Violence – Reason – Fear: Interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical approaches [1st ed. 2023] 3658408855, 9783658408855

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Jutta Ecarius · Johannes Bilstein   Editors

Violence – Reason – Fear Interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical approaches

Violence – Reason – Fear

Jutta Ecarius  •  Johannes Bilstein Editors

Violence – Reason – Fear Interdisciplinary approaches and  theoretical approaches

Editors Jutta Ecarius Department für Erziehung- und Sozialwissenschaften Universität zu Köln Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät Köln, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

Johannes Bilstein Fachbereich Pädagogik Kunstakademie Düsseldorf Köln, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-40885-5    ISBN 978-3-658-40886-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Preface

The book takes up events on violence  – reason  – fear and confronts them with scientific perspectives. The focus is on the question of the significance of fear and reason in the context of representations of violence, experiences of violence and a social increase in the threat of terror. Violence and terror as well as the fear of catastrophes have on the one hand produced new fears and on the other hand new discourses about the foundations of reasonable reactions to them. In terms of the history of mentality, the project of modernity is closely linked to the containment of violence. With the beginning of the Enlightenment, Kant argued in his 1795 draft ‘On Perpetual Peace’ that the democratic constitution of states and the establishment of alliances of states increase the chance of lasting peace. Kant basically calls for a ‘permanent congress’, a federation of states, to establish manners according to a moral standard with a practical reason. Here he anticipates what the UN Charter of 1945 also calls for in terms of international law. Justifications of war become inadmissible, so to speak, they become illegitimate. Exceptions are to serve solely to avert extraordinary dangers or to restore international peace. However, economic overload by economically strong countries, social inequalities and religious claims to power remain unconsidered. In this respect, the compromise character of Kant’s model must be discussed again and again: To what extent does it serve primarily to secure the peace of economically powerful, mostly secularized late-modern states? Does it also provide legitimation for their imperial expansion? Potestas as legitimate power of disposition thus provides the basic justification of statehood and peace with other states. For Max Weber, ‘all political formations are formations of violence’, the state is a human community with a monopoly on ‘legitimate physical violence’. Weber was aware that religious and political violence can form their own formations and have a revolutionary effect, feelings of a v

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‘duty to religious war’ can arise. This brings into focus the question of how people, all potentially capable of violence, can succeed in living together peacefully. The history of democratic thought is closely linked to the establishment of peace and just dealings with one another, with the right to free development and the acquisition of property woven into it. The rational insight into a legal order with monopolization of violence on the part of the state goes hand in hand with the idea and implementation of peaceful interaction, which is at the same time inherent in the principle of the democratic. Therefore, the anthropological assumption of the ‘vulnerability of man’ (Popitz) is to be combined with models of an equitable order of interaction based on reason. At the same time, the protection of human life as a universalistic value makes the use and justification of violence difficult. The project of modernity is thus intimately connected with the detachment from violence and the establishment of non-violence. Therefore, acts of violence and violent outrages of any kind  – whether religiously or politically motivated  – strike at the core of our democratic self-­ understanding, especially when they happen on the ground and not in distant countries, far away from enclosed spaces. Fear and irrationality, fear and aggression, rage and violent unruliness, if not animalistic in appearance, threaten basic democratic values and especially the rational orientation of political action; they also threaten the basic achievements of the Enlightenment, on which our understanding of politics and the traditions of modernity are based. What is happening is changing the way we perceive and look at things, because our eyes and ears can no longer ignore the fact that violentia also continues to have its place in modernity, even if it seemed to have been banished from it by ‘rational thought’. No-go areas’, (economic) crime, gangs, hooligans, right-wing and left-wing violence as well as domestic and sexual violence persist, are still not contained. Violence is treated primarily as a problem in many academic approaches in the cultural, educational and social sciences. This draws attention to the fact that violence and the project of modernity are seen as two different strands. Therefore, at present, there seems to be a feeling that violence is on the rise again, that the barbaric is overshadowing the rational once more, sometimes even trying to take its place and leaving us speechless. The theoretical models of Elias and also of Foucault assume – albeit with different weighting – the civilization-historical process of a change from the coercion of others to the coercion of oneself, the physical inscription of a self-disciplining, with which a change in behavioural patterns and bodily structures is connected. Struggle, aggression and also rage are sublimated by the individual, by the subject, and enclosed in a reflexive behaviour and thinking with which violence seems to be processed and ultimately banished. Violence is banished to special spaces such as football or martial arts, to music or limited

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phases of life (e.g. youth). The dressing up of the body controls and promotes performance under the ductus of discipline. Here, the reward for the good is tempting, violence seems superfluous. Both – the idea of a peaceful statehood and a disciplined thinking, acting and body – require a new discussion that sheds more light on violence and includes it in social orders, in acting and subject formation. The scholarly gaze must increasingly turn to this topic. In this respect, it is less a matter of focusing on individual acts of violence or violent excesses and illuminating them scientifically, but rather of reconstructing social dynamics of violence in processes of late modernity. Phenomena of violence are inscribed in culture and sociality and are to be studied as such. The social logic of attitudes, feelings, fears and also reason as well as social action is to be placed in the context of violence, so that it can no longer be negated, but rather comes into view and is researched. This is the aim of the present volume, which is based on a conference held at the University of Cologne in 2017. The almost shocking changes in our social and intellectual life caused by the Corona pandemic make the discussions at this conference seem like documents from another world. On the other hand, however, they point us – especially in view of the completely unforeseeable consequences of the Corona crises – to problem contexts and discussion necessities that have not been settled, but will certainly continue to build up again in the shadow and in the aftermath of these crises. For this reason, the argumentative context of the conference and of the present volume appears to us to continue to be of high, indeed: intensified topicality. Köln, Germany 

Jutta Ecarius Johannes Bilstein

Contents

 the Violence of Culture�������������������������������������������������������������������������������  1 On Johannes Bilstein Threatening Attractiveness: The Charisma of Violence������������������������������� 19 Hans-Georg Soeffner  Foreignness: Between Sacralization and Resentment����������������������������������� 39 Alfred Schäfer Fear and Vulnerability: Anthropological Approaches����������������������������������� 51 Jörg Zirfas  (Mis)understandings of Recognition: On the Problem of the ‘Negative Balance of Recognition’����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 67 Norbert Ricken  the History of Fascination with Violence: Mediations of the Immediate  85 On Jörn Ahrens  Violence in Late Modern Societies: Fury Rooms�������������������������������������������101 Jutta Ecarius  The Violence of the Media and the Media of Violence�����������������������������������115 Jochen Hörisch  Learning from Disasters? About Dealing with Disasters �����������������������������127 Lothar Wigger

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Contents

Politics of Anger �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������145 Micha Brumlik  It OK to Punch a Nazi? Aggression and Generativity in Ubiquitous Is Resistance�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������159 Holger Schulze Right-Wing Populism as Political Therapy: Emotional Dynamics of Social Declassification ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������175 Cornelia Koppetsch  Righteous(d) Anger: On the Medial Semantics of a Political Feeling ���������193 Imke Rajamani

Contributors

Jörn Ahrens  Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen, Germany Johannes Bilstein  Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany Micha Brumlik  Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Jutta Ecarius  Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany Jochen Hörisch  Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany Cornelia Koppetsch  Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany Imke Rajamani  Falling Walls Foundation GmbH, Berlin, Germany Norbert Ricken  Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany Alfred Schäfer  Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle, Germany Holger Schulze  Universität Kopenhagen, Kopenhagen, Dänemark Hans-Georg Soeffner  KWI, Essen, Germany Lothar Wigger  Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany Jörg Zirfas  Universiät zu Köln, Köln, Germany

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On the Violence of Culture Johannes Bilstein

1 Cultura: Worry and Run Away In Cicero’s Tusculanes, that is, the text which in 45 B.C. set in motion the European conceptual history of “culture”, and which then in the early modern period was accorded almost canonical character, it is precisely and famously defined in agrarian terms what belongs to “cultura” (Bollenbeck 1994, p. 38). As a field, though fertile, cannot bear fruit without care, so neither can the soul without instruction (“doctrina”). Each is without effect without the other. But care of the soul (“cultura animi”) is philosophy: it pulls out vices by the root (“extrahit vitia radicitus”), prepares souls to receive the seed, … and sows … what then, when it is full grown, bears the richest fruit. (Cicero 1992, 45 B.C. II, 13, p. 65)

So in the field of the soul must be sown and harvested, and weeds must be fought, and that from the beginning. One must uproot, cut off, throw away. Some little plants need special care, others must be destroyed; that is cultura. And in the same way one should do it in the soul. There are weeds and there is uncontrolled growth, and these are to be fought against; vices must be pulled out by the root.

J. Bilstein (*) Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_1

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From a pedagogical point of view, this is quite ambivalent, for this wild growth is initially quite desirable. Already in his writing on the education of the orator from 55 B.C., that is 10 years before the Tusculans, the corresponding selection-­ imagination explicitly appears: Indeed, as in the case of vines, it is easier to prune something that pushes out too much than to bring forth new shoots by care when the wood is no good; so also in the case of a young person I will have something to prune (‘Volo aliquid amputem’). (Cicero 1976, 55 B.C. II, 88, pp. 262–263)

So there is an other of what is desired to grow and what is to be cared for: The weeds, the wild growth, and this other has to go. The cultivation process is imagined as a process of selecting, sorting and judging. By no means is it just about lovingly tending a nice little garden, nor is it just about ‘living growth’ (Rehbock and Schneidereit 2007, esp. p. 268), but always also about ‘pulling out’ and ‘cutting off’ the roots of vice, about ‘amputare’ and ‘extrahere’ (Bilstein 2009). In this respect, the cultura metaphor in Cicero certainly takes up traditional philosophical motifs that can already be found clearly formulated in Plato or in the Platonic Socrates. In the latter’s maieutics – the pedagogue acts like the midwife – the identification and destruction of eidola, i.e. false ideas – Schleiermacher then translates ‘moon calves’ – plays a decisive role (Bilstein 2007). The fatal, nationally-distinctive and latently violent meaning of the concept of culture, especially in the Franco-German controversies of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – German culture versus French civilization (Bollenbeck 1994, pp. 31–96) – is thus certainly deeply rooted in its history of meaning and imagination. What is important here are the underlying normative assumptions, for it is not at all clear from the outset what is now weed and what is not. Ludwig Feuerbach, for example, defends ‘chickweed and celandine’ in 1839 as thoroughly curative and effective plants, even if they appear worthy of extermination as weeds. Therefore, do not be ashamed, philosophy! That you … appear as a weed. A weed is any plant – even the most beautiful, even the noblest – that stands where it should not stand, that in its place gets in the way of man with his limited purposes; for the naturalist there are no weeds. (Feuerbach 1839, p. 483)

Admittedly, these are rather late objections. As a rule, in Cicero, for example, it is not even questionable which plants are counted as weeds (Rassem 1979); the normative settings underlying the cultura metaphor remain omitted from the discourse. Thus, if ‘culture’ is already connected from its conceptual historical beginning with imaginings of violent access, with losses and amputations, the view of the evaluative categories remains blocked for the time being.

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At the same time, the impositions associated with the care of the soul can certainly be judged as terrible and horrible. Adorno and Horkheimer formulate this almost dogmatically: Terrible things humanity had to do to itself until the self, the identical, purposeful, masculine character of man was created, and something of this is still repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold the ego together clings to the ego at all stages, and always the lure to lose it has been coupled with the blind determination to preserve it. (Horkheimer 1971 [1944], p. 33)

This somewhat apocalyptically tinged final account of the cultivation process once again sums up the travails of uprooting, cutting off, eradicating associated with it. It argues (Bollenbeck 2007, pp. 233–270) in a line of tradition of cultural criticism that can be traced back through Freud, Nietzsche, and Hegel to Schiller and Rousseau, and in which the alienation, divisiveness, and pruning of original potencies are repeatedly emphasized as costs of the cultivation process (Konersmann 2008, 2012). Admittedly, the special feature of the symbolic-cultural system is that it has itself always dealt with its own overpowering and violent potentials – be it in linguistic, pictorial or musical works of art. A kind of permanent commentary (Bollenbeck 2007) on human performances of alienation emerges, in which the arts play a particularly prominent role. This performance of self-reflection will be examined a little more closely in the following using three examples. They are historically positioned quite close to each other around 1800, because I assume that around 1800 a social and mentality-­ historical constellation emerges that continues to be of decisive importance for us and our present patterns of life and world interpretation.

2 Enthusiasm and Conversion The ‘Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders’ by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck first appeared anonymously in 1796 and soon became a kind of early Romantic bestseller. In stories, anecdotes and legends, the book presents an understanding of the world that contains many of the elements constitutive for the further development of Romanticism: The Middle Ages are romanticized, Christian medieval legends are programmatically substituted for ancient Greek mythology; the arts appear as enthusiastic celestial powers charged with re-enchanting the world. They present works of “heavenly beauty” that elicit “hot tears of enthusiasm, of purest awe” from the yearning observer and make him “heavenly drunk” (Wackenroder and Tieck 1994 [1796], pp.  20–24, 26, 59). An idealized Catholic Church, in particular the Mother of God Mary, plays a decisive role in this.

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In this collection of stories there is a conversion scene that can probably be attributed to Tieck and that acts like a literary-fictional primal scene for the many later re-Catholicization movements of the Romantics. It is described in the letter of a young German painter from Rome to his friend in Nuremberg. He describes how he, the Nordic Protestant, attends a festive mass in the Rotonda, i.e. the Roman Pantheon, which has been converted into a Catholic church, and how he is in high spirits. He feels this way, as if something special were also going on in myself. All at once everything was quieter, and above us the almighty music began, in slow, full, stretched strains, as if an invisible wind were blowing over our heads: it rolled on in ever greater billows, like a sea, and the sounds drew my soul entirely out of its body. My heart throbbed, and I felt a mighty longing for something great and sublime to embrace. The full Latin chant, rising and falling through the swelling tones of the music, like ships sailing through waves of the sea, lifted my mind higher and higher. And as the music penetrated my whole being and ran through all my veins – then I lifted my inwardly turned gaze and looked around me – and the whole temple came alive before my eyes, so drunk had the music made me. At that moment it ceased, a priest stepped before the high altar, raised the host with an enthusiastic gesture, and showed it to all the people – and all the people sank to their knees, and trombones, and I do not know myself what almighty notes, blared and boomed a sublime devotion through all the bones. Everything, close around me, sank down, and a secret, wonderful power pulled me irresistibly to the ground as well, and I could not have kept myself up with all my might. (Wackenroder and Tieck 1994 [1796], pp. 84–85)

In this scene, which in Tieck’s case has a biographical underpinning, central elements of musical emotion are intertwined: music and priest, emotion in front of the saint presented, the blowing of the Holy Spirit and unadulterated folklore. It is the Catholic ritual culture that offers all this to the young painter from the North, and so he soon converts (Kemper 1993, esp. pp. 25–72; Littlejohns 1987, pp. 34–39; Bollacher 1983, esp. pp. 9–10). Not least the perception of the large mass of other believers contributes to the overwhelming effect of the scene. it seemed very clear to me … as if all the hundreds around me were pleading for the one lost one in their midst, and in their silent devotion were drawing me over to their faith with irresistible force. … I could not resist the violence within me: – I have now, dear Sebastian, passed over to that faith, and I feel my heart glad and light. Art has almightily drawn me over …. (Wackenroder and Tieck 1994 [1796], pp. 85–86)

Tieck has here transposed to Italy a scene that he himself experienced in Bamberg Cathedral. The decisive accent lies on the overwhelming effect of the aesthetic, of the music that ‘makes one drunk’ and that permeates the listener in his entire being.

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It is this that ‘omnipotently’ draws him over to the actually alien faith. Aesthetization and staging not only serve to accompany this conversion, but also act as almost violent initiators of existential conversion. Traditional topoi of the divine madness of the poets – ‘drunkenness’ – and of the enthusiastic character of music, i.e. due to otherworldly influence – ‘travail of the Holy Spirit’ – which go back far into antiquity, merge here into a narrative that deals with the power and violence of symbols in strategic naivety (Hesiod 1996. 700  B.C., pp.  31–32; Pieper 1962; Ehrenforth 2005, pp. 44–54; Bilstein and Zirfas 2009). This young Protestant is overwhelmed, a “sublime devotion” is sent into his bones, but he does not have the impression that he is doing something “terrible” to himself – in the sense of Horkheimer/Adorno. This story is not at all about gaining reason, control and rationality in the face of urgent sensuality – even if it is at the cost of something terrible  – but on the contrary: here, someone obviously takes pleasure in being overwhelmed, goes down enthusiastically, experiences this as irresistible sweet violence. The young painter describes to his friend the fact that the power of music and a spatially-performative overall staging brings him to his knees as a life-turning moment of happiness that reverses his self-definition (Bollacher 1983, pp.  43–59). This scene thus joins the anti-rationalist line of critique of reason that begins in Romanticism, then continues through – above all Nietzsche – into the twentieth century. Hermann Hesse still praises the text precisely for this: “In place of reason comes … feeling, in place of … art writing the enthusiasm of a loving contemplation” (Hesse 1975, p.  237) “There we find everything that we lack today: faith, morality, order, soul culture” (Hesse 1976, p. 219). And this line of a Romantic reception influenced by Nietzsche is then found not least in the discourses of pedagogy  – whether as a resentment-laden “cultural critique that makes stupid” (Konersmann 2012, pp. 87–91) or as a “cultural critique that makes awake” and perpetuates an anthropologically based unease (Konersmann 2012, pp. 91–97). In any case, the romantic convert in Wackenroder and Tieck’s story wants to somehow and as quickly as possible undo all the terrible things that evangelical, rational and reasonable humanity has had to do to itself (Auerochs 2006, esp. pp. 482–502; Rispoli 2011). To use Cicero’s metaphor: Here is someone programmatically resisting all pruning, insisting on his wild growth, and the cultural system celebrates him for it. The restrictions that flourish for him in Catholic culture, and which have been argumentatively virulent at the latest since the Enlightenment critique of religion and the church, are faded out.

