and this implies, however obliquely, the return to the realm of the heartbeat and the archaic soprano. It is nearly impossible to fathom the implications of these ­ anthropological

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observations with all their immense consequences. The prose of ordinary existence is based on the fact that from birth onwards, human children make a trivial but incredible discovery: the world is a still, hollow place in which the heartbeat and the primal soprano are catastrophically silenced. Existence in the lighted world is connected to a forcible loss we can never really fathom: for humans, from the first moment on, being in the world involves the unreasonable demand that we do without the sonic continuity of that initial intimacy. From this time on, silence transmits the alarm signal of being. Only the mother’s voice, which can be heard from outside, builds a precarious bridge between then and now. Because this renunciation is nearly impossible to accept, the being that has just arrived in the world has the task of overcoming the prosaic barrier that divides it from the sphere of sonorous enchantments. Music exists because human beings are creatures that insist on wanting to have the best once again. All music, including elementary or primitive music, begins wholly under the auspices of rediscovery and repetition obsession. The specific allure of musical art, right up to its supreme structures and including its moments of evidentness, of being carried along, and of joyful astonishment, is linked to retrieving a sonorous presence we believed to be forgotten. When music is most like itself, it speaks to us as musique retrouvée. After the ear’s exodus into the outer world, everything revolves around the art of repairing the broken link to our first bonding. But we can only recover the essence of this incomparably intimate and entirely individual relationship later on in the public sphere where cultural groups listen to sounds together. The rule for this turn to the public and cultural sphere is that what began in enchantment should return in freedom. What we call nations, and later ‘societies’, are always sonorous constructions as well – I describe them elsewhere as the phonotope2 –, each of which solves the task by its own way of embedding its members’ ears in a shared world of sound and noise. Public hearing is a means to offer substitutes to its members for the lost paradise of intimate audial perception. This allows an interpretation of the ‘homeland effect’ – because the word ‘homeland’ primarily evokes an acoustic impact that activates the obsessive liaison between ear, community and landscape. Recent generations of musical theorists have correctly interpreted what the localized and socialized ear routinely hears as bias in a typically local sound landscape, alias soundscape. There was an erroneous attempt to give this sound environment a direct musical meaning – I say erroneous, because at best the daily sound milieus show semimusical qualities, whereas authentic music only begins where the mere hearing of sounds ends. We can confirm this for ourselves by



La musique retrouvée 7

observing how the modern music industry, as a pure sound industry, spreads the plague behind the smokescreen of folk music and causes epidemics behind the smokescreen of pop music – things we can only regard as acoustic counterparts to Spanish flu, and against which no effective medicine has yet been found. If we accept these conclusions, we realize immediately why the way to music is inseparably linked to reclaiming the individuality and intimacy of hearing. As we have noted, this restitution can only happen in a roundabout way through public sound events and at the level of technical methods. In this sense we can say that participation in civilization means being on the path to individuated music. This statement gives an idea of the scope of the adventure that the composers and musicians of European modernity embarked on when they set out to discover the new lands of audible structures.

In the Curvature of the World Let us reaffirm what we have just stated: civilization, in the higher sense of the term, is the process during which opportunities for individualization are released, including those that promote an intimate atmosphere of listening for adult members of a nation with a particular culture. This immediately reveals the tension that arises between the demands of individualized adult existence and its tendency towards intimacy. It is this tension that leads to music being described as demonic territory. Individualization includes musicalization. This involves the fact that individuals are increasingly able to tap into the conditions of music in terms of flow, reception and media, regardless of whether we understand them as pre-subjective or pre-objective, so that the entirely musicalized person, the ultimate educational product of European modernity, would also be the person who can handle work and conflict skilfully and, moreover, has the most profoundly developed freedom for regression. Whatever the case with such psychagogic3 idealizations, it makes sense to speak of a development of music only within the context that combines availability of instruments and processes with abandonment to the flow that carries one away. In fact, this is the only context in which it makes sense to speak of a history of music oriented to trends, and finally of the part that musical productions have played in the inventions, discoveries and research of modern times. We cannot refer to the concept of modern times without mentioning Jacob Burckhardt’s resonant formulation that the culture of the Renaissance consisted of ‘the discovery of the world and of man’.4

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The classical approach has the virtue of understanding the process of modernity generally as an outward turn. A mind that is serious about research always wants to ‘go towards things’. New countries only exist in cases where the inhabitants of old, inward-looking cantons wake up and embrace extraversion. From this perspective, the new music that has been articulated since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stands side by side with the expansionism of European cultures of competence as a whole. Just as the clear notation of the maps of seamen who regularly crossed the oceans since Columbus made it possible to navigate previously unpredictable seas, the new maps of musicians charted the written scores, the journeys of the voices in the space of tonal events, for future vocal and instrumental movements. In both cases, nautical or musical enterprises were wholly aimed at being repeatable, and what the investments of shipping owners and their timetables achieved in the one case was echoed by the business of courtly, clerical and bourgeois performance and staging in the other. The new, modern aspect of authentic modernity lies in the fact that it simultaneously secured and extended the radius of supply – if civilization is on the way to music, music is on the way to virtuosity. In this respect it is united with technology in movement. That it has been handed down through generations of accomplished musicians encourages the chronic willingness to move on from what has already been achieved to what still has to be achieved. If the stock of competence did not incorporate the previous achievements, it would not be possible to develop anticipation, preliminary knowledge and advance intentions to guide the next steps. Conversely, if no consciousness had been created about living on a continent that is now called the Old World (for good reason), there would not yet be a coast from which people could make their own plans and attempt to set out for the New World. Part of the constitutive experiences of the modern age is that we cannot discover the world without experiencing the curvature of the world at the same time. In speaking of the curvature of the world, we are borrowing a speculative phrase that Thomas Mann used to characterize the paradoxical – or dialectical, if you like – interaction and intertwining of constructivism and primitivism in early twentieth-century music.5 It is a phrase involving Freud’s and Rank’s suggestive psychoanalysis just as much as Einstein’s doctrine of the curvature of universal space. It is saying that there is no exit into the unknown that does not have consequences sooner or later for the way the person on the outward journey feels about him- or herself. The same applies to elementary manoeuvres such as Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the earth and more subtle excursions such as



La musique retrouvée 9

those made by modern physicists, systems operators and biologists to reach the last particles of material and the complex structures of the brain, the genome, the immune system and biotopes. In both of these cases the outward turn causes shifts in the identity of the discoverer. We still have every reason to remember the following picture as a founding scene of the modern age: on 22 September 1522 the Victoria, the last of five ships that had set sail under Magellan’s command three years earlier on a journey on the western route to the legendary Spice Islands, arrived back in the port of San Lucar de Barrameda in Andalusia. On board were eighteen half-starved figures who were promptly put in penitents’ chains and led into the cathedral of Seville. A Te Deum struck up for the unprecedented return – profoundly justified, we realize, because after the completion of this oceanic loop nothing could ever be the same again in relation to the world picture. The people who discovered that the earth was completely curved had paid a high price for their experience. Out of two hundred and eighty men, only the eighteen mentioned above returned to their home port as the first eyewitnesses of globalization. Each man was drenched in the horror of the meaning of world openness, of what it meant to be open to the world, stamped forever with the memory of epic tortures and many miraculous rescues. We can still read about this today in the laconic entries in Pigafetta’s ship’s log. At the same time each of the returnees must have felt the irony of homecoming in his own way. Anyone who went through the whole process and returned to his starting point saw it with different eyes forever after. His home town was no longer the egoistic epicentre of life that arranged the world around itself like a periphery that became increasingly indifferent the further away it was; it was no longer the hub of the universe resting in comfortable ignorance. It became a point in a turbulent grid and a node in a mesh composed of transport routes, flows of goods and currents of news. The full representation of the curvature of the earth on the new world globes, those effective media of the modern age, signalled the beginning of the continuing crisis of the homeland triggered by the changes in the self-image of those who stayed behind, perpetually wavering between fascination and repulsion as they absorbed the news from the new territory of the earth. It is not hard to see that the nautical evidence for the global shape of the earth was only a first step. The adventure of extraversion revealed its true dimensions the moment the outward turn was also transposed into an inward turn. The process revealed a curvature of being that leads us towards a deeper irony of research. Anyone who stays focused strictly on the course and single-­mindedly ­dedicates

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themselves to the search for the hidden structures of the real world must realize sooner or later that they are operating on themselves and their own background. In its advanced state of progress, the ‘discovery of the world and of man’ that was begun under an Apollonian sun turned out to be an enterprise in which the world ceased to resemble its inhabitants’ own familiar home. The bias of the Greeks and the ancients towards an existence in which the universe inherently addressed mortals in terms of domesticity gradually lost its hold on affairs. Wherever research becomes radical, the living being becomes estranged and alienated in the total picture. Humans see themselves as beings that increasingly have an uncanny feeling of not being at home. This feeling means that the presence of restless, insatiable strangeness, even at our own front door, can no longer be ignored. We have known since Heidegger that the curvature of being must be understood as the curvature of time. What we call human existence is not a straight line between the beginning and the end. Rather, the existential line is bent by a strange kind of tension: the ‘ends of the parabola’ that define a single life mark out segments in the circle of Being. At least this is the teaching of the most resolute Western metaphysical thinkers from Parmenides to the Master of Meßkirch.6 They had their reasons for persistently returning to intensive study of the circle or the sphere as figures. According to this way of thinking, origin and future should merge into each other in immense curves, or emanate from separate sources. It is this bold speculation to which Serenus Zeitblom gave a new tone in his apologetic commentary on the ‘Apocalypse’, the major work of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, a work that was allegedly barbaric and overintellectualized, when he remarked that the ‘union of the oldest and the newest’ had been achieved in this horrifyingly modern artistic construct. He went on to say that this approach ‘by no means’ represented ‘an arbitrary act’, but was part of ‘the nature of things’: ‘It rests, I might say, on the curvature of the world, which makes the last return unto the first.’7

Departure to the Musical Treasure Island: Caliban’s Legacy In the light of the above we can begin to see that the history of music is closely related in its own way to the departure of modern, enterprising, inventive humans for new shores. Music is very often invoked to portray the curvature of the world in its own specific fashion but rarely does so intelligently. It expresses this curvature according to its demonic nature by articulating the curved temporality of human existence.



La musique retrouvée 11

Having said this, it takes little extra effort to explain plausibly why music had to become the real religion of the modern age – beyond any confessional schisms and sectarian splits. If religion has always offered more or less profound interpretations of the inexorable return of the mortal person to the unborn, the emergence of modern music created a powerful alternative to give this dynamic of return a safe and secure setting. In fact, modern music is more religious than religion because its privileged alliance with the latent faculties of hearing allows it to reach into our inner depths, the layers where we hardly ever encounter simple religiosity. The basis of modern music’s great advantage over religion is that music acquires an annunciatory power that conventional religiosity still barely understands, even today. (This has been particularly true ever since the change in music from polyphony to forms of chord-based expression, and the transition from composing under categorical laws to free composition of tonal events determined by the composer’s own programme.) From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, the intrinsic essential dynamic of higher music has made it irresistibly effective, because it was in the process of evolving a superior kind of eloquence in relation to questions of paradise or, more generally, of tension and relaxation. It shared this only, if at all, with modern poetry, which, ever since the age of Goethe and Eichendorff and of Lermontov and Lamartine, has not hidden its ambition of vying for the ear of the musicalized person. Consequently, since the days of the first Vienna classics, music in its enhanced form has opened up an endless tonal conversation on the difference between paradise and the world. Music’s superiority resides in the fact that its sole task is to address the ear – the ear that, as we know today, uses the memory of its own internal constitution to construct the place of differentiation between the world and the pre-world. We can estimate the greatness of modern music and its solidarity with the project of modernity if we recognize it as the medium of a powerful relation to the world that nonetheless does not deny the call of the deep. The adventurous heart of modernity throbs in the medium of music. If religion in its ordained form had to rescue human souls from earthly life and its depredations by regularly promoting retreat from obsessive worldly cares and even escapism, flight from the world, the music of modern times had the merit that it created a transitional medium in which the unrenounceable rights of regression and remembrance of the primal pre-worldly wounded state were tempered with the sense of self-development and love of the world. The ‘project of modernity’, and the solidarity of music with this project – it may be appropriate to conclude by briefly explaining

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these dubious terms. In fact, what right would we have to speak of an era called the modern age if we weren’t saying that this was the time when people in the West began restructuring their desires? For the Renaissance truly to become an age of discovery it had to define itself as a great turning point for human aspirations. To sum up, what was always important for the people of modern times from then on, whatever their own pronouncements on their latest goals, was to redirect the arrow of desire away from the goals of the nether world towards objects this side of paradise, objects that were attainable and enjoyable in their own lifetime. The geographical symbol for this turn is called America, the fictional symbol is Treasure Island and the mythological symbol is the goddess Fortuna. To be sure, since time immemorial people from the Western cultural context saw the striving of a bad ‘here’ for a good ‘there’ as healthy and rational, even if for the foreseeable future the ‘there’ was only attainable in the heaven of the Holy Trinity. The centuries following Columbus’s journeys made Europeans into treasure hunters, not just incidentally and occasionally but principally and constitutively. Treasure hunting has been the real metaphysical activity of the European psyche since the discovery of the continents beyond the ocean. The image of treasure involves the idea of the magnetic object that shares a common trait with the demonic: it does not stay still while it is being turned into theory. It is impossible to imagine the treasure without starting to look for it, and it would be impossible to look for it without already being caught by its allure. It is enough to describe the world as a place where treasures can be found to turn oneself instantly into a seeker, no longer in the sense of the transcendent and masochistic quest for God but in the sense of the modern, aesthetic-magical-economic enterprise. Being an entrepreneur means adjusting from reward in a nether world to expectation of profit in this world. The treasure hypothesis provides justification for the hybrid courage with which people of the modern era approached the vast expanse of the world and the earth. In the future the only meaning of new territory could be that it contained the possibility of treasure caves. When we suddenly praise the new, it is because it is linked with the human right of finding. Finding the treasure means providing evidence that nobody is happy for the wrong reason. Conceiving happiness implies believing that the coincidence of justice and favouritism is possible, and not just possible but legitimate. New territory: this term shows the spirit of utopia in its true colours; it is also the spirit of risk. That makes it sound like a gospel in the guise of geography. Believing in it means being convinced



La musique retrouvée 13

that treasures lie waiting on distant shores, on hitherto inaccessible islands, in nature’s nocturnal workshops, in glowing flasks, in glittering grottoes, waiting for their finders. They lie waiting thanks to a primal accumulation of means of happiness, and we still know too little about their origin, production and distribution; they are waiting because no luck exists that does not already have its eye on the person it will favour. Where Fortune returns, Fortunatus is on the spot – the man who has specialized in taking gifts from capricious hands.8 This is why Fortunatus was the first artists’ name of the modern age. Fortune’s treasures are a priori haloes that would be happy to decorate a wearer’s head as soon as they identify themselves as a finder. Having said this, and having issued the requisite warnings, we can give the idea a final twist to suggest how the musicians of modern times could become agents of the treasure hunt. It is obvious why they did not board ships to reach treasure islands. They used different maps from sailors and drew other coastlines to represent their America. The true, interior America attracts composers as soon as they set off, seeking and finding in another way, to discover the melodious treasure caves. But the artists themselves first had to produce what they found there. What they retrieved had never existed before they found it. To conclude, I would like to suggest that it was Shakespeare in his island play The Tempest who first touched on these dangerous liaisons between the New World of sound and the New World illuminated by treasures. The chief witness of this discovery is none other than the original inhabitant of the exquisite island that, thanks to wizardry (what today we call technology), has become Prospero’s empire – an aboriginal named Caliban whom one of the visitors, with colonial arrogance, calls a ‘mooncalf’, a ‘stinking fish’ and ‘most ignorant monster’, a Caribbean Papageno, a natural human and original proletarian who possesses, however, a privilege that the stiff new masters of the world can only hazily imagine. He has the prerogative of living in the midst of Nature that is producing sounds for the first time – and of observing from this vantage point the fabrications of higher culture with a mixture of scepticism, astonishment, submissiveness and rebellion. The lines that Shakespeare gave to his amphibian monster who was born yet unborn, who was entirely human and entirely an artist, should be studied as the permanent manifesto of the New Music: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
 Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments


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Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
 That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
 Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
 The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d, I cried to dream again.9 This description created a misunderstanding that still lingers on in today’s music business. Stefano, the pretender who claimed power on the island, drew an ominous conclusion from what he heard: without further ado, he believed Caliban’s description of the melodious treasure island as the picture of a territory, a domain, a comfortable palace, in which musical servants performed their duties. This explains the staid, thoroughly feudal and thoroughly bourgeois conclusion: This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, centuries have passed since this prophetic dialogue. The Calibans and Stefanos still meet up now and again to discuss this peculiar and strange island realm. These gatherings, which are usually held in summertime, are conventionally called festivals nowadays, but it would make more sense to see them as constitutive assemblies. They are concerned with the musical constitution of the world. Acute observers are doubtful that a common statement will emerge from this in the foreseeable future. The advocates of the Calibans persist with their argument that music is demonic territory; the Stefano fans stick to their position that if music cannot be entirely for free, at least its costs should be reduced. People still scarcely realize how the curvature of the world also affects the realm of values. Here, under the festive umbrella of a music event, we are still giving voice to the idea that nothing should be as valuable as the thing we want to have for free again from the moment of birth onward.

REMEMBRANCE OF BEAUTIFUL POLITICS

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to begin this brief rhetorical prelude to the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra on this 3rd of October in the year 2000 by saying that nobody could feel how strange this attempt is to combine speech and music as much as the present speaker. It seems to me we might even suspect the concert organizers of a lapse in good manners or an attack on the fundamental right of music to speak for itself in its own way. Since when has a major orchestra found it necessary to have its programme moderated by a verbal commentary? Since when have musical compositions had to accept sharing the stage with extra elements far removed from music? This kind of enterprise can only be justified by its connection with the date, the 3rd of October, the Day of National Unity in Germany. It is the day that marks the creation of the political union between the two German states that emerged from the dramatic events of the mid-twentieth century. It is, in fact, a public holiday that enshrines a political memory, and a day on which the majority of German citizens find remarkably little to celebrate, as we can see from the routine speeches of the class in this country that is obligated to celebrate anniversaries. It is a day on which the best thing people could probably do is to play Beethoven – as they are doing here and most likely elsewhere at this moment – the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, of course, a piece that imposes itself because it has been regarded for centuries as a concentrated expression of the culture of political celebration. This is why the chosen combination of speech and music here today is not just superficial, and more than a whim of the organizers. The Ninth Symphony, particularly its world-famous final chorus, represents an event of musical rhetoric;

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indeed, of musical politics in its own right. Because of this, it is not a serious breach, in respect of either the situation or the genre, if, before the performance begins, we say a few preliminary words of comment and reflection, words that concern not the musical but (if we can express it like this) the ideological score of the work. It is enough to recall the reasons why, following its triumphal premiere in Vienna in the year 1824, the Ninth Symphony went on to become the most famous and most influential musical composition of the modern age. The reasons for its almost numinous and precarious success (precarious because it is so excessive) can be found not least in the fact that it has an inherently appealing character, certainly at the conscious points, the vocal points, which is designed to harmonize with ideas beyond music, to support enthusiastic consensus, to make an overwhelming impression through a political programme. It is worth noting that even the nineteenth century could hardly have dreamed that this wave of musical-political consensus would keep rolling on so powerfully. It is no coincidence that after the final chorus of the Ninth Symphony was selected as the European anthem at the beginning of the 1970s, the United Nations also chose the piece as its theme tune. In other words, even if it is true that you can’t speak with great music as such, the thematic excesses of Beethoven’s ‘political cantata’ definitely tend towards using speech as an additional element. In what follows I would like to take the liberty of remembering the historical premises of the musical-semantic complex that gave rise to the Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy. The word ‘remembrance’ is particularly apt here because we need to start speaking again about largely forgotten relationships. If we want to imagine ourselves at the generating pole of Beethoven’s artistic achievement, it is necessary, to quote Hegel, to imagine a ‘state of the world’ [Weltzustand] when consensus was still called enthusiasm. At that time ordinary citizens were less concerned with sharing the same opinion than with being moved. Remembrance is necessary to be able to return in our imagination to the situation in which the progressive voices of society were obliged to present almost everything they had to say in an anticipatory fashion – unless they quickly found reasons to sidestep into idealized bygone periods. We must take a fresh look at a period in which a rising elite had developed the habit of thinking in sweeping terms. We have to think back to a phase of history in which individuals with their ability to dream for themselves became mediators of what they saw as dreams for humankind. Prior to its victory, bourgeois culture spoke an enthusiastic dialect in the same way that today’s globalization consultants rehearse the dialect of visions and missions when talking to their clients.



Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 17

It would take too long to elucidate the meaning of enthusiasm in philosophical, psychological and systemic terms, but we can say that this honed notion of political Platonism has played a key role in the self-motivation of bourgeois societies that were keen to explore new shores. It contained the barely hidden categorical imperative of confidence at work. It helped to groom the middle social layer that was interested in power by enabling it to present itself directly as humankind in general. Enthusiasm from a bourgeois perspective is always a delirious fantasy of inclusiveness. It goes hand in hand with the prerogative of having had no experience of one’s own – not with oneself, not with the institutional spirit, and certainly not with the game rules of economic relations governed by money. It reflects the state of grace that hovers over those who have not yet attained power – the grace of good conscience in a situation that lacks complexity. This blessed, powerful state of inexperience is the natural tone of the young Friedrich Schiller – the tone in which in 1785, when he was barely 26 years old, he wrote the prime document for the future politics of enthusiasm, the Ode to Joy, in whose success curve we are trying to find a little niche for ourselves, on this particular day. It is Hölderlin, however, who gives us the clearest and the most disturbingly beautiful testimony in the German tradition in his prepolitical reference to a vaguely imagined totality in the distant past. His epistolary novel Hyperion, written between 1792 and 1799, is set against the background of the Russian–Turkish war of 1770. It tells the story of the fateful involvement of the young Greek Hyperion in the initial stages of the freedom struggle of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. Even at that time the question of the spirit of Europe was already linked to what would later be called the Oriental question. There is no Western community of values without an eastern border. Hyperion’s explanation to his girlfriend Diotima as to why he felt compelled to volunteer alongside his friends as a soldier in this necessary war expresses the crucial statements of the early bourgeois politics of enthusiasm with an unsurpassed clarity. Hyperion’s appeal culminates in the proposition: The new union of spirits cannot live in the air, the sacred theocracy of the Beautiful must dwell in a free state, and that state must have a place on earth, and that place we shall surely conquer.1 These rarely quoted lines are truly momentous for our times. They are the key to the Beautiful Politics, the ideas without which we human beings would scarcely be able to comprehend the dramas

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of the past two centuries – and yet those born later usually know nothing of the existence and use of these ideas. This politics has the right to be called beautiful to the extent that, to speak in Kantian terms, ‘it is acknowledged as the subject of a necessary aesthetic delight’ beyond its moral value; and the beautiful may be called political because it is driven by hunger for realization, or, to quote Marx, for praxis. In this case, the pattern of theory and practice that later became influential is prefigured in the relationship of script and staging or war plan and military campaign. Beauty awakens from a swoon and takes command in the real world. Later generations are usually unaware of this formation because the separation of the spheres of power, art and religion has largely become a selfevident fact and it is hard to think of any reasons to change that. In a society defined by differentiation between subsystems, nothing is more embarrassing and damaging than this meshing and coalescing of dimensions or arrangements when we have long been convinced that they coexist closely but neither can nor should ever achieve fusion. Yet what else was enthusiasm in its heroic, naïve phase but the general matrix of embarrassing situations that emerged from unpolitical politics, from people’s gushing embrace of the universe and the relentless equation of the bourgeoisie and humankind? All the same, as long as we keep Hyperion’s argument in mind, we may suspect that Immanuel Kant had already lost sight of the main fact of the aesthetics of his time when he set out in his Critique of Judgment to confine the Beautiful solely to the borders of the arts. Kant said, ‘There is no science of the beautiful [das Schöne] but only critique; and there is no fine [schön] science but only fine art.’2 Kant’s objective of assigning beautiful things – and their producers, the geniuses – to a circumscribed field of play, a specialized region for art, made him miss the modus operandi of the age of enthusiasm, a large part of which coincided with his own lifetime. It blinded him to the highly conspicuous phenomenon that in his era, more than ever before or afterwards, not only beautiful art had existed but also beautiful physics, beautiful medicine, beautiful politics, indeed, even beautiful religion – however dubious and unsustainable those hybrid forms might have been. All this deregulated beauty is an outpouring of the politics of the beautiful soul that plunges into the general and oncoming stream, exhilarated by its capacity to expand and its desire to present postulates and by its universal inclusiveness that has yet to be tested by history. Enthusiasm appears as meta-competence in reaching out for real things; it wants to be the medium that is the message, and rightly so, because anybody who is enthusiastic is enthusiastic most of all about being enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is presented as the ability to infect reality with beauty.



Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 19

At this point I shall mention that it required a hundred and fifty years of sobering down before the operative part of this programme was ready to be put on the agenda again – this time under the heading of Design. To repeat my thesis, the fact that we can only fleetingly mention the existence of Beautiful Politics here implies that remembrance of an epoch which now seems far away – a time which would later be called German Idealism – was nothing more than an initial approach, a pretension or, as sceptics were already saying at the time, an excess, an upsurge of emotion that is demanding and therefore dangerous enough to try to become a reality. From a philosophical perspective, idealism was a logical and ethical ambition that did not shrink from any limits; in other words, the paradoxical enterprise of making freedom the central theme of a rigidly formed system. We should not forget what idealism was supposed to be in its most morally plausible and most socially futile dimension: the attempt of middle-class people to attain gentrification because they stubbornly believed that it was an indispensable qualification for legitimate claims to exercise of power. Idealism sought to make itself indispensable as a process of proof that bourgeois forces were also fit for and worthy of power as long as they could succeed in being part of a historically new type of aristocracy. The aristocracy should no longer be a state of the realm, but a propulsion system. We are talking about the aristocracy of enthusiasm for noble or, in other words, universal emancipatory goals relevant to humanity. Idealism emerged on this basis as the attempt to give pride of place to the world as a whole, a place with an ontologically ambitious name, that of the ‘subject’. The subject means the thing that is at the base – or, in modern terms, what basically does things, what achieves everything ‘at the base’ of every situation. This kind of thinking makes the highest appear like the broadest. What used to be at the top should now be something everybody is entitled to. What used to be the highest title has become the general style and an everyday form of address. It follows that the secret of the politics of enthusiasm is that it raises the whole of society to the level of the aristocracy – or, as Schiller said in the first version of the Ode to Joy, beggars would be brothers of princes. But if we’re talking about noblesse oblige, it applies even more to the subject. Nothing is more of a strain than being a principle oneself. Sometimes the subject, the everyday species, is presented as the productivity that posits the world [weltsetzend], that immediately encounters reality; and sometimes it is presented as free will without frontiers and finally as the capacity for universal brotherhood. The latter concept suggests the goodwill to create a single unified network of family,

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c­ ommunication and life with everything that is human and to speak, or, rather, to sing, with a single voice, a voice of the species. This is a fine, if intolerant, dream of inclusion whose tracks we can follow through two centuries up to the washed-out late German idealism of recent Critical Theory. Idealism as a form of enthusiasm for the species has an intrinsic impulse we could call the politics of choruses. Indeed, from this perspective, what are bourgeois societies but political music societies in which every member has a voice – a voice whose true definition is found in consonance, in agreement on existence in the long view, in the human species and its divinely ordained sections, the nations? Perhaps what Schiller set out to express in his Ode to Joy is only meaningful in the context of such melodious totalities. Only when nations become choirs of their own accord, choirs waiting for the musical notes – and political idealism is, perhaps, nothing but the decision not to doubt this –, can there be hope of enthusiasm, or ‘joy’ in Schiller’s terminology, triumphing against the divisive forces that are now (rather shallowly) called fashion, whereas we know, to the contrary, that they define valuable successful principles of modern society. In fact, nothing less than magic will be enough to bind what has divided society. It must have been a magic spell that stopped society’s subsystems on their way to dividing even further. Moreover, without magic, how can millions of people be guaranteed to keep calm when poets propose embracing? Without magic, how can we accept that the world is something we reach by a kiss? To repeat, however: what is idealism but this last indulgence in a pre-technological relationship to the universal? This kiss of the whole world! It would still be relevant – but not until communications technology was advanced enough to provide every household with remote kissing connections. But what are we supposed to think about an author who wants to suggest to his ‘brothers’, who are, presumably, enlightened readers, that there must be a loving Father living above the starry firmament? From where, we may ask, did the young idealist Schiller get this heavenly tent, the old firmament, which by his time had already been an obsolete cosmological notion for two hundred years? Where did he get the loving Father, when neither his own nor the sovereign could act as models? Hadn’t he just fled from the duke, from Mannheim to Dresden to his friend Körner?3 Joy alone made such things possible; it was the agent of higher cohesion and thicker mists; it obtained what no longer appeared accessible; the mail order company ‘Joy’ was known for its super-fast deliveries. Ladies and gentlemen, the point of these remembrances is not to present Beautiful Politics for retrospective mockery. I am rather



Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 21

emphasizing its astonishing quality and economic potential, and focusing on its seduction, which is barely imaginable today. It is only possible now, from this great historical distance, to estimate how many autohypnotic routines were needed at the time to sing of joy as the medium of total unification in the way that young Schiller did. We can understand the high level of awareness he had in trying to create his own illusions – joy, after all, is the reflection of the concept of enthusiasm that has gone in search of an audience that does not entirely desire as it should. Astonished, perhaps even envious, we can guess the extent to which bourgeois people of the period were still secure in their ability to slide from reality into eulogy. How short were the paths from piano duet to humankind at that time, and how quickly humans rose from mongrels to become a special breed. Who, today, can still ignore the facts as mindfully as an educated German around 1800 was able to? Who, today, can still look solely at the good and beautiful, hoping that reality will follow the good example? We are too familiar with the end of the story of the culture of the bourgeoisie: it sank, it ruined its reputation with hubris, it was destroyed by the onset of reality in the twentieth century. But we cannot deny that its strongest part was this chamber music of illusion that was played from scores in all the better homes – also, if necessary, since the gentleman senator was busy at the office, with the help of accompanists at the piano, who gradually lost their initial shyness beside the lady of the house playing the violin.4 Ladies and gentlemen, let me say a few words about the catastrophe of Beautiful Politics. I can be brief because in this case we are tapping the potential of a common fund of freely accessible intuition. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a test run for utopias, and after going through that it is clear to everybody concerned why the modern ‘free states’ or democratic systems, as we call them nowadays, were unable to provide fertile soil for the theocracy of beauty inspired by Hölderlin and graecomania. The only Beautiful City that passed the examination of history almost intact is the Kingdom of Sarastro, where revenge is unknown, at least as long as the aria ‘Within these sacred halls’ is playing. Only on the opera stage do princes embrace their opponents and even hug their assassins so tight that the dagger falls out of their hands. Of course, what should have made people think early on are the menacing lines, ‘Wen diese Lehren nicht erfreun/verdienet nicht, ein Mensch zu sein’ (‘Whomever these lessons do not please/Deserves not to be a human being’).5 Even on stage, the relation between enthusiastic inclusiveness and exterminating exclusiveness is illuminated for a brief moment – but who cares about the text in a transfigured world in which the bass is

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always right? All the same, didn’t the glamorous militant anthem of the French people contain a disturbing, racist refrain that threatened extinction with the words: ‘impure blood should soak the sacred fields of the fatherland’? Who would have been allowed to make a fuss about such scruples at this dawn of humanity? Who would have wanted to disrupt the triumphal music of the philosophies of unification and reconciliation? People only realized much later that every attempt to stage the real state according to the scripts of Beautiful Politics must inevitably end in atrocities of unprecedented scope. In fact, as soon as it developed militant features, Beautiful Politics, the practice of embracing the universe and of absolute totalizing inclusion, proved to be a very costly dream. Those awakening were forced to see their relationships clearly and to realize that every totalizing inclusion targeted to reality is paid for with equally real exclusions. And because this realization has now pervaded the everyday attunement of society, Beethoven’s music, at the very point where it succeeded impressively in the instrumentation and vocalization of enthusiasm for the human species, was incorporated into a historical movement that shifted its basic meaning, or, better still, its sources of vigour and panache. To understand this more clearly it is worth remembering that from the beginning the aesthetic sphere seemed to be at least twodimensional because it was responsible not only for the beautiful but also for the sublime, and this is what has been responsible for the transition to reality for hundreds of years. Just as impatient, impure theory constantly wanted to transform into practice, ambitious beautiful things were urgently trying to make the transition to the sublime – even if it should turn out to be terrible. This is why, from the very beginning, Beautiful Politics was always conceived as Sublime Politics. Indeed, the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible; yet we cannot be sure that it will casually disdain from destroying us. When the state mounted the platform in full regalia and demanded access to the citizen’s heart, it was acting as the Sublime State, that is, as the administrator of serious cases. Sublime may mean something that reminds humans of the possibility of their extermination – whether in the form of the concept of the infinitely large that appears as the mathematical sublime, or the observation of nature in its elementary dimensions that seem to tower over us limitlessly when we encounter the irresistible might of the dynamic sublime. But long before the encounter with these factors was worked out in aesthetic terms, the state of the early modern age had already established itself theatrically to its subjects and enemies as a potentially deadly force. It competed with nature as the source of impressive exterminations. It could not



Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 23

resist killing sufficiently often to support its claim to be the most serious instance. This is why, from the moment it became bourgeois, the sublime appeared philosophically as the aesthetic reflection of human freedom. It reflects our ability to take a position on our own downfall and the threat of it – provided that we retain the position of a spectator and remain secure from real threats. In this position the soul can hover between submission and resistance. Since the eighteenth century the bourgeois soul has practised the fall into omnipotent Nature in its artistic media. It never ceases imagining what it would be like to plane crash in the Alps or to be in distress in the Atlantic or to be touched by horror from the nether world at a country estate in the Scottish moors. In its nightmarish moments it rehearses death thoroughly, it watches heroes dissolving into the overpowering and sinking into the incredible, but as neither the Alps nor oceans nor haunted castles can satisfy the demand for occasions of downfall, there must be frequent recourse to the original source of the sublime, the Sublime State, where noble annihilation, both virtually and in real terms, still seems most likely to be guaranteed in its emergencies, the foreign policy wars. This touches on the sensitive point at which our late modern and postmodern embarrassment about the legacy of cultural enthusiasm begins. Today we can see more clearly how the sublime functioned as a bridge from the resistance of the subject to its voluntary self-extinction. In its founding period, bourgeois culture faced the enormous task of transferring the sublime from the absolutist to the democratic state. A bourgeoisie that reclaimed the aristocracy could not avoid this imperative. How could it dispose of itself without the aid of the aesthetic ideology that offered it the means to bring the beautiful into direct contact with the sublime? A recently published book tells us that Beethoven was an expert at this operation.6 The task set by the period and the reward for its solution are described with the greatest clarity in the text for his Choral Fantasy opus 80: ‘When love and strength are united/ The favour of the Gods rewards Man.’ Love must come into play as the ability to conclude the better social contract with beautiful souls; strength is needed to hold one’s own on the sublime front and to be bold in the face of downfall. This is the only way we can reach a more precise concept of enthusiasm: for joy to arise in the best bourgeois sense, the beautiful must be sublime and the sublime beautiful – and at the point where both elements are equally balanced, politics dissolves in emotion. Indeed, society seems destined to emanate its statehood, including its means of violence, like a spontaneous projection from itself. In the sublime civic state, volunteers precede conscription; tears surpass laws; the heart outbids the

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highest t­ axation rate. Perhaps there is simply no work in the history of the arts that holds the balance between the beautiful and the sublime at such a high level as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony does, particularly in its final chorus, when the celebration of friendship and voluntary downfall combine as a perfect example in the sublime total perspective. Such music irresistibly recruits us into the beautiful totality. It gives us an idea of what it would sound like if the small-scale politics of friendship could ever share common ground with the religious claim of the Sublime State. The Ninth Symphony has been dubbed a Marseillaise of humankind and claimed for the Eternal Enlightenment; but it has also been identified as the emanation of the German soul and repatriated, at least in the sense of an imaginary copyright, as a lasting loan of the Germans to humanity. We acknowledge the validity of both claims because both express modes of the politics of enthusiasm and both remain loyal to the ideals of the nineteenth century, to the idealistic populism that wished the sublime to have its place in popular tradition just as much as the beautiful, which, by definition, could be guaranteed the necessary appreciation. Aesthetic ideology brought the upsurge into the sublime within everybody’s reach, just as universal conscription democratized the chance to perish for the sublime civic state, which was now called the fatherland. With reference to the Marseillaise, Hegel clearly stated the political power of popular-sublime music: But enthusiasm proper has its ground in the specific idea, in the true spiritual interest which has filled the nation and which can be raised by music into a momentarily more lively feeling because the notes, the rhythm and the melody can carry the man away who gives himself up to them. He regretfully added, however, that situations had arisen meanwhile in which music alone was no longer enough to create ‘such a courageous mood and a contempt of death’.7 Similarly, modern universal conscription has both generalized and pragmatically downgraded great gallantry. The principle of the modern world – thought and the universal – has given courage a higher form because its display now seems to be more mechanical, the act not of this particular person but of a number of a whole [. . .].8 It is for this reason that the modern world has invented the gun, which not only changed the purely personal form of bravery into



Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 25

something more abstract but also embedded the decline of the individual in favour of the totality in an impersonal mass event. The continuing development of society and its art system has demonstrated that the synthesis between high and low cannot be permanently maintained. In terms of cultural history, the major event of the twentieth century – if we want a really bold formula – is that the idealistic synthesis of the beautiful and the sublime was exploded. This is merely another way of saying that the cultural revolution of the twentieth century caused the members of the avant-garde to break with aesthetic agreement and led to the de-sublimation of the mass audience. This twofold revolution ended the flirtation of masses and nations with the sublime and separated it from the beautiful – though we should not underestimate the transitional function of kitsch, whether socialist or nationalist, which has carved out its role ad nauseam as a decadent form of the popular notion of the sublime. The political result is to expose the Sublime State as a kitschy state and compel it to present itself in future as objective or discrete. The aesthetic outcome is more complex. Nonetheless, looking back at the past century we can recognize a clear structural dominance: mass culture has expanded the paths of the beautiful into highways. Kant would have trouble with his definitions all over again because everything is beautiful now except art, and everything is critical except art criticism. High culture has retreated into morose and costly sublimity. It lives on the fact that people can no longer accuse it of being generally understandable. The secret of its success consists in many people nowadays following the basic principle that makes the modernized sublime flourish: what nobody can find beautiful or understandable must be collected and exhibited. This is how the Sublime State still asserts its competence as the provider of museums. Ladies and gentlemen, let me end by saying that the historical drift of the modern art system has led to conditions in which the dangers characteristic of the age of Beautiful Politics and of the Sublime State seem initially to have been eliminated. The fateful explosions of the politics of enthusiasm have been relegated to the past; what remains of them still works to create majorities in the relatively harmless shape of consensus technique and creditable art. It would be ungrateful to say that we cannot live with that. Conversely, it would be an exaggeration to claim that this state of affairs inspires satisfaction. The dominant mass culture has released a flow of innocent kitsch; this has not only democratized emotion and relocated beauty from art galleries to bathrooms and beaches, but it has also de-sublimated the sublime, made death banal and

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established a kind of expressionism of violence and tastelessness whose only historical counterpart is the bestial entertainments of the Roman arena. Nothing remains of the claim to nobility for all except the inviolable freedom to lower the level even further. Given these conditions, it is obvious that, precisely in democratic mass cultures, it would be worth trying out a new, carefully stabilized relationship between the beautiful and the sublime. There is no discussion at all about the third dimension of the aesthetic, irony, or the fourth, conceptualization. In the process of clarifying these ideas, classical art must always play the role assigned to it. It is the only benchmark for understanding, first, what is no longer valid, and, second, what remains indispensable. The modern ear, which relates to elaborated experiences of dissonance, is happy with the occasional dip into the tonal world of enthusiastic flexibility that still shows the best that bourgeois culture was able to communicate about its inner states before its victory and decline. We are only too eager to borrow an hour of the enthusiasm of a vanished ‘state of the world’. Then, with enlightened nostalgia, we state that we are tempted to join a choir – let me remark here that more people in Germany today are members of choirs than of political parties. (This, incidentally, is only to give the Federal Statistical Office a mention on the Day of German Unity.) Ladies and gentlemen, the last word goes to an author whose hundredth birthday was publicly commemorated in Germany a few weeks ago. Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the first person to describe the difficulties of listening to classical music after its time in a way that speaks directly to the contemporary mind. In Aphorism 153 in his book Human, All Too Human, he noted that ‘Art weighs down the thinker’s heart’: We can understand how strong the metaphysical need is, and how even nature in the end makes it hard to leave it, from the way, even in a free spirit who has rid himself of everything metaphysical, the highest effects of art easily produce a reverberation of a long-silenced, or even broken, metaphysical string. At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards. If he becomes aware of this condition, he may feel a deep stab in his heart and sigh for the man who will lead back to him the lost beloved, be she called religion or metaphysics. In such moments, his intellectual character is being tested.9

WHERE ARE WE WHEN WE HEAR MUSIC?

In the Journey Out and in the Journey Back Philosophy knows a madness about which psychiatry knows nothing. Just think of Hannah Arendt, who was famously dry and rational but wrote an essay quite seriously titled ‘Where are we when we think?’ Or remember Valentinos and Basilides, the Gnostic theologians of late Antiquity who sought an imaginative answer to the question ‘Where are we when we are in the world?’ Still, there are fine examples in bizarre ideas just as there is method in madness. One of the possible lessons to be drawn from in-depth musicological reflections is that some rational benefits from madness involve more than simply inverting words. In philosophical terms the ear has become a talking point in recent years – as if this stepchild of epistemology had suddenly acquired a bevy of watchful adoptive parents. Indeed, in its heyday between Plato and Hegel, the Western philosophy of light and vision tended to be contemptuous of the realities of hearing. Western metaphysics was basically an ontology of the eyes that emerged from systematizing an outer and an inner vision. The subjects of thought appeared as seers who not only saw things and original images but ultimately also regarded themselves as the seeing soul – a local manifestation of absolute vision.1 We could describe the guild members as argumentative visionaries. Ever since the Young Hegelians discussed the ‘end of metaphysics’, it may be symptomatic that the inflation of media images has tended towards a maximum beyond which the absolutism of seeing can no longer be sustained. The Western habit of privileging the eyes at the cost of hearing has ceased to numb all the discussion’s participants to what the Greeks called the great things.

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Given this progress, we can live with the suspicion that the pious attitude people often adopt when listening is part of the revived conservative revolution with which old Europeans of the human species who insist on the remains of introspection try to postpone drowning in the gutted civilization of the media for the space of a few generations. The difference between a relationship to the world that is primarily about seeing or primarily about hearing has immediate implications for the unusual question of where we are when we hear. To see something, the viewer must stand at a clear distance to the visible object. Being spatially apart and opposite suggests the assumption of a gap between subject and object that has not only a spatial but also an ontological effect. The end result is that subjects see themselves as worldless observers who always adopt a kind of external relationship with the cosmos, which has already moved away from them; in that case subjectivity, rather like a predominantly theoretical divinity, would be first contemplative and then active. To the extent that the visual world is a distant world, ocular subjectivity accompanies the tendency to interpret oneself as an eyewitness who cannot be involved. The seeing subject stands ‘at the edge’ of the world like a worldless and disembodied eye in front of a panorama – Olympian contemplation and optical theology are two sides of the same coin. Philosophers trying to construe existence from the fact of hearing, however, could not have imagined an observer-subject far away at the imaginary outer limit of the world, because it is inherent in hearing that it never occurs except in the mode of being-inside-the-sound. No hearer can believe that he or she is standing on the edge of the audible. The ear knows no partner; it does not evolve a frontal ‘view’ of objects at a distance, because it knows ‘world’ or ‘objects’ only to the extent that it is in the middle of the acoustic event – or, we could say, insofar as it floats in or dives into the auditory space. It follows that from the beginning a philosophy of hearing would only be possible as a theory of being-inside – as an interpretation of the ‘intimacy’ that will become sensitive to the world through human wakefulness. However, humans usually react in the same way towards the audible as they do to their view of faraway things – namely, by objectifying and being distracted, not being intimate, remaining untouched in a self-protective, distancing mode. This reminds us that the liaison between the ear and intimacy cannot be exclusive. In other words, we cannot assume the entry of wakeful intimacy from hearing alone – just as little as we can transform people into mystics by telling them that they are beings-in-the-world. Where are we when we hear music? The question is bizarre



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 29

enough to evoke the transition from imagining objects to dwelling in media. Attitudes of dwelling are often revealed not by signs of involvement in everything surrounding the subject, but through the subject’s self-absorption. I am thinking of the Socratic ‘absences’ that still characterize the beginning of European philosophy like imperceptible question marks. Xenophon and Plato both report that Socrates had the habit of suddenly ‘turning his spirit towards himself’ and being ‘deaf to the most insistent address’. He simply carried on undisturbed with what he had been doing. He is said to have once remained standing upright at a military camp for twentyfour hours, completely lost in thought and immune to any call from the outside world. Such episodes would not be accepted as proof of ­musicality – but the question of where the thinker is immersed during his absences can hardly be answered without talking about a world of inner voices and tones whose presence may be more powerful than any other sound. If the philosopher is removed to a sphere that seems out of this world to ordinary mortals, his immersion in thought in a situation of deafness to outside noise still has relevance at a deep acoustic level. This is connected with what we call ensoulment and being-in-oneself at such an essential level that we would be unable to specify what the soul is supposed to be if self-referential hearing were not always a part of it. If Socrates had accounted for his absences, he would have reported on states in which the world is temporarily submerged without disrupting the continuum of one’s own ensouled presence. I hear voices, which means God is making me think; something is whispering in me, which means I am concerned with the great things of existence. Perhaps Socrates would have described himself as an expert for discretionary doomsdays. The ecstatic trances of the European proto-philosophers were a sleep of reason that engendered not monsters but inner voices, ideas and theorems. Being remote from everything that is otherwise the case creates the precondition for the moment of awakening when we are astonished that something is actually the case. One does not have to be a philosopher to let the world collapse occasionally. Every mortal has enough doomsday practice – and not just because he or she is sometimes swept away by apocalyptic moods. Humans are beings that cannot carry on without letting the curtain of the world theatre fall for a few hours a day, even if they define themselves in the daytime as rational beings and reason is supposed to be the ability to stay in a permanently wakeful relationship to an ever-present world. Weren’t philosophers the ex officio martyrs of the illusion of being able to keep watch permanently? It might be a punchline of post-metaphysical thinking that subjects today, after thousands of years of experiments with visions of

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permanent wakefulness, actively resign and convert to a positive theory of ‘not always being able to be wakeful in the world’. A new type of philosophical anthropology stems from the proposition that humans are beings who appear in the same rhythms as the world’s emergence and submersion – existent, non-existent, present, absent. The idea of anthropology as ‘onto-rhythm’ results in a twofold agenda: on the positive side a metaphysic of triviality, and on the negative side an ontology of discrete or grey nothings.2 From the rhythmological viewpoint a secret relationship emerges between diverse areas of human life not usually associated with each other: sleep and stupidity, the oldest spaces for retreat of beings to another world, relate to the culture of drugs, meditation, speculation – and to music, the lovely art that is said to transport us from dull hours to a better world. These things follow one another like links in an immune system for protection against the infectious, over-demanding world. A passage from Erhart Kästner’s book Mount Athos, The Call from Sleep suggests how the a-cosmic nature of the night combines with the monastic stillness and the ecstasy of hearing to form a shared pattern. The hour-drum, a wooden sounding-board, was struck for the beginning of each office, that is for the midnight service, for Orthos or Matins, which comes immediately afterwards, and then for Proti or ‘First Hour’. The hammer beats out on the cypress-wood board a series of fast notes; these are high or low according to whether the board is struck in the middle or near the edge. The monk carries it before him, and as he walks about the sound of tapping comes from one place, then from another, and gets louder and then softer, or stops, swallowed up in some dark gateway. This is the call to prayer of Athos; it is redolent of the East, of the desert; a bony, arid sound from a garden of herbs, preserved through ten thousand identical nights. It grips one nevertheless, this bony clatter. [. . .] The drumming weaves itself into one’s sleep and half-sleep. [. . .] Like ivory lace the sound patterns are projected on to the black cloth of night, and each phrase is crystallized in the suddenly ensuing stillness.3 This is not far removed from Emile Cioran’s curious musical theory: All that is musical in us is memory. When we did not have a name, we must have heard everything. Music exists only as remembrance of paradise and the Fall.4



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 31

If we succeeded in clarifying this Gnostic aphorism, we would have the key element of an in-depth musicology that would embrace both the musical art of the past and contemporary music. To explain this I shall simply divide Cioran’s remark into two main statements. First, we hear in advance, before individuation, which means that foetal hearing anticipates the world as a totality of noise and sound that is always in the process of coming; from the darkness the foetus listens ecstatically to the world of sound, usually oriented towards the world, leaning boldly forward to the future. Second, after the formation of the ego we hear backwards – the ear wants to stop the world existing as a totality of noise, it yearns for the archaic euphony of the pre-world interior and activates the memory of a euphoric enstasy5 that accompanies us like a night light from paradise. We could say that the individuated or unhappy ear continues irresistibly trying to move away from the real world towards a space of intimate a-cosmic reminiscences. From this perspective, music would continue to be the link between two tendencies that create each other like dialectically related gestures. The one leads from a positive nothing, from the worldless, the internal and the womblike, towards the world as it appears, the open scene, the world arena, while the other returns from the abundance, the dissonance and the overloading to the worldless, the liberated and the internalized. The music of coming-into-the-world is a will to power in the form of sound that is created on a continuous line that comes from inside and that desires itself like an incessant gesture of life. After the continuity is ruptured, however, the music of retreat strives to return to the a-cosmic limbo in which the wounded life, in the form of reluctance towards power, rallies and heals. For this reason there is a dualism of departure and homecoming in the primary gestures of every kind of music. The first pole involves an adventist theme entirely oriented to exodus, ready to ring out and step forward to the stage; the second is a typical Nirvana movement directed towards retreat and conclusion, extinction and repose. The fantastic development of modern European music is undoubtedly based on its extraordinary power of embodiment that could achieve a fresh compromise between fundamental aspirations at every stage of composition technique. The major works of Western music have arranged the emergence of the subject into the world as an exit with a large orchestra. At the same time they have made the journey home into the deepest and most remote places at high levels of melodic individuation – back to the isles of the blessed and into the gardens of the intimate couple. Wherever European music excelled as the art of the embodiment in the bodiless, it achieved a happy balance between the subject’s desire for dissolution and the

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work of self-construction in a sounding body. Wherever the music threatened to become too loud, orchestra positivism and the male chauvinism of composers were countered by withdrawal, melting away and secrecy. The synthetic energy of European classical music seems to have got lost in the contemporary music business – for reasons we cannot explore here. In today’s situation it would be pointless to wish to revive the good old days of an integrated type of music in which things that have since disintegrated and separated were still together. We could say that the multiple offshoots of music have become autonomous; each subculture listens to its own music. Along with other organs, the ear has discovered its polymorphous perverse nature and it is barely possible for one partner alone to satisfy it any longer. In what follows I shall distinguish between four current types of music, each corresponding to a different auditory attitude. 1  Authentic New Music exists primarily as a practice by experts. It hardly involves singing and playing in the sense of traditional naïve musicality; instead, it is concerned with exploring the means of production of sound and processes of composition. It is the practice that most strongly accentuates the place of composition or of the first production. The musical libido is tied up with the adventures of the score or the thrill of new production techniques – its dissemination at the place of performance and listening is usually weak. We can see this in the fact that, for New Music, the criterion of giving immediate pleasure is almost irrelevant and is replaced by technical recognition and professional appreciation – the vague sense of being on a high level and reaping indirect applause. As a result, New Music has become largely decoupled from loyal audiences and has retreated into isolation and perfectionism. Whereas one or two generations have passed since the time that Kafka’s parable A Hunger Artist was an accurate description of modern painters, sculptors and writers, it is still relevant today for composers of the modern age. 2  Performance music is energetic in its efforts to reach audiences. Like New Music it adheres to the primacy of production, aggressively prioritizing sonic and stage events rather than listeners’ expectations; but in focusing on presentation it is still struggling to appeal to the audience. As music with arena qualities it values most of all explosive tonal gestures and putting musicians in the foreground. As risk music in action it offers the best and worst of listening for the contemporary ear, whether vulgar pop vitality à la Prince or aristocratic free jazz. No wonder composers of New Music



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 33

are most likely to move to the field of performance once they have broken out of the festival compound. 3  So-called popular music, which should actually be called distracting music or sedative music, is assured of a mass audience because it is serious about protecting the listener from the risk of hearing something new. Anybody who plays sedative music does this precisely to tune into the surprise-free world of sounds, regardless of the level. The sound and resonance of popular music convey the happy message that the known has eliminated the unknown. On this view there are only irritatingly minor differences between the classical concert business and pop music. Both branches present music as a medium of age-old conservatism that always offers harmony and repetition in predictable syntheses. 4  Functional music evolves partial effects of musical structures and makes useful sounds for specific purposes. Traditional pieces for marching, raising anchor or singing lullabies to children anticipated the functional tendency of music. Modernity explicitly calculates the effects in terms of techniques of musical psychology. We can see this in the use of particular pieces in department stores, operating theatres and lobbies, and in hypnotic and meditative processes, recorded phone loops and suchlike. In each case, musical working agreements between listening subjects and sound environments are used to pre-empt consensus. By usurping harmonies, these practices forge the link between the peaceful oases of deep relaxation with musical backing and the acoustic patterns of totalitarianism with a smile. It is not difficult to show that each of the first two types of music more or less corresponds to the trend of progressive exodus music, while sedative and functional music belong to the pole of reminiscence and retrospective listening. In the case of the performative gesture and the sense of experimentation, the tendency of coming-into-the-world in tonal gestures, in a progressively a-cosmic way, remains clear; such music travels fearlessly from the formless into the formal, from the empty into the complex, and from the stillness into clear view. Imitating birth, it hurls itself towards the world, towards horizons that have never been blocked. The ways of being are strange: the journey from the womb to Donaueschingen, how could that possibly happen? But who are we to wonder that things turn out the way they do? A progressive a-cosmic attitude expressed as music can tolerate the so-called external world as long as it can continue to fill present cosmic space with its own sounds. Listening

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to oneself is enough; the rest will happen. Consequently, such music remains centred on the place of composition or production. Many composers of New Music do not deny that it doesn’t matter whether there will be listeners for their working experiments. Even if the place of listening is empty, that is no reason to give up. The story goes that the composer Edgar Varèse had a soft spot for young motorbike riders because they show you how to produce annoying bursts of sound. Conversely, from the very start, sedative and functional music are related only to the place of listening. They do everything for the listener, even if he or she does nothing for the music. Pieces like this have almost nothing to do with the isolation of composing in front of the audience. A regressive or nostalgic a-cosmic attitude still dominates the place of listening that popular, harmonious music aims to reach. We only hear what helps us not to hear the world and otherness. Instead of fostering discernment in listening and approaching audial sound worlds positively, music determines the great comeback for the unhappy ear: it fosters the urge not to listen, to pare down our listening, to listen selectively, picking our way out of the dissonance. To this extent the history of music is always an indicator for transformations of the unhappy consciousness.6 From the Orphic worship of Antiquity to Schubert’s praise of lovely art, music has been credited with the power of dissolving the spell of reality and transporting listeners into something that they – whether over-hastily or not – called a better world. However, in a period when the unhappy consciousness served as a productive force for improving the world, music that brought solace and reconciliation fell under suspicion of being the opium of the masses. In fact, the makers of tonal sedatives often seem like providers of cynical fiction, like journalists from a gutter press newspaper with triads, the three-tone chords that form the harmonic basis of tonal music. Because what does the nation want? Nothing but musical ways of keeping the world at bay: sweeteners, repetition, simplification. In other words, tonal populism as a consensus mechanism. Where are we, then, when we hear music? The location of the place remains vague – all we can be sure of is that people can never be completely in the world when they are listening to music. Hearing in the musical sense has always meant either going towards the world or fleeing from it. As a result, looking at an ontology of the ear reopens the questions of the old Gnosticism that can only appear in the modern age in the guise of anonymity. According to the Gnostic interpretation, the human condition of being-in-theworld should be envisaged as being inside the outbound journey or being inside the journey back – never as maintaining and residing,



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 35

despite Heidegger’s late crypto-Catholic turn in which he tried to address humans again as uncanny creatures living in the house of being.7 We rightly imagine the angels as musicians – they only make sounds, they don’t hear anything. However, we are condemned to music just as we are to longing and freedom. To paraphrase Thomas Mann, music, as the art of the damned, will remain demonic territory for the foreseeable future.

In the Percussion The Sonorous Cogito and the Deaf Spot – or Descartes’ Attempt to Think Soundlessly It is only meaningful to speak of a musical space when there are limits to what is musical. If we call everything that is audible ‘music’ of some kind or another, we dissolve the boundary between what is musical and what is not music. Talking about music – including the present remarks – would lose its object; it would be music itself transposed to the phonological score of normal language. Are you listening? In a musical space that was defined as totally without boundaries you would now have to accept that a piece of vocal philosophy for solo cogito was being premiered without subtitles for the hearing-impaired. LimaNeli Haschmu WaNschbok. Tama Haschmu: Portolabi Paehu Mui Pianeti
Tamiba Temibo Temibanu Karuzu
 HaifatuNeti
 Haifatusolum RofuNo.
 Hoi Kirwimme. Katosta Healobe Kepipi Schamfuso ... It cannot be said more clearly. This means we are right to question what musical space might be, how we enter it, how we secure our stay in it, and how we exit from it into the non-musical sphere. It would only be possible to answer if the entire musical sphere could be traced back to an unmistakable basic experience that provided the invincible foundation of musical certainty like an axiom or a melodious cogito. Yet we know nothing about such a basis, just as we know little of Descartes’ musicological intentions. It might be useful, however, to repeat the Cartesian thought experiment to investigate a psychological aspect that has

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been neglected so far. Let us follow Descartes, frenzied with doubt, and watch him struggling to reach a living self-presence where a worldless, absolutely self-confident ego without bodily feeling, internal organs or an external world wishes to triumph as an unconquerable basis of truth. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams. [. . .] I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. [. . .] I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain. [. . .] What follows from this? Am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that I cannot exist without them? But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I, too, do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist if he is deceiving me, and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true. [. . .] But how long do I exist? – only as long as I think. [. . .] But for all that I am a thing that is real and truly exists. But what kind of a thing? As I have just said – a thinking thing.8 This text should be read as an example of the exercise on which idealist philosophy, if not philosophy as such,9 is based – the exercise of thinking something away.10 In this particular case, what is to be thought away is nothing less than the world as a whole, insofar as it is present in spatial and sensual imaginings. The self of the exercise is seen as the irreducible remainder left over when everything that can be thought away has been thought away. The original Cartesian dictum Cogito, ergo sum can thus be reformulated: I think the world away and gain myself in the process. Or: I subtract all content from my ideas – ‘I’ am what remains with ultimate certainty – that is the active principle of imaginative life. It is easy to show that the Cartesian exercise of thinking away is centred on a blind spot – or, rather, a deaf spot. Thinkers believe



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 37

they are not in doubt as far as and as long as they think. But they fail to notice – or dismiss it if they do notice – that coming-to-oneself depends on hearing oneself. They are not aware that one can only be sure of oneself and one’s thinking because hearing oneself precedes thinking oneself. The Cartesian cogito assumes a state of not-­hearing that regards itself as pure thinking. We could also describe it as being-with-oneself without all the – possibly – deceptive sensory mediation. The not-hearing applies to the voice of thought that wanders through the person in thought. It is as if the philosopher has found a method for giving good and bad hearing a common basis. He stares into the content of the thought without ever taking notice of the sound of the voice in his thinking brain. This is the only way he is capable of not perceiving that his I-think-I-am really means I-hear-something-inside-me-from-me-and-others-speaking. If we notice this, the sense of cogito changes fundamentally. The minimal inner sound of the thinking voice, when it is heard and becomes intimate, is the first and only certainty that I can obtain with my self-experiment. We could call it a sonorous cogito. I hear something inside me, therefore I am – at least I have enough reason to claim that I am certain I can ‘deduce’ my existence from the act of hearing inside myself. This ‘I-hear-it-speak-in-me’ only emerges when I have nothing planned for my self or my thoughts. If I want to explain, prove or achieve something, this resolution distorts the hearing relationship to the thoughts currently coursing through me. Already then, ‘I think’ about something beside the whispering sound of present-day thinking. Like Descartes, I would be so deeply attached to my search for reasons that I would not notice that inner voices, certainly present ones, are at work inside me. Ambition makes us deaf – in epistemology too. Constructive ambition and meditative attention seem radically to exclude each other. Those who construct do not hear themselves; those who hear sounds ringing or speaking inside themselves cannot construct at the same time. In other words, we are persuaded that Descartes’ ‘certitude’ was based on the conviction of being able to construct oneself. Constructing is action without hearing, on a completely independent basis – simultaneously building oneself up and creating one’s own fundamental principles. Cogito is finding oneself in self-creation and self-creation in finding oneself. That is what is called the fundamentum inconcussum veritatis – the idea that God is no deceiver. The moment at which constructing is separated from hearing marks the beginning of specifically modern science as the action programme of reason without hearing. To obtain certitude in the absolute, this philosophy sacrifices the only really certain thing that is directly given

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– the sonorous cogito as interior hearing – which offers, admittedly, a kind of certitude that is absolutely useless and that we should not dream of using as long as the musical intimacy of hearing oneself still exists. The sonorous cogito is the exact opposite of that which Descartes demands of the logical cogito; it is not a base, because it doesn’t support anything, nor is it something unshakeable, because it cannot be fixed. The most certain thing is, in truth, the most useless. Focusing on inner voices and sounds means being able to be shaken – being open for acoustic presences to come; it does not mean that I obtain a solid base from them but rather that they subject me to their sounds. Anyone who listens to the voice of thinking is immersed in a sphere that other people always cause to quiver. Thinking is in the subject like sound is in the violin, by dint of a relationship of vibration. Insofar as people think, they are, so to speak, musical instruments for performances that mean the world. If the human ‘instrument’ has respect for itself, it sees clearly: I am not a fundamentum inconcussum, but a medium percussum. Because these considerations on depth acoustics are concerned with a kind of internal awareness that pre-exists the distinction between hearing music and hearing voices, we can also benefit from applying the remarks about the sonorous cogito to musical phenomena. It is music itself only in the self-hearing of the ‘instrument’, that is, of the subject, insofar as we now understand it as a soundsensitive medium. Music is only in the hearing subject. Admittedly, this sentence is inseparable from its converse: the hearing subject is only in the music. Consequently, the subject can only be with itself when it has something that makes itself heard inside it – without sound there is no ear, without an Other there is no self. The subject is only conscious of itself as thinking and living to the extent that it is a medium vibrating throughout with sounds, voices, feelings and thoughts. This idea is not new, of course. On its way to classical modernity, philosophy has been struggling for over a century to dispel the idealistic delusions of Cartesianism and expel the chimeras of absolute subjectivity in favour of embodied intelligence. Existentiality instead of substantiality; resonance instead of autonomy; percussion instead of groundwork. Can we achieve thought that hears by using logical methods? Is hearing as such something that can be produced or accomplished? Can we ever get further than to the point of asking for hearing? Judge for yourself. I éja Alo Myu



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 39

Ssírio Ssa Schuá Ará
 Niíja
 Stuáz
 Brorr
 Schjatt
 Ui ai laéla – oía ssísialu
 To trésa trésa trésa mischnumi Ia lon schtazúmato Ango laína la
 Lu liálo lu léiula
 Lu léja léja hioleíolu A túalo mýo
 Myo túalo
 My ángo Ina
 Ango gádse la
 Schia séngu ína Séngu ína la
 My ángo séngu Séngu ángola Mengádse
 Séngu
 Iná
 Leíola
 Kbaó
 Sagór
 Kadó Kadó? Cadeau? Maybe it’s a matter of learning to be better at the art of accepting presents or pure gifts. The text above is the last ‘movement’ of the Ango laïna by Rudolf Blümner, a kind of phonetic cantata for two voices from the year 1921. Blümner described it as an ‘absolute poem’. The Ango laïna demonstrates what poetry can be after it is emancipated from the vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric and phonetics of the German language. The poet’s writings on poetry reveal that his anti-semantic attack is based on the model of New Music. In the end he wanted to free poetic language from the curse of meaning. The spontaneous combination of vowels and consonants is supposed to re-create an original force of word formation. Released from semantic slavery, the sound emerges from the shadows and makes itself heard with unprecedented freshness and nakedness. Because it has no association with anything meaningful,

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the poem can call to an ear that it enters as if for the first time. But in calling, it creates a fresh new meaning. From the first to the last line its message is: ‘I am only for hearing; I am a text that brings the joyous message of non-meaning to the world.’ This is how the poem, flirtatiously and somewhat demurely, carries the banner of its audibility and is presented to the public like a spicy gift. But this is exactly what puts it out of earshot for most possible listeners, because initially they have two possible basic reactions: either they do not listen to the sound construct because they quickly ‘see through it’ or they overhear the presence of the fresh new syllables because they always ‘understand’ the text, whether they find it entertaining or not, and in this case ‘understanding’ means something like accepting the correct idea that the text means meaninglessness. What does this imply? Nothing, except that even a poem like this that is gambling on pure audibility cannot force us to hear under any circumstances. The sound-being of sounds must wait for the hearing-being of hearing – with the usual risk that it could all be for nothing. The auditory imperative of poetry – hear that this time you should do nothing but listen! – must ultimately be reduced to the questions: Can you hear? Have you heard? We cannot make a question into a command without destroying hearing. The offer of sound remains free. The moralizing demand for ‘New Hearing’ – which has infected the atmosphere of New Music for a long time – simply makes us realize that the only way the ear can be touched is to offer it the chance of hearing itself with the new sound. Percussion, Vibrations, Floating The idea that subjectivity is not fundamental, but rather has the nature of a medium, was not accepted overnight. Using two important texts by Hegel and Heidegger, I would like to visualize traces of the great twilight of the media in whose course the distinction between resonating and vibrating thought and reasoning and constructing common sense becomes clear. The Anthropology chapter of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) contains several formulations in the section on the ‘feeling soul’ that employ the methods of philosophical psychology and anticipate the developments of modern depth psychology by over a hundred and fifty years. Hegel was the first to articulate the idea that a soul which is still completely empty, inexperienced, not suffering and therefore undefined, is decisively and deeply pervaded by the vibrations of the mother medium. He writes in Section 403 of the Encyclopaedia,



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 41

Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensations, ideas, acquired lore, thoughts, etc.; and yet the ego is one and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in which all this is stored up, without existing.  [. . .] The soul is virtually the totality of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad [. . .]. This concludes in Section 405 with a logically exciting statement: Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is, because immediate, not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it. [. . .] By the self-hood of the latter it [. . .] is then set in vibration and controlled without the least resistance on its part. This other subject by which it is so controlled may be called its genius. What may still seem obscure here becomes transparent from the corollary to the same paragraph: In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother’s womb: – a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but psychical – a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the single self of the two. The mother is the genius of the child.11 The phrase ‘set in vibration’ implies an existential and deep psychological tremor in the midst of the idealist construction that became increasingly clarified, despite fierce opposition, during psychological research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without participating in such vibrations, people would be unable to belong to the contemporary intellectual world. But what Hegel still failed to note is that the child in the womb doesn’t just represent a passive medium set in vibration by the ensouling of the mother spirit, but that through an early development of the ear it floats of its own accord spontaneously, pre-actively, so to speak, towards the sound world of life to come both as mother and as non-mother. As we know today, the auditory birth of the child precedes its physical exit from the womb by several months. Hegel’s philosophical embryology achieved a bold link between the ancient concept of genius and the most advanced state of bourgeois exploration of the soul, the so-called animal magnetism that goes back to Mesmer and his school.12 Hegel heard right through the modern idea of genius back

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to the Latin source of the term and laid its psychological structure bare. The ancients believed that to have genius meant being a vessel or mouthpiece for another spirit with one’s inner self. The person with genius is the host of a force that resonates through himself or herself and is capable of extraordinary things insofar as epiphanies are possible in a profane individual inhabited by a superior spirit. In this context we can appreciate Hegel’s boldness in shifting the relationship between genius and soul to the mother–foetus relationship. Hegel wrote the paragraphs 403–5 quoted above to indicate the possibility of bourgeois mediumism. This would obviously have been impossible without the shock effect of Mesmer’s discoveries. The demystification of conditions in the womb was only humanly possible as a result of Mesmerism; since then a partially formulated critique of religious reason has hovered above the bourgeois world. At least the possibility of a democratic kind of esotericism – as authentic depth psychology – was introduced after the discovery of the magnetic trance, artificial somnambulism and hypnotic rapport. After that people could talk openly about the child’s mode of existence in the womb without these discussions necessarily driving the soul out of the subject under discussion. Hegel’s work contains statements about the natural magic of pure soul transfusions, perhaps partly inspired by Nicolas Malebranche, that can be traced back to the model of foetal inhabitation. The discovery of hypnot­ ism actually helped to prove that this suggestible mode of existence did not end once and for all with birth and the subject’s entry into adulthood. The use of magnetism for adults showed clearly enough that the foetal stage of being set in vibration can persist later in life – even though people who lived at the time of the first hypnotists may well have shuddered at the possible misuse of the magnetic relationship.13 As far as philosophical pedagogics is concerned, then, as now, its only idea was the necessary collapse of magnetic suggestibility; its goal was to establish the autonomous subject that had protected itself against being set in vibration. A typical example of this is the passage in which Hegel says that the purely passive soul, the foetal soul, is ‘not yet opaque, but without resistance’. The word ‘opaque’ has an echo of the Cartesian ­inconcussum – whereas the qualification ‘not yet’ underscores the meaning of every kind of selfeducation, the achievement of a state of being unshakeable. Following Hegel and Mesmer the positions of opaque subjectivity have been explored incessantly. An era of music and psychology dawned, relating the glass palaces of rationality to a seismic underground. The principle of self-preservation began competing with the principle of disruption. Young Hegelian philosophers, Bauer, Kierkegaard and especially Marx, forcibly imposed the metaphysi-



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 43

cal treble on the bass of reality. Philosophical thought suddenly looked for a way out into the real, the noisy, the outrageous – as if it had gained strength from somewhere to stop thinking away the nether regions. If ‘New Hearing’ ever existed at all it really came into its own in Engels’ account of the condition of the working class in England. Post-idealist philosophy grew ears for scandalous things and eyes for more than merely witnessing. What was once the pride of metaphysics suddenly appeared as nothing but an overtone of vanity above the fundamental tone of real human life. Schopenhauer made a breakthrough by envisaging the foundation of the world itself, the will, as directly musical. By giving music a mainly remedial role, he was still trapped in the net of classical aesthetics. He underestimated music’s proven ability in modern times to play its own part in the emergence of dreadful things in the medium of sound. Heidegger’s new approach to thinking also signified an advance towards a momentous development – establishing the intrusion of tones and moods in the basic post-idealist understanding of existence. What may still appear as something a person accomplishes in a methodically controlled way in Descartes’ meditation about thinking away as much as possible is transformed into passion and horror in Heidegger’s work: the involuntary suffering of withdrawal from the world. In his analysis of moods of Dasein Heidegger asked whether there was a mood which ‘reveals the sense of disclosure after nothingness’ – and answered positively by pointing to how the facial features of beings disintegrate into nothing in ‘deep boredom’. What Heidegger explains in his description of anxiety is crucial. Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of ... , but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of … is always anxiety for ... , but not for this or that. [. . .] In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels ill at ease.’ [. . .] What is ‘it’ that makes ‘one’ feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of a mere disappearance.  Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us.  The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us.  We can get no hold on things.  In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing. We ‘hover’ in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves – we who are in being

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– in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. Basically, therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel ill at ease; rather it is how ‘one’ feels. In the unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there.14 Heidegger’s unsettling experience is certainly not a direct musical moment in the musical sense, just as Hegel’s passive vibrating childhood existence was not a musical experience. Yet this theory of anxiety is about pre-tuning the subject as a medium percussum, a process by which the self shows that it can be a sound box. What is more, being held out from existence into the void has consequences for depth musicology: Heidegger’s anxiety suggests a catastrophe of hearing that is partly responsible for the creation of music. The original accident of hearing is the master copy that carries the imprint of every subsequent occasion when music is heard again. In other words, if the actuality of nothingness appears during the ‘rare’ experiences of great anxiety, the being’s sound disappears and is withdrawn together with the being as a whole. Being there in the world has always meant being exposed in a sphere where non-music is possible for the first time. Anybody who is born has dropped out of the continuity of acoustic depth of the mother instrument. The sharp vibration of anxiety comes from the loss of that music, which we do not hear any longer when we are in the world. A careful reading of Heidegger’s dark speech shows that the anxiety he discusses cannot be anything but anxiety in the face of the death of the inborn music, anxiety in the face of the terrible silence of the world after the separation from the maternal medium. Everything that will later be human-made music stems from a music that has been resurrected and rediscovered, that bears witness to continuity even after its destruction.15 Rediscovered music is music that links up with the continuum after its catastrophe. The newborn baby experiences serious existential panic when it can no longer hear the heartbeat and the visceral rustling of the primary music instrument. The place where it is floating in emptiness ‘in the world’ is the place where a strange silent expanse opens out that houses the acoustic continuum of the musique maternelle; only a fragile acoustic Ariadne’s thread still connects the newly born individual to the enveloping power that was uniquely part of its first, interior, shared world of sound. We can understand Heidegger’s conviction that the old panic was ‘sleeping’ behind the busy background sounds of ordinary life. What normally sleeps possesses the authenticity of the terrible thing that, if I withstand it, leads to me as an ‘existing individual’. Heidegger cannot stress



Where Are We When We Hear Music? 45

enough that inauthentic life happens in an atmosphere of noise and chatter whereas anxiety in the face of a terrible silence is an intrinsic part of what makes life authentic. But this implies that the original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein.16 Its essential character includes ‘uniquely characteristic peacefulness’, a ‘hushed peacefulness’ and the urge to shatter the ‘vacant stillness’.17 We could call this stillness the panicked thinking of the self because it involves existence hearing itself in the intimacy of the uncanny. I no longer hear anything, therefore I am here. Dasein in the stillness of the world is a string of an instrument quivering with its own tension. Perhaps everyone who has meditated through the ages has sought silence and stillness because existence hearing itself as the noise dies down helps to tauten the string. For this reason, music not only celebrates our linking into the continuum again but also, if it is more than a sedative or an anaesthetic, it perpetually reminds us of the cosmic stillness of existence.