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3 Taming, Confusion and Conversion Heinrich von Kleist’s novella ‘Die Heilige Caecilie oder die Gewalt der Musik’ was first published in the Berliner Abendblätter from 15 to 17 November 1810; Kleist later revised it several times (Kleist 1957 [1810]). The story is quickly told. At the time of the 30 Years’ War, four godless Protestant brothers in Aachen want to attack a nunnery, desecrate the nuns and raze the convent to the ground as a symbol of the hated Catholic faith. To do this, they sneak into the cathedral with a whole horde of helpers for Corpus Christi mass, wait there for a sign from their leader to begin their iconoclastic work. They are armed with “axes and tools of destruction of all kinds” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 195). The nuns, in turn, who are famous for their wonderful musical performances, learn of the danger and are somewhat distraught, especially since the conductor, Sister Antonia, is seriously ill and cannot conduct the performance. On the abbess’s instructions, the mass begins nonetheless. Everyone  – nuns, pious churchgoers, audience, iconoclasts – is gathered in the cathedral, when Sister Antonia unexpectedly appears; she has an old score with her and now conducts “glowing with enthusiasm” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 197) an ancient Italian mass. The effects are surprising: the sisters sing with almost unearthly beauty, the villains sink down, are moved by the heavenly power of the music and abandon their dark intentions. there was not a breath stirring in the halls and pews during the whole performance; especially during the salve regina and still more during the gloria in exscelsis, it was as if the entire population of the church were dead, such that, in spite of the four goddamned brothers and their followers, even the dust on the floor was not blown away, and the monastery still existed until the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when, by virtue of an article in the Peace of Westphalia, it was nevertheless secularized. (Kleist 1957 [1810], pp. 197–198)

After Mass, the brothers then disappear, their accomplices disperse, but Sister Antonia is found dead in her cell, which she never left. It was probably St. Caecilia herself who stepped in as conductor. The wild brothers, in turn, are not found again until 6 years later by their mother, who has been searching for them all this time. They have ended up in the local asylum, wearing monk’s robes and singing every night in the most horrible way. They have, reports a witness, taken up the habit. to intonate the gloria in excelsis with a horrible and ghastly voice … This is how leopards and wolves might sound when they roar at the firmament in the icy

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­ intertime; the pillars of the house … shook, and the windows, struck by their lungs’ w visible breath, threatened to collapse clattering, as if hands full of heavy sand were thrown against their surfaces. At this ghastly appearance we fell apart, senseless, with dusting hair; we scattered. (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 202)

The mother must first question all possible witnesses in a detective-like investigation in order to finally find out what happened. When she then visits the abbess of the monastery to clarify the background of what happened, she sees the score of the miraculous mass on the table – and is deeply shocked by it: She looked at the unknown magic signs, with which a fearful spirit seemed mysteriously to mark out the circle, and thought to sink into the earth, as she found the gloria in excelsis just opened. She felt as if the whole horror of musical art, which had corrupted her sons, were rushing over her head; she thought she would lose her senses at the mere sight of it, and after quickly pressing the sheet to her lips, with an infinite emotion of humility and submission to the divine omnipotence, she sat back in her chair. (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 205)

The good woman has no choice but to convert to Catholicism. This legend – as Kleist himself calls it – is told in the form of a frequently indirect, interlaced narration, linguistically with that Kleist-typical coolness that also appears to be a bit without compassion. “… where, by virtue of an article in the Westphalian Peace, it was nevertheless secularized” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 198) – the history of an institution cannot be told more laconically. The “violence of sounds” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 205) and the “terrible and glorious miracle” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 206) that leads to the rescue of the nuns are treated (Horn 1978; Horn 2011). The violence of the music is twofold: it appears in the heavenly song of the nuns and in the eerie, sacrality-parodying roar of the mad brothers, “with a voice that made the windows of the house burst” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 199). Yet the “violence of music” is a thoroughly popular topos of musical aesthetics around 1800, closely associated with the discourses surrounding the sublime (Gess 2011, pp. 243–357). Here, in Kleist, it varies across the spectrum of sublimity and horror. “The portrayal of music in the tale owes much to discourses on the sublime, in its combination of beauty and terrifying destructive power” (Mayer 2007, p. 242). The overwhelming scene, which after all makes the whole audience seem “dead” (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 198), conveys not only the glorification of musical beauty, but also “a destructive, life-denying energy”. In the quoted passage, therefore, that ‘violence of music … is paraded in all its ambivalence of elevation and degradation’ (Wachter 2015, p. 105; Gess 2011, pp. 341–354). Last

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but not least, what is at stake here – in contrast to the unbrokenly narrated conversion scene from the Herzensergießungen – is the relationship between profanity and sacrality, which in more and more secularized times is discussed in and by the example of art. For this reason, Saint Caecilia was very much in vogue in literature around 1800, since she can be used to discuss both the role of art – representation of the sublime; shaking of the recipients; enthusiastic attachment to otherworldly instances; unification of religion and aesthetics – and the source of overwhelming experiences. Herder, for example, in his essay on Caecilia as early as 1793, celebrates the “devotional art of sound,” which for him-the Protestant-keeps alive the memory of shocks that come from beyond and elude earthly or human influence: all this is felt “with great violence” (Herder 1793, p. 304). Herder thus prepares “that art-religious emphasis that then shapes the early Romantic image of Saint Cecilia in Wackenroder and Tieck’s ‘Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders’ in 1796” (Wachter 2015, p. 94). In this respect, Kleist’s text is also part of the art-religious discourse of the time, marking both the loss of transcendent ties and the search for substitute forms. In a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge on 21 May 1801, he writes: Nowhere, however, did I find myself more deeply moved in my innermost being than in the Catholic Church, where the greatest, most uplifting music still joins the other arts in forcibly moving the heart. Ah, Wilhelmine, our church service is none. It speaks only to the cold mind, but to all the senses a Catholic feast. (Kleist 1952 [1801], p. 651)

Here laments one who would like to have his heart forcibly moved, but at the same time knows that in his Protestant-Prussian culture he can at best only achieve this by way of aestheticization – in the religion of art, that is. In this respect, perhaps he really can’t be helped. In the middle of the altar, at its lowest steps, a common man knelt each time, quite isolated from the others, his head bent down on the higher steps, praying with fervor. He was tormented by no doubt, he believed. I had an indescribable longing to prostrate myself beside him and weep. – Ah, just a drop of forgetfulness, and with voluptuousness I would become Catholic. (Kleist 1952 [1801], p. 650; Wachter 2015, p. 93)

It is this ‘drop of oblivion’ that Kleist lacks. If he had it, he would not only be ritually suspended, socially embedded, but then he would also know where the source of all the violence that constantly assaults him is: above, in the divine. So when – this is the argumentative background of the Caecilien discourses of the late eighteenth century – the earthly or supra-earthly sources of music are ar-

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gued about, then ultimately, in a discourse tradition that can be traced back to Plato, it is about the source of those forces that prevent man from leading a virtuous life or help him to do so. It is about the conflict between the celestial muse Urania and the profane-banal Polyhymnia, between beauty guided by ideas and seductive pleasure. And it was already clear to Plato what one has to pay attention to here – just as with the distinction between moral and immoral Eros: and this is precisely the beautiful celestial Eros, which belongs to the Muse Urania, but the other of the Polyhymnia is the common one, which must be used with great caution, with whom indeed it is used, so that, although pleasure is harvested from it, it does not bring forth unboundedness. (Platon 2011, fourth century B.C., 187d–e, pp. 58–59)

Only in this way, following the Urania and controlling and dominating the Polyhymnia, can enjoyment be achieved without regret. Against the background of this Platonic dichotomy, the two forms of song in Kleist’s work now also appear. The heavenly song of the nuns and the pseudo-sacred roar of the brothers represent two thoroughly opposing concepts of music, of sublimity, of beauty, of sensuality and of violence: enthusiastically generated control and discipline on the one hand, uninhibited, unbridled sensuality and disordered libidinousness on the other. The concepts of art religion then becoming broad in the nineteenth century will develop synthesizing concepts of a secular enthusiasm for this, which – on the one hand – still somehow keeps the otherworldly sources of enthusiasm bubbling, but – on the other hand – slowly detaches them from the established religious patterns of interpretation. All the geniuses who are now celebrated and revered present a kind of secularized messianism “in pluralis” (Auerochs 2006, pp. 362–379; Sina 2011). We still have to deal with the after-effects of the genialism that emerged from precisely this constellation, right up to the present-day media world, which is increasingly shaped by genialist topoi. The fact that Kleist can only present the solution to this dilemma – secularization on the one hand, attempts to save transcendental ties on the other – on the literary level of a legend certainly marks part of the despair of this Prussian-worldly Protestant. And so the end of the text remains in that strange light of a secular laconicism that simultaneously marks cool detachment and ironic-resignative rejection of all enthusiasm: the sons, however, died, at a late age, of a cheerful and merry death, after having sung once more, according to their custom, the gloria in excelsis. (Kleist 1957 [1810], p. 206)

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They don’t quite succeed in ‘the effort to hold the ego together’ – instead they become the victims of a cultivation process against which they were actually pitted. They, the revolutionary perpetrators of violence prevented by the violence of music, are indeed amputated quite a bit: At least their revolutionary impulse and their unseemly willful rage. What remains, however, is then not cultura in Cicero’s sense, but sheer madness. It is as if here – even if with sacred assistance – the symbol system resists its destruction with its own means. The sacrifices of the nuns, on the other hand – after all, they are nuns! -who produce all the musical beauty, is not mentioned. They are subject only to the indirectly ironizing narrative gesture of the legendary text. To be noted: Embedded in the discourses on the violence of music, which were widespread in the late eighteenth century, are reflections on the origins of violence. One can  – as in the case of Wackenroder and Tieck  – recur nostalgically to the otherworldly ties of earlier times; one can also – as in the case of Kleist – set supernatural sources against dully unbridled sensuality. Both examples reveal the biographical and intellectual consequences of the shock of secularization as well as the transition of traditionally religious patterns of interpretation into the rhetoric and topology of art religion (Meier et al. 2011–2014). At the historical moment when the reservoir of answers of traditional religious mentalities to crucial and existential questions  – e.g. about contingency, e.g. about par excellence dependence, e.g. about the experience of fascination and horror – is exhausted, the discourses of art offer new patterns of argumentation and pictorial languages for precisely these experience-saturated problems of life. Thus, the question ‘Where does violence come from?’ must also continue to be addressed and discussed – this has not changed until today (Soeffner 2004; Detering 2011). And the topoi in which the eighteenth century dealt with these questions, which are now rather foreign to us, perhaps show us in the alienation some indications of the topoi in which we discuss them today. That all violence comes from hormones is not so self-evident either.

4 Truth as with Fists: Cultivated Irritation But one can also take a more relaxed approach to the whole thing – and that brings us to Goethe. He visited the Boisserée Collection in Heidelberg in 1814 and had the old German pictures shown to him one by one. “Every day … he was in the picture hall at eight o’clock in the morning and did not move from the spot until noon” (Boisserée 1905, [1814]). He was given an armchair in front of the pictures, had them shown to him, and then the 65-year-old Goethe endeavoured to make direct contact

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with the pictures and to make this clear to all those around him who were watching him: pretension of the second order, so to speak. Johann Baptist Bertram, one of the co-owners of the collection, is there and Sulpiz Boisserée has described it: He did not look at the pictures as they hung one beside the other on the wall; he always allowed only one, set apart from the others, to be placed on the easel, and studied it, enjoying it comfortably and absorbing its beauties, undimmed by strange impressions from without, whether of the world of pictures or of men. ‘There now,’ he said, ‘in his old age one has laboriously shut oneself off from the youth which old age comes to overthrow, for the sake of one’s own existence, and, in order to preserve oneself evenly, has sought to guard against all impressions of a new and disturbing kind, and now all at once there steps before me a whole new and hitherto quite unknown world of colours and figures, which forces me out of the old track of my views and feelings – a new, eternal youth; and if I wanted to say something here, too, this or that hand would reach out of the picture to give me a slap in the face, and that would be well deserved.’ … And before the picture of Mary’s death … he aptly remarked: From it the truth strikes us as with fists!. (Boisserée 1905 [1814]; Kemp 1989; Grave 2006, pp. 396–416)

‘Slap in the face’, ‘truth as with fists’, these are indeed fierce experiences Goethe lets sit there in his armchair and endure. Obviously, a lot is expected of the pictures. On the basis of a fiercely idealistic concept of art, ultimately of a now again calmly ironized religion of art, the works of art are given the status of independent subjects from which violent effects on the viewer emanate. It is the works that touch – in a very direct sense. The viewer is – on the one hand – somewhat defenseless in the face of this. On the other hand, however, this is exactly what he wants. For this, for this experience of violence, he always comes to the painting hall at eight in the morning, allows himself to be observed, and then has the whole thing recorded: Genius meets genius, the violence of this shock is well dosed. Goethe behaves here as a kind of prototype of the bourgeois concert audience that emerges in precisely this period. People want to be shaken, to have violent and powerful experiences – but in an armchair, in the opera and, if possible, without much further ado (Bilstein 2019). Truth as with fists’ – the charm of this formulation, once said by old Goethe, written down by the faithful, arises from its vagueness: neither is ‘truth’ defined more precisely, nor does the person so addressed have to fear bruises. The violence of art, once life-threatening and world-shattering in its enthusiasm, is now, in the bourgeois habitus of reception, largely tamed and defused. Goethe does not have to convert like the young painter in Rome, nor does he succumb to madness like the wild brothers in Kleist, but he will rise from his armchair, go home thoroughly shaken, and try, himself: as an author, to deal out just such fisticuffs.

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5 Bondage and Liberation Once again, reference is made to the ‘Critique of Enlightenment’. The above quotation refers to the preceding interpretation of a Greek myth, which sums up the violent impositions of all cultivations in a highly condensed image. It is the story of Odysseus, who faces the song of the sirens. He has been warned by Kirke that anyone who hears these sounds will meet certain death – but he still wants to hear them, and he also wants to survive. Odysseus wants both: undiminished pleasure and unharmed survival. He wants to take the fullness of sensual experience with him and yet remain who he is and how he is; he wants to expose himself to the sensual violence of the sirens, but under guaranteed conditions. A difficult enterprise. So he lets himself be tied to the mast, plugs the ears of his companions with wax – and listens to the unearthly beautiful voices. In the 12th canto of the Odyssey, Homer (translation by Johann Heinrich Voss) then states: • • • • • • • • •

So they sang with grace. Hot desire. I felt to hear further, and waved orders to the friends, To loosen my bands; but more speedily these rowed. And there arose quickly Eurylochos and Perimedes, Put several more shackles on me and bound me tighter. So we steered past the sirens, and quieter. Ever softer, the singing song and voice faded away. Hurriedly now took the expensive comrades of the ship. From the ears the wax, and loosed me again from the mast tree. (Homer 2016, eighth century B.C., 12, 192–200, p. 596)

So the clever Odysseus took both: The pleasure of the siren’s song and the security of his own existence. But at what price: only through bondage, through delegated self-control, through the deliberately induced paralysis of his own possibilities of action, can he escape the ruin and the destructive violence that are actually connected with the enjoyment of beauty; only through extreme effort does he succeed in remaining himself and with himself. For Horkheimer and Adorno, this scene is at the center of their analysis of the dynamics of the Enlightenment. They see the cunning Odysseus as virtually prototypical of modern, enlightened man, who – on the one hand – prepares for himself all the pleasures of this world, all conceivable delights, who also wants to experience the lure of musical violence, but who – on the other hand – constantly strives

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for self-securing – necessary – distancing from this world, in which too much pleasure threatens him with death. In their evaluation of this enterprise, the authors are quite clear. The fact that Odysseus only wants to be touched under controlled conditions, that he tries to regulate the extent and consequences of this touching, is credited to him here as bourgeois cowardice rather than the absence of that self-destructive generosity that is bent on experience at any price, à corps perdu, so to speak. But what would be the alternative? No more sitting comfortably on the couch and watching all kinds of crime scene movies? Do without the – secured – enjoyment of limited fury-rooms? Or, to put it another way: Do we really have to put ourselves through terrible things? And: Is it really so terrible what we had to do to ourselves? Let us remember: the examples from the turn of the century before last that I have presented all address, on a symbolic level, the question of where the violence to which one is exposed comes from. In Wackenroder and Tieck, it comes from a beyond idealized in the past. Fascinating and terrifying at the same time, the violence of cultural forms appears embedded in a performative overall staging that has an inspiring effect and leads the recipient to a happily experienced life conversion. In Kleist, the violence of symbolic forms comes from sacred intervention, which is, of course, at the same time legendarily relativized with cool distance. Fascinosum and tremendum are here – on the one hand – intimately connected, leading those affected to the experience of salvation or to madness. The fascination with violence is generated above all by the longing for an intensity that can hardly be gained in the disenchanted world (Crepaledi 2011). On the other hand, however, the institutional-spatial assignment to the ‘madhouse’, the laconic, not at all enthusiastic narrative style and the genre assignment ‘legend’ mark the obsolescence and fruitlessness of this attempted solution. All enthusiasm becomes enjoyable only as a legendary quotation. In Goethe’s case, finally, the violence comes from the works of art themselves, which are declared to be autonomous, and consequently, in his case, the horror has already been banished or has melted away into a biographical anecdote. The tremendum has disappeared and the fascinosum has withered away to a comfortable pleasure. If we juxtapose the three example narratives in this way, it becomes clear that the violence of culture is not reflected in this tradition of reflection on its anthropogenic roots. In Wackenroder and Tieck, as in Kleist, it is not actually people from whom the overwhelming effects emanate. Their sovereignty is paradoxically

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limited from the outset (Müller 2011, pp. 215–232). And Goethe lacks any reflection on the artists who, after all, produced the works of art that have such a violent effect in the first place. They, their motives and their desires, disappear behind the works. Such an anthropological reflection would, however, make it even clearer what we gain from culture – precisely because it has tremendous powers at its disposal (Bilstein et al. 2015). After all, Cicero’s gardener gains fruit and wine through his violent intervention. Wackenroder’s convert gains access to powers of the soul hitherto hidden from him through the mighty workings of musical enactment. In Kleist’s work, the miraculously violent intervention of music at least saves the nuns’ lives and freedom from the dark ambitions of the wild brothers and their companions. And Goethe, after all, finds some form of truth through the fisticuffs that come to him from the pictures. Based on a “cultural critique that awakens” (Konersmann 2012, pp. 91–97), the examples also show what gains can come from the intervention of culture, however hurtful. For all the criticism, that is, of the incisions and alienations associated with the process of cultivation (Bollenbeck 2007, esp. pp. 111–154), for all the discomfort and bondage we have to put ourselves through in caring for ourselves: It is the violence of culture that creates conditions for freedom and life (Thurn 1990; Bilstein and Zirfas 2017). And so Goethe’s serenity, his counterfactual insinuation of extra-­ human autonomies, may well appear to us as the admonition it was intended to be. The violence of culture, as it appears in the examples presented, is always characterized by a lack of rules and surprise. It does not announce itself, it is not prepared, nor does it follow a sequence of hints and threats. Rather, this violence overcomes order, tends to be boundless and sudden. In this respect it bears – if one follows Walter Benjamin’s criteria – the decisive characteristics of the lawless, all-­ overpowering violence of God. “This divine violence does not testify itself through religious tradition alone; rather, it … also finds itself in present life.” This violence is defined “not, then, by God himself directly exercising it in miracles, but by those moments of bloodless, smiting, expiatory consummation. Finally, by the absence of any legislation. In this respect it is indeed justified to call this violence also destructive; but it is this only relatively, with respect to goods, law, life, and the like, never absolutely with respect to the soul of the living.” (Benjamin 1999 [1920/1921], p. 199; Lindemann 2010). This divine power, bound to the soul of the living, is what continues to work in culture and helps to transcend all given orders and rules. Against the conventions and social appointments, it thus stands precisely by its sudden, unexpected and unpredictable effects for the sudden, unexpected and unpredictable developments of life.

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References Auerochs, B. (2006). Die Entstehung der Kunstreligion. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1920/1921]). Zur Kritik der Gewalt. In R.  Tiedemann & H. Schweppenhäuser (Hrsg.), Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften Band II (S. 179– 204). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bilstein, J. (2007). Die Kunst des Lehrens als Kunst der Zerstörung. In: B. Paust, J. Bilstein, P. M. Lynen & H. P. Thurn (Hrsg.), Aufbauen – Zerstören. Phänomene und Prozesse der Kunst (S. 31–42). Oberhausen: Athena. Bilstein, J. (2009). Cultura – zum Bedeutungshof einer Metapher. In L. Klepacki, A. Schröer und J. Zirfas (Hrsg.), Der Alltag der Kultivierung (S. 101–119). Münster: Transcript. Bilstein, J. & Zirfas, J. (2009). Enthusiasmus und Könnerschaft: Die griechischen Mythen. In J. Zirfas, L. Klepacki, J. Bilstein & E. Liebau (Hrsg.), Geschichte der Ästhetischen Bildung. Antike und Mittelalter (S. 47–57). Paderborn/München et.al: Schöningh. Bilstein, J., Ecarius, J., Ricken, N. & Stenger, U. (Hrsg.) (2015). Bildung und Gewalt. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bilstein, J. & Zirfas, J. (2017). Muss das sein? Zur Anthropologie der Kulturellen Bildung. In G. Weiß (Hrsg.), Kulturelle Bildung – Bildende Kultur. Schnittmengen von Bildung, Architektur und Kunst (S. 29–49). Bielefeld: Transcript. Bilstein, J. (2019). Kalte Spiegel, heiße Spiegel. Zur Theatralik bürgerlicher Selbstthematisierung. In I.  Haberland & M.  Winzen (Hrsg.), Schein oder Sein. Der Bürger auf der Bühne des 19. Jahrhunderts (S. 251–267). Oberhausen: Athena. Boisserée, S. (1905 [1814]). Brief an Schmitz, 24. Okt. 1814. In R.  M. Meyer (Hrsg.), Goethe Band 2 (S. 630–631). Berlin: Hofmann. Bollenbeck, G. (1994). Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt: Insel. Bollenbeck, G. (2007). Eine Geschichte der Kulturkritik. München: Beck. Bollacher, M. (1983). Wackenroder und die Kunstauffassung der frühen Romantik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Cicero, M. T. (1976 [55 v. Chr.]). De oratore. Über den Redner. In H. Merklin (Hrsg.) (S. 262–263). Stuttgart: Reclam. Cicero, M. T. (1992 [45 v. Chr.]). Gespräche in Tusculum. In O. Gigon (Hrsg). München: Heimeran. Crepaledi, G. (2011). Der ‘dichtende Terrorist’ oder die Sucht nach Intensität. In G. Crepaldi, A.  Kriwak & T.  Pröll (Hrsg.), Kleist zur Gewalt (S. 7–16). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press. Detering, H. (2011). Was ist Kunstreligion. Systematische und historische Bemerkungen. In A. Meier, A. Costazza & G. Laudin (Hrsg.), Kunstreligion. Ein ästhetisches Konzept der Moderne in seiner historischen Entfaltung. Band 1: Der Ursprung des Konzepts um 1800 (S. 11–28). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Ehrenforth, K. H. (2005). Geschichte der musikalischen Bildung. Mainz: Schott. Feuerbach, L. (1839). Der wahre Gesichtspunkt unter welchem der “Leo Hegelsche Streit” beurtheilt werden muß. In Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst Nummer 61 (Sp. 481–487). Halle: Wigand. Gess, N. (2011). Gewalt der Musik. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach.

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Threatening Attractiveness: The Charisma of Violence Hans-Georg Soeffner

1 Prologue The flyer for the conference ‘Violence – Reason – Fear’ (Cologne 2017, pp. 16–17) shows Caravaggio’s Medusa. Caravaggio concentrates the entire myth of Medusa on its climax: on the eye-gaze, the kairos, of the death of the Gorgoness. In this finale, all the structural elements of the myth are condensed into an expressive figure: The murderous danger that emanates from this apparition; the fear of death that Medusa inspires in others and to which she herself now succumbs – she is the only one of the three Gorgon sisters who is mortal1 (Duras 1984/1985, p. 125); the horror that imposes itself on the viewer of the representation, although he himself is no longer threatened. The story of Medusa, the violent refractions associated with it, which in turn find their catastasis in the fatal self-reflection, stands for a chain of increasing violence: Medusa, the most beautiful of the Gorgon sisters, is, Ovid tells us in his Metamorphoses (IV, 753–803), raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena. Athena, an eyewitness to the deed, then punishes not the rapist, her divine uncle, but  It is also true of the gods and their descendants that people “would [have to] be taught that immortality is mortal” (Duras 1984/1985, p. 125). 1

H.-G. Soeffner (*) KWI, Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_2

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Medusa: the beautiful Gorgoness is transformed into a hideous monster with serpentine hair, whose glowing eyes kill anyone who looks at it and turns them to stone. Caravaggio captures in his painting – designed as a splendid shield – the moment when Perseus, the minion of Athena and Hermes, supported by their tools – made with divine finesse – (winged shoes, invisibility cloak, mirror shield, sickle) holds up the mirror to Medusa – and cuts off her head with the sickle. It is the moment of a double act of killing: petrification by self-mirroring and decapitation. Perseus thanks Athena for her divine help by offering her the head of Medusa as a gift. Caravaggio experimented, it is assumed, with his own reflection in order to give the mirroring experience and the mirroring effect in the Medusa’s facial and eye expression a distinctive form: The expression of horror requires an (observing) designer who gives horror the ‘apt’ expression. Violence and horror, action and immediate reaction, condensed into a single moment, are analytically captured in Caravaggio’s work through mirroring – reflection – and reflexive design: By means of aesthetics and perceptual training instead of the tools of linguistic discursive rationality. The aesthetic-analytical answer to the question of the possibility of grasping and interpreting the ‘irrational’, here using the example of dealing with violence, fear/ exposure and immediate threat, does not arise from a fundamental aversion to reason – the experimental search for adequate means of design speaks against this -, but rather the twofold suspicion that (1) linguistic discursive means are not sufficient for the analysis of the origin, the effect and the function of the irrational, here of violence, and that (2) the attempt to come to terms with the irrational through reason could itself have irrational motives: That the attempt to give order to the world and to human existence through reason arises from the effort forced upon us to create and maintain a “section from the senseless infinity of world events, considered with meaning and significance from the standpoint of man” (Weber 1973b, p. 180).

2 Mythical and Religious Origins of Violence2 What was already seen in the philosophy of German Idealism from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, but was yet to be overcome by reason or spirit itself: The internal contradiction of the dimensions of reason (e.g., Kant’s practical vs.  Fourteen years ago I co-edited an anthology with Wilhelm Heitmeyer on the ‘timelessly topical’ subject of ‘violence’. I revise, vary and expand my then essay ‘Gewalt als Faszinosum’ in the following chapter, a critically revised ‘self-plagiarism’ (Heitmeyer and Soeffner 2004, pp. 62–85). 2

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pure reason) is taken up again and again by Romanticism and Schopenhauer, until Nietzsche radicalizes the ambivalence into an irresolvable aporia: The instruments of reason, especially logos based on language, become entangled in the thicket of metaphors and lie to us – in an admittedly ‘extra-moral’ but categorically unresolvable sense (Nietzsche 1980). Enlightenment and the ‘self-destruction of ­Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1964 [1944/1947], p. 3) merge and hollow out the project of modernity from within (for a detailed discussion, Miller and Soeffner 1996). Part of this ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ is the insight that “not merely the ideal, but also the practical tendency to self-destruction […] has belonged to rationality since the beginning, by no means [i.e.] only in the phase in which it emerges naked” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1964 [1944/1947], p.  7). Of course, this insight is also based on an attitude that makes use of ‘reason’, but in such a way that Kantian optimism about reason is contrasted with analytical reason stripped of its faith in ‘negative dialectics’ (Adorno 1966). The profound doubt of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the religion of reason, and likewise the negative dialectic of analytical reason fed by the experiences of National Socialist barbarism, see ‘the irrational’ not merely as an (uncanny, drive-controlled or deficient) counterpart of the rational, but discover it as an immanent component of the religion of reason and its project of modernity itself (Baumann 1966). It is difficult to deal with such doubt, to decisively analytically open up and endure antinomies and ambivalences of the faith in reason: the resistant, contradictory, affective-explosive, seemingly unreal or senseless, in short, the irrational in its motives and forms of action that are dark for common sense. Violence, especially the immediate violent action, the per se non-­ discursive, normatively outlawed and excommunicated, therefore non-translatable, but at best ex post describable, has therefore always been the greatest challenge for analytical reason. Violence – moreover, in the wake or as a consequence of the rationalization of the world – accordingly becomes the greatest annoyance for the Enlightenment and its project of modernity, especially when violence, as an act of liberation from the constraints of instrumental reason, (re)gains that power of fascination that not only suggests renewal through overthrow, but also proclaims the war against civilization and enjoys it in intoxication: “Then man compensated himself in a roaring orgy for everything he had missed. There his instincts, too long already curbed by society and its laws, became again the only and holy thing and the last reason” (Jünger 1980, p. 13). If one wants to analytically break down the causes and effects of such enthusiasm for the ‘sacred and the ultimate reason’ of the drives, then one cannot retreat with the reference to one’s own aversion to that from which religion and religiosity also feed: Towards the experience of incomprehensible, unbridled violence on the

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one hand and extreme powerlessness on the other – two significant sources of religion and with it of both irrationality and the fascination with violence. In the wake of the Enlightenment, there was no lack of attempts to rationalize religion as well. Besides the educated among the decided despisers of religion (Schleiermacher 1977 [1799]), there were also those tolerant intellectuals early on who wanted to uncover the ‘concealed rationality’ in religion and thus make it available to communicative or communicable reason (Habermas): The contradictory unity of rationality and irrationality constitutive of the great world religions was to be freed from its ‘unreasonable’ component. Schleiermacher aptly characterized such a purged religion. It has, he writes, “such philosophical and moral manners that it lets little of the peculiar [peculiar H.-G. S.] character of religion shine through” and it knows “how to live, restrict itself, and submit in such a manner that it is everywhere well-liked” (Schleiermacher 1977 [1799], p. 162). With these well-meaning attempts at purification that mostly fell by the wayside what – beyond reason – attracts people to religion: Those experiences and desires that for many are not covered or satisfied by reason. What remains – according to rationalistic hygiene – is a somehow reasonable, but “meagre and thin religion” (Schleiermacher 1977 [1799], p. 183). In 1917 Rudolf Otto made an attempt to gain clarity “about the irrational in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational” (Otto 1963 [1917]). It is an attempt worth remembering, especially in view of the presently observable inability to deal with the irrational; above all because Otto is not concerned with celebrating the irrational as the victorious antipode of reason, but with showing “that religion is not absorbed in its rational statements, and [from this] to bring the relationship of its moments into such clarity that it becomes clearer to itself” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 4). What is to be examined is the sacred, insofar as it is recognizably not possible to resolve it rationally: The “numinous,” that is, an expression that “is meant to denote the sacred minus its moral moment and, as we are about to add, minus its rational moment in general” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 6). In this context, and this is decisive for the object of my considerations, the subject of violence, it is also about that moment in the sacred, “which in itself can also be indifferent to the ethical and can be considered for itself” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 6). As an example Otto mentions the “wrath of God (Jahveh’s)”, whose “unearthly-fearful” violence is experienced as “sublimity” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 19), a wrath “that has nothing to do with moral qualities”, but expresses itself incalculably as “arbitrary passion” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 21). The numinous, irrational divine, as it is depicted in the Old Testament and also in the Koran, is that which can break through (e.g. ‘miracles’) or even completely destroy any order, including the order set by Himself as Creator (‘Flood’, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’). The motive for destruction may be ‘ethically’ justified (judgment), but it can also arise from pure arbitrariness (Schleiermacher 1977 [1799],

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p. 174). Above all, it is one thing: an expression of irresistible violence, violence over ‘heaven and earth’, life and death, demons and devils (Matthew 28:18 and Luke 9:1); violence is shown here as a mode of appearance of the sacred before its “ethical schematization” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 6). The counterpart and thus (potential) victim of violence experiences his own “schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit” (Schleiermacher 1977 [1799], pp.  157–162) and powerlessness in the face of a “schlechthinningen Überlegenheit (und Unnahbarkeit)” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 12). The sacred in its greatness, dignity and majesty (Latin: maiestas) expresses itself here in the “moment of “power” “violence” “superviolence”, schlechthinniger Übergewalt” (Otto 1963 [1917], p. 22). Rudolf Otto chooses the “symbolic name” “majestas” for this excessive violence and adds to it “the moment of tremendum”: “tremenda majestas” (Otto 1963 [1917], p.  22). The threat posed by the super-­ violence turns religion into something as ‘wild as the universe it illuminates: savage, cold, bleak, but infinitely strong’ (Stevenson 2000, p. 440). At the centre of this ‘wild religion’ is precisely that ‘majesty of God’ which one dares approach only with fear and trembling – if at all. From it the ‘earthly majesties’ borrow their claim to power. But this earthly power is not a ‘supremacy,’ but only “a faculty superior to great obstacles.” Such a power is called ‘violence only when it is also superior to the resistance of what is itself power’ (Kant 1913). For religion, such violence emanates only from the majesty of God. It is not by chance that the root ‘violence’ = ‘to rule’ = (idg.)* ‘wolþa’ = ‘to rule’ as well as the Latin expressions for violence ‘vis’ (potentia) and ‘violentia’ (potestas) go back to a common – semantically in itself contradictory – root: ‘Vis’, the fullness of power, expression of absolute freedom, dignity and honour on the one hand and ‘violentia’, the governor of violence, injustice, subjugation and imposed bondage on the other hand, are connected in their origin. A corresponding connection is found in the ‘tremenda majestas’ of the saint. This majesty is supreme and irrational, the trigger of total submission or the dispenser of a ‘grace’. There is ultimately no rational justification for either: Both are expressions of an ‘inscrutable’ will (the ‘deus absconditus’ – a hidden and therefore ultimately alien and alienating God to us) that expresses itself in ‘the deed’: A ‘deed in itself’ that sanctifies itself and at the same time – as in Schopenhauer (1923) – the will underlying it.3  In the context of the Christian religion, the dark and implicitly demonic is certainly seen in the violent act, but over time it is ‘subtracted from the divine and instead attributed to ‘Satan’ or his victims – but in such a way that the reflection of the sacred is still clearly recognizable’. Giusto de Menabuci is particularly impressive in his depiction of the connection between the sacred and the demonic when he colours the halo of the disciples with Judas in black on his Last Supper fresco (Padua Cathedral Baptistery), thus making the nimbus of the satanic visible. 3

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This “moment of the “energetic”” (Otto 1963 [1917], pp. 27–28), which promises absolute freedom in the capacity for action, explains the charisma of violence: the suggestion of freedom is the ‘gift of grace’ enigmatically bestowed on violence – violence as the possibility of liberation, as an obstetrician in an ‘old society pregnant with a new society’ (Karl Marx), and – as in Georges Sorel – as a ‘creative force’ (Sorel 1928) that has its own ‘morality’ (Sorel 1928, pp. 215–220) and can thereby transform the traditionally religious sublimity through acts of violence into the sublimity of a ‘socialist ideology’ (Sorel 1928, p. 263). It is precisely this charisma of violence on which all revolutions rely: On the overthrow as a creative act that ‘sweeps away the old orders’, frees them from systemic and other constraints, opposes the old values to new ones, but above all confronts the old power with a violence superior to it. The fact that almost all revolutions believe that they have to – and are allowed to – destroy old, traditional values on behalf of a ‘higher morality’ and that, at the moment of freedom, the revolutionary act, which will somehow legitimize itself afterwards, is ultimately considered superior to any morality, shows how much revolutionary ideologies – despite their often purely secular motives and goals – feed on the old, religiously based myth of violence: Precisely also when, on behalf of reason, ‘shaggy’, unreasonable regimes are to be swept onto the ‘dustbin of history’. In such cases, violence does not simply place itself above all, but rather against all reason: in contrast to normality (of everyday life), violence emphasizes the extra-ordinary, in this sense the abnormal. Its irrationality conjures up the extreme emotions: ‘normality, coupled with efficiency, may make popular; but ultimate love and ultimate hatred, deification and demonization, apply only to the extremely abnormal’, to the normal man ‘quite unattainable, may [this man] be far above or far below [him]’ (Haffner 2000, p. 50). This becomes particularly clear in the time mode of ‘the deed’, the overthrow and the ‘upheaval of all values’: the eruption of violence frightens and fascinates through its suddenness. Its ‘place’ is the moment, its tool is surprise – and its opponent is duration: the everydayization of the ‘great deed’ in many small acts. In the world of religion, one suspects the constant presence of the ‘dark violence’ of the sacred, but is nevertheless surprised by the intervention, by the act of a god – and would, if such acts never happened, gradually lose faith in the sacred. The ‘moment of the energetic’, the suddenness of the grasp and the kairós of the act make the terror and the faith, the confluence of supremacy and impotence, the destruction of order and the reflection of an ‘other’ order in the moment again tangible: In the interruption of duration and the apparent causal or final chains of history. Likewise, the overthrow and momentary experience of the secular revolutions suggests a glimpse of a realm of freedom – beyond the tenacious routines and constraints of precaution, beyond a future that seems to have been lived before it has even begun.