II

IN THE LIGHT

CLEARING AND ILLUMINATION Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism and Politics of Light

Omnia quae sunt lumina sunt Scotus Eriugena

Metaphysics as Meta-Optics Human beings, as reflective animals, can describe their existence in light and sound because they are at the forefront of a cosmic development that could be interpreted, in line with their dominant characteristic, as an audio-visual ‘eye-opener’ to being. The intelligence complex that operates in the species Homo sapiens incarnates the result of a wildly improbable biological-cognitive evolution. This has culminated in the emergence of living beings that relate to the environment through their brain coordinating the integration of the eye, ear, hand and language. The special position human beings occupy in the cosmos is obvious not just to theologians but also, and even more so, to biologists who are working on the riddle of human beings’ sensory world-openness. We do not yet completely understand how it works, but there seems to be a connection between the cognitive primacy of the human genus in the group of natural species and the primacy of the audio-visual senses in human beings. The Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson illustrated these ideas by trying to imagine that we are in a Brazilian rainforest in the middle of the night: The forest at night is an experience in sensory deprivation most of the time, black and silent as the midnight zone of a cave. Life is out there in expected abundance. The jungle teems, but mostly

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in a manner beyond the reach of the human senses. Ninety-nine percent of the animals find their way by chemical trails laid over the surface, puffs of odor are released into the air or water, and scents diffused out of little hidden glands and into the air downwind. Animals are masters of this chemical channel, where we are idiots. But we are geniuses of the audiovisual channel, equaled in this modality only by a few odd groups (whales, monkeys, birds). So we wait for the dawn, while they wait for the fall of darkness; and because sight and sound are the evolutionary prerequisites of intelligence, we alone have come to reflect on such matters as Amazon nights and sensory modalities.1 Pursuing these observations further, we can say that human intelligence, particularly when it is contemplative and scientific, means an ecstasy of audio-visual sensation. The representation of the world as such in human forms of knowledge is based on the special path of sight. In what follows we shall omit the auditory components of our cosmopolitan outlook; we shall focus on the path of sight that opens up when human beings veer away from the path of merely biological evolution. The majority of Western philosophers have used optical analogies to provide terms for the essence of cognition and the foundation of cognizability, and with good reason. World, intellect and cognition were intended to create a similar association to that of the lamp, the eye and light in the physical sphere. Indeed, the ‘principle of the world’2 itself, God or a central creative intelligence, is sometimes presented as an active, intelligible sun whose radiation generates world forms, things and intellects – like an all-embracing theatre of self-observation of absolute intelligence in which looking and creating are one and the same thing. This backs up the claim that Western metaphysics, on account of its pervasive obsession with ocular themes, was actually a kind of meta-optics. In that case, post-metaphysical philosophizing would be the attempt to overcome optical idealism and restore to the condition humaine the real breadth of its openness to the world.

Clearing In the ‘light’ of a post-metaphysical interpretation of the human condition we can see that human beings are adventive animals – beings in the process of coming. Although this is a classical idea, it has still not been completely elaborated. Previous formulations no longer meet the needs of contemporary philosophy. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition the term ‘creatureliness’, the idea that



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God created human beings, was used to describe the basic human feeling of coming into the world. The process of coming into being was interpreted as evidence of a divine original conception. This led to the idea that the process of human coming-into-being was less important than the original passive process of being put into the world. In fact, the medieval Christian world was more interested in order and survival than in the event and arrival of new things. In contrast, the modern post-Christian age highlighted the active, innovative moments in human beings’ relation to the world. It shifted the emphasis from human beings as products of creation to their own creative power. From a modernist perspective, coming into the world means, above all, producing the world that ‘the human being’ undertakes to enter on the authority of humans themselves; making it into a world where dreams of a life fit for humans can be universally realized. There are reduced views of basic human emotion in both kinds of anthropology – in the Christian interpretation of human beings as God’s creatures and vassals, and in the modern view of human beings as world engineers and self-­ producers. The adventure of the species as adventive beings has yet to be properly described from within. As beings in the process of coming, humans have the character of an animal coming from the interior. In this case ‘interior’ means foetal character, non-appearance or latency, concealment, water, familiarity, womblike character and homeliness. The process of coming into the world must therefore be understood in five different ways: in gynaecological terms as birth; in ontological terms as the ‘opening of a world’; in anthropological terms as an elemental change from liquid to solid; in psychological terms as becoming an adult; and in political terms as entering areas of power. Wherever there are humans, we are not just talking about the place where a species like any other frolics in the light of the sun, but the place where the clearing appears with inhabitants for whom we can say for the first time that ‘a world exists’. It follows that arrival and the clearing belong together on a deep level. The light that shines over everything that exists is not a fact like any other. Instead, it embodies the coming of the human being as an approach towards the world that enables renaissance. The arrival of the human being is itself the ‘eye-opener’ to the state of being in which the entity itself brightens. On this perspective the advent of the species as a whole – including its vanguard in knowledge and technology – should be seen as a cosmic adventure involving the idea of Lucifer, the bringer of light. On this view the history of humanity would be the period of the clearing; the age of humanity is the age of the lightning that forms the world, which we do

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not see as such because we are in the world and therefore in the lightning.

Light as the Guarantor that Beings are Cognizable All the same, the experience that the world remains reliably visible reassures human beings that they know a familiar place well – and as living entities active in the daytime they tend to interpret the meaning of being as being-in-daylight. This is why the early Western metaphysicians and philosophers saw the world as everything that is the case by daylight. We could almost say that by its nature Western philosophy is heliology, metaphysics of the sun, or photology, metaphysics of light. That the Egyptians made the first attempts at monotheism as the monarchy of the sun god is related to this rationalized metaphysical understanding of light. In religious history, the traces of this understanding could later be found in the Sol Invictus cult in Imperial Rome and in Mithras worship, while from a philosophical perspective this conception of light lasted until the metamorphoses of Platonism in the medieval Christian era. In the sixth book of The Republic Plato invented the famous sun allegory that laid the basis for the cave allegory, the basic theme of all subsequent metaphysics of light. Plato explained that aside from the eye and the visible object, a third element was needed to achieve successful seeing: light. Light is the gift of Helios, the god of the sky and lord of light, who gives us humans the sense of seeing and gives visibility to things. The sense of seeing is, by its nature, sun in its alternative state – solar flow and solar power – and therefore the reason why the sunny eye is open to the sun. Seeing basically means continuation of the sun’s rays by other means: sunny eyes shine at visible things and ‘recognize’ them by the power of this radiation. Thinking, for its part, is only another way of seeing; in other words, seeing in the sphere of invisible things, of ideas. Just as Helios is the giver of light for things that are visible, in the world of ideas, agathon, the Good, acts as the central sun that pervades everything. It is what gives human beings the power of thought, and at the same time the ideas become thinkable. Starting to think about ideas with the clear ray of thought is thus analogous to looking at welllit visible things with the (heliomorphic) optic ray. And just as the latter fails at night, where we can only see outlines and the dark void, thinking fails when it concentrates on subjects tinged with the darkness of mere opinion. Correct (agathomorphic) thinking is seeing in the eternal daytime of the world of ideas illuminated by the Good. We can see here how optical idealism decisively makes its mark by



Clearing and Illumination 53

prioritizing thinking that sees above sensory seeing. According to Plato, Helios is the image of the Good in his time, the Good that overflows from the sphere of ideas into the world of the senses. The analogy of the sun and godliness (goodness) becomes an ontological hierarchy headed by the intelligible divine principle. This means that the newer discipline of metaphysics of mind has superseded archaic natural philosophy – and that visible light is now ‘only an allegory’, although still an extremely malevolent, majestic allegory in terms of natural theology. It was not for nothing that medieval metaphysics was able to interpret the fiat lux of Genesis in the Platonic sense – because the creation of light and the sun are credible as the first acts of the God who was unable in His statement of creation to do anything but represent in material form the best things, those that most resembled His essence. In a world of supreme goodness that was to be created, the most noble thing had to be created first of all, as if light were analogous to spirit and God among the creatures of the earth, a sublime bond and medium of nature that can be seen as the evangelium corporale by redeemed human eyes. The compelling conclusion in positive theology that God is supreme and so the creation must be optimal implies a basic three-part definition of the creation: it must have a spherical form because the sphere symbolizes the optimal shape; it must be suffused with light because light is the physical optimum; and rationally it must be completely transparent because transparency signifies the cognitive optimum. All three optimal qualities occur together in a creation that is conceived as a sphere of light radiating from the absolute point of light, God – the sphaera lucis, which simultaneously provides the model of the world and a reason for its cognizability; understanding the world means comprehending the radiation of categories from the single unconditional source of light, of being and of comprehensibility.3 Of course, one of the chronic dilemmas of the metaphysics of light, both in Platonism and in the Christian philosophies that rely on it, is the question of the origin and status of the matter over which the light, as God’s first product of creation, was initially supposed to shine. Similarly, the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Book of Genesis must circumvent the question of what kind of waters the spirit of God is originally supposed to have floated above. The absolute determination of light in monotheistic metaphysics brought a tendency to over-illuminate being – to the point of the submersion of matter by light. This involves the Gnostic theme of the world estrangement of light as well as the eschatological idea that at the end of time world and life will be suspended in an ultimate symphony of light in the interior of the divine; then light alone would be everything that is the case – or rather: everything

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that is redeemed from the case and remains floating in eternity. The most sublime monument to this kind of imagining are the songs of Paradise from Dante’s Divine Comedy; they show a super-world of blessed intelligences completely modelled out of light in the light, all partaking in the freely flowing current of original light that ‘shares out’ and flows back into itself. Dante’s visions are a response to the final images of the Apocalypse of St John, which prophesies the end of the change from day to night and the hegemony of Eternal Light; in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem all the lamps, the starry ones and those made by human hand, will become superfluous. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. (Revelations 21:23) And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light [. . .]. (Revelations 22:5) It is indicative of the close relationship between monotheism and the metaphysics of light that the Islamic culture of the Middle Ages also produced an abundance of excellent discussions on philosophy of light – a mixture of Platonic, Plotinic, Aristotelian, Jewish and Arabian components sometimes enhanced by motifs from Iranian dualism.4 The Arabian philosopher Abu-Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059–1111) used expressions close to the Platonic tradition in his treatise The Niche of Lights [Mishkat al-anwar] (written around 1100) on the meaning of light in the sayings of the Prophet: The Qur’an’s verses take the place that is occupied by the sun’s light for the outward eye, since seeing occurs through it. Hence, it is appropriate for the Qur’an to be called ‘light’ and is like the light of the sun while the rational faculty is like the light of the eye. In this way we should understand the meaning of his words: ‘Therefore, have faith in God and His messenger and in the light which We have sent down.’5

Blinding/Bedazzlement Where there is much light, there are many shadows, and where there is too much light, darkness rules. Metaphysical monism has its own



Clearing and Illumination 55

dynamic, and when it becomes radical, it inevitably ends in mysticism. Anyone who believes unconditionally in the One ends up, for better or for worse, suspending all distinctions in the bottomless pit of the first of the last. This also applies when the absolute first is conceived as light, primal light or superior light. Human beings may be able to experience the last light-chasm in some manner, but only when those who recognize it perish in it – that is the rule of radicalized monism. Perishing in the One God abolishes the differences between light, vision and the lighted object: the seeing person drowns in the primordial sea of light that simultaneously ceases to appear as brightness – to the extent that brightness is still part of the contrast zone between darkness and light that is not in the abyss. Under monistic premises, therefore, mysticism of light forms the necessary finale to the metaphysics of light – rather like its overflow or excess function. Plato conceived the rise of the One liberated from the cave to the light and open air as blinding – as a catastrophe of vision in relation to the light in the sky. These concepts reached medieval theology through Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and helped to shape its mystical constructs of culmination. At the apex theoriae, the summit of vision, the brightest form of seeing turns into blindness, and the most perfect knowledge into ignorance. St Bonaventura (who died in 1274) conceived the last stage of the itinerarium mentis in deum – the soul’s journey into God – as an annihilating, transforming transition: that is, as the step into the darkness (caligo) and as the ensouling blinding or bedazzlement. In the vocabulary of mysticism of light, this final fusion of the meditating person with the Absolute is called ‘dying’, which means that classical metaphysics recognized a ‘death of the subject’ – by over-illumination. What the Middle Ages called illumination is the middle part, the part related to mystical light, in the exercise to achieve apotheosis through the triad of purification–­ illumination–unification. (In Latin this is purificatio–illuminatio–unio and in ancient Greek katharsis–photismos–henosis.) This is how German mysticism could arrive at sonorous phrases such as überliehte dunkle vinsterheit [where darkness beyond all light pervades],6 which may not be very bold poetically but is logically correct.

The Passion of Light Wherever the mysticism of light comes closest to religious themes we are dealing less with optics or logic than with shaping our own conscious life. For a long period the theory of light was the field where Western people could rehearse speeches about subjectivity.

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What makes people think about the question of God, world and the self is not the light of physicists but the personal light that is a metaphor for self-awareness and inspiration. In the midst of things whose aggregate forms the world as a whole [Weltganze], how can souls be found, something like lights of the self and inner sparks, whose illumination cannot be understood in terms of an inherent property or a natural reaction? Philosophy of light is consonant with the history of the riddle that ‘subjectivity’ asks itself in the process of self-discovery. Being oneself as a human being has always implied a moment of being a light or a spark, which raises the legitimate question of whether it has a different origin than the material world. Talking about the experience of an inner light means, mutatis mutandis, participating in the experience of Moses encountering the burning bush from which a voice speaks apparently in the spirit of the flame: ‘I am who I am’ – or, in a different translation, ‘I am the here-am-I’ (Exodus 3:14). It is hardly surprising that in high religion, beyond optics and logic, there was a turn towards personalizing light. Human beings are interested in exploring not just the origins of the light that shines, and the light that makes us aware, but, even more, the light that lives, that brightens and heals us. That is why metaphysics of light is basically just as much soteriology as philosophical optics, and just as much metaphysical therapeutics as logic. The prologue of the Gospel according to St John sets the tone for such stories of healing light. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:4) The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5) The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9) He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. (John 1:10) This light, seen as the ‘life of life’, shares the compulsion to suffer with the living person as such. According to St Augustine, this lux vivens enters the world ‘like a mortal’ and returns to its supraheavenly source after an exemplary trail of suffering that vanquishes the world and death. For this light, the world is the theatre of its passion. Among the canonical Gospels, the Gospel according to St John is the closest to Gnosticism. It portrays the souls of certain human beings – the pneumatics, or spiritual people – as fallen



Clearing and Illumination 57

sparks of light that recall their true nature through the appearance of a voice calling and a saviour who can liberate them from the prison of matter. The Gnostic drama of the light that has come into the world culminates in the religion of the prophet Mani, which interprets the course of the world as a passion story of suffering light. Each individual soul that contains light is involved in a threepart cosmic drama. In this drama light sinks from its original state of separation into a state of intermingling and suffering, and finally achieves redemption through purification, disentanglement and renewed segregation.7 Such narratives of the passion of light offer the logical possibility of an answer to the otherwise insoluble question of the reason for non-light, matter and evil. Because light is initially only expansion of itself it needs to be refracted by the resistance of the world to reflect on this resistance and to return to itself from its own self-­ estrangement. From the Gnostics of late Antiquity to Hegel, the passion story of the light that is estranged from the world without light is the condition that enables the homecoming light to be reflected in itself and know itself ‘at last’.

Enlightenment At the beginning of the modern age, Western rationality saw a basic shift in attitudes to the metaphysics of light. From that time on, the real world no longer lay under the rather hazy eternal light of a divine world above. Instead, it was progressively revealed during a process of illumination with the epistemological title of research and the political slogan of Enlightenment. The motivation for this lay in a new understanding of the very idea of the foundation of the world [Weltgrund]. The authoritative original construction of the world based on an order of creation was replaced by the establishment of the world by human beings themselves through human practice. There were far-reaching consequences for the understanding of light. Whereas ancient Western ontology – and Oriental metaphysics was hardly different in this respect – showed God, the world and the soul in a self-created or revelatory light, modern European rationality relied on human beings’ own illuminating action. Light (like intellect and action) became de-ontologized – it became the medium and the instrument of a practice that gained sufficient enlightenment by itself. ‘Enlightenment’ is the process by which modern reason makes the effort to bring light into social and natural relationships. We could say that light is activated and becomes a probe for the technological and political penetration of the world.

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The ontological and religious habit of participating in devotions to mystery is transformed into the will to demystify and expose. The common ground of politics and technology in the modern age is found in the pervasive theme of shining light into what was previously dark or obscured. Enlightenment is the age of light penetration. Privileged priestly intellectuals should no longer be able to fool people by claiming superior insight. This is why dubious characters are exposed in public, the politics of secrecy is replaced by the politics of transparency, unconscious motives are brought to conscious light and new energy sources are tapped to provide artificial lighting for homes and cities. A Luciferian – ‘light-bringing’– light of unconscious activism typifies the age that emerged from the siècle des lumières. In the self-image of the industrial, electrical and electronic modern age, lamplighters and philosophers, journalists and surgeons, detectives and astrophysicists are all members of the great coalition of the proactive illumination of all things. The partisans of the democratic-technological light campaign see the defenders of pre-modern relationships as their natural opponents – the ‘obscurantists’ and sympathizers of the bygone agrarian age with its supernatural lights and its privileged illuminations. The ‘Luciferian’ light of emancipated autonomous activity that has established its position as the ultimate reason in the modern age cannot tolerate any other light source beside it – especially no ‘light from above’.

Artificial Lighting: Postmodern Twilight Even the light of the Enlightenment has experiences with its shadow. It is typical of modern people’s personal experience that enlightenment and progress make them see the world not only more brightly but also with more doubt. The political learning processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a reversal that spread across civilization, from the optimism of the Enlightenment to historical pessimism. Most commentators, in trying to assess two hundred years of ‘enlightened’ politics and technology, find it necessary to ‘evaluate the Enlightenment’ or develop a critique of enlightening rationality. One of the most convincing themes of what is commonly called postmodernism is this retrospective investigation of the consequences of the Enlightenment.8 Reflection in the twilight of a great experiment: the formula of combining Soviet power and electricity did not result in a red dawn for the whole of humanity or a bright sunny day for the participants in the great socialist experiment. Instead, the result for almost everyone involved was a heavy black cloud over the prospects of life. Likewise, the synthesis of



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market capitalism and welfare state that characterizes the way of life of the ‘enlightened’ Western industrial nations has led not to general satisfaction but to a culture of sullen ambiguity that seems to have lost great perspectives and projections. The grey light of the post-historical lack of perspective hangs over the life of societies based on consumption and work. The age we live in no longer articulates its consciousness of light with huge solar symbols but rather with discreet arrangements of artificial light sources such as spotlights and floodlights. The highest level of artificial light technology occurs at the same time as a more widespread consciousness of universally confused perspectives and bewilderment that are nonetheless called ‘new’. This label reveals the disappointment of the Enlightenment in relation to its failed optical promises. The growing complexity of the world reveals the crisis of the panoramic rationality that confirmed the modern Enlightenment as the pragmatic heir of the ancient European metaphysics of light. Looking back at the history of optical idealism in both its religious and political forms we can see that today the entire Westernized hemisphere of the world has become an occidental world, literally an ‘evening world’.9

The Last Light Should we expect a postmodern return of religions of light as a reaction to unease about twilight? There are some indications of this. First, the monotheistic religions are presently engaged in worldwide offensives that show strong restorative features of light metaphysics, complete with panoramic views of the great Totality and ideological ‘descriptions’ of the world that are presented like certitudes. We should not underestimate the attractions of this for the volatile masses of the three religious ‘worlds’. Moreover, the speculative offshoots of modern natural science offer plenty of ideologically suggestive models of evolution in which ideas of light metaphysics return to the arena in a different form. This started in the mid-twentieth century with the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, the heterodox Jesuit who combined themes from light metaphysics, cosmology and Christology into an eschatological vision of Dantean scope. Teilhard de Chardin saw the entire world process as moving towards the total clearing of all beings in the sense that clearings are created in the forest. It is as if the ideas of anti-cosmic Gnosticism returned home to the cosmos under the banner of modern hypernatural science. This characterizes, for example, the system developed by Arthur Young, the scholar of nature and ­consciousness who

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described the present as the apex of a light-evolution curve in his book The Reflexive Universe (1976).10 After the descent of light over the world of particles and molecules, the plant world, the animal world and the human realm, this trajectory has reached a point where it may possibly ascend again with the goal of returning to the light. Young copied the loop or arc model of evolution onto a version of the doctrine of emanation from late Antiquity (a version more symptomatic than original), which held that the cosmos was created from emanations of the Divine One. Asian and Central European ideas of ‘illumination’ as the final goal of the soul reappear in scientistic versions, usually with overtones of evolutionary theory. The new evolutionists of light loops would like to establish the probability that a human race that is forced to understand its status quo as an interim result of cosmic development following an initial hyper-light catastrophe (the ‘Big Bang’) may well end up in a general illumination or enlightenment by means of future sweeping arcs. Authors such as Ken Wilber became famous with ideas relating to light and evolution.11 In places where such speculations lead to the formation of like-minded groups, as in some Californian subcultures, a new age of light or Light Age may be proclaimed – with echoes in some circles within Central European neo-sophistry and consultative philosophy. The old questions about what we will see as the last thing of all are still important for modern human beings in many ways. Is the last vision nothing but the eternal blinking of the last human beings looking into the evening sun that has lost its glow? Is it like the experience of the dying that the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes as a transition into the white light of extinction? Or will the last view be blinded in a nuclear light hurricane – something like a technological realization of the mystical transit of light? If it is true that there is nothing in technology that was not already present in metaphysics, then a humankind that has been pre-formed by the metaphysics of light has the prospect of finally looking into self-made great light – ‘brighter than a thousand suns’. Or is it a defining characteristic of the civilization process that the final vision of all things should be kept open by repeated deferrals? The difference between the last vision and the penultimate one will be abstract if the world is open to the eyes of artists. ‘The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.’12

ILLUMINATION IN THE BLACK BOX On the History of Opacity

The story of radical thought, or thought concerned with origins, which emerged as philosophy, recognizes only two basic ways to start thinking – we shall call them the black beginning and the white beginning. As regards the white beginning, we shall assume as much as possible, tending towards everything, and with the black beginning, we shall assume as little as possible, right down to the zero limit. People who prefer white are staking on the openness of the world, and are carried along by the certitude that, as long as we keep our eyes open, the relevant universe is always revealed to us in its self-sufficient totality. This is like understanding the world in the Olympian mode. For obvious reasons this arose at a relatively late moment in the history of the intellect because it presupposed that human beings could conceive a God who neither works nor intervenes. This is the famous philosophers’ God, who, under the codename ‘observer’, is enjoying a comeback today among the scientifically interested public. His relationship to the world can best be described as illumination in the white box. To understand this you should try to imagine Zeus, the father of the gods, the founder of joviality, up on the summit of the gods, going out onto the veranda after a siesta with his eyes wide open, sharply watchful, almost wickedly casual, his gaze sweeping over the archipelago of things. With such an attitude, getting an overview means overlooking a great deal; moreover, it means being content with everything as it is. In this case the world is a white box, and we are standing inside it as in a sphere of light – the intellect looks around in it freely as it does in something completely open and unquestionably illuminated. Because everything is finished and done, the only thing thought can do is to look around and celebrate. Nothing in the box could suggest

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the creation of technologies and problems; gods are too happy to construct and too detached to be affected by urgent matters. The Olympian god is the one who sees no reason to distinguish what is visible by the light of day. The philosopher Ernst Mach, in the ‘Introductory Remarks: Antimetaphysical’ of his major work The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, described an early experience that resembled such an Olympic panorama: I have always felt it as a stroke of special good fortune, that early in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in the library of my father, on a copy of Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon me, the like of which I never afterward experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later the superfluous role played by ‘the thing in itself’ abruptly dawned upon me. On a bright summer day under the open heaven, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view.1 Mach is describing the typical white box position as it appears in various types of mysticism and phenomenology. It is probably based on the doctrine of Parmenides of Elea, whose dogma that being and perceiving are the same thing gave the idea of the white beginning of thought bathed in light the status of a European norm. This resulted in thought experiencing a dead-end satisfaction through its share in the felt universe, which is only another way of saying that it led to nothing. The only results were second-rate, with nothing supreme. People who could amalgamate with the white box were people for whom thinking took a permanent leave of absence. They would enjoy the happiness of the gods of idiots, and that of the people in the middle, the phenomenologists – if phenomenology were seen as the art of explicitly describing everything pre-existing in the conscious mind without intervening operatively in anything. The contrast to this, as in Eastern schools of meditation, for instance, but also in Western philosophy as in the works of Descartes and Ernst Bloch, is the black beginning. Here, the intellect descends into an artificial darkness induced by ignoring all the world’s certitudes and by radically doubting so-called sensory data. The subject has his or her eyes closed and broods in the darkness of the lived moment, exploring a fictitious state in which wisdom or operations



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do not yet exist, but only pressure and undefined presentiments. Kafka described it as like a life of hesitation before birth. Ernst Bloch, in his famous books of introduction such as Introduction to the Philosophy of Tübingen, gave a classic formulation of this beginning of thought in the black box of anticipation/presentiment: I am. But I do not have myself. So first of all we become. The ‘am’ is inside. Everything inside is dark by nature. To see itself and even what is around it has to go out of itself.2 The result is a philosophy of exodus from original darkness. It interprets the world not as something that has always been inherently open, but as something that was predicted and in need of ­construction – it is the prophetic position of constructivism. The variations of this circulating today mainly operate through the filter of system theory. Alongside this, out of the darkness a tradition of Cartesian thought has developed in which the subject achieves full procedural control over his or her ideas by radically reconstructing his or her beliefs on the basis of logical criteria. The Cartesian ‘cogito’ undoubtedly furnished the prototype for the subjective black boxes of the modern age; it offered an attractive procedure for smashing white boxes and totally reconstructing the world out of thinking black cells. Some people see this as the start of the subjective mechanical engineering that launched modern times as the age of the engineer. The cogito, the thinking self, was a patent for reliably positioning the ego at the foundation of all other ideas. Descartes’ argument was like software for subjects who wanted to confirm their ability to build hardware machines without being machines themselves. In fact, post-Cartesian generations were engaged in new horizons of the art of engineering: think of state engineering in the theory and practice of absolutism; the engineering of beauty in the royal opera house and in the palace ceremonies of absolute monarchy; truth engineering in the early academies of science; educational engineering in Jesuit high schools and in their Protestant and secular counterparts; personal identification engineering in police forces of the modern age; and military engineering in the standing armies of territorial states. These examples show how the ability to build out of the worldless thinking black box has powerful effects in the world. In modernity, the sovereign person is the one who decides on the installation of black boxes. Taking the two beginnings of thought together gives us a glimpse into the depth structures of European rationality. Starting with the Greek enlightenment, ambitious thought was concerned with putting the world of the big white box inside the small black box

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of knowledge and competence. If, instead of doing that, we did the opposite, which seems more obvious, and put the black box into the white one, it would have to be invisible inside it and to vanish in the contented light of the celebrating intellect. If the intellect were operating instead of looking around jovially, the black box would necessarily grow to a substantial size. The reason why the two boxes have to be fitted into each other in this improbable way is thus related to the power that resides in knowledge: although thinking in the white box may be comprehensive and exhilarating, it allows only a weak form of sovereignty because it is inoperative and impotent; on the other hand, thinking in the black box may be narrow-minded to the point of stupidity and may tend to feed subterranean feelings of life, but it has a logical aggressiveness and momentous impact. Bacon’s modernist motto: ‘Knowledge is power’ should be interpreted as if he had said that constructing in the black box is power. The process of knowledge has had a formatting problem since its beginnings. The ancients spoke of it when they described the human characteristic of wanting to know everything as trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. Theologians affirmed that the finite intellect could not follow the calculations of the infinite. Consequently, mere human beings were compelled to distinguish themselves from God and admit that only He, the absolute Superior One, experienced the full unity of black and white; only He combined universal production and universal contemplation into absolute enjoyment – in our case, however, it was advisable to be modest and abandon the process of theoretical ambition as soon as possible and accept that human beings were destined to climb into the little grey box of faith and, from there, to reach the big white box in God one day. This was the constant pattern of theological critiques of human endeavour under ancient Western premises; today it appears mainly in the pious arguments of the Green Party. Despite such warnings, the attempt to draw the whole world into self-constructing black boxes has remained attractive even for people of the modern age. While it may have seemed absurdly overdone to begin with, it would never totally lose its exuberance despite a long stagnant period from late Antiquity to the beginning of medieval university history and the time when a renewed drive to accumulate cognitive capital began on European soil. This vouches for the long-term explosive effect of the arts generated by the initial black experiments. For a long period black intelligence challenged the white majority with the proof that all power came from the black box. It is not the sunny eyes of patronage shining on the world that change the world – it is the strictly formulated and operatively closed worldless ideas of competence



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that come out of the darkness and create the effective interventions in pre-existing reality. This already indicates the formation of the constructivist image of the world. But we may assume that by Plato’s time, if not before, people understood the full epistemological seriousness of this situation. His work shows how thinkers refined their understanding of the power of what comes out of the black box: Plato had good reason to assign such great importance to mathematical exercises. He recognized that numbers and geometric figures were sovereign factors that arose out of the black box and did not need the visible world to be true. Of course, Plato understood that human beings naturally stand in the middle: he accepted that we remain attracted to the flesh although we participate in the revelation of numbers. Platonism left the legacy of an image of human beings in the twilight between eroticism and mathematics: we are beings that must still love although we can already calculate. No wonder that, after Plato, there were continually philosophers who wanted to attribute more than a half-share to calculation, to God’s ideas before the creation and more generally to connections made independently of context. The spectre of absolute knowledge has haunted European history of knowledge ever since: it implies the idea of entirely replacing the white box with a black box that would have its own light. This contains the programme of the constructivist revolution: the black box of operative consciousness should foster development of a construction manual for the whole world, including operative consciousness. This would mean that the theory for the great totality that began as white would stop being merely jovial, just for Sundays and only contemplative, and would develop in the Black Box of conscious competence into applied, workaday art – in other words, into technology. Great theory would then truly and finally become what it always wanted in the depths of its magical dream: a technological world power. I am aware that I have introduced an idea of the black box that contradicts the usual Black Box concept made famous by the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner. As we know, Skinner wanted to remove the so-called mentalist concepts of introspective psychology such as act of will, spontaneity, freedom, interiority, intelligence, and so on, from the field of purely empirical psychology based on tangible behaviour, and demanded that the object or the behavioural complex traditionally called the soul be seen as a Black Box. He argued that wanting a direct glimpse inside the Black Box was impossible and pointless. Skinner claimed that he borrowed the term ‘Black Box’ from soldiers’ slang, and that it was used to describe objects left behind by the enemy that should not be opened and investigated under any circumstances because they could be

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explosive. By contrast, I have suggested a concept of a black box that preserves specific features of subjectivity and idiosyncratic interiority, not, of course, as a sort of mystical spark, but rather like an endogenous agenda or a fixed idea that repeats itself without a context and holds steady against changing environments. Typical examples are intelligent machines like flight recorders, which are now also called black boxes; in some cases, after plane crashes, the black box is searched for as if it were the only surviving soul on board in a position to give information about the reasons for the crash. This assumes that a black box is seen both as an environmental scanner – something like an observer and memory of flight parameters – and as a context-free unit. And while people in crashes fall out of their biological continuum from a great height, black boxes are not sensitive to sudden changes in altitude; they are designed to record landing and crashing with equanimity. We may assume that in the present technological revolution increasing numbers of people will develop the wish to become immortal black boxes – the white box religions are gradually fading away because they presuppose the idea of human beings as overly vulnerable, overly passive, ontologically masochistic creatures. Whereas the white box seems to privilege perception over action – this is the normal phenomenological situation –, in the black box a person’s own operation is unconditionally privileged in relation to the environment; this, in turn, is the standard situation of technology or any kind of systematic operation. The two types of boxes are constantly intermingled in the everyday experience of the world. If the world is perceived as the white box, it is expected to be open and transparent. Ideally, the white world is a space without secrets; at most it has shadows but nothing unknown, no reverse side completely in darkness. People feel they know the situation and are secure in brightness, and things that are not directly in the field of vision are still visible in principle, even if there is no observer looking at them at the moment. The white world offers the possibility of all-embracing epistemological serenity because Being and presence converge in it. But everyday experience always sabotages this openness to some extent. For even in the world seen in terms of white preconceptions we are struck by emerging black boxes standing out from the bright background like disturbing blotches. Their existence, but even more, their ­prominence – the way they protrude and stand out – clouds our white box feeling, and when we look around the developed globe we realize that at critical places important things exist and we cannot look inside them. As a whole, the cognitive daily life of Homo sapiens is like an intermeshing and juxtaposition of open and closed objects, and at the point



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where this result itself is recognized as an open and self-evident fact the phenomenological axiom that the familiar takes priority over the unfamiliar tips the scales – ultimately, the world is everything in which we feel familiar. What is unfamiliar only wins out in pathological periods, and this can lead to black boxes overshadowing the world in general and seeming to be impenetrable toto genere. Historians of ideas have identified periods that were largely influenced by such feelings about the world; we are thinking particularly of late Antiquity, when people saw the imperial machine as an alien structure, and the present-day world, in which large populations have the feeling of living in a transit camp of innovations. There are reasons why late Antiquity and the modern age are the two great epochs dominated by Gnostic theories of exile: periods in which people succeeded in making propositions about their displacement in the world. The omnipresence of black boxes is, however, a matter less of feelings about life than of cognitive strategies. For the black box forces its observers and partners to switch from understanding to external manipulating. In places where the world is crowded with black boxes, the phenomenological optimism which insists that things are explicable by their appearance is corroded. The moment we catch sight of the black box, understanding hits a barrier. In fact, when we encounter black boxes every way we turn, our usual comprehension totally collapses. The dark cartons disturb us by making us feel that things in their interior are very different from their surface appearance. Inside them, the essence of appearance turns its back on us. This experience of the exterior of the black box insulting our intellect has its own specific history: it is the intellectual history of being unable to understand, a history that splits into two strands – the history of the intelligence resigning in the face of things it cannot fathom and the invasive history of research that mounts a cognitive counter-attack as a response to being humiliated by the limits of understanding. In what follows I shall try to establish the thesis that the process of the modern age shows by its results that it can no longer be interpreted as Enlightenment, as the growth of transparency; rather, it creates situations in which, more than in any form of early culture, the environment surrounds us as an aggregate of black boxes produced outside of it. I would like to describe this process broadly as the cultural history of the opaque. It illustrates the process of intelligence in relation to non-transparent factors on the basis of five typical configurations that I shall call: the grave; the body; the book; the bureaucracy; the complex machine. It would be an

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a­ ccidental but not undesirable effect if people recognize this series as a progressive approach to the living environment, or, rather, the box environment of modernity. 1 There is no doubt that the people of the modern age still see the grave as a suggestive, if outmoded, representative of the black box principle. Modern coffins epitomize the things we do not look inside of: first, because the idea of leaving the dead to rest in peace demands great respect, and, second, because we are convinced that, with the exception of a few criminological or politically motivated exhumations, buried coffins have nothing to tell us. The modern box for the dead is a demystified and therefore empty black carton. We no longer assume it to be an operative subject, something whose activities could reach out of the darkness and intervene in our sphere. This conviction of the emptiness of the box for the dead obviously developed in a lengthy and difficult cultural process – it belongs to the solid core of something that Enlightenment still means in a positive sense today. Enlightenment implies the conviction of sepulchral nothingness, the certitude that nothing is planned and put into operation in coffins that could have consequences for us in the light of day. In this respect the coffins in graves today are the only black boxes with which we have a totally relaxed relationship. They are epistemologically extinguished objects – in their case we no longer have to worry about hidden centres of action; the dead are out of the competition for reality. A brief review of the history of belief in the dead will convince us this was not always the case, and that in earlier times graves were regarded as the real operational centres of world events. If the dead are not simply as people think of them in the atheist modern age, not discarded biological machines past the expiry date when their immune systems stop functioning properly – for that is what the systemic concept of life actually means –, if dead people have not ended up being switched off absolutely, but have moved on to a different aggregate state of being and now exist invisibly on the other side of the light, then it is obvious why graves were once the epitome of filled black boxes. If they contained important personalities, particularly ancestors, kings and founding fathers of religions, the peace of the box was not guaranteed; on the contrary, the grave is a prime crucible of unrest – a workshop for activities that affect us, an office in which functionaries from the nether world compose and decide measures for the present world. From this perspective, in ancient times the grave was nearly the paradigm case for black box experiences. The real powers were at work on the other side of the grave and used it as an entrance into our world. Consequently, in relation to the realm of the dead, the concerns of



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human beings between the Neolithic revolution, the beginning of the great period of ancestral burial, and the modern era, the age of pacification of graves, have fairly clear outlines: the living had to do everything conceivable to obtain the most precise ideas of the interior of the eminent black box. In pre-philosophical terms, what we have known as metaphysics since Aristotle’s time began as nothing other than black box research, the attempt to get a glimpse inside the black boxes of ancestors, kings and gods. The axiom of the oldest theory of cognition is: knowledge of the grave is power; penetration into the black box of the dead allows complicity in the procedures of the other side. This means that everywhere around the centre of ancient cultures we find priestly knowledge that is primarily knowledge of communication in relation to the spirits inside the black box. Ancient Egyptian culture probably went furthest in this respect: it not only had a complex sociology of gods, but its books of the dead also show that its priests drew the best maps of the afterlife, so that death in Egyptian society could be conceived as a carefully planned journey into well-charted territory. Skinner, incidentally, would have had to labour with a double form of mentalism in the Egypt of the Pharaohs because the Egyptians thought humans possessed not just one soul, but two. One was born in the body while the other lay in the placenta. This is why the Pharaoh’s placenta was always mummified immediately at birth and safeguarded in the office of a royal priest until the ruler’s death, after which the external and internal soul embarked together on the journey into the realm of the dead. Fortunately for Skinner he lived in Christian America where there was only one soul to deny, and not two. Given these oldest studies and imaginings, we can speak of technology originating from the spirit of observation of tombs. Anybody who wanted to be powerful in this world had to try to discover what the operators in the interior of the black boxes planned and how they set about achieving this. This is how magic, the mother of technology, arose through imitating and thwarting the operations of the dead. Anybody who came from the light to penetrate the secrets of the black cell acquired symbolic and thus operative power. The human capacity to act was largely restricted to having control over symbols. Ninety-nine per cent of operations that were essential for life were symbolic acts. In mythical terms they were mainly based on imitating the deeds of the dead. By contrast, the non-symbolic operations of technology mostly came from imitations of the living black boxes we call bodies. The path to the modern age is identical with the development from symbolic to technological actions.

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2 Aside from graves, living bodies were, in fact, the decisive black boxes in ancient times. This applies both to animal bodies and to human bodies – at first we never know which is which. Even if one lives inside such a body oneself, it is impenetrable and has no porthole for looking into; all the same, as the inhabitant of my self, I have privileged access to this body, which may be an advantage during coitus but is certainly a drawback in the case of snake-bites. When it comes to other people’s bodies, they are truly opaque entities that we are prevented from opening, and we don’t even consider looking inside unless they are enemies whom it is permissible to cut open in some circumstances. As an aside, let me say that the innocuous-seeming notice stamped on mail, ‘May be opened by the Post Office’, has a sensitive anthropological background that becomes obvious when we realize that we are the Post Office and the parcel is the enemy. In terms of animal bodies the idea that hidden operations occur inside them stems from two experiences that we can’t ignore: first, the fact that animals and human beings die, which implies, secondly, that the vital operators have stopped working inside them and have moved on to work elsewhere. In this respect, acquiring knowledge means something like having a glimpse of the modus operandi of the vitalizing force in the interior of the box – research that was inspired in the age of philosophy by the promising term ‘self-knowledge’. Knowing oneself means surprising the internal vitalizing force, combining with it and ensuring that we stay united with this operating principle even in death. From then on we are superior to our own black box, the body, and can consider whether we settle into another box after moving out of our own or whether we enter a pool filled with disembodied souls that religions describe as paradise or condominiums filled with God’s presence. The modern world, however, did not explore the interior of the black body box on the path of so-called knowledge but with anatomical methods. The biological sciences show us how human beings proceed with a black box of nature in the modern way: one begins with surgical explanation and biochemical presentation and does not rest until individual parts or functions can be replaced in the interior of the box. Indeed, the essence of technology is best described by an anatomical-prosthetic process, which operates on two levels: first, release, which means the extraversion by which an interior becomes an exterior, and, secondly, substitution, the development of the prosthesis. A broad definition of prosthesis allows us to develop a rigorous description of the conquest of the black box. Let us assume that my body will not provide a headache-free state at the moment. If it is nothing more serious, I can be free of headaches with the aspirin prosthesis. In other words, the technological axiom



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of bodily enlightenment is that we only understand what we can substitute. As a result, what was initially the black box becomes the glass box for us. The technical body, as we know, is the transparent body. But technology is looking for more than the release of the interior of corpses. The bodies themselves force us to make the complementary observation that small, screaming boxes fall out of some of them that we identify on closer inspection as offspring. At first we do not understand at all how they can be produced inside there. Our mothers fascinate and terrify us so much because they embody the black box for their own ends. They are extremely cunning black boxes that look harmless in family photos. There is much to be said for the assumption that thinking begins in the child as dreaming of the difference between the inside and the outside of the mother box. Anyway, the principle of the mother’s womb, to an even greater extent than the grave, is a focal point for interior work that cannot be observed. It is, incidentally, not by chance that ancient maternal religions everywhere assumed the identity of the grave and the womb. In doing so they used the opportunity to explain one unknown factor using the other. This was the operation that helped people in earlier times not to surrender completely to cognitive defeatism. The operating forces in the mother box show us that Nature only provides us with results whose production we simply have no possibility of actively participating in for the foreseeable future. But technological intelligence does not accept being permanently excluded from female production. It opens the mother box and asks the question ‘how?’ inside it. Whoever supports transparency will publicize the mother plan; whoever wants to take the risk of more democracy will make the mother’s body into a public place. In terms of the history of ideas, the pioneers in the mother box are the early metallurgists who shrouded their techniques in secrecy and developed them in exact analogy to the perinatal process. They extracted the ores from the maternal mountain and processed them in artificial mothers, in stoves and foundries, like an accelerated pregnancy, until gold and iron were produced. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote a beautiful book about this, The Forge and the Crucible,3 whose sub­title could be ‘On the birth of technology out of the spirit of masculine substitute pregnancy’. This theme persisted in the continuum of the history of ideas up to modern times, even if gynaecologists replaced metallurgists and alchemists in the turn to modernity. There is much to indicate that in future the symbol of masculinity will no longer be the phallus but the test tube. Anybody who opens the black box of life to understand what goes on inside it is also relying on

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the prosthesis. Research in this field means drawing construction plans for Nature and realizing them as substitute plans in one’s own work. Genetics researchers act like industrial spies peeking at the procedures of the rival company, Nature, and faxing them from the mother’s body to the genetics laboratory. We could call this the Lopez effect4 in natural philosophy. At the moment it seems that the industrial concept of the future will make an impact here. 3 If we look at the book as a black box, we are dealing with the first pure cultural construct with an opaque appearance. Books, like graves, may have a significant interior, but their grave character and body character are entirely culturally produced. It follows that the book is the original model of the perfect technogenic black box. It is the original perfect machine, the first efficient working hypothesis of the magic of high culture. The history of high culture up to the present day has always been first and foremost the history of the book, and to the extent that the process of this history has progressed it also represents, perhaps, a history of optimization of the book. It was the emergence of the book that first enabled the relation between white and black boxes mentioned earlier, for the book is the prototype of the black box in which the white box is supposed to be enclosed as a spatial paradox. It is the little box that makes major content transportable – which would not be possible without writing as a technique of miniaturization. Writing means, first and foremost, writing big things in small letters. This is why the literate faction of humanity has been hoping for the ultimate miracle of enlightenment since the emergence of the book: all readings are only preliminary readings while we are waiting for the final book. In terms of its structure, the metaphysical age was a waiting period for the book that contains everything – until that point we also read novels, mathematical textbooks, weekend supplements, essays on system theory and other ephemera. The metaphysics of the book hit its first crisis with the new media, basically with the rise of the newspaper in the period from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and today, if we are not completely deceived, we are seeing the irreversible transition to post-metaphysical book culture. This involves a new black box phenomenon replacing the book as the primary magic box made by human beings. Since the arrival of the new media, waiting for the book that will turn all previous books into footnotes has become meaningless. The wonderful feeling that everything is in the box has shifted to another medium. Since its first appearance the book has had a divisive effect on its host societies and has provoked a nearly anthropological distinction



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between groups that have the power of literacy and those that do not. Early on, in ancient Egypt, the scribes were a mysterious caste while ordinary people who could not read saw the temple texts and scrolls as machines of the gods. We can see traces of this divide in Shakespeare’s works, and Prospero’s studies in his magic book that mean more to him than his dukedom testify to an epoch in which the inside of a book could become more important than the state, or, more precisely, the heart of the state itself was a secret text written in books that were difficult to read. The book thus introduced the experience of the manmade black box into partially literate society. The vast majority of people in the age of handwriting knew books only as book spines or unrolled cylinders – for most people, opening them and trying to read them was an almost sacrilegious idea, which, incidentally, still applies more than we may imagine today. Countless people still think of books as something too meaningful for them personally to be allowed to intrude into. The manmade black box makes most people depressed, and only manic ambition leads people inside it. In the Middle Ages if somebody said, ‘I want to learn to read,’ it was practically the same as saying, ‘I want to be a priest.’ What we call humanism was essentially the project of grammatical education of the human species, and what we understand as human rights is essentially the same thing as the dignity we are owed as subjects capable of reading. If we assign human rights to ourselves, it is because our names are in some book or other, at least in church records and at registry offices, because we are beings about whom something could be written in books, whether individually or as groups. If God, the greatest of all readers, knows us, it is because our name, if we are lucky in metaphysical terms, is entered in the book of life. Our fellow human beings have to recognize us because we carry a small book, our passport or identity card, with us. People who are not satisfied with this minimal book, or who are unsure whether God will find their name in the book of life, can write books themselves to secure their name and lay claim to the human right to be read. This assumes that we have reached the interior of the world of books and have mastered the art, among other things, of dealing with writing materials. This assumption does not hold for the great majority of human beings even today, and for them the equivalence of the book and the black box is still valid. Most people will pass the whole of their life without getting beyond the level called the ‘user interface’ on technical devices that, in the case of books, means the covers and what is printed on them. Societies have been deeply divided for thousands of years into those that could operate in books and those that see books as opaque bodies. This is also

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expressed in two different types of destruction of books. People who burn books because they oppose their content belong on the pages of the book themselves because that type of destruction is a kind of review. Book burners are only innocent when they throw books into the fire in the firm belief that their most important quality is that they can be burned. The most famous recent case of a naïve book burning occurred in 1946 after the discovery of the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi – the grandmother of the person who found the manuscripts burned what was probably the major part of the find in a fire for brewing tea. There is something of that grandmother in all of us, because literacy is inherently a fragmentary project. We can only absorb a fraction of a fraction of all existing book pages, and we, too, behave towards all the rest of the books as if they were destined for making tea. Nonetheless alphabetization has artificially illuminated our interior world in a wonderful way; our dark brains light up when they climb into the right black boxes and reality quickly starts wavering when its inhabitants open different books. 4 At around the same time as the book, a huge black box emerged out of the human sphere that was described by those who knew it well as a cold monster – I mean the state, embodied in administrative authorities or bureaucracies. In the worlds of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, learning to write was mostly used directly to obtain entry into the political black box. For farmers and artisans, however, the early empires with their palaces and temples and chancelleries seemed like entities from outer space, sitting in their oversized graves replete with a mysterious inner life driven by fate. Even today some people have supernatural feelings at the sight of administration towers, seeing them as vertical coffins in which deals are done for us. But the actions of the state in the interiors of government offices basically consist of correspondence. This is why the state needs special tables, the so-called bureaux that were used for writing files ex officio. The French word for writing desk, bureau, is thought to come from the coarse cloth, la bure, with which the officials’ writing desks had to be covered, just as the Lord’s table in churches, the altar, was supposed to be covered to distinguish it from profane tables. Bureaucracy consists of acts of writing at the covered table of state. We know that Charlemagne, when middleaged and already ruler of a military empire, tried to learn reading and writing because he rightly believed that a monarch with great ambitions like his had to be the foremost reader and writer in the state. This was the only way a Germanic black box could make itself strong against the Byzantine one, and it was only by this means



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that Franconians became new Romans. The throne was once the symbolic heart of the political box and public offices functioned as its internal organs. If we only study the history of the state and political ideas as they are conventionally presented, we will miss a decisive aspect of statehood: we will fail to see that for the public of all epochs a face of the state existed that seemed to be completely lacking in ideas and incomprehensible. Those who work in the monstrous box themselves justify the state in terms of its rationality – initially for sound theological reasons, later for sound democratic reasons that are not called ‘reasons of state’ for nothing. Anyone who sees the political black box from the outside, however, and that still means the great majority of people today, just notes that people simply do not understand the state, whatever reasons might be given for their attitude. This is why most of the history of political ideas could devolve into a history that has regrettably never been attempted, the history of the state not being understood by its inhabitants. This lack of understanding emerged in two aggregate states. The dramatic state, particularly in war and revolution, is opaque for its inhabitants because they never understand the motivations of the actors in power, or do so only too late – for example, when the gentlemen publish their memoirs. Most Europeans are vaguely aware that Napoleon went on a military campaign in Egypt, but we may well doubt whether anyone – in present times as well as historians – has ever understood what he wanted to do there with his army. The trivial state, on the other hand, is opaque because its subjects, later its citizens, do not usually know what public servants and administrators do in their hidden routines. As long as the state has existed, popular incomprehension about any kind of activity by public servants has also existed. Indeed, insight into the machinery of state almost resembles an epistemological matter. The question: ‘What do public servants actually do?’ is nearly as fundamental as Immanuel Kant’s question about how synthetic judgements are a priori possible. Anyone asking the question had to be willing to investigate the interior of monstrous boxes. But what could seriously make us want to do that? Systemic experts would explain that the opaque administrative state is only expressing a normal structural division: bureaucracies are constructs that create high levels of complexity for themselves under what we are told is a meaningful organizational imperative. It follows that their opacity could be a sign of their efficiency. In other words, let’s give Bonn and Brussels the benefit of the doubt. Just as most people live extremely well without knowing the details of the processes in their lungs, duodenum or prostate gland, they should leave the state to its own devices as long as things function to some extent, without

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having to know exactly how foreign ministries, federal financial administrations or defence ministries are constructed. Luhmann showed brilliantly how trust must substitute for understanding in complex systems.5 In fact, the states that have become famous in history have taken considerable advantage of our lack of understanding of what they do; conversely, they have mostly taken a tolerant attitude towards our lack of interest in them. When opinion polls show that two-thirds of citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany do not know the difference between the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and the Bundesrat (the Federal Council representing the different federal German states), experts regard this as a sign that the Federal Republic is in good shape as a system. It would be much more threatening if masses of students started taking an interest in pension systems or if the whole nation took the foreign minister’s concerns to heart. There are times, however, in which populations who understood more would be indispensable for sustaining troubled nations; most of all, the population would have to understand more and more why they understand less and less about the actions and non-actions of the state. Europeans are facing a century ahead that will be brimming over with extra lessons in the political black box. What we once naïvely described as the long march through the institutions will turn out to be the duty to do overtime in the insides of a complicated monster. 5 This brings us to the last object in our series of black boxes: technical equipment in its most recent form as it occurs everywhere in practical daily life. Today we are surrounded by countless parasubjective systems or automats that would make psychologists of the Skinner school feel extremely comfortable. These systems actually function in a way that can be convincingly described without reference to mentalist concepts. Automats are the first subjects that are reliably trivial machines – in other words, units for which the instructions for assembly and use also make their essential character completely understandable to us. The symmetry of production and understanding remains a privilege of the producer because technical equipment in the users’ market, especially in the case of a massproduced article, is inherently only for use and does not want to be understood. The majority of high-technology black boxes today are ironical or, in psychological terms, contemptuous machines. They appeal to users who are happy with being just users and who generally avoid getting into intellectual competition with the machine. For these undemanding users the manufacturers, assisted by designers, have made the machine charming – we live in an age of sympathetic devices. Charm in the design age means superficial poli-



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tics, and this expresses the recognition that unavoidable insults must be rephrased in the form of compliments. Every complex device basically signals to its user that he or she is declassified beside it. But a clever user interface does not say that: because it is not deep, it does not have to be upright and honest. It turns to the owners with a smile that assures them they can feel in control. If you correctly interpret that mechanical smile, you will find a less complimentary message behind it. In fact, the smart system is telling its users that it is enough when only one of the two of us is an idiot. This reverses the black box principle in an epistemologically significant way. For the first time in the history of the opaque, users learn an attitude that leaves them free not to want to get to the other side at all. This is because high-tech black boxes, although over-filled with complex functional elements, are metaphysically and psychologically empty. It follows that we can be sure that the devices do not personally want to insult or manipulate us. It would be inappropriate to try to compete with them; and it would be excessive to try to fathom their construction details. The modern high-tech box encourages its users to stay at its surface level – and we should note that this is a good-tempered rejection. From the perspective of economy of thought or life, devices actually have no depths that would reward getting inside them. In fact, we are better advised to replace defective devices rather than try to understand them. This attitude launches a quiet cultural revolution. Interactions with devices they don’t understand have a direct personal effect on people and lead to elegantly shallow relationships. Young people in many places are already growing up in a world of erotic norms that are about scoring in a reciprocal game of user interfaces. It is evident that release from understanding leads to relief. But not only interpersonal relationships are affected by the departure from understanding. It affects the whole ecology of the mind. There is much evidence to suggest that, in terms of practical knowledge, modern high-tech boxes lead to an unprecedented situation in the history of ideas. There are signs of the return of an Old Stone Age attitude in which the searching and incisive approach – the pressure towards the other side of the black box – is disappearing altogether. The great desire for knowledge that fed on sepulchral darkness, feminine secrets, the enchantment of books and the mystique of the state becomes trivial in the face of a mechanical environment that we don’t understand in the least but that increasingly relieves us of the burden of being expected to understand. Be smart, be an idiot – this is the motto of the new black box ethic. Ask about the buttons and keys, and leave the interior complexity alone – there are people who are paid not to be idiots in relation to the inside of machines.

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Fight back only when the paid non-idiots are exposed as idiots after all. It follows that modern societies mediated by machines are collective entities of inter-idiotic relationships that involve precisely defined fields of non-idiocy or consultancy services. The popular expression for the architectures of inter-idiotic relationships is ‘network’. These structures attempt to interlink weak intelligences in such a way that they are smarter together. In networks, intelligences become teams, insofar as we precisely define teams as performanceboosting groups. Societies, on the other hand, are constructed so that the intelligences of the players make each other mutually trivial or predictable. It is easy to check whether one is in a team or in society: anyone who is smarter together with others than alone is in a team; anybody who is smarter alone than with others is in society. This perspective allows us to explain the misery of the intelligence economy in democracies and certainly in despotic societies because such social ensembles almost never acquire team qualities. The media of democracies also function according to the latent guiding principle: together we are more stupid. It is easy to understand why a total non-idiot no longer makes sense in these games, and it follows that classical philosophy, which has been declared dead for more than a century, has actually reached the end in the face of the newest black box. The philosopher was the delegate of societies that tried to cope with their inability to understand by postulating some people who understood everything in the heart of the world. Today the world has been offered to everybody for not understanding – the complex machines have taught us how not to understand. Some people know how the machines are made while the rest learn to be satisfied with knowing how to push a few buttons. This experience is important for our understanding of what intelligence is and does. Perhaps the only relationship we have to the world as a whole is a relationship of touching. The whole thing is not a white box, as phenomenology and its theology suggested, but is, all in all, a black box with a few small active lights inside. Active lights are not suns, and the old metaphysics of light and enlightenment is no longer responsible for them. Wherever the horizon is black, its opacity stops being irritating. We reach the end of the seemingly immemorial phenomenological illusion of trust and familiarity. The epoch of belief that once existed in the disclosedness, or presence, of the entity as it emerges in the world is coming to an end. This makes it clear that intelligent watchfulness may occur, but it is a property in short supply and only has a weak light. Not everything is as it seems, and we ourselves do not have an internal light for everything.



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We begin to realize that the deeper connection is between being and not noticing, between reality and not understanding, between power and non-appearance. Manifestation is the ontological exception, and the things that are comprehensible and familiar are merely a thin film over the things that are incomprehensible and unfamiliar. Complex machines subtly help us over the basic phenomenological illusion. Philosophy’s tendency to overload the obvious comes to an end under the smile of the user interface. Intelligence is released on a large scale in the process – disappointed, but happy. It is only after this disappointment that we understand the difference between working and celebrating in a way no other generation has understood it. The light of this difference brings the illumination into the black boxes.

III

DESIGN

THE RIGHT TOOL FOR POWER Observations on Design as the Modernization of Competence

The Thousand-Year Empire of Competence: Towards a Self-Definition of the Modern World Among those who have reflected on the character of modernity there is a more or less clear consensus that the age we live in is like a gigantic experiment by the leading technologically competent nations on the topic of the boundless increase in power and the growing intensity of life. In this global experiment, modern persons moving onward from generation to generation discover they are carriers of a specific will to power. It is certainly not true, however, that men with the qualities of Columbus or Descartes, Cosimo or Bacon suddenly emerged as a new ready-made species that had established a predetermined empire of unfettered competence founded on a brutal master plan. The names I have just mentioned are individual symbols of a transpersonal turbulence that escalated into the historic experiment of continuing growth in power and competence. It was not individuals who initiated the great leap made by modern philosophy into the mode of existence of the new competencies. Rather, active people were caught up in an autonomous spiral of increasing competence which was set in motion by the creative spirits of early modern times through recruiting the inventive drive and initiative of these men. To some extent the great names of the early period in the history of European empowerment are the names of experimental apostles, individuals who could be seen as the first people to be appointed for a new global European mission. These men were the bearers of an original apostolate of the power of knowledge that spread with the irresistible force of a triumphant religion, continually producing new calls and inspiring

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people to new apostolic successions. Modern Europe’s spiral of expanding power and competency can be described as a serial game in which each new generation – starting from the competency level of the older one – added its own particular chapter to the novel that highlighted the epoch. In the context of the play all actors are equal, and in the context of the call to power status distinctions vanished at the beginning of the modern age. Emperors and citizens were simultaneously media of the autonomous power spirals – princes, like engineers, heard the call of new horizons of competence. Plus ultra was the motto of the Habsburg emperor Charles V, and the Spanish fleet crossed the oceans of the early sixteenth century under this banner, which might be claimed as the decisive European slogan of the modern age. Only somebody who shares the feeling of carrying on according to the internal modus operandi of his or her life is a modern European in the precise sense of the term. Subjectivity in its modern form is only possible and true after the pilot individuals of the spiral of modernity have internalized the theme of increase. Compulsion and spontaneity are inseparably interlinked in the will to keep pushing onwards, which means we can no longer say whether the spiral’s dynamic comes from the desire to be competent or the compulsion to be competent. All we know for certain is that its flywheel mass finally becomes more and more subjective, in fact it acquires more and more competency, such that the desire for competency turns into the competency to desire, and the compulsion to be competent turns into the competency to be compelled. In other words, the moment of competence takes priority every time, and the human subject progressively emerges as a person whose actions, knowledge, desire and will are based on a subjective capital stock of competencies. All this is just another way of saying that modern subjects are discrete media of power, obviously not simple power but power with a growth index, power of empowerment, if you like. People who can do something in a modern way can do it so that from the start it involves the idea of and capacity for a growth in competence and a desire to increase skill. Now, I would like to use these remarks on the increasing dynamic of power and competence to define the character of the present age. It is common in the Western world to say that we are living in a postmodern era. What this means is either an epigonic position in relation to heroic and avant-garde modernism, especially in the arts, or a disillusioned position in relation to exalted ideas of historical planning and control of nature. If modernity were a composite of genius and constructivism, postmodernism would be a mix of mediocrity and chaos management. I



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would like to show that these contrasts are not valid from the perspective of the history of competencies. Because above and beyond these two positions, and running right through them, is the unstoppable spiral of increasing power; in fact, we might even see the so-called postmodern age as just one more landmark in the dynamic of empowerment that has accumulated over centuries. What characterizes the postmodern era is the stereotyping of former avant-garde qualities and the transposing of the creativity that was once associated with pathos into everyday manipulation of materials and symbols through the members of a worldwide design ­civilization – in other words, through the supranational smart new middle layers of society. On this view, modernism and postmodernism are linked by an overwhelming continuity. So-called postmodernism is doubtless also a phase in the history of the Euro-American plus ultra. It has not relaxed the compulsion to power – at most it has adapted the compulsion to be competent to state-of-the-art technology and introduced a degree of play into the contemporary style of competence. There is no sign of a real historic break in the sense of stopping the escalation of competence. As long as a superior power does not blast the spiral of increasing competence it will continue winding on unimpeded as the kinetic core of modernity. Even that which would like to resist it seems to contribute to its thrust; anyone who opposes it just propels it further. Consequently, modernity can only be followed by a further, higher level of modernity. As long as the world is left to pursue its own dynamic, our times have nothing ahead of them except their own continuation and heightening into the unforeseeable future, which will always maintain the same principles – up to limiting values which, we assume, can also be overwritten and extended on and on. This means that modernity is its own end time and can intrinsically be nothing for itself except its own future source, as long as it continues to be the winding onwards of the competence spiral. In this sense we must understand it as a dynamic millennium. Those who live their lives as genuine participants in the global experiment of the modern age have to account for their spontaneous involvement in a millenary operation; the yet-unvanquished imperial motto has been valid since the sixteenth century in Europe. Regardless of whether we see Columbus or Charles V as the engineer of the Renaissance, or the utopians of the Baroque period as the original apostles of the modernist gospel of competence, we are still following on from them with each statement of life today. Whether we look back for centuries or extrapolate the present into the future, we are first and foremost agents and media for a thousand-year empire of competence.

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Simulation of Sovereignty: On the Birth of Design from the Spirit of Ritual As far as we know, this turbulent empire is not a comfortable place. In the agitated end time without end, the life of the individual will be defined by a new mood of competitive performance. This will force the individual to evolve into an adaptable biological machine. The individual person, as somebody who is skilled or has competence, must become the channel for the abstract willingness and concrete ability to perform. This individual’s social pride and personal dignity are based on the consciousness of his or her ability to contribute to the rising level of performance as a whole. Individuals in the competence universe must see themselves as relatively sovereign in their sphere of activity. Precisely because of this the modern individual falls into an unavoidable trap, or at least there is no direct way to avoid it. The chasm opens up because the person in the age of increasing competence who is so proud of his or her performance can only occupy an ever smaller, increasingly relativized and specialized position in the general whirl of the competence spiral. Modern experts can do less and less better and better. That they are alert and can mobilize their will and ability on wide horizons is a justified reason for their existential pride; but it is simultaneously the reason for fundamental and unavoidable humiliation. The total mass of competence of the world that has been mobilized for experiments is growing in an exponential relation to the advances in learning made by individual experts. The more competence individuals acquire, the more they are likely to be players in an overall game which inevitably makes their radius of competence – however large – seem insignificant. This paradox of individual competence that simultaneously rises and falls forms the backdrop to the development of the system of modern individualism. The individualist civilization is faced with the task of rousing the abilities and expectations of the individual sufficiently that the individuals who are spurred on to achievement do not sink into annihilating depression as a result of the unavoidable discovery of their immense all-round incompetence, which is only now becoming visible. Individualism creates the bracing psychosocial climate that provokes and negates the sovereignty of the individual at the same time. It is precisely the dramatic development of this difficult situation that allows a place for the principle of design in the system. For design, seen from an ecological perspective of competence, is nothing but the competent liquidation of incompetence. It secures the individual’s competence limits by providing the subject with



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processes and gestures for navigating as an expert in the ocean of his or her incompetence. In this respect we may define design as simulation of sovereignty: design is when one is capable despite everything. I think it is worth exploring the reasons for this in more detail. The reasons, as one can guess from what we have said earlier, are by no means close to the topic as it appears. Martin Heidegger emphasized in his famous dictum that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological,1 and in relation to our topic we must state clearly that the essence of design is nothing like design. I have just defined design as the skill of incompetence, and I would like to proceed by underpinning this formula with some anthropological considerations. The roots of competent incompetence naturally long predate the modern world of competence. In fact, they pass through the whole terrain of primal human history and early cultures. In those times Homo sapiens was a toolmaker and narrator of myths, drifting in hordes and tribes through a reality of Nature that was largely unconquered technologically and unexplored in analytical terms. For early humans, not being competent – not being able to do much and not being able to change much in relation to their ­environment – was almost first nature, at least compared to the power radius of late culture. All the same, early humans were anything but helpless victims swamped with fear of an overwhelming world outside. On the contrary, they were lively, inventive, highly mobile actors in a survival game they played with great success, even if they could only have dreamed of the competence horizon of an average modern individual as if it were an existence under divine protection. If their forms of life seem like cultures of sheer impotence from today’s perspective, it is because of an optical illusion. In reality, modern human beings’ range of competence has expanded so much that they are far more at risk of helplessness than prehistoric human beings. They are more often at risk of failing through incompetence, and on more fronts. Early humans, by contrast, benefited from having a grasp of almost everything they needed for their personal and social sustenance, while they managed everything they lacked the skills for more or less routinely with the protection of rituals. Assuming that the Flood falls from the sky with thunder and lightning on your roof of leaves, if you can survive the storm at all you can survive it better if you chant a song for the weather god. It is not important to be able to make the weather yourself – even modern abilities do not go that far –, but it is important to know a technique for keeping fit in bad weather. You must be competent enough to be able to do something in a situation when one usually cannot do any-

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thing. Only someone who knows what to do when there is nothing to be done knows enough efficient and continuing games of life to prevent himself or herself from collapsing in panic or freezing into immobility. Skilful lack of competence creates a kind of freewheeling attitude or a parallel process in which life can go on even in the presence of things that make us helpless. I use the term ‘ritual’, a term from ethnology and science of religion, for such parallel processes. Prehistoric people could not be entirely sure whether the sun really rose as a result of their waking before it and encouraging it to rise by dancing in a circle; but this enabled them to deal with the demons of the dawn and thus to enter their day playfully and keep their mythical identity as children of the light planet and the dark earth. Since archaic times, ritual has closed the gap through which impotence, panic and death invade our life. In this sense we can talk of the birth of design out of the spirit of ritual. For although design is unmistakably a modern development and is manifested in things rather than in gestures, its gestural substrate – competence when skills are lacking, keeping fit, preserving form in the midst of things that dissolve form – still prefigures in primeval history the parallel gestural and symbolic actions that we call ritual. Without having a causal effect on events in the autonomous environment, rituals give coherence to the lives of their practitioners as they are lived and, if they are properly understood, have the power to bring order into a world that cannot generally be controlled. Extra ritum nulla salus. Above all, even we modern individuals have retained remnants of ritual competence for the unmanageable, watershed events of life – particularly the death of people close to us. Such rituals allow people, parallel to the event they cannot control, to continue dealing with their own life’s drama through minimal patterns that show the right way to carry on and cope with things. The same applies to births and birthdays, weddings and separations, the transition from the old to the new year, and jubilees. They are thresholds built over remnants of rituals whose transgression requires a minimum of formal fitness. Rituals, as elementary game rules and sources of form, provide the gestural repertoire for this. From here it is not difficult to return to the present structures of design-based management of incompetence. If necessary, a coat of paint will always do the trick. When a Swissair plane crashed at Athens Airport in the 1970s, aside from the obvious rescue procedures for the survivors and dead passengers, the airline also oddly instructed an airport worker to go to the spot immediately and paint over the clearly visible and identifiable Swissair logo on the tail of the plane that was protruding above the wreckage. You might call this first aid for a wrecked firm logo. It shows precisely what design



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can and will do in extreme cases: the overpainting of the tail proves that we can always do something when there is nothing more to do. It would be meaningless and frivolous, however, to derive the design question solely from the type of incompetence catastrophe I have just described. After all, dealing competently with relationships and devices for which we cannot be perfectly competent occupies a disproportionate part of our modern professional life and daily leisure time. For the average user, all the technical systems that function on the basis of sophisticated precision engineering, burning technology, nuclear technology, electricity and electronics are completely obscure entities. All the same, our daily life has long since been organized in relation to such technologies. The principal machines of today’s world, the car, the computer, the entire range of consumer electronics, sophisticated tools and suchlike – for the great majority of users they are all just shiny surfaces whose interior worlds are impossible to enter except in an amateurish, destructive way. In traditional rhetoric one would speak of books with seven seals, while in modern-day terms such impenetrable, complex blocks in the users’ environment are called black boxes. After the technological revolution the sphere of individual life is full of such devices that allow apparently magical telepathic operations – such as remote listening from a distance, watching TV, telephoning, remote control steering, remote reading – operations that are all based on internal working processes that have no relation to the user. Design is ­unavoidably involved wherever the black box has to offer the user a contact interface to make it usable regardless of its hermetic internal nature. Design creates an open exterior for the dark box of puzzles. We could call these user interfaces the face of the boxes. They are the make-up of the machines. They simulate a kind of kinship between the human being and the box and they whisper in the user’s ear, arousing appetite, desire for contact, sensations of handiness, and initiatives. The more incomprehensible and transcendent the interior life of the box is, the more appealingly the box face has to smile at the natural face of the customer and signal to him or her: ‘We can get on together, you and I; I’m not hiding any of my sensitive spots from you; my PVC physiognomy expresses my genuine sympathy and I’m ready to serve you.’ Design helps to inspire the belief that a man and his electric shaver are male team comrades, almost the same as the housewife and her washing machine. When it comes to complex devices, design creates the façade of signs and contact points that enables users to join the game without being tangibly humiliated by their evident incompetence as regards the internal mechanisms. From the user’s perspective, ignorance must become power. I send faxes, therefore I am; I use a mobile t­ elephone,

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therefore I adjust to the network. The universe of product design revolves largely around the sensitive issue of serving the competence needs of users who are incompetent in dealing with structures. From this perspective a customer is always an idiot who wants to purchase sovereignty. And the designer, in strategic alliance with the manufacturers and experts for the interior of the black boxes, is always poised to introduce new applications or follow-ups into the sovereignty market. Modern customers, as users of unexamined technology, are everyday imposters: illuminators with toggle switches and dimmers, telepathy artists with fax machines, kinetic jugglers at the wheel of a car, and masters of levitation in a passenger plane. And in the sense that all of these obscure technical objects would not be the way they are without the contribution of designers, we can describe the profession of designer as that of an outfitter for imposters. Designers furnish everyday imposters like myself and everybody else with the accessories for continuing simulations of sovereignty. In everyday language we call the same products ‘useful aids to make life easier’. This service has models and relations in a sphere that seems very far removed from the technical element, and, in fact, contrary to it: the rhetoric and grammar teachings of Antiquity and the teachings of the aristocratic age in dance and manners. Both provided training in linguistic and physical attitudes that spared individuals from being lost for words and losing their stability in free-fall situations. When there is no longer any suitable word, there is still always a word in place; where everything stable has collapsed, good behaviour is still possible. Design repeats these provisions with sovereign means of control in the horizon of a technological civilization. It provides the technical stuff for power for people who try to appear as something more than helpless puppets of competence amid the present monstrous spiralling of power. Whether this attempt can succeed is today the source of argument between the humanist and technically oriented factions of cultural criticism.