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Compared to the paralysis that such ‘leaden times’ radiate, even the risky game with chance seems to make life more worth living because – as in Goethe’s Eugenie (‘The Natural Daughter’) – it prefers the freedom of arbitrariness to predictability: “O seize me, violence, with honorable fists; fate, thou blind one, tear me away!” (Goethe 1912 fifth act, sixth performance, p. 249). In the free act as well as in the moment of decision culminate those elements – determination, courage and also a certain unscrupulousness – in which the criterion for the effect of the charisma of violence is expressed: the proving of oneself to one’s allegiance. It decides “on the validity of the charisma” (Weber 1976, p. 140) of a person. Proving oneself at the moment of decision obviously radiates a brilliance that the persistent tenacity of a person or institution proving itself in many individual acts can hardly counteract – even when one suspects that the charismatic-free deed will create new consequences and constraints: “Man thinks to do the free deed for nothing! He is only the plaything of the blind/force, which from his own choice quickly creates for him/the terrible necessity” (Schiller 1814, pp.  397–398). Committed to the kairós of action, charismatic acts and moments are difficult to make permanent: The extra-ordinary nature of the kairós resists its temporalization in duration. And the attempt to revive and perpetuate the great moment through backward-­looking celebrations clothed in memorial rituals increasingly closes off the future as time goes on. The remedy by means of which the “allegiance, discipleship, party confidence, etc.” (Schiller 1814, p.  143)  – in short, the following associated with the charismatic act  – attempts to lift the moment of the extra-­ ordinary out of the passage of time, is the replacement of habitual, routinized temporal orders by an order of symbols and rituals (the forms of action of symbols) (Soeffner 1995, 2000, pp.  180–185; Raab and Tänzler 1999, pp.  59–77). Thus, charismatic forms of rule or the rule of charisma – even more than even traditional forms of rule – tend to dissolve or eclipse everyday orders of time and course in the field of tension between deed ethos and symbolic order. The charismatized life is supposed to prove itself in a festive chain of singled-out deeds and memorials of deeds (Caillois 1988, esp. pp. 220–225).4 Almost all charismatic forms of rule, be they ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’, religious or secular, offer illustrative material for such attempts. Violence and deed do not themselves stand for power, but are its forms of expression: Without the possession or claim of power, neither the effective exercise of violence nor the ‘free act’ are possible. Accordingly, for Max Weber, power means “every [emphasis Max Weber’s] chance to assert one’s own will within a  On the connection between war, violence, and festival, see Caillois (1988 [1950]), esp. pp. 220–225. 4

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social relation, even against opposition, no matter what this relation is based on” (Weber 1976, p. 28). The means of seizing every opportunity and asserting one’s will is “struggle” (Weber 1976, p.  20). Here Weber distinguishes those types of struggle which are oriented towards ‘meaningful goals’ and are often bound by rules, from that type of struggle which is forced upon man and which closes itself off to any measurement of meaning: The ‘struggle for existence’. This “(latent) struggle for existence of human individuals […] for chances of life or survival, which takes place against each other without any meaningful intention of struggle, is to be called ‘selection’” (Weber 1976, p. 20). It is precisely this struggle that determines power or powerlessness and the chance to exercise violence. It is about the deadly alternative of being chosen or being selected, what Weber formulates analytically descriptively in the ‘freedom of value’ he claims, Carl Schmitt will later transform normatively into ‘political theology’. The divine omnipotence, however, is literally beyond the category of ‘chance’: to want to resist divine violence is without chance. The inner-worldly struggle for power, on the other hand, if it is not subdued, aims at the destruction of the opponent. The struggle for survival is therefore characterized by the tension between the struggle for survival as the destruction of a ‘social relation’ – the opponent – on the one hand, and the factual impossibility for individual human beings to survive entirely without social relations, i.e. without other human beings, on the other. An anthropology informed by this antagonism – as in Max Weber – will seek the origin and essence of human culture not in an ‘urge of man towards the higher’, but – like Kant, esteemed by Weber – in two opposing human ‘inclinations’: Both the “inclination to socialize” as well as “the great inclination to isolate himself: because he finds in himself at the same time the unsociable quality of wanting to direct everything solely according to his own sense, and therefore expects resistance from all sides, just as he knows from himself that he is inclined to resist others”. He can ultimately overcome his egoism, his “inclination to laziness, […] ambition, lust for power, or greed” only by having to come to an understanding with his “comrades,” “whom he does not well suffer, but from whom he cannot let go.” It is this “unsociable sociability of men” that forces them “out of crudeness into culture”. (Kant 1974 [1784], pp. 31–50, pp. 37–38)

From this point of view, the antagonism between struggle and violence on the one hand and the compulsion for sociality on the other hand is the midwife for the emergence of human culture. Sigmund Freud continues this idea – speculatively – consistently by anchoring the founding act for the genesis of human culture in an exemplary destructive act, patricide (Freud 2000a [1912/1913], pp.  287–444). The “band of brothers” not

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only murders the father, but also consumes the victim, “enforcing identification with him in the act of consumption.” This “totem meal, perhaps the first feast of humanity,” transforms in ritual “repetition” of vicarious acts of sacrifice the “criminal deed” into a chain of “commemorative celebrations” (Freud 2000a [1912/1913], p. 426). In them, “sacrifice and festivity […] coincide, every sacrifice brings with it a celebration, […] no celebration can be celebrated without sacrifice” (Freud 2000a [1912/1913], p. 419). Thus, in his speculative sketch of the violent origin of human culture, Freud tells how a social association emerges from a collectively committed, murderous founding act, which has its dark genesis in the common sacrifice and in memory rituals and thus at the same time recalls the compulsion  – indispensable for the self-­preservation of the collective – to domesticating communalization – to sociality. Later, Freud will revisit the patricide motif in a self-reflexive, autobiographical turn: The founding father of psychoanalysis, who is as decidedly Jewish as he is secular, recognizes that in his repeated interpretations of the Jewish founding figure Moses he analytically decomposes the founding myths not only of the Jewish religion but of religious thought in general: commits patricide – even of his own religion (Freud 2000b [1914], pp.  195–222, c [1934–1939], pp.  455–581). How definitive this critique of religion turns out to be can be seen when he lets his ‘major work’ on religion, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, end with the Heine quotation: We leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows. (Freud 2000d [1927], pp. 137–183)5

3 From Secularized to Political Theology6 So far, I have been interested in tracing a semantic field in which the mutual attraction of religious and political imaginaries of power becomes apparent: of ‘par excellence’ omnipotence and powerlessness; existential struggle/enmity and connectedness; destruction of social relationship and community; inclusion and exclusion. In this context, the religious and political worlds of imagination also refer to each other when ‘the religious’ – in the interplay of Enlightenment and modernity – becomes ‘secularized’: The god/gods change their clothes and now appear in secular-political costume. This is exemplified by Carl Schmitt’s concept  Citations pp. 138, 183.  I owe important impulses for the following chapter to the discussion with an indispensable, friendly discussion partner: Jürgen Fohrmann (2017). 5 6

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of ‘political theology’: ‘All the concise concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt 1996a, p. 49). In this concept, the aforementioned antagonisms are condensed into a fundamental conflict: To the fundamental distinction between friend and foe. Unlike Kant, Weber and Freud, Schmitt does not see the root of the antagonism that triggers violence in the fundamental difference between the individual claim to sovereignty and the compulsion to social compromise and thus to sociality, between destructive action and the path “from crudeness to culture” (see above), but in a fundamental front between two collective subjects. Accordingly, it is not from this frontal position that the effort for culture – forced upon human beings – and the associated attempt to legally contain and contractually institutionalize violence (Hobbes 1970 [1651]) arises, but rather the foundation of ‘the political’ as the focal point of collective interpersonal ‘interactions’ (Georg Simmel). This ‘sphere of the political’ is characterized by the struggle for existence of a specific collective subject: the ‘people’: As long as a people exists in the sphere of the political, it must itself determine the distinction between friend and foe, if only for the most extreme case – the existence of which it decides itself. Therein lies the essence of its political existence. If it no longer has the will or the ability to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically. (Schmitt 1996a [1932], p. 50)

By incorporating the ‘most extreme case’, the ‘state of exception’, into his ‘modern theory of the state’ and making it a central element of constitutional law, Schmitt deliberately refers to the extra-ordinary, ‘supra-rational’ character of this element and to the analogy between Christian theology and his theory of the state – between an ‘omnipotent God’, the ‘omnipotent legislator’ and the ‘secular’, legislative sovereign: ‘The state of exception has an analogous significance for jurisprudence as the miracle has for theology’ (Schmitt 1996b [1932], p. 49). Even to the present day, people argue – in a mixture of admiration, grudging fascination, and resolute dislike – about Carl Schmitt’s political theory: the structural entanglement of myth, political shaping through religious tradition (Schmitt 1925), and political decision-making/action. It is an entanglement that finds expression in the interweaving of biography, worldview(s), and theory of this anti-­ intellectual intellectual: In the alienating synthesis of Roman Catholic tradition and National Socialist ideology; constitutional competence and resentment critical of democracy; philosophical intellect and anti-Semitism (Schmitt 1982/1995, pp. 106–111). Looking back at this discussion, however, obscures the seduction to which Schmitt also succumbed, through the manifestly basal tendency, timelessly

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e­ ffective in all cultures, to distinguish between an ‘us’ (the family, the tribe, the clan, the people) and ‘the others’ (the enemies) (Müller 2018, pp.  149–154, pp. 311–312).7 The ‘political enemy’, according to Schmitt, “need not be morally evil, he need not be aesthetically ugly […]. He is simply the other, the stranger, and it is enough for his essence that he is existentially something different and strange in a particularly intense sense” (Schmitt 1996b [1932], p. 27). Schmitt’s political-theoretical exaggeration of this basic pattern can be found in a trivialized but equally dangerous form both in contemporary debates about political ‘solutions’ in dealing with migrants, ‘internal enemies’ and in the ‘struggle’ to preserve the imagined ‘own identity’. May Trump, Orban, Salvini, Gauland etc. may fall far short of Schmitt’s intellectual level, the consequences of this worldview are similar – above all in the replacement of the rational approach to problems by the mythical thinking that Schmitt (1940)! wanted to give form to in the ‘political theory of myth’. “In the power of myth lies the criterion of whether a people or other social group has a historical mission and its historical moment has come. From the depths of genuine life instincts, not from a résonnement or a consideration of expediency, spring the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision, and the great myth. In immediate intuition, an enthusiastic mass creates the mythical image that drives its energy forward and gives it the strength for martyrdom as well as the courage to use violence” (Schmitt 1940, pp. 9–18) (emphasis H.-G.S.). That Schmitt’s world view, theoretically exaggerated into a ‘great myth’, is not that of an individual, but corresponds to the historical time from 1933 onwards and to what ‘great thinkers’ at that time considered ‘spirit’, is also proven, among other things, by Martin Heidegger’s speech on taking over the rectorship in Freiburg (Heidegger 1933): and the spiritual world (emphasis M. Heidegger) of a people is not the superstructure of a culture, any more than it is the armoury of usable knowledge and values, but it is the power of the deepest preservation of its earth and blood forces as the power of the innermost excitement and farthest shaking of its existence. (Heidegger 1933, p. 3)

The elementary ‘ties’ of the Germans are correspondingly earthy and bloody. There are “three ties – through the people to the fate of the state in the spiritual order”, which are “equally original to the German essence” (Heidegger 1933, p. 4). And similarly to Schmitt, the ‘German way of being’ consists in struggle:  The shyness of the strangers, the suspicion they are unsolidary towards the ‘natives’, seems to be universal. That this shyness automatically turns into enmity, on the other hand, does not: trade, courtship, etc. speak against it. 7

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By disavowing rational analysis and drafts of action as ‘résonnement’, allowing ‘life instincts’ and ‘immediate intuition’ to take their place and combining ‘great enthusiasm’ with ‘moral decision’, Schmitt creates a concept of politics that legitimizes the ‘use of force’ both externally and internally (‘martyrdom’). The extra-­ ordinary, the state of exception, ‘the reality of being and the real possibility’ (Schmitt 1996a [1932], p. 28) of the people, as sovereign ‘to determine for themselves the distinction between friend and foe’ (Schmitt 1996b [1932], p. 50), thus become more real than a reality that analytical ‘pure’ or ‘practical reason’ try to approach. By emphasizing an immediate, ‘absolute’, ‘real reality’ and the “violent origin of ‘real reality’” (Fohrmann 2017, p. 104), Schmitt subscribes to a worldview in which exceptionalism and ‘immediate intuition’, ‘great myth’ and ‘great moral decision’, ‘mythic image’ and ‘miracle’, decision and deed merge into an absolute comprehensive reality. From it all other social realities are derived as ‘subuniverses’ (William James) dependent on it. For Schmitt, however, these are also characterized by the same structural dualism friend/enemy. The worldview of Schmitt’s political theory, which Hans Blumenberg pointedly characterizes as the “absolutism of reality” (Blumenberg 1979, p. 9), designs a dual world: friend/enemy; inclusion/exclusion; normal state/exceptional state; everyday/extra-ordinary; immediate intuition and decision. Political action itself is oriented towards the extreme case, which in turn demands a totalitarianism of action. Since the “great moral decision” is guided by the friend/enemy distinction in “immediate intuition,” a central maxim of social action is omitted vis-à-vis enemy and victim: the commitment to the “reciprocity of perspectives” (Mead 1973 [1934]; Soeffner 2014, pp. 207–224). The loss of reciprocity, in turn, results in a loss of reflexivity and distance on the part of the agent – both with respect to oneself and with respect to the other. The state of political theology thus constitutes, vis-à-vis a faceless enemy, a collective subject that merges with its obligations for the state: in assuming the duty of the state, each individual also assumes the state view. The other, stranger, becomes in this view an anonymous object/enemy. The ‘great moral decision’ thus consists of the destruction of the social relationship with the excluded: of asocialization and centroverted one-way ethics. Those who in this way merge with the collective subject not only anonymize the (hostile) counterpart, but also transform their own individuality into the type of impersonal functionary and executor of state duties: In all forms of “collective violence,” according to Hannah Arendt ­following Frantz Fanon (1961/1966, p. 14), “individualized values are the first to

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disappear” (Arendt 2009 [1970], p. 67). This links the type of bureaucratic executor in totalitarian states – exemplified by Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler – with that of the representative of military obedience in elite units even in democratic states. Thus a captain in the US Marines writes to his mother during the Vietnam War: There is a job to be done here. Almost every day there are difficult decisions to be made conscientiously. My experience is invaluable. This job requires a conscientious man. The group of men doing this job needs a conscientious leader. In the last three weeks, we’ve killed over 1500 men in a single operation. That shows responsibility. I am needed here, mother. (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, p. 412)

When theory meets empiricism, when the theoretical ‘absolutism of reality’ meets its empirical implementation and the reality it brings about, the difference between a state proclaimed at the cathedra and a state acting in fact becomes apparent; between friend and foe as theoretical homunculi on the one hand, military comradeship and anonymized enemies/victims on the other; between the destructive act as an abstractly violent founding act and the concrete chain of destruction it can trigger. Wilhelm von Humboldt – unlike Schmitt – saw this difference between political theory and the consequences it triggers very clearly: Every development of truths which relate to man, and especially to the acting man, leads to the desire to see carried out in reality that which theory proves to be right. […] But however natural this may be in itself, and however noble in its sources, it has not infrequently produced harmful consequences, and often even more harmful than the colder indifference or […] the ardent warmth which, less concerned with reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas. (Humboldt 2015 [1792/1903], pp. 192–193)

From this insight Humboldt derives the ‘general’ principle: One should always carry over principles of pure theory into reality, but never before this reality, in its entire scope, no longer prevents them from expressing those consequences which, without all foreign admixture, they would always produce. (Humboldt 2015 [1792/1903], p. 197)

Theoretical constructions, just like ‘socially constructed’ (Berger and Luckmann 1970 [1966]) conceptions of reality, which habitual constructivists (Hubert 2017; Reichertz and Bettmann 2018) – unlike Berger and Luckmann – easily overlook, have ‘real’ consequences when factual action is oriented towards these constructions and creates social reality. It is precisely this (political) reality-creating act that Schmitt relies on – not at all constructivist, but realpolitik. Against the background of the existential funda-

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mental distinction between friend and foe, the sovereign – irrespective of the factual consequences of its actions – becomes quite concrete in terms of state law with the authorization to set the state of emergency. supreme legislator, supreme judge, and supreme commander at the same time, ultimate source of legality and ultimate basis of legitimacy. (Schmitt 1996a [1932], p. 10)

The consequence: Legality is thus derived from the legitimacy of the (violent) founding act. How difficult even the constitutions of parliamentary democracies find it to deal with the unresolved relationship between the constitutional founding act and the rule of law can be seen in the preamble to the German Basic Law: There it is stated that the “German people [have] given themselves this Basic Law by virtue of their constituent power” (Basic Law 1946, Preamble, Sentence 1). With this statement, the Basic Law also claims that fundamental legitimacy from which legality as well as the procedures and institutions securing it are derived (Article 20, para. 2): “All state power emanates from the people, it is exercised by the people in elections and votes and by special organs of legislation, executive power and jurisdiction”. In short: The legal power is based on the  – unconditionally claiming legitimacy  – constitution-giving = establishing power. In this, that the “liberal secularized state” lives on preconditions “which it cannot itself guarantee”, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde sees “the great venture that [the state], for the sake of freedom, has taken” (1967, pp.  75–94; Fohrmann 2017, pp. 66–71).8 But – unlike Schmitt, for whom the “people or other social group”, a collective that is, becomes an “enthusiastic mass” out of “the depth of genuine life instincts” and through “great(er) enthusiasm”, which carries the state through the “power to myth” (all quotations see above) – Böckenförde sees the central, constituting element of parliamentary democracies in the relationship of the individual citizen to the constitutional order. Accordingly, the liberal state – so Böckenförde, using the example of freedom of religion – cannot and should not demand from the citizen as a condition for the citizenship status a confession of values, as the current talk about the so-called Leitkultur suggests. But the citizen as voter has to accept and obey the laws of the state (Böckenförde 1978, pp. 24–29). In short, the citizen is required to be faithful to the law, not to his or her convictions (Soeffner 2018, pp. 75–94).9

 For a discussion of the legitimacy/legality relationship, see Fohrmann (2017, pp. 66–71).  Cf. Soeffner, Hans-Georg (2018): Werte im Spannungsfeld zwischen Freiheit und Gesellschaftsvertrag. In: Rodenstock, Randolf; Sevsay-Tegethoff, Nese (2018), pp. 75–94, here: pp. 89–90. 8 9

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4 The Basically Penultimate Word of Hermeneutics: A Conciliatory Conclusion? If the whole of human life is seen as a ‘struggle for existence’ in which ‘the political’ finds its expression and its field of probation, one ‘realm of meaning’ and ‘realm of reality’ claims dominance over ‘manifold, […] competing realms of reality’ (Schütz 2003, pp. 117–220, pp. 175–180). If this dominance in world interpretation and action is accepted as “excellent reality”, this leads, as I have tried to show, to a narrowing of perspectives and thus to a limitation of options for interpretation and action: To a loss of interpretive openness. The ambiguity and contradictoriness of our perceptions and experiences, which in turn point to the uncertainty and risk of human decision-making, gives way to a focus on an imagined ‘actual’ that “in existentially witnessed determination” (Heidegger) calls for decision: for ‘great moral decision’ (Schmitt) (Heidegger 1960 [1927], p. 309; Schmitt 1940, p. 11).10 Goethe put the fascination that comes from such concentration of perspectives on decision and deed into verse with light mockery, using the example of Faust’s translation efforts in translating the first sentence of the Gospel of John into ‘my beloved German’ (Faust): It is written, ‘In the beginning was the Word!’ Here I falter already!

Dissatisfied with the ‘word’, which he ‘cannot possibly appreciate’, Faust tries the formulation: ‘In the beginning was the sense’, but then asks himself: ‘Is it the sense that works and creates everything?’ It seems better to him: ‘In the beginning was the power!’ but even there ‘something warns him that [it] will not remain so’. Then the decision is made: All at once I see counsel and write confidently: In the beginning was the deed. (Goethe 1912, p. 56)

The consequence of this translation would be that also Genesis would have to be rewritten. For in it creative deed and word/speech are closely related to each other:

 I deliberately draw the two quotations together in order to make visible once again the parallels in the thinking of Heidegger and Schmitt: cf. Heidegger (1960 [1927], p.  309); Schmitt (1940, p. 11). 10

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“In11 the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was desolate and empty”. But then follow eight performative speech acts  – “And God spoke …” (Luther 1974 [1545], pp. 25–26), from which the initially empty earth becomes the fleshed-out creation: Divine speech materializes creation, which in turn is reported in a grand narrative: Creation is followed by Scripture and interpretation. But to interpret creation and scripture, one must read Faust’s efforts backwards: from deed back to word.12 For man as an ‘undetermined’ (Nietzsche), cosmopolitan, therefore forced to interpret, historical being, the experience applies that the question ‘how everything began’ was and is answered with ever new beginning and creation/death myths, but that ‘at the end’ – again and again anew – stands the word: The interpretation of the world views fed by images, narratives and myths. Even the everyday, interpretive understanding of the living world is – as a constant confrontation with the ambiguity of perception – anything but one-dimensional. This basic experience finds its expression in the word ‘inter-pretation’, among others. ‘Pretium’ = ‘price’ and ‘interpretium’ = ‘broker’s money’ clarify what is initially at stake in everyday life: the mediation between parties/interests, which without mediation would not come to mutual understanding and a possible agreement between the participants. The basic operation of interpreting is thus comparison, the enemy of the ‘incomparable’, ‘unique’, ‘absolute’. The attempt to interpret the irrational rationally using the example of ‘violence’ and ‘deed’ shows (cf. I, see above) that precisely in the exaltation of reason – as an apparently analytically unassailable ‘counterpart’ of the irrational – pre- and irrational motives are recognizable. But the interpretive comparison of reason and irrationality, of ‘practical’ and ‘pure’ reason on the one hand, and of myths of action/violence and creation on the other, reveals that both the charisma of reason and that of the irrational point not to univocity but to alternative designs as starting and ending points. Not only the already mentioned inner ambivalence of the religion of reason and the coercive character that institutionalized rationality and rationality frozen in institutions can assume show this – they are, after all (see above), often enough the  Jürgen Raab, a meticulous reader and good friend, is the occasion for the following remark: The difference between the ‘in the beginning …’ of the creation story and the ‘in the beginning …’ of John’s gospel points to the fact that God sets an act in the beginning. Within this work of creation, the performative speech acts then follow in the beginning of this process. Faust, in his final ‘translation attempt’, resolves this difference in favour of the act. Goethe, the creator of Faust, in turn gives us back (his) word: a creative ‘parallel action’ (Robert Musil). 12  Cf. Kierkegaard’s well-known insight that life must be ‘lived forward’ but can be ‘understood backward’. 11

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cause for the emergence of ‘counter-violence’. Quite obviously, alongside reason – and often both more strongly and more functionally than it – the irrational itself, albeit in its manifestations that we perceive as positive (trust, sympathy, compassion, love), makes a fundamental contribution to human coexistence. What Max Weber states for eroticism, namely that it is able to convey the feeling of having “escaped the cold skeletal hands of rational orders just as completely as the dullness of everyday life”, applies in a similar way to the other domains of the non-rational just mentioned. They, too, capture the “core of the truly living, eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor” (Weber 1973a, p. 469). And they, too, accomplish something that the strongly undercooled charm of ratio hardly succeeds in doing: they draw people to each other and stabilize communities by permanently grounding human coexistence with sympathetic emotions beyond the rationality of purpose. In short, the irrational is fascinating not only in its demonic form of expression, violence, but also in the surprising purposelessness of a humanity that does not have to search for rational reasons before it becomes humane. The analysis of the charisma of violence would thus have to be followed by the analysis of the charisma and fascination of purposeless humanity. Just as interpreting as a method has developed from the mediating everyday practice of comparison, so too hermeneutics arises from a fundamental everyday procedure of understanding: The Greek ‘hermeneuein’ initially means ‘to interpret’, i.e. ‘to translate’ on the basis of comparing different languages. The methodically controlled practice of hermeneutics has a consequence that must be repugnant to the pathos of actuality, of the state of exception, of the absolute distinction between friend and foe, and the unequivocal decision against the enemy that this demands: Hermeneutics demands the “departure from the principled” (Marquard 1981; Soeffner 1989/2003, pp. 114–159). But it too has its initial myth. It lives from Greek polytheism. And the patron saint of hermeneutics is a clearly ambiguous god: Hermes. It is the god of herds, of trade, of the economy then and now, of thieves, of dreams. Last but not least, he is the companion of souls, guiding them on their final journey to the underworld. Zeus, a quick-change artist who liked his equally clever and mischievous son – for good reasons – attested to him being “a very resourceful, eloquent and persuasive little god.” If so, Hermes asked, “make me your messenger,” and I assure you, I will “never lie again.” The crucial addition for hermeneutics immediately follows, “But I cannot promise always to tell the whole truth” (Ranke-Graves 1959/1960, p. 54). Only those who possess the whole truth can tell the whole truth. Hermeneutics and science know truth only in the plural: truths. The singular, on the other hand, applies to an indispensable maxim: truthfulness (Kant 1974, p. 637).

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Soeffner, H.-G. (2018). Werte im Spannungsfeld zwischen Freiheit und Gesellschaftsvertrag. In R. Rodenstock & N. Sevsay-Tegethoff (Hrsg.), Werte – und was sie uns wert sind: Eine interdisziplinäre Anthologie (S. 75–94). München: Roman Herzog Institut. Sorel, G. (1928). Über die Gewalt. Insbruck: Wagner. Stevenson, R.  L. (2000). Die Wrackräuber. (The Ebbe-Tide). Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe. Weber, M. (1973a). Soziologie. Universalgeschichtliche Analysen. Politik. In J. Winckelmann (Hrsg.). Stuttgart: Kröner. Weber, M. (1973b). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. In J.  Winckelmann (Hrsg.). Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Weber, M. (1976). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Studienausgabe. In J. Winckelmann (Hrsg.). Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck.

Foreignness: Between Sacralization and Resentment Alfred Schäfer

1 Foreignness as a Relational Concept It may seem banal to emphasize that strangeness is not an ontological concept. Foreignness does not exist ‘in itself’. What can be understood by it only arises in relation to other concepts – such as the own or the other. The own, the other and the foreign cannot be determined independently of each other. And the respective relations remain fragile, since their significations cannot be fixed ontologically, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous signified. This is not to say that such fixations in the form of (ontological) determinations of essence are not to be found in concrete political or identity-political discourse. However, such strategically motivated determinations of the Other always serve relationally to reassure and valorize one’s own. Counter-strategies will then be directed towards opening up the relational determination game of foreignness, otherness and Eigenheit. This will be discussed later. First of all, a cautious approach to the use of the three concepts in their relation to each other seems to make sense.

A. Schäfer (*) Martin-Luther-University, Halle, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_3

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A first approach arises when one assumes that one’s own only shows itself in the demarcation from the other. In the Hegelian formulation: only in the other can the own come to itself. The contouring of the self depends on the profiling of the other. Only the attribution of characteristics, patterns of relationships, self-­understandings with a view to the others makes it possible to distinguish one’s own from them and to understand it as one’s own. Hegel already knew that the proper can thus only be understood as the other of the others – as dependent on a determination of the others that excludes any immediate identity of the proper with itself. The otherness of the others may be a projection (an othering – Fabian 1983), but only from it can the imagination of the proper then be gained. The mutual constitution of self and other also remains fragile because the respective identities themselves are not simply fixed in their relationship to one another. This relationship must always be established anew and with a view to other points of view that allow one to distinguish between one’s own and the other. Such logics of determination manage without a strong understanding of foreignness. This is due to the fact that the respective distinctions can ultimately be related to comparative criteria from which a difference can be created. These can be different understandings of economy (peasants versus nomads; developed versus undeveloped economies), family relations (extended versus nuclear family), educational practices or customs: But they only show up as differences because it is assumed that, say, all societies have these organizational problems and solve them differently. A look at political history and the present teaches us that the comparative criteria are not handled neutrally: They are used to justify superiority and inferiority, humanity and barbarism, strategies of subjugation and development aid. The comparison of one’s own with the other seems to suggest value judgements and identity-political strategies of demarcation with the most diverse – even violent – consequences. The point of view of foreignness sets a different accent here by radicalizing heterogeneity. This means that the possibility of resorting to comparative criteria becomes problematic, to say the least: The foreign is not to be determined as Other, from which one’s own can then be grasped. In contrast to the other, as it appears in relation to the own, the foreign simply remains inaccessible. Waldenfels has pointed out that this inaccessibility shows itself in the attempt to approach it. But if the foreign cannot be determined as the other, then it simultaneously means a challenge for the determination of what can be understood as one’s own. Strangers make one’s own self-understanding a problem. And they do this  – following on from what has been said above – not only in a differential demarcation from the Other, but also in an evaluative relationship. Thus, beyond its inaccessibility, the foreign also poses the question of the possibility of an evaluative comparison, for which the criteria are ultimately lacking.

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From the not only theoretical, but also practical and affective dilemma of a relationship to the foreign, one can seek the way out of identifying the foreign as Other after all, and thus open up possibilities of understanding. Such a strategy cannot simply be rejected as illegitimate, because it opens up possibilities of relation and communication that are indispensable for shaping social relations in times of migration. These relations between the then Other and the Own may remain problematic; they also open up the possibilities of idealizing and pejorative judgments, since one now believes to know what the Others are all about. I will not pursue this problematic area of change further here and evaluate the field of political debate it has opened up. In contrast, I would like to hold on to strangeness and the incomparability it implies and consider two ways of dealing with such strangeness. In doing so, it is important for me to show that these forms of dealing with foreignness cannot simply relate to it – in a sacralizing or exclusionary way. Rather, in both cases, strategically complex operations are implicitly necessary. One cannot simply love or hate the foreign, because one would have to know it in order to do so. One can – as a first form of dealing – stylize the foreign as a challenge to an all too self-confident own and hope for gains in distancing oneself from one’s own from its difference to the determinable otherness. Such a strategy demands that one constantly work through one’s own determinations of the foreign and question them. In contrast, a strategy that seeks to identify foreignness as a threat demands that foreigners be defined as others on the one hand, while at the same time being understood as indeterminable and therefore dangerous. This is not at all an easy operation, because here the difference between Other and Stranger must be conceived in such a way that it simultaneously constitutes and threatens the own. In my second step, I will try to show that this problematic manifests itself in a specific form of resentment. If you like, the two strategies considered here form an affective field of tension in dealing with the foreign, in which the attempts to replace foreignness with otherness also move, in order to open up a level of communication (which remains problematic).