Competence as Competence in Revising: Design under the Categorical Imperative of the Consumer World Having discussed how design was born out of the spirit of ritual, we must talk about a second, specifically modern source of designcivilization. The way the modern world works as an experimental culture is the practical conclusion of the belief that things are not beings or creatures, but functions or materialized acts. If things were beings in their own right and origin – things of God’s grace, in a



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sense –, trying to lay hands on them would be latently or manifestly blasphemous; every design, insofar as design means drawing things in a new way, would be a rebellion against the created or naturally born essence. If things, however, are carriers of functions, then they are not protected and sanctified by any original seal, and are inherently open to constant improvement and re-creation. In this sense, design as an attitude and profession is rooted in the elementary revisionism of pragmatic modernity; but revision is meliorism: re-making means improving. In other words, design is the conclusive form of functionalism – people who make designs admit to being practising functionalists; they are committers of the verb ‘to function’, apostles of the belief in the primacy of function over structure that has been missionized worldwide. Stepping back from such self-evident statements and questioning the meaning of these all too illuminating expressions, we reach a terrain where the relationship between the thing and its function or the function and its thing becomes visible in a very dubious manner. In his notoriously obscure oration about ‘the thing’, Heidegger explained the questions asked here using the example of a jug. Briefly, the function of the jug is revealed in its suitability for the task of holding water or wine in its hollow interior and standing ready for pouring – which is why its appearance combines the three characteristics of hollow body, handle and spout. It would follow that the function of the thing is simply its service or use. Leading on from this example, generally speaking things are useful tools to hand. But as serviceable tools, things are simultaneously discreetly sovereign donors – giving beings, we could say, in the hands of living beings. This is particularly clear in the case of the jug. The jug is there to do the job of pouring, which means that as an example it shows directly how this thing, by serving, also gives. One must admit that Heidegger was right in seeing no reason to flinch at the statement that the essential character of the jug is to give. From here it is only a small step to the main principle of the ontology of things that says the essence of the thing as such is the gift of pouring. This surprising theorem brings us to a double-sided understanding of things: one side places the functional service of the thing at the beginning, and leads from there to the human being as master and user, while the other side starts from the character of the thing as a gift and defines human beings as recipients of gifts of things.2 By its tone and logic the second view is naturally at home in a premodern interpretation of the world and being, because instead of serving people’s desire for multiple competence it reminds us of the gratitude they owe to the things that give themselves. Quite simply, it delineates the position of anti-design. A person who implements it in the literal sense would

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not be somebody in search of sovereignty, a competent-incompetent user of the tool for power, but somebody who meditates and is pious about things, a recipient of gifts in kind in the form of tools, material and foods. Cum grano salis this would resemble Catholic artisans’ and farmers’ philosophy in which the proper use of any tools or machines always begins with a prayer about the things, in the same way as meals begin with saying grace. No designer has ever emerged in this manner. Designers may believe what they like about themselves but they are not God’s henchmen and not labourers in the vineyard of being. A designer cannot regard himself or herself only as a curator of what is already there. All design stems from an anti-prayer; it begins with the decision to pose the question of the form and function of things in a new way. The sovereign person is the one who decides on the exception to the rule in questions of form. And when it comes to the form of things, design is the permanent exceptional state – it explains an end to modesty in relation to how things are traditionally constituted, and the spirit of radically questioning the function of a thing and its masters and users is manifested in the will to create new versions of all things. Every kind of functionalism contains a spark of Luddite prejudice against objects. Whereas we are not supposed to think about the price when we receive a gift, the designer object is open to pricing questions and revisions from the start. Instead of taking the thing as it is, design begins with the function and turns the thing into a variable fulfilment of it. Design is possible because and to the extent that we can apply the dictum that each thing has its price. In fact, the history of how design has risen to become the almost unchecked ruler of the new version of things has to be written in an economic mode as well. For what we describe here in ontological jargon as a ‘thing’ is called a ‘product’ in economic parlance. A thing that carries value is a commodity. If a thing with value is put on the market to compete with other things of the same type, the product, if it is willing and able to achieve success, will become a comparatively better commodity in competition with its peers – in other words, it will shift from being a commodity, or goods, to being an improvement, or a better thing. At first glance this may merely seem like wordplay, but on closer inspection it is the valid term for the dynamically charged value object. The commodity that has improved as a thing of value seeking success has a dynamic way of being on the market that means it is already, as such, a thing that seeks comparison to make it look even better. We could say that it obeys the categorical imperative: always present your image on the commodity market in such a way that the theme of your existence can be understood at any time as expressing and motivating the



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effort of improvement. Because designer goods as such are now presented as embodiments of the demand for excellence in opposition to rival commodities, they are, as it were, the real existing comparatives of things. From an ideal-typical perspective, in the modernized product world there is no longer a market trend for static commodities but only one for improvements – there are no stable qualities but only products that surpass and enhance. The revisionist approach to things in design is articulated precisely at the intersection between experiment and competition, between functional improvement and improved utilization. These two improvements are complemented by a third, if we take into account that a design object seldom, in fact never, comes alone. Each individual design object profits from closeness to its own kind – it adopts an atmospheric added value that stems from the family resemblance to related products that have been optimized, stylized, freshly conceived, further elaborated and exaggerated; in other words, improvements. The critical theory of product ranges is concerned with improvement groups. But whether seen in an ensemble or as a single item, after rejuvenation in design the thing is always a comparative object – it is the successor of an ousted or surpassed thing, the result of an optimization story that is open-ended in relation to the future. If, as we have said, the designer in the role of Homo aestheticus and psychologicus is a provider of simulations of sovereignty, he is also, as Homo oeconomicus, the outfitter for goods on the path to improvement; he is the man of the unconditional comparative – a development aid worker for trending things. He could be described as an all-rounder for revisions of things. He acts in this capacity as a rigger, a military parachute packer, for the power struggles of owners of variable capital that circulates in the form of ‘improvement products’. And just as the present world market actually rewards improvement, design becomes not only one success factor among others but, what is more, a basic element of and a nutrient solution for modernized success, meaning more cleverly made success, in its own right.

Applied Art for the Ego After ritual and capital, we should mention a third source that makes design meaningful in the present arena of power. The key word is applied art. I do not wish to embark on an excursion at this point into the swamplands of theories of modern art. Nor shall I consider the classic Marxist idea of product aesthetics and the liberal catchword ‘consumer aesthetics’. I shall also ignore

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the ‘role of the aesthetic in the apparent solution of fundamental contradictions of capitalist society’3 – after all, we are no longer in the 1970s. I assume we know how designers contribute to adding surplus value in packaging and presentation as cosmetic artists of products. We also know that pseudo-improvements, the pretence of quality differences and creating the illusion of customer choice have long since been problematic domains of design as applied art that has gone astray, and this is a premise I can introduce here without further commentary. In a culture of identity, difference necessarily becomes a scarce resource. In relation to applied art, as everybody knows, difference not only is a contact ground for encounters between beauty and technologies, but also epitomizes processes to regenerate the semblance of the beautiful life. In this respect applied art is a privileged access to the dream factories whose contribution is vital to sustain the complicated psycho-political machinery of modern mass societies. Even critics of ideology now accept the idea that modernity is just another name for the difficult job of finding the right balance between deconstruction and construction of illusions. It follows that design as applied art is always a regulator in the subjective ecology of individualistic civilization; it provides the air conditioning for nervous large-scale societies and contributes to the fine tuning of systems that create illusions and flair. It motivates and tones the players in the lotteries of the society that prioritizes performance and experience by the widest possible distribution of the sovereignty premium together with its methods of simulation. Everyone should have access to that winning feeling – this is the rule for inclusive games. As long as democratic concepts take the lead in advanced illusion design, technological progress will seem like a lottery to many people, if not everyone. On this note, the French railway company SNCF presented its high-speed policy to the population with the slogan: Le progrès ne vaut que s’il est partagé par tous. [Progress is only worthwhile if everyone shares in it.] On the reverse side of this generous illusionism, however, is a growing atmosphere of harsh rationality. Its signs haunt every medium and the trendsetting press has been broadcasting exclusively on this wavelength for a long time now. Applied art – combined with a new absence of illusions into exclusive games – results in the modernization of egoism, and it is this effect of this new mass-scale self-designing that brought a chill breeze to the postmodern illusion-hothouse of the West in the period before 2000. Design as art applied to the ego creates smart managers with the latest bundle of competencies combining speed, information, irony, taste and cool ruthlessness. The one-time avant-garde idea of making a work of art out of the life of the individual itself has now, after a delay of



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barely three generations, reached the grass roots of society. What is called ‘lifestyle’ is the breakthrough of design to the level of selfstylization and personal biographies. Nowadays the individual aims for the competency to present himself or herself as a compromise between artwork and machine – rather like Andy Warhol, who has long been seen worldwide as the patriarch of design-supported neo-­ individualism. Subsequent generations have learned from Warhol that sovereignty is an effect of the investment of energy in shallow processes. And if individuals in the age of design want to apply shallow processes to their own body, then we should prepare for a new psychosocial era, and perhaps even an anthropological quantum leap. If our picture of the trend doesn’t deceive us, this will necessarily result in a structural transformation in the traditional human image, and may even shape new psycho-physiological and neuronal processes. It seems as if a type of Homo semioticus will replace the highly cultivated Homo psychologicus. The manifest carriers of this development are already adults, our children, our mutants; in their case the classical ‘deep’ triad of psyche, memory and inner world has been replaced by the new plane of operator, memory store and on-screen space. The ‘soul in the technological age’ could become something like a living cursor in busy spaces where events happen – a cursor in search of its course, a runner in search of the track that would be his or her ‘own’.

In the Battle of the Titans However we may judge such hypothetical tendencies, what matters is that design in all of its three roots is involved in a kind of psycho-political battle of the Titans4 in which the forces of hope and the forces of despair are wrestling with each other like two global powers or total atmospheres. In this respect the collapse of commun­ism certainly did not end what was called the bipolar era. At best we can say that the superfluous battle of the Titans, the East–West bipolarity, has finally vanished to make way for the necessary battle of the Titans, the fateful conflict throughout humanity between confidence, along with what gives it justifications, and despair, along with what nourishes it. It is the struggle for the raison d’être of a human race that has had to learn to look rationally at its relationships while modernizing. This bipolarity encompasses all contemporary works and arts; in the battle of motives that give reason for hope or drive people to despair, the life impulses of present and future generations come into their own – or dissolve into nothing. On the whole the media have failed to understand this

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psychodynamic endgame of species intelligence, although they have all been shouting wildly like warriors in the fog. The political class, too, has barely understood it, although it has long since been operating on the battlefield itself with rather confused manoeuvres. No institute of strategic studies has ever wasted a word on the course of this ultimate psycho-political drama, let alone risked a hypothesis on its outcome. The intelligentsia is under a curious spell that prevents it from appropriately fulfilling its office as world witness. It is evidently still too difficult for people today to be combatants and observers at the same time in the middle of a battle of the Titans. The rule seems to be that those who see do not fight and those who fight do not see. And yet it is high time for a visionary combat and combative vision – particularly because hardly anyone still knows, or can know, to which side of the battle he or she was actually recruited. This is the frame for the current crisis of vision that everybody is talking about. The view as such is clouded in the confused battle of the Titans. One person’s reason for confidence is another’s cause of despair; one person’s cause of despair is another’s reason for confidence. Even the last bipolarity has its dead spaces and no man’s lands; double agents lose their way between the fronts, and the scenarios of the world war in the depths are hidden behind clouds of ambiguity. But wherever ambivalence holds sway, design is not far off. Designers are also make-up artists for bottomless confidence and creators of simulation methods for illusory hopes and false escapes. They are the crack troops of double agents in the battle of the Titans, working with confidence on new things fit for the future and running blindly and desperately along the same old path in a panic of self-preservation. They agree with both sides and equip them with signs and devices. Designers, as members of the indecisive class par excellence, are simultaneously providers of toys for the last humans and inventors of tools supposed to prove their worth in future workshops. But their indecisiveness is not a mood or a personal weakness. It reflects the state of all competent authorities at this present moment of the world. It shows that we do not currently know what competencies a person must be equipped with to avoid creating further causes of despair.

ON THE CHARISMA OF SYMBOLS

In the process of world modernity the symbols that are known throughout humanity inexorably grow in importance. Whereas linguists and politicians continue to puzzle inconclusively over whether a general universal language would be desirable or achievable, certain individual symbols have long since become established in something like a new world order. Even the world of signs and symbols has a star system. A kind of Platonic heaven of ideas arose in the course of the twentieth century above the turmoil of languages, codes and messages fighting for their share of the market of comprehensibility, and an elite of neo-universal symbols has entered this realm. The present text offers a brief selection from this semiological heaven of ideas that hovers above the modern world. For our contemporaries in the new millennium, particularly the inhabitants of the First World, what is presented here constitutes the seventh heaven of the global symbols that embody fixed elements of their vocabulary, indeed, of their world picture. In a dozen images of various kinds – trademarks, original symbols, insignias, pictograms – a constellation of sign lamps shines out; its comprehensibility has transcended the boundaries of every regional culture and the barriers of every language. These megastars of the signs and symbols stand out from the mass through an almost ‘planetary’ visibility, like satellites that orbit the earth as artificial stars. These semiotic stars of the first magnitude stand above the mobilized earth as codes of their own monstrous epoch. Looking at them, we realize clearly that the talk of One Earth is more than an Americanism or an empty phrase of the history of philosophy. The appearance of these signs offers a chance to reflect on the state of the world as revealed in the global distribution and readability of the present examples.

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The picture seems to define, as it were, the age of globalization in its radiant icons, its universal trademarks, its imperial messages. Indeed, by the power of their forceful penetration and visibility worldwide, the super-successful symbols in this collection always point – at least from an evolutionary perspective – to the basic process of modernity to which they owe their wide dissemination: the expansion of the world or, we could say, the drama of real globalization or unification. By dint of having been able to hold their own in reputation and validity, wherever they appear they spread the good news of modern times as the age in which each news item and each product can potentially be made anywhere and be made available at the same time. The function of the star system in the global synthesis is no different, and what is right for personal superstars is only fair for semiotic ones. This highly abstract perspective is the only way to clarify something these freely associated symbols have in common. How else could the Apple trademark appear next to the Taoist ying/yang world disc, Mickey Mouse beside the Christian cross, the CocaCola bottle next to the swastika and the Levi’s label beside the Star of David without a caption to link them all together? It is as if we were walking around in a semiotic laboratory in which the universal applicability of world symbols was being tested. The martial law of the market and the divine judgement of success always decide on the good or bad luck or the symbol candidates. Understandably also, in the laboratory environment, the differences tend to be overshadowed by the common elements, and even a heavily compromised symbol like the swastika can be lined up and tested here in the vehicle park of transportation fit for global use. All the better if no one today can still find a positive meaning for it. Wherever the world itself is seen as a theatre for globalization tests, theology and economy have common concerns. As members of a fundamentally missionizing culture we must expect the Christian cross to shine out behind every great symbol of success and a­ dvertising – as the model for every kind of propaganda. The cross is undeniably the prototype and path-breaker of a semiotic world politics that had no reason for existence except to give universality to a message and a symbol of salvation. In other words, the missionary precedes the marketing experts – and the advertiser is a paid prophet. Because capitalism is also a religion – in other words, a way of life of a supreme guiding force –, its main emblems, both names and products, are necessarily imbued with moderate messianic energy. They transport joyful messages from the life of ease into the consciousness of stressed people all over the world, who strive for relief like insects moving towards the light. Part of the game



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rules of the new world religion, however, is that it should be able to present itself as anti-religion. Any modern person defines himself or herself as a member of the non-faith Consumers’ International, which pretends to have renounced all forms of absolutism and fundamentalism. The great symbols, however, know better than their users – they speak the language of glory and longing which points to something beyond the sphere of consumer benefits. Who could have illusions about the messages that accompany the Mercedes Benz star? Isn’t this the guiding symbol of a kinetic world religion that promises its followers release through mobilization? Who can fail to see bright hopes of pleasure and performance shining out from the advertising symbols of this collection – as if messianic products were the mediators of a happy and successful life? It seems as if human beings are consciously and increasingly resisting the attempt to trace very great successes back to pure chance. To maintain our emotional and logical balance we want anything at the peak to be certified by something deeper than manipulation and dice games. In everything very successful, logic suspects something of its own basic forms and archetypes – as if the structures that push their way to the very top were stamped with an agreement of a higher kind, let’s call it predestination or a guarantee that comes from the original image. Even if it is not a question of openly archaic signs and symbols and basic structures, as in the versions of the circle, cross and star discussed here, but only a matter of arbitrary brand names and emblems, taken together the megastars of the world of consumer symbols constitute an archetypal batch. It will probably always be difficult in such cases to say whether the chance success created the lustre or the archetypal lustre created the success. The hit and the original image feed on each other, and something of the charisma of the famous name and the influential form floats over both of them. The profane successful brand has something in common with the dignity, however illusory, of the species, which seems to have emerged initially from a creative intelligence.

FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY

1 From the time that human beings started living in modern societies they stopped experiencing the higher things they shared under the auspices of churches. The social bond that holds members of modern nation states together is composed of cultural and economic rather than religious strands. For market-based societies this poses the problem of how to bring their countless hardly connected members together in enough communal games. Today, when a large number of people gather together as a society to join in an open debate or as an audience at a performance, they usually remain as a gathering of strangers or near-strangers who rely on some extra mutual goodwill to overcome their original unfamiliarity with each other. Unlike a community linked by faith and religious ritual, such a social assembly first has to demonstrate its sense of belonging. This secular worldly connection is registered in events such as official civil ceremonies, which perform a kind of citizens’ liturgy in which society reconstitutes itself as an assembly in reality. When an assembly is constitutive it means we are talking about rules for superior kinds of party games: the theme of the gathering is socially constitutive play as such. From a physical perspective we learn what a democratic society means between two extreme points: one is the discretion of the polling booth, where freedom is manifested as the right to segregation; the other is the openness of a ceremonial hall, where freedom of assembly creates a kind of civic bodily warmth – let’s call it the democratic ether – in which, if all goes well, the feeling of communality is diffused. The result, incidentally – because ceremonies, like



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elections, are rare events –, is that gathering together into a society is an exception for society itself. As a rule, modern societies do not come face to face with themselves. If they stray from this rule, it is only because they have found a special occasion to appear before themselves. Such an occasion happens when particularly useful members of human society celebrate jubilees. If a theory of jubilees were ever developed, it would have to show how years with round numbers, the years distinguished by the mystery of zero, could be used to visualize the rules of the game or, to put it more pompously, the basic values of a social federation with ritual intonation, ‘in the presence of the team gathered together here’. Part of the character of jubilees is that the people attending the festivities offer the celebrant a chance to meet himself or herself. In the exceptional situation of ceremonies, what people have in common matters more than what divides them, and in the exceptional moments in which we can speak of real existing civility, what is usually unthinkable appears ­possible – a common approach to what makes people reflect when they come into the world and share the weight of reality. My question is whether the social bond can also be tied for a few moments in the act of thinking deeply, which is generally our loneliest, most abandoned state, furthest away from society. I would like to discover whether it is possible to touch on basic structures of existence in our times in a public meditation session. The exceptional state of contemplation can result in society as an assembly being reconstituted once more to achieve better understanding of the present state of play with itself and the world.

2 Although I have not yet named the topic of this speech in these preparatory remarks, I have mentioned the key in which it will be introduced. Let me use the mood of ceremonial contemplation to present some ideas about play and games – insofar as philosophers are competent to speak about such subjects. This is not an accidental reference to a possible competence problem: most of the history of Western ideas strongly rejects the relationship between the spirit of philosophy and the world of play, and it took major ruptures in the system of thought before a philosophical discussion about such an un-philosophical topic could emerge. Old metaphysics behaved partly as if it wanted to break through the game of appearances to reach a deeper, more stable reality whose sublime state of standstill would be edifying for the human mind. Not to see the fleeting, the temporary, the playful aspect of the phenomenal world, or, rather,

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to desire and be capable of ignoring it – that was precisely what the splendid one-sidedness of the philosophical mind was based on; it remained blind to the active surface of the world to save all its vision to look at the ideas, concepts and structures that populate the intelligible worlds. The intelligible nether world only knows pure persistence as such; its way of being is not that of sportive play but that of essential survival. It contains no dancing, no flickering and no rule reversal, only the peace of the last principles. Insofar as humans’ angelic potential for genuine knowledge is activated in their lifetime, an eternal light burns over their intellect that has glimpsed the intelligible world beyond – the capacity for pure intellectual perception. What gives the age of classical metaphysics its all-embracing vitality is the heady feeling of a success story for logic: it proclaims the joyful message of the triumph of the essential over the accidental, of reason over result, of the origin over the emanation. In principle, the religion of philosophers believes in nothing but the redemption from coincidence. The original metaphysical activity of human beings is based on the conviction that the things of the sensual-seeming world are not serious enough to merit philosophical attention. The redemption from coincidence includes the redemption from mere experience as such.

3 When a philosophy of play is proposed today, or even seen as possible, we find that the basic position of classical Western metaphysics as such has been abandoned. Such a change cannot occur without reorganization of the judgements that determine the difference between serious and unserious things. That we are in the middle of such a revolution in judgements as well as a confusing change of sides between the serious and the not-so-serious is the thesis I wish to illustrate briefly in the following pages. At the same time it may offer a plausible explanation as to why a philosophy of play is the only theory of the present age worth considering. The great metamorphosis that modern thinkers pronounced in relation to the time-honoured discipline of love of knowledge was rightly redefined as an ambitious concept: the image of the Copernican Turn.1 The best way to communicate the depth of the revolution that has led to the philosophical rehabilitation of chance in the past two hundred years is by comparing it to the collapse of the world picture. Old metaphysics was in love with the eternal and the necessary that shines through the real like pure light through a cloud. Modern thought, conversely, has been devoted to the quest



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for reality; this is now set against the backdrop of infinite possibilities involved in thinking ‘it-could-also-be-different’. Apart from psychological motives, the new desire to let the mind obtain a foothold in deeper levels of reality had a theoretical basis. For in modern times the subject of cognition, the pervasive human being, increasingly appeared before himself or herself as the object of cognition. Modernity and self-referentiality, human or systemic, are only two aspects of the same case. Since then philosophy has had to break every statement about being and what exists into a statement about human beings. It began with the unpredictable, momentous turn towards the subject connected with the work of Immanuel Kant, with the concept of transcendental philosophy, and with the irresistible rise of a new philosophical discipline that became anthropology. This turn yielded significant effects in the intellectual balance of the modern world. The naïve boom in higher worlds severely obstructed its metaphysical needs from that time on. The desertion to the absolute was no longer easy to achieve. Modern human beings cannot simply do ontology as in the age of Platonic academics and heavenly doctors; at best, all they have is scientific knowledge of the ontological animals that they are themselves. Whatever human beings may think about God and the world in the post-idealistic era, they can only do it wearing anthropological glasses to remind them constantly that everything that appears before the intellectual eye has been through the human prism. It follows that nothing that exists can be manifested as purely in-itself any longer. From that moment on, human beings, particularly as philosophizing beings, are condemned to themselves as they really are; they have to recognize themselves as an impure condition of a reason that can no longer be called pure. It follows that the chance that created the world – that was previously called by the beautiful name ‘creation’ – had already dealt a false hand to the intellect long before the latter reacted metaphysically and tried to avoid the evil game of becoming. Since the time the intellect became human and historical – all-too-human and all-too-historical – and realized its entanglement in what-had-become, it was in the middle of the game again: like someone who is always tricked and who, at the same time, takes the game in his own hand.

4 From that time on, the human being, a creature of games of chance, had to occupy the centre of philosophical attention as the creator of new games. The anthropological turn broke the floodgates that

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were supposed to stockpile chance behind essential things, and the modern human subject was overwhelmed with a new, diverse set of responsibilities for what is accidental, factual, historical, local and unique. One particular skill stands out from among these areas of competence that were suddenly highlighted with such strong emotions: artistic competence as a deeply disturbing and challenging ability to create works of art. People of modern times consciously see works of art as the final justification of chance. In the work of art not only is the non-necessary real, but it has also become necessary in some respects. What God omitted or forgot in the first creation is now retrieved by the force of human power; even the stock of everything that exists is increased through creative acts. Human beings, as authors of works of art, the most superior kind of play, are reconciled with the unnecessary in an exemplary fashion. In art the accidental is necessary for salvation, as it were. The subject that creates art is similar to the God of creation Himself, who has accepted His own capriciousness because, from the abundant choice of possible worlds, He chose to make a reality out of the present world and none other. On closer consideration our world still gives an impression of being thrown together and improvised. But as always, it still gets the best reviews in theological circles. The recipe for this is as old as the creation story itself: anyone who has made anything in the world has to ensure that a self-made review is published and officially confirms that it was good. The modern turn to the subject enforces the turn to the human being as the originator of art: the artist, as the person who gives meaning to meaningless things, is a redeemer of random chance.

5 What is play other than art’s little cousin? Of course art, too, must profit from the modern turn of thought towards human beings. It is a simple step from praise of art to that of play – and anthropology must take that step because in this case it is forced to move. Having brought humans as creators into the discussion, it can no longer keep silent about human beings as players. Whether Homo artifex or Homo ludens, anyone who positively categorizes human beings as accidental has to turn things around as if play were a human being’s best friend since the beginning of time. In this respect, play has achieved a similar fate in theory to Nature, which was also redefined in romantic anthropology from its role as human beings’ oldest enemy and became their most intimate accomplice – indeed, their better self; on this view, Nature can do more for us than we



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can do for ourselves. By analogy, play is endowed with the power to enrich us beyond anything we ourselves can plan and calculate. Johan Huizinga’s assurance in his classic book2 that human culture is a gift of play concurs fully with this romantic way of thinking about play. Huizinga saw play as an ecstatic function of Nature; in play what is natural spontaneously goes beyond itself – moving towards intellect, the drive to representation and self-celebration. Play is the theatrical organ of Nature. Human beings are defined simply as the artistic directors of the energies for play that arise out of biological existence. These energies always contain an active overshooting factor, and in the light of the romantic analysis of play Nature appears not as an astute housekeeper but as a diva for whom enough is not enough. Huizinga’s idea that a game principle runs right through human beings seems like a reasonable Dutch response to Nietzsche’s Dionysian doctrines – the game is rather like the god from below who traverses the human sphere and then transcends it with laughter, a pirouette and a paradox. We can see here that, even today, the great theories of play are unable to do anything but get close to the principal case, which was called the divine in the metaphysical age. It remains true that wherever anthropology is practised, theology cannot be far away. All the same, at this point the difficulty often arises that Western people are still only able to imagine serious divinities at the origin of everything. The world must have a serious reason if serious people are researching into its beginning. An omniscient world creator may be just about acceptable – but how are we supposed to believe in a first player?

6 If human beings did not exist, anthropology could be a serious science. But it cannot become solidly established because it is shaky about its object. Human beings, down to the depths of their essential nature as ontological ephemeral spirits, have a hazy character, and this identifies them more reliably than any definition. Yet all the blurring in the theory of humankind goes back to the impossibility of deciding on objective criteria whether ‘in principle’ human beings are poor or rich creatures. To varying degrees, these two options have demarcated the history of civilization since time immemorial. The thesis that has openly held sway for centuries speaks of humans as beings born with deficits, as crooked sinners, as thinking reeds, as precarious late products of evolution, as pariahs of the universe, devoid of instincts, as slaves of the drive for self-preservation, as

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bare survival artists and as gloomy savers. The antithesis, which is still mostly latent, represents a doctrine on human beings as creatures of luxury, as fireworks of being, as the fixed spot of cosmic consciousness-raising, as finite gods, as poets of their own worlds, as serene procreators and as brave profligates. Both these versions, which are difficult to relate back to each other, reflect different ethics and temperaments and, what is more, different logics, different rationalities, different ways of finding existential balance. This deep divide in the anthropological approach naturally corresponds to different conceptions of play. If people are considered poor, they are regarded as creatures that play nonetheless – for relief and compensation, to raise their spirits and to learn. The hypothesis of deficiency sees play reflected through the four faces of its opposite: through birth, through work, through war and through death. On this view, play stands face to face with those serious crucial moments in which the weight and force of the world are concentrated. Each time, play is only redemption of compulsions and an easy interlude between difficult tasks. It is precisely the people who play who are the poor ones – they play because they need to. In cases where rich people are mentioned, on the other hand, they are seen as beings who play from the ground up. They do this because they own far too much per se, because they brim over with their own importance, because realizing their potential requires wasting themselves. Part of the hypothesis of wealth is the view of play as absolute. If people are rich beings, it is to the extent that they do not interpret play through its opposite. In absolute play the serious factors of life are not counterposed to the game but are an inherent part of it; they keep it moving, they give it substance, universal content and humanity. Egon Friedell once said that culture consists in having a wealth of problems.3 By analogy, an anthropology of superfluous things would say that play consists in having a wealth of oppositions. When the rich life believes in itself, it celebrates its difficulties. It follows that a religion of robust frivolity is part of the modern world.

7 To explain what I have just said, I shall conclude with a diagnostic thought for our times. By now, in terms of its industrial society, present-day humankind has stocked up several hundred years of experience with the adventure of modernization. Above and beyond this timespan it has continuously maintained a dynamic process of



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technical learning, capital formation and an accelerating pace of life – despite massive setbacks and crises. All in all, these modernizations add up to an avalanche in the way the world works. People experience this subjectively as an increase in wealth and relief that would have been unimaginable until recently; but it is accompanied by an inflation of risks. Nevertheless, our age has not really been able to revise its basic feeling that we are living in deficit. The patterns of thought and feeling of deficit anthropology are more universally present than ever. For every person who has more to give than previously there are a hundred who demand more than they previously did. Sometimes it may even seem as if the people who have become wealthier and have fewer burdens are the poorest and most burdened of all – because they have lost their instinct for coping with difficulties. This has been a theme of the critique of modernity since early existentialism: Kierkegaard said that anyone who wished to be a benefactor of human beings in the midst of progress and relief had to create difficulties. This idea ran subversively through the nineteenth century and Nietzsche made it big and ­dangerous – then it attacked the last humans, the fellahin of progress; Heidegger transposed it into audacity – then there was talk of the necessity of lack of necessity; and something comparable has reappeared in today’s discourses on the rebellion against the ‘secondary world’.4 On the economic level, Illich has spoken of a simple modernization of poverty.5 Anyone who makes a deeper diagnosis of the state of things today is forced to describe modernized worlds of scarcity. More than anywhere else, the old anthropology of poverty seems to be triumphing in the rich societies. These paradoxes reveal something that I would like to call the fear of people who have become rich in the face of wealth. This shows nothing less than modernity recoiling from its own principle in the moment of success. Marx definitively captured the essence of this era when he proclaimed the world revolution of the will as wealth for all. It was the Western world that adopted this slogan more radically than the East, which was still wallowing in misery. Yet the present discomfort about the rich life is shown by contemporary Westerners’ deep fear of looking closely at their unparalleled situation in the history of civilization: there is a touch of embarrassment about oversized successes. Modern persons seem overwhelmed by the unshackling of wealth. They want to possess wealth but not recognize it; they don’t want to do without it but they don’t really want to grab it. They want to suffer from it as from a comfortable illness; nobody wants to be guilty of, or indebted to, his or her wealth. In fact, sensitive people in particular feel morally shy about openly making the historically possible transition from scarcity to

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abundance as the main destiny of human life. Doesn’t it seem like betraying the testimony of poverty theory, for which a high price was paid? Wouldn’t it mean turning one’s back on people whose lives are still hard and overburdened? And shouldn’t openly betting on a rich life end in hubris? People who stick to poverty in rich societies still feel that a morality of abundance is immoral. For this reason we act blind to the obvious: that for our part of the world the  traditional justifications, whitewashing and compensations of the poor life are no longer valid. Things look bad for the cause of the anthropology of poverty, even if the rich life has not won its case by any means. Despite all the evidence, the nouveau riche of modern times, which means us, do not really believe in the changed premises of existence at our particular moment of the world – the premium that the status of poor has enjoyed over the millennia is still too high, and we are still accustomed too much to the modest little form of soul that lives from compensation. Thinking oneself poor continues to bring fictitious profits – or, at least, fictitious claims to them. Wealth, however, involves an obligation, more than mere nobles are capable of. But the fact is that wealth does not involve an o ­ bligation – it liberates, it brings benefits. The rich life reveals itself in its overflowing. It has something to spare, it allows us to play with it, it offers games and it wants other lives, new lives to join the game in this world and in new worlds. Where wealth governs, there is no Flood after us; what follows is the invitation to extended games. It was this, not least, that was meant by the Europeans’ departure into modernity. In essence, the modern world was – and still is – an enterprise for overcoming poverty and wretchedness; this enterprise takes the form of a wager placed on the character of human beings. Anyone who takes up such a wager is betting on the assumption that under the auspices of poverty nothing can yet be revealed about how things stand between the human being and himself or herself. Wherever people seek the essence of modernity in this sense there is an entrepreneur at work to obviate situations in which human beings can be explained and excused by what they lack. In a contemplative moment like this it may be relevant to remember the revolutionary roots of our age. Since neo-conservative miserabilism has gained ground, the generous substance of the modern age – transcending the morality of scarcity and moving towards a morality of abundance – is being rolled back more or less secretly everywhere. This defines the deep reactionary current of the present time. The psycho-politics of having-nothing-to-spare is increasingly poisoning the prosperous societies on the planet. It is not clear whether this trend will continue. At least two things are required to stop it: constantly



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repeating the question of where material and human wealth really comes from, and – as a result – initiating more extensive games on the occasion of every gathering at which people of our times celebrate and interpret themselves.

IV

CITY AND ARCHITECTURE

THE CITY AND ITS NEGATION An Outline of Negative Political Theory

The following remarks need a decisive approach, for three reasons. First, because closer inspection reveals the topic to be a vast subject with a content much too big for a lecture – we can only tackle it under the Epicurean motto that a long and a short speech amount to the same thing.1 Second, because we shall show that the negative for the theory of the city that I want to develop here is not a supplement from a late or decadent or overcomplicated age, but a condition of the Western urban spirit from the very beginning. It follows that negative political theory, the negation of political theory, should begin just as classically as political theory itself. Third, because the present zeitgeist is against the idea we are proposing here that European urban cultures were founded on the game of negations of the city by typical city dwellers – for the zeitgeist is plagued by political correctness. It will not hear anything about the city except ideas modelled on clichés of positive urbanity, and insofar as what I say here cannot be ‘correct’ in a cosmopolitan sense, a sense of urban citizenship – at least, not on first reading –, the following remarks will try the audience’s willingness to allow space for lack of correctness or, we could say, multidimensionality. I will defend the thesis that the paradigmatic European city is not the sum of its positive citizens but the sum of those who are sustaining the city and those who are escaping from it. The city that gives us something to think about, as an object of nostalgia and as a chance in the present, has always been more than merely the totality of its active inhabitants. Cities become interesting through the people who are in the city as though they were somewhere else. It is not simply the assembly of inhabitants that characterizes what fascinates Europeans about their most important cities, but the dual assembly of citizens and

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deserters. Only cities have what we can call inhabitants in the higher sense – citizens whose existence is deeply bound to their city; but the only places that ancient Europe would have accepted as worthy to be called ‘cities’ are those where, alongside the inhabitants, people who live differently are clearly noticeable. Fans of dialectical formulas could put it like this: the classical city is the assembly of the assembled and the non-assembled. To back up these statements I shall invite influential witnesses on the cause of the city to speak in ten short hearings. First we shall hear a few words about the founding of the ancient European polis from the spirit of metaphysical resignation; second, we shall analyse contempt and weariness in terms of negative social or urban bonds; third, we shall talk about the rupture between the urban spirit and truth as it occurred in the venerable institutions of Athenian philosophy; and, fourth, we shall follow up with some remarks on kynicism and cosmopolitanism, while in fifth place we shall discuss how disappointed citizens of the ancient city discovered misanthropy among their fellow citizens. The sixth and seventh points of our tour of the various impulses for negation of the city offer some brief comments on ancient institutions like the Anchorites and the mystery cult; our eighth argument relates to idylls and the pastoral; the ninth examines the political betrayal of the city by its most illustrious citizens; and the last point – almost logically – concerns urban aestheticism. Since the days of Baudelaire, all urban addicts have praised the act of mingling with the crowd that the poet extolled as ‘a holy prostitution of the soul’. This will bring our negative political theory to its factual conclusion; the analysis will show that, in reality, the emotion which seems to be most sympathetic to the city, the heady feeling of the metropolis and the excited collective buzz in the symphony of the big city, sealed the downfall of the early trading city in a mystical practice of irresponsibility. At the peak of urban joys, in the orgy of impressions, in the aesthetic affirmation of circulation, the political city dissolved forever into the aesthetic phenomenon. As this course has to move fast, we will only be able to sketch the outlines of a negative political theory.

1 The first person we shall call to the witness stand is the poet Pindar (who died after 446 bc). He is to cast his vote on what the Greek man of the fifth century before the Christian era would see as the best justification for living in cities. We can hear his answer in the fifth Isthmian Ode:



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[. . .] but two things only there are that minister to the brightest bloom of life as wealth blossoms: success and the good speech that a man hears of himself. Strive not to become Zeus; you have everything if destiny of such splendors befall you. Mortals must be content with mortality.2 This advice, two and a half thousand years after it was formulated, surprisingly makes sense to contemporary readers – if only the first part; even if we can no longer experience what an ancient polis was,3 at least today we are again fully aware of its function: citizens of the late twentieth century4 know just as well as classical Greeks that a city is useful mainly as a setting for victory ceremonies, both in the narrow sporting sense and in wider political and cultural terms. It is the nub of male existence in the urban multitude to be picked out of the masses and to become a living topic of discussion. The city may otherwise be what it chooses – a commercial centre, a fortress, a seat of government, a cultural centre; it is first and foremost a theatre of ambition in which candidates compete for a share of fame. Fame is the fortune of the good name the city dwellers spread in their sphere of interest through their mass media, city talk and panegyric, glorifying poetry. In ancient Athens anybody who spoke out was already famous for fifteen minutes. The victor was the person who succeeded in rising to the peak of the urban landscape. Greek cities’ capacity for fame in their classical century was evidently highly developed, and the famous competition festivals, of which the Olympics was just one, had to provide enough victors, or the urban fame machine would have been doomed to dry runs. Fame and panegyric were essential because they represented the anti-depressants of the Greek city-state system. No other cultural form of Antiquity has imposed such a high degree of metaphysical resignation as the Greek polis, and consequently hardly any other had such a need for illustrious victors and glorifying praise. This psycho-political riddle of the Greek state is solved in the second part of Pindar’s verse. It shows that the polis was only possible because it was able to convince citizens to see themselves as mortal and nothing but mortal humans. The polis was a system for balancing depression and ambition. The adult Greek man only attained full citizen’s rights in his city by metaphysical resignation; he could only start working in public offices after burying his dreams of personal immortality – as a citizen among equals, a mortal among mortals. The Greeks knew that to make it possible to found cities in which free citizens could run their own affairs in peace and war, the imitative rivalry or jealousy among human beings, the metaphysical as well as the material, had to be neutralized, and in this respect nothing is more effective

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than the subjection of everybody to the command of a common and impersonal ruler, Death. It follows that the apolitical poet par excellence, the ethicist Epicurus (341–270 bc), had good reason for saying, ‘Against other things it is possible to make ourselves secure, but when it comes to death we human beings all inhabit a city without walls.’5 This means that anyone who knows, as a Greek knew, that he or she is mortal becomes, by virtue of this knowledge, a supporter of the European city. Western urban culture has its real foundation in the egalitarian idea of death. Only people motivated by an unquestionable idea of community can tackle communal democratic tasks, and that is what the Greek emphasis on mortality actually means. Only mortals who were actively convinced of their own mortality were entitled to play a useful role in urban life. It was as if every worthwhile goal of human desire lay within the horizon of the city. If this were not so, the city would be torn apart at the centre of its motivational force and its best citizens would inevitably start looking for ways to attain immortality. That is why Pindar pledged his victors to be satisfied with victory and fame: ‘Strive not to become Zeus!’ It is not humanly possible to be Olympian – Olympic victories have to suffice! If the striving to become Zeus were legitimate for the urban ethos, the cooperation of mortals for the city would soon be over; only the cruder types would let themselves be bought off with fame and victory, whereas the better ones would have to turn away to seek the best: in fact, they would have to become Zeus and transcend the city. The Greek city, more than any other, speaks through its poets to prohibit this wilful ambition. It bans the quest for resemblance to Zeus and for divine immortality with its most powerful word of prohibition: hubris. But all souls have the potential for hubris – as Greek theology well knows, for it is based on a detached kind of anthropology. The souls of citizens must always be called back from this tendency to hubris and returned to the service of the city. In the third Pythian Ode, Pindar is remarkably explicit when he sends the maniacal, volatile soul back to the urban field: Do not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals. But exhaust the limits of the possible.6 These lines embody the pathos and fundamental contradiction of all Greek-inspired forms of urban humanity: the polis as culture or life form is something special for people who give their souls for the city. This gift remains a paradox to the very end; to still have a soul and yet be prepared to forgo its immortality for the sake of democracy –



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if such an improbable demand is the price for the Greek miracle, this already offers the glimmer of an explanation as to why this miracle was only short-lived. The old European trading city was tied to a programme of depression that involved using up the souls of city dwellers in mortal tasks as if there were no others. The noble mortality that underpinned the old democratic trading city can preserve its chance as long as urban educators succeed in persuading young people not to aspire to any other heaven than the one that opens up through being famous among one’s fellow citizens and winning victories in battles or games or service.

2 We shall now call the second expert – who is, exceptionally, a modern one – from the Paris of the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire made ‘Paris spleen’ unforgettable in the prose poems of his late work. ‘Spleen’ means the sense of being tired of life, the feeling of the modern individual who cannot imagine living in a different place to that which makes him feel tired of life. Baudelaire’s confession, ‘À une heure de matin’ [‘One a.m.’], is one of the most brilliant descriptions ever written of being weary of yet addicted to the city at the same time. It is a prose poem that circles around the exclamation, ‘Horrible life! Horrible city!’ – a text that was, understandably, Rainer Maria Rilke’s favourite piece of writing. I suggest reading it as a modern response to Pindar. Enfin! seul! On n’entend plus que le roulement de quelques fiacres attardés et éreintés. Pendant quelques heures, nous posséderons le silence, sinon le repos. Enfin! la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même. Enfin! il m’est donc permis de me délasser dans un bain de ténèbres! D’abord, un double tour à la serrure. Il me semble que ce tour de clef augmentera ma solitude et fortifiera les barricades qui me séparent actuellement du monde. Horrible vie! Horrible ville! Finally! Alone! No longer hearing anything but the rumble of a few hackneys delayed and exhausted. For several hours we’ll have silence, if not repose. Finally! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared and from now on my sufferings will be my own. Finally I’m allowed to relax, bathed in shadows. First, a double turn of the lock. Turning the key seems to me to increase

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my solitude and raise the barricade that essentially separates me from the world. Horrible life! Horrible city!7 Baudelaire’s protagonist, who has come back to his room from the bustle of the big city, shouts ‘Enfin!’ – Finally! – three times. If we take seriously the poet’s impatience to put a day in Paris behind him, we can understand what existence in Paris around 1860 meant for the most resolute city dweller: to be tortured by constant contact with people whose presence is painful because they humiliate whoever cannot deny his likeness to them. By now the big city has become a stage for a majority of losers whose mutual communication consists of permanently hurling diffuse insults at each other. None of them really understands what they are doing to each other by being half-anonymously in each other’s company. They are introduced to each other – only to realize that almost every hand they shake multiplies the number of faces for whom they can’t do anything and who can do nothing for them. For the citizens, the people with ambitions, the people seeking their chance, the city is the place where they vaguely learn that they cannot give each other what they are vaguely looking for. They can only watch each other failing. Wherever they appear there are beings in action who beg their peers more or less awkwardly for the recognition that their peers cannot give them. The crudest, most vehement, most unsuccessful of these seekers for recognition even forget what they are begging for and their nastiness can burst out like a force of nature in the middle of the commercial quarter. This is how the refined metropolis comes to resemble the primeval forest. What the poet in his soul-searching feels washing over him are examples of both things: people begging for recognition and his own murky game in dealing equally with these ladies and gentlemen and monsters. After a day like this the man in the city has entirely earned his self-loathing. Somebody who loathes himself or herself believes, of course, that truth still exists, even in the big city – perhaps the last Catholic illusion. For the sake of this truth the poet goes to his room like a sinner to the confessional box – and like a revolutionary taking up position behind the barricade. By confessing, he proves that people are right to rebel, and it is, indeed, the barricade to which modern literature owes a radiant scene; a day in a big city is recalled before the last pang of conscience. Horrible life! Horrible city! Let’s go over my day: having seen some men of letters, one of whom asked me can you go to Russia by land (apparently assuming that Russia is an island);



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argued at length with the director of a review who, to each of my objections, replied, ‘We’re all gentlemen here,’ as if to say that every other paper is put out by rogues; greeted a couple dozen people, three-quarters of whom I didn’t know; shook hands with a like number, without the precaution of gloves; during a rain, to kill time, went to see a lady tumbler who wanted me to design a costume for Vénustre; paid court to a theatre director who, dismissing me, said, ‘You might do better consulting with Z-Z-, dullest, stupidest and most famous of my authors, the two of you might come up with something – go see him and we’ll talk about it’; bragged (why?) about several nasty things I hadn’t done and denied in cowardly fashion some misdeeds in which I had luxuriated, flagrant braggadocio, offences to human dignity; refused a friend an easy favour and wrote a recommendation for a perfect skunk; oof! can that be all?8 One could introduce apolitology – negative political theory – as a discipline, and explain it in terms of the demand for a political theory to match this passage of prose and the consciousness it exhibits. The poet presents himself clearly as a creature with a double life who seeks his chance by day in the big city theatre of ambitions and becomes his own audience at night with the ability to see himself as a witness and as somebody with a conscience. This is the primal scene of negative political theory: if the citizen cannot completely anaesthetize himself in the urban business, but instead retains the ability, regardless of its origin, to take a rather eccentric view of himself playing the role of a citizen, then this observer is already the quintessential non-citizen. Anybody who watches other urban dwellers going about their business remains an urban dweller himself doing a typically urban activity – being a spectator. People who see themselves being carried along by the hustle and bustle of the city transcend the city and become transcendent witnesses, to some extent without a city. In Baudelaire’s account the apolitical witness has a double definition, through Catholicism and through art religion. The Catholics brought the monk with them into the big city, and the artists brought the Saturnist, the melancholy extraterrestrial creature that lives the life of a fallen angel in the city. The voices of these two non-urban figures are united in the final lines of Baudelaire’s prose poem to form a strange bedtime prayer: Mécontent de tous et mécontent de moi, je voudrais bien me racheter et m’enorgueillir un peu dans le silence et la solitude de la nuit. Ames de ceux que j’ai aimés, âmes de ceux que j’ai chantés, fortifiez-moi, soutenez-moi, éloignez de moi le mensonge

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et les vapeurs corruptrices du monde; et vous, Seigneur mon Dieu! accordez-moi la grace de produire quelques beaux vers qui me prouvent à moi-même que je ne suis pas le dernier des hommes, que je ne suis pas inférieur à ceux que je méprise. Annoyed by everyone and annoyed with myself, I’d like to be redeemed and gain a little self-respect in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those I’ve loved, souls of those I’ve sung, strengthen me, sustain me, take from me the world’s lies and breath of corruption. And you, Lord God, accord me the grace to produce a few beautiful lines, enough to prove to myself that I am not the worst of men, that I am not beneath even those for whom I have such contempt!9 It doesn’t matter whether we try to devalue these lines by attributing them to a hysterical Catholic or whether we hail them as paradigms by reading them as a typical statement of modern urban individualism; it is enough to have been exposed to the gravity of this scene, whatever the literary distortions, to see that it differs from classical political studies in its approach to the question of individuals’ ability to belong to their cities and communities. This urban bedtime prayer implies that towering over one’s own city should be seen as a fundamentally serious issue. The non-citizen as the interior double of the citizen is a challenge to phenomenological recognition. Non-city dwellers, non-citizenry, non-polity – these are factors that finally raise categorical demands even if it displeases political positivists. The city dweller does not live from the city alone, whereas the city, in turn, in its most brilliant guise, lives from the people who transcend it.

3 The third witness of our course in negative political theory also comes from Athens. We shall hear the testimony of Plato as the immortal source who can tell us how the city was founded in a strange, new and subversive way out of the spirit of philosophy. And because we ask him slightly different questions than usual, he will confirm that he founded not just one discipline, political theory, but another one into the bargain, namely negative political theory, and that he has been wondering for a long time why people who were later called Europeans – not to mention North Americans – have always considered him the initiator of the one art form alone and have ignored the other one all the more.



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Perhaps it is merely capricious to question Baudelaire and Plato in immediate succession because both can be seen as signifying typical moments in a broad continuum of the history of consciousness: when Baudelaire calls on an inner witness in his confession who carefully documents the relationship between the theatre of the city and its motive forces, he can do this basically because he is a successor to a Platonic discovery that was interrupted by Christianity. He uses what Plato first explicitly revealed, the soul’s ability to conduct dialogues with itself and ‘to be superior to itself’ in these dialogues. It is worth quoting the locus classicus itself here. In the fourth book of The Republic Plato makes Socrates say: ‘Soberness [sophrosyne] is a kind of beautiful order and a continence of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase “master of himself” I know not how; and there are other similar expressions that as it were point us to the same trail. Is that not so?’ ‘Most certainly.’ ‘Now the phrase “master of himself” is an absurdity, is it not? For he who is master of himself would also be subject to himself, [431a] and he who is subject to himself would be master. For the same person is spoken of in all these expressions.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘the intended meaning of this way of speaking appears to me to be that the soul of a man within him has a better part and a worse part, and the expression self-mastery means the control of the worse by the naturally better part. It is, at any rate, a term of praise. But when, because of bad breeding or some association, the better part, which is the smaller, is dominated by the multitude of the worse, I think that our speech [431b] censures this as a reproach, and calls the man in this plight unselfcontrolled and licentious.’10 By simple deduction we could work out that all Plato meant was a city reform from an aristocratic viewpoint; in this case he would indeed be the prototypical conservative political theorist that school education depicts him as. In reality he represented the beginning of an inner emigration of the better elements into a logical exile. The Academy garden where masters and pupils gathered was not a theatre, not a marketplace, and not a stadium from where successful careers in civil society could be launched. Plato’s plot of land was a terminal for ideas superior to the city. From the Academy, people reached heights that important, self-assured citizens never attained. The best people did not reach such heights through fame and victory at all, but through clarifying ideas themselves by dint of shared discussion. It may be true that the Academy could not have

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opened its doors anywhere else except in Athens – and its activity is certainly revealing in relation to the city and its key political and religious focal points; but at the decisive philosophical moment the doors were closed and the intelligentsia, even if it spoke of the polis, was involved in a logical ascension in which very few of the dignitaries, let alone politicians, participated. The institution of philosophy has been able to live with this ambiguity for two and a half thousand years, and if I am emphasizing the negative or esoteric side of classical philosophy of the polis more than usual, it is only to confirm as extra muros what has evidently been intra muros since time immemorial. Outside the walls, philosophy means practice in urban synthesis. This means that cities are human network systems, and the art of the correct network system formation is the most important topic for the outer perspective of philosophy. From Plato’s pupil Aristotle onwards to Hegel and his monstrous epigone, Lenin, philosophy has maintained its exoteric face, the face of political theory, and has commended itself as the school of knowledge of art for political synthesis. In fact, philosophy, which means Platonism, was a spiritual exercise in superiority to urban reality from the very beginning and was consequently never simply political theory but a priori a theory of the other city – a theory of the city that does not exist anywhere and that nobody journeys to without the aid of the semantic space travel that became known later under the name of ideas. Accordingly, Plato, whom Marsilio Ficino called pater philosophorum, was not so much the founder of positive political theory as the discoverer of a process of emigrating from the middle of the city into the other city, the Uranian polis, the Allopolis, the city that is quite different to this one. In Plato’s greatest dialogue, Socrates speaks as the first citizen of Allopolis. Philosophy after The Republic is the philosophy of the establishment of allo-political theory in the existing polis itself. As a fundamentally subversive art form it trains souls to rise from their own cities into super-urban exile. The Platonic Socrates must consequently perform his ideal urban-critical play to the very end. It shows how people in Athens have to live as people who live differently if they want to be superior to the real inhabitants, particularly crude inhabitants like themselves. Plato’s editing of the Socratic speeches of defence makes the most sense from this perspective. All philosophers become ipso facto postSocratic when they accept Plato’s interpretation that since Socrates’ execution there has been a divorce between the city and the truth. Their judicial murder of the best and most righteous man was the rock on which the old city as a place for the good life foundered. Whether this necessarily had to happen or whether it was a reversible



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error is a question that Plato would not consider when he founded his Academy. By setting up an exemplary school, he realized for the Athenians the prophecy that Socrates addressed in his apology to those who voted for his death sentence. And now I wish to prophesy to you, O ye who have condemned me; for I am now at the time when men most do prophesy, the time just before death. And I say to you, ye men who have slain me, that punishment will come upon you straight-way after my death, far more grievous in sooth than the punishment of death which you have meted out to me. For now you have done this to me because you hoped that you would be relieved from rendering an account of your lives, but I say that you will find the result far different. Those who will force you to give an account will be more numerous than heretofore; men whom I restrained, though you knew it not.11 The post-Socratic city had to live with the stigma that it would house philosophy and philosophers in the future. It would always be inhabited by individuals who do not flourish in the city but stay in it like travelling doctors on a stage of the journey to large numbers of patients. At the same time something started to blossom that we could call the utopia of the school: as we know, European cities are only as good as their academies of higher education – and these schools, with the city’s consent, prepare their students for life in a much better city. This is why part of the magic of important European cities is a layer of eternal pupils who learn for the academy and not by any means for life. If people wanted to make a fateful statement about the late twentieth century in Europe they would have to assert that the tension between city and school has ended and that cities today have the schools they deserve. But as long as the spark of Plato has not completely died out there will always be fresh educational approaches that train people for a better city that is nowhere to be found.

4 We are now ready to invite the fourth witness; in the present situation it can only be one of the first post-Socratic thinkers. Having heard the third witness, we understand why post-Socratic thought is part of the picture of ancient European city culture. After 399 bc, the year of Socrates’ execution, it was an open secret that the city could declare certain internal observers of

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its activities to be enemies and kill them. The polis, on the other hand, knew that it was defined by its judicial murder of its best citizen-witness – it could only exculpate itself by allowing postSocratic thought. This discovery led to two constructs in the city consciousness that were not philosophical in a precise sense but were decidedly post-Socratic. As we have seen, philosophy is a medicine for the incurably unjust city. Plato administered it in cleverly calculated doses; we are informed about the risks and side-effects in the theatre, in city conversation – and in retrospect by Diogenes Laertius; this source tells us that Socrates was followed not just by the long Platonic revenge but also by the rise of the theatre players. Their catchword was twofold: kynicism12 and cosmopolitanism. The modern users of these words do not realize that both initially meant the same thing because their meanings have diverged in two different directions over time. The word kosmopolites and the word kynikos developed in the same wave, from the same post-Socratic dilemma. The master was dead. How should people investigate the life of people in the city in future when the city, as a murderer of philosophers, had demonstrated that it intended to limit theory? Of the three possible answers here, Plato gave the first by institutionalizing philosophy as a didactic subversion in the middle of the polis. His idealism provoked, as it were, a new kind of self-observation of the city by super-citizens, by Uranian witnesses who see urban things with heaven’s eyes – which inevitably leaves the real city permanently disgraced in relation to its own concept. The other two answers came from Plato’s rival, Diogenes of Sinope, and they are, respectively, paraphilosophical and a parody of philosophy. We should not forget that cosmopolitanism first began as the evasive reply of a postSocratic philosopher to the potentially life-threatening question of where he was actually at home. Laertius captured the episode in a single short sentence: Asked where he came from, he replied, I am a cosmopolitan. This has become legendary as the first appearance of the word ‘cosmopolitan’. Since ancient times, beautiful souls have translated it nicely as ‘citizen of the world’, thinking they are expressing something deep and soul-searching in line with the Stoical tradition. People forget who the speaker was. Most of all, they neglect to add the key question for any kind of post-Socratic thought: to which place has the wise observer brought his fellow men and women to safety while he lectures and studies? Diogenes’ witty words contain one of the rare enlightening statements in this rather murky affair;



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the real light of his reply flashes out when we translate kosmopolites not as ‘citizen of the world’ but as ‘citizen of the universe’. Suddenly this reveals the new position of the speaker: Diogenes, acting like a literary clown, unabashedly assumed a divinely eccentric position – like Lucian and others after him. Briefly becoming like Zeus himself, he judged things as if he were watching from the cosmos; main place of residence the ‘universe’, second place of residence the trash can near the old gymnasium. In principle, anyone who lives so far out and only phenomenally in the trash can will not worry needlessly about incidents here – after all, he or she basically lives in the divine quarter and the gods are famous for their eternal grins and for their cool indifference to mere human destinies. But how does the cosmically apathetic person avoid the accusation of hubris? Socrates died for the accusation of impiety. Should a parodist of the gods like Diogenes be any less at risk? But this shows us how cheekiness can save life. The best kynical strategy is to hide the universe’s view of the ridiculous city behind the eyes of dogs. In other words, philosophy becomes God and God becomes a dog and mingles in the crowd as an observer from below. This gives rise to kynicism as a habit and ethos. At first kynicism only exists as a way of seeing – it provides a viewpoint for sovereign covert investigators against the city. Who can talk of godlessness in this context? One day he saw a woman kneeling before the gods in an ungraceful attitude, and wishing to free her of superstition, according to Zoïlus of Perga, he came forward and said, ‘Are you not afraid, my good woman, that a god may be standing behind you? – for all things are full of his presence – and you may be put to shame?’13 Heraclitus of Ephesus was the first to relate this story – which, as we can see, did not survive the journey from Athens unscathed. When Diogenes of Sinope quotes it, his tone of voice is mocking – we can almost imagine him saying: ‘Everything is full of philosophers,’ and, even better: ‘Everything is full of dogs.’ In any case, a dog sees much of what citizens should rather close their eyes to. The next question is: where are the real city dwellers in this game who are being so stubbornly watched now by philosophers imitating God and tramps imitating dogs? The man with the universal eyes has a ready reply, the dreadful reply that went down in the history of European ideas: He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, ‘I am looking for a man.’ 

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One day he shouted out for men, and when people collected, hit out at them with his stick, saying, ‘It was men I called for, not scoundrels.’14 This anecdote, the most famous of Antiquity, is the other cornerstone of negative political theory. Just as Baudelaire would think in solitude at midnight and find his salvation in dissatisfaction with himself, Diogenes would think about himself being able to play the master to the dog he portrayed. His moments as master occurred at noon when enough people were present to insult and when the sun stood high enough in the sky that Alexander the Great could be sent away from it.

5 As we leave the fourth witness to hear the fifth one, we can take advantage of the short recess to note that we have gained solid ground on our course. We have established outlines in cultural history for two forms of withdrawal from the urban theatre of ambitions. The first withdrawal occurred as philosophy, to the extent that it rose beyond the level of urban success; the second occurred as cynicism, to the extent that it fell into the gutter beyond victory or defeat. Both undermined the system of balancing out depression with fame and success because they had an ironic approach to mortals’ goals of public ambition. A third dropout from the urban theatre would become the most dangerous of all, at once the most helpless and the angriest. The third member of the alliance against the urban ambitions system is the man who hates human beings and can prove that only experience with fellow citizens and offices made him what he is now. The next witness is Timon ho misanthropos, as Lucian called him in the title of a dramatic story. Timon’s story can be read like that of a Greek Job. Shakespeare, the playwright who was the most important mind in the political theory of the early modern age, devoted one of his most pessimistic plays to Timon of Athens. It was written between 1605 and 1608, close to King Lear. This finally made negative political theorists give this character the attention he merited. Considering the Athenian Timon who was disenchanted with his city gives us the opportunity to rethink Pindar’s justifications for the city once again. It is quite clear that Timon’s Athens was not only a homogeneous field of citizens competing for honours but also a setting for dishonourable competitions. From early on, the city was a composite of a city of aristocrats and a city of commerce – leaving



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aside the urban underworld for the moment. What this combination actually meant was first shown in the catastrophe that separated these elements. It might give the impression that happiness is just another word for not having to analyse. Athens’ best times were those in which the Athenians treated the difference between their own selves and other Athenians as if it didn’t exist. In its most serene days the manic city was identical with the economic city, with people looking for prestige and those looking for money temporarily sitting at the same tables. At least there was no sign of anything that would make citizens wary of the dangerous differential that their capacity for cohabitation simultaneously justified and threatened. The polis did not yet know that it could only exist when a non-scheming class in it held the balance with a scheming one; democracy was impossible without a strong additional dose of aristocracy. The case of Timon marked the end of the happy days of nondifferentiating. The decline of Athens began not least with the enlightenment of Timon; just as the death of Socrates had shown that the polis was unable to give a suitable place to its intellectually most brilliant citizens, the fall of Timon showed that there was no further space in the city for aristocratic, manic generosity. The city was de facto in the hands of undistinguished people – one knew that from then on. The pillars of bourgeois aristocracy that Pindar extolled were broken; being famous in the eyes of one’s fellow human beings is not worth much if the fame does not save you from ingratitude. That was precisely Timon’s fate, and it was immediately understood as a powerful example. The Athenian Job was not tested by God for the limits of his devotion; no, he himself tested the equality of his fellow citizens after he fell into debt as a result of noble expenses – and learned that the wealthy Athenians who owed him so much had nothing to give back to him. His many false friends excused themselves one and all when he needed their help. Timon’s response to this lesson was misanthropy. It is the logical end for the aristocrat who had believed he could get back from citizens what he had given them as a nobleman. Timon’s hatred of humanity marked the moment in world history in which a society of mutual gifts was submerged in a society of mutual businesses. The generous person with his great name collapsed into misery. In the new reality of money, a great name alone no longer necessarily meant unconditional credit. This was how Timon earned a second name, misanthropos – which stands for the bankruptcy of aristocratic trust in the idea that one’s fellow citizens are as high-minded as oneself. Almost a century later, when Aristotle discussed fostering the high-mindedness and generosity of citizens in Book Four of the Nichomachean Ethics, he was already merely conducting verbal

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analyses that barely retained their relevance in the urban reality of that time. In fact, Shakespeare, faced with something similar in his times, rightly invented a philosophical brute, a kynic: he showed the noble lords that it was folly to overvalue bourgeois crumbs. Apemantus, the kynic, states that the only people who maintain unflinching self-respect are those who expect nothing from others, or in other words, they expect the worst; looking at the hustle and bustle of Athens with the eyes of the universe is enough on its own to save ourselves from disappointment. Understanding everything means despising everything. That is what Timon, the noble man, does not yet know – he will learn it. Timon’s speech cursing his city is Shakespeare’s memorial to the apolitical awakening of a citizen from his political dream. Here is Timon’s monologue outside the walls of Athens from the beginning of Act IV: Let me look back upon thee. O thou wall, That girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth, And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent! Obedience fail in children! slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench, And minister in their steads! to general filths Convert o’ the instant, green virginity, Do ’t in your parents’ eyes! bankrupts, hold fast; Rather than render back, out with your knives, And cut your trusters’ throats! bound servants, steal! Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, And pill by law. Maid, to thy master’s bed; Thy mistress is o’ the brothel! Son of sixteen, pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire, With it beat out his brains! Piety, and fear, Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, Degrees, observances, customs, and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries, And let confusion live! Plagues, incident to men, Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners. Lust and liberty Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth, That ’gainst the stream of virtue they may strive, And drown themselves in riot! Itches, blains, Sow all the Athenian bosoms; and their crop



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Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath, at their society, as their friendship, merely poison! Nothing I’ll bear from thee, But nakedness, thou detestable town! Take thou that too, with multiplying bans! Timon will to the woods; where he shall find The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. The gods confound – hear me, you good gods all – The Athenians both within and out that wall! And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow To the whole race of mankind, high and low! Amen.15 Timon’s appeal for rebellion in the inverted world began a process by which Europeans learned to look soberly at their relationships – far removed from feudal transfiguration and aristocratic mystification. One day Marx, writing in the Communist Manifesto, would reclaim Timon’s sobriety for the revolution. Revolution is a modern name for the call that was already a call to departure in Antiquity, the call to break out from the false city. The city of money is the inverted world; where do we find a world that stands on its feet?

6 The sixth witness represents the Anchorite or hermit revolution of late Antiquity that engendered, first, Oriental and, later, Western monasticism. This was the source of the communism of the Western monastery and the spiritual movements. It is obvious that the retreat of hermits from the city can only be understood in terms of extrapolating impulses that had already been explored. The oldest Anchorite thought was the pursuit of Platonism, kynicism and the philosophy of Timon by other means – and from that time on the other means were primarily Christian and Gnostic. If we try to bring Plato’s heaven, Diogenes’ trash can and Timon’s forest together in one place, we arrive directly in the Egyptian desert, a day’s hike south of Alexandria, where the first athletes of Christ wanted to challenge and annihilate the world with their exercises. The patriarch of the Desert Fathers was Anthony, a young Christian who left his city to coerce his soul to blissfulness in the empty graves from the time of the Pharaohs. The Anchorite revolution that swept the whole of Egypt, Palestine and Syria with a mood of desert madness between the third and the sixth century anticipated the relative psycho-political collapse of the ancient polis. It may have been business as usual in the city in the millennium

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between Pericles and Theodosius, but the souls of city dwellers had experienced too much for them to carry on playing the same simple game of contests, victories and fame. They would have been compelled to realize that desire was dreaming of more ambitious goals. Diogenes must have seen out of the corner of his eye that somebody else was surpassing him in trying to see the world with universal eyes. Alexander of Macedonia was the first person who was sufficiently unrestrained and enough of a genius to boot out Pindar’s abstinence and openly reach for divine honours in his lifetime. Even middle and late Platonism started playing provocatively with the fire of mania and explicitly told its adepts that theosis, the deification of the soul, was the real justification for existence in the best life, the theoretical one. In 27 bc Octavian assumed the divine title of Augustus in Rome and had himself fêted as saviour, deliverer and redeemer. Following that, mere mortals were completely uninteresting for a whole era. Promulgating such mysteries deprived the urban psycho-reactor of its effective fuel rods; the glowing coals of mania burned more slowly and the wish for deification was transformed into urban ambition, its success evaporated and it finally vanished altogether. Instead, souls burned out directly in religious mania or were extinguished in numbed horror of urban daily life. This explains why, until the time of Luther, the West would accept a division of humankind into clergy and lay society cum grano salis; it corresponded closely to the collective psychological reality. In a timespan of over a thousand years there were only two major groups of human beings: those crazy about God and burnt-out souls; it took until the new urban culture of the late Middle Ages for a middle ground of citizens to re-emerge. These citizens combined secular orientations with increased psychological vitality – the matrix of modern non-religious vitality. Christianity scored its first points in the general psycho-political climate of late Antiquity. In the cities it founded a new, initially secret theme for assembling; it exalted the more or less euphoric love relationship between brothers and sisters into an invisible spiritual city; it re-channelled the flight from the city by reinterpreting the desert as the cruel openair temple of the new God who potentially offered salvation. This explains why desert sanctity is yet more than a radical version of Timon’s position; Anthony, Macarius, Onuphrius, Pacomius and the others would not have spent their whole lives in the Theban and Nitrian deserts merely because they loathed Alexandria. For these men, the desert lived because it was the place where God could be sought. Of course the Christian Anchorites benefited from the neoPlatonic removal of inhibitions; certainly for some time by then,



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becoming Zeus had been regarded, at least in Hellenophile circles, as a noble idea and attainable by human beings. The new theosis in the desert was simply the peaking of such trends in a type of Christian athleticism. Hugo Ball’s essay on Byzantine Christianity, published in 1923, contains a very beautiful description of simple Egyptian monks as athletes of mourning, and hermits as athletes of despair.16 Both these clerical types are athletes who specialize in not playing in the city’s games. Their Olympic games were called humility and the goal of their training was not to win in city affairs. Monastic psychology made a frontal attack on the urban ego – it deconstructed the phallic-political type of human who is interested in reputation as reflected in victors, gains security through property, and brags and pays with sexual energy. For the monk the city is nothing but a recharging station for ego batteries that are to be discharged in the desert under the proper rules. The statement of our sixth witness concerns how this discharge is carried out. I shall cite an excerpt from the 52nd Letter written from the desert by Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345–99), in which he chides a brother monk who had tried to draw him back into the urban psycho-sphere with the wrong kind of praise. 1  We are not writing a letter in reply to you, but a very serious reproof because you have sent us a letter that inspires terrible feelings of proud boasting in us! I was disgusted at reading your eulogy, that is, the reward for proud boasting. For it is unseemly to write in that manner to people who have withdrawn from the world and to enfeeble their souls that are weak from passions and that love vanity. 2  Instead, one must write the opposite to you: Remain sitting in the desert, wretched souls, serve God with fasting and prayer, do not look at the world that often made you wretched in many different ways. Remember your old shipwrecks, remember the thieves, how often they brought you low. Do not forget the sea and the wild waves. 3  Remember the stench of greed that comes out of your throat and craves pleasures in plenty. Remember how many shipwrecks the greed for money has caused and how many wars among men it has inspired. Incarcerations and prisons and a multitude of different kinds of torture instruments. For this reason the blessed Apostle, considering these things, aptly called the ‘greed for possession the root of all evil’. But what should we say about ideas of proud boasting or arrogance or about the sudden hurricanes of heresy that have flooded the

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ship and covered the pilot’s intellect? – These and other things should be preached for the ears of those who have abandoned the world. [. . .] Those who write eulogies for somebody who has gone away from the inhabited world is like a man who throws ‘wood or twigs or tow’ into a burning oven to make it burn even more.17 Alexandria’s strength lay in the fact that people in that city truly enjoyed reading such writings. They reassured the city dwellers that they weren’t really missing anything by remaining in their villas and workshops, their canteens and catechism schools, their libraries and brothels, and tirelessly discussing the latest reports of new records in the humility championships out there in the hostile desert.