2 Sacralized Strangeness The attraction of foreignness, as has already been suggested, consists in questioning the self-evidence of the self by depriving it of the possibility of constituting itself from the Other. Such foreignness is not simply there: the good savage of the eighteenth century must be proclaimed against a colonialist definition of the inferior Other (Bitterli 1976; Fink-Eitel 1994). The invention of the good savage was

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not least intended to question the self-valorization of an occidental Christian civilization ready for any murder, whose greed claimed countless victims in the colonies. And it was supposed to make this possible by removing the otherness of others from the common logic of development, which assigned them only a lower (sometimes even an animal) rank. In the process, otherness became an incomparable strangeness whose value and dignity were to be located beyond one’s own systems of order and whose perspective was to be recognized as equal. On the one hand, the exoticization of the Other as a noble stranger produced a critique of one’s own self-assurance and superiority; on the other hand, it is a starting point for romanticized counter-designs to the emerging capitalist modernity. Foreignness as an intrinsic, perhaps even better, because original counter-­design to one’s own society, critically judged from here – such a strategy had to make itself – as, for example, pedagogy did at the same time vis-à-vis the foreign child – the advocate of something that could not be understood as foreign. It almost inevitably falls into the paradox of taking sides with something that it itself cannot understand. Its authorization depends on the fact that it stands up for something whose dignity consists precisely in the fact that it cannot be understood. If we disregard a phantasm of empathy that has persisted to this day, according to which gifted individuals are supposed to be able to merge with the foreign, the royal road here seems to consist in sacralization. In this, it is the strangeness, which one cannot do justice to out of one’s own, that obliges the one who perceives it as such in the first place to remain faithful to this not being able to do justice. To speak in the name of a sacralized stranger is then as necessary as it is impossible. In terms of type, sacralization creates a kind of religious bond that attempts to do justice to the unrecognizable sacred by placing itself at its service. This service implies the insight into one’s own inadequacy, which can still be directed against any claim to dispose of the foreign, against any claim to treat it as a determinable other. The science that works on the paradox of foreignness, ethnology, is not free of such sacralization strategies: it works not least on the rehabilitation of the foreign. This formulation dates from the 1990s (Streck 1997), that is, from a time when anthropology, like no other science before it, had grappled with the problem of representation and ultimately failed to find a solution (Berg and Fuchs 1993). In this context, the analysis of the foreign always appeared as a representation that had not left the logic of the self and therefore did not do justice to the foreign. Even field research did not lead out of this dilemma of showing the intrinsic value of the foreign and at the same time only being able to do so from one’s own perspective. Even before the debate on representation, Claude Lévi-Strauss had worked this out in an article on Rousseau as the founder of the sciences of man. For him, the study of the stranger in situ requires the systematic will “of an identification with the

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Other” in unity “with the stubborn refusal of an identification with oneself” (Lévi-­ Strauss 1975, p. 47). The refusal of identification with oneself constitutes the possibility that the Other can become significant as a stranger, as another ‘I’ (Lévi-­ Strauss 1975, p. 49). If these are not to remain merely abstract postulates, then it is necessary for Lévi-Strauss to view fieldwork as more than just a cognitive learning process. In it, the researching person finds him/herself exposed to an environment over which he/she cannot dispose, which he/she does not understand – and yet to which he/she reacts as an ‘I’: ‘but it is an I physically and morally tormented by exhaustion, hunger, privation, the shaking of its habits of life, and suddenly emerging prejudices whose existence it had not even suspected’ (Lévi-Strauss 1975, p.  47). Ethnographic fieldwork, therefore, consists first and foremost in putting oneself in relation to one’s own reactions and affects: The field researcher must learn to make his own reactions his object; he must attain “an appraisal of a self that proves to be an Other in relation to the I that makes use of it” (Lévi-Strauss 1975, p. 48). It is the decentering of the self as the representative of a cultural other that, for Lévi-Strauss, is the precondition for accepting oneself in the stranger – and thus opening up a double space of strangeness. For Lévi-Strauss, working on one’s own affective reactions to strangeness thus opens up a space of possibility for research in which the logic of one’s own claims to disposal is broken through to the extent that a relationship to the stranger, who ultimately remains unknown, becomes conceivable. In it, a self, which has learned to perceive its own ego as foreign, and an other, which dwells in its otherness, meet. A process has then taken place in which the impossibility of being able to do justice to the other from one’s own leads to a negation of this own and thus also to the hope of at least approaching the other as a stranger. With Rousseau he sees such a possibility founded in human pity (Lévi-Strauss 1975, p. 50). Such pity or compassion is not immediately given as something in which one’s own or one’s own political positioning could celebrate itself as humane. Lévi-Strauss shows the travails of a theoretical and affective decentering of the self so that the possibility of such compassion can emerge.1 Before we now deal with resentment as another affectively significant form of dealing with the foreign, which instead of decentering one’s own relies on (in part hateful) exclusion, it seems to make sense to take a look at the strategic possibili-

 At this point it must be mentioned that the difficult way of dealing with the foreign shown here also structures the concept of an ‘educative experience’ as it can be thought of from Adorno (1962). Here, too, what is at stake – vis-à-vis the gesture of an identifying world and self – is a double strangeness. And here, too, it is the mysteriousness of the world and the Other that can make possible an alienation of one’s own will to self-assertion and identification (Schäfer 2017). 1

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ties that are generally available to a sacralization perspective of the foreign vis-à-­ vis perspectives of exclusion and devaluation. Such a view is directed towards a necessarily abstract space of options for action, which may be spelled out concretely and performatively in very different ways. It seems to be the case that the sacralization perspective of foreignness has a rather weak status vis-à-vis those who do not already share it. This can be illustrated by two strategic modes of operation. If the strangers have been objectified into Others, to whom one perhaps also attributes negatively evaluated characteristics, then a first (and rather ­superficial or normative) strategy seems to be to try to turn the attributions into their opposite, as it were. One will then try to emphasize positive characteristics, to refer to the enrichment of one’s own by the others, to organize places of (folkloric) encounter, etc. In a second – systematic – strategy, one can invoke the strangeness of the attributed others: One can thus try to reject the attributions and thus also the (negative) evaluation of the others by pointing out that, as strangers, one cannot know them after all. Such a strategy must remain ambivalent, because the reference to the mysteriousness of the strangers in those who have already classified them as a possible threat in their attributions is more likely to reinforce the perceived threat than to abandon oneself to the fascination of the unknown. In addition, the very person who advertises foreignness cannot himself identify what he is advertising. Ultimately, he is promoting an opening towards the unknown, which, in the eyes of its addressees, is precisely the reason for developing exclusions and resentments.

3 The Resentment Towards Foreignness Resentment does not have a good reputation. This is first of all because it is attributed a dominance of affectivity that cannot be supported by rational arguments. Affectivity dominates rationality (Knoop 2016, p. 156). Rejection and devaluation of an opponent are not reasoned, but seem to obey mechanisms that blind the rejector. He is therefore also resistant to efforts to dissuade him from his point of view by means of reasonable arguments. Worse still, resentment can arm itself against the enlightening imposition of rationality by imputing to it a devaluation and arrogance – in short: a resentment. The assertion of a civilisational and reasonable superiority of rationality thereby places itself under the spell of an affectivity that rejects those who do not bow to this passion. It is not possible here to discuss the relationship between reason and passion. Suffice it to say here that it is not at all easy to assert a clear front position between ‘pure’ reason and affective resentment without becoming entangled in the logic of

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hegemonic strategies.2 And it is precisely this field from which the second reason for rejecting ressentiment can be seen. Since Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morals’, ressentiment has been understood as a political and indeed extremely effective strategy of the weak against the strong (Nietzsche 1966). It is the inferior who have no chance in an open confrontation with the strong – whether this is conducted violently or also with insightful justifications – but who nevertheless succeed in transforming their weakness into strength and superiority. The strategy consists in a moralization of the relationship, which Nietzsche – without this being of importance here – attaches to Christianity. The basis of this moralization strategy consists in an assumption of equality. Against its background, the superiority of the strong is always suspected of having come about illegitimately. If it is possible to inculcate a sense of injustice in the superior, then they will endeavour to establish the legitimacy of their superiority by respecting the weak as what they are not: as equals. For Nietzsche, the strategy of the weak has thus worked. The relations of domination have been reversed: it is the weak who now dominate the strong by subjecting them to a compulsion to justify themselves, which deprives them of their superiority. The latter must now always ask themselves whether they do justice to the weak as equals in principle, whether what they do can be legitimized vis-à-vis the weak. It is the association of ressentiment with a perhaps rightly given weakness, an inability to assert oneself or to manage one’s affairs rationally, that sustains ressentiment’s bad reputation. Even though Nietzsche does acknowledge a culture-­ creating significance to ressentiment in his genealogical narrative, these negative connotations remain. Max Scheler likewise locates the “contagious psychic poison of ressentiment” (Scheler 2004, p. 7) as a coping strategy for dependency relationships. Now, at this point, it is not his broad arguments against Nietzsche in which Scheler, a converted Catholic, seeks to absolve Christianity of the charge of being a religion of resentment that are of interest. More significant-and pointing beyond Nietzsche-is a quasi-sociological location of resentment. Scheler sees modern cul It can only be pointed out at this point that, not least, the relationship between social criticism and resentment would also have to be negotiated at this point. If reason is not simply given independently of the passions, but is itself based not least on a passion (for that very reason), then one will have to argue passionately for the reasonable point of view without these arguments having to be accepted by those who do not share that very passion. In doing so, the latter cannot simply be classified as irrational, since they are, after all, doing nothing other than being a-rational to rationality – where a-rationality on both sides stands for the relation to rationality not already determined by the rationality of arguments. It is precisely this a-rationality that is caught up in the discussion of ressentiment where it is spoken of as a polemical concept. 2

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ture as one based on the postulate of equality. Everyone should have the same opportunities and the same rights. Given this starting point, modern society, for Scheler, must develop procedures of fair comparison in order to distribute those who are equal in principle to different and unequal positions. The fundamental problem then is that such procedures can always be challenged: Competition among equals means that anyone can feel unfairly treated according to some (subjective) standard. For Scheler, then, it is the demand for equality that is central to modern society that makes experiences of inequality and injustice ubiquitous (Scheler 2004, p. 15). This makes modern society one for which not only the demand for equality but also resentment is characteristic. Disadvantage, perceived as unjust, leads to the denial of entitlement to those who are superior in comparison, especially affectively. For Scheler, the ubiquitous occurrence of resentment therefore has its reason not in a psychological structure or irrational affects, but in a culture based on equality: the recourse to the standard of equality allows a specific connection of resentment with rational arguments (Olschanski 2015, pp. 18–19). One does not have to follow Scheler when he (with Nietzsche) tries to understand the modern culture of equality, the “humanism and rationalism of the modern bourgeoisie” (Scheler 2004, p.  76) itself as the effect of a ressentiment, against which he puts forward a Christian idea of equality. Analytically significant, however, seems to be his connection of the production of social inequality on the basis of equality with ressentiment. This ressentiment insists on an equality that is always already given as opposed to a comparison based on a competition that ultimately produces injustice. In the name of equality, inequality is rejected as unjust. And this is ultimately done by rejecting any justification for inequality. Ressentiment, we might say with Martin Seel, “is an aversion sealed off from argument and experience” (Seel 2004, p. 776) because the loss of the common, of an equality that knows no losers and no exclusions, is experienced as threatening. Conversely, this means that the projection of a harmonious community that should actually characterise the world of equals leads to the affirmation of an idealised ‘we’ that excludes any inequality, superiority or power. Seel puts it this way: ‘Ressentiment is an affect of affirmation of an average, limited, manageable, familiar horizon of bonds and values beyond whose boundaries one does not dare to feel, think, act, in a word, to live’ (Seel 2004, p. 777). At the same time, however, Seel (with Nietzsche and Scheler) also marks the political deployment of such a resentment. This consists in the inversion of the experience of one’s own inferiority into the perception of one’s own superiority. This inversion is based on the fact that one is treated unjustly while actually being morally in the right (Seel 2004, p. 777): it is a victimization strategy that figures the counterpart as always already oppressing. The figure of this inversion now not only permits the affirmation of one’s own

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as right; it also permits the defense against justifications of what one experiences as unjust. Such justifications come anyway only from the superior and represent for their part an elitist resentment against those supposedly to be enlightened. At first glance, resentment towards foreigners seems to fit easily into this analysis. The affirmation of one’s own in the face of a threat ‘from outside’, the clinging to the familiar and the refusal to accept arguments and experiences that could question the assumed self-evidence of one’s own can be identified as phenomena. The perceived (and also propagandistically supported) threat turns into rejection, ­aggression or even hatred, which at the same time affirms the moral superiority of one’s own. And yet, against the background of the previous considerations on the functional logic of resentment, resentment towards strangers raises questions. According to this view, ressentiment was based on experiences of injustice that were articulated against the background of an equality that was not adequately taken into account and that ensured the unjustly treated a moral superiority over the socially superior. If, however, strangeness is understood as radical heterogeneity, this implies at the same time that this equality cannot be claimed as a criterion of experienced injustice. Strangeness is then to be understood not only as that which is radically different, but also as that which excludes any comparison with one’s own – as this is possible, for instance, with a determinable Other. The question that arises from here, then, is how foreignness can become the object of resentment when neither the condition of a presupposed sameness nor that of comparability is given. The question, then, is by means of which operations strangers become the object of resentment. This question cannot be answered merely by turning strangers into others in resentment, i.e. by ascribing to strangers certain characteristics that make them an other of one’s own. At the beginning, it was pointed out that one’s own and the other are relative concepts that refer to each other constitutively. This does not have to be understood simply as a peaceful relation, but can also be thought of as an aggressive demarcation. In this way, a dimension of resentment becomes visible that has not been in focus so far: here, the inversion of inferiority into moral superiority turns into the logic of an aggressive confrontation, the result of which has not infrequently been war. In the present context, the resentment towards foreigners who, for example as migrants, are themselves in a weaker situation, a strategic game with the difference between otherness and foreignness can be observed. The ascribed negative characteristics (exploitation of social systems, disregard for the dignity of women, uncleanliness, etc.) constitute on the one hand a wonderful image of one’s own as superior; at the same time, however, this ascribed otherness is dramatized by the fact that one cannot even know what these others are capable of. This dramatization turns others into strangers: their otherness becomes a surface behind which a much greater danger threatens to hide.

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Now, with regard to the theory of ressentiment, one can ask how such operations come about, if not only no claimed equality plays a role as a criterion, but even a superiority over the foreigner. At this point one usually helps oneself with the thesis of a shift. According to this theory, it is those who are ‘left behind’ by comparison or who fear the threat of social decline, who see no possibility in a climate of neoliberal competition of upgrading their own situation by means of the criterion of equality, who develop resentment towards foreigners. Behind this ­thesis, then, is the perception that those disadvantaged in comparison no longer see any possibility of articulating resentment against an unjust comparison by invoking equality. This resentment is then shifted to those who still threaten their own status justified by the comparison: the foreigners. Once one assumes that this mechanism of shifting resentment from the comparison perceived as unjust to the strangers should work in this way, then the question still arises as to why resentment is directed at people whom one does not know, who therefore have no place in the order of equality. In other words, how can one feel unjustly treated by them under the criterion of a presupposed equality and therefore develop a moral superiority toward them from which aggressive rejection results? If one follows the theory of resentment, then a common basis of equality and comparability must first be established in order to be able to articulate one’s own experience of injustice. But this is precisely what is not happening now. Rather, it is the stranger’s unjustified claim to such equality to which the perception of an injustice affecting one’s own position attaches itself. Instead of a seemingly unjust comparison, which is unjust because it violates the claim to equal treatment, it is the claim to equal treatment itself that is the basis for the experience of injustice and thus for the resentment. The uncanny threateningness of the others, which makes them strangers, then demands that they be repelled, excluded and persecuted in that claim to equality – that claim to equality whose disregard is otherwise considered the source of resentment. The fact that the strangers are understood as people with equal claims then forms the source of a resentment whose affective charge goes even beyond the quasi-normal experiences of injustice and inequality and is capable of mobilization within the framework of an imaginary (and equal) own (such as the people). It is the strangers’ claim to equality that, on the one hand, interprets them beyond the consideration of their otherness (which presents the own in a positive light), as it were, into the own itself. And it is this claimed ‘identity’ with one’s own that, on the other hand, generates a threat that goes far beyond mere otherness. The strangers are then not only (negatively evaluated) others who – in the sense of resentment – are treated better than oneself. This injustice is now exaggerated by the fact that they demand for themselves an equality that they do not have because they do not belong to one’s own. Such a constellation, in which the unjust discrimination against the strangers by the state and social services is topped by the fact that these strangers

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actually have no claim to equality and equal treatment – such a constellation has a peculiar effect. It causes the ‘normal’ resentment, the experienced unequal treatment and injustice in a society that treats equals unequally, to shift. In relation to the defence against the strangers’ unjustified claim to equality, the injustice experienced within society now suddenly appears to recede into the background. Against the foreigners, an idealizing exaltation of one’s own ‘we’, the Germans against the foreigners, then helps. Only from this ‘we’ figured as ‘equal’ can the unjustified claim of the foreigners be dramatized. And those who, as a government or aid organization, support this claim of the foreigners to equality, present themselves in this light not only as those who want to help others, but as traitors to the unity of their own ‘we’: they are now met with the hatred of those who want to defend their equality as Germans against the claims of the foreigners – and in doing so forget that within this ‘we’ they otherwise do not exactly represent a harmonious community of equals.

References Adorno, Theodor W., (1962). Theorie der Halbbildung. In: Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (Hrsg.): Sociologica II. Reden und Vorträge (= Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, 10), Frankfurt a.M., S. 160–180. Berg, E. & Fuchs, M. (1993). Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bitterli, U. (1976). Die ‚Wilden‘ und die ‚Zivilisierten’. Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung. München: Beck. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other. Anthropology makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fink-Eitel, H. (1994). Die Philosophie und die Wilden. Über die Bedeutung des Fremden für die europäische Geistesgeschichte. Hamburg: Junius. Knoop, C.A. (2016). Criticism or Ressentiment? Literary Studies and Politics of Interdisciplinarity. In J.  Riou & M.  Gallagher (Hrsg.), Re-Thinking Ressentiment. On the limits of Criticism and the Limits of its Critics (S. 149–166). Bielefeld: Transcript. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1975). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Begründer der Wissenschaften vom Menschen. In C.  Lévi-Strauss, Strukturale Anthropologie II (S. 45–56). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Nietzsche, F. (1966). Zur Genealogie der Moral. In K.  Schlechta (Hrsg.), Werke in drei Bänden Band II (S. 761–900). München: Hanser. Olschanski, R. (2015). Ressentiment. Über die Vergiftung des europäischen Geistes. Paderborn: Fink. Schäfer, A. (2017). Theodor W. Adorno. Ein pädagogisches Porträt. Weinheim: Juventa. Scheler, M. (2004). Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen. Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann. Seel, M. (2004). Zuneigung, Abneigung  – Moral. In K.H.  Bohrer & K.  Scheel (Hrsg.), Ressentiment! Zur Kritik der Kultur. Sonderheft Merkur, 58. (9/10), S. 774–782. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Streck, B. (1997). Fröhliche Wissenschaft Ethnologie. Eine Einführung. Wuppertal: ­Hammer.