7 We shall now briefly summarize the hearing of the seventh witness, who is supposed to throw light on the case of the ancient mystery cults in relation to urban life. Most of the trends that emerged in the form of mystery schools from the late Pythagoreans to Adepts of hermeneutics in the third century ad can be seen as wild offshoots of Platonism. We have nothing to add here about their relationship to negative political theory. It is obvious that on the path via the Eleusinian mysteries, the Dionysian cult and the Magna Mater cults, elements of suppressed matriarchal religions remained integrated within the androcentric reality of the polis. This created an immensely far-reaching zone of apolitical female attitudes. From an overall perspective this is the zone of those who endure the city rather than shape it. But in Athens there was already a proud silence convinced that the world supported its suffering.18 When passivity is designed as sovereignty it creates a counterworld to the realm in which people are active, visible and prominent. Perhaps we should see the ancient mystery cults essentially as apolitical schools for passivity and passion. Let me consider for a moment the idea that sustainable nocturnal cultures would be impossible if they were not balanced out with idiosyncratic ideas about passion, or the suffering of Christ. What we call high cultures are power structures that use their schools of passion to maintain this balance. To explain this superficially it may be enough to follow Aristotle’s famous advice that ‘those initiated into the mysteries’ (the teloumenoi in the original Greek) should stop learning, mathein, and start suffering, pathein. Yet suffering, whatever that may mean in this case, has no place in the spectrum of active, male, urban modes.



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It translates the patients of mysteries far beyond the visible city. Compared to the pathos of mystery, the fortune and misfortune of outer urban destinies no longer played such an important role for souls. But the bourgeois masculine adept only attained the mystery through a quasi-feminine inversion; he had to suffer his life’s direction being turned inside out, away from the marketplace towards an almost unreachable cell buried deep inside the ‘innermost self’. This is why our seventh witness is a passage from the Gnostic work The Exegesis on the Soul, a text on sexual mysticism from a psychological and educational perspective from the Codex II found at Nag Hammadi. Probably inspired by the Simonian school of Gnostics, it was written towards the end of the second century ad. Until the day when the soul runs everywhere, in which it has sexual intercourse with anybody it meets, in which it becomes defiled, it is under the anguish of those it is obliged to accept. But if it perceives the pain in which it is, and weeps to the Father and repents, then the Father will have mercy on it and invert its womb, it will turn from the outer side inwards again, while the soul will retain its individuality. In fact, they are not feminine; for the wombs of the body are inside the body like the intestines. The womb of the soul, however, surrounds the outer side like the male characteristics, which are outside. Now, when the womb of the soul turns inwards according to the will of the Father, it submerges and is immediately cleansed of the defilement of the outer side [. . .].19 This Gnostic document is important because it makes us realize that the quintessence of the mysteries is found not in wild ecstasies, heavenly soul journeys, visits to the dead and suchlike, but in an apolitical or meta-political introversion. It is noteworthy that castration and depoliticization must be expressed by the same symbols. By means of the mysteries, city dwellers critical of the city achieve their incorporation into the great inner empires where other rules apply than those of genital procreation. The transfer – paradosis – of civil rights in the inner worlds occurs through non-sexual conceptions. This is why evolved and interesting cities are always rather wanton in metaphysical terms. The time will come when people will regard every city that does not resonate with daily news from the empires of the introverted as being extinct. There is good reason why the world cities of Athens, Alexandria and Rome were also bastions of the mystery cults.

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8 The eighth witness will inform us as briefly as possible about idyllicism, the doctrine of the idyll, as both an urban and an urbancritical genre. Idyllicism is the metaphysics of the vacation; vacation originally meant the right or privilege to take one’s leave from social ties and obligations. Historically, idyllicism arose in the Magna Graecia, its birthplace was Syracuse and it chose to reside later in Alexandria because the founder of the genre, the poet Theocritus, who was born probably around 280 bc in the historic Sicilian city, later lived in the Egyptian metropolis under his sponsor Ptolemy II Philadelphos. As a citizen of the two Greek worlds, Theocritus knew how to address city dwellers who were tired of the city. He was the inventor of the postcard – the eidyllion, or idyll, the little picture that people sent from Sicily to friends and relations in the city, and later from Arcadia, Ireland and the Algarve as well. Idylls are verbal postcards – they show the eternal sunset in the south over hills where eternally fresh springs bubble under eternally shady trees. Their heathens are the simple people in Sicily, the bukoloi, actually cowherds that the bucolics of a later age made into shepherds because sheep on postcards convey better than cows the impression of harmlessness and peaceful authenticity. Theocritus’ great invention forced all the better European cities to set up idyll kiosks and idyll post offices where the innumerable greetings from the simple life could be posted. All modern travel agencies are successors to the Attic idyll kiosks. Back in Antiquity, a kind of idyll critique soon developed – for everybody liked getting postcards, even if they reacted in different ways. They could look at them and enjoy the kitsch and see through them and look down on the kitsch and enjoy that. The result was that clever people were soon swarming around the villas explaining to their familiares why they thought some of the little pictures were not as authentic as others. The Graeco-Roman practice of sending postcards also had a very practical, serious aspect. It confirmed the rich city dweller’s opinion that to be a human being in the full sense of the term, apart from a city residence one had to have a house in the postcard where one could return to being like the farmers and shepherds. A city dweller is therefore a person who has ideas and idylls – and the right buildings for enjoying both, academies here and holiday homes there. The ancient wish to own land, without which it is impossible to imagine the centuries of Roman culture, was just the result of political idyllicism taken to its ultimate conclusion – regardless of whether we are talking about a bourgeois Tusculum or an imperial Tivoli. This was



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taken to such an extreme in Virgil’s work that a poet declared the idyll internally to the city’s inhabitants in rather the same way that war was declared on external enemies. Ernst Bloch used the term ‘militant Pastorale’ to refer to the nationalist blood-and-soil cult of the land in Germany in the 1920s,20 and with this in mind we read Virgil’s grandiosely vague Fourth Eclogue from his pastoral poems with different, mixed feelings. The most powerful idyll proclaims Rome’s aspiration to total vacations in an intact world that has returned: Unbidden, the goats will bring home their udders swollen with milk, and the cattle will not fear huge lions. The serpent, too, will perish, and perish will the plant that hides its poison; Assyrian spice will spring up on every soil. But as soon as you can read of the glories of heroes and your father’s deeds, and can know what valour is, slowly will the plains yellow with the waving corn, on wild brambles the purple grape will hang, and the stubborn oak distil dewy honey. [. . .] even the trader will quit the sea, nor will the ship of pine exchange wares; every land will bear all fruits. Earth will not suffer the harrow, nor the vine the pruning hook; the sturdy ploughman, too, will now loose his oxen from the yoke.  No more will wool be taught to put on varied hues, but of himself the ram in the meadows will change his fleece, now to sweetly blushing purple, now to a saffron yellow; and scarlet shall clothe the grazing lambs at will.21 When the idyll goes for the jackpot, the postcard becomes the picture of the world and the whole of reworked Nature is incorporated into an amazing holiday. Europeans should never forget that the main dictum of Virgil’s Eclogue, novus ordo saeclorum, is written on the Great Seal of the United States and thus on every dollar. Each dollar is a down payment on the last idyll. Fortunately, in normal times the desire for redemption of the city, complete with its industrious principle, is less acute. The average New Yorker is content with a holiday home in the Berkshires, at Lake George, in the Adirondacks, at best in the Catskills, which Manhattan insiders call the Jewish Alps. Europeans, too, have preserved the human right to idylls for the modern age. In London the weekend was invented almost three hundred years ago to enable the gentlemen of the Lower House of Parliament to spend at least part of the week as their human dignity required, in other words, at a country home. And for some time now, today’s Germans from Hamburg,

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Düsseldorf and Munich, even if they don’t own a farmhouse in Tuscany, have no longer had any alternative to the journey through traffic jams into the idyll.

9 To conclude, the ninth witness will tell us about betrayal of the city, and the tenth about urban aesthetics. My task will be to collect evidence for the thesis that a close but unsuspected connection exists between the two. We know now that the polis is a psychodynamic reactor in which human beings’ mad desire is intended to be brought under control to fuel democratic goals. If the city stokes up ambitions that can no longer be spent within its own walls, then it will produce its own traitors. Plutarch summed this up classically by referring to Alcibiades’ splendid talents as rightfully inducing the Athenians to make very contradictory judgements. The poet Aristophanes described the problem early on with a metaphor: ‘It is best not to rear a lion in the city, but if you must, you had better humour its ways’ (The Frogs, V. 1432/3). Athens’ psychodrama of rearing lions that play with the state and finally break out of it and tear it to pieces appears in a highly concentrated form in an anecdote by Plutarch: Once, when Alcibiades succeeded well in an oration which he made, and the whole assembly attended upon him to do him honour, Timon the misanthrope did not pass slightly by him, nor avoid him, as he did others, but purposely met him, and, taking him by the hand, said, ‘Go on boldly, my son, and increase in credit with the people, for thou wilt one day bring them calamities enough.’ Some that were present laughed at the saying, and some reviled Timon; but there were others upon whom it made a deep impression; so various was the judgment which was made of him, and so irregular his own character.22 Although Plutarch lived nearly five hundred years after the scene described above, he could still sense that he was touching on a dangerous secret. By retelling Antiquity’s most obscure political anecdote, he gave a brief glimpse of the risks of breeding human beings for politics and high culture. He had his reasons for quoting in that same passage the words of a wise Athenian, Archestratos, who said that Greece would not be able to stand two Alcibiades.23 It is not difficult to imagine Plutarch himself saying what I will now posthumously attribute to him: the most gifted and handsome



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city dweller, the enchanting youth Alcibiades, who radiates intelligence, energy, ambition and visions, is an urban monstrosity. He is the city dweller who combines all the best characteristics of the typical city to such a degree that his fellow men see him as a monster and he is compelled to behave like one towards them. Alcibiades’ betrayal of Athens ensued only because Athens, by uniting the best options in one individual, created a monstrous figure that naturally rose above his city. If Pericles did not exist as the positively contrasting monster that flourished totally within the concerns of Athens, Alcibiades would stand alone as the prime product of Greek human breeding in the context of urban politics. As for the later king’s son, Alexander, although he played with cities, laid waste to cities and founded cities, he was by no means a city dweller. Alexander and Alcibiades were both political beings whose immense potential reached out into the realms of the apolitical. Plutarch described Alcibiades’ enchanting, extravagant character in Chapter 23 of his biography: For he had, as it was observed, this peculiar talent and artifice for gaining men’s affections, that he could at once comply with and really embrace and enter into their habits and ways of life, and change faster than the chameleon. One colour, indeed, they say the chameleon cannot assume: it cannot itself appear white; but Alcibiades, whether with good men or with bad, could adapt himself to his company, and equally wear the appearance of virtue or vice. At Sparta, he was devoted to athletic exercises, was frugal and reserved; in Ionia, luxurious, gay, and indolent; in Thrace, always drinking; in Thessaly, ever on horseback; and when he lived with Tisaphernes the Persian satrap, he exceeded the Persians themselves in magnificence and pomp.24 At this point we are almost inevitably reminded of Nietzsche’s controversy with Wagner over the rise of the theatrical type. Wagner had created his own Olympus in Bayreuth, where he was able to lord it over the Germans as an artistic god and rogue – a German entry into the present-day star system. Alcibiades started his games for social success in Athens, competing informally with gods and heroes. While leading a fleet on a campaign far from the city he was sentenced to death for the crime of mimicking the Eleusinian Mysteries and insulting the goddesses during drinking bouts; he was accused of having worn priestly robes and arrogantly addressing his friends as initiates and illuminates (epoptai). (As is often the case with someone highly gifted, it’s difficult to tell whether he did this seriously or as a joke.) When Alcibiades heard about the

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j­udgement he completely renounced his fatherland, entered the service of Sparta and waged war against Athens – almost as if he wanted to make Timon’s evil greetings a reality. Meanwhile Athens, for its part, was obliged to be grateful when the traitor returned to be celebrated by the Athenians, whose admiration pleased him most of all. When cities decay they become stopping-off points on tours by demigods and monsters.

10 This brings us effectively to the end of our course in negative political theory. Any modern reader can easily understand the moral of the Alcibiades story. Our age is justifiably called the century of wolves. It could have been called the century of monsters – or, more critically, the century of the catastrophic breeding of urban monsters. Nowadays we understand the justification for such formulations a little better. The European city is a powerhouse of ambition that eventually causes losses for its operators. The most gifted creatures bred by cities shoot beyond them like living satellites. Great careers generally lead out of cities and hardly ever back to them again; at most they pass through them. In the end, the madness of the best persons has little to offer city politics – it is precisely the best who are condemned for treason. (For a long time Hans Jürgen Syberberg, the Alcibiades of Munich, has been unable to do anything in Germany that would correspond to his potential; nowadays he is only able to do large projects abroad.25) In the age of globalization, evolution has rapidly moved beyond the city and has deprived it of the role of a fatherland. Those who move factories to locations on the cheaper periphery are no longer seen as traitors; and people who hide capital in tax havens no longer betray anything except the profit instinct, which is seen as healthy. If some people move their jobs from the public sector to working in industry and banking, the only ones who can criticize them are those who can stop them: nobody. If leading research scientists, famous directors, conductors, Formula 1 drivers and top managers switch to a different camp, they have the right to do so and it is what everybody expects from them anyway. Lopez26 is only a typical Alcibiades of capital. We should note, however, that world capital today can afford not just two Alcibiades, but two thousand. The city, on the other hand, even the most powerful city, will gradually realize that it cannot carry on behaving as if it is still the subject of some story or another. People who hold out in the city can only try to prove their usefulness sometime, some-



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where, to someone – if necessary, just to themselves. Or, like our last witness, they can dream of a sovereignty that is at the same time both absolutely urban and absolutely apolitical. The last politics of the city is the aesthetic defence of the city. Let us hear Baudelaire once again as the witness for the modern age. His prose poem ‘Les foules’ [‘The Crowd’] shows how the political city is betrayed by its aesthetic defence. It is not given to everyone to blend into the multitude: enjoying the crowd is an art and only he can gain a stroke of vitality from it, at humanity’s expense, whose good fairy at his cradle bequeathed a taste for travesty and masque, along with hatred of home and passion for travel. Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and productive poet. Those who cannot people their solitude can never be alone in a busy crowd. The poet rejoices in the incomparable privilege, that he can, at will, be both himself and another. Like a lost soul searching for a body, he enters when he wishes into any character. For him all is vacancy; and if certain places appear to shut him out, in his eye they are not worth a visit. Who walks alone with his thoughts draws a singular intoxication from this universal communion. Whoever readily commingles with the crowd knows feverish pleasures eternally denied to the egoist, locked like a strongbox, or the sloth, confined like the snail. He takes on himself all professions, all the joys and all the miseries that circumstances hand him. What men call love is petty, limited, feeble compared with this ineffable orgy, with this sacred whoredom of the soul which renders itself entire, poetry and charity, to the sudden unexpected, to the passing unknown. It is good sometimes to remind the favored of this world, were it only to bring down their stupid pride, that there are felicities greater than theirs, larger, more refined. Founders of colonies, pastors of their people, missionaries exiled to the end of the world, no doubt know something of these mysterious intoxications; and in the bosom of the vast family that their spirit has formed, they must sometimes laugh at those who pity their so troubled fortunes and so chaste lives.27 The poet, as a Catholic snob and a mystic, has no qualms about confronting the arrogance of the big city challenge. His flexible soul wishes to be the place in which the city mingles with all its inhabitants. The synaesthetic orgy is the price for the attempt to

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communicate with everyone who lives with close neighbours in metropolitan areas. His communion with them all shows that even the saint in the city must necessarily become a monstrosity: he is the monster that the increasingly monstrous urban world brings into human focus. However, the attempt to be everything to everybody does not create an apostle but somebody who prostitutes his or her integrity. I shall conclude with a remark related to the diagnosis of our times. Today I believe we have more than one reason to rethink Pindar’s reminder of politics for mortal human beings. The two and a half thousand years of European experiences with human beings, gods and monsters are obviously impressive; they show that if we want to understand cities and states, we have to understand something of their inhabitants’ madness. The Parisian prince of the opera, Jacques Offenbach, never missed an opportunity to declare: ‘I don’t understand anything about politics’ – and why should he? His musical theatre made him the psychiatrist of the bourgeoisie in a direct fashion. This much is clear in our times: mere politicization is no longer helpful to humankind. To be sure, there was, and still is, a political awakening from apolitical dreams. In fact, the revolutionary new age wished to be nothing but an awakening of this kind; but there is also an apolitical awakening from political dreams – since the days of Plato, moments of this other kind of wakefulness have shimmered through Europeans’ consciousness. In places where neither of these two forms of awakening occurs, the body politic perishes. City life for the citizens of Western Rome in the fourth and fifth century still consisted mainly of waiting for the barbarians; for the people of Byzantium in the fifteenth century it was waiting for the Turks. Many Europeans today act as if their only choice is to wait for the monsters – or for the prospect of civil war. If we wish to refute these tired contemporaries of ours, these dead souls from the Atlantic to the Urals, the best way is to give plenty of examples showing that recombining the two forms of wakefulness in new ways produces new arts of living.

ARCHITECTS DO NOTHING BUT ‘INSIDE THEORY’ Peter Sloterdijk in Conversation with Sabine Kraft and Nikolaus Kuhnert

archplus: Mr Sloterdijk, in your Spheres1 trilogy you attempt to sketch a philosophical theory that conceives space as a central category. Why? Sloterdijk: Because human beings themselves are an effect of the space they have been able to create. All previous generations were aware to some extent that humans do not camp out in nature. The camps of prehistoric humans already began as a minimal structure based on distance, which shows that beings like us live under a particular spatial principle of assembly. The oldest camps date back over a million years, far beyond the prehistory of Homo sapiens. They show that the whole of human development can only be understood in relation to the secret of spatial construction for anthropogenesis. This monster of a book with its two and a half thousand pages should actually be called Being and Space, rather than Spheres. But the times for working on ontological theory are over. So I have settled for something more contemporary, for a constructivist and anthropological style of theory. The third volume of your trilogy contains a detailed discussion on architecture that includes the sections ‘Cell Building’ and ‘Foam City’. The chapter as a whole is titled ‘Indoors: Architectures of Foam’. It is not clear from the discussion why you chose that title. Indeed, why can’t we simply carry on with the old cosmology that was built on the equivalence of the house and the world? For that very reason. The whole of classical metaphysics is a figment of the

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imagination based on an implicit theme that is only openly revealed in a few places, such as in the work of Hegel and other authors. It says that the world is like a house and that human beings are not only mortals but also people who live in dwellings. In other words, humans are fundamentally creatures that reside. Their relationship to the world as a whole is a relationship of residence. The question is: Why does modernist thought depart from this equivalence between world and house? Why do we need a new metaphor to describe the manner in which human beings establish themselves in their own spatial structures? And why do I propose the concept ‘foam’? The answer is, quite simply, because we no longer need a universal house but rather a unité d’habitation, a habitation unit, a conglomerate or stackable mass of habitable cells. The idea of the cell abides by the spherical imperative, but instead of the cells stacked in a house producing the classical form of ‘world house’ it produces foam – solid foam as a multiplicity of individual worlds. I emphasize the individualistic aspect of the self-construction of these cells with so much feeling because the plural character of the cell conglomerate is important. For the early modernist architects, the quasi-­metaphysical imperative of the new architecture with its slogan ‘Support the individual’s need for world education!’ was obviously felt much more keenly than it is by their present-day counterparts, who have long since regarded it as self-evident. Is the collapse of the world house or of the all-embracing sphere into foam bubbles an entropic image? Not only entropy is involved, but also negative entropy – what I call ‘negentropy’ – because things are much more complex nowadays than was possible under the concept of unity. Let’s not forget that metaphysics is the realm of great simplification, which explains its comforting effect. Where does the energy for this negative entropy come from? From the friction between the cosmoplastic plans, the worldcreating designs of individuals. In earlier times individuals were much more heavily involved in the collective enterprise of creating something like a shared cosmos. You could say that the world picture itself had performed the function of a collector. Today we release the cosmoplastic energies of individuals and build up much more energy with them. The result is not easy to express as a totality; it cannot be represented as a rounded whole like the huge Ball of Being of metaphysics, which was supposed to serve as a universal



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vessel, a container for everybody together. When we are sitting in foam we cannot even imagine being able to see into the neighbouring cell.

Explication Explication as a figure of thought acts as a guiding thread all through the third volume of Spheres. For example, in the introduction to ‘Architectures of Foam’ you write that the modern age makes dwelling explicit. What do you mean by that? Walter Benjamin, in his Arcades project, was the first person to attempt to depict an architectural form as a historical-philosophical phenomenon. This involves an idea connected with our theme of explication. Benjamin’s great intuition consisted in looking more intently than earlier generations of scientists had done at the role that people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played as creators of milieus, or, even better, as creators of interiors. In other words, he saw the building of interiors as a timeless motif in the sense that human beings always have the need to construct an ‘inside’, an interior for themselves. At the same time, as a historical materialist, he wanted to emancipate this anthropological motif from its apparent timelessness. Consequently he asked: ‘What does the capitalist man do with his need for an interior?’ The answer was clear: he will use the most advanced contemporary technology to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs. He takes cast-iron, glass, the constructive possibilities of new pillar technology; his technique combines prefabricated elements. Paxton’s Crystal Palace with its famously short construction period of only eight months represented the triumph of this technology. Arcades are such provocative structures for Benjamin because the market, a type of space that had seemed until then to be the epitome of openness in the polis, is drawn inwards. Although markets built inside halls were an older trend, it was exciting and shocking for hermeneutic interpreters of capital like Benjamin that capitalism adopted the architectural possibility, firstly, of drawing the forum effect inwards, and, secondly, of inverting the interior effect, that is, the salon, outwards. These two tendencies meet in the arcade. The citizen wants to bring the world, the cosmos, into his salon; to some extent he wants to impose the dogmatic form of the room onto the universe. From this perspective, he no longer wants to go out at all. Benjamin thought he could decipher the need to dispense with the outside world in the deepest interior of the capitalist dynamic. He

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was naturally projecting from his own personal structure, for real capitalists, in fact, are quite different from Benjamin’s ­assumptions – they go outside, they are sea voyagers and they flee from interiors. Benjamin lent an anthropological perspective to a piece of his own scholarly neurosis, but that is not our problem. The author’s handicap turned out to be heuristically fruitful because he could project exactly the point at which he could count on the cooperation of reality. In fact, that is always the fruitful moment: when reality is more neurotic than the neurotic person, it is enough to look through the lens of personal disturbance to identify the situation. Benjamin is a perfect example of this. In his own way he felt the need of the capitalist man of private means to exist as a pure hothouse plant. Like that man, Benjamin wanted to bring the world inside and completely aestheticize it to satisfy his need for security and immunization. A passage in Corbusier’s writings states that the choice is between revolution and architecture. He decided in favour of architecture. In your terms it would mean he decided in favour of the explication of new living conditions. And then he no longer needed a revolution because revolution is only a false description of explication. In a wicked passage in the introduction of Spheres III, referring to Bruno Latour, I say this even more sharply: ‘We were never revolutionary.’ Basically the twentieth century became almost completely trapped in its own linguistic games. We must remove two dangerous categories from its vocabulary: one is the concept of revolution, which only belongs in marketing nowadays, and the other is the concept of masses, which is also no longer usable in an affirmative sense. If such a thing as an effective (so-called revolutionary) change of reality actually exists, then we will see it in the sense that a new technology develops the implications of something that is happening in life, transforming and propelling it forward in the process. In this respect Corbusier was completely right. A technician always decides in favour of advancing technology. Everything that is successful is operative and he or she is not really interested in the symbolic accompanying noises. People no longer ask which programs will be announced but which programs will be written. This is the operative infiltration of existing conditions. Mere symbolic announcements have no effect at all, but anything that promulgates and popularizes hand movements and allows other people to make hand movements they have never made before has an impact. Modern apartments are full of technical gadgets that explicate life in the household (although now,



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rather than having grips, which belong to the obsolete phase of tools with handles, these gadgets have buttons, for we have reached the world of fingertip operations). To return to Benjamin: can we use the historical-philosophical interpretation of contemporary architectural phenomena to re-trace how implicit issues become explicit? Is this a kind of guiding theme of the Spheres project? In this context Benjamin is usually read as the hermeneutic analyst of capital, as somebody who discovered a coded script of reality in a parallel act to Freud and who proposed a sort of dream interpretation of capitalism. Just as Freud propagated the interpretation of dreams of the individual soul, Benjamin promoted the dream interpretation of the money system. He left the aspect related to spatial philosophy in the background. Despite this, Benjamin evidently understood that behind every form of spatial creation is a problem of transference. Human beings are creatures who move house, who change to another space or even a different element. In other words, they move constantly from A to B, and if they are as they are it is because they always bring with them the memory of another space in which they have been. Furnishing and decorating, producing spaces, is based on a difference. We cannot create an absolute space, nor a completely new one. Instead, we always create a differential space that is furnished in comparison to another space. Benjamin had understood that human individuals could have a unique transference dynamic. From this he deduced the fact that we are born as creatures equipped with a prenatal memory and prenatal spatial remembrance. The constellation of woman and space cannot be entirely eliminated, even with the modern gynophobia. Whatever the architecture, the question as to how far the coding of an interior is feminine remains relevant in the sense that building serves the purposes of dwelling. To the extent that human beings operate as dwelling creatures, they move in an energy field where the creation of the interior is influenced by feminine transference.

Intimacy Is that the argument developed in Spheres I: Bubbles? Spheres I is essentially devoted to exploring a powerful concept of intimacy – in an explicitly regressive movement. In this book I approach the topic of ‘being in’ in reverse gear, so to speak. First, I

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look at the phenomenon of interfaciality: when human beings look at other human beings it creates a non-trivial space – the interfacial space – that we cannot interpret physically. It is useless for me to measure the distance between the tip of my nose and theirs with a tape measure. The interfacial relationship creates a completely unique type of spatial relationship. I describe this spatial relationship from the perspective of mother–child interfaciality and trace it back to the animal kingdom. My next step tries to interpret the images of the intercordial relationship that arises when humans interrelate so emotionally that two hearts create a resonance chamber together – the metaphorical factor becomes more important here. And then I tiptoe around the most intimate relationship that exists because, from the perspective of the new life coming into the world, women are habitable. Women’s bodies are dwelling places! Behind this shocking thesis, a natural history perspective emerges that I examine under the heading ‘The Egg Principle’. As we know, among birds and insects, and among the great majority of species, the fertilized egg, the carrier of genetic information, is laid in an outside environment that must have certain external characteristics of the uterus. At this juncture something quite incredible happened in the evolutionary line that leads to the mammals: the body of the female specimen of the species was defined as the ecological niche of the species’ own progeny. To some extent that is a dramatic turn in evolution. We could say that a double usage of the female specimen occurs: not only that she lays eggs, in which case her role as an ovulation system wholly suffices for the definition of femininity, but rather that the eggs are laid inside her and she is occupied as the ecological niche of her own progeny. This is how women became integral mother animals. Moreover, a kind of event arose that never previously existed in the world, namely being born as a product of this total milieu. And because birth is a biologically ambitious event with ontological consequences, it is important to stick to this moment with the ultimate indiscretion. Does the transference of this primary fundamental experience seem to you to be an extremely virulent theme in spatial imagery? Absolutely. Because if we use the concept of transference from psychoanalysis, is it possible to ask how living creatures who carry the trace of being born will construct themselves? The answer will be that they will probably do it in such a way as to build a minimal trace of that archaic sense of being protected into their later shells. We should note that transference evidently does not relate to



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feelings, nor to confused affects, but to the process of spatial creation as a whole. The construction of casings for life generates a series of uterus repetitions in outside environments. This does not explain variations in spatial needs. Not all of them transmit the wish for archaic protection in this form. Many people feel extremely trapped in small spaces. There are the so-called cave dwellers and tree dwellers. Spheres theory is not trying to explain everything. It is not a universal theory but a detailed kind of spatial interpretation. Incidentally, one can also elucidate very different kinds of spatial types in terms of the prenatal perspective – wide oceanic spaces on the one hand and hellishly tight ones on the other. As I have said, Spheres 1 discusses microspherological phenomena. By microspherology I mean the description of the effects of intimate space. They are always seen interpersonally and I find the paradigm for this in the dyadic relationship. I show how we should actually conceive the dyad and I trace it back to a prenatal proto-intersubjectivity. I discover that the question is less about a mother–child relationship than about a child–placenta relationship. In other words, the original duplication occurred on a pre-personal level and the mother only entered the picture later, after the deepest possible regression exercises through the discovery of the so-called psychoacoustic navel. My results are based on Alfred Tomatis and other authors who have worked in this delicate field. They describe the foetal ear as the organ of primary bonding. That is quite exciting for people who wish to believe it but meaningless for those who do not accept the topic as valid. What does that mean in relation to a contemporary explication? Or does ‘explication’ in this context mean that we can detect implicit content with contemporary analytical tools? It is not only the analytical tools that give us access to specific elements of living relationships such as dwelling, working or loving; it is not only a cognitive process that is in progress. What we are dealing with here is a real process of working something out. That can be understood simply with a form of expressive logic or production logic. In this case, of course, I am in line with the tradition of Marxist anthropology. If it is true that we have to look at the whole of natural history to explain the formation of the human hand, then it follows that we have to consider the whole of cultural history to understand why we can do psychoacoustics today. Anyone who

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works anthropologically always has to try to date his or her own anthropological theses. This leads us to observe that everything Hegel and his contemporaries described as the phenomenology of mind – including a wildly over-optimistic teleological interpretation of process – can be rewritten again as the history of explication. Not everything that exists implicitly becomes explicit. An explication will only relate to the parts of living relationships that have been developed by contemporary technology. For technology – and this is actually the book’s basic assumption – is the attempt to replace naturally arising or religious and symbolic immune systems with explicit technical immune systems. If you want to replace something, you have to understand it better than a mere user does. If you want to make an artificial limb, you must precisely define the organ to be replaced. This takes you from the concrete function statement up to the general situation and then back down again to the possible functional equivalent – which is just how functionalists work. They always start from the question: ‘What does the system in its present form achieve?’ And: ‘What can we do instead?’ Architects understand that very well. What are the characteristics of the space formed by intimacy? What does it achieve? It is certainly a pre-geometric space. How can we replace it with technical methods? Architects would probably immediately have the associative idea: ‘We must build cosy corners!’ That wouldn’t be too far wrong. If we ask what a cosy corner represents, in functional analysis we arrive at the term ‘primacy of the protecting atmosphere’. And when we have recognized the primacy of the protecting atmosphere – in fact, the primacy of the atmospheric factor at all –, architects can deduce that they should not take geometric ideologies as their starting point. Instead they should be thinking in terms of atmospheric spatial effects. That requires translation. After all, intimacy is first and foremost an intersubjective category that can be thought about or expressed in different spatial terms. I think of intersubjectivity as its own kind of spatial relationship. It took the first seven hundred pages of the Spheres project – the entire first volume – to construct a non-geometric, non-physical concept of spatiality. Its strong characteristic is that, by being together, beings of the human type evoke the sense of reciprocal accommodation. An amorous couple provides a clear example: the lovers are already together in some way or another and the question ‘Your place or



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mine?’ is actually secondary. Incidentally, this is a lovely example of an explication: this state of togetherness and going somewhere as people who are already together is the gestural explanation of what was already implicitly present by being together but now emerges explicitly. That is also why Spheres I includes a theory of the bedroom, as well as a little theory of the bed or of the anonymous self-completer. Balzac’s theory of the bed is, to be precise, also a spatial theory. Do you refer to it? Unfortunately not, but I refer to other sources. In relation to the phenomenon of bed, what interests me most of all is the pillow and the eiderdown because I want to show that there is a kind of intimate cohabitation that remains entirely within the pre-personal realm. Many people would rather divorce their spouse than part with their pillow. Human beings always set up an inconspicuous completer around them. The cultural history of sleep is itself a history of explication of these nocturnal self-completers with the aid of sleep helpers, if you like, who are technically represented in the history. Covering oneself is a gesture of acknowledging oneself. It contains the quest for one’s own unmistakable tight space that one sees as assisting sleep. Many people cannot fall asleep without a blanket covering them because they need this minimal completer to give the all-clear signal at night. Your book uses examples of two types of building, apartments and stadiums, to combine the result of different explication processes. ‘Result’ not in the sense of a final outcome but rather as a segment of a continuing process. This brings your discussion onto the contemporary plane of architecture. Some intermediary steps are missing between the ontological grounding of a spatial theory as you developed it in Spheres I and its concrete establishment in historical/contemporary terms.

Insulations Does ‘world island’ mean the whole presence of the world at a place and at a particular time? Yes. Contrary to the generally accepted view so far, the world is not this great whole that God and other jovial observers have spread out before them. Rather, worlds appear in the plural and have an

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insular structure. In some ways islands are extracts from worlds that are inhabited and they can be used as world models. This is why we have to know what is meant by a minimal complete island, an island capable of being a world. In the chapter ‘Insulations’ in my book [Spheres III] I distinguish between three kinds of island: absolute islands such as a space station, which is completely isolated; relative islands such as a hothouse for plants; and anthropogenic islands with a structure that could allow human beings to emerge on them. The anthropogenic island is a self-insulating dynamic system resembling a human incubator. Apes are put in and people come out. How is that possible? If we argue in Darwinist and philosophical terms, how can apes enter into such self-reflexive relationships? How was the anthropogenic engine started? I describe this island as a nine-dimensional space in which each individual dimension has to be given to allow the effect of anthropogenesis, of becoming a human being, to occur. If just one dimension is missing, we fail to get a complete human being. It begins with what I call the chirotope, the space of the hand. What does the hand have to do with anthropogenesis? The answer to this question yields an initial theory of action, an elementary kind of pragmatism. Next, I deal with the phonotope, the auditory space in which the self-hearing group resides. Then comes the uterotope, the space of deep affiliations, followed by the thermotope, the heat spheres or pampering space, and the erototope, the jealousy space and the field of desire. On the latter I would note that the development of species-specific jealousy was extremely important for the process of humanization – because human beings are mimetic animals that never stop jealously and vigilantly watching what other people are doing. Indeed, they even imitate those who successfully pretend not to watch what others are doing. This is followed by the ergotope, the space for war and struggle, the thanatope, the space for coexistence with the dead, in which religious symbols dominate, and finally the nomotope, the space of the legal tensions that give a group normative security. Buckminster Fuller’s theory of tensegrities plays an important role for this aspect. Modern apartment culture can be derived from this general island theory because an apartment will only function if it is convincing as a minimal complete island for an individual.

Dwelling Places Doesn’t this description include the definition of dwelling, of human beings as beings that reside?



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Not really. In my book I develop what dwelling means in a long opening sequence to one of the chapters. I describe step by step how the different dimensions of house dwelling become explicit. You have to understand that houses are, firstly, machines for killing time. Admittedly this is a rather curious theory. In fact, people wait in a primitive farmhouse for a silent event in the fields outside that they cannot influence but that comes regularly, thank God. They wait for the moment when the fruits they have planted ripen. This means that at first people only live in a house because they acknowledge the belief that it is worth waiting for an event outside the house. In the farming world the temporal structure of house dwelling was seen from the perspective of being compelled to wait. This kind of being-in-the-house was first questioned in the Middle Ages when urban culture began to spread in northwestern Europe. Since then, growing sections of the European population have been integrated into a culture of impatience, or being unable to wait. In Goethe’s times only 20 per cent of people were urbanized, and 80 per cent still lived under the old agrarian conditions. Heidegger, whom I regard in this context as the last real philosopher of peasant life, continued to conceive existential time as waiting time and consequently as boredom. The event this waiting leads to is naturally something profoundly simple: that things will become ripe on the field of becoming. The philosopher equates this field with world history without considering that the world of the cities can no longer be field-shaped. In the city, things do not ripen, they are produced. Having defined dwelling as halted existence and the house as a bus or train stop, I move on to the house as a reception centre, as the sorting place for important and unimportant things. The original house is an acclimatization plant. People spend considerable time there, which means they acclimatize unconsciously and their habits unify with their surroundings. When that happens, they have created the background that makes unusual things possible in the first place. In this sense, dwelling is a dialectical practice – it makes itself useful for its opposite. Perhaps we should briefly mention that in this opening sequence you cast Vilém Flusser in the role of Heidegger’s opponent. The arc of suspense could not be greater: where the one argues ontologically, the other makes things technically explicit, and where the one assesses modern human beings’ losses in terms of the past, the other sees things pointing towards a new start. This is why the two men belong together in a wider perspective. My third step develops the theorem of embedding or immersion.

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The philosophical theory of being-in that Heidegger established is extended here. The question of what it means to be inside something is answered. How does it happen? I illustrate these questions with the aid of some statements by Paul Valéry, who interpreted what ‘being-in’ means in terms of the paradigm of architecture. Valéry thought architecture meant that human beings enclose human beings in works made by humans. This touches on the totalitarian side of architecture. Finally, in the fourth stage of the explication the real nervous system of the phenomenon of dwelling is exposed, the definition of the house as an immune system. This is done by focusing particularly on the dimension of atmosphere design, of the air we breathe in the building. Part of the venture of modern architecture is that it has made the apparently immaterial facets of existence, human beings’ stay in an atmospheric environment, technologically and aesthetically explicit. The modern art of housing will not be able to return again behind this level of skill in designing casings for human beings. If you go through these steps in my book, it will be clear what I mean when I claim that the apartment and the sports stadium are the key architectural icons of the twentieth century. At this point we can return to Benjamin’s path once again – but we arrive at different answers to the ones Arcades gave. To conceive the interior nowadays, we first have to practise monadology. One person – one apartment. A monad – a world cell – … ... although it used to be: one bachelor, man or woman – one apartment. That’s right. Modern housing construction is based on a celibate ontology. In the same way as modern biology defines life as the successful phase of an immune system, from the perspective of architectural theory we could define existence as the successful phase of a one-person household. Everything becomes integrated. The world and the household are one. But a one-person existence can only be successful, if at all, because there is architectural support that makes the apartment into a completely artificial world. In other words, the early modernist architects were right to see themselves as portraying humanity. Eliminating the megalomania factor leaves us with the fact that the architects of the first one-person apartments enabled a historically singular type of human being on a mass scale – at most this was prefigured by the Christian ascetics.



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Individuation You describe the apartment as a studio of relationships with the self. Considering that human history began with the formation of hordes, with a rudimentary form of division of labour during hunting, the emergence of this type of human being with its singular reproduction, a being that can live almost autonomously, is rather disturbing. Two questions about this. Earlier you described intimacy, dyadic intimacy, as spatially constituent. What remains of this in apartment culture? And are there any forms of spatially significant coexistence between the extremes of single and masses, isolation and assembly? The first question is easier to answer. The apartment individualists have discovered a process by which people as singles can create a couple with themselves. This happens in such a way that the person selects the ‘event’ setting for his or her own life – in other words, the mode of judgemental observation. Individuals in event culture constantly differentiate themselves from themselves. They can choose their own self as their interior Other. Strong individualism presupposes that one keeps the second pole and the other poles that belong to a completely rounded personality structure inside oneself. This psycho-structural possibility is prefigured in ancient European culture; its origins can be traced back to Antiquity. The classical examples are the hermit monks who went to the Theban desert to the south of Alexandria, a few days’ walking distance, and settled there to pray. As far as we know, they had a fairly rich interior life. The most famous of them, St Anthony, was visited so often by torturing spirits that he could not be described as being alone. In modern terms we would say he lived with his hallucinations as roommates. Nowadays he would probably be in a psychiatric hospital and dosed with tranquillizers. What is the difference between this extreme form of individuation and autism? Autistic people do not have the degree of inner space that allows them to be in their own company. The idea of individuals’ structure of self-completion in interaction with themselves is deeply rooted in media anthropology and only explicable in terms of media history. The minimal formal conditions for self-completion are that a so-called single is integrated into a dyad – whether with real or imaginary Others. The question of the social life of isolated people is more difficult.

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What will become of the animal from the small group Homo sapiens if it sits there in its pure individual representation as the sole inhabitant of its world apartment? The question is worrying. Two possible answers come to mind: the first one would be that the individual imitates the whole horde. That implies the task of representing twelve people in one’s interior. In the absence of the real Other, this is how a complete social structure would necessarily be simulated. In psychology the formation of a multiple personality is seen as a symptom of illness, as the development of a seriously disturbed personality. From our point of view the multiple personality would be nothing but the individual’s response to the disappearance of the real social environment. It would be a plausible reaction to chronic social under-challenging. The other possibility comes from modern practices of networking. The horde returns as the address book. Physical proximity is no longer a necessary condition for sociability. The future belongs to telesocialism. The past returns as the life of telehordes. Under the heading ‘Dialectic of Modernization’ you describe how the empty centre of society becomes filled with illusory images of the centre. In Spheres III I try to explain why the concept of society should vanish from our vocabulary along with the concepts of revolution and masses. This human conglomerate that has been called society since the eighteenth century is built on monadological or nuclear units of life forms. Moreover, we can also see that it contains numerous milieu hordes, specific groupings that organize as subcultures. Think of the world of horse lovers – a huge subculture you could lose yourself in for your whole life, yet it is nearly invisible if you are not a member yourself. There are hundreds of other such milieus in the social field at present, all typically constituting the centre of the world themselves and barely existing for others. I describe them as inter-ignorant or mutually ignorant systems. They are necessarily set up in a way that they can’t or shouldn’t know each other, otherwise their members would be cheated of enjoying their specialization and exclusiveness. If you had encyclopaedic tendencies and peeked into hundreds of scenes, you would get nothing out of it. In terms of profession there are only two or three types of person who can afford such polyvalence. In the first place there are architects, who – at least virtually – build for everybody; then novelists, who



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put people from all kinds of different scenes into their novels; and lastly clerics, who have to make graveside speeches for all sorts of odd people. And the list ends there. In other words, the multiple personality, on the one hand, and single networking, on the other; those are the two possibilities for completion that I see operating in individualist populations. Doubtless the predisposition of Homo sapiens passed down from the anthropological hordes cannot be overcome, but because the explication of the old legacy is progressing simultaneously on several sides, the horde-like or social moments of the life of sapiens can be revised for today’s special needs. The rather more dyadic theme, that is, intimate relationships, is explained up to the point at which intimacy is formally imitated by self-completion mechanisms. That provides the starting point for new evolutionary forms. The more collective features derive from telesocial tendencies and milieu tribalism. Looking towards the longer term, this will lead to the emergence of human types who are rather different from anything we have known so far. The models you describe for the apartment, from the early modernists to Kurokawa, and for urbanism to Constant, were valid for the 1960s. After that a change of direction occurred in architecture, based on a reconsideration of the city – the city in particular as something that cannot be grasped, defined or reduced. The concept of the capsule disappeared. The city was seen as a weave that was defined as typology on the one side and urban morphology on the other. This was the beginning of the triumphal march of postmodernism that sidelined the utopian approaches of the 1960s.

Foam Please allow me to explain – or defend – the capsule motif again in a different way. I am not concerned with the excluding aspect that characterizes encapsulated relationships. I am more interested in a critique of the textile metaphors that urban studies and network theory have been using in recent years. Talking about nets and weaves encourages a tendency towards despatialization, or disregarding space, that I see as dangerous. In network thinking there are only interfaces and points derived from the model of two or more intersecting planes or curves. This results in a world picture whose constituent element is the point. Network theorists think radically non-spatially, that is, two-dimensionally, and they use concepts of anorexia nervosa to express their relationship to the environment.

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Their graphics reveal that the isolated point in the world is seen as an interface between lines without any volume. In contrast, I use the concept of the foam bubble or the cell, or the capsule if you like, to show that the isolated element already has an expansion of its own. We should not revert back to an ontology of points but should start by assuming the cell fit for the world as the minimal element. A little more monadology can do no harm – but a monad is not an extendable point; it is more like a micro-world. I am not interested in the capsule metaphor as such because the cell metaphor is much more important. The term ‘cell’ expresses the content of the world and the form of the world contained in the individual point. Weave and net metaphors bring us, at most, to tiny nodes, but we cannot inhabit nodes. The foam metaphor, however, highlights the microcosmic unique spatiality of each individual cell. The foam metaphor as the implosion of a universal unity, a globe, is a fantastic image. This still leaves the question of which characters these metaphors have when they are conceived in connection with architecture. Architects tend to take images literally. That has already happened. Frei Otto2 quite intentionally tried to extract nearly natural or organomorphic spatial creations from soap bubbles. Frei Otto used experiments with soap bubbles and soap film to demonstrate that minimal surfaces, that is, surfaces with the same tension, are the optimal form for load bearing in constructions made with membranes and tensile structures. That is rather different from a formal loan from the realm of biology or nature. In fact he was concerned with geometrical questions in relation to the use of materials and power dissipation. The foam metaphor supports an intellectual virtue: it prevents us from reverting to the over-simplifying Platonic geometries of traditional architectural history. Foam has no square forms – and that is interesting news. However, there are also no simple spherical structures any more, at least when the foams have left their wet or autistic stage. Contradictory forces of deformation are always at work inside them, with the result that we end up dealing with structures that are not smooth in which more complex geometric laws apply. What is the argument against the right angle?



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The basic idea of this theory of multiple spaces can only be understood if, at the same time, we keep in mind the reflections on alternative statics that run through the whole of the third volume of my book. We live in an age in which the function of classical statics, of loading and carrying in stress-bearing constructions, has been replaced by constructions under traction, in other words, tension totalities. I am thinking mainly, of course, of Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrities as well as the pneumatic constructions and air structures of the twentieth century. The new logic of structures works entirely beyond the wall and the pillar. Tension totalities are the technical transition between the foam metaphor and modern construction forms. Foam is a kind of natural tensegrity, the more so when it no longer appears as ‘individualistic’ foam in which soap bubbles float past each other in a liquid solution, barely touching each other. When foam becomes older and drier, a complex interior architecture develops. Many bubbles burst, the remaining air from the bursting bubble merges into the neighbouring bubble and the foam dries out from the inside. Beautiful, architecturally sophisticated shapes, the polyether foams, are created in the process. Polyether foam is characterized by the theme of co-isolation, which means we and our neighbours share our mutual separation. My walls are your walls and we have the situation in common of being turned away from each other. The concept of co-isolation is fundamental for the universe of foamy forms. The neighbourhood of world designs or living spaces inside a co-isolated structure has a different quality from the neighbourhood of spaces within traditional segmented cultures. There, everything is socially segmented; the world is like a conglomerate of isolated farms. The image of the potato sack that Marx used in the 18th Brumaire to describe the situation of peasants farming parcels of land in France perfectly describes the situation of wet foam. In that case each cell flows past the other cells without reference to the world around it; they do not touch each other, however much they resemble each other. How much is left over from the foam metaphor of the psychosocial structure of the space, and how much from the constructivist approach of spatial constitution? In my opinion, foam is a very useful expression for what architects call density – which is another negentropic factor, by the way. Density can be expressed in psychosocial terms by a reciprocal stress coefficient. Human beings create atmosphere by urging each other to get closer to one another. We should never forget that what we call society implies the phenomenon of the unwelcome

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neighbourhood. Density, therefore, is also an expression for our over-communicative constitution, which, by the way, is continually goaded on by the dominant ideology of communication. By contrast, anybody who takes density seriously arrives at praise for the wall. This observation is no longer compatible with the classical modernism that set up the ideal of the transparent house, the ideal of mapping interior relationships onto exterior relationships and vice versa. Today we are focusing once again on the isolation capability of a building, which should not be confused with massiveness. Isolation, taken as an independent phenomenon, is used to explicate the living relationship of neighbourhood (which remains rather weak in my book). It would have required writing a song of praise to isolation. That would explore a dimension of coexistence which acknowledges that human beings have an infinite need for non-­ communication. The dictatorial features of modernism all derive from a false version of communicative anthropology: the dogmatic view of an over-communicative image of human beings has been naïvely accepted for far too long. We should conclude by talking about the different levels of abstraction that the Spheres project covers. It is a philosophical sketch of a theory of space. It uses knowledge from anthropology, biology and psychology and from medicine and the social and natural sciences, engineering technology, etc. These areas are sometimes like digressions and can be read as essays in their own right. Is philosophy still the meta-theory that succeeds in integrating all these fields of knowledge?

Being-in-the-World Contemporary philosophy is a rather perverse science that has difficulty revealing its subject. Any other discipline can easily say what it is about: biologists study life, architects study constructed space, psychologists are concerned with the psyche, etc. Which subject are philosophers actually dealing with? The only possible answer would be a super-subject that is not an authentic subject but an overall relationship or a horizon – and that is called the world. If we imagine the world as the ancients once did, as a giant container, the subject of philosophy would appear as a big globe, so big that it contains absolutely everything. As long as we conceive the world as the maximal globe which integrates everything that exists by a single reverse movement inside itself, a movement that is rightly called universe, which means once-reversed, so that everything is inside and nothing can be outside, then philosophy seems to have a proper



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subject, namely this beautiful maximal globe called the world that is surrounded, if you wish, by the absolute globe called God. Spheres II: Globes is concerned with these two big globes, with philosophical cosmology and philosophical theology. In the third volume, however, I show that classical philosophy was prematurely optimistic about its ability to confirm the existence of its subject with cosmological and theological methods. Today, in many respects, both epistemologically and empirically, we know so much more than our ancient predecessors that we are no longer blithely able to approach the great totality. Instead, we look for a more discrete type of theory. In the third volume, Foam, I try to show that even small forms demonstrate world character. In this sense foam theory is a micro-cosmology connected to a poly-cosmology. Each soap bubble as its own cosmos? Yes, we should always work right through these implications. When I talk about a couple, I mean it from the perspective of worldmaking à deux. When I talk about a bedroom, I do it from the perspective of world-making through a construction form, and even when I talk about pillows and duvets, those nocturnal completions for a dismantled self, it is always an amorphous form of worldbuilding3 using intimate quasi-objects. Even sleepers are in the world and are together with something. Being-in-the-world always has the features of being together with someone. For us, the socalled question of being is the synousia question, the issue of social intercourse. Being as togetherness implies a four-place relationship because it describes the existence of somebody with somebody and something in something. This formula describes the minimal degree of complexity that must be construed to arrive at a concept of the world. Architects are deeply involved in this way of seeing from the start because they have particular skills for interpreting the total relation of being-in-the-world. For them, being-in-the-world means staying in a building. A house is nothing in the first place but a sculptural response to the question of how somebody can be together with somebody and something together with something. Architects interpret this most mysterious of all spatial propositions – ‘in’ – in their own way; all they do professionally is ‘inside’ or ‘in’ theory. Heidegger deduces the problem very beautifully in Being and Time, to the extent that the book deals with a theory of space rather than a theory of time. He begins with being inside generally and moves on to being-in-the-world. He has understood that the preposition ‘in’ or ‘inside’ goes very deep. He makes every possible

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effort to i­lluminate the basic relationship of being-in-something. He shows that we are on the wrong track if we conceive being inside as a container-type relationship. In fact, Heidegger’s freshly conceived being-in means ecstasy, and that is something absolutely crazy because it means being held out into nothingness. From that moment on, the ‘inside’ does not have the sense of a container but of ecstasy instead. It follows that we no longer really know where we are when we are in-the-world. Returning to the methodical plane: the architect who buys archplus4 and reads part of the third volume of your book may think: ‘Fantasies about architectural theory’. That would be the wrong conclusion. Would architects also realize that your argument is on a level of digression where you develop this ‘being inside’ from the perspective of the twentieth century’s performance? How can the poor architects reading this get their bearings? Architects are not poor but rich people who obviously have the luxury to think, otherwise they would not be doing theory. As I try to show, luxury is absolutely fundamental. If you start thinking you are poor, you are lost. Believing in poverty is the sin against the spirit that will not be forgiven. Human beings are never poor, not even the poor. Homo sapiens is constitutionally incapable of being poor because of his tendency towards world-openness. People only think they are poor to be rid of world-openness. Interpreting human beings as poor animals is a trick invented by laziness. The spatial theory of my book Foams is principally a theory of ecstasy linked to a theory of ecstasy compensation – which means architectural theory. So I thought it was meaningful from the beginning to try to establish a dialogue with architecture. Heidegger, incidentally, anticipated this with his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’,5 although I think it misses something in relation to the premises and the exposition. But he was asking the right questions. We have to do the same thing all over again with Heidegger against Heidegger, to quote a well-known phrase. That is just what I have attempted in Spheres III. Human beings are indeed ecstatic creatures, they are held out into the openness, they can never be definitively tied to some kind of cosy contained situation. In the ontological sense they are always outside, but they can only be outside to the degree that they are stabilized by inside support. We must strongly emphasize this aspect today against the current



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romanticism of openness. It is spatial immune systems that make the state of being outside bearable. It follows that buildings are compensatory systems for ecstasy. The architect as a type is found here next to the priest and the therapist – as an accomplice for the resistance to unbearable ecstasy. Heidegger’s starting point, by the way, is less to do with architecture than with language, and language is, in fact, a complete programme of ecstasy compensation. As the majority of people say the same thing all their lives and language usually functions wholly repetitively, we live in a state of symbolic redundancy that functions just as well as a house with very thick walls. ‘Language is the house of being’6 – we are gradually beginning to understand what that meant. My language is a fortress in which we can take refuge against the open world outside. Still, we let visitors in now and again. Talking and building usually create so much security in human relationships that we can occasionally succumb to a little bit of ecstasy. From my perspective it follows that architects are people who philosophize in material. Somebody who builds a house or a building for an institution is making a statement about the relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic, between being outside and being inside.

The Role of the Architect This brings us to a controversial topic, namely that architects often tend to educate people – whether deliberately as the modernist architects did, or simply by implying that the design of a building is always a design for life as well. The educational element of the early modernists refers to an explicit recognition of the latent megalomaniac moments in architecture as a whole. And that is perfectly justified because as an architect one makes fairly challenging proposals for forms of life. When somebody erects a building that will have a lifespan of a hundred years or more, it is a massive intervention in living conditions. If I were an architect, the best I could do in the circumstances would be to convince myself as follows: ‘I am allowed to do what I am doing because I know what life is, I know what a good form of life is. I have thought for long enough about ideal containers for human beings, and I know my containers are absolutely fit for human habitation.’ In other words, these architects would be well advised to admit their delusions of grandeur. If I cannot say something like that, it would be better for me to seek refuge in another profession. Perhaps the history of architectures in the past decades has been influenced most

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of all by sceptical themes invading architects’ self-confidence, at least on the surface. But the architects who once built the arcades in Paris and the palm houses in England and then the buildings that housed the world exhibitions, and the architects of early modernism, were people who may have suffered in many ways, but certainly not from a lack of self-confidence. They were obviously convinced that they were the pioneers of a new form of humankind. A better world. The pioneers of the new types of building were apostles with something better than an old gospel. They had plans for new human beings in new kinds of houses.

Architecture is Part of Immunity Culture What comes next? Will you keep on pursuing the spatial theory approach of the Spheres project? There will be one more volume: In the World Interior of Capital.7 It is a sequel to Spheres II and III from the perspective that the earth, for better or worse, is also a sphere – but not the world sphere of ancient cosmology. This book looks at the emergence of the world system and the overall condition of life under capitalism. My argument refers back to Dostoevsky’s metaphor of the crystal palace. On his journey to London in 1862, Dostoevsky visited the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham near London – not Paxton’s original construction of 1851, which famously stood in Hyde Park. What the great Russian writer saw, or thought he saw, became, if you like, the birth moment of the opposition to globalization. Faced with Crystal Palace and London’s addictive amusement industry, Dostoevsky turned into the first fundamentalist of anti-Western reflection. He thought he had recognized how the whole West was integrated into a kind of consumerist Baal cult. ‘Baal’ was consequently the title for the London chapter of his travel sketches, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in 1863. It is, incidentally, one of the best works the nineteenth century produced in the travel writing genre, certainly on a level with Thomas de Quincey’s The English Mail Coach or Heinrich Heine’s magnificent piece The Baths of Lucca.



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Globalization Starting from Dostoevsky’s text, I would like to elaborate the crystal palace metaphor as a symbol of world capitalism and a powerful emblem of globalization. Part of the virtue of this image is that it highlights the difference between inside and outside from the very beginning. It emphasizes the necessary and unavoidable exclusivity of the so-called process of globalization. In this sense globalization means the erection of an exclusive kind of comfort structure with the aid of all the appropriate kinds of media and material transactions. We are only using the word ‘globalization’ properly when we realize that it is a camouflage for an extended macro-interior – in other words, a world interior space that encompasses the reality of products as a whole to the extent that it is developed for the owners of purchasing power. The crystal palace is the shared house of purchasing power: a building with invisible, yet from the outside nearly insurmountable, walls that houses around one and a half million persons or somewhat more – for simplicity’s sake, let’s say the group of the winners of globalization. If we extrapolate Dostoevsky’s crystal palace through the twentieth and into the beginning of the twenty-first century, we arrive directly at the concept of Empire that Negri and Hardt recently proposed for the entire structure of present-day capitalism.8 But Negri and Hardt forgot to make it explicitly clear that their empire and their multitude are by no means figures that are completely integral to the planet; even the empire is only a very big but thoroughly exclusive event. We could call it a yacht club with moorings in a large number of countries. The authors’ theses can only be understood in the sense that there is no alternative place for the opposition today: of course not, when we know that you have to belong to the yacht club if you want to oppose the club rules. Naturally, there is an exter­ior, even now, and more than ever. One can leave the empire when one wants – in the way adventure tourists do. But one cannot stay out permanently without being downgraded. What is the difference between the symbol of Benjamin’s arcades and that of Dostoevsky’s crystal palace? Circulation of products occurs in both, and both are interiors – we could say the crystal palace is the place where globalization is present, whereas the arcade is more local. Are we talking about a qualitative leap? That’s right, there is a leap in format that includes a leap in quality. Benjamin rightly conceived the arcade as a synthesis of market and

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salon. On one occasion he called it the ‘sexy street’ of trade where, he said, useful things prostitute themselves. The crystal palace, however, goes well beyond these oases of lascivious cosy capitalism where dandies and flâneurs feel at home. We should not forget the historical fact that the original Crystal Palace was designed to house a new type of event. The Palace of 1851 was the site of the first World’s Fair. The idea that the world represents the epitome of things that can be bought and that it can therefore become an object for exhibition underlines the trend of transforming the entire world into an event environment. The ontology of capital created a powerful new instrument for itself with the world exhibition concept. The main impact was that the consumption dynamic became part of the interior world as well and made subjects into integral consumers. By ‘subject’ I mean that which consumes and enjoys itself by consuming and enjoying world objects. The Crystal Palace’s form of construction was exactly what was needed for this in the nineteenth century – it incorporated the result of globalized world trade and colonialism. The programme of psychedelic capitalism has been around since that time – and a hundred and fifty years after Dostoevsky’s visit to London we can clearly see the continuity of the development. From then on, real world trade or transportation continued to happen only inside superlative buildings. We should remember that trade or transportation in the explicit sense means control of reversible relationships, whereas the less controlled and one-sided movements are better described as expeditions. We can only begin talking of traffic when the equation ‘Outward journey minus return journey equals zero’ holds in a practical sense. A metro train driver who drives back and forth every day can give precise information about the transportation system. In the age of discovery, on the other hand, there were only asymmetrical journeys and the journey out was always of prime importance. Outward and return journeys first became strictly symmetrical in the context of authentic transport conditions – that is why transport is an entirely post-historical phenomenon. Train drivers in local transport are the most authentic witnesses of post-histoire; they drive back and forth on their route twenty times a day in both directions and can testify that there and back is a difference that makes no difference. So far we have hardly talked about the second volume of Spheres: Globes. It ends with the philosophical history of terrestrial globalization. Here, too, the main focus is on space, or what happens to space. How do you relate that to the different levels of spatial criteria in the Spheres trilogy?



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I have just outlined the main ideas of the concluding section of Spheres II. The terrestrial globalization that began with Columbus’ journey and ended with the establishment of a satellite environment in the Earth’s outer atmospheres is an episode lasting just five hundred years that we could describe as the world history of Europe. In this period the Earth’s inhabitants, and the Europeans first of all, became clearly aware that the Earth itself was the only globe in the cosmos that was important to them. During this authentic era of globalization people in Europe started to feel that the Earth was immensely big – yet not too big to be circumnavigated with the aid of ships, as long as one could invest a year for a journey. In the age of electronic globalization, however, there is a growing feeling that the Earth is a dirty, clouded little globe that we can circumnavigate in a single day. Globalization in the age of rapid media means destruction of space, and consequently negation of the globe. You describe the history of the modern age as a history of the space revolution going into the exterior, as blasting the protective shells of a metaphysical cosmos in which there was only one unique interior. I begin by following the tracks of the great writers about ideas and culture, from Jacob Burckhardt to Hans Blumenberg, who have shown us what resulted from the discovery of the world and of human beings in the Renaissance. The space discovered in the age of Renaissance sea voyages yielded a very equivocal result: first, a planetary agoraphobia that was expressed in the fear of the world felt by common people from the countryside; and, second, a new type of feeling about the world as a homeland in which many individual people became like nomads and learned to feel at home in the wide open spaces of the world system. As we can see, the present has inherited both of these feelings and perpetually combines them into the oddest syntheses. Nowadays the feeling of the world interior has been transferred from Christian metaphysics to the social security system.

Two Worlds Is this ‘world interior of capital’ a new kind of world house, to return to the concept you began with – a formation on a new level of an interior which is gradually losing its exterior? Liberal ideologues would obviously like to describe the world of the Global Age in those terms – the whole of humanity gathered around

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the donation table of capitalism and everybody receiving their allotted share of the great gifting. The truth is that the hothouse of interiorized comfort creates a partial universalism that includes many and excludes very many. The optimists calculate the proportion of inclusion to exclusion today as two billion to four billion people, and the pessimists as one billion to five billion people. In other words, at the moment it is still a Western house with limited entry and tight control over access. A Western house through and through, even if it straddles parts of Asia. In this ocean dome of capitalism everything that is consumable in any way can be experienced as part of the interior of capital. Its borders are drawn by discrimination. As I have said, they follow the line along which people have purchasing power. What are we dealing with here? With a new form of metaphysical sphere or with a world made of foam? In my view, reality belongs by nature to conglomerations of multiple elements and bizarre neighbourhoods – in other words, to foamy structures. Still, for several thousand years there have been powerful and real forces trying to unite the multiple elements. The will to power is nearly always expressed as the will to create a synthesis and, consequently, the will towards the middle and the will to capture the world from a dominant centre. The age of imperial world fantasies coincided more or less with the age of unified metaphysics. Aside from philosophers, fortune-tellers and generals, architects have also been involved in this affair since Antiquity because the epitome of the unified form, the metaphysical sphere, appears in domed buildings. Spheres II contains a fairly ambitious chapter on architecture, which is placed exactly in the middle of the book and deliberately tackles this problem. The digression about the Pantheon in Rome crowns the attempt towards a summary reconstruction of metaphysics out of the spirit of crystal ball gazing. I interpret the Pantheon and the culture of large domes in general as the attempt by older architects to reconstruct the classical idea of the Uranus cosmos in architectural form. The Pantheon dome is the original image of all the domes that have ever been built. Everywhere that the idea of constructing a dome exists, a macro-interior is designed that expresses the cosmological claim to encompass the whole world under one roof. Classical metaphysics is based on the world–house equation in which the dome, or domed building, functions as an invisible member. The house is a dome and the dome is the cosmos.



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In other words, the dome is a theocosmic form of construction, a form arising from theology and cosmology, and it will continue as long as God appears as the building owner. The introduction to Spheres III, ‘Airquake’, says something like: ‘God is dead. And that is the good news.’ But it seems as if reality did not hold to this idea. Otherwise we could shimmer away dreamily and peacefully as mutually isolated soap bubbles, some with a Muslim tint and others with Christian colouring. Instead, the liberal achievements of the West are clashing with the eternal values of Islam. I think you are correct in observing that a kind of war about images of the world is in progress. The West has left behind the era of metaphysics of the monocentre, whereas reactionary or, in other words, revolutionary Islamism represents a movement to rescue the illusion of the centre. Temporarily, however, the ideology of President George W. Bush9 has resulted in a degree of symmetry between the two conflicting sides because Bush behaves as if we are still living in the age of militant centrism. This explains the Americans’ silly expression ‘the war on terrorism’. Looking concretely at the processes of the conflict, we see immediately that we cannot talk about a symmetrical conflict. Terrorism is a correct, if evil, way of interpreting Western formation of foam, namely by trying to make isolated bubbles burst in the big society of cells that makes up Western civilization. Here a pair of towers, there a tourist bus, somewhere else a train in the station, or a discothèque or pizzeria. This kind of thing admittedly succeeds in isolated cases, but not more than that. The rest is about over-interpretation. Nowadays it is not easy, of course, to avoid over-interpretation of terror because, by its nature, life in the foamy world is accompanied by the explicit consciousness that all of us exist together in a state of fragility – and anybody who thinks about their own fragility tends towards exaggerating the danger to himself or herself (just as people in heroic and immortalist cultures tended to exaggerate their own self-confidence). This radically distinguishes us from the Islamists’ way of thought. Like the Christians of the Middle Ages, they have revived or perpetuated the idea of a divine super-immunity that is supposed to surround every true warrior. The most effective weapon against this would be the export of Western-type social security. As long as such systems are not available to Islamic people, they will take refuge in immortalism and post-mortalism. If we take a relaxed view of religious metaphysics, particularly metaphysics of monotheism, we can discern a form of imaginary social security. As we can see, these are all topics that belong to the extended field of immunology.

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Immunity In the metaphysical security system the community always takes priority over the interests and well-being of the individual. There is no doubt that the pre-eminence of the collective superimmunity, the community, was conventionally evident without discussion. The individual’s interest in immunity only became emancipated in the modern world. Before then a strict collective style of immunization was imposed, and there are still remains of this today in the form of compulsory conscription, the duty to pay taxes and statutory insurance systems. Anybody who refuses to cooperate with them is still seen as a traitor and deserter. Community and immunity are basically expressions for the same thing. Both words derive from munus, which means something like social task or collective work that must be accomplished. In Roman times munera were taxes and communal levies, and later state construction projects as well, and the term was also used for the organization of games in the arenas. The concept of immunity describes the corresponding negations. People were in-mun if they were exempt from obligations and had the right to take leave from communal duties such as the collective burden of taxation or the civic burden of a court case – as long as they held public office. I think today we live on the cusp of a major turning point of the immunity system and the concept of community is on the decline and is becoming diffuse, although in the past it was the most important universal term in the whole of social theory. The concept of immunity, however, is inexorably rising to the heights of theory and practice; today it is already the most important universal concept for the functional definition of both the biological and social systems. Now comes the most important point: individualism relates to individual immunology – on closer inspection we can see it is an incredible notion that people who tend to think and feel conventionally cannot imagine easily, if at all. And let us not forget that our current post-anti-modernist Catholicism also declaims against these changes just as it campaigned a hundred years ago against all kinds of liberalism and secularism, sometimes using expressions that sounded like clerical fascism. Some historians of ideas rightly feel reminded of this when they hear what the spokesmen of militant Islam propound against the West. Present-day Islamists argue against the Western design of the world for the simple reason that they cannot imagine individualism as a modus vivendi and condition of immunity – unless it is in the form of pornography. These are the reactions we get when God is not dead.