Fear and Vulnerability: Anthropological Approaches Jörg Zirfas

1 Introduction Human beings are vulnerable creatures: They are vulnerable and susceptible, in some situations their lives prove fragile and breakable, they can be harmed and suffer by their circumstances, and not only at the end of life are they inescapably confronted with their finitude and mortality. Since these observations affect all people – even if not to the same extent – vulnerability can be understood as a significant anthropological category. As an anthropological thesis, it can be stated that humans are vulnerable beings because they are bodily, socially, culturally and reflexively constituted living beings. People are vulnerable because they are physically and emotionally vulnerable, because they can be materially harmed, or because they are deprived of recognition and participation (Popitz 1992, pp. 43–47). The term vulnerability is understood as the vulnerability or susceptibility of a person in the face of existing hazards, risks, crises or damaging events that have already occurred (Bürkner 2010, p. 24; Burghardt et al. 2017).1  Vulnerability does not mean being injured or damaged (as so often in the relevant literature, where the potentiality of vulnerability is equated with the reality of injury), but only the possibility or probability of being injured or damaged. 1

J. Zirfas (*) Universiät zu Köln, Köln, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_4

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Against this background, I would first like to remind you of a simple, perhaps even banal fact: people are afraid because they are vulnerable and they are vulnerable because they are afraid. Because they can feel pain and suffering, because they are threatened by uncertainties and insecurities, because they are confronted with losses and finally – and above all – because they are finite and mortal, they feel fear. And: because they are afraid of facts, because they are afraid of embarrassments, offenses and injuries, this in turn makes them vulnerable, fragile and susceptible to attack. Fear is one, or perhaps even a decisive indicator of vulnerability, and vice versa: vulnerabilities manifest themselves in fears and anxieties. Human life is always both: being afraid and seeking protection. If we talk about violence in the context of fear and vulnerability, we can look at it from the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim. From the perpetrator’s point of view, fear is about fear of freedom; from the victim’s point of view, it is about fear of coercion. These forms of fear express anthropological vulnerability, since they always involve situations that overtax people, that they cannot cope with – both as perpetrators and as victims. Fear has to do with threatening situations that are on the one hand unknown and on the other hand all too familiar. It announces danger and mobilizes people to flee, resist or conserve resources. It is equally conditioned by life-historical experiences and their evaluations as by fantasies and their uncertainties. These aspects will be explored from philosophical, psychoanalytical and social science perspectives. First, there are some remarks on fear as an emotion, and the conclusion is formed by considerations centered around the connection between finitude, violence, fear and hope. I argue from the perspective of historical anthropology, which – in this case – always reflects the historicity of human images, fears, vulnerabilities and forms of violence, as well as the historicity of their ways of looking at things (Böhme 1996; Perniola 2009). In this respect, the following considerations do not claim to be transcultural or ­transhistorical.

2 Fear as an Emotion Emotions or affects (emotions) can be distinguished from feelings (sentiments), from moods (moods) and from sensations (feelings).2 While sensations such as pain, itching, etc. are at their core physical experiences, the other affective phenomena appear  Ben-Ze’ev (2009, pp. 73–77) distinguishes the main types of affective phenomena with the criteria: (1) general or specific evaluation and (2) current or potential nature of the phenomenon, and thus arrives at four affective types: (1) emotions (specific, current), (2) sentiments (specific, potential), (3) moods (general, current), (4) affective traits (general, potential). However, this differentiation does not seem to be clear-cut. – In the authoritative literature, the terminology is often used in an undifferentiated manner. 2

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to be of a different order. Feelings – such as trust, love, world-­weariness – are latent, longer-lasting dispositions that lack direct bodily arousal and do not immediately result in a response; they are not intentionally directed at a state of affairs and are difficult to dispute in their appropriateness. Moods – of joy, of dejection – on the other hand, may have an occasion or cause; they are not intentionally directed, “less intense than emotions, but last longer than them, and at the same time are of shorter temporal duration than emotions” (Ben-Ze’ev 2009, p. 11). Anxiety can include moments of emotion as well as feeling and mood. I focus first on anxiety as an emotion and do not separately address anxiousness as a feeling and trepidation as a mood.3 First, in general terms: emotions lie at the intersection of subjectivity and culturality and of onto- and phylogenesis as well as of controllability and unavailability, and they occur as both conscious and unconscious phenomena.4 Emotions are of short duration; they have a (rapid) judgment and evaluation dimension, social and communicative as well as arousal and motive components; they reduce the complexity of perception, information, inference and choice and they can therefore also be associated with a certain intentionality and attractiveness5; moreover, emotions are i. usually accompanied by a range of physiological changes and, where appropriate, physical behaviors6; they are highly dependent on personality, circumstances, and perception of significant change (Ben-Ze’ev 2009; Ekman 2010). Moreover, emotions have an idiosyncratic legitimacy, usually feeling right and justified (de Sousa 2009, p. 202; perhaps precisely because people do not feel responsible for feelings).7 Emotions differ primarily in their evaluative content; they  Anxious moods make people extremely vulnerable: anxious moods, to a high degree, “limit our alternatives, distort our thinking, and make it harder for us to control what we do, and usually for no rational reason” (Ekman 2010, p. 72). 4  On the main concepts of emotions represented in philosophy, cf. the overview by Krebs (2015, p. 180 ff.), who distinguishes the following models: Body theory (bodily states of arousal), sensation theory (perception of arousal), behavioural theory (voluntary and involuntary behaviour), cognition theory (evaluation), narrative theory (narrative integrated units) and component theory (from the approaches presented) – to which the approach advocated here also belongs. 5  “Feelings are types of fixed patterns of urgency among objects of attention, directions of questioning, and strategies of inference. […] Feelings fix problems” (de Sousa 2009, p. 320). 6  Is there something to be said for fear being read primarily from the reactions of the eyes? Does fear have to be understood from sight and from the gaze? (cf. the movie Peeping Tom). 7  This anthropologically common fact can be well related to the historical sensology of Perniola, who speaks of an age of the “already-felt” in the present (Perniola 2009, p. 19 ff.). According to him, feeling has acquired an impersonal, anonymous, socialized character; people’s feeling resembles a “reflection”, a “reprocessing or an “echo” (Perniola 2009, p. 31). In order to regain emotional autonomy, it is necessary to learn to feel, i.e. to practice „attentiveness, vigilance, constant attention” and at the same time also “letting oneself be felt”: “offering oneself so that something in us can find a possibility of being-in-the-world” (Perniola 2009, p. 139). 3

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are often associated with other emotions, feelings, and moods, as well as with a person’s self-concept and self-design. In short, emotions enable us to experience a living reality; through them we learn what is truly important and significant for us and our well-being (Engelen 2007, pp. 54–55, 94). They capture the “axiological level” of our reality (de Sousa 2009, p. 481). Emotions can be understood as an expression of our anthropological vulnerability, having to do with the uncertainty of our actions, limited resources, and reliance on others; they therefore provide “right” evaluations and ways of responding, rapid mobilizations, and social means of communication (Ben-Ze’ev 2009, pp.  149– 150). However, they “are also a way of coping with this vulnerability. When we attach importance to limited changes in our current situations, we are in a sense ignoring the more profound kind of change that underlies our vulnerability; this is a kind of self-deception. […] We deal with these changes as if our profound vulnerability is meaningless” (Ben-Ze’ev 2009, p. 28).8 Fear, like a number of other emotions, e.g. disgust, shame, sadness, anger, joy and contempt, is one of the basic emotions of human existence (Demmerling and Landweer 2007, pp. 63–67). Humans can learn to be afraid of basically everything: the dark and trials, coercion and freedom, the strange and their own, life and death, and of course fear and even the loss of fear. Everything can become an object of fear. In view of the historically and interculturally high variability of fear (Delumeau 1989; Wiezbicka 1999), it can be argued that fear probably says less about the object, but much more about the fearful individual. In this sense, fears could in turn be differentiated according to culture, milieu, gender, age, development, religion, education, nationality, etc. A distinction is often made here between justified and unjustified or groundless fear; or also between real fear directed at a specific object and existential fear directed at the indefinite future. A distinction can also be made between immediate and indirect threats, manifest and latent, intense and less intense fears, mood-­related (worry), episodic (panic) or situational fears, and emotional amalgamations of fear, such as fearful, shameful or sad fear. Pathological forms of anxiety can be divided into three categories with Freud (Freud 1982b, vol. VI): Into the anxiety neurosis a general anxiety, into the phobias related to real or imaginary threats, and into the hysterical anxiety of the anxiety attack (see below).9 In addition, however, one can also count pathological forms of shyness, depression and post-traumatic stress dis But another form of deception can be noted, for the subjectively perceived danger is often more significant than the simple facts (Ben-Ze’ev 2009, p. 138). 9  The current DSM V distinguishes analogously between anxiety, fear and panic attack. 8

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order. In addition, a distinction is often made between fear (and with it horror, shudder, horror, horror), which refers to something known, and anxiety (and with it apprehension, worry, melancholy), which refers to something unknown (Delumeau 1989, p. 29). Depending on ego strength, an anxiety hierarchy can be developed, which can range, for example, from individual isolated phobias to ego decay. Fears are suffered, but they can also be produced. With the connection to a concrete object, a visible or even imaginary opponent, fears can be intensified and made permanent.10 We learn fears by associating them with “key scenarios” (de Sousa 2009, pp. 298–301), ritualized situations that are then associated with similar types of situations and characteristic responses to those situations later in life, from which a more complex fear repertoire emerges.11 However, people can also learn to stop fearing and not display the corresponding fearful expressions and actions. In this context, the learning successes or the learning limits in dealing with fear can be determined by six factors: By the proximity to the subject developed in evolution; by the similarity of the triggering event to the original situation in which the trigger was learned; by the biographical earliness of the original fear experience; by the intensity of that experience; by the density, i.e., the repeated occurrence of fear in relatively short periods of time; and, finally, by the affective temperament of the fearful person (Ekman 2010, pp. 65–68). In pedagogical terms, this is about re-learning or education, i.e. transforming patterns of perception, judgement and action in terms of improved ways of appropriating facts – and doing so in a hermeneutic, pragmatic and non-injurious way. It is about a measured anxiety that responds appropriately to situations in terms of content, form and time.

3 The Fear of Freedom In modern times, it is above all the existential philosophers and the psychologists who have worked out the connection between freedom and fear. The central starting point of philosophical discourses is formed by Sören Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, who see fear as a central borderline situation for human existence  Bauman assumes, with Michael Bakhtin, for example, that the established powerful in the primeval times owed their power to a transformation of “cosmic fear” (of natural disasters, for example) into official, human fears; these transformed the primeval fears, consequently, into the “horror of breaking the law” (Bauman 2017, pp. 52–55). 11  “An important part of parenting is identifying these reactions, in the context of the scenarios, giving the child names for them, and thereby teaching them that they are experiencing a particular feeling. This is, in part, what it means to learn to feel the right feelings …” (de Sousa 2009, p. 300). 10

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(Fink-Eitel 1993; Demmerling & Landweer 2007, pp. 83–86). Kierkegaard placed anxiety in a theological, philosophical and psychological context with the questions of innocence or guilt and freedom. In doing so, he assumes that fear is not only negative, but at the same time positive, when he speaks of it as “sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy” (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 51): fear has a dual character, for it is not only terrifying, but also attractive and captivating. Fear frightens – but it also fascinates. For, and this thesis may also be surprising at first, fear refers to freedom, being “the reality of freedom as possibility for possibility” (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 50). If anxiety is an indicator of being free from the “mental,” i.e., emotional moods, and from the “physical,” i.e., vital impulses, it indicates, on the one hand, the possibility of leading and shaping one’s life and, on the other hand, the possibility that leading and shaping may fail. When Kierkegaard writes that anxiety is born out of “nothingness” (ibid.), it means a state of mind that has not yet conceived and grasped its life, a state of innocence and ignorance: “Dreaming, the mind projects its own reality, this reality is nothingness” (Kierkegaard 1996, p.  50), i.e. it is not yet and therefore can succeed or fail. “Anxiety is neither a determination of necessity nor of freedom, it is a biased freedom, where freedom is thus not free in itself but biased, not in necessity but in itself” (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 59). Therefore, fear also goes hand in hand with innocence (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 50). It is only the be-ing and be-ing of the self that makes a person guilty, because it leaves the state of innocence. “Accordingly, anxiety is that vertigo of freedom which arises when the spirit wants to set the synthesis [of the psychic and the physical, JZ] and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then seizes finitude in order to hold on to it. In this dizziness freedom sinks down. […] when it rises again, it sees that it is guilty” (Kierkegaard 1996, p.  72). Dualistic anxiety is anxiety of freedom, it conveys possibilities of powerful availability and powerless unavailability of life; hence the ambiguity of guilt (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 72). In this respect, it indicates that in every becoming of the self there is always a self-failure, in every appropriation there is always an alienation. To summarize: In Kierkegaard, fear is fear of freedom, fear of pleasure, and fear of guilt. For Heidegger, who thinks in the footsteps of Kierkegaard,12 fear becomes the basic state or feeling of Dasein in general – to which all other emotions and moods remain related (Bollnow 1943). Anxiety – unlike fear, which refers to something  Cf. Fink-Eitel’s (1993, p. 80) parallelization of Kierkegaard’s concepts: (1) freedom and possibility, (2) necessity and reality, (3) dualism of concepts in comparison with Heidegger: (1) draft, (2) facticity, Geworfenheit, (3) Verfallensein. While Kierkegaard understands anxiety from freedom, Heidegger thinks it from facticity, i.e., being fallen. 12

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specifically threatening or deleterious – is concerned with the whole of Dasein or with the “world as such” (Heidegger 1979, p. 187). Heidegger analyzes not only the anxiety of freedom, which he, like Kierkegaard, understands as “being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping oneself” (Heidegger 1979, p. 188), at the same time Daseinsangst, which refers to, characterized by worry, life as a whole, and finally Weltangst, which he brings together with the uncanny of a worldly “un-­ at-­home” (Heidegger 1979, p. 189) (Fink-Eitel 1993, pp. 81–82). World anxiety is the central starting point of his analyses. Man does not fear in the face of the world, which would have to be called world-fear, but in the face of his solitary being in the world. For Heidegger, the world appears threatening and uncanny,13 senseless, without support and relationship, and inauthentic, summarized as: “inner-worldly nothing and nowhere” (Heidegger 1979, p. 186). Heidegger is ultimately concerned with the freedom of the self-fearing, with its possibilities of self-determination. In view of the lapse into the Man as an understanding of the facts of the world, the facticity of being thrown, solipsistic individualism or radical isolation, and finally the uncanniness and meaninglessness of the world, enduring fear takes on an almost heroic character. Put differently, Heidegger reinterprets the phenomenon of impotent anxiety into a phenomenon of power: he speaks of the “possibility of the mightiness by which the mood of anxiety is distinguished” (Heidegger 1979, p. 344; Fink-Eitel 1993, p. 84). To summarize: In Heidegger, anxiety is fear of the world, of existence, and of freedom. Sigmund Freud also remains committed to a subjectivist understanding of anxiety: ‘the ego is the sole site of anxiety, only the ego can produce and feel anxiety’

 At this point a connection can be made with Freud’s little 1919 paper on The Uncanny, in which Freud declares the uncanny, the terrible, the fearful, and the horrific to be part of one’s self. He writes: “If psychoanalytic theory is correct in the assertion that every affect of an emotion, of whatever kind, is transformed into anxiety by repression, there must be among the cases of the anxious a group in which it can be shown that this anxious is something recurrently repressed. This kind of anxious would be precisely the uncanny, and in this it must be indifferent whether it was originally anxious itself or borne by some other affect” (Freud 1982a, vol. 4, pp. 263–264). The uncanny has a fearful, overbearing character that puts the perceiver at risk of unlearning and losing perception – of no longer being able to perceive. Identity becomes questionable because (self-)perception implodes in the face of the uncanny. The uncanny is also the site of disorientation as getting lost in a space in which one is (always already) trapped, an uncanny space in which identity gets out of joint. “The uncanny would actually always be something in which one is, so to speak, unfamiliar. The better a person is oriented in the environment, the less easily he will receive the impression of uncanniness from things or incidents in it” (Freud 1982a, vol. 4, pp. 244–245; cf. Zirfas 2016). 13

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(Freud 1982a, vol. I, p. 520).14 Freud, in his psychoanalytic approach, which may well be read as an anthropology, presents a sophisticated analysis of human distress, which may be caused by ourselves, by nature, or by others: From jesting and suffering to “discomfort” and grief, to fear, terror and anxiety. The latter he first put into three forms: Realangst (of the outside world), Neurotic Anxiety (of the drive desires of the id), and Conscience Anxiety (of the demands of the superego; Freud 1982c, vol. I, p. 521). In its development, the infantile ego goes through a history of alternating states of anxiety: from man’s first experience of anxiety, birth (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p. 272), through the loss of the mother’s (breast) in the oral phase (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, pp. 277 f.) and the fear of loss of the object’s love in the anal phase (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, pp. 278 f.), to the imagined fear of the loss of the penis, the castration fear in the phallic (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p. 279) and the social conscience fear (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p. 279) in the genital phase. The sign of a well-developed healthy ego is the endurance of all tensions, in that the ego even “… brings about in its turn an influence on the processes in the id … by bringing into activity, by means of the anxiety signal, the almost omnipotent pleasure-­ unpleasure principle” (Freud 1982c, vol. I, p. 527). The “peaceable” ego (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p.  244) uses anxiety as a response to a state of danger-in other words, it increases tension to prevent even greater tension from the anticipated dangerous situation-but in doing so it runs the risk of missing the current appropriate response. Anxiety is not a drive-economic, automatic event, but an ego performance: a signal for the purpose of influencing the pleasure-unpleasure instance, intended to make the ego independent of the economic compulsion (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p. 280). But when anxiety becomes permanent, and it reaches a certain intensity, and the ego is no longer able to evoke it itself, the “signal anxiety” acquires the character of a compulsive neurosis. The ego deprives itself of certain free possibilities of satisfaction in favor of the obsessive symptomatology, from which, however, it knows how to extract certain satisfactions (primary and secondary gains). Another pathology consists in tying the dangerous aspect to a situation or to an object; the phobic fears are basically fears re-transformed into fear. “Most phobias, so far as we now overlook it, go back to such a fear of the demands of the libido” (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p.  253). And finally, anxiety hysterias consist in a perfect symptom formation that protects against the endangering affect. “Somehow anxiety is behind all symptoms …” (Freud 1982b, vol. VI, p. 261). With Freud, it

 I am here skipping Freud’s early biological concept of anxiety, which attributes anxiety to a disturbance in the patient’s current sexual behavior (Ermann 2012, pp. 36–39). 14

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is consequently necessary to distinguish between anxiety as a symptom and the unconscious anxiety of repression.15 It is striking that in all these theories fear is a phenomenon of freedom. Be it as freedom of choice and decision, as lust anxiety or guilt anxiety in Kierkegaard, as world anxiety and existential anxiety in Heidegger, or also as signal anxiety and neurotic anxiety in Freud. They all owe their existence to margins and possibilities, indeterminacies and risks, availabilities and uncertainties. In anxiety, man is confronted with a dizzying multiplicity of possibilities for action as well as with a bottomless abundance of possibilities for realization and an infinite plurality of potential consequences. In the freedom of fear, however, human beings are also confronted with themselves and their vulnerability, with their fragility and finiteness, with their unboundedness and uncertainty (Zirfas 2017).