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That was not the good news, then. Incidentally, God is dead just as little in the USA. He is still alive wherever the changeover of immune systems from transcendent safeguards to immanent safeguards fails. Nevertheless, the Americans have found something that allows human beings to get along with the not-dead God. They have developed a perfect synthesis of religious totalitarianism and ecumenical tolerance – our Muslim friends could learn a great deal from this. The American compromise on religion could tell us what happens when some groups remain religiously hot, like panicking Ascension Day congregations permanently waiting for the final countdown but still behaving like ordinary members of civil society. In terms of religious history, American sectarian culture is phenomenal. There are thirty-five Protestant denominations, including a multitude of fervent fundamentalists coexisting under the open skies of the Constitution, probably because the country is big enough to allow the many manic communities to settle with the requisite distance between them. The privatization of religious space rounds off the picture: people live in a world that fosters private life and communitarianism and they accept that there are other, similar worlds to which – thank God – they are not obliged to belong. People can tolerate each other because the idea of a state church, an established church, is frowned upon. The political theology of the United States is usually expressed in very general terms and has a latent effect, which means it cannot be broken down to apply to one particular member of the thirty-five denominations. That is why liberal Americans have been rightly worried since a fundamentalist sect succeeded in bringing one of its men to the top – by American standards the case of Bush is an anomaly. Normally we are dealing with mediocre Christian presidents. These lukewarm brothers in the White House then receive visits from the representatives of manic groups who recharge them with their transcendental mandates as far as possible. The result is a working form of religious mania that is tolerable under normal conditions. An atheist in the White House is still as unthinkable as ever. The foam metaphor of Spheres III communicates a degree of lightness, as well as hope, in relation to the rubble heaps of the past such as conflicts of faith, ideologies of the nation state, etc. But shouldn’t an analytical-philosophical approach start from the idea that phases of peaceful development where rationality is prioritized are replaced by troubled phases such as the present one – that there seems to be a kind of fundamental metaphysical need that persistently breaks through in

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specific waves? Shouldn’t the question focus on how we deal with this problem? I see it rather differently. From the perspective of empirical idealism, what you call a fundamental metaphysical need is the need for integral immunization. I really think that cultures imply the continuation of immune systems by symbolic means. When people design different kinds of metaphysics, we must always ask ourselves what they are actually doing. There are two possible and totally contradictory answers. Either the metaphysicians are doing a kind of art in the coded language of theology, they are creating complexity surpluses, they are increasing the risky nature of their life forms and are constructing further improbability. In this sense metaphysics would be a practice of the adventurous heart – it would be a form of life and thought beyond the struggle for existential security. Or, on the other hand, metaphysicians weave a symbolic net against the real and imagined risks of life, they build up their immune system to get ultimate insurance against threats of all kinds, against the hostility of the outside environment; they work towards reducing the riskiness and improbability of their existential imaginings. In these cases – and they are the overwhelming majority – metaphysics is a practice of the fearful heart. In my opinion, we can incorporate conventional theology and known religious practices into this kind of view without violating their own specific character. I propose a non-reductionist way of dealing with religious and theological tradition, an approach that preserves the sense of the complexity and beauty of metaphysical constructs without negating the work of three hundred years of deconstruction and criticism. The conflict between Islam and the West is also the conflict between different orders of immunity. If I am well insured, I do not need a merciful God. Modernism explains religion and proposes optimized substitute forms for its various functions – and this occurs for long enough and often enough that the radicals who resist substitution are released. In my opinion the only thing from God that will survive the reduction will be the psychological luxury functions. He continues to be a space for enhancing ecstatic communications; the result is a residual God who can be symbolized by references to pure transcendence. It seems to me this is a worthy solution and all the other tasks of religion are only a superior form of social welfare. Isn’t religion’s main task to regulate interpersonal relationships? You can look at it like that if you wish, but then you turn religion into a moral code and thus an easily replaceable factor. For us in



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the West, the God of social relations should be able to die in peace because we have evolved a secular form of morality that is strong enough to replace the socializing themes of religion. Our attitude to all the remaining mystical issues and the thanatological nucleus of religion can then be a private matter. I also think that Islam, like all the other monotheisms, is an agonizing religion, a religion of dying – but its agony is still stuck in the vehement phase. In that phase the dying persons parody life by behaving aggressively and – God knows how – robustly and vigorously. Basically, however, this rotten monotheism no longer has anything reasonable to say about the modern world. A clever Orientalist once remarked that Islam stopped thinking in the thirteenth century, and everything suggests this is true. Nowadays the return of thinking is happening in the form of defence. This creates redoubled hatred: first, hatred against the riddles of the modern world, and, second, hatred of the cultural forms that are considerably more advanced in terms of their work on the process of dying. What is acted out today on the world stage is a confused affair internal to monotheism – overlaid by an almost equally confused tension within academia because it is obvious that the Arab and Qur’anic university does not yet know how to deal with the fact that it was first degraded by the Christian and later by the secular European university, while, conversely, Western academics do not know where to make the connection with their Muslim colleagues.

System Elasticity Isn’t that hate targeted at a system that distributes life chances in the world very unfairly? Hate against the system has existed ever since the outline of the modern world with its whole blasphemous novelty has become visible in our own lives. Everything that is attributed to the external haters today was argued earlier by the haters of modernism inside Europe itself – argued in great detail and by hundreds of people. Anti-modernist resentment has been a kind of European folk music since 1789 – and it is not generally played by the poor but by prosperous people seeking revenge. We have been battling with home-grown estrangement critique for more than two hundred years now. Since Fichte’s early writings, since 1794 if not before, when the first overall representation of the system of epistemology became available, a finely honed neo-idealism has existed on European soil that has constructed the most explosive ideas of a critique of the

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system from within, the idea of estrangement which says that true human beings are not at home in the shell of the civilization that objectifies them. Since then the metaphysical left has always offered a critique of the real world in which we are living in the name of the true homeland in which we are not living. My metaphor of the world interior of capital, which has echoes of Rilke, expresses the attempt to leave the continuous line of linguistic games about estrangement. It adds some levels to the concept of immanence – without becoming completely devoted to that concept. As far as the critique of modern forms of life from inside Western civilization is concerned, the last two hundred years were an epoch in which things reached incredible intensity. As a result, extremism was the style of the times. I think it was Nietzsche who first said: we are the ‘most extreme’; our power consists in identifying ourselves with the extreme. Countless members of European modernism didn’t need to be told that twice. All our home-grown opponents of the system, on the left and on the right, had their bombs in their hands whether they detonated them or not. By now we can look back at eight generations of intelligentsia who made bombs – although we must admit that not everybody who makes bombs goes on to throw them; at least not in the area of semantic bomb-making. Still, the question remains as to why these people who supply the knowledge of destruction have not conclusively destabilized the system. Your contribution has been rather towards introducing the necessary corrections. In fact, these internal extremists have achieved the complete opposite of their declared intention – and, ironically, this even applies to the various types of European fascism. They have kept the system educable and provided it with the amount of stress necessary to make it more flexible. This is why the modern West is so remarkably invulnerable. Although our commentators, politicians and advisers today behave as if we are incredibly fragile, this discourse is based on a false interpretation of statistics of external terror and an outdated concept of building. It refers to archaic statics as if everything that ‘stands’ today were a complex of buildings in the traditional sense. Only in this context can we understand why the attack on the World Trade Center was thoroughly regressive – and why completely the wrong lessons have been learned from it so far. The optical illusion of September 11, 2001 is that two buildings collapsed before the eyes of the world on that day. Everybody was sure they had seen what happened there. But in reality the spectacle distracted us. Since that time the collapse of the twin towers has been



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a false metaphor for what terrorism does. What actually happens is the opposite, for instead of collapsing, the attacked structures are reconstituted. They develop their self-repairing energies. When we realize this, we arrive at a concept from the new post-statics logic of structures on which our world design is based. September 11 concerned the old type of architectural structures, which do not represent the structures of modern structural art at all because we cannot conceive the latter in terms of traditional statics. Anybody who only thinks about the falling buildings misses the timely conclusion to be drawn from the story as a whole. Only a few months after the event it was clear to everybody concerned that the towers would be replaced by another random structure – and that this would be done quite easily by drawing on the enormous energy surplus released by the disruption to the system. This is the way intelligent systems react, systems characterized by totalities of tension instead of the old heavy type of static constructions. Architects react much more intelligently to terror than do politicians, who make stupid speeches about war to hypnotize themselves into feeling they are doing what is necessary. I think the reason for this is that modern architecture has been part of the new immunity structure for a long time now. It has recognized that the architectural buildings we traditionally describe as houses represent spatialized user-defined immune systems. Immune systems are embodiments of the expectation that disruptions will occur, and their task is either to have the right passwords ready (as in the case of known invaders) or to develop new ones (as in the case of viral agents). That is exactly what happens nowadays. Regardless of how one judges the individual entries for the Ground Zero competition, we can predict that in terms of technology the new structure will be greatly superior to the old one. This should be the real information we glean from the events of September 11.

FOR A PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with Reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry For a New Poetry of Space Looking back one day we will realize that the year 1999 represented a milestone, if not a complete break, in the history of modern architecture. The completion of Daniel Libeskind’s building for the Jewish Museum Berlin and its opening to the public in January of that year was the end of a process that is called ‘fulguration’ in chaos theory – a flash of lightning in which the particles of the surrounding atmosphere are rearranged into a new pattern. When lightning becomes a building – you can see it with your own eyes at the intersection of Markgrafenstraße and Lindenstraße in Berlin. The event happened simultaneously on three levels and was clear to see for anybody close enough to witness it. On the first and most visible level, this building is articulated as an artistic phenomenon – as an apparition in the true sense of the word. It flashes in its surroundings like a unique object, unexpected, undeserved and elusive. The erection and completion of this building represents a contradiction to the venture of twentieth-century architecture yet gives it a new beginning at the same time. There were probably only a few other buildings in the history of architecture that have their own individual laws. This one has canonical power, although by its nature it can only exist once. Aside from all its other meanings and dedications, from first to last this building is a manifesto of architectural modernism recognizing itself after a hundred years of history and reaffirming its methods in a supremely conscious way. The building is a piece of art in every detail, a work of art by virtue of its regal character, infused with its triumph over the greatest obstacles – even the god of architects holds his breath in



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these rooms. Visitors, meanwhile, find themselves transported into an atmosphere of masterly discretion, far from lecturing and overimposing showiness. This building is an event for other reasons, too: because of its timing and, even more, because of the site on which it was built. When the city of Berlin awarded the commission in the 1980s for construction of a new Jewish Museum at a prime location in the city, it was obvious that the project involved high moral aspirations and a careful historical and political approach. Libeskind, who was already seen as one of the great contemporary architects because of the works he had designed but not yet built, saw this enterprise as the chance for a unique ethical and aesthetic gesture. In 1990 he moved to Berlin with his family to be free to immerse himself completely in the project. This was more than a practical issue – it was an affirmation of the opportunity Berlin offered and a sign that he was prepared to take a position in contemporary German reality. As a Berliner by choice, Libeskind defined the city as a workplace from two main viewpoints: first, as the setting for an architectural venture; and, second, as a construction site in terms of memorial policy. Fifty years after the Holocaust, with the surviving historical witnesses passing away, the time had come to understand the memory of the monstrous evil the Nazis had perpetrated and the remembrance of Berlin’s lost Jewish culture in a different medium and at another stage of development – a situation that was illustrated by the form of the museum as an object, as it were. Following a flash of wisdom in Berlin’s cultural policy, the authorities took the risk of entrusting Libeskind with this task. His design of the model had inspired hopes that Libeskind, the poet, the chamber musician, the contemporary architect who specialized in studying complexity, would succeed with this practically insoluble object. Today we know that the result exceeded all expectations. Even Berlin’s ordinary citizens have gradually realized that the city owns a jewel now, and they can intuit that its presence means that a form has been found for relating to the traces of exterminated Jewish life. This brings us to the third reason why the Jewish Museum Berlin represents a major event. Its erection marked a new state in the ecology of historical memory for Germans, Europeans and Jews all over the world. Through its location and form it sealed a memorial pact between the building’s owner, who inevitably represented not just the city of Berlin but German society as a whole, and the architect with his entire team and the museum’s curators, who are inevitably regarded – each with his or her own uniquely personal touch – as representatives of contemporary Judaism. The building, seen in terms of both its materiality and its aesthetic effect, is in

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itself the contract between the memorial parties who have pledged themselves to a common effort to do justice to the past as far as the present generation is able to in the light of the terrible events to be commemorated. This makes architecture into a conciliatory event. The Jewish Museum demonstrates a historically unknown combined effort for peace in the shadow of remembrance of the extermination. From this perspective, Libeskind’s building is a research workshop of irenics, of peace studies – or, perhaps even better, of the art of peace. It embodies a hypothesis on the possibility of cooperative coexistence between the survivors of moral catastrophe.

Being in the Work of a Person: On the Critique of Participatory Reason After the museum building in Berlin was erected, Libeskind wrote a note on why he felt emotionally willing and ready to enter the architectural competition in 1988: ‘I felt this was not an agenda I had to invent or a building I had to research about: this was something I was implicated in from the beginning [. . .].’ I would like to look carefully at this by exploring the meaning of the phrase ‘implicated in from the beginning’ in the context of a contemporary theory of space and participation in surrounding situations. When the artist realizes that he does not have to invent anything to understand something, and does not have to search for anything to find something, it indicates a dimension of the work prior to the work for which we shall suggest the provisional term ‘participation’. In what particular way can the erection of a building be understood as a manifestation of membership of a space and participation in a generational complex? We can find the key to this in the writings of Maurice MerleauPonty, whose major work Phenomenology of Perception from 19471 was concerned with the riddle of the physical participation of human beings in their spatial environment. We only need to highlight the decisive formulation: ‘The body is not in space, it inhabits space.’ (Le corps n’est pas dans l’espace, il l’habite.)2 In this context the apparently simple term ‘to inhabit’ describes a participatory relationship that is evidently older and deeper than any definition of location offered by the wisdom of geometry or population registration offices. The same applies to the relationship to time in which human beings participate existentially by inhabiting a period, a history or a drama deep in their hearts. Shared inhabiting in space and time sets up a relationship of existential immersion. Paul Valéry showed very convincingly how this kind of considera-



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tion comes close to the essence of art and the arts. In 1921 Valéry had already worked out related ideas in a passage in his dialogue essay Eupalinos or The Architect. He rescued the figures of Socrates and Phaedrus from Hades and depicted them in an imaginary conversation about the principle of immersion and inclusion in the work of art in relation to architecture and music. Socrates’ reflections on people being immersed and enclosed in manmade environments began as a meditation on the dualism of ‘In’ and ‘Opposite’: I feel compelled to chat about the arts. [. . .] A painting, my dear Phaedrus, only covers a mere surface such as a panel or a wall. [. . .] But a temple, along with its precincts, or again the interior of this temple, forms for us a complete greatness within which we live. [. . .] We are, we move, we live inside the work of man! [. . .] We are caught and mastered within the proportions he has chosen. We cannot escape him.3 This reflection highlights two moments at once: first, it insists that what encompasses us in this case represents the sublime; and second, it emphasizes that what surrounds us is an artificial construct and not a natural environment. We are talking not about Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime, which describes nature as a superpower, but about the artificially sublime, whose ubiquitous presence can allow us to experience a work made by human hand like an integrated environment. With a single leap, Valéry’s Socrates lands in the fiery centre of modern aesthetics and is directly confronted with the riddle of the total work of art. Because, according to the avantgarde, this encompasses the whole environment, the observer has no possibility of absorbing it only in the ‘bourgeois’ pose of watching from the sidelines. In relation to the temple I am standing in, being-in-the-world means being in the work of someone else, and, even more, being consumed by the artificial magnitude. Is it only coincidence that this Socrates used expressions reminiscent of the sermon of the former (theatre) tent maker Paul on the Areopagus, the speech about the God in which we live and move, and have our being?4 According to Valéry, the same thing was valid for only one other form of art: music. In Eupalinos he says: To be in the work of a human being like fish in the wave, to bathe in it thoroughly, to live in it, to belong to it [. . .]. Did you not live in a mobile edifice constantly renewed and reconstructed, incessantly renewed and reconstructed within itself and entirely dedicated to the transformations of a soul

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none other than the soul of extension itself? [. . .] And did not those moments [. . .] seem to surround you, slave as you were of the general presence of music? [. . .] And that inexhaustible production of enchantments, were you not enclosed along with it, nay forcibly locked up, like a Pythia in her chamber of vapours?5 These comments on the sojourn of humans through the theory of the enclosing work of art lead directly to the explanation of aesthetic totalitarianism or voluntary servitude in a manmade environment. Both cases immediately establish a relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime. There are then two arts which enclose man in man [. . .] in stone or air [. . .] and each of them fills our knowledge and our space with artificial truths [. . .].6 Modernism appears to be an experimental scheme to prove that the sublime is just one step away from the banal. At the time Valéry wrote these reflections, the cinema film, the main medium of mass culture, which was evolving into the medium of superior force, was still in its early days but was already moving towards a system for mass immersive experiences of daydreaming and imitation. It worked towards enslaving the eye and making the organ of detached observation into an organ of submersion in a sort of tactile environment. At the same time people at the Bauhaus school in Weimar had begun to argue about an integral intervention in the area of everyday living situations under the heading of Gestaltung – which describes the German approach to design. Not only music is demonic territory, as Thomas Mann asserted; spatial design, like architecture, is related to the uncanny feeling of belonging permanently or occasionally to an environment totally created by human beings. These arts explain why humans stay in places with the aid of immersion systems that are merely proposals for enslaving the consumers of pre-formed situations. Through these systems, dwelling or being-in-the-house is interpreted as welcome submission to one’s surroundings. To the extent that houses are installations or fitted immersion systems, they explain existence as a sculptural task. The installation is the aesthetic explication of embedding. One of the ways this is shown is in the two basic values of aesthetic judgement that embedding shares: embedding in comfortable, banal surroundings is called ‘beautiful’ and embedding in uncanny, mysterious surroundings is called ‘sublime’. Libeskind’s architectural art shows how it is possible to create



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a third kind of embedding, which is both beautiful and sublime and yet simultaneously neither of the two: not seductive by being pleasant nor simply overwhelming by being tall and uncomfortable. Libeskind’s space – for which he often uses the word ‘meeting’, or encounter – is a proposal for immersion in spatialized freedom. His interiors receive visitors like a font in which the intelligence of the people immersing themselves is baptized in the name of mindfulness. Just as Malebranche defined mindfulness as the natural prayer of the soul, Libeskind has given the invitation to mindfulness a new form with a startling interplay of light and dark spaces.

Breakthrough to Multivalent Space Aristotle remarked in Physics that when a man builds a house, he is simply doing what nature would do if it made houses grow. This tells us which role traditional philosophy assigned to architecture: that of a vassal and assistant of physis, of nature. In situations where nature cannot be objectively imitated because it has not produced any model houses, the traditional architect must assume nature’s role and do its work on a caretaker basis; in this case the imitation refers to the modus operandi of nature, which is depicted as the mistress of growing things. The houses of human beings thus stand in nature as things above nature, as second-order plants, so to speak, in the midst of an environment where plants grow naturally. We hardly need to say how radically the constructivist ‘revolution’ of modernism rejected the old metaphysics of growth. We could sum up the architecture of modernism at first sight as the rebellion of crystals against the character of plants or as the revenge of arbitrary against involuntary forms. In his own personal way, Libeskind, one of the great masters of architectural modernity, is evidently involved in the revolt of the artificial; willingly or not, he is a representative of crystals and contra-natural geometries. In relation to this adventure he could have simply said he was implicated in it from the very start. In his case, being implicated in the history of modern art is overlaid with being implicated in the tragedy of Jewry in the twentieth century. It is tempting to say that when Libeskind the architect builds a house, he does what history would do if it made houses ‘grow’. This yields a formula for Libeskind’s contribution to the canon of architectural modernism: What happens when crystals become receptive to history… From now on we should redefine the meaning of participation: the artist’s dual citizenship in the spheres of forms and those of tragedies creates demands on both sides. Crystals should receive

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what belongs to them and history should receive what belongs to it. The citizens of Berlin and visitors from all over the world have been able to see for themselves since January 1999 how these contradictory demands take shape in one and the same building. After taking the tour through this building, even the naïve visitor unacquainted with the history of modern architecture leaves with the lasting impression that something crucial has happened to the space itself. If Libeskind’s museum building has become a kind of myth within a short time, it is mainly because the presence of voids, the empty spaces that cut through the building in a mysterious rhythm, creates a sensual feeling of gaping discrepancy that nearly every other building only implicitly acknowledges. This might give us the impression that abnormal tectonic forces have lifted the cellar above ground level as if it were weary of its subterranean status. On second glance it is clear that this is not about crazy cellars, nor about the projection of a hypothetical architectural subconscious. Libeskind’s voids actually articulate an event relating to the grammar of the space: they touch not only on the myth of the master plan but also on the dogma of the overview and the idea that remodelled space should be universally accessible. If history made houses grow, it would have to leave open spaces in buildings – or, even better, leave blank spaces – which shall remain inaccessible and uninhabitable. Someone who is a participant in the history of European Jews in the twentieth century and who reconceives the space has to try to preserve the memory of events that can never wholly become the property of the people who live there. It is impossible for us to live in the Great Evil – yet in a building that explodes the history of the crystal it is necessary to preserve a dimension that takes account of this uninhabitable state. Understood on this level, the voids embody the symbolism of absence. They radically formalize the world beyond within the world of the living. But as they lack the festive and communicative qualities of normal graves, they refer instead to those who were not buried, who perished without a trace in the catastrophe. The voids can thus be seen as manifestos for peace. If ordinary cemeteries – true to their name in German, Friedhöfe, enclosed courts – represent enclaves bordered by walls in social space in which the dead and the living can meet each other, close yet far away, the spaces Libeskind left out are, to some extent, ontological enclaves or meta-cemeteries that provide a form for the impossible intercourse between the living and the victims of the Great Evil. They embody the austere peace of commemoration of things that cannot be depicted. In this sense they are a Jewish approach to defining what is sublime. The empty spaces give all observers a glimpse of the limits of observation; they



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rebuff any kind of close approach with sublime justice and put all visitors in the same situation. No individual can take possession of these rooms and incorporate them into his or her personal perspective. Neither the architect nor any kind of privileged interpreter of history has access to these spaces of absence. Precisely because of this, the empty spaces participate in things that inherently withdraw from participation. By removing free access to specific spaces in the interior of his building, Libeskind has modified the way people experience the accessible fields. In doing so he is demonstrating that architecture is much more than the application of three-dimensional geometries to human content. The space inhabited by people is revealed as a multivalent entity. Wherever people stay, a divorce of spaces occurs: the habitable is contrasted with the inhabitable; the immersible with the non-immersible; the visible with the invisible; the transparent with the opaque; the penetrable with the impenetrable. If Sigfried Giedion is correct in his thesis that the adventure of modern architecture began with the breakthrough to perception of sculptural space, Libeskind’s Berlin project can be defined primarily as a culmination of the interplay of mass and emptiness. However, as the heir of Le Corbusier, who developed the dialectic of le plein and le vide [the full and the empty] in the art of constructing buildings, Libeskind introduces an intersubjective dimension into the closedoff space. The voids are spaces for someone precisely because they are no man’s spaces. They demarcate the strange territory in which mortal human beings are summoned to practise coexistence.

V

CONDITIO HUMANA

ESSAY ON THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST Heretics * Wastrels * Falls/Cases * Inhabitants

They come from far away, from sultry mountain villages and evil market towns where festivals have fallen into neglect and curses hold sway. They first raised their heads three thousand years ago, earlier than the rest. They felt something new was in the air: unlike all their ancestors, these people would live in towns and cities – the villages and tribes would not have the whole future to themselves. Emotional spaces expanded as if to make room for larger worlds. From the hills above, royal and bourgeois views lit up the expanded universe. Generals look at things like that, and shamans who see beyond the horizon. The cities were not yet built but humans were already looking towards the spacious areas that would be filled with cities. The prophets and founders were the first to see that it was only from the perspective of the cities that the world would become the totality, the big, the biggest. Their visions showed a type of human being whose secure integration into the new, bigger world would demand all the forces of the future. The flood of obsession would be dammed and the wickedness and ecstasies of the old country would no longer reach their former heights. A permanent interior mainland arose where ideas were established like early settlements at river fords. Cities, knowledge and enterprises could grow there. A humorous, enterprising type of person gathered at the temples to worship gods of thoughtfulness inside them. The divine itself seemed to want to be clever; with ever-watchful eyes, light and shared knowledge, the eternal witnesses of the world were enthroned in their heady vigil on the heights. The atmosphere of the polis was pervaded with a permanent atmosphere of cleverness that felt natural among city people. The city dweller was somebody who could absorb the sense of being close to such clear-thinking

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divinities. A wakeful atmosphere radiated over the city from the Acropolis like a beautiful alarm that summoned the spirits of the citizens together under the same sky. The daily business was a competition of clarity, the speeches and conversation a constant test of what can stand communal discussion. Childish, rural, befuddled faith disintegrated in this acidic medium. If the gods themselves had subscribed to wakefulness and knowledge in such a new and all-pervading manner, how should their human imitators fail to follow them? To believe differently in a different God: this mission, which was understood by the brightest individuals of the old city, marked the beginning of the history of a cleverness that still has an impact on the arts to this day. During a metamorphosis that lasted two thousand years, the adventure of heresy shifted from priests to philosophers and from the latter to artists – the last inheritors of the urban quest for the powerful, effective, true and good. Philosophy arose when the Greek magicians, the iatromancers or clairvoyant doctors of the age of trances and magic, settled in the cities and learned to obey the rules of urban mediation. What was wisdom then? What was the good life? Being able to inquire into the conditions of happiness in view of the horrors of the world – this mission became the benchmark for the Greek spirit. When Socrates appeared before his judges, he embodied the discussion on the dimensions of heresy. An individual man was responsible for a way of being entering the stage of ideas. What was on trial before the court was not so much the crime of godlessness formulated by the conventional prosecutors; the charge was against the interior mobility of a different faith which the believers in the old faith suspected of showing disbelief. Solid people, those who were not open to seduction, did not understand what Socrates was doing in his seductive inquiries; they saw him as the brooding monster seeking reasons for what was holy, hidden and fundamental. Wasn’t such thinking a crime in itself? Who, if not a serious criminal, would dare to demand reasons for the world’s reasons? It was really uncanny that this man, without giving any ultimate reason, came close to the final causes almost like a demon. Wasn’t he acting as if the final causes were dependent on what we said? Socrates had understood that this versatile and deep, inscrutable faith actually embodied the principle of urban cleverness – and this fact alone illustrates his superiority over his judges. He could play the part of the model citizen of his city and still remain the monstrous inhabitant of an opposing world. That is why, at the end of his defence speech, he pronounced the words that mark the formal opening of the history of heresy. He, Socrates, didn’t believe in the gods?



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For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty, I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and convict myself, in my own defence, of not believing in them. But that is not the case; for I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me.1 This is how pious impiety began explaining itself: believing like no one else. In this closing speech, dissidence appeared as the natural element for the urban style of cleverness. This is the prototypical scene of modernity. An intelligence explained with all the force of ‘the first time’ that it was gambling its own life on the wide open spaces of experimentation. Indeed, it assured its listeners that they were also free to do so if only they behaved consciously as what they were: city dwellers, people with the power of speech, mortals gifted with reason, people experimenting with a different life – a post-natural, meta-cosmic existence in the light of acropolitics, the politics of the Acropolis. I do not believe like any of my accusers – this phrase marked the critical moment in the world revolution of the soul. Faith – the taking of clear steps forward into what is hidden – ceased to be based on submission and allied with the lively turbulence and logical light of the soul that never stops thinking. But what is this light except the interior of the life that has awoken in the world alarm of the city? The philosopher, of course, the exshaman who still bears the signs of earlier initiations, introduced heresy and a different kind of magic to the world at the same time. From then on, souls were no longer tied to Mother Earth and burdened with missions. Release or delivery became the catchword of a different kind of magic, and its agenda was to make people cheerful. The motivating idea was to investigate the number of approaches to happiness and exits from the false life. The departure from all kinds of caves, from their misery and numbness, began in the city. Because the city is the place of decision-making about unequal people without destinies, it is here that the difference between happy and unhappy people first comes to be voiced. What are human beings essentially? Are they poor or rich? Oppressed or privileged? Beasts of burden or darlings of the gods? Humans began to reveal their nature in the answers they gave to these questions. To be is to reply; to reply is to be. Spirits and destinies part company under the summary law of answers. An irreducible difference separates mortals from each other in a very confined space. From the time it was no longer possible to mould human beings into unified

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s­tatements, Sophocles’ tragic chorus could declare that there are many monstrous things in the world but nothing as monstrous as human beings. Ordinary citizens think of human beings as poor creatures in a situation of overwhelming scarcity striving for wealth – they see human beings as animals that always lack something. This is how solidly based beings talk about themselves – and citizens swamped by scarcity still follow their example to this day. Contrast this with the generous thinking of those who cast different spells, who seek not to explain human beings but to surprise them instead. For them, humans are animals with too much wealth that come into the world to burden themselves. The best example of this species is the type who practises divine tolerance, whose soul goes through extremes. If people have a hard time, it is not because they have inherited misery but because they are prepared to buckle down when there is scarcity. Closer to the gods than to the animals, the rich, the uncanny and the well travelled take their chances in wrestling with matter and suffering. Abundance and success make their life monstrous. As they are at home in the heights, they ridicule further steps upwards; assignments and areas of activity are always below them. As citizens of the real city, they are also inhabitants of an inexhaustible interior space that is nothing but the playing field for possible clever moves. When these city magicians turned artists come forward with a work, a fine phrase or a trick, they always gamble with the ‘whence’ of their gesture. They openly reveal their intangibility by employing signs that come from the region of reasons. When there is more wakefulness than stuff to fill it, the hour of irony has struck. It is a spontaneous objection to the unreasonable idea of believing in positive dictates. It hovers in the air, changing the importance of everything. No object can match its breadth, not even a pompous total world philosophy. The alternative magician does not have visions; he or she actually floats in person in front of every structure. Works, actions, images, worlds – what is all that except material that is useful for marching through the wide expanses? The artists of the different faith create structures that are evidently not the work of people on their knees. Each work is endowed with something of the spatiality that has been part of its making. The works always tell us that for their producers the serious problem is that of becoming small as opposed to being big. The floating creature that drifts towards the world from its formless state has no other means of revealing itself than by repeatedly becoming externalized in the structure. By working through the first steps to learn the alphabet it shows the transformational power in which it always rediscovers its life. It follows that sustainability is something that great art never lacks. By ceaselessly changing,



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the alternative magicians exhale the space from which they receive everything. Its scope is more familiar to them than their visible work. They could forget everything they have created except the sphere from which creation originates and continues. By increasing the stock of phenomena, they are acting as sponsors of the visible world. Among the countless people who have opted in advance for a life of poverty, they remain the last and the only rich ones. What they squander is the experience of every gesture that determines form, that has a value and that derives from a surplus. They have a power when tackling themes, a restlessness in relation to the defined line, a brightness in relation to colour. If they were philosophers, they would be concerned with telling the world about its breadth. Wealth is the ability to decide on options for special things. Rich is the mood that does not lose height when it succumbs to trivia. Without pride and without theories it confirms its freedom to cross the lowlands like the devil crosses the sacred halls. How is it that the world is everything that is the case? We know least of all about the motion that we are. Did tradition teach us that it was the Fall of Man that makes us suffer the world?2 Falling is the motion that crosses the world and to which wakeful human life as such is subject. Anybody who falls suffers the absolute passion that cannot be overcome – unless by falling. The world is the container of all falls. Like a dark force of attraction, it exerts a gravitational pull over the beings that have just come into the world, whereby they learn about resistances. Anybody who falls gets hurt and feels pain and rebellion. For this reason every fall has to be a compromise between anger and patience. Anger helps the ego that has become entangled in the world not to give up under the weight of dead things; patience, on the other hand, protects the world inside us from the revenge of the nothingness with which we wanted to undo the trauma of existence. People who learn through suffering how to curb their fury can become patient labourers. Work creates a separation of powers in despair. At the same time, the patience that counteracts the anger is a continuation of pre-existential sovereignty by other means. It introduces a trace of the old floating vastness into the tumult of life. Is there another definition for the life of an artist than creating a chain of intense days across decades to keep a labour force on track? Art as the work of those who work differently is always work on the fall or the case. The artists who represent their fall show the brutality of the world and the absence of presuppositions for our falling apart so glaringly because falls cannot be achieved skilfully. Everything in works of art that is raw and luminous and necessarily belongs to the present emphasizes the materiality of the world as it appears in free fall. When it comes

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to falls, all the details are the same. When they come into view, we always have to confront the same idea – that this is reality, that a clenched fist is punching our eye, making it feel that whatever may be present is asserting its power. Only from this perspective can early forms appear as complete pictures, finds as works, works as raw materials, coincidences as perpetrators, deeds as drifting and processes as gestures. The same particularity of the world is at work in all these things. Our eyes are constantly stopped in their tracks by visible things that exist as limits. The whole brutality of the world is contained in this stopping, which is a reason why modern art gets closer to the exigency of being than anything has since the magical cave paintings. Painters who use their fall as the theme of works and series necessarily notice over time how, viewed roughly, things look the same. A person falling out of the window is equally indifferent to the façades he is falling past and the scenes of life behind the windows he glimpses as he falls. He is so deeply involved in the naked situation that it makes no sense for him to imagine something deeper underlying a phenomenon. What is the first thing now? What is the second? The phenomenon is the depth itself. Art put into free fall is infused with the equal depth of phenomenal things. But what may look like a guide to indifference towards everything is actually a kind of exercise in the power of experience that goes to extremes to expose itself to the diverse views of the world and their enhancement in the works of art. St Thomas Aquinas wrote that angels are not like physical creatures in space but that they created out of themselves the space that they illuminate and animate with their essence. In the twentieth century, Merleau-Ponty wrote the words that should be the starting point for every discussion about humans’ sensual being-in-theworld: ‘The body is not in space, it inhabits space.’ (Le corps n’est pas dans l’espace, il l’habite.)3 It is the great artists who, then as now, leave the truth of this statement open. As inhabitants of the world’s depths, they remind us to ask how to inhabit the world house in the first place. When we are in the world, is it like being settled inside our own four walls? Have we been given everything that is the case to constitute a home? Ready for moving in, ready for furnishing, like a being ready for occupation and we only have to settle in and pay our instalments? Whoever is an artist would always answer such questions in the negative. He or she has faced the dilemma of living in a non-house since time immemorial. Artists are the ecologists of uncanny things, the resident doubters, the people who live differently. That they live among things means cooperating with emergent forms – whether from nature or culture or from the cosmos of scientific signs and models. The house of those who live differently is full



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of foreign guests – it is a point in the world grid, a magic number, an observation point looking onto crude colours. The master of the house himself moves around in his realm as if in the laboratory of a mad inventor. If the guests are willing to join in the rich conversation to be had among his creations, they may take up residence in works of art. What the artist in his workshop offers them is nothing less than admittance to a paradise in which the oldest elixir of happiness still flows today: attention.

CONFESSIONS OF A LOSER

I have realized what my most persistent mistake is. I had to turn forty before I finally saw the light. Ever since childhood I had cherished the firm belief that one always had to tell the truth, come what may. Truth, and only truth, they told me, made a good life possible. Truth makes you free, some said. Truth makes you happy, others claimed. I took their advice to heart. My life followed the track of inconspicuous unhappiness. Nobody told me that a good person doesn’t get further than average. I followed the path of the colourless majority, who have nothing to reproach themselves with and accept everything. Then came the turning point that marked the start of my new life. The truth about the truth suddenly struck me on a fateful weekend. From now on nobody would persuade me to be honest at my own cost. I will tell you this much: a good day starts with a big lie. My own case is an object lesson. I stagger into the bathroom, look in the mirror and see the shadow of a pale mass oozing discomfort. If I were forced to look more closely, it would trigger a crisis. My enemy is in the room and wants to share the sphere with me. My nocturnal self is already stalking me and demanding half of my life. It has been pestering me for years with the notion of talking with me about what it sees as my problems. But I don’t deal with ghosts any more. The thing in the mirror is unreal. The question of who I am – in future I will be the one to decide. I fetch the atomizer from the cupboard and engulf myself in a cloud of goodwill; I put softfocus drops in my eyes and remember my affirmation: ‘What luck that I am as I am.’ Now I am ready to face my doppelgänger. I smile at my image in the mirror as if the fellow were humanly close to me. I have forgotten the multifarious reasons for spitting in his face



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and have decided long ago that deep down I like the guy. In fact, I have hardly ever met such an interesting person. I’m not exaggerating. That has brought the first step to recognition – an early victory, a good omen. I can already tell that today I will say lots of nice things about other people as well. Isn’t ‘positive thinking’ the fundamental rule of the new ethics? Positivity and toughness: the victors’ alloy. No sentimental stuff before the start; no moment of quiet concentration before the big booze-up. Watching, relaxing, reflecting, all of that is only for losers after the race – they do it with the help of commercial TV channels that have been remodelled with programmes to cater entirely for losers. My programme is about upgrading. Smiling at myself three times before breakfast – that’s my mental stretching. I energetically train muscles for telling lies in places where other people sit on their depression. I get the deep tissue moving. A high bouncing ball would look lazy compared with me. I count to ten and find myself enchanting. They haven’t promised me too much – a dream figure for my better self within weeks. Self-criticism is the early morning drink for losers – nowadays I take immaterial vitamins. The winner in me starts the engine roaring; I check through my appointment calendar. I tell myself with a booming voice that I can trust in myself blindly. I like the guy; this fellow is the irresistible type. That hovering in the no man’s land of the morning doesn’t mean anything. I leave the house like a grenade leaves a launcher – living ballistically is the order of the day. A smart projectile in search of its target – since I started my new way of thinking I feel the happiness of those who attack. A man with the Siegfried factor is speaking to you. They really didn’t promise me too much. The new 3-D lying system Mendanetics-Basic – from the Latin word mendacium, the lie – has made a new man of me. Over four weekends they have remodelled me to become the man of the moment. They tell me that in less than six months I could progress to 4-D-Super-Mendanetics, and when I succeed, which of course I will, nothing can stop me from becoming an identity counsellor for winners: persons, firms, countries – we have formulas for every customer format. As you can see, I dare to dream great dreams again. Since I began playing the good luck game, I look back to my former naïve life with expert cold-bloodedness. I was a child of ancient occidental culture – and that means in questions of truth I was a primitive person, raised to understand truth in a fitting way for flatlanders, creatures who live in a two-dimensional reality and regard a third or even higher dimension of truth as the work of the devil. Ironing oneself out is the virtue of these old authentic types. They seriously believe that one can find one’s direction in the world labyrinth simply by distinguishing between true and false, good and

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evil, suitable and unsuitable. Their flat cosmos allows no room for complex games; they know nothing of forays into untested areas, and they can hardly imagine where experiments with anticipated truths could lead to. Yes and no, sic et non, either–or, that is the drab everyday reality of the old 2-D system. In my flatlander years even a simple ‘maybe’ took the wind out of my logical sails – I became passive and actually admitted everything. I was the good person in the queue, trapped in a mournful truthfulness that I was proud of like an old family heirloom. Back then I collected defeats like trophies that enhanced my human dignity. I was a fool, a good person. The more I failed, the brighter my beautiful soul shone – my ego was a neurotic jewel, inept and saintly, crouching in the sulking corner of the world, an untouched person, a denier and a scorner. I had internalized St Augustine’s fundamental principle that lies are reprehensible under any circumstances; even if the whole of humanity can be saved by a single lie, the utterance of an untruth still merits damnation. I had learned from Immanuel Kant that a right to lie for the love of humanity existed only as a supposition, and the moral law I cherished demanded that, whatever the circumstances, I should reveal the full, undisguised truth. Like most victims of tradition, I was raised to live as if I were permanently in the witness box, sworn in to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Today it is a mystery to me how I could ever have thought of the classical 2-D ideologues as great intellects. Why didn’t I rebel against their rigorous fibbing earlier? Well, I have probably already explained – I felt bittersweet gratification in being more truthful than most people. Yet there were already a few precedents in Antiquity, counterauthorities and people who acted as character witnesses to support anybody who rejected the strict priests of truth. I can still remember today that our new 3-D picture of the world – I won’t mention the 4-D visions here – had already existed indirectly and discreetly for a long time. Even among the ancients there were clear-headed people who formulated permissions for lying, at least partially. Think of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria – didn’t he advise clever women who wanted to keep their lovers to deceive their men by faking desire even if they did not feel it at that particular moment? Aristotle likewise discussed cases in which lying is better than speaking the truth – such as illnesses when we should cheer up the sufferer, or when noble deception is necessary to save the fatherland in war. In a later period the Jesuits highly praised and refined the art of lying, whereas their arch-enemy, Luther, gave permission for everything, including the worst tricks, that might damage the Pope, the Antichrist. But what



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is all that compared to the sublime brutality with which our progenitor Machiavelli taught the ultimate technical use of truth and lies in his work The Prince? In substance, Mendanetics stems from the existence of this major work. We, the postmodern princes of lies at our monitors, think back proudly to this bold predecessor. Since that time the word ‘lie’ has essentially been superseded. Instead of lies we should talk today about self-inductive hypotheses. Lying is nothing but an ancient European misnomer for experimenting with contra-factual statements – an art, by the way, that we learn from prophets rather than from philosophers. Is it by chance that more than half of our Mendanetics trainers are former theologians? A liar is simply a prophet who has had bad luck, probably due to unprofessional dealings with the available data. Today I know that a person who doesn’t tell the plain truth is not a liar in the sense that the flat people believe, but is someone who takes out a loan on something that is not yet reality. Lying means: living with semantic debts. It would be a miracle indeed if the laws of speculative capital came to a halt at the spoken truth. The basic form of speculative truth of our times is the ‘project’ – the throw of the dice to project the will into what is to come, what is desired or demanded in the future. On this view the liar of yesteryear would be the prototype of the entrepreneur – a pioneer of 3-D realities, experienced in the art of projecting statements not yet backed up by reality until the sum of coherent fictions becomes a kind of fact. Up until now, people with such talents were usually victims of old Westerntype denunciation. The new situation, however, which affects me personally, sweeps away the prejudices: Mendanetics ensures that the entrepreneur principle is introverted and applied to the ego programme of the entrepreneur. The art consists of sharpening up like a projectile and not being deterred by obstructive authorities – whether they are called morality or old bourgeois truthfulness – from launching oneself as a missile on the grand stage. One of our early morning affirmations says: anybody who slows you down is the enemy. Repeating this phrase to oneself intensely like a prayer or an oath before taking the car out of the garage has taken some of us to the top pretty fast. Another phrase is: study how to eliminate obstructions internally and externally. You have to remove those ugly little truths coolly, like a bug zapper. You should understand that our ancestors were wrong to say that a little grain of lying, low-dosage, might be permissible – as if lying were only a phenomenon or a seasoning. No: Mendanetics-Basic, the holistic 3-D teaching of truth-lies for the new millennium, insists that people fail to understand the idea of lying as long as they only see it as an additive to a substance that is otherwise fake-free. Our

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breakthrough is that we serve up the lie as a main course – or, better still, as a network, a construction kit. Strategic ontologists like us understand the world soberly: everything is a theatre of competition and the survivors are the people who stage the show better. That is why lying is our marching orders, our tonic, our diet. Lying helps me to get started where truth of all kinds leaves me standing on the spot. The main thing in a performance world is to combine individual lies into great success – vision is everything; it is the beginning of the miracles of the fourth dimension. This, of course, takes us onto terrain that I am not qualified to speak of yet. In six months I will be ripe for 4-D Super Mendanetics. I expect great things; I am close to transfiguration. Systematically telling lies – that will add the last touch of glamour to my life. Nowadays I sometimes glow like a halogen lamp. I will shortly become transformed into a total work of art.

MINIMA COSMETICA An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement

Ladies and gentlemen, this lecture, like everything else concerning the ecological fate of our planet, comes half a century, or perhaps a whole century, too early. Anybody who wanted to talk briefly about how a civilization with an incomparably high level of luxury consumption achieves ecological balance would have to look at accomplished, or at least solid, facts. Such facts can only be discovered by long-term observations of the sole case that will provide information about our interests – our own case, actually. Conclusions from the past are no longer valid because relations in the modern age are not comparable to each other. History is no longer the teacher of life. If you want to know the truth about our crisis, you will have to wait. Only a historian three or four generations from today who looks at the ecodramas of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries would be able to see the material that would qualify him or her to make valid judgements; he or she could look back on the turbulence that the future represents to us like a mass of problems that had been dealt with. He or she could benefit from the methodical advantage that our riddles will have become their system of rules, and our expectations will have become their established facts. By the way, in using the male and female pronouns in this rather odd parallel fashion, I am referring to the inexorable sexual dualism of the future sciences of history and social studies. One of the side-effects of emancipatory progress, however delayed it may be, is that it also puts women in a dubious ecological situation. Tomorrow’s research into the past will illuminate everything we were able to produce today by means of the environment and cosmetics and expose it merely as a demonstration of our incorrigibly brilliant recklessness. In the face of the truth to come in a hundred

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years, anybody who behaves as if he or she could already speak the truth would undoubtedly be – well, what? A charlatan? An illusionist? A confidence trickster? A rainmaker? A Pied Piper? A card sharp? At this point we could list all the many words for trickery and cheating but would still not exhaust what there is to say about how our claims for the future lack real seriousness. But perhaps premature concern about future truths has a different meaning. There are strong indications that the meaning of ‘truth’ is undergoing a major change in the logical budget of our civilization, a change that requires us to take increasing responsibility for the facts that have not yet been established. If we are concerned a hundred years too early with things for which we have no proof, this may be an indication that yesterday’s charlatanry is about to become tomorrow’s seriousness. People today will increasingly be drawn into a type of futurized practice that forces them to worry about the facts before they appear. To the extent this is true, we have reason to pay attention to a transformation in traditional mental attitudes. To be brief, I will summarize this transformation in three sweeping statements that are part of a diagnosis of our times. First, insofar as we are sufficiently involved in contemporary life, we are living at the peak of a reorganization of our logical budget from the primacy of the past to the primacy of the future. Second, in future the interest in truth will not be able to be expressed mainly as history, in the sense that history asks how it really was, nor as philosophy, in the sense that philosophy asks which origins and principles actually give rise to that which exists; instead, it will take the form of prognosis and prophecy, to the extent that this sees things coming that must come and invokes what should come if things are done correctly. Third, we are participating in a broad horizontal transformation from passive to active promotion of prophecies. In some situations we stop reacting to warnings and predictions with suffering and instead we start creating our own facts to fit the fictions and projects we prefer. If this theory could be firmed up, however, it would not imply that we were unconcerned about the perspective of the historian a hundred years from now. On the contrary, the historian of the future will sit in judgement on the prophetic activities of the present, and the truth that intelligence will find when it looks back in a hundred years’ time will also pass judgement on our predictive activities. The proposition we advanced at the beginning still holds: if it were a matter of providing cogent truths in the sense of retrospective assessments, we would, indeed, be arriving too early. We are coming in time to realize what doing history means for the future. It means using active prophecy to gather the material that will be available to future historians. Nonetheless, we have been



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warned that anything we do and say from now on can be used against us before the court of the future. In the dark decade after the end of the Second World War a dictum circulated in the Western hemisphere that human beings were condemned to freedom. It was one of the theses that would become both classic and inapt in the course of a few decades. The author of this theorem, Jean-Paul Sartre, succeeded in making it the hallmark of existentialism; the phrase may not have epitomized his times, but it certainly captured their mood. The basic tone of the decade was a sense of bottomlessness that people at that time called the absurd. Existence was pervaded by a kind of cheap tragedy. Those who were alive had experienced fragmentation; those who had escaped felt the chance nature of their survival in every gesture; what still existed stood around like remains, surrounded by annihilations and empty spaces. Those who had survived felt their existence outlined more sharply, as if an invisible hand had drawn a black line around their own life. The abrupt absence of forty million people who had died vibrated in the atmosphere like a mystical emission; some of the more sensitive survivors expressed the feeling that a lifetime was only a loan from those who had vanished. It took a long time for the cloud of absurdity to dissolve. By the late fifties, however, slogans of reconstruction were increasingly being taken up. A new kind of solidity developed, people talked of the New Realism, positivists of all nations united to come down to earth and face facts, and in the sixties we saw the banners waving for overconsumption. It created the backdrop for new risks and new forms of security related to democracy and unchecked industrial growth; both democracy and growth optimism encountered irritating opposition from neo-utopianism and the moral impatience of young Western academics. Then an odd concept appeared on the horizon: ‘quality of life’. Anybody who remembers the time when this was a new expression will be unable to suppress a smile. The word floated above the capitalist political parties like a Zeppelin over a fairground; it was as if politicians had discovered how to put pie in the sky in their electorate’s letterboxes. This is all history now – it is lecturing, to paraphrase Thomas Mann, in the grammatical tense of the deepest past. What was completely broken back then? It seems to me as if Herbert Marcuse simultaneously became the contemporary of Plato, St Paul and Spartacus, Adorno was immersed in endless conversation with the prophet Jeremiah, Mao Zedong’s shadow joined the circle around Tamburlaine and Cortés, and Simone de Beauvoir and Galla Placidia discovered traces of mutual sympathy. Such

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dreamy conjectures may confirm the impression that the past has lost all its dimensions and collapsed into a single point, as it were. Only a few people still alive now can remember the time when existence seemed to flow out from the depths of time like a wide, peaceful stream; nowadays the weeks behind us quickly turn into jet trails that dissolve into unreality in seconds. Years are like garbage bags collected on New Year’s Eve. How undignified elapsed time became, as if the concept of waste included the consumed present. A new zeitgeist took shape – a spirit of destruction that was presaged through signals from the 1970s on has been within our grasp since the 1980s and can be verified by huge numbers of personal statements. This spirit, too, is full of the sense of bottomlessness, but not the same as the one that produced the absurdity of the 1950s; today it has a different shade. In short, aestheticism has overwritten absurdity. Not decision, but experience is the key word of our times. People today do not dream of making their own choices without any reason, as people did in the general drabness of postwar life. Today’s great opportunity comes from consuming oneself without reason. We do not feel the empty space gaping around us and as if all institutions were built on sand because the dead appeared in the majority, as after the war – no, we have become unrestrained because the world as a list of options makes us feel dizzy. We are bottomless because we have to choose between fourteen different types of salad dressing. The world is a menu and we have to consume and not be doubtful. This is the basis of the postmodern ‘condition’. You only have one life, so fill your plate, eat yourself up, don’t leave anything of yourself; the leftovers will end up in a plastic sack anyway. We drift on the ocean of appetite. Our readiness for experience has removed the world’s borders. Although the last conservatives, both Stoics and Christians, have preserved the remnants of faith in the spirit of serious missions and objective tasks, the broad majorities have long since converted to the Consumerist Unbeliever International – to paraphrase a remark by the English cultural historian Ernest Gellner.1 In his capacity as a consumer, the human being of the new millennium perceives his position in bottomless existence. He is no longer condemned to freedom but to frivolity. The frivolous person is someone who must decide for one thing or another without a serious reason – it is the dove-green and not the crimson, the salmon teriyaki and not the lamb shanks, the Seychelles and not Acapulco; it is Naomi and not Vanessa, the Bad Boys not Depeche Mode, the biggies from Honda not BMW, Long Island not Bogenhausen. To know that one will die and to summon the energy to wear not silk but cool simple striped cotton – that demands greatness, and that



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is precisely what the members of our generation tacitly possess. In lucid moments we are shocked by our own capacity for decisionmaking. The roots of this recent decisiveness are actually not to be found in a high-energy will to power, as impassioned Nietzsche followers would have liked to believe. In fact, they come from small, unstable differences in tension. We could call their regulatory principle ‘the will to have fun’, if we understand fun as the principle of elimination of small and tiny quantities of tension. At the same time, what we call the ‘will to have fun’ is not an expression of will in the conventional sense because in the culture of fun the traditional image of human beings who are able to will something has become obsolete. Fun was not, and is not, a principle that takes itself seriously. There is nothing at its core that insists on basic principles. The ability to evacuate positions is the defining characteristic of people who want fun. Frivolity is the aura of a world situation in which the great mass of everyday ways of behaving is justified for one reason, for fun – a justification that is a weak difference, a small gap. We could add a sweeping, almost inappropriate generalization that the system of frivolity hovers over a principle whose basis is minimally sufficient. Options, moods and preferences must be sufficient to give the details their established place in Being. We could be tempted to think that from a philosophical viewpoint we are dealing with an order of weak reasons. If the world is an embodiment of options, it follows that its inhabitants are concerned with making decisions based on attitudes close to indifference, and with turning decisions into visible behaviour. Ladies and gentlemen, I am deliberately linking these remarks on the postmodern system of frivolity to the ideas I shall now consider. Perhaps they can help to articulate an aspect of the dilemma about today’s specific topic. Cosmetics and environmental crisis – it is easy to see that this configuration combines things of unequal value or puts things of different weights on the same scale. There is no doubt that cosmetics, together with everything involved in today’s beauty industry, is the leading phenomenon of the world of weak reasons I mentioned earlier in terms of the reality of options. There is also no doubt that the present environmental crisis signifies a system of serious reasons in the background of the optional, frivolous designs of reality. We suspect, at least, that this system of reasons has not stopped existing. The easy things are trying too directly to join up with the difficult things, the system of unserious things wants to link up with ecology, which means the logical centre of knowledge about serious things. This cannot be achieved directly. The present author knows no method for solving this dilemma. To track down the solution to the riddle that has been set we either need paranormal forces

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or have to be prepared for a complicated investigation. There is much to be said, of course, for the first option. The present author still remembers a memorable incident that occurred in an Austrian spa, Bad Aussee, in September 1993. This was the place where, owing to human error – which is the legal term for frivolity –, a green mamba escaped from its vivarium during a show with exotic snakes in a spa hotel. This is an extremely poisonous snake that enthusiasts regard as one of the most beautiful creatures in the snake world. It vanished under the parquet flooring in a corner of the room and could not be found for several days. The little world of Bad Aussee was in turmoil, and thanks to the media coverage, half of  Austria was gripped by mamba fever. Police and fire-fighters arrived at the scene, tore up the parquet flooring and dug into the walls. Sections of the national army were deployed, snipers with shotguns secured large areas of the town and we may be sure that worried fathers within a radius of 50, 70 and 100 kilometres went around their houses on tiptoe attacking anything sliding, hissing, green or lethal. The local population sent in around a thousand tips on how to capture the snake. The majority of the advice, incidentally, came from the occult quarter – a fact that throws the incident into sharp relief in terms of social theory; one could have no more illusions about the methodical awareness of central Europeans in the period before the transition to the third millennium. The era of trans­ pragmatism has dawned – anyone who achieves anything is right. The hunt ended on the third day. The creature was found approximately where it had last been seen, somewhere under the floor that had been removed in the meantime. The punchline of this happy rediscovery was yet to come: the Austrian public TV channel ORF interviewed a diviner who laid claim to the success in the snake hunt.2 I have never forgotten what the man said about his methods: he explained that the hunt had taken a long time because he had not seen the animal personally beforehand and he said that meant he could not make any direct ‘mental contact’ with it; that left only indirect methods. The green mamba’s owner had to concentrate on the snake, or, as people in such circles say, he had to ‘get mentally attuned to it’. Then the diviner, in turn, concentrated on the snake’s owner or got mentally attuned to him and could eventually localize the snake using his inner impressions. As the public could see, this procedure was soon successful. The green creature was back in its vivarium again and its owner had to bear the costs of the action – destroyed flooring, dismantled wall panelling, daily expenses for security officers, early departures and loss of bookings for the Bad Aussee hotel business. All these are circumstances that qualify Austria as an advanced high-risk society.



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The present author admits that while working on this study he was forced to think more than once about the diviner from Bad Aussee; he was plagued by the dismal thought that the diviner was not morally worse off than he was when it came to investigating the ecological opportunities of a civilization of luxury consumers. I can imagine the mental chain extended by a few links like this: the diviner mentally attunes to Karl Lagerfeld; Karl Lagerfeld mentally attunes to Claudia Schiffer; Claudia Schiffer mentally attunes to her make-up artist; the latter mentally attunes to the head chemist of the cosmetic firm Schwarzkopf – and he or she is mentally attuned anyway to cosmetics in the area of debate between aesthetics and ecology. In our analogy he or she would be the person who knows the green mamba personally. If all goes to plan, we should be able to announce a model solution within a reasonable deadline. Unfortunately the present author is not very good at dealing with media in general and diviner-type media in particular; philosophy, it seems, is not yet the best preparation for the challenges of our times. Anyone who has studied the works of Plato and Adorno is fighting a losing battle; he or she comes up with solutions without asking themselves how and why. Success doesn’t care how you achieve it. What you are about to hear are approaches to the transitory subject that have been arrived at by completely conventional means, attempts to get closer to the present-day problem using detours in the history of ideas. Given the nature of the subject, digressions into philosophy of religion will be inevitable. I will confine my remarks to four relatively short sections: the first section reflects on the ancient European idea that human beings are creatures distinguished by irredeemable deficiency – including the idea of original sin. The second section looks at the methods sinners use to make the consequences of their deficit seem bearable – including the dual ideas of purgatory and indulgences as a retrospective purification procedure for persistent offenders. The third section considers the motif of ecological misanthropy, which can be regarded as the return of radical punishment for sins under non-religious auspices, followed by possible ways and means to evade the prophetic environmental economy. The fourth and last section deals with the possible psycho-ecological function of optimism.

1 Although I do not know whether there are studies on the ecological content of the concept of sin, it seems clear to me that in the right light we would see a meaningful connection. Leaving aside detailed

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rhetoric about classical sins and vices, particularly as they are represented in the Judaeo-Christian traditions, we can see, looking at both sexes in fact, a dark picture that still has some relation to present reality. Human beings are portrayed as creatures that have deep reasons for being disposed to or deciding to flout a given Great Order. The theory of sin in its classical form until the dawn of the modern age was a construct of Christianized late Antiquity. In the transition from pagan Antiquity to the Christian era, people first became interested in systematizing the anthropologically pessimistic themes of the Ancient World and incorporating them into the new economy of redemption. Certainly, Romans and Greeks in the days of myths and theatre, as in those of philosophy, essentially knew that humans were at risk from deficiency and vice. The word ‘hubris’ reminds us how early human beings became the object of critical eyes that saw them as creatures with self-indulgent tendencies. Yet it was one step further from the ancient critique of hubris to the early Christian teaching, the Augustinian doctrine of the condition of humanity as inheritors of original sin. It was the necessary step for destroying every possibility of the self-justification at the basis of the ancient teachings of wisdom and for convincing individuals to accept unconditional dependency on a doctrine of redemption and its apostolic intermediaries, the Catholic bishops. A way of thinking was established in the era of patriarchal theology that we call ‘theonomen’ rule. It held that the world is a cosmos of order created, maintained and ruled by a unique God, a cosmos in which each individual living being has been assigned its designated place and character. This is why ‘being in one’s place’ and ‘being in order’ basically mean the same thing. Human beings are the poignant exception in this beautiful topology. They are the only beings that do not stand – or no longer stand – in their pre-appointed place. Adam, originally installed in the middle of a garden of paradise as its permissive guardian and beneficiary, was unfaithful to his assignation, his placement, and we all know the consequences. Since that time the whole of humanity has been ‘embodied in Adam’, as the biblical teaching of species and groups says, meaning mad about places or, in theological terms, ‘fallen’ or ‘expelled’, ripped out of its original localization and looking for new ­positions – and why not for regained paradises as well? Part of the strength of the Church Fathers’ analysis is that it examined the case of Adam in considerable detail. It was convinced that the only possible answers to the question ‘Where are you, Adam?’– the question that began the human game of hide-and-seek, and then the expulsion and deformation of human beings – were answers that were incompatible with the idea of the Great Order. Adam is always in the wrong place,



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always confused and contrary, always in a mask, lurking in the bushes, in exile, astray. He is at the place of resistance, in the realm of disobedience. Adam’s disobedience manifests the super-paradigm of human civilization since the Neolithic revolution – the revolt of a primate against the cosmic order. But what is disobedience to one’s own self? How could it creep into a world beautifully constructed by God? This question hits the nerve of the investigation. It goes without saying that to answer it people had to go beyond Adam to explore possible conditions of resistance against the law to their very depths. St Augustine, in his analysis of the First Egoism, pioneered an in-depth diagnosis of subjectivity as a negative form of diabolical self-assertion, being hunched up or curled up in oneself, in idiosyncratic positions. It is not just Adam, of course, but actually, far ahead and above him, Satan himself who initiated the intrusion of the negative, the ‘no’, into the cosmos of order that had been initially set up for saying ‘yes’. The first denier, as the inventor of nothing, parodied the divine creation, so to speak, by producing his ‘no’ ex nihilo, out of nothing. The first devil – and this is the key to everything – had no ulterior motive for his choice, just like any poor second- or third-rate devil. He acted out of abundant lack of motivation: because he wanted what he wanted, and that’s all. He chose himself and his separation for no reason, from the depths of a mood, just as fashion designers decide on their colours for the season. It was that simple and simply that. St Augustine discovered anarchy, so to speak, in the First Negation; this is the first time that philosophical reflection illuminated the absence of a beginning of something that wilfully began of its own accord. St Augustine emphasized that the devil’s ‘no’ was not based on any conditioning experience and rival principle; the negative angel would not be excused by pleading that he had a bad childhood before the Fall; nor was he the vassal of a second, evil God. He made his refusal freely: its freedom empowered him to completely turn against the Great Order of things and orientate towards free will. The angel of contradiction is basically an artist. Lethally elegant, as lightly as a model at the end of the catwalk, Satan turned his back on his origins. As he turned back again, people could almost imagine his long, carefully tended curls swinging around his shoulders – he was said to be an effeminate type. For Augustine, the first half-turn, this original perversion, held the destiny of humanity; everything that would later be called history is merely the explication of this turn away and its possible correction by a turn back. From the Christian viewpoint, World history is essentially a game of perversion and reconversion. We could say it is the drama of human statements about a truth

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which they, human beings in the shape of Satan and Adam, initially and mostly turn their backs on – with God’s help and with the aid of suffering – in order finally, perhaps, to return to it. That truth is something that is generally not found and fixed at the first attempt but can only be discovered after a distortion – this view already belonged to an earlier phase of Jewish literature on wisdom. The so-called Old Testament contains weighty interpretations of the theme of sin and repentance, not least in relation to female vanity; it is easy to see that this gives us the pattern of Satanic self-referentiality. The oldest of the Jewish writing prophets, Isaiah, emerged with the first critique of women’s stubborn attachment to cosmetics: The Lord said: Because  the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarves; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the mirrors, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils. Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; and instead of a belt, a rope; and instead of well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a skirt of sackcloth; and branding instead of beauty. (Isaiah 3, 16–24 ESV) We can see clearly that the prophet suspects hair as the basis of the first separation, curls as the beginning of the first curling up inside oneself, and the hairstyle as an agreement to take a particular path. Because of this, remorse must begin with the scissors. If I read the passage correctly, it says that the Lord cuts off the hair of proud women with His own hands – this is the only cosmetic treatment that satisfies the Great Order which has been violated. Come off the catwalk, throw your clothes on the floor, wipe off your make-up and get rid of that highly original hairstyle – these gestures are inspired by an early passion for reconstituting what zealots have always regarded as simpler, initial, true relationships. Nowadays we would most probably see this passion as radical-ecologist.



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2 We have now identified the enemy and marked off the front line. There is a clear trail from Satan’s bottomless rebellion and the original foundation of self-referentiality to Adam’s disobedience and from there directly to the pretty, inward-winding curls of the daughters of Zion. The devil likes himself better than God – the tragedy opens with an act of aesthetic dissidence that begins as moral and ends as ecological. As we have said, the fact that human beings as embodied in Satan and Adam like themselves better than anyone else arouses a tendency towards dangerous originality. The Church Father Tertullian had distinct views about the problem of fashion or, as he expressed it, of women’s trappings – cultus feminarum –, which had a threatening dynamic for all forms of the Great Order: ‘Was [God] unable to create crimson or steel-blue sheep? Even if he were able to, he did not want to; but things God did not want to do, human beings should not do either [. . .].’3 This should not be confused with advocacy of natural colours – what Tertullian, the rigorous theologian, had in mind was a veto against interest in any colourful fashions at all. In his opinion the business of colour involved entering a terrain of originality that aimed towards supplementing what was God-given in a way that was far from innocent; human originality is based only on implicit and explicit resistance to the works of God’s own hand. Tertullian expressed it in formal terms: ‘Anything that does not come from God must necessarily come from his adversary.’ People familiar with the Great Order realize that this means: the way to hell is paved with original ideas. As for the idea that hell is the exact description of the future empire of the devil and his original followers: this came to be the dominant conviction in the works of the Church Fathers during late Antiquity and remained unchallenged until the high Middle Ages. The thousand-year empire of the Catholic belief in hell is one of the most powerful facts of European consciousness. It was an immensely extensive psycho-political regime that made a dubious connection between terror and control of the soul. Human beings are rotten from the beginning and are consequently not upset at being threatened with the worst. The early Middle Ages had no qualms about using terror as a method of education. As St Augustine realized, to make the notion of hell seem extremely serious it was imperative to keep emphasizing that punishments in the nether world were eternal and to insure against objections from merciful advocates of laxity. Examining the formal guarantees that people would burn for ever in hell, he came upon the question of infinitely r­ eclaimable energy

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sources. It is not a trivial matter for God to secure the incombustibility of a sinful body in the eternal fire; when we seriously consider the questions of fuel technology in eternity, we come close to nothing less than a breakthrough to the conception of the self-refuelling reactor. In the twenty-first volume of his work The City of God, St Augustine achieved an impressive feat of constructive imagination by designing an energy concept along the lines of a closed plutonium cycle to ensure that the flames of punishment will remain burning for all time. With almost loving precision, the bishop Augustine envisaged in detail how the sinful body would smoulder like an eternal briquette in a kind of torture that would preserve its form – a last Christian tribute to the Greek morphophilia, the love of boundary and shape. St Augustine also wrote unforgettable commentaries on the problem of the combustibility of disembodied demons and wicked angels. What concerns us here is the inexorable correlation of sin and punishment in hell – in the present context we are not interested in issues of repentance and paradise. It is true that the works of the Church Father of Hippo also include references to the possibility of post-mortal purification; in principle, however, his teachings on the Last Things – like all the teachings of the Church until well into the twelfth century – are based on a harsh dualism of paradise and hell, salvation and damnation. This only changed fundamentally in the high Middle Ages when the idea of purgatory began its triumphal march. Thanks to the ground-breaking studies by the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff,4 we know today that the ‘birth of purgatory’ was more than a retrospective ornamental addition to Christian eschatology. It is probably not exaggerating to describe it as the greatest event in the European store of ideas between Bernhard von Clairvaux and Luther. Under the banner of purgatory the West discovered the synthetic energy that it has still not exhausted today. The establishment of the third place between hell and heaven also gave historical validity to the idea of the third way. Europe has been both things since then: the mother of the revolution and the emporium of interim solutions. We do not forget that since then everything that people of the modern age, especially in Eastern Europe, have had to sacrifice for the future in the name of revolution and transitional periods has been a purgatorial suffering that has become immanent. As long as Europe thinks about its world history, it sees the future as essentially purgatorial; it is actually the people of the former ‘Second World’ who will soon realize that in making their present leap from one transitional period to another they have merely changed their purgatory, so to speak. The adventures of the dialectic have their source in purgatory. It is where Europeans first learned to say



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‘both … and …’. It is where they discovered the magical synthesis that constructed a common element to bridge over an irreconcilable contradiction. And above all: under the banner of purgatory they learned to be agile in a new metaphysical way – they acquired their typical mobility in sin and the recklessness that comes from being conscious of deficiency that has influenced the moral profile of Europe from its foundations to the present day. Purgatory taught the Christians of Europe – more precisely, the lay people, city dwellers, traders, profiteers, scholars, captains, princes and artists – a lesson that could be called the first modernism. Flames of purification flickered out of the nether world into the different parts of the human world and spoke with a thousand pink, yellow and green tongues: it is not necessary to be radical to thwart evils at the root; it is not necessary to seek the ‘truth’; it is not necessary to take the monk’s habit and the cross to avoid serious temptations; it is not necessary to place one’s life with every tiny little gesture under the literal authority of the Great Order. It is enough to keep out of the way of the most blatant rogues; it is enough to be moderately sinful; it is enough to be available for retrospective accounting; it is enough to settle one’s debts to the Great Order in a pay-off scheme sometime later. This lesson contains everything that countless people wanted to hear from the late Middle Ages onwards in order to put things right with the world and themselves: they were people who were not entirely indifferent about their good conscience, yet did not feel called upon to live a life of austerity. Purgatory opened the way of salvation for moderate, easy-going, bourgeois sinners. Its fire gave the green light to a type of layperson in Europe’s courts and cities who was not wholly without expectations. It gave a start to the diligent average sinner. In those days even profiteers could acquire blessedness by roundabout routes.5 Although a consciously committed sin is unforgivable, it is still forgivable if it is linked to a bond for years of purification torture in the nether world. It is here that we find the modus operandi of modernity: the salvation of the unholy came into prospect. Still under Catholic patronage, the first signs emerged that the regime was easing up; a risky venture. People predicted an era of galloping progress, a time of nearly unlimited credit, a time of sin with limited liability. Commit your sins now, suffer later and still be blessed after all: this was the basic formula for the European-Catholic economy of salvation for laypersons. Purgatory secured the ecological solvency of the average evildoer. Because he or she was destined to be tortured enough and retrospectively purified after death in a temporary hell, the Great Order, although violated, would still receive its due in the end. The establishment of purgatory created an

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a­ cceptable means of payment out of the sinner’s pain multiplied by the time factor; years in purgatory could be weighed up against the suffering of the Great Order caused by our transgressions. And since the Great Order only ever suffered relative damage through individual sins, punishments in the nether world were wholly adequate as reparation. From that moment on, ecology was possible in the actual sense of the word if it meant the operations of the most comprehensive domestic economy – including the lowest and highest. Nowadays we would speak of systemic external costs. In these oblique preliminary ideas about the history of ecological reason it may suffice to say that the idea of purgatory marked the beginning of an effective Christian world economy: it allowed the Catholic practice of indulgences as a prelude to modern capitalism by showing the spirit of commerce as a perpetuation of the spirit of the victim; it prefigured the controversial ecological idea that defaulting on payment in the present meant that borrowing could be done against the future; and it cleared the way for the notion that such credit could be repaid with reparations in the fires of purgatory, always on the premise that the biggest evil, eternal damnation, would continue to be recognized and feared in human consciousness as the epitome of what should be avoided. Purgatory opened a window for human originality in the normative world of the Middle Ages. Purgatory highlighted the key figures of future generations: persistent offenders, witty innovators, followers of economic fashions and, last but not least, the people who charged interest, the brokers, the proto-capitalists who usually had success with the principle of unnatural profit. It is not far from the rescue of profiteers to the Protestant sanctification of lay work. All that is missing now is the theological justification for originality, an acquittal for the vain extra invention of works that were not contained in the first edition of the Creation – better known today as innovations. Then all the necessary themes would be assembled for European world actors to make their definitive break-out from the shell of the idea of the Great Order. By justifying, indeed canonizing, original people, human beings would have a good conscience about using inventive practice to seize power; they would be convinced that there is no Being before the deed, no norm before the will, no essence before existence. These desires began to be fulfilled in the early Renaissance philosophies of art, from Nicholas of Cusa to Marsilio Ficino; this is where the productive layman and the inspired genius first received their metaphysical consecration. The result was that the privileged characteristic of the Absolute – ­creativity – was passed on to human beings. Modernity is the age of creativity, the age of enterprise, the age of projects – an era that



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could only come to an end because it became incapable of adequately handling the side-effects of its own rich inventiveness. We are now ready to turn the pages to the present state of the problem.

3 These references to the past would be superficial if they did not contain the complete basic structure of the present ecological conflicts. In fact, the timespan from the end of the Middle Ages to the ecological twilight of the late twentieth century can be described as a stage play with the title ‘Decline and Return of the Idea of the Great Order’. Its plot echoes a periodic movement in the history of ideas and customs that led to the collapse of original sin and the emergence of sinning against the environment. Between these two end points is the total process of activity – involving economics, weapons technology, transportation technology, epistemics, information technology and aesthetics. What is striking about this process is how the theme of fundamental sinfulness moved from heaven to earth. In line with modernity’s principle of secularity, a religious difference between God and human beings has ceased to impress us. Faced with a rupture of primary importance, we have to ponder on the historical difference between the human species and its ‘living space’, which we could also call the difference between the techno-system and the ecosystem. The crucial issue is that the theme of fundamental human misalignment which theology calls ‘sin’ has returned under different auspices. It has returned as the perception of the visible break in the way of life in the industrial age between the human sphere’s mode of existence and how the rest of Nature is ordered. Sin that has become immanent can still be sin, serious, deeprooted and deadly. Recognizing this forces people in the advanced industrial countries to provide answers to the major question of the age of industrialism: how do we obtain a merciful Nature? A reform of the system on every level is on the agenda of world history. The ‘human beings’ in the industrial system, the far-reaching, polyvalent end consumers eager for experience, increasingly seem like beings whose rift with their natural preconditions is just as fundamentally evil as the relationship between the angel who invented negation, on the one hand, and the holy totality, on the other. In the same way that Satan was poisonous for the pyramid of creation, what human beings have issued, at least since 1750, has been poisonous for environmental cycles, whether on a large or a small scale. In other words, anybody who wants to decontaminate the world has no choice but to start with the hypertrophic human factor.

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And now we can see how the two Catholic European styles of order – the brutal early one that demanded hell for seasoned sinners and the moderate later one that opened a purgatorial third way – became valid again for processing immanent sins committed against the order of the ecological system. The severe method was based on the idea that people who received the news of their approaching end unconditionally retreated into themselves – those who acted otherwise could expect the reduction of humanity through autogenous hell; they could reliably expect Nature’s revenge on a purely causal basis. This may be the truth, but who wants to hear it? The authors of the moderate style are very understanding towards environmental sinners who are unable to hear; they offer them the prospect of a purgatory in which everybody who persistently sins and intends to continue doing so can acquire a clear conscience provided he or she is willing to pay the price of the sin, either in advance or after the event. This introduces the decisive concept into the debate: the price. Anybody who talks about the third place between heaven and hell should not be silent about indulgences. In principle, the late medieval system of indulgences or writing off sins was nothing but an impressive price system for accredited Church penalties and periods in purgatory. It prefigured the European market as a system of overseas trading with more or less holy goods (on the basis of Roman contracts, we hardly need add). Think of saints’ attempts to appease God with intercessory prayers for the sinners in hellfire, the mitigating effect of back payments by the relatives of the deceased, deathbed donations to the Church, price lists for all manner of crimes and transgressions, ransom payments for missed crusades, broken oaths, avoidance of confessions and neglected fasting duties, special funds for dykes and church buildings, and much more. In 1521 Archbishop Albrecht von Mainz, who was still Luther’s highest superior at the time, wanted to finance ambitious construction plans for the city of Halle. He announced a special indulgence in the form of a gigantic catalogue of relics that listed forty-two whole bodies of saints and nine thousand individual items, mostly bones, with a total value of nineteen and a quarter million years in purgatory. The catalogue’s main attractions were the shoulder blade of St Christopher, a handful of the earth from which Adam was created, and the basin in which Pontius Pilate washed his hands; branches from the burning bush and manna from the desert were among the other items from what could be described as Germany’s first mail-order company. To this day the little manual by Pater Arnold Guillet Die Ablassgebete der katholischen Kirche [The Prayers for Indulgence of the Catholic Church] states quite clearly:



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The indulgence is best compared to a share. The more shares a person owns the greater the share of the firm’s capital and profit he receives. The ‘firm’ we belong to is the Church; a person who gains an indulgence becomes a ‘shareholder’ in the Church.6 It would have been even better if the author had talked about a central bank that issues a currency or bonds from its holy treasury and uses its subsidiary banks to control transfer flows from the mercy borrowers to the mercy owners. As we know, it was the reformist theologians of Calvin and Luther who removed the basis for that monstrous but effective salvation economy by completely transposing God’s mercy into the realm of the unconditional, the incalculable and things that cannot be bought. Ladies and gentlemen, our times have been called the period of decision-making in relation to the history of civilization and even natural history. In fact they should be called the years of triumphal indecision. During the past decade the moderate deal in ecological affairs has become the rule worldwide. The uncompromising voices who warned us to turn back, the penitents who criticize the system and the green heralds of the apocalypse have been pushed into the background and find an audience only among noble and mad, marginal people, among excitable types with extremist tendencies, people who are receptive to the ideal of ecological sanctity. Today, as in the Franciscan Middle Ages, they are not mainstream characters. The only thing that can happen in their circles is extreme outrage for the benefit of maltreated Nature; this is where the sense of justice flourishes in catastrophe. It is true that in the present state of things people who love whales and dragonflies become enemies of humankind. Radical ecologists are ashamed of their species. In their metaphysical, sensitive way they dream of the earth empty of human beings once again. Their sense of order even goes as far as seeing the dissipatio humani generis, the extinction of the human genus, as a welcome trend in the world’s progress. In their case, ecological misanthropy culminates in the paradox that humanity will be likeable only after active self-criticism has caused it to vanish from the face of the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that this high-minded love of spaces empty of humans is not a majority option at the moment. The persistent offenders on every continent, the originals not prepared to do penance, the developed and the developers, the creative and the stylized people, the beautiful and quick people, including the broad majority of consumers and producers, owners and voters, drivers and travellers in the First World, at least after they have given up denying, are demanding a different

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way, a way into the way out, a third way in peril. And it is precisely the outlines of this way that have won out with irresistible logic in recent years. A constitutive purgatory has been born, and we ourselves are its first clients. After a phase of dualist turmoil between economy and ecology we, too, have incorporated a third place into our world view, a place where ecology is no longer opposed to economy; aesthetics is ethics; consumption is conservation; and going onwards is turning around. The new third place makes it all possible. The economy insists on its legalities and habits but still puts on ecological airs: it purifies itself and its products – in fact it launches a hypermarket for everything that purifies, lowers, filters, reduces, detoxifies, extracts and miniaturizes. The dialectic is once again on track towards defeating dualism. All the same, there is just as little fun to be had with the ecological way of purification as there once was with the religious way. The religious way is also associated with the awesome seriousness of the revived idea of the Great Order, a seriousness that is simultaneously distant and present, and this idea may now be presented, without explicit metaphysical perspectives, in bio-systemic languages and with all kinds of scientific reservations. When the clearest analysts of our situation are the very people who become converted to such ideas, this shows our monumental embarrassment more clearly than anything else. With a realism worthy of the label of Catholicism, present-day purgatorial ecology incorporates the major moral and physical factors of our situation into its analysis: sustained sin and its gamble on the continuation of a life full of cheer; the neglect of consciousness about procreation in nearly every human population; the cracks in structure of the Great Order – the state of the ground, water bodies, fauna, flora and the atmosphere; the shortage of time; the cowardice of people who hold office; the perpetrators’ fear of becoming victims; their reluctant readiness to let their persistent sinning cost them something. These moments can combine to form the outlines of a new total economy, something under the heading of ‘eco-social market economy’, ‘ecological realpolitik’, ‘Marshall Plan for the Earth’ or ‘the economy of sustainability’. Such approaches involve thinking with commendable logic about the total costs of original lifestyles, including funding models for persistent sins against the ecosystem. The most important programme in this direction was written by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker.7 The cover picture of this study shows the globe divided into quarters. The Atlantic is recognizable on the left with a ribbon of soft white clouds; on the upper right is Europe, graceful and brownish in colour; and below that is the yellow land mass of Africa. It is the visual design characteristic of the new Great Order.



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Anybody who can look at the sea and earth from that perspective can harbour few illusions about his or her place in the space. The book’s title says a great deal all at once: Earth Politics: Ecological Realpolitik on the Threshold of the Century of the Environment. Not only does the word Realpolitik indicate that the time of reckoning has come; the reference to the approaching ‘century of the environment’ is certainly not modest in terms of the philosophy of history and has a clear purgatorial meaning. In an ‘epoch’ like this, actors of all persuasions have to show unprecedented commitment in determining a price system for the prevention of catastrophic effects. Von Weizsäcker had good reason to give the systemic central chapter of his book the heading: ‘Prices Must Speak the Truth’.8 We can deduce from this that future history will only be able to retain minimal coherence in terms of world history if it leads to a world domestic economy regulated by markets. In this economy, money would be spent as the price for indulgences for acts of revenge by the damaged environment. The persistent appetites for sin would be fed into the market and a generalized practice of paying penalties would lead by way of market mechanisms to self-stabilizing cyclical processes. It is an open question whether such a system of prices for environmental damage could work on a sufficiently global basis – it would mean the effective introduction of a new quality of political economy that would simultaneously be a world economy and a rescue economy. The only comparable historical example that is not doomed to fail from the start is the Catholic economy of indulgences. It is an exciting model with a bizarre coherence that makes it almost grandiose, and its success was unrivalled for centuries until something better was found. Today, as we witness the fall of shortlived profane economism, we are becoming more aware again that prices can affect even indirect, invisible things operating in the background. The sky is not for free, and even the chemical composition of the stratosphere must be financed; from now on budget decisions will become confessions of faith in a future life. We have to take into account that vast majorities of people who half-believe, who believe only a quarter and who do not believe at all will not stop doing what they should not do under any circumstances in the sense of the biospherical global order whose outline is now vaguely emerging. The costs of this will increasingly tell the truth. The god of immanence, the money which moves everything, is facing turbulent times ahead in which it will have to reveal itself as never before.

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4 Ladies and gentlemen, my conclusions mostly concern those people who are surprised that they are happy and cheerful. I think our train of thought up to now has prepared us for this surprise. We can now see more clearly why human beings are animals in whom frivolity and constructiveness converge. When Homo sapiens occidentalis looks in the mirror nowadays, he does not see an original animal that likes itself. He is looking at a constructivist who is making encouraging signs to him from behind the mirror. Constructivists are people who want to derive extreme consequences from the facts of human productivity, both logical and material. They teach that there are no Great Orders in existence that we would have to enter only to be submissive and conform; we are already co-productive to begin with. Wherever people claim order, construction is always to be found as well, and wherever construction exists, fields open up for the interplay of indeterminate processes and the use of energy vectors. This is the systemic reason that makes it possible for prophetic activism to support a cause that seems lost from the start. Human beings are auto-flexible animals to the very end – they can become almost anything they can sustainably imagine themselves to be. But can we successfully imagine an effective, environmentally friendly mode of being that is also pious about being global? As we have seen, in the system of industrial frivolity, originality works as the fuel and engine of the wide-awake movement. It is this originality that seems preordained to take a constructivist turn in the future. We have reasons to cease being randomly inventive; instead, we have to receive the outputs of the original animal constructively in big cyclical processes. This condemns system construction to planetary orders of magnitude. Constructivism is the objective idealism of frivolity – which accounts for the predestined form of thought of the age of eco-realism. If anyone is looking for an epistemological anti-depressant, here it is, available on the market in various forms. It will help to foster successful real-life illusions of environmentfriendliness, or at least to reduce hostility to the environment. A changed concept of technology on a new horizon of invention is emerging among today’s intellectual avant-garde in engineering and ecology; we can detect a second kind of originality that will bring the consequences of the first kind under control. The second kind of originality shows us that hope should not be blind – this is true today more than ever. As a mechanism of the second kind of originality, the new self-critical invention would mean a conversion



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of the system. Its axiom is the realization that reproductivity goes deeper than mere productivity. Thinking about originality and sustainability together can bring a completely unknown idea to light – that of a new kind of Nature that human analysis has helped to mediate with itself. The unparalleled situation we are in justifies people today looking in the mirror. We look at our own external appearance to keep fit. In the battle against entropy, little gestures often have a big effect – keeping fit is half the business of politics. For people plagued by doubt, make-up can also become a gesture of primal trust. If a Great Order could smile, it would do so in the face of this gesture. This is how beings with originality stay fit for the long working days of the third way.

VI

MUSEUM

THE MUSEUM School of Disconcertment

Remains are not a sign of death but of mystery.

H.P. Jeudy

Otherness and Varnish There are days when our feeling of belonging to the world fades. It is as if an invisible elastic band that normally pulls us along on our daily track suddenly slackens – we may think that part of the emotional equipment that organizes our participation in life has stopped functioning. Albert Camus described states like this to illustrate his ethics of the absurd. In contrast to Heidegger, who described existence as being held out into the nothingness in his inaugural speech as professor in Freiburg in 1929, Camus explained the absurd scent of existence as coming from the shocking experience of being immersed in triviality. A small interruption in the brain activity that we use to make incessant to-do lists and meaningful plans for ourselves is enough to suddenly plunge us into the naked reality of existing. At such moments we may see an otherwise hidden aspect of the world as a totality: briefly, existence means being surrounded by things that have nothing to do with us. You can walk past an open telephone booth and see a man talking into the phone, gesticulating wildly, and suddenly the street and the whole neighbourhood turns into a flat backdrop, the houses stand there like meaningless gestures making big promises, busy passers-by rush on aimlessly with absurd exaggerated motions, posters make disgusting empty gestures, and the trees on the avenue, the traffic lights, the shop window displays and vehicles are merely an assembly of ­gesticulations boasting of

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their existence. The world seems like a film with the soundtrack switched off so that nothing remains except the impenetrable and gimmicky mass of facts brimming over with the ridiculous pretence of their presence. The world scene is reduced by everything that language and participation have contributed to it – being has suffered a sensory attack and continues to exist only in resting mode. Observers are surrounded by situations and movements that no longer have binding relevance to anything, they freeze inside, their perception is stuck, they stop believing things, and the world curls up in triviality like a piece of paper in the fire. When speech returns after the absurd break, people may well remark that the world in its totality looked as if it had turned into a museum. It was like being transported to the border of the totality and seeing the totality from there as an immense exhibition piece, an original-sized copy of itself. As an imitation of itself, the world did not differ from its original state in the slightest detail except for the characteristic of significance – its sudden disappearance turned the same thing into something incomparably different. The same thing in a completely different state turns into a gaping chasm to otherness. A thing we have seen visibly a thousand times and that has grown on us like a shared habit can revert back into something inexcusably strange – I say revert because at such alienating moments the veneer of familiarity that covers things cracks and makes them seem overlaid with an original, aggressive otherness. For anybody who has been through such a mad interlude it is like going to an ontological exhibition opening where the world puts itself on display and glitters at us through the fresh varnish of otherness like a senseless novelty. In the ecstasies of boredom, of the feeling of meaninglessness and over-abundance, the world itself becomes a world’s fair – everything known and visible seems to have moved into a world museum we cannot remember ever having entered. We should be careful not to interpret this speculation as a symptom of the modern malady of alienation. On second glance, what seems all too familiar is actually an ancient achievement – its appearance marks a threshold in the history of civilization. The birth of philosophical thought out of the astonishment that initially accompanied the adventure of Socratic and Platonic thought is just as important as the birth of subjectivity out of world estrangement. Only great disconcertment about the world as the place of What and That can trigger the monologue of the soul that Plato defined as the medium of philosophy. We are astonished about the dawning of the world as an event in which everything we know appears once more on the horizon like a sunrise in broad daylight and enters the arena of what is



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present in reality. It follows that the disconcertment the authors of modern absurdism have articulated is an authentic variation of philosophical astonishment. Both are states that cannot be fixed or professionalized. Disconcertment and astonishment belong to the no man’s land that stretches between science and enlightenment, psychedelics and method. These considerations reveal a connection between the museum sphere and the alien: museology is a form of xenology, the scientific study of the alien; museum studies are part of the phenomenon of cultural strategies for dealing with strangers. This explains the deep ambivalence of the German word ‘museal’,1 the adjective relating to the museum; if the museum per se is a xenological institution, it is inevitably part of the double meaning of the alien. As a place to encounter beautiful strange things, it communicates experiences on the xenophile spectrum such as desire for the new, acknowledgement, invigoration, exoticism and sympathy with the non-ego; as a place for presenting ugly strange things, the museum is linked to experiences on the xenophobic spectrum, with reactions of rejection against the non-ego, with contempt, antipathy and revulsion towards what is dead, external and dissimilar. This ambivalence makes the modern museum one of the sensitive points for studying the work of culture as simultaneous acquisition and rejection. In contrast to theories such as Nelson Goodman’s that emphasize the didactic functions of museums, or the doctrines that trace the multiplication of museums in the twentieth century to the conservation problems of societies that have become historically accelerated – as in Lewis Mumford’s studies – in the following we shall try to develop a xenological concept of the museum. This integrates the indisputable didactic and conservational aspects of museum practice into the context where we know the world as strange and it looks at us strangely as something we know.

The Hall of Memory of the Self and Place of Skulls of the Other Since the nineteenth century, museums have widely been seen as having an epic function: using art works and everyday objects, they narrate the path of a historical subject up to its present level. This kind of evolutionary idea of the museum was difficult to achieve in practice; it was most successful in the form of a national museum in which a nation represented its history with the aid of national relics – from the bronze sword to the guided missile, from linear pottery culture to the food mixer, from the oxcart to the magnetic levitation

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train, from the river mill to the nuclear reactor and from Charles Martel to Helmut Kohl.2 The epic design can best be achieved in the area in which ‘history’ can actually be represented as the sum of continuities and renewals: a military museum would have the opportunity to narrate the history of the species of warmongering animal in the context of weapons; a technology museum could unfold the history of the animal laborans and of Homo faber using tools and machines from farming, artisanal and industrial production. The narrative museum is one of the many ideas with which the nineteenth century caused embarrassment for the twentieth. In tasking the museum with a grand narrative, historicism created an institute to implement its preconception of a history to be narrated to us and about us on the level of cultural policy. In this respect the narrative museum and the museum that presents evolution are only materializations of a historical text whose writing can be seen earlier in philosophical and political literature. The same intellectual authority that writes national, cultural and world history also informs the cultural policy that leads to the construction of national museums, picture galleries, national galleries and museums of applied arts and technology. The history of museums in the nineteenth century shows a remarkable symbiosis of observation and power. For a brief historical moment the victorious forces of the imperial bourgeoisie allowed a compromise with contemplation. The fact that the world had just been constructed as a global factory, a wholesale emporium and a setting for total war did not exclude its simultaneous transformation into an object of educational contemplation. Historicism is the philosophical Sunday of the imperialist week and its museum is the bourgeois temple. This is why all the exhibition pieces in nineteenth-century museums whisper to their visitors: enrichissez-vous, ‘enrich yourselves’. The emotional and intellectual enrichment of the visitors reflects the process of bourgeois acquisition of the world as simultaneous confirmation and marshalling of all stocks. Nineteenth-century museums are not actually narrative in character. The history they seem to be reviewing and providing testimony for has de facto previously been narrated elsewhere. Treitschke’s historiography is the real Prussian national museum, just as Burckhardt’s morphological vision of Renaissance culture represents the real visit of educated Europeans to the imaginary museum of Italy.3 Museums themselves always remain as mere compilations, storehouses for pieces of cultural war booty, splendid guesthouses for trophies of scientifically camouflaged plundering, archives, treasure houses and stockpiles for objects of bourgeois value. The epic spirit that renders history visible gives them a touch of the great



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narratives that were composed outside the museum walls in literature and in university chairs of philosophy. Beat Wyss, an art historian from Zurich, discovered the real origin of philosophical museology in his ingenious interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art.4 Although the word ‘museology’ is a neologism that only appeared around the mid-1960s, the idea of museum studies was already immanent in Hegel’s aesthetics and even more in his history of philosophy. In his travels through world history Hegel became the first total museum visitor. Acting as secretary of the world spirit he recorded the developmental phases of the spirit that exists in itself and the spirit that exists for itself. In this perspective, the whole of world time becomes an interior space the spirit has to cross in the process of self-recapitulation. This interior space has already been conceived as the exhibition room of the absolute historical world museum. Phenomenology passes through it on the way towards its present in which the world and the self-acquisition of the spirit are to become accomplished facts. After it has quickly gone through the first room, in which the monstrous sphinx-like early Afro-Asian history is on show, it arrives in the second room, where the exhibits of Antiquity shine beautifully as individual items. Finally it arrives in the room of the Christian world era, the room that, as expected, can only be the third and last one. It smells of prayer and work – it is the integral culture nation as the rational retirement home for humankind. There is much for the intellect to see in this gigantic room; it proceeds from its medieval bias of faith in the Revelation and feudal tutelage to the modernist autonomy of self-knowledge and of the bourgeois constitutional state. The third hall is enormous – it already includes a Prussian posthistoire and the thousand-year empire of the modernist project. It is the room that houses the Western world civilization of the modern age and which serves as the meeting place for the United Nations composed of the last human beings. Thanks to Hegel’s concept of violence we have an outline of the present-day world as the world’s fair of progress. In his plan the world itself becomes a dynamic museum in which life and memory, exhibition and millennium are the same thing; this is why it does not differentiate between what is staged and the absolute. The fact that what is real here is also rational tells us that the exhibits of the phenomenological world’s fair actually reveal the final truth of the totality. In the constitutional state, in the encyclopaedia of sciences and in romantic art the intellect conclusively revealed what it has always objectively and subjectively harboured. From then on it no longer drifted anarchically where it wanted to but only where it could, which means in the interior of the millennial third hall. This is why

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Hegelians have never been able to distinguish between the rustle of inspiration and the hum of an air-conditioning system – perhaps this accounts for their fury about so-called false immediacy, because how could a fresh wind from outside get into a Hegelian museum? The only thing that could possibly be blowing there is the ventilator. The basic concept of Hegelian and historical museology, which is also the key concept of bourgeois society, is acquisition. People who go through the tours of national and world history that museums offer do so to acquire a double kind of ownership, of the world and of themselves. To obtain full possession of its identity the intellect has either to assimilate or to destroy what it is not – at best, to destroy it through assimilation. That is the meaning of historical museum culture: it is designed to portray the entire past as a statement of the becoming self. The alien can no longer be anything but a self that first appeared anonymously but was quickly recognized and incorporated. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is enthroned in an unusually reconciled fashion above the world-historical scene, which, we are told, is a place of skulls. Hegel sees the world museum at the same time as a world graveyard that already also integrates the living; but the spirit feels quite happy there because each grave houses its own lived possibility and each bone represents an ancestor. The Absolute Spirit is prepared to recognize all previous and simultaneous spirits as relatives on condition that they are willing to be put in a museum and historically buried. But this recognition is ultimately exhausted in acts of incorporation. Conserved in absolute memory, the statements of past alien life become the property of the philosophical museum expert. Because history itself moves on as the accumulation of museum stocks, the museum administration is hardly troubled by the suspicion that in this case property could be theft. Yet as long as acquisition defines the meaning of history, the alien is destined to be reduced to remains. The foreign remainder is the factor we can neglect in the historical game, the dust of the archive, the intangible breath of a life that should only mean something to us in terms of its statements and results. ‘The life of infamous people’ and the existence of people without any form of expression decay into remnants. In this philosophy, which sees the world itself with all its property owners as immersed in triviality, the shudder we feel at the strangeness of existence is also a trivial leftover. A new type of museology that has liberated itself from the identity compulsion of the nineteenth century no longer sees the museum simply as a hall of memory of the self. However much curators may talk about ‘functions of identity presentation’, the only possible authentic twentieth-century5 museum is the one in which the theme of strangeness is sharply exposed in a way that fits our age of



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consternation. Lucius Burckhardt6 was right to claim that the ethnology museum is the most museum-like museum of all. It should be a necessary inspiration for the museum of the twentieth century. Its task is to involve a society that clings to identifications in intelligent cross-border communication and trade with others – and with its ‘own’ members as well. For this reason, too, the authentic museum of today is a museum of interior ethnology. While the fourth generation of our nineteenth-century museum policy is currently being replayed in African and Asian countries, advanced museum practice in the first-generation nation states is beginning to tackle the internal decolonization of culture. Whatever aspect of the past and present world these museums may display, their historical moment will only come when they introduce their audience to an enlightened form of world estrangement.

Museums and Non-Museums One of the clichés of the recent discussion in museum studies is the comparison of museums with analogous institutions and places of culture. After definitions by philosophy of history, education, cultural politics, conservational and compensation theory failed to clarify the xenological core of museum practice, some perspicacious authors have approached the problem more indirectly. This has led to museums being compared with graveyards, mortuaries, garbage tips, mausoleums, madhouses, penal institutions, sanatoria and brothels – comparisons that often seem lacking in respect. Such parallels are usually intended less polemically or humorously than serious people may think. What defines the seriousness of such reflections in museum studies is that they do not shrink from referring to suspect places and functions to communicate the specific way in which the museum is different. The other places the museum is associated with have one heterological and xenological – or fundamentally different and alien – factor in common with it: when it comes to suspect places, it is clear that the museum of acquisition itself is an eccentric place, a splendid frame around the strange, reprobate, bizarre, excellent and incomparable things that we would happen upon blindly like owners and users if no museums existed. The association between the museum and the graveyard is the most macabre, but also the most obvious, of those mentioned above. That decrepit things rest in a museum in rather tarnished peace is part of the standard view of popular museology. In reality the museum is less of a graveyard than a heaven on earth for leftover objects, because the day of the exhibition was the dawn of the day

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of resurrection. In this sense things that have succeeded in being included in a permanent exhibition have really been recorded for posterity. Talking of the resurrection of the body makes more sense for them than for the mortal shell of Christians who, whether buried in the earth or cremated, have the same low odds against preserving a trace of similarity to themselves up to the Day of Judgement. Seen from a Greek rather than a Christian perspective, for the exhibits the entry into a collection means the journey to Hades, where they gather in dingy cellars with the famous and the unknown and live in the shadows for all eternity. It is true that the collectivization of things in the museum is rather like cities of the dead where simple people ‘reside’ next to the private owners of imposing graves. On the other hand, we can only find a convincing analogy between the permanent exhibition of a thing and the burial of a deceased person if we think of the Egyptian pyramids rather than the Christian churchyard. The tertium comparationis, the third part of the comparison, consists in the passionate effort to conserve the mortal body; if museums and pyramid graves are really the nearest equivalent on earth to metaphysical immortalization, ancient Egyptian undertakers are the objective colleagues of contemporary curators. There are even supposed to be people who don’t like going to museums because they feel that the smell of burial objects clings to all the exhibits. In fact, even today part of the activity of collecting for museums is nothing but a continuation of tomb robbery by other means. One of the significant ways modernity represents itself is that our Egyptologists have taken possession of mummies to turn them into exhibition objects. Anybody who has ever seen the mummies in the Egyptian Collection in Berlin or elsewhere must have instinctively understood how the modern spirit of exhibiting has triumphed over the discreet old-fashioned bond between the living and the dead. In the process of exhibition, the modern production of posterity as a state of permanent visibility triumphs over the ancient hope of survival through hidden transformation. But when museums exhibit the bog people, mummies and human skulls they have acquired, they come up against the limit beyond which the things assert their own interests against the exhibition. Wherever the heaven of things becomes a morgue itself, the xenological core of the museum is exposed to view. The dead exhibit communicates the main message of the modern museum: there is something insolubly strange in the world. At the same time, museum routines, by their very nature, make what is frightening and indigestible tame and staid, and give us a deceptive feeling of familiarity with the most extreme and the strangest things.



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In his reflections on ‘Museums and Other Houses’, Nelson Goodman emphasized the comparison between the penitentiary and the madhouse.7 He thought that the common factor of these institutions is generally that they have a specially designed security system to prevent the inmates from breaking out or to protect over-sensitive subjects from the environment. This tells us that once things are delivered to museums they hardly ever find their way out again. At most they are transferred to more modern institutions or sent on leave from jail as part of a prison reform – heavily insured, of course. The fact that some well-funded museums operate ‘an elaborate intelligence network to capture the wanted’ also seems to fit the picture.8 In our context the extra-territorial character of Goodman’s two comparative institutions is striking; both are destined to isolate individuals who have become alien to their environment because of law-breaking and psychological anomalies. This applies in a similar way to the sanatorium comparison, which is also designed to make people aware of the ‘institutional monstrosity’ of the museum.9 In the brothel comparison, the opportunity for some moments of careless pleasure is the characteristic that makes both museum and bordello seem like places of abreaction and relaxation away from the general hustle and bustle. For those whose professional affiliations require them to see museums mainly as didactic institutions, this definition of the brothel may overstep the permissible limit. For the same reasons, the same people should start encouraging museums and German football league stadiums to emulate each other because both places are very eager to describe success in terms of audience figures. The comparison of the museum with graveyards, Hades and the city of the dead takes us into macabre territory, and the comparison with the garbage tip leads us into cynicism. Just as thanatology touches on the mysteries of conscious life, cynicism opens a channel to the moral treasure centres of civilization. Anyone who argues a priori against art and garbage being comparable, of things fit for the museum and things fit for the garbage dump, is refusing to use the analytic power of cynical indifference to differences in value for his or her own benefit. From the perspective of cultural ecology the analogy between museology and garbage theory is certainly striking: museums are establishments for processing cultural problems of waste disposal – depots for the exemplary preservation of special waste from civilization, permanent disposal sites for weak radioactive substances and the combustion residue of creative processes. Whereas garbage dumps dispose of the material leftovers of life processes anonymously and downwards, museums provide disposal

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upwards and into memory. They are dedicated to the special waste category called the ‘objective spirit’ that they select as the recyclable result of earlier life processes and make available for subsequent productions. Insofar as values conserved in museums and preserved cultural items can be likened more to a compost heap than to a permanent disposal site for household and industrial waste, the old gardening culture of composting actually anticipated modern recycling ideas on the level of organic transformation. If we look at material results of civilization from the garbage perspective, it is very clear that the accumulation of knowledge about production gives the subject only a semblance of self-acquisition and power over the outside world. We are gradually beginning to understand that the primary accumulation occurs on the waste side, where dysfunctional and unintended results and by-products of the civilization process are growing faster than our ability to control waste. Since the piled-up garbage and accumulated side-effects of social reproduction are increasing more rapidly than the heap of skills, things that are alien and cannot be acquired as such are erupting in the very centre of the modern process of world acquisition, in the midst of self-empowerment through production. Garbage as a heterologous category par excellence is a sign of the non-ego’s revenge on the subjectivity that insatiably produces and consumes. Garbage conserved in a museum is an expression of the self-pity of the subject that can foresee the threat of its destruction when the stranger hits back. Exhibited garbage objects are only partly created out of identification with the counter-attacker; what they express more strongly is the rebellious subject’s belated impulse to focus on the part that has been disregarded, even if it is objectively clear that civilization must gird itself for another battle against Nature as waste. If the museum were primarily an educational establishment, it could be content with illustrating the history of human forms of expression and life for posterity with the aid of art objects and trivia. But because it is essentially concerned with studying what is alien, we can also use it to assess how far the world is becoming estranged from its inhabitants.

WORLD MUSEUM AND WORLD’S FAIR

Absolutely Museum-Like We can be what we want nowadays, but just no longer absolument moderne. We don’t have to be more avant-garde than the world to obtain a total view of it when we follow its orbit. On the contrary, the time has come to be absolutely museum-like to deal with the problem of the world ‘as a totality’. Anybody who wants to understand what it means today to come into the world must realize what it means to visit a museum.

Museum Nausea and World Dizziness:
 The Museum as the Pre-School of World Estrangement Human beings are creatures that come into the world. Only a subsection of those who come into the world will become museum visitors. Coming into the world and going to a museum are not only very different activities but are also contrasted in terms of very different degrees of general participation. My proposition is that under the logic of modern times these processes – coming into the world and going to a museum – converge. How does this happen? We could begin with arguments from statistics and social sciences: modernized societies are societies in which education is compulsory and, next to schools, museums are becoming increasingly important among the institutions of modern compulsory learning. It follows that a young person in our civilization has as little chance of avoiding a museum outing as avoiding school sports,

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learning imperial foreign languages and calculating percentages. Coming into the world ends up with going to school – this is a statement that no longer sounds exaggerated to us. In our part of the world, school has become so inevitable and so ubiquitous that living and going to school have had to develop synonymously. School as a metaphor for the world and life has a directly illuminating effect in a society in which schools stand on every corner as institutions of cognitive capital. When people talk about ‘lifelong learning’, the eternal pupil inside us nods knowingly from personal experience. Something comparable exists nowadays in terms of museums – even if the museum as a metaphor for the world still sounds rather precious and is frowned on as a metaphor for life. Who would ever admit not only that human beings drag themselves through an exhibition now and then but also that the process of coming into the world could resemble a museum visit in the first place? Has historicization left us in such poor shape that museums have advanced in our lifetime to become an absolute metaphor similarly to the way that the labyrinth, the theatre, the house, the book, the school and the spool have become indispensable words in our world picture? In that case, how should I argue if I want to explain that talking about the world as a museum is more than a foam bubble in metropolitan chit-chat, that it actually represents a rhetorical figure of value in the context of the history of civilization? Let us speak openly: if the museum is accepted as an expression for the totality of the world or a world feeling, it means we are in the terrain of Gnosticism. The museum is a neo-Gnostic world metaphor that first appeared with the concept of necessity during the self-completion of modernity and has consistently gained plausibility since then. People who use this metaphor are infecting our feeling about the world in general with an easily understandable and specific museum nausea and are naming the strange totality they live in after the museum, the best-known model of alienation in the culture. The word ‘museum’ can be used as an attack on most of the content of life today, which is indifferent, half-dead and random. At the same time the word ‘museum’ hints at the tragedy of the ‘objective spirit’ and heightens suspicion that the past is always more powerful than the present and that life never really matches up to what has already been lived. In his brooding thoughts about the problem of museums Paul Valéry says that our heritages smother us; he goes on to say that we necessarily have to give up. What can we do? We become superficial. Generalized criticism of museums is also a final stage of any cultural critique that has blamed existing forms of life since the late eighteenth century for our inability to cast off a particular sense of alienation. The older the culture, the more



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alien it appears to newcomers – like a Kafkaesque authority and a Hegelian heap of skulls. I once tried to invert the cultural criticism that has become world criticism to find out what happens when alienation from the world stems not from the fallibility of external relationships but from internal dizziness and the absence of a sense of belonging. Could it be that it is not the world that is alien to us but that we are alien to the world? Is it the world’s fault that it can be seen from the absurd perspective of a museum? Or is it the visitors’ fault that their local history museum suddenly seems foreign? We should probably not ask questions like that. A better solution might be to start from a relationship between the ego and the world that contains the possibility to create otherness from the outset. It seems to me that people estranged from the world blame the strangeness of the world because of a failure of synchronization between the existence of the world and the discovery of the world we make when we enter it. A deep sense of strangeness is an effect of mistakes in our original naturalization. This can lead to many of us acquiring citizenship of being in an incomplete sense. The world becomes a museum if I have to stay in it without knowing how I arrived here. It becomes museum-like, alien, objective, block-like and rebuffing when the joyful energy of the initial arrival and discovery has become rigidified in my existence. When the continuum of permanent birth is broken, it inexorably gives the impression that the world seems to have been there before us forever – as the oldest pre-arranged set-up in the world, a miserable fait accompli devoid of light. Then the world becomes the bedrock of facts which have existed the longest and which will inevitably shatter all those latecomers; it must appear to us as the immense sum of the stored past that has not passed, and our present life, which has arrived much too late and is limping along behind, finds it impossible to keep up. In this manner, ‘world’ becomes a concept expressing human beings’ resignation at the incredible advance lead of things. When Heidegger speaks of being-in-the-world, the phrase carries echoes of human tardiness in relation to the alien cosmos. It is also impossible to ignore the threat that in competition with the harsh facts that existed before us we have only been given a last chance through death. Only to the extent that our own death means the end of the world do we catch up with the world and become extinct together with it; in other words, it makes us synchronous and on the same level with the world for the first time. Otherwise, to borrow Heidegger’s notorious terminology, we would have no choice but to look bravely into our fateful ‘thrownness’. Thrown into where? Into something that tastes like nothing, or nothing that appears as

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something, whichever you like – in any case, in a context of older, more powerful, long-established authorities and laws that simply remain to be found. The older form of Gnosticism used the concept of the world prison symbolically to define this basic sensitivity of human beings. The Gnostic viewpoint says that humans are beings that have fallen into the cosmos, the dazed survivors of a metaphysical crash landing. According to their character, which in this context means their history, human beings are prisoners of matter, and their emotional entanglements, wishes and desires have led to their enchainment to the rock face of existence. It would be a miracle if modernity, which revises everything, had not issued the prison regulations for people imprisoned in being. Modern penitential reform has liberalized ontology, with the result that nowadays the world prison of late Antiquity has evolved into the postmodern world museum. The conditions of imprisonment in the Leads1 of matter have been modified: we are allowed prison leave and sex and television in our cell. Our transcendental homesickness has become a kind of cultural unease, and our hatred against the created and completed world for being full of bad things has turned into a lack of respect for the classics and determination to use new writings against the old established texts, if not to render them unwritten at least to shake them up, distort and parody them. The present form of Gnosticism is trying to break out of the prison of the original text to return to the heaven of the unregulated writing hand. The impatient psychotics among us want to slough off the old skin of the world and risk direct ascension to heaven; cautious and resilient people make do with subsidies and are content when they manage to remodel the straitjacket imposed by the world into a personal item of clothing. If we are already condemned to be in the world like strangers in a museum, then it seems a matter of metaphysical and museological health not to hang around eternally as a lost visitor on the edge of the world. It is advisable, as soon as we have got over the first shock, to change sides and join the museum makers. Museums themselves can even become their own museums to a modest degree, and friendship with museums is a new beginning for the discreet friendship with the world that is part of the cheerful attitude of recuperated Gnostics. A good example of this comes from Emil Cioran, who reports on one of the most macabre and happiest museum visits of our century in an essay called ‘Palaeontology’: An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me in the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has



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been months since this accidental visit and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology. [. . .] Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed on its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves [. . .] the solidity, the seriousness of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life.2 The temptation of the museum has never been so vividly expressed. A person who loves museums rejects the world as a deadly imposition; only somebody who can see the dead as equals can easily accept the world as home. For somebody who feels drawn to the dead, there is no better place in this world. People who feel at home in museums, on the other hand, have found the place in the middle of the world where a person can be present, can be here on the spot as if he or she were already gone. With unerring certainty, Cioran’s Gnostic genius has discovered the natural history museum as the place where being-in-the-world offers an exit from the world of its own accord. Being surrounded by primeval bones lessens the error of coming into the world and the Gnostic feels at home among his or her own kind. But the jubilation ‘after life’ means the pre-cosmic jubilation for an existence that can remain on its own as long as there are no external relationships and no harsh facts, nor any world history and humans that make it. The museum is at its most dead where it most clearly shows the qualities of a pre-existential womb. Close to the calcified bones of primeval animals, the Gnostic spirit feels the mineral mother, the earth. Our museology has to return to that spirit to understand what has been going on for the past two hundred years or so as the princes, the ministers, the grand bourgeoisie and finally the democratic educators set up countless artificial caves of the past and sent whole populations thronging through them.

The Museum as a Uterodrome Before airing some thoughts about the possibility of putting the world on display and looking at the idea of the world exhibition

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or world’s fair, I cannot resist treating you to a scary digression. Afterwards, I think, we will feel like Schiller’s diver who re-emerged from the underwater depths and was grateful for breath in the rosy light of the world above.3 There is a kind of archetypal fantasy from the bourgeois nineteenth century about museums swallowing and retaining human beings. Patrick McGrath pursued this idea in a sarcastic short story, ‘My Dead Body’, which appeared in a catalogue to the exhibition Permanent Collection – Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz in the Brooklyn Museum in 1988 and is the most radical contribution to imaginary museology yet; once you know this story, you will never think about the term ‘permanent exhibition’ in the same way again. Imagine awakening in utter darkness and realizing you have been buried alive [. . .] your most terrifying nightmare has become a reality. They have nailed you down in the coffin, they have lowered you to the ground, and shoveled dirt on top of you – and then they have left you. Above you in the thickening light of a gray winter afternoon in a cold North American city, to which you are a stranger, you imagine a soft wind murmuring through bare trees that claw like grotesque hands out of the black earth. You see the dusk creeping over this deserted place, the shadows clustering above the headstones. The gates of the cemetery are locked for the night, and gradually the wind rises, as darkness falls, and howls in the trees like a demon. Below the ground, in impenetrable blackness, in a total and absolute silence, you lie in a box and wait for death. I had come to this city to catalogue the contents of this museum. For some months I had been ill; perhaps that explains why I was so sensitive to what was going on in the museum – no one else appeared to notice. You see, I had been there less than a week when I realized that a number of items in the African gallery were not, strictly speaking, inanimate. They weren’t actually alive, not in the way that you are alive, or I am (precariously) alive; but the last traces of a decaying spiritual power still somehow clung to them, enough to stimulate movement and occasional sounds. [. . .] The question soon arose in my mind, what happened when the museum closed for the night? [. . .] I hid in a toilet in the men’s room just off the Grand Lobby and waited until everyone had left. [. . .] A few lights burned, such that a deep gloom pervaded the place, lending it rather a sinister aspect. [. . .] I wandered between the display cases of the African gallery, surprised that



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these familiar objects should, merely by reason of reduced illumination and the emptiness of the building, now seem so mysterious. [. . .] My mood quickly changed, however, when I began to hear heavy clumping footsteps. I traced the sound to its source: it was a MBamba nail man, from the Kingdom of Kongo, who was stamping his feet. [. . .] It was at this point that I became truly frightened. I had realized, you see, that the nail man was after one thing only – revenge! – and that he carried within him all of the anger, the pain of betrayal and destruction, that the people of Kongo had suffered at European hands! It was ironic, I reflected as I climbed rapidly to the third floor, that such a vengeful spirit should have been carried back to the Western world entombed in the museum where his malignant powers could grow like a cancer. [. . .] They were all on the move now, even the limbless Roman torsos were dragging themselves across the floor towards the stairs. [. . .] The black head of Julius Caesar floated through the gloom, a horrible red gleam deep in his dark eyes, and on came the scarab-breasted dummies. [. . .] Up, up they came. [. . .] I could go no higher. But still I could hear it, distinct amid the hideous shuffle and rumble that filled the gloomy building [. . .] and I trembled with terror. I should be dead by now! By now I should be dead! These insects of the soil – they are in my ears and my eyes, my nose, up my anus, they are eating the soft parts, my earlobes, my penis, my inside thighs. [. . .] Why don’t I die? Why does life go on, even if the body is devoured? This is the curse of the nail man! I have been chosen to suffer for the Kingdom of Kongo! They cornered me under James Hamilton’s ‘Last Days of Pompeii’, and that is where the nail man laid his curse on me. I was found there the next morning: in the absence of vital signs I was presumed dead. That was three days ago. For three days I have been ‘dead’. They think me ‘dead’ now. But I am not dead, not at all, despite the coffin, the insects. [. . .] Perhaps, like the nail man, I am condemned to live forever and remember the suffering of the people of Kongo. Perhaps, like him, I will rise in the night!4 As I have said, the piece was published in an exhibition catalogue in New York and is quite literally a catalogue story. In the story, death becomes self-referential and finds euphemisms, words to accompany itself. Death is persuaded to speak out of the museum. From now on something speaks that usually lacks speech – thanks to McGrath

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the cataloguing principle has penetrated not only into the museum at night but also into the coffin, and continuously produces phrases from the innermost silence. The museological horror story relates to a human dream whose ambivalence intimately affects the character of the museum. Our first-person narrator speaks as if while doing cataloguing work he involuntarily discovered the shortest path to immortality: from the city to the museum, from the museum to the grave, from the grave to the eternal inner light of awareness, still present there even post mortem. For him the dream of immortality has turned into a nightmare as though the museum were nothing but an institution to make nightmares come true. McGrath’s hapless curator experiences a death in the first person – he becomes a living buried person, a pure ego without a world. He enters directly from the ethnological collection into immortality – and we feel compelled ourselves to recognize a museological core in the idea of immortality, this basic theme of metaphysics, or, more precisely, to be aware of the idea of the historical metamorphosis of burial caves as essential for the museum of the modern age. The burial cave is, in fact, the imaginary space in which the contradiction between being dead and continuing to live seems to be suspended. The museum as a burial cave functions as a projection screen of imaginary death: it is there for the metaphysical piece of art to become complete and be preserved by the process of us losing ourselves. As our ghostly history shows, we should be cautious about seeing this extension of life after death as entirely positive. Imaginary death may mean immortality for me personally and may allow me to think of myself as going further, even if I have to think myself ‘out of this world’, but the same thing in relation to other people implies something absolutely uncanny: I cannot believe your spirit has more permanence and capacity to return than my own. If I survive physical death, I know myself that it may lead directly to a heavenly high life, but if the others also survive their death, this will lead to even more ghosts, and we have reason to fear them intervening in our present life. This is why all human cultures are concerned about placating the dead. We have to keep them in a good mood, we have to satisfy their demands for piety, and above all we have to take great care to do everything possible to prevent their return. Such measures have an allotted place in the psychodrama of cultures everywhere. There are points in the imaginary topography of all human communities where the affairs of the living are carried out with their dead – the domestic altars, the temples, tombs, cemeteries, monuments, catacombs, cathedrals, battlefields, war memorials; even national calendars are subject to the requirements for appeasing the dead and keeping them away.



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In this light, it is not difficult to argue plausibly that museums of the eighteenth, the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century can largely be understood in terms of the psychodrama of modern arrangements for the disposal of the dead. As we know, the social status of the dead has fundamentally changed since the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment obstructed their return as spirits, demons and manias. Since then even important, high-ranking dead people have had to give up haunting and submit to enlightened regulation of authors’ rights; the ancient and feudal constitution for ghosts is no longer adequate for processing the remains of terminated life. From now on the great dead who still have an impact can only survive under copyright protection, which means as testators and as authors of works and testaments. Modernity retrospectively sends the geniuses and spirits of earlier times to school and to museums; it tells them they may only live on inside us if they turn into material for lessons or exhibitions. Dead people officially return only on the curriculum. They have to become classics and exhibition pieces, and in famous cases they return as creators of constant or rising values. Think of the ghostly success of Vincent van Gogh, who has been able to live from his paintings since he died. What I want to say, briefly, is that the conditions of survival for dead persons and dead things are beginning to change dramatically in the modern age, and that aside from cemeteries – the traditional places for housing and disposing of corpses –, schools and museums are the institutions that have to bear the main spiritual responsibility for keeping the dead away. All the same, these institutions are also subject to the rule that keeping away the dead who are still living can only be achieved by cultural compromise – in other words, by invitations that refuse, by despatching what has been fetched, by resuscitation that kills, by destructive preservation, by announcements that black out, by imaginings that distort, and by exhibiting that makes things invisible. The museums of the present achieve extraordinary things in all these disciplines; in many places, in fact, they go far beyond their allotted task and handle living artists as if they are already dead and as if the risk of their return should be eliminated by organizing major exhibitions of their work as a precaution. In other words, museums, rather like the neurotic symptoms of the Freudians, are compromise constructions between return and defence – raising and finishing off the past at the same time. They are centres for coming to terms with the past in the tenuous sense that they resist our conquest by the dead, by things of the past, former things and decrepit things. Patrick McGrath’s story is the best kind of museology because it explains the crucial function of the museum

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by assuming its failure. The curator’s psychosis in relation to graves opens the way for inferences about normality in museums. He sees the museum pathologically as something that has become completely and utterly what the regular visitor only glimpses – the cave entrance in the belly of the earth, the initiation site for reunification with the birthing element, the cultic location for visualizing the path the ancestors had to follow to bring our nation to its place and our culture to its present level. Because the narrator remains caught in the museum trap like a model victim, he makes us realize what is important for other visitors: to find their way out as quickly as possible. Museums are the ideal modern institution for playing the game of fast-in-and-out, the game that is vital for life. The museum is our official uterodrome, the circular racing arena of the uterus. Not everybody can embark on extensive underworld journeys and follow in the tracks of Orpheus, Aeneas, Dante and the psychonauts of great psychoanalysis. But our museums are perfectly suited to the average person’s rides through hell. This is why the widespread fear of museums is significant and indispensable to the museum as a place for keeping the dead away. People who enjoy spending time in museums are taking risks with the dead at close range. Maybe they already belong more to the exhibits than to the expounders. Maybe they are already deeply immersed in the undertow of the graves. Those who have not noticed recently that they are suffering from the typical museum syndromes of tiredness, dizziness, weariness with life, nausea, claustrophobia, breathlessness, yawning and the panicked rush for the exit should consult a psychoanalyst or, even better, an analyst of existence as soon as possible. Otherwise the museum may well claim further victims. Another aspect of a healthy and functioning museum is that we are not haunted by the things preserved there and we are completely convinced they are not alive. McGrath’s museum worker breaks this rule shockingly by acting like a primitive animalist and attributing more life to the exhibits than they legitimately deserve. His most unforgivable failing is that his ears detect something we do not usually hear and that he identifies with the whispered messages of the figures in the museum as if they had spoken to him personally and shared their secrets with him. The curse of the nail man from the Congo is a typical ghost’s voice; although it comes from the sixteenth century, it has managed to slip through the enlightening censorship and can be heard in the inner ear of a thoughtless present-day museum employee. The MBamba nail man is a contemporary of Luther’s writings, Calvin’s sermons, Michelangelo’s sculptures and Dürer’s paintings. It seems, of course, as if we have got rid of these voices and constructs and can assume that the figure



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from the Congo is just as securely established in museum culture as his European counterparts. McGrath’s story shows the opposite. When the museum fails, our defence against the dead becomes porous at that point and missions, prophecies and curses that are hundreds – indeed, thousands – of years old can speak to us as if there were a breach in the historical wall of time. The museum is where we realize the ghostly element of intellectual history: there is still no history of culture that, however hidden, would not simultaneously be a history of continuing possession by spirits.

The World’s Capacity for Exhibition: On Truth and Capital Ridiculing the museum means really visiting the museum. It is time for us seriously to ridicule the museum and observe the origins of the process by which the world is made into a museum. What causes modern societies to be flooded with institutions for presenting finished things from bygone work? What is responsible for the results of our ancestors’ work weighing on us today ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living’? This is no different from Karl Marx’s statement about the ‘tradition of all the dead generations’.5 Why is it necessary that the sum of values created by all previous producers continues to be exploited as if it were global capital? In short, how did the remains of the past come to cause this massive pollution of the present? Making the world into a museum is a result of the capitalist cultural revolution that increasingly entangled local civilizations in the adventure of synchronization from the eighteenth century onwards. The result of the worldwide spread of capital is that all the traditional communities in which people live together, in Europe and in the other continents, are breaking their ties to the legacies of their ancestors – in other words, their dead. Capital synchronizes the world by giving nearly unconditional priority everywhere to exchange with foreign people who live contemporaneously with us rather than to the bonds with one’s own deceased ancestors and their internalized voices. The ancestors may still speak their languages beyond the grave and perpetually repeat their basic statements about the world and its order, and their descendants will probably still be mindful of the voices and remain bound to the world of their origin through these voices. But the voices of the past are losing their former monopoly and becoming increasingly historical, mediated and relativized; they are being drowned out by a new standardized world language that is only interested in discussing topical and contemporary things. At the same time, things can

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only come onto the world market wherever the world language, money, relates everything to everything else. It is solely through capital that synchronous relationships triumph over the traditional bonds people have with their origins; the present system of exchange actively suppresses forms of life based on the past. Wherever that occurs, strangers who are living in the same period become more important than one’s own dead. It follows that local cultures allied to the world market become less tied to their traditional ways of being and increasingly oriented to remote partners who live in our own times. In cultural terms the synchronization of the world through capital produces two new phenomena: the historicizing museum and the topical exhibition. Both realize a new idea of the world, or, more precisely, a new form of presentation and summary of the world as the epitome of values. Museums and exhibitions gather together objects of value in human culture at special collection sites and present them for collective evaluation. Just as world historiography and the lexical encyclopaedia were the main literary media for synchronizing the world from the eighteenth century onwards, in the nineteenth century the museum of culture and the world’s fair were inexorably established as the two most powerful concepts for presenting the values of the world. The museum was erected as a temple of value and the world’s fair as the world emporium. In both cases the idea of the world as exhibitable – as something that could be exhibited – depended directly on the exploitation of values. The term ‘world’ in itself is already seen here as the embodiment of achievements, works and values deriving from human labour, and its presentation or visibility assumes that an audience of people who are thirsting for values and eager for acquisitions is prepared to recognize and welcome these objects. This audience can evolve as an audience of buyers and viewers through the very fact that the objects come onto the market and enter the museum. In this context the notorious remark of the French ‘citizen-king’ Louis Philippe, ‘enrichissez-vous’, is not just a motto for the bourgeoisie of yesteryear. It contains the museological confession of the age that believes in the equivalence of works and values. Once the world has been synchronized by universal exploitation, the unification of values in the museum and in the world’s fair follows of its own accord. In the age of exploitation of values the relationship to past life often becomes abstract. Although value arises mainly through the expenditure of living labour for the benefit of exchangeable products, we seldom see the past of the product itself, the living atmosphere of the environment in which it was produced and the amount of artistry and effort that went into it. The product’s ‘ances-



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try’ plays a lesser role in its exchange value. To some extent value is abstract past, neutralized effort, homogenized labour. The form of value of the life products ensures that the legacies of previous producers are transferred to us without making us feel we have any special obligations to them. In the age of value the dead are less likely to consign substantial traditions to us than to leave us with movable convertible property. If we talk about an inheritance, we inevitably ask ‘how much?’ rather than ‘what?’ From this perspective, Marx’s remark that ‘The revolution of the nineteenth century has to let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content’6 is factually accurate and linguistically revealing. Marx offers different formulas for the content of this revolution: first, the ‘accelerated power of motion’ of capitalist nations; then ‘unchaining and establishing [of] modern bourgeois society’ and its resulting socialist society; and finally ‘social revolution’ and reformation of the world through the proletariat that produces everything. Looking back at the Marxist era, we must say that it makes more sense to us to describe the nineteenthcentury revolution as the establishment of universal exploitation and processing of the world. This process, in fact, can only continue successfully if we let the dead bury their dead so that we can be free for our present-day possessions and obsessions: wealth, topicality, events. The universal revolution consists of cutting ties in all directions to the legacies of our own dead and thus ending the possession of living beings by their ancestors. The synchronization of all living people and things in the common age of the society of universal barter involves the project of splitting off the world as a totality from its earlier epochs and giving it a fresh start as a big company for the whole of society – as a society of the world market, as a factory of humankind. For the first time the spirit of production dares to aim for a definitive victory of present-day life over the addiction to past life. Producing and exchanging becomes messianic – the goal is nothing less than to redeem the living from the weight of the ‘tradition of all dead generations’. This redemption must fail, however, for one main reason. The synchronized world of capitals remains tied just as closely to dead persons and things as the unsynchronized local worlds of tradition were. Value merely brings the modernization of the dead with it because it is past production, abstract legacy, neutralized tradition. Since the nineteenth century there has not just been ‘labour as such, labour sans phrase’, as Marx wrote, but also legacy as such, legacy sans phrase. Since then we have been concerned with a novelty in world history, a repetitive past purely in the form of value. The trend is for all inheritances to take the form of credit and to be ­anonymous

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– pure availability acquired in the past. The dead may not return, but what is dead circulates everywhere as value that wants to preserve itself and continue exploiting itself. The concrete possession of the living by their ancestors has become abstract possession by self-exploitative values. This is why Marx was wrong in believing that the revolution of the nineteenth century could not ‘begin with itself’ until it ‘stripped away all superstition about the past’. In reality the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought superstition about the past to its highest generalized form – the universal world form. From then on, ‘past’ meant having created values that could be further exploited. ‘Past’ is only another word for the history of creation of value. Value became superstition sans phrase. Wherever values are systematically exploited, the universal standard becomes dominated by ghostliness and the Earth becomes the haunted castle for the gentlemen in grey. The past, acting in the name of values to be exploited, prepares to strike out in revenge on all subsequent life. Owing to the rule of value, the conquest of the present by the abstract past assumes planetary dimensions. Capital uses inexorable power to create an ontological greenhouse effect on Earth, in bank accounts and in our brains. This is the context in which philological museology could express the essence of its subject for the first time. The museums and world exhibitions of the nineteenth century were nothing but stages, markets and trade fairs for the ‘values’ that humans produced in every time and place. Serving the epiphany of value – that is the real function of the fevered exhibition activities that have played the chorus in recent contemporary history, particularly since the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the synchronization of the worlds of labour and value by means of world’s fairs, expositions universelles or international exhibitions had a special status in the self-creation of a globalized market. In terms of exhibition theory, what Heidegger called ‘the age of the world picture’ corresponds to the age of the world’s fair. For the organizers of these great events, the issue of whether the world can be presented and exhibited is not really a problem. As their work shows, they have faith in assembling all sorts of consumer goods on a large scale – machines, tools, works of art, fashion articles, architecture and ideas – everything, in fact, that makes the world of today the world we know. For the people organizing these shows, the world’s ability to be exhibited depends solely on at least one specimen of everything that belongs to the concrete world of value being represented at the fair – like in a capitalist Noah’s Ark. The world’s fair is a Platonic heaven of thought, a general assembly of values, and anything that can be sent on tour as movable goods can take part in it.



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One thing is clear about these gigantic spectacles: it is not the museum that makes the exhibition but the exhibition the museum. In some ways the museum is only what is left standing from the exhibition, as we can see from the example of the megalomaniacal follow-up plans for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. The idea was to leave a dozen pavilions standing on the banks of the Seine and turn them into museums – headed by a museum with a retrospective overview of all previous world’s fairs, followed by a museum of comparative education, a peace museum, a museum of comparative history, a museum of hygiene and experimental sciences, a public museum of fine arts, a museum of sea travel, fishing and Arctic exploration, a museum of scholarly societies, congresses and bibliography, a museum of oceanography and experimental zoology, a museum of sports, artisanship, metallurgy and mineralogy and an archaeological museum. The complacent hubris of these plans, which were launched in a press campaign in Paris, shows that the spread of capitalization and the cataloguing of the world like an inventory are broadly parallel processes. The consumer world casts its shadow over everything else and forces it to accept the mode of being of something worth knowing at the very least. Real value, market value and knowledge value mutually reflect each other. Bouvard and Pécuchet7 celebrate their world citizenship in the museum. They begin the thousand-year empire of the petite bourgeoisie and declare what is worth knowing as national property. It is more than coincidence that patrimoine is the key concept of present-day French museology. The eternal French citizen is a pensioner of humanity for whom world history has shrunk to the National Library and the Earth to a colonial museum. The educated middle-class citizens of the belle époque in Paris knew that the status of their metropolis as a world-class city was closely tied to their role as the city of the World’s Fair. We experience most clearly what the ‘world’ actually is at the places where people have most strongly believed in and practised the idea that the world as a whole can be exhibited and represented: in the representative world capitals of the modern age in Europe and America. The twilight of the museum in the past decade has obviously revived at least the first idea from the 1900s that we mentioned. The reflective process of commemorating the World’s Fair that was already suggested at that time inevitably had to return someday. This explains why since the 1970s we have been moving towards the museum to top all museums. Meanwhile – since 1983, to be precise – we have obtained an overview of the series of twenty-seven great economic and artistic events that fall into the category of a

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world’s fair with the help of an exposition des expositions universelles that was held from July to December 1983 in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; it was extensively documented, of course, in the accompanying ‘Book of World Exhibitions’.8 This Expo des Expos was an important recognition that capital’s powerful mechanisms of synchronization form a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, and are a worthy topic for a museum themselves and can be exploited as exhibition value. Anybody who had believed, however, that this kind of enterprise would bring recognizable progress in the discussion of how far it is possible to exhibit the world would have been bitterly disappointed by the results. Simply applying the exhibition to itself does not clarify the nature of the exhibition, and the problem of exhibiting the world will be even more distorted than previously by a history of world’s fairs flooded with images. This is hardly surprising, of course. No business wants to be discontinued. Exhibiting valuable objects and highlighting exhibits will continue to be the darkest side of the exhibition business – just as the production of visibility stubbornly persists as the invisible element in the process of photo-technology. The exhibition as an event presenting pieces of evidence is a completion of what Heidegger called modern ‘enframing’, and the time is ripe for considerations on enframing, which will unavoidably lead to questioning the process of exhibiting. What is aletheia in the world of world exhibitions? What does ‘unconcealment’ mean in the age of its technical reproduction? What does exhibiting the world have to do with the beginning of the world itself into which we, as human beings that have come into the world, blink like newborn babies looking into the light? If the world is an exhibition and a museum, what force inside us is pushing us towards the exit as if there were something ‘outside’ that was free from the pressure to be on show and the crush for parking spaces? There is probably no real ‘outside’ for us. What is left for us is a place on the threshold between inside and outside, between the museum and its opposite, and only at this place, looking back at the world that arose and was exhibited and blinking forward into a nothingness that allows everything, can we see ourselves as inhabitants of something that cannot be exhibited.

VII

ART SYSTEM

‘I TELL YOU: ONE MUST STILL HAVE CHAOS IN ONE’

Modernity means a change in the gospels. The bad and the good news are no longer safely in their appointed places. Decorum is so shaky that the obedient and disobedient swap places. From now on we have to keep trying over and over again to work out what can be a model. Imitation seeps into all the cracks, over-attentive, on the track of other people’s success. The business supplement, the sports section, cultural pages, society news – these are the social guides to jealousy. Society is the sum of its competitions. From Zarathustra’s landmark speech to his followers: Submit to tests! Set up your file. Collect evidence that makes it clear you had to exist. Position yourself, get started on your topic! Don’t forget to set up your sign because the power of positioning is all-important. Take part in the experiment that will show what goes and stops; admit that many things fail by their very nature! The world has become an experiment – anybody who has not tried will not have come into the world. There is only one mistake, that of remaining latent. In future, cleverness means resisting temptation by leaving no traces. Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ is the verbal expression of the new state of the world. The command to experiment, like the law and love in earlier times, desires proclamation. We should not let it confuse us that in this case temptation is called creation. Tightrope walkers are also experimenters and creators of daring acts. They take part in the new move towards risk. Their fall is like a signature under a work and Zarathustra acknowledges them as colleagues. As the prophet says in his new blessings that proclaim the temptations: Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss.

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A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is loveable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.1 Modernity: that means feeling the pressure to choose between keeping oneself going in stationary relationships and improving through trying. There is only as much modernity as there is willingness to experiment more ambitiously to follow on from the accepted state of art up to the present. The search for the actors of modernity is the consummation of the modern age. This is another thing Nietzsche announced through his prophet. It is a provocation that divides those who make a gambit from those who want to hear nothing more about trying. When the prophet of the people of the future throws his phrase ‘the last human being’ into the crowd, he is challenging those who are not last to declare themselves. When the last human beings strike up with the phrase ‘After us, ourselves!’, then those who are not last gather under an irrational banner: ‘After us, the star!’ Modernity: that means that the chaos inside people can become scarce. It is a bizarre definition of chaos: as if it were not an event around us that we find ourselves in or stumble into, but rather an internal resource that could be described as not yet used up. Nietzsche was the first to conceive chaos as a remnant. He envisaged it as potential that could be exhausted. He saw it as a magnitude that demands us taking a position: chaos is the authority of the monstrosity which creates conflict for people who usually exist in an ordered and finite situation. Sublime chaos tears subjects open – provided they can realize that they have chaos in them. The monstrous is a self-relation that human beings express variously as guardians of order, sleepwalkers, players and artists. Anyone who takes the liberty of reminding other people of their relationship with the monstrous is identified as a new type of disturbing element. ‘I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.’ Who talks like that? A mad person who wants to convince other people to share his madness? A metaphysical griper in search of an audience? An unredeemed soul that draws fellow sufferers into its self-therapy? Modernity: that means asking about the conditions of production. ‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.’ This is the true voice of recent aesthetics – at its clinical and romantic extreme. Production is still unerringly regarded as birth; chaos still has to serve as a uterus in which the work is formed silently and incredibly; Nietzsche is still acting the role of the



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g­ ynaecologist-philosopher of the arts. His creative insult is aimed at the fertile and the infertile. Advised by the old nurse Baubo, he knows that the creative being is a woman who has reasons not to show her reasons. Chaos’s favourite son is not the devil of denial but the daredevil. He is the means by which as yet untried things take their place in the work. The aesthetics of genius, gynaecology and belief in mediums: they are all part of the same matrix. Modernity: that means finding the rule by exception. What do you actually possess when you have chaos in yourself? A gas, a yawn, a gape, a shapeless mass, a dark emptiness. The idea that this is the birthplace of stars is a sad kind of physics. When Nietzsche makes his dancing star emerge from chaos, he is merely admitting that the most fragile person comes from crude parents. However, chaos only contains stars as a Dionysian element – by Dionysian, we mean torn and divided, angry at itself, condemned to self-duplication. Being capable of giving birth means needing a world of expression for suffering. What saves the turbulent foundation of life from itself? Only the ascent into a glorifying form. Productive chaos is nothing but the suffering, dreaming god. Aren’t most people behaving very rationally in refusing to hear about creative human beings? The Superman, the star, the yearning? These are words from a life that still needs such things. A person who is one of the inventors of happiness is beyond that. Modernity: that means mistrusting the illusory images of communication. Zarathustra may well feel that his provocation has already failed before the first word. Nobody among those whose pride he addresses would be prepared to harbour what the speaker says is still there. Those who imagine themselves in terms of the monstrous can have no illusions about the outcome of the sermon. Zarathustra, who has neglected to mention the pride of the last human being, will ask himself whether it would not have been better to address their sensitive point. The art of how to talk to nobody has been tried and tested. Is Zarathustra himself too proud to make a second attempt, this time for everybody? I tell you: you still have otherness in you. You are still different from yourselves and still a hope for your own future. A little bit evil and a little bit untidy, a little bit u ­ npredictable – that is capital composed of chances that can lead to further chances. But I can see the time coming, the time when nobody will have anything left in them that is evil, messy and unpredictable. When the starting chances are no longer distinguishable from the subsequent chances the era of emptied human beings will herald. They will make more than ever before but the history of creation will be over, and with it everything that presupposed a difference between the interior and the exterior. The history of

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improvements will reach its conclusion. Its continuation will happen without you in storage systems, networks and processors. Modernity: that means that prophecies turn against themselves. The forecasts are vectors that ensure things happen differently. They regenerate chaos in internal and external settings. The refutations develop in situations where the end of creation out of the chaosinside-you is expressed as an open possibility. Unexpectedly for the star abolitionists, the evidence for chaos will be provided as soon as the star appears.

ART IS FOLDING INTO ITSELF

Who is Paying for Art? Is there anybody who loves the arts who has not dreamed of breaking into a museum to be alone with the work of his or her choice? Have you never been convinced, when looking at a work of art, that you are the only person who has understood the real meaning of the work? Are there any experts on aesthetic secrets who have not felt the temptation to ban other eyes from seeing the work? The art business is a system of jealousies in which desire for the works results in them becoming objects of desire. If a work has attracted desire, its rivals appear beside it and want the longing bestowed on the other object for themselves. Every object glitters with the yearning for the yearning of the others. The market inspires sensuality, the hunger for desire makes things beautiful and the compulsive need for attention creates interesting things. This system functions as long as there is a taboo on the idea of the moment of fulfilment. Although the works appeal to our desire, they are prohibited from surrendering to the person who acquires them. Their value lies in the fact that they refuse their owners and wait for further offers. The bourgeois development of greed has been in progress for two hundred years. Having offered the big bourgeoisie a new kind of sensuality, it is presently doing the same for the middle classes. By now the magnetism of value excites a perceptible section of the public. People who want to be somebody open an emotional account for art in their inner self. It does not matter whether there is little activity on the account. The important thing is that many eyes are ­watching the market from that moment on. The observer’s ego becomes a

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depot for values and meanings. Only an account-shaped self is fit to be paid into with art in the form of value. If I did not already have the first-person form of a possible owner of works and values, the works would have no value appeal for me. I have an account, I am an account, I put my credit on my own account. A work will only be important to me if I can book it to my own account. This is the current state of value fetishism. Did art have this meaning from the beginning? Was it never an extravagant outpouring of forces that were too free to be possessed? What did Kandinsky mean when he wrote: ‘In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration’?1 Were there never transfers to accounts by people who dreamed that their payment would give them another ‘whole life’? Meanwhile the art world has been overdrawn by private accounts. Can art withdraw itself from them?

The Art Exhibition as a Revelation of Creative Powers Before the onset of modernity the entire stock of things in the world that could be described as the work of human beings was very small. Things produced by human beings were almost negligible compared with things that existed naturally. Moreover, works of art in the real sense of the word made up a very tiny share of produced and selfmade things. Wherever the major forces of life are the natural and traditional forces, human beings have to see themselves mainly as receivers of being and as guardians of ancient holy orders. The most powerful early testimonies of the might of works of high culture, sacred buildings, were technical responses to the ideas of holiness and majesty. They marked the beginning of artistic processing of the numinous, the spiritual element. Human self-perception became active from the time that the modern system of self-empowered production was set in motion. Subjectivity increasingly occupied the position of the originator of being and of that which exists. It developed the creator position for itself; it discovered that the world’s system of order was not really something that had to be preserved and repeated from the very beginning, but much more something to outdo and to produce on the basis of future designs. From then on we could say that the world not only had to be interpreted differently but also had to be decisively changed. It was no longer a fixed stock of things reproduced according to its own laws – it was a construction site transformed according to human plans. The genius and the engineer became the chief models for an unprec-



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edented enthusiasm generated by human beings themselves. The two types were like guarantors of human creative power. If people achieved this self-confidence, it could spark off the modern urge to outbid each other. This explains the anthropological and ontological mission of the modern work of art: the finished work evokes human creative power as such, while its artistic level proclaims that production has surpassed nature. This is the dual meaning of the perfection of art. For this reason the visible appearance of skill, of craftsmanship, has always been one of the main themes of art in the modern age. It is in the work that human virtù becomes virtuosity; it is a virtue for humans to use their power to create things. This means that craftsmanship worthy of the name is not concerned with showing off artistically. What is important is the newly formed subjectivity that is able to learn what can be learned until it takes the risk and plunges into achievements that cannot be learned. This is why art reveals humanized spirituality: creative artists put things into the work that go beyond what can be positively learned. In doing so, artists share in a twofold creative power corresponding to the dual nature of artistic skill. As masters of their subject, they know how to repeat; as geniuses, they step into uncharted regions. Mastery without genius is great expertise; genius without trained excellence is intense and regenerating. The two together can inspire human lives that are the goal of humanistic worship. In both aspects artistic skill has innate epiphanic qualities that give human beings themselves awareness of essential human powers. In art the human being can appear to the human being. The work of art that praises the master preaches its author’s creative power and affirms the possibility of authorship as such. The magic of the effects gives an idea of the level of the cause. Where worlds beside the world are created in the works, it makes their creators look like gods beside God. The epiphanic tendency of modern creative power demands that production and exhibition are interconnected. The creative force cannot reveal itself without unveiling the work in a presentation space. The visualization of the skill of production presupposes the production of visibility. It acts as the central agency for epiphanic productivity. It shows what artistic bourgeois subjectivity has to show: to present itself in its objectified power, to present worlds in the visual work. This implies the power to attack and rework the world itself modelled on the world picture. When the work is publicly shown, the bourgeois public arena helps to conceal this revelation. The epiphanic meaning of the revelation of creative powers is discreetly shrouded by the exhibition’s significance for publicity and commerce. Exhibiting gives the revelation a popular format. Human creative powers are revealed as

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understatements in which nothing is recognizable except what is visible to the naked eye in the pictures. This guarantees that nobody is able to see anything more than he or she can understand. Profane persons are not forced to scorch their eyes looking at the apocalypse of inherent human powers in the exhibition salon.

Modernization and the Increase of Arbitrariness Why are we witnessing an inflation of things that can be exhibited at the end of the twentieth century?2 First, because there is a parallel inflation of things that can be produced. The monstrous increase in all means of production has led to a huge increase in all kinds of production power. Larger and larger segments of reality are being transformed into raw materials for productions – into basic materials for illustrations, relationships and transformations. Everything that was once a product can revert back to raw material to store the effects of work as suffering material once again. Whether goods are mobile or immobile, in the modernization process it is possible in principle to exhibit everything that played a role in the secular processes to improve producible things. Display nowadays not only includes the immediate products of creative power but also involves the raw materials, accessories, prototypes, interim stages and waste. In Marxist terms one not only brings the products to be exhibited but also the means of production and ultimately the relations of production, too. Even landscapes and living spaces have been declared exhibits. The entire social structure is straining to get into the museum. This is not completely incomprehensible: if we still had the paintbrush with which Raphael had painted The School of Athens, we cannot possibly imagine what would stop museum directors from exhibiting the paintbrush next to the painting. What is more, if the mortal remains of Raphael’s clients had been superbly preserved as mummies and still existed, who could guarantee that we would not be able to admire them in a side room of the museum today? Anything connected with the modern miracle of production of a work can be included in the appropriate revelatory form in the exhibition. We can see a more fundamental cause of the present inflation of things for exhibition in the dynamic of the modern arts themselves. If modern exhibiting as such represents a voluntary declaration of creative power, during the twentieth century the boundaries of what it is possible to exhibit have been exploded by a twofold revolution of the arts: by the radical self-liberation of expression and construction, on the one hand, and by the inexorable extension of the concept



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of art, on the other. These two explosive processes with their didactic conservatism and art-political expansionism have combined into a common effect: a tendency towards increasing arbitrariness that has run right through the twentieth century. The contemporary culture of exhibitions and trade fairs can only be understood as an organizational system within art for processing aesthetic arbitrariness as it approaches its maximum value. Its accomplishment is to process the fluctuations of modern art hermeneutically, both in terms of museum studies and commercially, so that increasing arbitrariness can coexist with the self-celebration of creative power. All the traditional parameters of creative work can be revolutionized; what remains stable is the convertibility of the work form and the value form. Young investors on the art exchanges do not need to be told more about the spiritual element in art. They have summed up modernization for themselves: the equivalence of the form of the work and the form of value has clearly been deduced. The gold that represents the pure possibility of bearing value glitters invisibly in the innermost core of the works. If we can describe a work of visual art as incarnating a spark of creative power, this immediately forms a value crystal that makes it suitable for acquisition. Works of art are exhibited as aesthetic shares. The extension of the concept of art reflects the expansion of the value-creating artist’s subjectivity. In the end everything that the artist’s life touched must be transformed into art. King Midas is everywhere. If it were legally feasible, Andy Warhol would simply have taken entire streets in New York he had turned into art works by walking through them and would have sold them off to collectors with fat wallets.

The Victory of the Exhibition The art exhibition of the modern age is the right contemporary institution for extinct and active creative works. It organizes retrospectives and samples current productions. The works shown under the spotlight are essentially tied to their manner of display. Their form of value does not make them naturally fit for hoarding as hidden treasures. Aside from being out of place in art-political terms, they would be unhappy in a feudal treasure chamber as regards their spiritual value because the meaning of the work would not be understood. This meaning characteristically tends towards the public and towards open display, whether in the form of market, museum or history of art. In the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense, the internal gesture

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of a work of visual art anticipates its exhibition. The work is already demanding the white wall from which it tries to catch the eye of specific people. It is already clamouring to interrupt the emptiness of the exhibition room. It is already pointing towards the catalogue that secures its visibility in absentia. It bangs its head against the wall of indifference that thinks it has already seen everything. It flirts with experts who have their comparisons at the ready. It is already begging for a place in memory and an empty page in art history where the epic of creativity will be updated to the latest version. The closer we come to the present day, the greater will be the number of works whose gesture and substance wholly fit these descriptions. Museums, trade fairs and galleries are actually the right institutions today for producing aesthetic visibility, and the production of art itself will irresistibly fall in line with the styles of museums, galleries and the colonization of Cologne by art. Gallery art flows to wherever there is an art gallery. The result is that the modern art of art exhibitions becomes firmly entrenched in its tautological development: the production of art revolves around exhibiting art that revolves around producing exhibitions. The modern art mediation machinery has been installed as a display machine that has long since become more powerful than the individual works exhibited. The exhibition production process with its commercial core and its publicity wings has become autonomous. It races across its mass of exhibits on its own steam, and ultimately it no longer shows any creative power except its own. Exhibiting as such has stopped being a kind of art because it can do what it wants, and since then art has been in conflict with the process of making it visible. There have been historical moments in which the white museum walls represented an important step forward into free space. The walls were like a stage for the public presentation of the self-­revelation of human creative power in the bourgeois age. The manifest creative power spoke down from the walls to essential forces that were as yet unawakened. If admiration did not stun these forces into apathy, they realized the heights they could be capable of reaching. The creative powers that emerged could hope to continue in the form of inflammatory forces. Force wants to be understood by force, which means it wants its impact to be preserved. We can say that the force of opening up generated by what the work showed first created the exhibition space of the modern art museum. Otherwise it would have remained as a feudal or semi-feudal treasure cave. In fact, the present Safe Art movement is a continuation of this. Only the acting element of the artwork itself can emanate the force to open up the room in which it emerges into visibility. The epiphany of the power



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to create enables the museum and gallery – and not the other way around, the gallery and museum – to put art on display. Yet nowadays the creative powers themselves have invested in the machinery of directing visibility. The self-exhibition of trade fairs, museums and galleries has pre-empted the self-revelation of the works; it has forced the works to adopt the mode of being of self-advertising. Since then, works have to generate their own applause. Aletheia has its furthest outposts in advertisements. The self-advertising of works means that the last truths have passed on: ephemerality is revelation until cancellation. The painting flashes briefly in the present; there is a possible afterglow of its value on bank accounts. The only thing we can be sure of is that nowadays no painting can be as meaningful as the re-usable hook on which it temporarily hangs.

Art is Deserting the Gallery! Where is It Going? The source of the continuing cult of the arts lies in the human and religious hope that modern people have in their power of creativity. This includes the confidence that people can induce themselves to produce the conditions of their happiness on their own. In doing so, humans demonstrate that they are able to create preconditions for happiness and eliminate reasons for unhappiness. They are also lucky to be able to express their misfortune. This threefold ability seems like unmitigated benevolence; anyone who has a share in it is a partner in the human alliance against the forces of misfortune. What can the art of art fairs add to this? It is condemned to cut the link at a deep level between creative potency and the promise of happiness. In fact, a work in an exhibition of works knows no greater happiness than to make the leap into the big exhibition. Human creative power has an immense capacity for happiness, and under the law of equivalence of the form of work and the form of value, we can distinguish a personal share of this capacity for happiness – it is, in fact, the part of the power of production that brings the work into circulation. The happiness it is seeking is that of being exhibited, traded and intensively interpreted. It tends to be forgetful when it comes to remembering the source of legitimacy of all the exhibition and production. The right to art derives solely from human forces calling to create their own happiness. Happiness calls itself up; by evoking itself it strengthens itself, and it uses this strength to make itself happy. In the end, the radiation of modern expertise depends upon the magnetism of happiness. Mastery of happiness is attractive because, with its help, the ability to live goes beyond being compelled to live. This is how playing enters into life

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and makes it more than just a burden. Art is the anti-serious tendency: it crosses the threshold from ‘you must’ to ‘you can’. This lends art the seriousness of great relief. Important works of art are places that open up at the self-­revelation of happy creative powers. Because such powers are expended as an act of celebration and flow out of gratitude for themselves, each work of this kind streams into the universal fund of happiness. These works are equally far removed from unhappy expertise and from speechless misery. The modern work of art attests that human contributions to happiness are possible. Moreover, they are open to the chance that human beings can be their own contribution when they are free to be experts but also free of being possessed by their expertise. Collections, galleries and museums should be judged by the promise they keep themselves. On that criterion, museums have no happiness and happiness has no museum. In other words, art that knows something better deserts the gallery. Where does it find something better?

The Dawn of the Work In 1989 it is time to say clearly that we are living once again in the middle of a Belle Époque, an age of stationary assaults and galloping inflation. On all fronts, mobilization is accompanied by simultaneous delays. The territories where the forces are deployed have been given a name that troubles the good conscience of the powers of creation: environment. Anyone who says ‘environment’ makes a face as if he or she has a disabled child from now on. The producers gather together like a parents’ meeting. But by now we have had some time to look back. What happened ten or twenty years ago in artistic life seems to be buried in the depths of history today. Beuys and Giorgione meet up on the edge of the Milky Way and smile at each other – they are contemporaries now. They belong to the small group of the dead who know what it costs to try to seduce human beings into living. That place down there, that small blue disc, the discus thrown thoughtfully into the universe – it is inhabited by creatures that dare not understand their situation. For their benefit somebody put signs of life into circulation, traces of felt, of body heat, of forces of attraction, the little fat rolls of the well-padded sleeping goddess, music and bare skin under pleasant trees. Every human being is a human being. What kind of magnanimous charlatanry could claim that? Every human being is an artist?



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How long is it since that could be said without guile by cultural consultants? Nowadays people are not really happy about seeing themselves in very high definitions. There are historic times when they must think of themselves at a higher level because great things happen to them, and other times when they belittle themselves because they are challenged by enormous things. The present Belle Époque is an interim period between the small and the large gestures. The energy tends to flow towards the involuntary great person who looks voluntarily for a reduction in size, while everything that tries to make itself bigger involuntarily seems small. The reason for this delay, this sitting on the fence, this inability to decide, has a radical aspect. A schism has opened up in the interior of the creative forces themselves and is continually deepening. Art no longer sees virtuosity as its absolute precondition. Genius no longer sees the engineer as a necessary partner in every enterprise. The artistic forces no longer see technical mastery of methods as their natural ally. The capacity for happiness has distanced itself from the aesthetic potentialities on display. This schism definitely dates back some time: it reflects complicated changes in the alliances of the bourgeois energies that reshape the world. Even the happiness campaigns of modern times have had their deserters, their wounded, their war victors and double agents. Exhibiting also changes its meaning in this reshaping of alliances. Nowadays, it seems, one can only show second-best things. The displaying of works can scarcely be the moment of epiphany in which expressive and proprietorial forces of happiness are communicated to an audience. The exhibition has long since disintegrated into different things: the presentation of the fetish, the value offering or the exhibition of an accompanying philosophy. What does art that knows better do? Where should it go to gather itself for something worthy of revelation, something that shines into the exhibits from happiness we cannot buy? How can works admit that they are only epicentres of something better? Art is folding into itself. This is not the same as retreating into one’s own home, into a cave of wordless hollowness, but art is shrinking its front to the world, shrinking its contact area to the rest of business. It is stepping back from the exhibition front. It rethinks whether it was always well advised to pitch into the very front line of visibility. It considers its alliance with the publicity machines of museums, galleries and publications. It allows the question as to whether proof of happiness and being at the front can mean the same thing. In all this it indicates how it shares the historical self-doubt of the creative powers. By folding in on itself it becomes complicit in the crisis of things made by human beings. What should

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it mean to present works on the exhibition front now, when it is actually the time for production to question itself? How should one simulate the happiness of competent craftsmanship when it has long been clear that the freedom to do creative work has been trampled down by the compulsion to put energies into the work and exploit values? Ten years ago people were already saying that art was deserting the gallery and going to the country, going to people. This was supposed to suggest that it was looking for free space and wanted to find a different scope for happiness, to interrupt unhappiness. The happier forces are calling to themselves for accomplices, not for owners. Even the form of the work and the form of value are made available so that the voice of art can become a pure overhead trajectory again, an arrow of happiness we can experience at the moment when life goes faster than its exploitation.

Twilight of the Exhibition People are saying that art is becoming sidelined nowadays, that art is folding into itself. It is being sidelined by folding inwards. It is folding into itself by being sidelined. It is only showing a little bit now. It has more than can be shown. It can still show that it contains something more that is not showing. A new ecology of showing requires a different regulation for exhibitions. It is no longer the work in its parading mode that comes into view now. Almost nothing about the work offers a target to the viewer. The work remains folded up, rolled inwards, tacked to itself as if it were closed. The day of its exhibition and unfolding is not today, perhaps not again, perhaps not yet. All the same it has a kind of existence, if not in the usual sense. The present moment of the work is neither the present of its value nor what it contains visually. It cannot be seen fully as it is; it remains in the sharp angle of the world; curious eyes cannot read through it and consume it; the covers stop the viewer from seeing inside: in some cases the folds are so thick that we cannot even find out whether there are really works in the containers. We hover involuntarily between two hypotheses: there is something inside, or there is nothing inside. Yet the descriptions leave us in no doubt that what is standing there folded up must be connected with important works. The artists have invested heavily in the objects and their spending is also quantitatively high. A residue of lived time, ideas and existential tensions has built up inside the objects. Where is the white wall on which the totality of inward-folded surfaces could be spread out



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again? Would it not be good if such a wall existed? Or have the works themselves rejected this wall? Have they become resigned to the fact they are undiscoverable? Are they angry with the white wall? Do they feel a lack of acceptance? Do they want to stop casting pearls before collectors? Or are they the operational mass in a new exhibition trick? The works show no traces of their experiences with walls and galleries. Their previous history hardly counts at the moment. There is something abrupt and casual about the way they stand around. Now they are lying collapsed in on themselves: they are not pleading; they are not sulking; they take no action against themselves; they protect themselves. They demand some space on the margins without boasting of their existence. They stand at the side, as humble as shelves in cellars; placed there, not exhibited; assembled, not highlighted. What they say would have remained completely speechless if it were not for Anselm Kiefer’s rabbit fur exhibit in his Dachbodenbild. This work offers a text like a meta-painting that can be read as a reflection on the old art exhibition space and about how other forces broke into it. The breakout from it is shown by Gilbert & George’s large-scale drawings, the ‘paper sculptures’. The train of thought behind these assembled objects is connected, probably for the first time, not to the works but to their exhibition. The key is in renouncing explanation, dissemination, hot air and mass effort. The works themselves reveal a sharp turn away from focusing on exhibitions; it seems the works can do things differently. They do not produce themselves although they are produced. Art moves aside, refusing to engage in molesting passers-by. This lesson in discretion makes most art exhibitions look like bodybuilding competitions.

Beyond Autonomy: Lying Idle; Staying in Touch with Oneself Is it possible for artists to resign from art without presenting their departure as a work of art? First of all – why should they leave art? When happiness can no longer be found in art but rather beside it, before it and after it, the time has come to resign from the forms of the work, of value and of the white cube. Joseph Beuys’s resignation statement was a continuation of his avant-garde dream of transforming art into life. He was claiming for himself personally and for his times that something existed that was more generalized and more intense than artistic art. Perhaps one has to fail as an artist to move on as an assistant of happiness. Perhaps the very creative powers themselves must lie fallow like a field that

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has been too severely exploited for too long. Removing the creative happiness from works of art consigns art to the sidelines. Are these works sad that their impact is not stronger? Do they find their intimate existence as a cheque unsatisfying? Are they pretending to great exhibitions that they have a capacity for exile that, in fact, they secretly deplore? Do they feel contradicted by time like the naïve things of yesterday? Such questions are probably too invasive. They disturb a peaceful, marginal situation that the works of art have just discovered. To be able to rest on oneself – that is certainly something new for the presentation pieces of aesthetic creative power. It is an unusual experience for 999 works accustomed to pleading their own cause to the world not to demand that passersby come to a halt in front of them. Lying idle and waiting – this is an unexpected adventure for art objects accustomed to exploitation. Folding up inside themselves and not entering the annals of art history in top form – this is the feat that art works thirsting for meaning were least well prepared for. Or are they actually prepared for more than could have been imagined at the moment of their creation? Art is lying idle. People will simply walk past and a slight breeze of distracted attention will waft through the pieces of work. Without this the same people would pass by anyway, but the works would call out after them, begging and tempting like a bargain that offers us the alternative of grabbing it or missing it. Are these works calling? Are they luring us? And if they have already left the gallery – whom are they approaching? Who is coming up to them? Are they close to us when we walk past them? Will our walk past be different if they are standing on the sidelines? Walk past? How does one walk past so much casual stuff? Does one pass by without memories being evoked of something nameless, something to come, something wonderful that will later be given the vapid name ‘art’? From the moment we have glanced at the surface of the objects they have to be regarded as seen. This is not the time for big promises. We will soon get out of this exhibition hall as well. No faraway place speaks as if it were drunk on great future happiness. But seen is seen. What is visibility? Perhaps the everyday life of revelation. So what is revelation? That something that shines at you with its visibility. How does it happen? When I am in the open. In the open? When I am so far outside that the world shows itself.

EMISSARIES OF VIOLENCE On the Metaphysics of Action Cinema

1 Human beings can be divided into those who seek violence and those who escape from violence, and the group of escapees from violence can be subdivided again into people of our times and people trying to escape from the times we live in. People who have managed simultaneously to escape from violence and the times would be somewhere, just not here, hiding in the stillness in the country, hoping that the rest of the world gets some benefit from their distance to the times and to violence. When they fail to escape from the times, some of the escapees revert back into a very special kind of contemporary people: intellectuals. Intellectual types in our times are individuals who have failed in a series of escape attempts from the times and the world, with the result that they begin to reflect publicly on what it means to be born into this place and time and to stop denying their own role in the world’s important issues. ‘I have returned from Arcady’ – this could be the password of the failed or returned escapee from the times. Anybody who comes back from somewhere else, whether an imaginary or a real place, will see immediately that everyday life here consists of becoming an accomplice and consumer of incessant agitation and information about violence. In other words, they realize that there are continuing reasons to escape, even if their belief in possibilities of escape is exhausted. What is the first thing we notice when we get back from somewhere else, from salvation, from vacation? Above all that the people who are escaping from violence are surrounded by groups

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looking for violence, groups composed of perpetrators and informers who make it increasingly impossible to flee to non-violent spaces. Information on violence generally follows a disgraceful or contradictory pattern: we go about our normal (or pseudo-normal) business while at the same time bombs explode in car parks in New York, city districts are on fire in Bombay, rampaging Serb soldiers flatten villages and triumphantly seek eye contact with captive women abandoned to rape, while German petrol bombers set fire to houses and people, and children throughout the West get ecstatic about electronic extermination games. Perhaps it is better not to talk immediately about such things like a psychologist or political scientist who has always understood them, but rather from the perspective of the failed world escapist who begins without a theory but feels a kind of shared excitement instead. To talk about violence – or, rather, to talk out of its sphere – without falsely objectifying the issue, I think it is advisable to explode the illusion of distance right from the beginning, the illusion that situates us in a pacified zone and situates the violence across the border. Instead, I suggest an exercise in spherical thought – in which ‘sphere’ is translated in the literal Greek sense of the word, as ‘ball’. Let us explore this topic in the style of meditation with balls. Considerations on violence could begin with the memory of the hyper-ball that we can describe here without further ado as Being. Existence would mean always being in a sphere or being incorporated by a sphere. My proposition is that what we usually describe as ‘violence’ without thinking and in relation to individual cases has a spherical format by nature or in its form of dissemination. When ‘it’ ‘exists’, then it does so in the mode of being everywhere, or, in other words, in elementary or mediated dissemination. One cannot stand facing the sphere like a panel picture – despite what Lucretius says in this didactic poem: ’Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds Roll up its waste of waters, from the land To watch another’s labouring anguish far, Not that we joyously delight that man Should thus be smitten, but because ’tis sweet To mark what evils we ourselves be spared; ’Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife Of armies embattled yonder o’er the plains.1



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In a spherical interpretation of violence, Lucretius’ role as a spectator falls within the circle of violence because the theatre of violence is only a local projection inside the sphere that has no outside. To stand in the interior of the sphere of violence at a spot from where the violent actions appear before one’s eyes like scenes still means remaining shut inside the sphere. If we wanted to express this relationship as a formula we would say: being-in-the-world means being-subject-tothe-might-of, with the latter transcending all individual cases: being subject to the might of kidnappers, the might of bankers, the might of a jealous partner – or whatever else could attack you on all sides – ending in God’s mighty hand, in whose grip, we are told, some people feel better than in any other impenetrable shell. Let us listen once again, calmly, if possible, to the potentially panic-inducing formula: being-in-the-world means being-subjectto-power – and think about the impact of this sentence; as I shall show, there is a long story behind its exaggerated tone. I want to complete this exaggerated theorem with an exaggerated story to set the proper tone for relaxing into less extreme observations. Readers of James Clavell’s epic about Japan, Shogun, will remember a terribly cruel episode at the beginning of the novel: shortly after Captain Blackthorne’s ship lands on the Japanese coast, one of the twelve sailors is chosen by a straw poll to substitute for the entire crew and to be tortured and executed by the samurai of the territorial lord, Yabu. A man named Vinck draws the lot – but in the  scrum with Yabu’s thugs another sailor named Pieterzoon is picked out and taken away for the horrific execution. He is the man who will undergo the long, torturous death – an apocalyptic beginning to Japanese–European relations. Starting at sunset, Pieterzoon is seethed at medium temperature in a huge iron cauldron used by fishermen in winter to boil whale oil and fish glue – the torturer has special orders to draw out the procedure. From a distance, Lord Yabu listened to the screams of the sailor in the boiling water all night long before sending a samurai named Omi to report to him on the condition of the man in the cauldron. The screams began when the moon was high. Yabu was kneeling in the inner garden of Omi’s house. Motionless. He watched the moonlight in the blossom tree, the branches jet against the lighter sky, the clustered blooms now barely tinted. A petal spiraled and he thought.  Beauty   Is not less

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  For falling   In the breeze. [. . .] ‘You looked into the barbarian’s eyes?’ ‘Yes, Yabu-sama.’ Omi was kneeling now behind the daimyo, ten paces away. Yabu had remained immobile. Moonlight shadowed his kimono and made a phallus of his sword handle. ‘What – what did you see?’ ‘Madness – the essence of madness. I’ve never seen eyes like that. And limitless terror.’ Three petals fell gently. ‘Make up a poem about him.’ Omi tried to force his brain to work. Then, wishing he were more adequate, he said:   ‘His eyes   Were just the end   Of Hell –   All pain,  Articulate.’ Shrieks came wafting up, fainter now, the distance seeming to make their cut more cruel. Yabu said, after a moment:   ‘If you allow   Their chill to reach   You become one with them,   Into the great, great deep,  Inarticulate.’2 Now we understand: Pieterzoon had chanced upon a mystic who made a game out of merging with the screaming man in the cauldron – at a depth that lies beyond boiled seamen and meditating feudal lords. What interests us is that in the case of the seaman we could hardly be persuaded to do what social psychologists call ‘taking the role of the other’ unless we could find a way to ease conditions in the cauldron to such an extent that we could imagine taking the place of the person inside. If, as we are sometimes told, being a member of the human species involves being required to put ourselves in somebody else’s place, looking at Pieterzoon’s ‘quandary’, we can only discern a



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conditional form of humanity. We could call it the law of limited solidarity. First of all we would lower the temperature in the vessel to lukewarm, like the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea at the end of July. Then we would realize that the sides of the cauldron are an unreasonable obstruction to our view. We would remove them or expand them to the point where they resemble a normal horizon in flat countryside. Every sign of actual danger to body and life would be eliminated – nobody would be boiled, nobody shut in, any one of us could then take Pieterzoon’s place without protest, and if the scene developed into something that ended with death at some point, we have ways and means to keep calm as long as necessary. Although we are vaguely death candidates, we define ourselves by carefree concern and don’t let any stress about the end interrupt the open-ended moment. If one can put it like this, we unite with the other person in a middle zone where he or she faces as little threat from terrible things as we do here and now. During our stay in the entertaining world cauldron we have the company of relaxed Pieterzoons who conduct conversation and business with each other and are ultimately as indifferent to each other as Lord Yabu and the seaman would have been if their paths had never crossed. In other words, we are members of a liberal democracy. It is now clear what I meant earlier when I talked about loosening up overwrought statements. If we say that being-in-the-world essentially means being subject to the power of something, this should not apply in the radical sense of Pieterzoon’s story. It is our responsibility to dissolve the panic motif to the extent that we can see ourselves in the world like a bather in the sea in July at a place from where we can call out to our girlfriend or boyfriend and say, I can still stand at this point. Everybody knows that the sea can change, too, and if it did, it would be fatal to stay there. If we are cheerfully in the midst of things, soluble in the sea like water in the middle of water, it is only because while we are in the state of being in there we have no reason to think about how we are going to get out. If we apply this to the fluid of violence in which we are dissolved, it tells us that we may well enjoy specific states of being inside something – the summery state and the bourgeois state – whereas if we found ourselves in the middle of some other states we would start panicking and looking for a way out. In what follows I shall examine the question of the way humans who dissolve in violence behave when they have to get out of the terrible bath. Perhaps all of history is only the history of solutions to violence.

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2 If we want to talk about violence and its dissolution or division, it is impossible to avoid talking about human beings as ancient runners and ancient throwers. This is nothing new: anyone who goes to the movies risks a lesson in anthropology, and action movie fans eo ipso come close to palaeo-anthropology because, as I shall show, action provides the long-lost key to the transition from ape to human. I shall begin with the observation that today’s popular culture is the setting for a regression from drama to action. Nowadays, instead of the interpersonal conflicts we know from the high-culture theatre play, inter-bestial or inter-mechanical action sequences can be widely seen. On first glance they do not seem to have anything in common with the educational dimension of the European and oriental culture of theatre and narrative. I will shortly show, however, how far such action scenes also have a particular educational meaning – although in the sense not of humanization but of hominization. What academic history discusses under the heading of prehistory and early history is, in fact, the opposite of what the textbooks present – the realm where apparently nothing happens, in which boring populations of hunters and gatherers vegetate during hundreds of thousands of years of messing around until, finally, warriors, kings and scribes arrive to liven up history. In reality the enormous time period of so-called prehistory is dominated by an event whose dramatic character towers over every individual drama: the event of original hominization. For the period of over a million years a single gigantic event occurred, a titanic story whose violence and tension overshadowed everything that happened later except, perhaps, the kindling of nuclear fire. Who would deny that this represents a challenge to historiography? Most readers feel uneasy when they open books written by palaeontologists. Accounts of experts poking around in African or Chinese prosimian bones are dull, and probably not what the subject could really accomplish once we have accepted that so-called prehistory must necessarily contain the most breathtaking experience of all, the event to crown all events, the sheer catastrophe we originate from. Given this state of affairs, I would suggest testing the following hypothesis: modern action cinema is a species of experimental writing of pre- and early history using the methods of advanced film technology to process humankind’s archaeological secrets. Action cinema illuminates an aspect of truth about the inaugural event that formed humanity that we could summarize under the heading: the secession of human hordes from Old Nature.



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Looking closer, we can see that the two universal elements of action cinema – running and shooting – are usually linked in sequences that cinéastes call ‘the chase’. This is barely different to the major event of early history that gave rise to Homo sapiens – as the running animal whose legs measured two-fifths of its height that became a human being because it survived the chase. To do this it was necessary for early humans to be transformed from fugitives to counter-attackers – mostly by throwing stones and swinging from branches. The unified gesture involved in running to escape, turning around and throwing something at the attacker is the oldest pattern of human action – it is actually the pattern that advances hominization and allows the creation of a specific human group atmosphere. The singular combination of the skills of running and throwing created an invisible ring around those who possessed those special abilities, a distance from everything else in nature. From then on, nothing more could compel human creatures to adapt to the environment simply by means of their body. In the interior of this invisible ring the human head became remarkably big, the skin remarkably thin, the women remarkably beautiful, sexuality remarkably chronic and the children remarkably infantile. The old sapiens hordes were floating – or, better still, fleeing – islands on which nature allowed the experiment of a luxury evolution with consequences for the world. Because human beings as runners, throwers and beaters successfully evaded the direct pressure of animal competitors, humanity became the species that lifts its head, looks into the open country and quivers with wakefulness. Theoretical behaviour arose exceptionally early in human beings – to some extent from the excess of wakefulness that opened the eyes of the attentive animal Homo sapiens to the luxuriant vista of the still plain. This perspective helps explain the third universal aspect of action cinema: the waiting, the sitting still, the hero’s immersion in the stillness before the attack, the small movements of the perpetrators in the eventless scene heavy with imminent events. I assure you that anybody who puts something like this on screen is not a priori promoting brutality, as cultural critics argue, and not just somebody speculating on the reliably vulgar instincts of fellow human beings. He is primarily, and specifically in this case, an explorer of early history who sent his probes back to the field of hominization to discover for himself and for us the real content of prehistoric human formation. Action films explore the never entirely forgotten boundary of conflict where the decision is made whether creatures from hordes should survive or not.

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Having said earlier that all history is the history of violent solutions, now is the time to add: it is the history of escaping from chases and the history of being able to move from escape to counter-attack. One could almost talk of the birth of human beings out of the spirit of counter-attack. In the beginning was counter-violence – which means the flight from violence that erects boundaries in the space by the act of throwing. The animal of distance, the human being of the horde, lives on an island of distance from its surroundings, an island that is excluded from Old Nature by the intrinsic complementary relationship of escape and counter-attack. This is why it would be easier to think of the old hordes together with their highly cultured successors in peoples and nations as social rafts drifting on the sea of Old Nature with the tendency – which only became clear much later – to turn the timeless drift into a historical journey. Now we can understand why the whole of palaeo-history must offer variations on the themes of throwing and shooting. To the extent that they invented themselves in counter-attack, human beings are artillery-type animals: throwers, shooters, creators of distance by using missiles and throwing border stones. If we remember that the first ‘borders’ were not drawn or fixed but thrown (and remained empty afterwards as part of the no man’s land between the throwers), then the archaic suggestive power of guns in general and exchanges of fire in action cinema in particular becomes highly plausible. The historicism of action film reminds us that the horde ego finds reasons for conflicts about distance and demarcation whenever the old actors clash during their outings. The person who shoots at others on a wild trip out in the wide world is not always the cool killer or lonely cowboy; he might just as well be an old hunter engaging in foreign policy for the horde – not in terms of territory but rather in relation to ideas about the real or imagined intactness of the horde ego. This ego, in its informal precincts that are relatively pacified internally, drifts through the world cauldron, which is filled with violence. Looking back to hominization in the horde therefore gives us the opportunity to consider the artillery before the artillery that seems inseparable from the entire process of becoming a human being. Homo iactans may well be a better name for Homo sapiens. If Heidegger had lived to see the Terminator films, I am sure he would have revised his statement that human beings are the beings that have to design themselves. Instead, he would have said that human beings are the beings who are condemned to throwing per se. People who want to talk about throwing should not keep quiet



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about hitting the target. This brings us to the dark side of the present considerations, because we have to discuss the relationship of shooters and throwers to the objects they hit. I shall preface my remarks by mentioning that this may concern what modern commentators call a subject–object relationship. The question of hitting the target brings us to the topic of the Terminator for the first time because the hits that enliven the oldest hunter lore and the latest killer video machine fantasies are the terminal hits, the terminating hits and the bull’s eyes that put the full stops after the object’s autonomous existence. The object relationships of shooters could be described as a kind of happy sadism. Shooting at an object not only means putting it out of your way: a ‘true’ shot recognizes something specific in the other person in a place where it would be better to have nothing, which means, if this leads to hitting the mark, that the hit is the ‘production’ of this exact nothing in place of the false something that was there before. From this perspective any kind of artillery would inherently include a latent Terminator theme. Whenever people shoot seriously, the nothing is invited to change places with the previous something. The cult of the hit that runs through all action movies is an everlasting extinction ceremony that celebrates the original extermination miracle of the human hordes after the event as if it were something that today’s sapiens-iactans cannot do without. If I have used the expression ‘extermination miracle’ without immediately distancing myself from the term on moral grounds, it was not to prepare a theoretical Black Mass but to give plausibility to a palaeo-anthropological theorem about our human horde members’ primary experiences of power. For in the history of the species’ ego formation, exterminations are older than creations and extinction is more fundamental than invention. Why does termination take precedence over inauguration? The answer derives from the basic conditions of the horde’s reality. The group, surrounded by the invisible membrane of its natural distance, drifts towards the old sea of nature, a raft like Pieterzoon in a potentially dangerous world tub. On average it may offer lukewarm temperatures and sustain the raftsmen as long as there are only a few of them; but it encloses them, apparently forever, in its impenetrable shell of violence and power that keeps them in an ambivalent state of primal passivity – safe and squeezed at the same time. In this context it is understandable what throwing and hitting the target could have meant originally: the beginning of an infinitely slow and difficult counter-seizure of power that would culminate in the possibility of apt statements like the Cartesian dictum of

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man as the maître et possesseur de la nature [master and owner of nature]. The first hits take human beings into the zone of a new kind of ecstasy. They start jumping and shaking with strong revolutionary emotions. In fact, we can say that ego orgasms give rise to the subject. The hit triggers a kind of euphoric sadism that forms the ego and probably represents the guiding thread of the psycho-evolutionary process as such. We are talking about a sadism that makes the ego blossom – in the sense that it learns how to use artillery power to destroy an object. This is the first point where human beings broke through into the technological-magical zone. By its nature, initially this can only be a zone of extermination and magic; the magic of transformation and production will follow the path that the magic of denial with throw and shot has carved out in telecausal terms. People who have trouble envisaging these connections may find it helpful to compare a current phenomenon in the subculture of sport. We only have to consider the circumstances in which we become witnesses of the most powerful statements of desire that human beings can express. The theatrical climaxes of our porno queens are feeble comedies compared with the goal-scoring orgasms at the heart of all the reporting on major football championships. You only have to study the gestures of the heroes on the field after they have scored a goal to see the eruption of wild forms of ecstatic satisfaction – forms for which there is no equivalent in the entire range of gestures within civilization. If we only looked properly, we would see that this often involves eruptions of almost obscene piety, and not only among men from southern countries who sometimes break down on the grass after scoring a goal, cross themselves and whimper before rolling their eyes and thanking some higher authority for the mercy of the shot. These are the Saturday prayers of modern humanity, prayers wept jointly by millions of viewers in front of small screens and in stadiums. These are the spontaneous prayers of preserved early history that make monotheist Sunday rituals look artificial by comparison. I am convinced that these masculine shooter orgasms and hit cults are imitations of the primary sadistic jubilation with which the first hunters and throwers celebrated their original, albeit precarious, victories over Old Nature. At the core of its success the history of human skill follows this sadistic axis on which the subject asserts itself in triumphing over the object that has been hit and destroyed. The ominous cruelty of children sometimes contains aspects of this. It is a pole of attraction from the start for power that wants itself for its own sake. It is the longing for the extreme feeling of finally scoring some victories against Nature, which is overpowering on



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every other front. It takes the first steps towards breaking out of Nature’s cauldron – ballistic preliminary rounds for the metaphysical idea of overcoming the world. It is thus appropriate that in the second Terminator film, which is the present peak of modern action cinema, the killer machine appears as the ally of the little Messiah – just as it is right that the holes he shoots with big handguns into the heads and bellies of his enemies are finally shown explicitly as holes, thanks to computergenerated images. At last everyone can see without mediation what ‘terminating’ means: to make a hole where previously something complete, resistant and false existed. To quote a wise old caveman’s proverb: ‘No survival without eliminating adversities.’ But what if the entire world looked like an adversity? What if the Earth became the target of a last sweeping shoot-out? As we know, ordinary heroes in action operate on the sound idea of annihilating hits. Terminators in the last exchange of fire, however, operate on the concept of the redemptive mission of exterminating the global exterminator. Global destruction means the fantasy that the whole of humanity will be boiled in a nuclear cauldron. What distinguishes the new Terminator syndrome from the usual artillery nihilism is the metaphysical collateral that a few correct hits could save humankind. Anybody who successfully shoots down people who are threatening to shoot everything becomes the redeemer, with the gun as a symbol of holiness. How can we explain this mention of the Gospel in the same breath as the most brutal literature of violence? I am afraid it is high time to ask Arnold and James what they think of religion.

3 As we can see, James Cameron’s Terminator movies of 1984 and 1991 belong to a history of ideas, types and clichés that constantly revives a form of prehistory. The Terminator movies take imaginary ideas of virile authority and combine them into a final image: we could be looking at the end form of the shooter, the apotheosis of the ballistic man. We might have thought this basically says everything about the archetype of the shooter, but, in fact, Arnold and James produced a message that, when decoded, takes us into the heartland of a religious system. For Terminator 2 not only shows the definitive shooters, not only a special class of gunmen, men resembling projectiles – no, Arnold, the noble cyborg, has a mission to fulfil that will serve the whole of humankind. A man on a mission, it is easy

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to see, not only fires off projectiles but is also an emissary who leads a project from the world beyond in this world. This is not just a man who shoots but also one who is shot – a man who materializes on American soil in thunder and lightning next to the garbage. It is immediately clear why such a phenomenon leaves film critics helpless – you would have to be a missionary theologian to be able correctly to determine the rank and classification of this strange machine angel. I shall now look at some analytical aspects of action cinema from the perspective of lay criticism of the mission. The first thing I notice is that if Arnold-Terminator is really supposed to be a character in the catalogue of heroic virility, he exposes the non-phallic nature of such heroism more clearly than Rambo or Batman ever did. The shift from man to android machine completely reveals the nonphallic character of the flesh-covered tin figure: this man is nothing but an automatic sprinkler. Psychologically his firepower belongs not only to the phallic but also to the anal stage; his weapons are not phallus symbols but frontally mounted anal projectors that prepare adversaries for the garbage dump. It may well be true that all duels take place among men, but among men in men’s rooms, men who trumpet to the apocalypse on the toilet, men who fart each other out of the world using hot-air devices from anal technology. When kids cheer at big bangs on the cinema screen regardless of whether the bangs happen in an old steelworks or in intergalactic spaces, they are exposed to dubious temptation. They are converted to the idea that heroes with male exteriors shouldn’t be afraid of anal duels. It is the dawn of an age of tele-faeces. Indeed, such players no longer aspire to fight and win in a style that qualifies as masculine. They want to make the objects even more like faeces and to stride away across shit and rubble. And this is what happens, with miraculous lack of emotion and perfect composure. The fighter in the turmoil remains cool as a jewellery dealer, unfeeling as a stone Apollo, taut, taciturn, efficient – the perfect sphincter man. On the outside he still resembles the historical man, but his construction programme has won over the human condition: the motto of his actions is Never human again. In psychological terms we could describe the cyborg as a fixated pre-Oedipal type. Expert opinion would say that he is subject to a kind of anal dualism that only accepts the alternatives of divinity and shit in relation to objects – and, as usual, everything rests on a malign narcissistic syndrome. This brings us to another remark: the male type in action cinema à la Arnold and James is treated as if he were made out of pre-



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Oedipal matter, and this is precisely why he cannot exist without a background figure who directs him. This makes the Terminator the psychological vassal of a lord and transmitter who has programmed him with a mission like a fully automated Jesuit. Arnold advances as the synthesis of Achilles and Jesus with the physique of the former and the pace of the latter. As a rule, ever since the historic transition to the style of world-redeeming actions, these actions have had to be executed without hesitating and at top speed, or, as St Mark the Evangelist wrote, euthys, immediately, right now, straight away, directly3 as the crow flies from that place in Galilee to the heavenly goal. This is why Terminator 2 is a landmark in media history: not because it uses film as a medium in particularly advanced ways, but because the medium of God, the missionary, the man on a mission, appears here in a new aggregate state – like an angelic machine, an archangel who has exchanged his sword for an updated weapons system. Arnold is the modern St Christopher who carries the saviour of humankind across the world as if it were a battlefield. A third, brief remark about the female transmitter behind the male transmitter: if you have seen Terminator 2, you may be hazy about all kinds of things – for example, about whether the logic of the story is totally absurd or actually makes sense. There can be no doubt about one thing, however: the film presents a snapshot of situations in the matriarchal dream factory of the United States of America. It is a document of agitation by the mother religion that has swamped the Western hemisphere not just recently but – more or less unnoticed – since 1967. The film also does something very much geared to our times, something for which Madonna Megastar found her own formula on a different stage: it is devoted to the creation of a Protestant Madonna image. The real hero of the story is, of course (as we realized long ago), neither Arnold Terminator, the noble warrior, nor the nice fellow John Connor, the designated redeemer of the world and resistance fighter against the machines. From a structural perspective the heroic figure in the story is John’s mother. It is she who presents the world menaced by nuclear war with salvation in the form of her son. What James Cameron created in collaboration with Linda Hamilton was nothing more than the design of a mother god who had read Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett. The authors of this genuinely evangelical project succeeded by making a travesty of the Catholic imago of the heavenly mother overflowing with milk and grace. They underwent breast reduction, replaced the burning heart with a training course in shooting, translated the dolorosa motif into psychiatric treatment and cut Joseph

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out of the scene. Even a man who renounced his manhood at the side of the new mother god would have disturbed the cool line of Amazonian perfection. The result is that the second Terminator film reveals a world that is miraculously empty of men with its centre inhabited by an Amazonian matron with her fatherless boys and its periphery populated by cyborgs and male extras who can be blown to bits at any time. The centre of centres is still the mother’s womb with its heavy Protestant associations, asserted as the epicentre of the mission and of the emissary. Whereas in the case of the Jesus of the canonical Evangelists there was a tacit division of labour by which his physical being came from the mother and his spirit from his supernatural father, in the apocalypse according to Cameron the mother is the repository of everything: being and meaning intersect in the uterus of the New American Woman. They not only cross over and meet each other in it; in fact, they originate from it and radiate from it like divine sparks from the pleroma, the totality of the Godhead in Christ. Belly and spirit have united in this form of feminism to proclaim that nuclearism, the ideology of the nucleus, is the last word of the masculine world whereas autonomous femininity will bring redemption through old-new ecological religion. It follows that Terminator 2 should be read as symptomatic news about processes in the imaginary realm of the world’s most perfect matriarchy, the United Fodder and Mother States of America. I will refrain from linking these observations to Arnold personally and I will say nothing more about the cult around Aurelia Schwarzenegger, the hero’s mother, who directs the mission of the greatest living Austrian from who knows where. All the same, we can imagine that flooding the West with images and symbols could be an element of the capitalist matriarchy that tells everybody to consume so that they may proclaim the splendour of the Grand Mother Company. Perhaps the wave of consumption of violent images contains an aspect of truth about the oral empires of modernity that Ernest Gellner aptly called the ‘Consumerist Unbeliever International’.4 My fourth and concluding remark concerns the modernized cyborg that is assigned the mission to kill in this film. He is the only figure in Cameron’s cinematic Wagnerian opera that introduces a new, uncanny, nearly transcendent dimension. This deadly actor is based on a morphoplastic system of intelligent liquid steel – a vision of the new nether world of mind and matter. Looking at this figure, we can say that anyone familiar with the second instalment of Terminator has seen the glint in the eye of the contemporary cyclone. By now Arnold is already only interesting in



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a historical sense, a curiosity from an age of stoical hooligans. There is no doubt that the future belongs to his antagonist, who is capable of transformation. All through the film, Arnold stubbornly remains himself, more or less demolished, an old European machine as a variation of the Aristotelian substance that was to be revived as a founding subject in the modern age. This is very different from the smart antagonist who haunts the screen like a theorem on the importance of function over structure. He can long since become what he sees; equipped with an autopoietic programme that generates forms, he reconstitutes himself every time he is smashed up. What makes him a phenomenon is his ability to merge with anything he wants to exterminate. He is self-reflexive like a Hegelian slot machine and selfless like a Buddha. He embodies the perfect completion of posthumanity. He is the first machine that could be a female mystic. De-programming it requires using the elements themselves: the indestructible destroyer in the red-hot cauldron of a steel works only dissolves at the last moment; it is the only place where the transformation of the concrete subject into the element without a subject can still succeed. What can no longer be shot can only be melted down. We think we can actually physically see the death of the Terminator reflecting that of Empedocles across two thousand five hundred years. Arnold and Pieterzoon have merged into one person and send merry greetings from the tub. The eyes of the iron man in the red-hot cauldron no longer show signs of madness; he goes towards ‘death’ like driving into a garage. The melting of the Machine Man suggests the last violent solution. Was it possible to avoid the feeling that something in the destinies of these emissaries of violence could show us the track of future paths of annihilation?

GOOD-FOR-NOTHING RETURNS HOME Or The End of an Alibi – and a Theory of the End of Art

If I had a salaried job, I would probably be into art as well. Department head at the radio and then poetry – that would be ideal. Martin Walser, Die Gallistische Krankheit The future of art1 – I would like to ask whether it is possible to consider a problematic heading like this seriously without fearing the worst for the person who has agreed to talk about it. Our first glance already tells us that the objectivity of this subject is such that it flees as soon as people start talking in the ‘talking about’ mode. The future and art – two of the most explosive categories of the modern culture of reflection – are combined in an apparently harmless way. They are placed side by side like two boreholes in the intellectual consciousness or, if you like, two a priori defeats for the process of thinking about and talking about. Art: talking properly about art and to art and from inside art would require developing an adequate aesthetics of modernity, perhaps even an anthropologically based aesthetics, or resolving all aesthetics into a discipline of mental wakefulness concerned with perception and expressive emotions. And all this – as we have known for ages – is scarcely to be hoped for, as has been the case since well before Adorno’s death, and is too difficult for people living at present. The future: this category entangles us in the paradoxes of the philosophy of space and time, which explains the presiding concept of the future as something unfathomable – it shows us how our intelligence will inevitably get lost in the depths of the temporalization of time if we spend too long now on the nothingness that is supposed to become temporalized as the something of a later



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moment. I think it is not exaggerating to say that the category ‘the future’ is totally overloaded. People nowadays talk about the future of art. I can tell you right away that this will end in melancholy. One should not judge such melancholy, of course: it has its merits; it is what creates space for doubts in us – it is, in fact, the aura of the defiant consciousness that might become entrenched in the statutes of a venerable academy. I would even go as far as to ask: what is an academy aside from institutionalized melancholy about the fact that art is long and life is short and we can neither solve crucial problems nor forget them? Aside from the academic defiance shrouded in the elegant nimbus of well-established futility, modern reflection basically consists of two strategies to reduce anything that is too difficult to the format of the individual ability to think. Both of these strategies are clumsy. The first is to stab the problem in the back with critical ideology to deny its claim to its own kind of objectivity. The second is to blow the problem’s cover with the experimental methods of Gay Science, contravening the laws of academic gravity, to prevent it from becoming established as a serious solution. The seriousness of such Gay Science consists in turning its back on solutions per se because it is important not to solve the problem but to show that every solution becomes an accomplice of the problem. Let us start by looking at the critical ideology process, which means critical rebellion against the objectivity of the object. A question about the questioner is used to expose the naked truth of what is being asked and to prove that it is trivial. What lies behind the question about the end or the future of art? Who is the person who wants to know what the future of art will be? Who must have which intention when he offers to extrapolate his future from his present situation today? Who is sitting so comfortably in the present that he only has to slide down the slope of his expectations to land up in his future seat? Critique of the interest that motivates the question about the future inevitably comes up against how the intellectual and material rights and power relations of our society are currently constituted. Critique of ideology is crime studies in reverse: in this case we do not deduce the criminal from the evidence of a crime but deduce the probability of a crime from the perpetrator, or start from a beautiful phrase to deduce the ugliness of the person who needs to utter the phrase. As always in strategic thinking, the perpetrator is already known from the start because he can never be anybody but the person who gives his name to existing ideological and economic relationships – which are described today as neo-conservatism. His pictures were displayed on all the hoardings in the republic in the past year,

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but instead of being apprehended he was elected and delegated to take care of the future, if not of art then of public finances – which is, perhaps, also a kind of art but does not belong to Aristotle’s Categories. Critique of ideology has a sharp ear – as sharp as the hearing of a semantics expert on the academic battlefront. The future of art – for someone determined to hear things that way, it is, of course, a neo-conservative option, a rejection of the ‘no future’ people in the squatters’ camps of West Berlin, a topic that the Bavarian Superior Court of Audit can consider as a valid reason for public expenditure, a subject with a positive and symbolic psycho-political effect that fits the times like a means to create trust in the plans for the apocalypse which will result from the spirit of goodwill. But concepts can lose their innocence; after the bankruptcy of social movements, media moguls can purchase complete terminologies on the cheap; entire systems of semantics can change owners. And if we are not deceived, the New Right has bought into the principle of hope and is donating free fatherland T-shirts to the nation’s voters, along with optimism badges, little boom flags, hope stickers and future ball pens. Wherever neo-conservative orders of the day are presented to a public that we can assume to be looking for meaning, and wherever the task is to produce the desired atmosphere of business as usual, people talk warmly about the future; for in a world that is already feeling the threat of collapse, the ‘future’ is the ideal word to hold on to. Even on the lips of those suspected of being the gravediggers of any kind of future, it is a symbol of the most fundamental human rights, the symbol of the right to life in a bearable present – bearable because such a present can keep on believing that it does not have to doubt the content of the future from the very start. So much for critical ideology’s attempt to avoid the objectivity of the object by proposing a prior vote of no confidence in it to stop it from evolving. However plausible this manoeuvre may seem, if it succeeds, people will soon develop an aversion to quick victories of critique over the object of criticism. Moreover, critique, in turn, rapidly falls victim to a new critique because in principle the spiral of distancing and denial can rotate infinitely – until critique finally settles down comfortably to being in the same state of misery as those it criticizes. If the enterprise does not fail early on and if the object itself begins to speak, the only thing left at present is to follow the path of the essay. The essay is a sort of good-natured uncle of criticism as an ideology, akin to this criticism in its undogmatic spirit but different from it in being willing to approach things in a non-destructive form, or, even better, to let things happen on their own. Count



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Hermann Keyserling once said that the shortest path to one’s self leads around the world. We could adapt this to say that the shortest path to an answer to the question of the future is a digression that allows us to approach it from a great distance. In this case, too, the essay is the right basis if we can agree that ‘essay’ is a codename for sophisticated thematic transgressions. This is what I shall present to you in the form of three pertinent digressions from the subject. I will begin by briefly outlining them. The first digression will explore the horizon of our relationship with the future. I shall begin by testing the market, or by a rhetorical investment consultation on the question of whether the ‘future of art’ as such is a secure investment topic. Do we have enough future that we can afford to worry about the future of art? Aren’t discussions about postmodernism and Young Wild Ones, about neo-populism and the aesthetics of uninhibitedness, about spraycan publicity and new sacredness, about the female way of writing and irony in post-history at risk of scaring audiences away because of certain irregularities in the coming of the future? This means I shall talk in the first place not about the future of art but about the future of the future, or, if you really insist, about the art of still having a future nowadays. On this occasion I shall mention three aspects of our future future. More precisely, I will talk about a threefold erosion of today’s relationship to the future. I do not mean the doubts about progress that emerged a hundred years ago. Any further comment on that topic would mean bringing the middle-class concept of education into the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Excuse me, please, we are not promoting aestheticism here but exploring reality. Anyone who wants cultural critique can buy it at bookshops. We are not discussing the fear of social decline among the highly privileged. We are far more interested in the ideological and economic implications of the worldwide credit system that is the foundation of the material relationship that we all have to the future. I would like to remind you of the fact we have all repressed that nearly everything that happens today in the economic and political system occurs on the basis of loans, in several senses. For every car, on average three of the wheels roll on credit. For every newly built house, at most one in five roof tiles belongs to the so-called owner. Everything you can see of a building above the earth is a feat of refinancing acrobatics floating on an invisible cloud of hypothetical finances. Purchases and sales have long since been conducted in the unreal spaces of a ‘what-if’ economy. The public budgets of the Western hemisphere have such huge debts that if anyone were to try out the crazy idea of living from what ‘is really available’ at a particular moment, the

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coming generations would have to dedicate everything to balancing accounts. Most ‘Third World’ countries, and some of the ‘Second World’ as well, have contracted loans from the economic powers of the ‘First World’ that span across generations and will last for a whole era, with the result that if those countries were mad enough to be realistic, they would have to adjust to spending the third millennium paying off their debts, at best by developing a national computer industry for calculating the interest. Beyond the private and institutional levels of debt, however, the core of the modern time machine, the international industrial system as such, is emerging as the bravest debtor of all, dynamically raising the debt levels on what it borrows from natural resources and on its balance sheet to irretrievable levels. As far as future debt commitments are concerned, there are no riddles or surprises – it just looks like a freeway into the void. The routes into the linear future are clearly signposted. Tomorrow was already over-built yesterday, like Germany’s autobahn network. We have invested our karma in the bank and the fate of our children’s children in the movement of compound interest. This future has the structure of a computer printout on which the repayment instalments of a surrealistic mortgage rise to incalculable sums. Social psychologists have statistically proved that ever since the older generation has realized what the younger generation is facing, even death has lost its terror for them. In this world, this side of the boundary of any metaphysics of fate, we are living in a situation of irredeemable debt that entangles us like the equivalent of fate in the industrial age, or, rather, like a predestination surrogate for human beings who once appreciated seeing their history as self-made. Given these levels of debt, every responsible person behaves as if he or she were obeying the categorical imperative of a Kantian enlightened by the stock exchange report: act according to the maxim whereby the extent of your borrowing could become the principle for a general doomsday law at any time. The death wish of borrowers who are so deeply in debt that hopelessness reverts into a joke leads to a second aspect of the future of the future, which I shall talk about at the appropriate point later – an aspect that reveals the existential attitudes of important creative groups in society and how they feel about life, which allows us indirectly to draw conclusions about the future of the future. I shall speak about a kind of blockade of the future that can be seen everywhere nowadays in discothèques, in the serious art business and in philosophical seminars as well as in the shopping precincts of the West. A new phenomenon that we could describe as an



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anti-dialectical mannerism of affirmation has taken over; a new, defiant colourfulness with a negative attitude to the future, a hopeless, because simulated, mood of ‘here-and-now’ is accompanied by flickering distraction and surrounded by a sense of ice-cold excessiveness. Cross-country vehicles drive wildly through inner cities; anyone who wants to make a name as a cultural theoretician only has to claim that the return of suspender belts signals the resurrection of eroticism (and Der Spiegel magazine will print it). I call the entire complex of these phenomena the left-wing Dionysian syndrome. You could also call it nuclear Biedermeier or the age of fishermen’s choirs or the third Neo-Romanticism or Californian Late Antiquity or the electronic post-March era2 or the resurrection of ornamentation. It doesn’t matter what you call it because they are all labels for the same ghostly experience, a truly nauseating experience: namely, that our late capitalist normal time has shattered into a thousand pieces, that the world clocks of capitalist and socialist philosophers of history have gone completely wrong, giving everybody the hazardous freedom of being able to say what time it is for him or her. In an era like the present one, in which normal clocks melt and digital clocks keep on counting meaninglessly, we may suddenly realize that we are beginning to hear the drums of an internal Stone Age once more; that shamans appear in the pedestrian precinct; that snake power rises from the pelvic base and dances along our spine up to the thousand-leaved lotus under our cranial vault, and that after we have come down again from our high we can publish our Collected Wild Experiences with the publisher Matthes und Seitz.3 A third aspect that the future of the future shows us is a reflex reaction to the effects of the loss of monochrome illusions, the effects of the explosions of imaginary shared moments in time. Simultaneity no longer exists and Bloch’s construct of a simultaneity of nonsimultaneous moments is futile appeasement in the face of the apocalyptic unfettering of the calendar. If it is really the case that each person nowadays claims individual status and withdraws into his or her endogenous growth period; that each culture publishes its own special calendar; that all militant groups rewrite world history for themselves and with reference to themselves; that every branch runs into other branches of social evolution; that the directors of every multinational corporation write their own screenplays to push through their options for the world history that is yet to be made – if all this is true, then it raises the inevitable question of where the people who are alive at the same moment today should look for the lowest common denominator for their contemporaneity. If they look, where will they find the connecting element between their

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paths in time, which follow different curves? Where should they find the principle that could provide minimal synchronization for all the worlds of time that have flown apart? I think this touches on one of the secret topics that are responsible for the present-day boom in catastrophe theories and philosophies of transitional periods. Anyone who, despite everything, wants to go for the jackpot – in relation to philosophy, diagnosis of our times, or social reform – needs a concept for a synchronicity that runs through all of life today, which means a concept for a time quality and particular flavour of the present moment in the context of universal history. How else can we achieve such an all-embracing synchronicity except with the thesis that we are all in the same temporal boat, that we all constitute a risk society defined by the philosophy of history – for better or worse – as a mutually supportive collective of cosmopolitan citizens in the transitional period, or as agents of an Aquarian conspiracy, or as an apocalyptic alliance of unexploded evolutionary bombs? Such pathos-laden synchronization of everyone with everyone will naturally create a new asynchronicity, specifically between human beings who think they are living right now in the lofty super-age of the history of philosophy and others who reject the principle of solidarity with humankind in the form of a collective of the transitional period or an apocalyptic community and prefer to live watchfully on their patch and to await, with what Siegfried Kracauer described as ‘hesitant openness’, their fate. It is probably symptomatic, and diagnostically significant for intellectuals, that some of the most sensitive present-day thinkers (such as Rutschky and Kamper) have recently reconsidered the experience of waiting as an intellectually honest form of existential cleverness (similarly to the ideas in Kracauer’s essay ‘Those Who Wait’, written during the early Weimar Republic).4 This waiting retreat from great history is an attitude which seems to me to be born of an experienced and straightforward subjectivity that is both in tune with the times and desolate – a subjectivity that derives its balance from a modernization process that ends, at best, in courageous scepticism. We are now in a position to make some statements about the future of art. The art of the future will, of course, reflect the present worlds of its respective subcultures. On the one hand that means it will be an art for those who wait, for latently depressed but relatively robust individuals – in obsolete terminology they are called ‘adults’: in other words, people who do not want to travel under the big black sail of the new philosophy of history. Consequently it will be an art that is not in an apocalyptic hurry and can afford time for enlight-



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ened hesitancy; an art that will let the breath of tradition through – or, rather, the two traditions, the classical and the modern, for by now both of them have absorbed the postmodernist lesson that there are just not enough traditions to satisfy our need for permanent breaks with tradition. It will therefore be an educated but hypocritical and arbitrary type of art based on the neo-bourgeois comfort of a risk-free revolution against defenceless pasts. On the other hand it will be an art that belongs in one of the many regional and individual problem calendars, catastrophe timetables or New Age designs; the art of impatience and of immediate enjoyment, an art of ‘not knowing how to go on’ and of absolute reduction, an apocalyptic art of redemption or one that wants to begin arbitrarily in a new place somewhere; a do-it-yourself art for enthusiasts and model makers who start at random and play with materials and influences, reluctant to make associations, overwhelmingly neonaïve, bravely decoupled from the weighty heritage of what has already existed and what is overabundant; and, of course, an art that will lay beauty on so thick that the critical ego has no choice but to escape into cynicism: smashed-up humankind seems preferable to cafés for drug addicts. So much for the first digression. I shall return later to what I have just outlined. In the second digression that I shall now sketch out I shall stress the sceptical attitude towards art even more by approaching the question of the future of art from a prosaic perspective – tackling the present interior minister’s question of what the purpose of art is anyway. In this section I shall make it clear that I approach the material – in Hegelian terms – from the standpoint of philosophy, meaning from the site of external reflection, or, to put it less elegantly, from the low-brow angle. Let me briefly remind you of the definition of ‘low-brow’. It describes someone who just wants to know how a thing works without really getting involved in the issue of what it is for, how much it costs, whether the Russians are behind it, and, most of all, what one could do instead. Seen from the radicalized low-brow position – or, we might just as well say, from the functionalist perspective –, the outcome for the phenomenon of art in the modern age is unclear. I will proceed as if this unclear situation had two sides that can be represented as ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’. It follows that art belongs, on the one hand, to the compensatory social system. It has a symbolic role in collecting the human needs that are not satisfied by conflicts of political interest, either in the work sphere or in conventional communication in society or the family. Whereas classical aesthetics says that in the world of aesthetic illusion, conflicts between the individual and society

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that are irreconcilable in reality can appear to be resolved, functional analysis recognizes the phenomenon of ‘art’ as a subsystem in a network of therapeutic and compensatory institutions that run like veins through social life and help to regulate its chronic tensions. In this interpretation the arts as a whole would be something like an immune system that society concedes to individuals. It is a system that makes individuals less sensitive to indigestible realities and allows them expressive detoxification for frustrated yearnings and insults they have suffered. It follows that nothing can be better for social conservation than art, whether critical or beautiful, if art is rightly seen as a refuge for homeless dissatisfaction, as a poetic institute for needs or as a padded cell for prophylactic revolution – in short, as a kind of cleansing purgative in the frustration economy of a highly complex social order that inexorably forces people into denial. This is where ‘on the other hand’ becomes relevant. The phenomenon of art starts developing a utopian and anthropological potential. In terms of the compensation theory I have just outlined it contains a mysterious kind of dysfunctionality. Anyone who has felt attracted to modern fine arts must know that the mood inside the aesthetic cyclone is not about satisfying the residual needs of modern human beings. What characterizes the self-interpretation and ‘pathos of truth’5 of the modern arts is that they are often presented to society as having authority over the most important issues of human development. We are not talking about the therapeutic use of leftovers, or about fictional compensation or fantastic vicarious satisfaction under normally adverse circumstances. This is not the place for bandaging the middle-class soul; rather, we enter aesthetic space as a protected reservation for the authentic, as a workshop of emancipation where human beings want to become what they really are. It is the place not where dressings are changed but where standards are set; it is the place not for letting out pent-up feelings but for defending a plateau of human ability to exist. It is a matter not of other-directed regeneration but of autonomous creation. Life forces are not neutralized here as they are in the sphere of consumption, nor destructively united and mobilized as in fascist ideologies, but productively applied with creative caution in the public arena. In this context it is easy to show why major art in the modern age is so often associated with an aesthetic of rawness, rejection and negativity. For great art in an age of devastation cannot simultaneously believe in itself and in the applause of a crowd that obviously acts as an agent of devastation. It cannot seek agreement with people who agree with the embodiment of the horrors that define everyday life in modern times. The irreconcilable nature of impor-



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tant works of modern art results from the utopian anthropology of artists rebelling against the realistic anthropology of positive sociologists with their cynical doctrine of compensation. What is being demanded here is nothing less than a new world constitution, because for the feelings of great artists (and for any kind of positively childish human beings), the only truly bearable world would be a world that does not need further false beautification or aesthetic compensators, not to mention illustrious deniers and negation elites. Instead, people are demanding a world in which the most temperamental aesthete could come home like a returning exile to a liberated country to create things there in beauty without lies and legitimately to compose harmonious songs – in a spirit of second innocence and unforced reconciliation. For this reason a major part of important modern art is art of the unhappy conscious mind, and rightly so. But the art of negativity is a kind of art that intrinsically wants to end. It must ultimately have the will to negate itself and make itself superfluous; for everything that is only a response to pain and transgression is encapsulated by the very apt Mephistophelian dictum that it would be better if nothing had been created. If we inquire about the future of art from this perspective, we are also asking about the future of painful things in society. The answer comes from the social relations of suffering and conflict themselves. I can imagine that the future of social life as a whole will be increasingly dependent on the development of therapeutic and compensatory enclaves and islands of living warmth – structures that modern jargon describes as alternative lifestyles. The further the crisis of the industrial society of work and armaments advances, the more clearly we can see the profound depth of the alliance between the modern tendencies of aesthetic and therapeutic practice. (Let me remind you of Odo Marquard’s famous essay that illuminated this constellation of art and healing arts in terms of the history of philosophy.6 In fact, I could often cite Marquard’s theses in this lecture and generally agree with them.) It is not exaggerating to say that this alliance of art, medicine and the art of living determines one kind of future of Western societies. After all, today we are witnessing a process by which wage labour is rapidly dismantling social synthesis, with the result that the old clamps that held together a large-scale society regulated by the work ethic are losing their hold in increasingly dramatic ways. In the face of such tendencies – leaving aside the defensive delaying tactics of labour unions – I believe that only the alternative productive forces of aesthetics and therapeutic methods, of neo-kynical7 arts of living and non-escapist groups with new religions, will be capable of

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­ eveloping bearable lifestyles for the new majorities that will soon d pitch their tents at the gates of the traditional world of work. It is the challenge of aesthetic-therapeutic-ecological forces and new religious forces to foster a process of cultural life outside the establishment, and if this fails one doesn’t have to be a prophet to foresee an era of post-historical brutality and barbarization. Subcultures that still have some idea about the essential relation between beauties and freedoms also have to question whether future society will move towards an anaesthetized and wired police state that has to achieve social synthesis using the most modern means of violence to control a nation of isolated asocial people, or whether it will succeed in proving how desirable and achievable a polycentric, aesthetically wakeful society can be – a society that will not find any contradictions between universalism and particularism practised under the banner of the ethics of unarmed neighbourliness. Hopefully I will not irritate you if I move on from this outline of the second digression from the topic to the announcement of an internal digression that at least has the virtue of referring to the title of the present essay. ‘Good-for-Nothing returns home’ – what can that mean in this context? To begin with, the figure of the goodfor-nothing is ideal for illustrating the two sides of the ambivalent theory of art I have just outlined. At first glance, Good-for-Nothing, the jobless offspring of German Romanticism, seems like the compensatory figure for bourgeois dissatisfaction as such. He was the comic vagabond person of the late pre-industrial age, a fantastical globetrotter whom benign fate sent for a rest cure in the south. For the bourgeois soul in the age of the first factories and industrial class struggle, his adventures were like a relaxing dreamlike voyage in beautiful foreign parts to repair the damage caused by indigenous banality and to recover from bourgeois frost in the balmy nights of an Italian summer when the post-horns sound in the distance, the scent of lilacs wafts on the breeze, girls burst out in sudden laughter full of promise, and skirts rustle in the gardens. Good-for-Nothing is called by that name because he emerged from the relations of production like a sleepwalker; because he does not perform wage labour or create surplus value. He is happy because still he has no idea that those who stayed at home, deeply discontented, would end up someday claiming even his talent for dreaming as a force of social production. Good-for-Nothing, the evasive genius, represents the modern escapism of art in its most successful version. It is the perfect compensatory model for the inmates of institutions with mostly sedentary jobs. At the same time, as we know, this is not the whole story. If Good-for-Nothing still bewitches us today, it is not just because



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he represents a construct of sublime poetry, however much Eichendorff’s art of storytelling may move us,8 but rather because everybody who encounters the poetic Good-for-Nothing has to remember that he or she has already seen this figure in reality somewhere at the margins of society, passing by almost invisibly, usually with harsher contours and much darker shadows than in vagabond poetry. And yet, ever since middle-class society has existed, the domesticated imagination has wrestled with dubious marginal figures who are suspected of having escaped from the network of social pressures to live a life entirely based on whim and wilfulness, on quick wits, wanderlust and mobility – people who know the extremities of human existence and are not affected by the dullness of bourgeois society’s middle layers. At every point where the civilizatory process became more firmly established, Good-for-Nothing appeared, or, rather, disappeared, in new modernized metamorphoses, and it is no exaggeration to say that we can identify the emergence of new stages of socialization when a certain type of person goes underground – the type who is later invested with the Good-for-Nothing fantasies of those left behind. A figure that is a mixture of refusenik and fortune’s pet, Good-for-Nothing became a symbol of the most charming possibilities of existence in a very flawed form of modernity. If I say now that Good-for-Nothing returns home, there is something surprising about this statement – surprising in a way that arouses deep suspicion. For it cannot imply that the world has reached its moral peak in recent years so that the last aestheticizing troublemaker is able to return to a generally mild state of reality where people can speak without lying and participate without cynicism. ‘Good-for-Nothing returns home’ can only mean that something extremely uncanny and strange is disrupting the world’s structure with unforeseen dislocations; that the old lines of demarcation between the pressure of the daily routine and the dream of liberation are beginning to dissolve; that an unknown form of communication has begun between outside and inside. When Goodfor-Nothing returns home ... , well, what then? Do we have to leaf through the prophecies of Nostradamus to know that at the time of the return of an artistic gypsy with unusual blue eyes a difficult world is lurching along at the edge of the abyss? Oh dear, these are bad times for prophets when environmental reports and strategic studies predict more disaster than the blackest book of oracles. When Good-for-Nothing returns home; when the romantic man of absence suddenly seems to have been brought to reason; when the boundaries are blurred between dream time and p ­ roductive time;

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when former dreamers become realists and realists discuss variations of the apocalypse, then it is time to accept that this is a sign not of an arbitrary and transient episode in the modern cultural whirl but that an unconceived event is brewing and trying to surface as a concept. Allow me to indulge in an additional digression in telling you that I am about to launch into an internal digression within the announcement of the second digression from the topic. I want to use a different argument now for the high symptomatic status I am giving to the return of Good-for-Nothing: I shall use the philosophy of history like a lantern to light up the position of Good-for-Nothing in modern times. In the past two hundred years, the figure of Goodfor-Nothing has been indispensable for making the life of the bourgeois hero bearable. This can partly be explained by the fact that he acted as a fantasy figure to relieve the stressful everyday life of progress. Indeed, he was better than most other figures in providing alibis for people who were tired of society because he personally incarnated the alibi of the modern age. I shall explain this in more detail by reading out the profile of this bourgeois deserter. Good-for-Nothing was definitely a deserter – a deserter from the unreasonable demands of the bourgeois-social revolution, a useless runaway from the Jacobin hypermoralism of absolute subjectivity and from the principled outrage against everything that simply exists without us having improved it. Good-for-Nothing, the eternal deserter, was chronically indisposed when it came to working on the Creation that needed correction and eliminating the printing errors of an old-fashioned God. Since time immemorial he was overcome with nostalgic nausea at the prospect of having to work on the industrial overhauling of the world. He was the left-handed rascal of art, drunk on life, who never got up before noon; the first integral tourist, the German cousin of the bastardo nobile who is still up to his tricks today, glittering in southern kynicism; the absolute escapist, blown away like the status quo’s last sigh. His goal is the blue flower of the Romantics; his time: blue Monday, washing day; his space: wherever there is more blue sky than clouds; his strange habit: the complex about the south; his passion: crossing borders; his borders: the constant pull between wanderlust and homesickness; his favourite idea: both for and against; his motto: hen kai panta, which means, philologically, one-and-all. But there must have been more to it. Good-for-Nothing spent the industrial age in an exotic backwater. He took the liberty of staying far away from the modernization massacres of two centuries. In emergencies he obtained sick leave from the bloody and imposing workplace of history. In short, he was the bourgeois son with the most solid alibi; he was the person who could



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not have been the culprit because he was never at the scene of the crime but always in lovely spots where the only crimes committed were acts of omission. When the survivors in the years of the French terreur saw the dark side of modernism emerge for the first time and demonstrate how political murder can become systematized, Good-for-Nothing was already in the deep south and sighing on the track of his dark Annadiva. When the survivors were fighting each other in two world wars, Good-for-Nothing was roaming through Ticino, wild and lonesome, or walking beside Alexis Zorba across the Cretan hills, or sitting on the sacred mountain Arunachala at the foot of the enlightened Bhagwan Shri Ramana Maharshi, immersed in the experience of ahamspûrti, the vision of the true self. While clouds of terrible smoke billowed in the sky above Auschwitz and showed those who were still there something unimaginable that they had witnessed all the same, Good-for-Nothing was living in retreat in a Japanese monastery or writing a novel in Californian exile about the musical and moral depths of the German soul. Good-for-Nothing is plainly one of the few people who was not guilty and did not fall under suspicion because he never seemed to have the slightest connection with the catastrophe in his home country. It is odd, however, that his alibis were usually accepted by all sides without envy and nobody dreamed of seriously challenging them. For everyone is dimly aware that this refugee is absolutely indispensable – indispensable because one can borrow something from him that money cannot buy otherwise. I mean the feeling of being not guilty, despite everything, in the same way as the person who is present; the feeling of being allowed to carry on, despite everything, in a manner basically not permitted, not even once, to people who were there at the time. It is a borrowed feeling, since nowadays even innocence seems to be available for loan, and one will have to give it back someday, as each of us knows deep down. All the same, we could not continue living without the moral loan from the imaginary deserter; we would actually be swamped by our complicity. The distinction of Good-for-Nothing’s absence has illuminated the dubious relationships that those left behind never escape from and has reminded us of the possibility of another kind of innocence. The only authority that can promise the people of the age of world wars this innocence is a futurology based on aesthetics and morality. The perfect absence of what the collective dream took along to its faraway place created a vacuum in which all the restless dreams of alternatives and changing could develop under modern auspices. Good-for-Nothing’s metaphysical mission was to symbolize the

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great Other of modernity that inspires all kinds of change. We inevitably conceive the Other as ontologically absent and in the future tense. Expressing this touches on the logical nucleus of the madness that is emerging more clearly day by day as the cell of the prevailing reality principle. It is just as controversial as the European structure of alienation generally because the futurist projection of the better Other describes how selfhood and otherness are linked up to ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’ to become the logical pattern of permanent alienation and transgression against the self in our times. Nobody can claim, of course, that it is easy to leap out of this logic of postponed otherness. The whole lightness of being of a Good-for-Nothing involves staying at the level of merely imagining his or her life and ideas being transformed into radical categories of here-and-now. This lightness is held in check by the gravity of circumstances and by the serious principle that cloaks the madness at the core of reality with an aura of reason and goodwill. Because improvement does not recognize the present, people who live in the mania of transformation have lost any criteria for knowing what it means to have done enough. We have forgotten that the purpose of all action is not to have to do anything more. But what do today’s agents of the world of labour and armaments base their ideas on, if not the otherness and superiority of future securities and enjoyment? Isn’t every agent of the system and every system of action hopelessly indebted now to the hope of something better? What exists today is legitimated not by existence but by its prospects, not by privileges but by promises to do better, and not by abundance but by increase. Everywhere that the industrial time machine has been installed in modern consciousness, life becomes distorted into rushing forward into a different entity that always forces itself on us as more of the self we are missing and an intensification of what things were like yesterday. Wherever the industry of the age of improvement has begun to dominate, life has turned into hectic borrowing on the future so that today’s lack of verve and frivolity with its peaks and troughs is overwritten with cumbersome, dead certain dreams of improvement. Perhaps this underlines how shocking that little phrase is: ‘Goodfor-Nothing returns home’. After all his escapades he has had second thoughts. He has realized that he has served out his time as an alibi creator, a lender of innocence and a total imaginary escapist. Goodfor-Nothing, whose profession was to cross the boundaries into the other world and explore beautiful faraway places, has set out on his last journey. By now he knows that banality cannot be shaken off and that ‘background’ means a ‘future’ that cannot be dismissed merely by acting out one’s desire for otherness. The projections in



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space and time have collapsed and experience has ground down the illusions of tourism and futurism. The principle of hope has turned out to be a useless stopgap. In the meantime Good-for-Nothing was everywhere, just not here. Now, however, he is here and everything becomes mildly chaotic. Old inhabitants rush towards the newcomer: ‘For God’s sake, didn’t you have a good time in those faraway places? After all, everything was different there and it was the difference that interested you. And now you are back here we beg you to tell us what you want to do differently here.’ I assure you, questions like these will largely dominate the social debates of the future and the ensuing arguments will be all the more provocative, not only because Good-for-Nothing has no idea how to answer, but also because the people who stayed behind are not aware yet that they have risked their necks with this question. After a long absence Good-for-Nothing is still not very talkative and certainly not at his rhetorical best. He talks hurriedly about unilateral disarmament and filters in factory chimneys. Now and then he even uses the word ‘totality’, which is terribly embarrassing. He gives the impression of not telling everything yet, whether or not he is willing or able to. But even if he has difficulty with the rhetoric, he is obviously on the ball with a naïve kind of panache. As if accidentally, Good-for-Nothing jumps the five per cent barrier9 and can paraphrase Lord Byron’s remark that ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’ by saying ‘I awoke one morning and found myself ready for a coalition.’ The future will show whether this kind of homecoming was an end to aesthetics in every respect. From today’s perspective, however, Good-for-Nothing seems incredibly busy, which is probably not very lucrative in terms of the superior art business but does offer the beauty of energetic naïvety. He opens vegetarian restaurants, boutiques, hotels, studios and travel agencies; he sets up countryside communes, health food shops, research institutes, discothèques, meditation centres, therapy practices and other repair businesses; he disrupts church conventions and parliaments and concentrates on everything he does as if he had enough energy to breathe some pleasure in existence into a world that has become tired of life. Good-for-Nothing has not realized yet that his return means something more and bigger than cocky children of the bourgeoisie coming to their senses. He is only dimly aware that if he just sits down among us like that in his harmless manner he is endangering a kind of metaphysics; he is corrupting Western logic and ethics; he is plunging the world calendar into even more date crises and threatening the history timetables of already nervous imperialist systems.

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Can’t he see what he is doing when he moves the outermost extreme into the interior, when he filters the utopian foreign future into an indigenous present and, utterly seriously, retrieves otherness from its temporal exile in the chronological tomorrow and brings it back into the here and now? Everybody has secretly wished that this annoying returnee would go to the devil at some time or another. There is, however, nowhere left for the devil to dispatch him, for the separation that logicians and Doctors of the Church negotiated between heaven and hell has been abolished. It is possible to prevent shocking mixtures of red, green and black, but whatever is mixed together, a little bit of blue will float over the whole thing, the blue of a sky that is often cloudy but is the sky of home. Well, here is Good-for-Nothing sitting among us and grinning with this slightly idiotic, over-friendly grin and smiling this dubious smile devoid of strategy and tactics. This dear human being who has been cast adrift, with whom nobody can be angry – if only he hadn’t returned the mission for the future to its sender and made us feel like strangers in our own homes. Suddenly we feel condemned to actuality; it feels like a reformed prison. The alibi of improvement has collapsed, the objections to change have been resolved: we are facing the decisive moment like convicted loan swindlers and are not prepared for most of its reclamations. By now I think it must be clear why I did not want to discuss the future of art in the first digression but the future of the future instead, and before I come to that I want to indicate briefly what I shall say in the third digression from the subject of art. It will be confined to a short reflection that uses a radical turn in thinking to revitalize the risk that was once called philosophy. In this third digression I use meditational philosophy to attempt to interpret the essence of an existentially significant experience of art – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I am assuming, incidentally, that it is already absolutely indispensable now to have a kind of art whose future form I can describe – but indispensable in a way that is not affected by Hegel’s thesis about the end of art. Conversely, I assume that a kind of art which can prove its indispensability will provide for itself in its own time and defy any kind of expectation. In fact, it will clearly show that essential experience of art can only be gained by rejecting conscious expectations. Finally, it remains to be asked why aesthetic experience through art is sometimes indispensable. The answer is so elementary and the aspiration of this elementary quality is so radical that neither the answer nor the aspiration can be formulated philosophically, because philosophical thought is not elementary enough or radical enough for this answer. It can only be formulated with the addi-



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tional qualification that the formulation will destroy and distort its object. There is no alternative, and the mistake that will become clear here is a mistake it is impossible to avoid making. The reason lies in the nature of the thing itself because being mentally awake inherently means being able to withdraw from the idea as it is being formulated – with the result that, at most, all that remains of the mental awareness in the formulation is a remnant like a shed skin which indicates that we would have found quick thinking here yesterday if we had happened to be here but now we have to be content with its traces, with the present signs of an absent person. Having said that, we are in a position to answer the question of indispensable things in the arts. Art can prove its indispensability (even, and especially, after Hegel) if and because, in the midst of the modern culture of reason and will, it embodies the most important and best-legitimated approach to the dimension of mental alertness. From the arts it is a short stretch to what philosophical jargon calls ‘decentred consciousness’, meaning the form of consciousness in which the self surrenders the strategic centre of being-in-the-world in favour of a state of belonging without a central focus. It is the state of being of meditation – if we can quickly agree not to use the name of meditation for the state in which some people sit half-asleep in a holy stupor with their legs crossed, only to lose the last link with reality. Instead, the concept of meditation should stand for those forms of practice that can help to dissolve the illusion of the psychic central perspective and the focus on a strategic self. In my opinion, the arts have represented the most important complex of quasi-meditative exercise systems in the modern tradition. They have created, as it were, a school of Western sensual and intellectual yoga, a way of symbolic exertion. It seems to me that in alternating between aesthetics of regulation and freedom of expression and between skilled discipline and relaxed play, they evolved the most effective kind of Western Tantrism, if we may call it that – a non-dualist amoral discipline with the intensity of things that occur without a subject, and this intensity gives it the seal of truth. The modern arts that can be interpreted through Tantrism offer many individuals the experience of a sensual, physical, nonconceptual school of consciousness of being. We should not forget, however, that this para-meditative quality of modern arts has been generally suppressed today because the artist has become more important than his or her medium. The majority of artists see the disciplines of art as an excuse for lack of discipline – in other words, for an opportunity to spit into the spittoon of the public arena. They easily forget that art, by its nature, is an anonymous master whose truth unfolds only by e­ xternalization.

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However, people who unconditionally surrender to art, the master that begins with seduction but later becomes unyielding, can discover in the moment of success that they are in the grip of a gentle, yet revolutionary experience. They can discover that beyond knowing and wanting they have always been part of a consciousness that is non-protruding and non-objectifying. Anyone who learns this as an artist is superior to any philosopher, just as a mentally alert person can win the argument against a blabbermouth. In the living process as it happens a kind of eventful calmness may emerge that overrides the highly developed consciousness of the skills of strategic, technical and artistic subjectivity. This is, in fact, the salient point of meditation: in the pure process of meditation there is a dissolution of the distancing mechanism whereby the self as self is ‘positioned’ in relation to objects. The voracious transitivity of productive action and imaginative thinking is arrested and transformed into the intransitivity of the unimaginable event. Anyone who knows this also knows the magical flare of the present. And he or she knows the dimension of life that can never lose its spell, even under the pressure of the theoretical and practical banality of modern objectification. The fusion of otherwise ruptured subjectivity into the accomplishment of the work of art is part of the metaphysical hallmark of the modern arts. Its power is based on captivating the divided and divisive self through the experience of an undivided, intense presence. It is clear, then, why the arts are indispensable, on the one hand, and very confusing, on the other. We have already talked about their indispensability. Their confusing danger is due to the fact that art often does not know what it is. Artists are very happy to forget that only a hair’s breadth divides the path of symbolic exertion from the narcissistic career. The arts have become a wonderful excuse for confusing the way with the goal. The arts have long since become goals in themselves and have strayed onto the path of stupidity: the path of top achievement, of commitment, of the imposing artist – and of helpless good intentions. Art is magnificent, artists are skilled at doing what they are skilled at, and the arrow always hits the mark. But the important thing is to know that if you hit the mark you miss everything else. Ladies and gentlemen, so far I have explained how my text is structured. As there is not much time left, I should speed up to get to what I have announced. But I am sure that you have already seen through this ploy long ago. If everything is done the right way and if announcements have to be followed by what is announced, then I should now be obliged first to speak about the future of the future, then about the so-called social dynamics of the field of aes-



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thetic therapy in modern society, and finally about the fundamental principles of art in relation to meditational philosophy. The only question for now is whether everything is being done properly. You have probably already guessed the answer. Nothing will come of all this – we probably went too fast today. Normally this threepart announcement would have to roll towards you frontally, so to speak, and I could guarantee you that the whole of the next hour would seem quite familiar to you. I will put it differently: if a future plan really contained the future, if the grammatical future were the ontological mortar for establishing future events and speeches, or if a loan were really paid back in the same currency in which it was made, we would all be in a miserable situation; our life would almost belong to the bankers; the prophets of apocalypse would be necessarily right; then the peace that was loaned with weapons would be paid back with war; and in the end I would have to read out word for word everything that I have just presented in the compact style of an announcement. And you would recognize it as precisely that and would think, ‘We’ve heard it all before, and for God’s sake don’t repeat it; please give us something new, something worth the effort of being here and paying attention.’ I do not mean the attention from earlier for the phrases from earlier, because those phrases are already at the place where the dead are to be found, the place where realists through the ages have sat on the ideological sidelines and reckoned with the eternal return of the same thing because they know that when we are mentally absent, repetitions define reality. No, I mean the latest attention, the wildest and most incredible attention we have; I mean the almost malevolent wakefulness where nothing has to be said twice. Well, I can see that you have seen through my ploy. You have heard that I have said everything I announced through to the very end as far as possible, here on the spot. This is a very simple tactic: it involves shooting the arrow of expectation into the future in such a way that it can always fall back onto the soil of the moment. It is a matter of looking ahead openly and steadily without repeating oneself. I admit it was a rather cheap ruse. But I didn’t find a better one for expressing what is involved in the future of art or in the future of the future as such. When I immediately do and say and not do and not say what is really to be done, to be said, to not be done and not be said, then there will never be anything left to do, to say, to not do or not say. Every challenge will meet people who are there to accept it. But that is rarely the case when absence of mind holds sway. We always arrive too late. We always arrive just in time to see that we have arrived too late. For if I immediately do and not do, and say

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and not say, what should happen and should not happen, I will later have to scrape yesterday’s burnt intentions off the bottom of today’s pot. I will be preoccupied by the fact that I have postponed yesterday until today. I will be shackled by incomplete negativity. Failures and reminders will pile up on the desk of life. Missed chances will crowd at the entrance to the present like relentless creditors. We will only leave the house armed with good excuses. Life becomes a very complicated and frustrating business of fulfilling plans and catching up, a miserable game of postponement and avoidance, a refinancing and repayment action of the kind required from people who live in the blessed times when announcing, postponing and borrowing money are still supposed to help. Incidentally, what is called world history is only this kind of refinancing action on a large scale arranged between the generations; it is what results when too many people postpone too many things for too long – in the absurd hope that they will get away with it this time. But if people live in a state of postponement, the unfinished past that defines them will inexorably catch up with them. In this respect Heidegger’s maxim that our past is mostly what lies ahead of us is very apt. I am sure, of course, that it is unfair, not to say disrespectful, to use word games to turn an occasion for calmly creating theory such as an academic lecture into a mindfulness exercise in meditational philosophy. How can that be justified? My reference is what I attempted in The Critique of Cynical Reason10 as the beginning of a philosophical anti-philosophy. In that book I showed the need for a kind of mental wakefulness that evolves beyond automatic moralizing ideas and the normed discourse that are presented as theory, and beyond the routine reflex activities that are popular as ‘practice’ among people of sound common sense. The Critique of Cynical Reason, however flawed, was an attempt to bring philosophy a step forward towards a school of mental wakefulness. We have to go beyond the outworn duality of theory and practice, of imagination and production, of concept and execution. An expansion of intelligence into new dimensions is already present in the current process of theory and practice. Much depends on whether we succeed in responding to these new constellations of theoretical and practical intelligence. To overcome hopeless pragmatism and even more hopeless Young Hegelianism, today’s philosophy is taking off into the dimension of mental alertness, which has to expand, in a way, as a third dimension above theory and practice. Borrowing from the great tradition of Eastern and Western schools of mindfulness, I call this third dimension of an intelligent way of being-in-the-world ‘meditation’ or dhyana. The current talk about the end of philosophy can assume a new, positive meaning if we



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realize that what is smarter in the relation to theory cannot be a different kind of theoretical philosophy, just as what is smarter in relation to practice cannot be a different practice, even if it is the practice of the theory. Rather, theory and practice must submerge together and be transformed into the medium of a kind of meditative atmosphere that includes mental alertness. Philosophy after the end of philosophy will be meditational practice and meditational theory. At the higher levels of complexity of a scientific, political and aesthetic intelligence communicated by mental wakefulness we are dealing with a new combination of dimensions of intelligence: in other words, with meditation on theoretical practice, theory of practical meditation, practice of meditational theory, and so forth. A combination like this offers the contours of higher-level forms of intelligence, and the earlier a culture of meditation becomes more widely accepted on the modern level, the better it will be for a world threatened with destruction by the proliferation of clever idiocy and narrow-minded intelligence. Many avant-garde groups experimenting with new forms and connections in science, technology, art and meditation are already developing a new process to create more subtle communications and more useful divisions between ideas, actions and events. I would argue that this is where the real art of the coming arts is emerging. I am certain that it is the beginning of a new ecology of spirit, and the present announcement is not made as an empty prognosis or the credits list of Never, Never and Co. It is made in the form of the growth of real intelligence. This can be witnessed by anybody who decides to be a person of our times and to make his or her home in the sphere of mental wakefulness. I will end by being a trifle indiscreet and revealing a secret to you that Albert Einstein told me recently across the ether. Einstein appeared to me in a dream about a week ago. He was very friendly and open and actually refrained from sticking out his tongue. He seemed to be in a very good mood, like somebody who is mischievously happy about a new discovery. He told me that he had recalculated his much misunderstood energy equation with his colleague God, or, rather, with God’s third person, and he almost went mad when after slightly changing the factors he suddenly found the universal formula – in fact, much more than that, he became the universal formula himself. Well, I do not have the slightest idea about modern physics, but my sceptical hackles rose at such an arrogant hypothesis. So I told Einstein that I couldn’t imagine it, however hard I tried. When he offered to tell me the formula, I had to admit truthfully that it would be a waste of effort because I am such an absolute ignoramus about physics.

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But Einstein showed such childish enthusiasm for his new formula and was so obviously enjoying the interdisciplinary inspiration that in the end I felt obliged to say politely that I thought his discovery was very interesting. He then went over to a blackboard to write out the formula and was poised to do so when he started becoming very transparent and watery. I was worried he would disappear at any moment without his formula. But he pulled himself together and as he wrote himself on the blackboard I discovered that I couldn’t hear or see because, if I remember rightly, he wrote: ‘Universe (U) equals Intelligence (I) minus Anti-intelligence (AT), with the condition: I equals Meditation divided by the resistance factor of imagination in time; AT equals resistance material multiplied by the square of the average of chair glue.’ After Einstein had nearly filled the whole blackboard he mentioned that his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker11 was already on the right track to the universal formula, but that for the sake of the world he should really put the persistency coefficient in a different place. Then Einstein and the blackboard blew up together and all that was left of the whole show was a sort of ticklish feeling in the atmosphere that I immediately identified, despite my deficient knowledge of physics, as cosmic background giggling.12 To conclude: the present will show which past the future will bring. If the past is the space in which the Persian wars, the Crusades and the First, Second and Third World Wars all happen at the same time, the future is the space in which we shall see whether Einstein’s dreams are made of froth. Today, as a follow-up to philosophy, a form of consciousness conducive to new kinds of relationship between mind and event is emerging, helped by a mentally awake way of thinking – a consciousness beyond the outworn old European duality of theory and practice. If the main event of history is human intelligence itself, the emergence of a superior intelligence will become the condition for history to go on, which it will do only if human beings survive the self-imposed risk of a dull, numbed intelligence tied to the egoism of strategic self-preservation. In this higher process of emergence, doctrines evolve that could be called non-Euclidean studies in cleverness in subjects such as acting with restraint, intervening out of meditation, guiding processes by letting things happen, trusting intelligent impulses, and revolutionary calm. In the process, new exchange regulations for seriousness and lack of seriousness will develop after good old irony proves inadequate for communication with a world that thinks the apex of cleverness is to have destroyed itself by being wonderfully astute in a future past. Enlightenment today, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but using the perspective of meditational philosophy to overcome the Exact



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Future. Enlightenment today takes the form of something produced by a meditative cybernetics to promote a present with a future and an art of being mentally present and aware. And however much we have tried to escape into mental absence, we have already taken at least one step into this state of mental awareness.

AFTERWORD Sloterdijk and the Question of Aesthetics Peter Weibel

Introductory Remarks To understand Peter Sloterdijk’s writings on aesthetics and why they are unique it is necessary to give at least an outline of the ‘setting’, the historical background to the problems discussed. As we know, art today is a ‘discourse’, a conceptual field in which different kinds of pictures, objects, processes, activities, theories, ideas and institutions all play a role. The instability, contradictions and conflicts that characterize this field’s dynamic make some of its observers and commentators uneasy. Some learn from the example of New Jersey (such as the land artist Robert Smithson), and some from Las Vegas (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown). Some extol autonomous formalism and the sublime (Clement Greenberg), others the transfiguration of ordinary things.1 In his writings on the aesthetic experience J.M. Bernstein urged us to consider the epistemological, ethical and political dimension.2 Aesthetic modernity, he argued, is the adequate and political response to capitalist modernity, which is characterized by rationalization, reification and disenchantment. True aesthetic modernism should defend radical attitudes against universal and instrumental ambitions. Using a mixture of Marx, Lukács, Kant and Adorno, Bernstein enshrined aesthetics in ethics and politics. In the past twenty years British and American historians and theoreticians of art, under pressure from the global media industry, have recognized the need to extend analysis of visual culture from the specific objects of art to all forms of image in our culture, to the mass media of film, television, animation, and so forth. The field has widened under the heading of ‘visual culture’. W.J.T. Mitchell3



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has emphasized that the visual field is socially constructed, and analogously the social field is visually constructed. In relation to this ‘pictorial turn’, as Mitchell called it, Stanley Cavell and Noel Carroll had already written early on about the mass medium of film as an obvious fact.4 James Elkins, in his books The Domain of Images (1999) and Visual Studies (2003),5 expanded the theory to include images from natural sciences. Adorno’s sceptical work Aesthetic Theory (1970)6 saw art as still having control of the possibility of truth content but only in a purely utopian function. To do this, art has to reflect society and is thus not completely autonomous. On the other hand, it has to be autonomous to assume a critical function. In terms of a ‘culture industry’ in which mass culture means tricking the masses, the truth of art can consist of enlightening social illusions: in other words, to ‘un-deceive’ (Bazon Brock)7 and remind people of what society can and should be. Niklas Luhmann described art as a subsystem of the social system that observes itself and is organized according to its own rules. Luhmann was close to Adorno’s concept of autonomy. However, as the rules of art (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase8) are a discursive system and therefore open to change, the art system, the ‘operating system’ of art, is independent of the social context, the institutional situation and the state of discourse. Peter Weibel and George Dickie stressed the independence of art from institutions and its definition and mission, and Arthur C. Danto took up this theme later. Sloterdijk’s writings on aesthetics appear in this field of discourse. His studies touch on all the classical and modern branches of the arts, from music to architecture, from the art of enlightenment to the art of movement, from design to typography. He roams across all the fields of the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible. The historical scope of his observations stretches from Antiquity to Hollywood. In other words, he approaches the practice of ‘visual culture’ at the same time as showing affinities with the institutional theory of art. He reflects on the conditions of presentday art production, from sponsorship to the museum system, from media development to the metamorphoses of aesthetic subjectivity. Likewise, he looks at the classical problems of the philosophy of art, especially its relationship to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, society, politics and the subject, from Aristotle to Adorno and from Kant to Kierkegaard. This raises familiar questions about the status and autonomy of art, its truth content and its social role. The key in all this is Sloterdijk’s inimitable and startling approach, which allows him to stray from the well-trodden paths of art

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c­ ommentary. Seen through the prism of his thought, art becomes a heterodox form of knowledge. His elaborate use of language and the artistic skill of his changing positions and perspectives reveal unexpected, convincing insights and perceptions. Sloterdijk extends his unique method of ‘discourse estrangement’ [Diskursverfremdung] to the observation of works and genres of art, and, in doing so, makes the newly defined objects look completely different. The boundaries between philosophy and literature, argumentation and narration become fluid, and the art objects themselves seem to be set in motion. Under Sloterdijk’s scrutiny, familiar aesthetic phenomena become sources of surprise. By giving them a new context he gives them another existence. The subjects of his theoretical prose appear to the reader like unknown entities; at the same time they are shown with a kind of detail and familiarity that can only come from a new way of seeing. Sloterdijk’s major contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics is that his works provide an important element for solving the problem of modernity.

Modernity between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment For the past two hundred years the fate of modern art has evolved or expanded between two poles. The two poles are called disenchantment and re-enchantment. Aesthetic agendas of disenchantment and re-enchantment ran through the twentieth century in parallel or successively, together and in opposition to each other, in sequence or as alternatives, unipolar and bipolar. After Hegel, who saw the world as devastated early on, in the period around 1800, Max Weber described the effects of industrialization, the Enlightenment and the sciences in the nineteenth century as ‘the disenchantment of the world’. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution mark the beginning of the epoch of disenchantment, and it would be fine if we could call it ‘the epoch of modernity’. This is unfortunately impossible because a counter-movement began very early on, a movement that combated the Enlightenment and the end of the absolute in politics and religion, science and its impact and industrialization. This movement aspired to restore the Church and the monarchy to their positions of hegemony. ‘The German romanticists [. . .] were the first heralds in the combat against the philosophy of the Enlightenment,’ Ernst Cassirer wrote in The Myth of the State (1946).9 The Romantic era and its commandment, expressed by Novalis, ‘The world must be romanticized,’10 ushered in the agenda of reenchantment of the world and the arts. The problem is to show that



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modernity is a combination of the two programmes, that the two are interwoven. The French Revolution (1789–1804) signalled the end of absolutism and the beginning of the machine-based Industrial Revolution. It set the tone and defined the conflict between the aesthetic, philosophical and political parties and programmes of modernity and anti-modernity. The Revolution was followed by the Restoration. At the Vienna Congress in 1814–15 the five great powers, Russia, Austria, Prussia, France and Great Britain, formed a ‘holy alliance’. This pledged the crowned heads to adopt the Christian religion as the supreme principle for their political acts in order to preserve the divinely ordained feudal structures and to prevent the reforms of the Enlightenment. Between 1816 and 1829 the universities were under surveillance, censorship was in force and there were restrictions on freedom and teaching, professional bans, special courts, and so forth.11 The years from 1830 to 1848 were once again years of revolution: the first models of parliamentary systems or constitutional monarchies developed with equal rights for all citizens and freedom of opinion and the press. In 1848 The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels was published. It described the situation of progressive global industrialization as dramatically as if it were talking about globalization nowadays: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle in everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the worldmarket given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose

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products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.12 Behind this dialectic of revolution and restoration, of reason and faith, industrialization and idyll which is discussed in Klaus Lankheit’s book Revolution und Restauration (1965),13 we can see the movement that reacted to the horror scenarios of the time (barbaric wars, slums in the cities, pauperism in the countryside) with an agenda of aesthetic re-enchantment that Heinrich Heine called ‘The Romantic School’ in 1833. Heine was an opponent of the Romantic movement. ‘But what was the Romantic School in Germany?’ he asked, and replied: ‘It was nothing other than the revival of the poetry of the Middle Ages as manifested in the songs, sculpture and architecture, in the art and life of that time. This poetry, however, had had its origin in Christianity; it was a passion flower arising from the blood of Christ.’14 Heine was already operating with the dual contrast of spiritualism and sensuality that was so typical of the contradictions of modernity. He saw sensuality as the school of thought he personally stood for, which defended ‘the natural rights of matter’ and invoked the Hellenes embodied in Goethe as an honorary Greek. Heine, the poet of the Enlightenment who fought for the end of every form of political and religious absolutism, accused the Romantics of ‘absolute spiritualism’ and argued that their religiousness led to support for despotism. Referring to the Roman Catholic Church, he argued that the Christian religion, ‘whose unnatural mission actually introduced sin and hypocrisy into the world’, became ‘the most reliable form of despotism’. People have now recognized the nature of this religion, they will no longer let themselves be fooled by promissory notes on Heaven. [. . .] Just because we now comprehend so completely all the consequences of that absolute spiritualism we can also believe that the Catholic Christian philosophy of life is doomed.15 Quite the opposite happened, in fact – the myth returned. F.W.J. Schelling, the leading philosophical writer of the Romantic era, outlined a Philosophy of Mythology that assigned culture the role of



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mainspring. Schelling’s opinions about art were very important for the art of the German Romantic movement. According to him, the mission of art was to take the highest place among spiritual productions. The task of philosophy, he argued, was to understand the ‘Absolute’ in ‘intellectual contemplation’16 or ‘brilliant intuition’. Schelling distinguished between the artificial product and the organic natural product. This allowed him, in his oration ‘On the Relationship of the Formative Arts to Nature’ (1807), to liberate art from the imitation of nature and to proclaim the work of art as a ‘Natura naturans’ that acted of its own accord.17 This, according to Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of ‘universal poetry’, fostered the ‘sanctity and purity of art’, which implied that ‘caprice is the only law governing the poet’.18 This legacy of the Romantic period was the beginning of the autonomy of art, the ‘sacred’ axiom of modernity. Schelling’s rejection of the imitation of nature inaugurated a turn towards the aesthetics and culture of reception and paved modernity’s way towards artistic acquisition processes and the emancipation of the viewer. In Schelling’s view, the author of the work of art became less important than the work itself and its reception. ‘So is it with every true work of art in that every one of them is capable of being expounded ad infinitum as if it contained an infinity of purposes while yet one is never able to say if this infinity has lain within the artist himself or within the work of art.’19 In other words, ‘infinite exposition’ ushered in the infinity of interpretation and a culture of the recipient that we find in the twentieth century in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Schelling, together with Hegel and Hölderlin, had also considered the reconciliation of aesthetics and philosophy, pleasure and reason, beauty and truth, aesthetics and ethics. ‘I am convinced now that the highest act of reason, which embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are brothers only in beauty.’20 He did not allow the reverse conclusion, that beauty only exists as truth and goodness and that aesthetics is only the brother of politics, ethics and science. This manifesto shows Schelling and the Romantic movement at the point where the paths divided, at a watershed. Schelling and Hegel went off in different directions. Schelling turned away from reason and knowledge and reverted to faith and mythology. In a lecture series given in 1802–3, later published in the book Philosophy of Art, Schelling wrote: ‘The unity of the finite and infinite is thus an act in Christianity.’21 The basis of art, he wrote, lay in ‘this new mythology’ and was closely allied to philosophy as the conceptual representation of the absolute. In this lecture Schelling

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established the mythology of Christianity as the founding story of all forms of art. This prescribed the return to Christianity in the philosophy of art around 1800 in an almost dictatorial fashion. By trusting in Christian mythology,22 by reverting to myth and religion, the Romantic movement followed a pattern of reaction to the disenchantment of the world resulting from industrialization that we are also experiencing today: many people are seeking refuge in religion again as a reaction to the devastating effects of globalization. The Romantic reaction was radically opposed to the Enlightenment and to German Idealism, which was based on the power of rational conceptual thought. To quote the Phenomenology of Spirit, which Hegel wrote in Jena in 1806, ‘we state the true form of truth to be its scientific character’. Hegel ‘outed’ himself as an opponent of the Romantics, reproaching them: ‘The absolute [. . .] is not to be grasped in conceptual form but felt, intuited; it is not its conception but the feeling of it and the intuition of it that are to have the say and find expression.’23 Hegel was already critical of the Romantic movement’s method of visual perception, while Edmund Husserl would later refer to it in his pamphlet against rationalism, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (1936).24 Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1835–8)25 mark the beginning of the final phase of the Romantic form of art. Hegel saw Romanticism as signifying the end of art, as expressed in his famous dictum that philosophy in the shape of self-consciousness of the spirit had replaced religion and was the only thing that could advance towards absolute truth. Religion and art were secondary. Art was defined as ‘the sensual appearance of the idea’, giving it an epistemological, conceptual character. Hegel favoured the classical art of the Greeks. He saw the Romantic form of art as evidence of the dissolution of art, in line with his theory that philosophy was the only discipline in which the spirit comes into its own as the highest stage of human development and the discipline to which sensuality is subordinated. The existence of the sensual work of art could only be justified as a forum for the human spirit, not as sensuality for itself. In his essay ‘The End of the Romantic Form of Art’ Hegel wrote: Therefore the artist’s attitude to his topic is on the whole much the same as the dramatist’s who brings on the scene and delineates different characters who are strangers to him. The artist does still put his genius into them, he weaves his web out of his own resources but only out of what is purely universal or



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quite accidental there, whereas its more detailed individualization is not his. For this purpose he needs his supply of pictures, modes of configuration, earlier forms of art which, taken in themselves, are indifferent to him and only become important if they seem to him to be those most suitable for precisely this or that material. [. . .] It is therefore no help to him to adopt again, as that substance, so to say, past world-views, i.e. to propose to root himself firmly in one of these ways of looking at things, e.g. to turn Roman Catholic as in recent times many have done for art’s sake in order to give stability to their mind and to give the character of something absolute to the specifically limited character of their artistic product in itself.26 By referring to Romanticism’s use of earlier modes of configuration and forms of art, of dramatic staging of pictures that already exist, of eclectic acquisition strategies and indifference, Hegel described Romanticism – as seen from the perspective of the modern age – as a ‘postmodern’ reaction to the Enlightenment. In fact, we can discern a process of repetition in each epoch: disenchantment and re-enchantment, Enlightenment versus Romanticism, modernity versus postmodernity. When the industrial and political revolutions around 1800 ushered in the demise of political Absolutism, the concept of the Absolute migrated for survival into philosophy and art. There it has survived and has ruled up to the present day – precisely because modernity never dispensed with its romantic legacy and its challenge to the Enlightenment. The absolute and the spiritual, the religious and the sovereign, the authoritarian and the picturesque still persist in modern art. Spirituality, precisely what Heine reproached the Romantic movement for, survived continuously in the abstract art of the twentieth century. This is illustrated by the title of an imposing volume, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (1986),27 that investigates the influence of Romanticism, mysticism, esotericism and occultism on the genesis and development of abstract art. Another example is Hans Scheugl’s book Das Absolute [The Absolute] (2001),28 which outlines a panorama of modernity and also contains traces of religious romanticism. A further contribution to the history of ideas of modernity, a book that illustrates the Romantic legacy, the quest for the absolute in modern art, is John Golding’s Paths to the Absolute (2000).29 The contents list already suggests the Romantic vocabulary of the fusion of the arts

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to the level of the sublime. Here are a few examples: ‘Malevich and the Ascent into Ether’, ‘Kandinsky and the Sound of Colour’, ‘Pollock and the Search for a Symbol’, ‘Newman, Rothko, Still and the Abstract Sublime’. The ‘farewell to the absolute’30 never took place. The modern age drowned between Scylla and Charybdis, between Enlightenment and idealization, between disenchantment and re-enchantment. In other words, we can say that Romanticism created the aesthetics – in fact, it founded aesthetics as such – that helped to form the discourse of modernity despite all its contradictions and regressions (to Antiquity, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages and religion). Romanticism decisively shaped the image of modern art and the modern artist: for example, in the desire to create a new basis for art in the nation and to unite utopia, art and life. The battle cry of Fluxus, of happenings and action art in the twentieth century, ‘Let’s turn our life into a work of art’, is literally a demand of Ludwig Tieck in his book Fantasies on Art for Friends of Arts (1799).31 Every sphere of social life was to be aestheticized; they should all become art. This is the echo of Romanticism’s programme of poeticization. Everything is art and each person is an artist. What Joseph Beuys proclaimed had already been advocated earlier by Novalis: Every human being should be an artist. Everything can become beautiful art.32 Friedrich Schlegel’s major contributions to Romanticism include his concept of universal poetry: There is no realism as true as poetry. [. . .] Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its mission is not merely to reunite all the different genres of poetry and to bring them into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It seeks, and should seek [. . .] to make life and society poetic.33 This demand from the 116th Atheneum fragment (1798) brings Schlegel close to Novalis and his programme: ‘The world must be romanticized.’34 Universal poetry itself produces the fusion of the arts, the unification of the genres of poetry and philosophy (see Schelling), the Gesamtkunstwerk that the avant-garde of the twentieth century would persistently demand. It is typical of Schlegel, incidentally, that in two Atheneum fragments he expresses reservations about the outcome of the French Revolution. It is hardly surprising that he converted to the Catholic faith in 1808 and that he and Schelling became leading representatives of a form of Christian philosophy.



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The atheism of the Enlightenment, which established the society based on science and technology and on distribution of knowledge, along with industrialization and political revolutions, marked the beginning of the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Romanticism was the first backlash. It was against Enlightenment, reason, science, technology, and industry; it was the first re-enchantment programme. There have been repeated movements advocating reenchantment programmes ever since then.35 There is a long and recurrently fashionable tradition of scepticism in relation to science and technology, the mechanical arts and their results. This scepticism reappeared exactly at the historical moment when the Enlightenment (and the encyclopaedia) postulated and proclaimed the primary role of science. At that historical moment, under pressure from the dawning Industrial Revolution, rationalization began to embrace every sphere of life, arousing the discontent among some social groups that was famously analysed by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The challenge to this rationalization gave rise to a philosophical tradition that still exists today. As late as 1936, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher, was still writing about ‘the crisis of European sciences’ that began with their rationalization. He dated this crisis as far back as ‘Galileo’s mathematization of nature’, arguing that the crisis of science consisted of loss of historical experience, which was replaced by mere mathematics. ‘Through Galileo’s mathematization of nature [. . .] nature itself becomes [. . .] a mathematical manifold,’ Husserl wrote. He contrasted intuition and experience with the rationalization of the world ‘more geometrico’ – by geometrical custom – and ‘counterintuitive symbolism’. For ‘the actual process of measuring, applied to the intuited data of experience, results, to be sure, only in empirical, inexact magnitudes and their numbers’.36 According to Husserl, the crisis of science is that it is being reduced to mere knowledge of facts, because it loses its ‘importance for life’. In fact, the crisis of science is also a radical life crisis. Only turning towards history and to the sphere of life could liberate us from this crisis. Husserl, like the Romantics, adjured history as the supreme authority, as the highest source of our actions. The result of the legacy of Romanticism in the modern age is that we have never really become modern, as Bruno Latour has explained.37 The argument between Enlightenment and Absolutism, between concept and intuition, between sensuality and spirituality and between rationality and religion has obviously not ended. It is continuing under different premises and conditions. This means that the old equations and calculations are no longer valid and

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modernity, particularly because of its Romantic legacy, has to be superseded. We find suggestions of this in Sloterdijk’s writings.

Beyond Modernity The re-enchantment of the world is still attempting today to romanticize, poeticize and aestheticize life as a whole. It is calling for general aestheticizing, for a return to intuition instead of analysis, to perception instead of abstraction, to pictures instead of numbers. Walter Benjamin observed the two positions and presented them brilliantly in the conclusion of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (written in German in 1935–6): ‘This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’ Benjamin continued: But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics. [. . .] The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. [. . .] All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.38 Fascism took refuge in an aestheticization of politics, and communism in a politicization of aesthetics. This leads to the conclusion that total aestheticization includes politics and thus that Romanticism ends in fascism, whereas total politicization of aesthetics impels Hegelianism into Marxism. These, then, are the two poles between which the fate of modernity played out: the disenchantment programme and the re-enchantment programme. There has long been a yearning for an agenda that frees us from this dilemma, even if the price is the end of modernity. Sloterdijk’s philosophical aesthetics offers basic elements and methods for retreating or departing from modernity. This crucially involves creating a new context and definition for aesthetic judgement, aesthetic value and aesthetic experience, which were all classically defined in a generally binding form modelled on Kant’s categorical imperative. Imperare is the Latin word for ‘to order’ or ‘to decree’. The imperative is a type of order, a commandment, a law. Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ is a general commandment for practical action in the sphere of ethics. It says:



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‘For a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another [. . .] .’ The categorical imperative can be seen as a ‘practical law’ similar to the laws of nature: ‘So act that the maxim of your action can become a universal law.’39 The categorical imperative is a law of reason, a ‘basic law of practical reason’. The philosophy of aesthetics has assumed so far that the same rational conditions also apply to the aesthetic experience and that aesthetic knowledge obeys universal laws; that aesthetics is not just a subjective field – because only taste is a matter for argument, whereas aesthetic judgements follow universally valid and binding rules and laws. Sloterdijk’s writings show that an aesthetic imperative of this kind, that acts secretly in some ways as a precondition for all existing aesthetics, cannot possibly exist, and in doing so he turns modernity upside down. Ovid’s dictum from Daedalus and Icarus, the Eighth Book of his Metamorphoses,‘Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes’ (‘And he turned his mind to unknown arts’), can be rendered as: ‘And he turned his mind to the arts in an unknown way’ (to escape the fate of modernity). Sloterdijk’s aesthetic project has an ethical dimension. This is the question that echoes in Kant’s famous phrase, ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’,40 the connection between aesthetics and ethics. What can connect aesthetic pleasure, which is uniquely defined by the experience and appearance of beauty, and which is at the centre of what we describe as epiphany, with the ethical law of Kant’s categorical imperative? How can the one thing be the echo of the other? How can Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica from 1751 be related to Kant’s ethics and Hegel’s philosophy? How can we describe an aesthetic experience without spoiling our enjoyment, and how can we make it harmonize with philosophy at the same time? Are Truth and Beauty related? Is Truth only a product of the intellect and Beauty only a product of the senses? Isn’t it possible for the intelligible to be an event and result of the senses and Beauty a product of the intellect, and therefore Truth? Did the equations ‘Truth equals Beauty’ and ‘Beauty equals Truth’ lose their meaning in the twentieth century, the nightmare of history? Is the assertion that the world has become absurd and meaningless the same as the assertion that art has become ugly as well? Aren’t cognition processes the precondition for enjoying Beauty, and isn’t it reality itself that produces the enjoyment in the first place? Does aesthetic enjoyment exist beyond the pleasure principle, or, in other words, has aesthetic pleasure been extracted from the pleasure principle and squeezed out of it by sublimation and

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asceticism? If Jacques Lacan accused Freud of political agnosticism in his lecture on Science and Truth [La science et la vérité, 1965], one could accuse Sloterdijk of aesthetic agnosticism because he thinks sublimation does not produce beauty but, on the contrary, Beauty and aesthetic enjoyment are to be found beyond the pleasure principle. There is a limitation, however: the place where the enjoyment occurs is not necessarily the desirable place for other people. In this respect we are talking about a limitation of Kant’s categorical imperative. Sloterdijk is not demanding a universal ethics that would apply to each individual and therefore to everyone. It is the attempt to escape from seeing the nightmare of history as the meaning. But can the aesthetic replace the meaning in the same way as repetition can replace sublimation? Meaning and senses, conceptions and perceptions, knowledge and beauty form a new equation in Sloterdijk’s treatment, an equation that does not serve either thanatos or eros but, on the contrary, tries to escape from both of them. Sloterdijk’s aesthetics is not, however, a theory of compensation because it does not separate from the idea that aesthetic enjoyment has to remain at the heart of the aesthetic experience. Writers do not separate from life through their writing and artists do not separate from life through their work and consequently transmit the death wish. On the contrary, writing and the work of art or reading as such are the enjoyment and the celebratory act of life. This is how aesthetic experience can be harmonized with enjoyment, reconciling the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Sloterdijk goes from the categorical imperative to a law of desire located between Kant, Freud and Lacan. He does not see culture as the sublimation of libidinous desire, just as Aristotle did not regard the concept of philia in the Nichomachean Ethics as utility or lust or virtue. Precisely because he rejects a universal application of aesthetics, there is no universal application of ethics. Ethical and aesthetic commands should not be robbed of their absurd character or their imperative character. Sloterdijk follows the ideas of Blaise Pascal expressed in his Thoughts on Religion: All men naturally hate themselves. We take advantage, as we can, of concupiscence to promote the public good. But it is only a pretence [. . .] . In a word, selfishness has two qualities; it is essentially unjust, because it aims to become the centre of everything; and it is offensive to others because it would make them its slaves: for every one in whom self is a leading principle is the enemy, and would be the tyrant of the human race.41



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Even before Kant proposed his categorical imperative, Pascal had relativized it. The logic of the categorical imperative does not function in any situation where people all hate and serve, exploit and subjugate each other. Pascal’s solution, as we know, is faith: ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – I believe because it is absurd. Sloterdijk takes a similar approach. He shows the aggressiveness of any imperative, whether the ethical or the aesthetic. Kant tried to turn the command of the Gospels: ‘Love your neighbour as you do yourself’ into a rational call: It is in this way, no doubt, that we are to understand the passages from Scripture that contain the command to love one’s neighbour, even our enemy. Since love out of inclination cannot be forbidden, but beneficence from duty itself [. . .] is practical and not pathological love [. . .] and only the former can be commanded.42 This command, as we know, is the categorical imperative, which is based solely on the logic of the rational demand for freedom from contradiction and which tells every rational being to respect the human being in the other person. Kant wanted to separate the commandment to love as an ethical imperative from religious faith and to explain it rationally. This practical ethics corresponded to a practical aesthetics. Aesthetics went through exactly the same process in the nineteenth century when it tried to establish itself as a science. It was the experience of detaching beauty from faith – in other words, from the intuition of visual perception, emotion, and so forth – and explaining it rationally. The aesthetic experience, the emotional impact of beauty, gave rise to a rational call, a commandment, a demand that sounded almost legal. Aesthetics became part of jurisdiction to some extent; it was interpreted according to the commandments of the aesthetic gospel. The aesthetic experience became a commandment and a law, which robbed it of meaning because aesthetics was actually supposed to be the field of pathological love, the field of mere inclination. Taste, as we know, is a matter of argument, and that is the essence of taste: it is negotiable, something to barter with, and not a law. When aesthetics starts commanding it becomes impossible to enjoy it. Commands spoil aesthetic pleasure because the point of aesthetic pleasure is to act without orders and commandments and laws. Crossing the line, transgression, is consequently a crucial moment of future aesthetics. Sloterdijk attacks the aesthetic command, the dictates of the beautiful. He knows that the destiny of culture’s progress lies buried between ethical and aesthetic orders and c­ ommandments.

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The human tendency towards aggression that Pascal identified does not contribute to culture by resisting progress, as Kant and Freud believed. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, culture’s moral claim to oppose aggressiveness, which it makes through the commandment to love one’s neighbour, actually reinforces it. It is a paradox that anything that opposes aggressiveness decisively strengthens this aggressiveness. In other words, aesthetic commandments do not work to eliminate barbarism. The aesthetic imperative that we counterpose to barbarism actually reinforces the latter. Anything that opposes ugliness paradoxically acts as the decisive factor in reinforcing it. Anyone who outlines an ethics of eros, of eroticism, paradoxically contributes to the aesthetics of thanatos, the death instinct. The Nazi aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl shows us how the aesthetics of the death instinct and of aggression cloaked an ethics of aggression. At some point we realize that if ethics is the field of eros, the commandment to love one’s neighbour, aesthetics is the field of thanatos, the commandment of the death instinct. Sloterdijk wants to liberate us from the dilemma of a two-­ hundred-year-old alliance of ethics and aesthetics, from categorical and aesthetic imperatives. He refers to Nietzsche’s ideas as expressed by Zarathustra: One should honour even the enemy in one’s friend. Can you step up close to your friend without going over to him? [. . .] In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in your heart when you strive against him.43 These quotes show the reversal of the commandment to love and the appeal to Pascal’s definition of the ego as the enemy of every ego. Nietzsche did not say: love your neighbour to the extent that you love your enemy as a friend; he famously reversed the values and said that one’s friends should be one’s best enemy and one should even honour the enemy in one’s friend. This rule would wipe out once and for all the idea that we can use enemy images because the only available images we would have would be those of our friends. The equation, as we construe it, between ‘Hell is other people’ (according to Jean-Paul Sartre) and the idea that we ourselves are the only good ones – the kind of thinking the politics of the United States has always specialized in, and still does today – this infernal equation is, in fact, the universal quality of the commandment to love. Freud saw the commandment to love one’s neighbour as nearly inhuman, or, at least, that was what Lacan wrote in his book The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60).44 Paradoxically, we escape from this infernal equation if we abandon the universal nature of



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the commandment to love: in other words, if we abandon the ethical and aesthetic imperatives and admit that these imperatives have a mutual affinity. We must abandon the universality of the aesthetic commandments to really allow ourselves to act aesthetically and to extricate ourselves from the aesthetic hell of the modern age. So we could say that Sloterdijk has designed an ethics of aesthetics in which aesthetic imperatives do not appear. He sees the aesthetics of modernism as inhuman and is looking for a human aesthetics. In this respect he is following Lacan, who taught us that everything that can be transformed from enjoyment to commandment or prohibition simply reinforces the prohibition all the more. We can see that this commandment orders the subject: ‘Enjoy!’ and shows him his own castration in a horrifying manner through this commandment. The command ‘Enjoy!’ castrates the subject and spoils the pleasure. Aesthetic pleasure can only function if it does not have to obey any commandment or prohibition. For this reason Sloterdijk opposes an aesthetic imperative derived from Kant and his categorical imperative. There should be no restrictions on aesthetic enjoyment because they inspire resistance, and this resistance spoils the pleasure. The commandment to love contains the possibility of inhumanity, and Kant’s categorical imperative also contains the possibility of inhumanity, and that is why Sloterdijk denies the possibility of an aesthetic imperative. He also rejects Nietzsche’s solution of turning the expression of the aggressive instinct into an expression of the will to power, which Foucault attempted to use in his analysis of power in the Western system. Sloterdijk’s aesthetic blueprint does not represent any particular collective teaching and he does not even see aesthetic experience inspiring the creation of a cultural collective because he knows this could be used as a basis for a political regime. Every imperative reminds a person of his or her isolation, the compulsion of a commandment from the super-ego. Sloterdijk demands a democracy that allows subjectivities to shift their conflicts by not formulating them absolutely clearly. This is the meaning of his literary and philosophical methods of de-definition or un-definition. Taking Pascal’s insight and Nietzsche’s error, he looks for the basis for a subjectivity that is neither power nor tyranny but the foundation for an aesthetics of democratic subjectivity. Here, too, we can refer to Hegel and his basic principles of the philosophy of right, which already provide us with the idea of a paradoxical link between the rhetoric of desires (aesthetics) and the logic of the political (ethics), because Hegel evolved a system of right based on special qualities and uniqueness and not on universal liability. By the same token, Sloterdijk’s aesthetics is a theory of singularity and not a universal construction.

Notes

La musique retrouvée  1 Translator’s note: This text was the opening speech given by Peter Sloterdijk at the Lucerne Festival, Switzerland’s prestigious festival of classical music, on 11 August 2005.  2 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk discusses the idea of the phonotope in his book Spheres III: Foams: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).  3 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk has borrowed the word ‘psychagogisch’ from Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice to describe the combination of Psychologie (psychology) and Pedagogik (pedagogics). It is translated here as ‘psychagogic’.  4 Translator’s note: This is the title of Part IV of Burkhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010).  5 Translator’s note: See the quotation from Mann’s Doctor Faustus that closes this section.  6 Translator’s note: The Master of Meßkirch was an anonymous German Renaissance painter active between 1515 and 1540. Sloterdijk is making an oblique reference to Martin Heidegger, who lived in the town of Meßkirch.  7 Translator’s note: Serenus Zeitblom and Adrian Leverkühn are figures in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1997).  8 Translator’s note: Fortunatus is a popular German story from the sixteenth century about a legendary hero who lived on money from the never-empty purse of the goddess Fortuna. The story first appeared in the Volksbuch, a book of folk tales from 1509.  9 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act III, Scene 2.



Notes to pp. 17–30 321 Remembrance of Beautiful Politics

  1 Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece’, in Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Erich L. Santner (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1990/2002), p. 78.  2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 172.  3 Translator’s note: Schiller wrote the Ode to Joy as an expression of friendship in an album belonging to his trusted friend the jurist Christian Gottfried Körner (1756–1831). Körner invited Schiller to stay in his home from 1785 to 1787, and often helped him financially. The ‘sovereign’ refers to Duke Karl Eugen, ruler of Württemberg, from whom Schiller had fled.  4 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is referring to Körner’s work as a judge and the fact that his home in Dresden was known as a salon for music and literature.  5 Translator’s note: The reference is to Sarastro’s second aria, the ‘Hallenarie’ in Act II, Scene 3 of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (‘Within these sacred halls [. . .]’).   6 Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
   7 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 909.  8 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 278.   9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 106.

Where Are We When We Hear Music?   1 The following publications indicate how Western opticism, or concern with vision, is catching up with itself and practising self-reflection at the same time as working towards defining its own limits: Jürgen Manthey, Wenn Blicke zeugen könnten: Eine psychohistorische Studie über das Sehen in Literatur und Philosophie (Munich/Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1983); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Thomas Kleinspehn, Der flüchtige Blick: Sehen und Identität in der Kultur der Neuzeit (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1991).  2 Aspects of this have been realized in the present author’s work: the Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988]) includes an implicit metaphysics of banality, and outlines of an anthropology of absence are contained in the 1988 Frankfurt Lectures (Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen [Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988]), in the essays on political kinetics and in other writings on discretionary a-cosmology, the study of the non-world. 


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  3 Erhart Kästner, Mount Athos, The Call from Sleep (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 60.  4 Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 80.  5 Translator’s note: By ‘enstasy’ Sloterdijk means a state like samadhi, the Sanskrit description of a meditative trance or state of absorption.  6 The most important contemporary theory of the unhappy ear, Adorno’s philosophy of music, is wholly based on a double bind. The theory says that regression is constantly forbidden (because in the first place musical technique has to orient itself to historical modalities) and imperative (because great music always shows nostalgia for what is impossible in the world).  7 See Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Die wahre Irrlehre: Über die Weltreligion der Weltlosigkeit’, in Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas H. Macho (eds), Weltrevolution der Seele: Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch zur Gnosis von der Spätantike bis zur Gegenwart (Zurich: Artemis & Winkler, 1993), Vol. I, pp. 38–46. 
   8 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 15–18.   9 It is generally overlooked that the ‘real philosophies’, materialist movements or ‘heterologies’ that have emerged since the nineteenth century are philosophical in the accepted sense. Perhaps the reintroduction of things that were thought away earlier suspends philosophy as such. The post-Hegelian gesture of saluting the reality of thinking, i.e., the anti-Platonism of the consciousness of hard facts, machines, codes and systems, has ipso facto an anti-philosophical effect. What remains is the question: How is post-philosophical wisdom possible? As a bios theoretikos, a reflected life not geared to redemption? As a form of nonfoundational behaviour in sets of macro-problems? 10 The habit of securing a self-assured inner self by thinking away the dispensable exterior persisted right up to Immanuel Kant, whose lectures on metaphysics include this amputation fantasy: ‘A human being whose body has been split open can see his entrails and all his inner parts, thus this inner is merely a bodily being, and wholly different from the thinking being. A human being can lose many of his members but for that he still remains and can say: I am. A foot belongs to him. But if it is sawed off then he looks upon it just as upon any other matter which he can no longer use, like an old boot, which he must throw away. But he himself always remains unaltered and his thinking loses nothing. Everyone easily comprehends this, even by the most common understanding, that he has a soul which is different from the body.’ See Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, trans. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 45.   In his critical works Kant revised the naïve idea that the cogito can simply stand for the soul. 11 Original German edition: G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophi­ schen Wissenschaften III (1830). Quoted here from 
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. 3rd Book: Philosophy of Mind/Spirit, trans. William Wallace. Available at: http://www.hegel. net/en/enz3.htm.



Notes to pp. 41–58 323

12 See Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum: Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse im Jahr 1785 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). Mesmer s­ ignalled a possible end of the monotheist (apostolic) fashion for mediums (medium­ ism) in high culture; indeed, a kind of ‘postmodern’ post-­monotheist neo-mediumism has been around since the nineteenth century. 13 This terrifying vision reached its culmination in Thomas Mann’s short novel Mario and the Magician, which portrays the abuse of the psychic rapport as a psychological condition for the possibility of fascism. 14 Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 44, 51. 15 I am suggesting that, similarly to the difference in the context of natural philosophy between natura naturans and natura naturata, there is a profound musicological difference between musica musicans and musica musicata. 16 Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, p. 48. 17 Ibid., p. 45.

Clearing and Illumination: Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism and Politics of Light   1 Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 3–4.  2 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is using Heidegger’s term Weltgrund, usually translated as ‘principle of the world’.  3 Cf. Klaus Hedwig, Sphaera Lucis: Studien zur Intelligibilität des Seienden im Kontext der mittelalterlichen Lichtspekulation (Münster: Aschendorff, 1980), particularly the chapter on the theologian and philosopher of optics Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253), p. 119ff.   4 For Arabian optics and philosophy of light, i.e., al-Kindi and Alhazen, see the standard work by David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); today’s Western knowledge of Islamic thought owes much to Henry Corbin’s major work, The History of Islamic Philosophy, trans. Liadain Sherrard and Philip Sherrard (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, 1986), particularly the chapter ‘Al-Suhrawardī and the Philosophy of Light’, pp. 205–20; and The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1994).   5 Abu-Hamid Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights, trans. David Buchman (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1998), pp. 7–8.   6 See Henry Suso, The Exemplar with Two German Sermons, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 29.   7 On Mani, see Amin Maalouf, The Gardens of Light, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Brooklyn, NY: Interlink Books, 1999); on Manichaeist religion see Karl Matthäus Woschitz, Manfred Hutter and Karl Prenner, Das manichäische Urdrama des Lichts. Studien zu koptischen, mitteliranischen und arabischen Texten (Vienna: Herder, 1989). 
   8 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), especially the ­sections ‘After the Enlightenment: Cynical Twilight’ (p. 76), and ‘The

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Notes to pp. 59–95

Weimar Symptom: Models of Consciousness in German Modernity’ (p. 384).  9 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is playing with the word ‘Abendland ’ (literally: evening world), the German term for the Occident or Western world, as the counterpart to the Orient, the Eastern world. 10 Arthur Young, The Reflexive Universe (Cambria, CA: Anodos Foundation, 1976, new edition, 1999). 11 Ken Wilber, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View on Human Evolution, 2nd edition (New York: Doubleday, 1981). 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 146.

Illumination in the Black Box: On the History of Opacity   1 Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C.W. Williams (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1914), p. 30.   2 Quoted in Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 1.   3 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy, trans. Stephen Corrin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).  4 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is referring to Jose Ignacio Lopez, the key figure in one of the automobile industry’s most famous industrial spy cases in the late twentieth century.  5 Translator’s note: Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) was a German sociologist. Sloterdijk is referring to his widely cited studies on trust. See, e.g., Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

The Right Tool for Power: Observations on Design as the Modernization of Competence  1 Translator’s note: See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, ed. William Levitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1994), p. 4.  2 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk, following Heidegger, is exploring a play on words based on the German verb schenken – to give a gift –, which derives from the act of libation or pouring, and the related noun Geschenk, a present or gift.  3 Translator’s note: This was the title of an article by Wolfgang Fritz Haug: ‘Die Rolle des Ästhetischen bei der Scheinlösung von Grundwiderspruchen der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft’, Das Argument 64(13), 1971, pp. 190–213.  4 Translator’s note: The battle of the Titans, or Titanomachy, was the great war in Greek mythology fought between the Titans, the old generation of Greek gods, and the Olympian gods led by Zeus.



Notes to pp. 102–25 325 For a Philosophy of Play

 1 Translator’s note: The reference is to Kant’s discussion of the Copernican revolution in The Critique of Pure Reason.  2 Translator’s note: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).  3 Translator’s note: Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, Vol. 1: Renaissance and Reformation, trans. C.F. Atkinson (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), p. xvii.  4 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is referring to a key debate about an essay ‘The Revolt against the Secondary World’ by the German author Botho Strauß. See Botho Strauß, Der Aufstand gegen die Sekundäre Welt: Bemerkungen zur einer Ästhetik der Anwesenheit (Munich: Hanser, 1999).  5 Translator’s note: See Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

The City and Its Negation: An Outline of Negative Political Theory  1 Translator’s note: Cf. Paul Valéry, ‘Four Fragments from Eupalinos or The Architect’, in Dialogues. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, trans. William McCausland Stewart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 65–180, esp. p. 80.  2 Pindar, Isthmia V (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). Available at: https://archive.org/stream/odesofpindar035276mbp/odes​ ofpindar035276mbp_djvu.txt.   3 Valéry, ‘Four Fragments’.  4 Translator’s note: This lecture originally appeared as an audio book in 1994.  5 Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 31.   6 See note 2 above.  7 Translator’s note: Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), p. 18.  8 Translator’s note: Ibid.  9 Translator’s note: Ibid., pp. 18–19. 10 Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols 5–6, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1969). Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Pe rseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D4%3Asection%3D431b. 11 The Apology in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1966), 39c ff. 12 Translator’s note: For Sloterdijk’s use of the term ‘kynical’, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 13 Diogenes Laertius VI, 38, in R.D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Diogenes Laertius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). (First published 1925.) Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

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Notes to pp. 126–61

hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D6% 3Achapter%3D2. 14 Ibid., 41, 31. 15 William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 1. 16 Translator’s note: Hugo Ball, Byzantinisches Christentum (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1923). 17 Evagrius Pontikos, Briefe aus der Wüste, ed. Gabriel Bunge (Trier: Paulinus Verlag, 1986), pp. 264–5. 18 For an examination of the angry silence of matrons, see Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 19 Quoted from Peter Sloterdijk and Theodor Macho (eds), Weltrevolution der Seele: Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch zur Gnosis von der Spätantike bis zur Gegenwart (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1991), pp. 150–1. 20 Translator’s note: Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Oxford: Wiley, 2015). 21 Virgil, Eclogue 4, trans. H.R. Fairclough. Available at: http://www. theoi.com/Text/VirgilEclogues.html#4. 22 Translator’s note: Alcibiades by Plutarch, trans. John Dryden. Available at: http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/alcibiad.html. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Translator’s note: Hans Jürgen Syberberg (born 1935) is a German filmmaker who became famous in the 1970s and 1980s and was later attacked for his controversial political views. 26 Translator’s note: See ‘Illumination in the Black Box’, note 4 above. 27 Translator’s note: Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, pp. 22–3.

Architects Do Nothing But ‘Inside Theory’: Peter Sloterdijk in Conversation with Sabine Kraft and Nikolaus Kuhnert  1 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy has been translated into English by Wieland Hoban and published by Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents (Los Angeles) as follows: Spheres I: Bubbles: Microspherology (2011); Spheres II: Globes: Macrospherology (2014); and Spheres III: Foams: Plural Spherology (2016).  2 Translator’s note: Frei Otto (1925–2015) was a leading contemporary German architect.  3 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk’s use of the terms ‘world-making’ and ‘world-building’ relies on Heidegger’s famous essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971).  4 Translator’s note: archplus, or ARCH+, in which this interview first appeared, is a German periodical for architecture, urban planning and design.  5 Translator’s note: See note 3 above.  6 Translator’s note: Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. Frank Capuzzi, in Pathmarks (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 254.



Notes to pp. 162–209 327

 7 Translator’s note: This has since been published. See Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).  8 Translator’s note: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).  9 Translator’s note: This interview was originally published in 2004.

For a Participatory Architecture: Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with Reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry  1 Translator’s note: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D.A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).  2 Translator’s note: Ibid., p. lvii.   3 Paul Valéry, Eupalinos or The Architect, trans. W.M. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 93–4.   4 Acts: 17:28 ESV: ‘In him we move and have our being.’  5 Valéry, Eupalinos, p. 94.   6 Ibid., p. 96.

Essay on the Life of the Artist: Heretics * Wastrels * Falls/Cases * Inhabitants  1 Translator’s note: Plato, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett. Available at: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.  2 Translator’s note: ‘The world is everything that is the case’ is the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Sloterdijk is playing here with the German words Fall (case) and Sündenfall (the biblical Fall of Man) in a complex series of associations that are translated here as ‘case/Fall’ or one of the two terms depending on the context.  3 Translator’s note: See ‘For a Participatory Architecture’, note 2 above.

Minima Cosmetica:
An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement   1 See Ernest Gellner, ‘From the Ruins of the Great Contest: Civil Society, Nationalism and Islam’, in Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 180.   2 Another account featured a fire-fighter armed with only a torch who searched a cellar, which apparently led to the successful conclusion of the search.   3 Cited in Hans Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben
(Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1986 [originally 1981]), p. 75.   4 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).   5 See Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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Notes to pp. 213–37

  6 Arnold Guillet, Die Ablassgebete der katholischen Kirche, 3rd edition (Stein am Rhein: Christiana Verlag, 1984 [originally 1971]), p. 4.  7 Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Erdpolitik: Ökologische Realpolitik an der Schwelle zum Jahrhundert der Umwelt, revised edition after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992).   8 Ibid., pp. 141ff.

The Museum: School of Disconcertment  1 Translator’s note: The ambivalence of the German word ‘museal’ comes from its two meanings: (1) relating to museums; and (2) evoking the idea of museum objects preserved as relics of earlier times.  2 Translator’s note: Charles Martel was a seventh- to eighth-century Frankish statesman and military leader who won a famous victory against Muslim invaders at the Battle of Tours in 732. Helmut Kohl (born 1930) is a German conservative statesman who was chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998.  3 Translator’s note: Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96) was a German historian and political writer famous for advocating power politics; the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) was one of the first major historians of art and culture, particularly of the Renaissance.   4 Beat Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).  5 Translator’s note: This was originally published in 1988.   6 Lucius Burckhardt (1925–2003) was a Swiss sociologist and economist who specialized in architectural theory and design theory.  7 Translator’s note: Nelson Goodman (1906–98) was an influential postwar American philosopher. Sloterdijk is referring to Goodman’s book Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).   8 Ibid., p. 175.   9 Ibid., p. 177.

World Museum and World’s Fair  1 Translator’s note: The Leads was an eighteenth-century prison directly under the roof of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. The name came from the lead roof tiles of the palace.   2 E.M. Cioran, The New Gods, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 35–6.  3 Translator’s note: This refers to the ballad ‘Der Taucher’ (‘The Diver’) by Friedrich Schiller, written in 1797. It tells the story of a young knight who dives into the sea and returns with terrifying stories of what he saw in the depths.  4 Quoted from Patrick McGrath, ‘My Dead Body’, in Permanent Collection – Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1988), pp. 44–8.



Notes to pp. 241–80 329

 5 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is referring to the famous statement in Karl Marx’s work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in the original German in 1832. Available at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.  6 Ibid.  7 Translator’s note: Bouvard and Pécuchet are the title figures in Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished satirical novel, published posthumously in 1881. It is famous as a chronicle of failure and blunders in the quest for knowledge.  8 Translator’s note: Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris, Les Livres des Expositions Universelles 1851–1989 (Paris: Éditions des Arts Décoratifs Herscher, 1983).

‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in one’  1 Translator’s note: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (selections from ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’). Available at: http://www. gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm.

Art is Folding into Itself  1 Translator’s note: Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, ed. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946). Available at: https://archive.org/stream/onspiritualinart00kand/onspir​ itualinart00kand_djvu.txt.  2 Translator’s note: This was originally published in 1989.

Emissaries of Violence:
On the Metaphysics of Action Cinema   1 Titus Lucretius Carus, ‘On the Nature of Things’, written 50 bce; trans. William Ellery Leonard. Available at: http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/ nature_things.2.ii.html.  2 James Clavell, Shogun (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 76, 83–4.   3 On the theme of haste in relation to Jesus, see Hans Conrad Zander, Ecce Jesus: Ein Anschlag gegen den neuen religiösen Kitsch (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), pp. 27–62.  4 Translator’s note: The term ‘Consumerist Unbeliever International’ comes from Ernest Gellner. See ‘Minima Cosmetica’, note 1 above.

Good-for-Nothing Returns Home or The End of an Alibi – and a Theory  of the End of Art  1 Translator’s note: ‘The future of art’ refers to the original title of this essay, which was delivered as a lecture at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1984 and later published in the book Ende der Kunst –

330

Notes to pp. 285–304

Zukunft der Kunst [End of Art, Future of Art], ed. Elmar Budde, Heinz Friedrich and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1985), pp. 108–36.  2 Translator’s note: ‘Post-March’ sarcastically refers to the historical period after the March 1848 uprising in Germany.  3 Translator’s note: Sloterdijk is ironically referring to the German publishing house Matthes und Seitz, founded in the late 1970s, which publishes important modernist authors and, according to its website, specializes in ‘individuality, freedom and revolt’.  4 Translator’s note: Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was a German writer, journalist, sociologist and critic. Sloterdijk is referring here to his essay ‘Those Who Wait’, published in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 129–40. (The phrase ‘hesitant openness’, cited above, appears on p. 138.) The contemporary authors Sloterdijk mentions here are the sociologist Michael Rutschky (born 1943) and the German philosopher Dietmar Kamper (1936–2001).  5 Translator’s note: The reference is to Nietzsche’s essay ‘Über das Pathos der Wahrheit’ (1872). See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth’, trans. Bruce Armstrong, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Carolina Molina y Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. 83–7.  6 Translator’s note: ‘Wiederabgedruckt’, in Odo Marquard, Aesthetika und Anaesthetika: Philosophische Überlegungen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 35–46.  7 Translator’s note: See ‘The City and Its Negation’, note 12 above.  8 Translator’s note: Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Memoirs of a Goodfor-Nothing, trans. Ronald Taylor (New York: Ungar, 1955).  9 Translator’s note: The ‘five per cent barrier’ is the percentage of votes cast in an election in Germany that allows a political party parliamentary or local representation and therefore the possibility of acting as the minority party in a coalition. 10 Translator’s note: See ‘The City and Its Negation’, note 12 above. 11 Translator’s note: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. During the Second World War he was involved in Germany’s nuclear research programme. 12 See Ilya Prigogine, ‘Investigations on Cosmic Background Giggling’, Journal for Dialogical Physics, 3, 1983, pp. 817–72.

Afterword: Sloterdijk and the Question of Aesthetics  1 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
  2 J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  3 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).



Notes to pp. 305–9 331

  4 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).   5 James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003).  6 Translator’s note: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [originally 1970]).  7 Translator’s note: German art expert and philosopher Bazon Brock has written about ‘true’ art using a pun on the concepts of deception (Täuschung) and disappointment (Ent-täuschung).  8 Translator’s note: Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).  9 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New York: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 180. 10 Translator’s note: Novalis, ‘Fragments on Poetry’, quoted in Lilian R. Furst (ed.), European Romanticism: Self-Definition. An Anthology (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 4. 11 See Robert Waissenberger (ed.), Wien 1815–1848: Bürgersinn und Aufbegehren. Die Zeit des Biedermeier und Vormärz (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1986). 
 12 Translator’s note: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Allen Lutins. Available at: http://www.guten​ berg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html. 13 In the preface to his book Revolution und Restauration (Baden-Baden: Holle, 1965), Klaus Lankheit wrote: ‘The beginning of the nineteenth century brought a new phase for humanity [. . .] that Baudelaire called a “faithless” century’ (p. 5). 14 Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Hermann Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 3. 15 Ibid. 16 See F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, trans. D.W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [originally 1802–3]). 17 Ibid., p. 18. 18 See Friedrich von Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968). 19 See F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993 [originally 1800], p. 225. 20 ‘The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism’ (1796/7), a joint manifesto by Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, cited in Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard (eds), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 252.

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Notes to pp. 309–15

21 See Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 69. 22 See Novalis, Christianity or Europe: A Fragment (1799), cited in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. F.C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69–71. 23 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J.B. Baillie (Kindle edition, 2010 [1806]). 24 Translator’s note: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970 [originally 1936]). 25 Georg W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 2004 [1835–8]). 26 Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, Vol. I, trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 627–8. 27 Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890– 1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986). 
 28 Hans Scheugl, Das Absolute: Eine Ideengeschichte der Moderne (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2001). 29 John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 30 Thomas Ebersberg, Abschied vom Absoluten: Wider die Einfalt des Denkens (Gundelfingen: Eironeia, 1990). 
 31 See Ludwig Tieck, ‘Fantasies on Art for Friends of Arts’ (1799), in William Heinrich Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, trans. Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971). 32 Novalis, from Faith and Love or The King and Queen fragments (1798), in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and trans. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 33 Friedrich von Schlegel, ‘Atheneum Fragment’ (1798), quoted in Martin Travers (ed.), European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 19. 34 See note 10 above. 35 See Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984); and The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 
 36 Edmund Husserl, The Essential Husserl, trans. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 349. 37 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 38 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935–6), in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), p. 242. 39 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [originally 1785]), pp. 105, 152. 
 40 Translator’s note: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans.



Notes to pp. 316–18 333

Mary Gregor, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 129. 41 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts on Religion and Philosophy, trans. Isaac Taylor (Glasgow: William Collins, 1838 [originally 1670]), pp. 284, 398. 42 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 15. 
 43 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [originally 1883]), p. 49. 
 44 Translator’s note: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

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