4 The Fear of Compulsion We now change the perspective from the “perpetrators” to the “victims”. Perhaps most overwhelming is the fear that people feel when they are faced with a danger in which they perceive themselves to be powerless. Anxiety occurs when dealing with situations that one did not bring about and cannot control, which are thus unpredictable,16 hard to understand and manage. These situations remind us in a “frightening way of the (incurable?) vulnerability of our own position […] of the humiliating experience of our helplessness and inability to endure the dispiritingly precarious character of our position in the world” (Bauman 2017, pp. 21–22). One, if not the paradigmatic situation of powerlessness, is torture.17 It is a ritual of enacting the ability to kill that seeks to demonstrate the absolute power of the torturer and the powerlessness of the tortured; it is a programmatic of the helpless  Michael Ermann (2012, pp. 25–26) has presented a phenomenology of anxiety that distinguishes between unconscious (repressed) and conscious, manifest anxiety. The latter in turn is distinguished into realistic signal anxiety and pathological symptom anxiety, and the latter in turn into neurotic and structural symptom anxiety. – Anna Freud elaborated the mechanisms for defending against anxiety: Rationalization, repression, reaction formation, affect isolation, undoing, denial, projection, turning against the self, introjection, regression (Freud 1996). 16  From the point of view of unpredictability, it is arguably terrorism that exploits the sense of vulnerability most rigorously (Townshend 2005). 17  Torture is understood here to mean institutions and acts by which physical and mental pain is intentionally and systematically inflicted on human beings, such pain being inflicted both by a public official, one of his deputies or with their tacit consent, and by private individuals or members of various organizations. 15

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fear of being killed (Popitz 1992, p. 54). Torture can demonstrate this power because it does not arrange a transition to death, but the status of suffering and dying. Torture “plays” with killing and death – hence its proximity to art, but also to craft and ritual (Zirfas 2012). Here, the fantasized form of a delimited, perfect violence becomes a hazard-free reality. Torture, in this sense, is the attempt, in the medium of absolute violence, to place the victim in perpetuity. Torture is a ritual of cruelty because it demonstrates to the victim that it can hold him in killing. Torture does not enact and practice the annihilation of man but his nullification, i.e., it steadily postpones the annihilation of man. Whereas killing aims at complete elimination, at the annihilation of any human remainder, torture aims at staging the possibility of such annihilation. In this sense, killing follows an aesthetic dream and torture a political one. Torture is a ritual metamorphosis that arranges the status of suffering, powerlessness, and dying. Torture victims are kept alive in such a way that they die without entering the state of death (Sofsky 1996, p. 88). In this context, one can recall an order in the Dachau concentration camp that made the attempt to commit suicide a severe punishment (Popitz 1992, p. 55). If the ultimate limit of violence is killing, then in torture it is a matter of repeatedly postponing this limit and at the same time preventing people from making use of their possibility to kill themselves. The focus of torture is the body, its agony, pain and limits. Torture reduces the victim to pure physicality, pays homage to a materialism of the body. The tortured is nothing but body; torture accordingly a total bodily capture, an objectification through a complete bodily mastery. The pain is due both to physiological facts and to the fact that the instruments, images, and agents of violence are accessible to immediate contemplation. Torture is an “obsessive demonstration of the agency” (Scarry 1987, p. 34) of pain. It could also be said to play on pain, the fear of death, and vulnerability.18

 More recently, the torture technique of beating has been increasingly replaced by the technological torture of electric shocks, because these leave no permanent visible marks. This technique is also one of domination: severe pain, immobility, loss of muscle control, nausea, fainting, gastrointestinal emptying, anxiety and depression are the consequences. Through technology, the Force manages to achieve several effects at once. First, it itself becomes less immediate, even more invisible, insofar as the modern electric shock belt, for example, offers the possibility of shocking the wearer over a distance of eighty to ninety meters; it also becomes more unpredictable, since in many cases the victim can no longer anticipate the actions of the torturers, and it also offers the possibility of further lowering the inhibition thresholds of the torturers, who now no longer have to take immediate action themselves. – In addition to technology, the indifference of the torturer and the (religious and political) glorification of power in the “syndrome of an absolute violence” (Popitz 1992, pp. 66–69) can also be negotiated in the context of torture. 18

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In this agent, the cruel situation of torture is of a frightening simplicity. The pinching of organs, the severing of limbs and the penetration of orifices leaves no room for differentiation; here meaning and expression coincide completely. ­Intense pain destroys consciousness, is a form of mimesis to death. In intense pain, the human being is thrown back on his corporeality, he shrinks down to his body and loses the reference to himself and the world. For even in the body the alien power reigns, even one’s own becomes the territory of the other, which as absolute power has taken complete possession of this body. Physical pain (especially in its chronic form) goes hand in hand with the restriction of freedom, with feelings of powerlessness and despair, with loneliness and fear of death or even a longing for death, and finally with the question of meaning (Vogel 2013, p. 42). It is probably no coincidence that there is an etymological connection between fear and pain: from the Latin angustus, “narrow”, “scanty”, “miserable”, fear is used synonymously with pain, for example as “stomach fear” and “tooth fear”; and pain, in turn, stands especially for those physical sensations associated with “sharp”, “biting” and “cutting” wounds (Kluge 1957, pp. 23, 664). Those who are afraid (already) feel the pain. It is therefore obvious not to separate the question of fear from the question of pain and vulnerability, or to understand the question of fear from vulnerability. However, human beings are not only vulnerable and afraid because they are bodily constituted, but also because they are self-understanding and symbolic beings. The latter means that people always live their lives against the background of a more or less conscious idea of what human life can be, is or should be; and this idea is communicated through signs (such as gestures and language). What makes people so vulnerable that they can be struck, even destroyed, by words? And to what extent do linguistic disregards generate (new) forms of vulnerability? Here, I assume with Butler (2013) that people’s linguistic attitudes towards each other “their linguistic vulnerability to each other, […] is not simply added to their social relations with each other. Rather, it is one of the original forms that these social relations take” (Butler 2013, p. 50). Social relations are ab ovo vulnerable relations because of the physicality and symbolic nature of human life. And furthermore, people are vulnerable through language not only because they depend on social recognition and respect, but because they are linguistic beings. In this respect, insults, humiliations, stigmatizations aim, on the one hand, to hurt people; and they aim, on the other hand, to “enforce their description and represent them as ‘reality’” (Posselt 2011, p. 106).19 Linguistic violence aims at muting, at rendering  Nevertheless, linguistic violations also never have only empowering, subjugating effects, but also empowering, liberating ones. Butler speaks here of an “empowering vulnerability” (2013, p. 10) that opens up specific possibilities for expression and action. 19

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speechless the Other, who can no longer formulate a rebuttal. Conversely, there is no pure experience of violence; it is always already mediated by language and its contexts of meaning and significance. Assuming that human beings are symbolic beings who exist in and through “language” (in the broad sense as a system of signs) – a thesis that would still have to be spelled out in terms of linguistic philosophy, phenomenology, developmental and cultural theory -, relationships to oneself, to others and to the world are founded linguistically, above all by addressing others. This foundation can take place “positively” or “negatively”, i.e. language would consequently have the power to produce vulnerabilities. On the one hand, it has a homeopathic effect, in that it produces a specific (negative) understanding and evaluation of ourselves in the context of language; on the other hand, it has an allopathic effect, because the bodily-­ fleshly, emotional and motivational (even unconscious?) is also permeable to language, is affected by it and can thus be experienced as bodily injury. In this respect, language has not only a linguistic but also a somatic effect. When people are beaten, are they not also symbolically violated? And when they are insulted, are they not also physically hurt? Does a theory of vulnerability thus undermine the dualism of body and mind that is significant for the Occident by drawing attention to forms of permeability and the interpenetration of ratio and corpus? Or can even physical violence be understood as a derivative of linguistic violence, to which it conversely lends its metaphors (Posselt 2011, p. 92). In dealing with these questions, a more precise distinction would have to be made between the vulnerability of language or speaking on the one hand and the vulnerability generated by language or speaking on the other. If language or speaking represents a violation in certain respects  – as Adorno, Foucault, Derrida or Butler claim, for example – it can be concluded that vulnerability is already connected with the fact that people speak at all and must use the language of the “others” in doing so. With regard to the production of vulnerability through language, it would then be necessary to show how a violation is first produced through a specifically performative or ritual use of language or speech (insults, insults, orders, interrogations, etc.) (Herrmann et al. 2007). Thus, an insult does not manifest itself “in itself”, but only becomes relevant to a particular individual or group when, under certain circumstances, a culturally rehearsed use of language, a particular mode of speaking, is also understood as an “insult”. This, however, raises broader questions, such as whether and how silence can offend and whether there are culturally independent forms of linguistic vulnerabilities that are experienced as offenses by all members of the human species.

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5 The Finiteness of Being: Fear – Violence – Hope Fear can be understood as fear of freedom or fear of powerlessness. In this respect, I would like to argue here that, anthropologically, fear essentially means two things, an existential fear of life and an ontological fear of death (Tugendhat 2010). Both perspectives are about an anthropological vulnerability that is closely linked to questions of finitude and transience, of losses and separations.20 The fear of life is a fear of having lived the wrong life, of not having seized the right opportunities, of not having used all the margins. The fear of death is the fear of stopping, of dissolving into nothingness, of the demise of the self and the world. One can see a connection between these two forms of fear insofar as the fear of life is ultimately also a fear of death. For the fear of life results from the awareness of finiteness: through the fact that man knows that he can die at any time, freedom of choice and decision, fear of pleasure and guilt, fear of the world and existence or also signal fear and neurotic fear only gain their tremendous significance. The wasted life is a life before death, before the existential fact of annihilation – which can express itself in very different ways, for example in biological-physical or symbolic-metaphysical form. In short, fear is not primarily rooted in fear of life, but in fear of death.21 And it should be remembered at this point that people are still vulnerable after death, for instance by having their corpses physically desecrated, by being deprived of a burial (a prominent example from the Iliad is the revenge of Achilles’ second death on Hector), or even by being denied memory. Not only the damnatio memoriae, the cursing and demonstrative erasure of the memory of a person by posterity, but above all the forgetting of the forgetting of the victims appears to be of extraordinary importance here. In this respect, only again the violence resulting from fear appears as a (kind of) self-defence against mortality. Here it is a matter of situations in which excessive demands result in aggressiveness – against oneself and against others. Fear as a signal and warning of danger can paralyze people (and thereby become destructive  Like hardly any other philosophy – apart from psychoanalysis (Bittner 1995) – existential philosophy has reflected the presence of death in life and the consciousness of death. If one understands the formula that death casts a shadow over life not metaphorically but existentially, not only fears and experiences of violence but also phenomena such as loneliness, illness, melancholy, night, sleep, rites of passage, losses, even love or eroticism appear as negative preludes to death in life (Theunissen 1991). Fear and violence can thus be noted as important forms of the presence of death in life. Here, indeterminability, contingency, loss and farewell are central determinants (Zirfas 2009). 21  “Throughout our lives, the possibility of our death is always in the background; it reminds us of our profound vulnerability” (Ben-Ze’ev 2009, p. 27). 20

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itself) or mobilize them to activity, thereby harming themselves and others. Fear becomes violent when it negates the other – one’s own and the other’s.22 The four basic forms of anxiety that Riemann identifies in his classic of the same name – the fear of self-giving, which manifests as ego-loss and dependence; the fear of becoming oneself, which is experienced as insecurity and isolation; the fear of change, which appears as transience and insecurity; and the fear of necessity, which manifests as finality and bondage23 – can be associated not only with specific personality types (the schizoid, depressive, obsessive-compulsive, and hysterical personalities) but also with specific forms of violence that result from these fears: Fear of self-giving is served by violence as a defense and protection, and often manifests itself in forms of cruelty and sadism: “brusqueness, sudden hurtful sharpness, icy coldness and inaccessibility, cynicism, and split-second turning of affection into hostile rejection are its most common expressions” (Riemann 2017, pp. 37–38); fear of becoming oneself is expressed primarily in feelings of guilt, which can lead to self-hatred and self-punishment, as well as conscious or unconscious self-destruction (Riemann 2017, pp. 83–84); fear of change leads to self- and other-empowerment, self-control, drill and correctness, and fighting against that which is not “all right” (Riemann 2017, pp. 142–145); and finally, the violence stemming from fear of necessity is expressed in the fight against threats to self-worth: “intrigue, devaluation of another to the point of character assassination and up to his or her destruction, pronounced attitudes of revenge can thus arise” (Riemann 2017, p. 197).24 Viewed negatively, these considerations point to the fundamental anthropological desire to be excluded from the threat, suffering and death, and viewed p­ ositively,  Put differently, and in terms of educational theory: Fear becomes violence when it makes education impossible. Education is the attempt to deal with fears in a non-violent way in relation to oneself and to others. Violence is the attempt to negate anthropological vulnerability. 23  These four forms of anxiety can be understood as forms of self-alienation and alienation from the world, which – when they become pathological – no longer allow a “return from alienation” (Buck). – However, one can also think of an anxiety that is afraid of no longer being afraid. One might call this fear the fear of the impossibility of education. Just as the host in Klossowski (1996, p. 126) “fearfully welcomes the stranger whom he sees appearing on the horizon as a liberator” with the exclamation, “‘Enter quickly, for I am afraid of my happiness,’” one can be afraid that the stranger’s happiness will exceed the hitherto authoritative happiness; and one can be afraid that precisely this situation will no longer occur (Derrida 2001, pp. 93–96) – that there will no longer be any education. 24  It can also be combined with Durkheim’s forms of suicide; Fear of self-giving corresponds to altruistic, fear of self-becoming to egoistic, fear of change to anomic, and fear of necessity to fatalistic suicide (Rosa 2016, pp. 192–195). 22

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to be given more than desired. Fear and vulnerability always resonate with the hope of being spared and the hope of a different world. In this respect, the reasons for the fears coincide with the goals of hope. Hope appears as the emotional principle of fear, and indeed as the ultimate reason for the passive resistance that fear offers to threats of harm or destruction (Fink-Eitel 1993, p. 87). Put differently: Because we are free, finite, and vulnerable beings, we have fear-but even more fundamentally, we also have hope in learning to deal with fear, with vulnerability, with violence, and with mortality.

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(Mis)understandings of Recognition: On the Problem of the ‘Negative Balance of Recognition’ Norbert Ricken

1 Introduction Violence provokes – not only fear and possible counter-violence, but also the not infrequently perplexing question of what causes violence. Precisely because it is increasingly understood as a break in and with the social and societal order – and despite all its everydayness no longer as a structural part of the order – the perception of and attention to violence has increased significantly. It is therefore not always easy to distinguish whether violent phenomena have actually increased, whether critical attention and sensitivity have increased significantly, or even whether public sentiments have merely changed. However, it is indisputable that the question of violence, its forms, causes and effects represents a socially pressing as well as theoretically demanding challenge. The adjustment of the topic in the title, placing violence in a relationship between reason and fear, already implies a specific coding that is also found in the text of the call: New uncertainties and experienced contingencies are associated with fear and violence or a willingness to use violence, to which reason and – I would add  – order are then brought into a counter-position. This configuration may be quite obvious and may be able to put forward good reasons; however, it is underestimated that order and security do not represent violence-free zones either – quite N. Ricken (*) Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_5

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the contrary: order, reason and all kinds of other stabilities (such as normalities) are also permeated by violence. Heinrich Popitz pointed out this omnipresence of violence many years ago – and did not just mean that violence can happen at any time: “Man need never, but can always, act violently; he need never, but can always, kill – individually or collectively – together or in division of labor – in all situations, fighting or celebrating festivals – in various states of mind, in anger, without anger, with pleasure without pleasure, screaming or silently (in deathly silence) – for all conceivable purposes – anyone” (Popitz 1992, p. 50); rather, he has used it to try to mark the fact that violence and power are closely linked and that, ultimately, there is and can be no order that is not based on a specific version of violence: “No comprehensive social order is based on the premise of non-­violence. The power to kill and the powerlessness of the victim are latent or manifest determinants of the structure of social coexistence” (Popitz 1992, p. 52). However, order and violence then reveal themselves as a paradoxical connection, since violence – albeit on different levels – is simultaneously excluded and included in relation to order. It is this – if not normative, then at least evaluative – coding of violence in the dual between fear and reason that I would like to deal with in the following. The guiding assumption here is that what seems so immediately obvious to us: namely, that violence should not be a component of our everyday order, is connected with or results from a problematic form of thought and at the same time renews it, in which duals and their oppositional coding dominate, so that order and non-order (e.g., as violence), safety and security, and the possibility of violence (e.g., as violence) dominate. (e.g. as violence), security and insecurity, reason and unreason, but also individual and society as well as self-determination and heteronomy are merely opposed to each other – and thus conceal relational connections and interactions, but also paradoxes, or make them unworkable. In other words, could it not be that the prevailing coding (and exclusion) of violence as unreasonableness or even irrationality and the ideas of reasonable (and insofar peaceful) subjectivity invoked therein imply the possibility of a harmonious and inherently unbroken order that not only conceals its own power structure, but also ultimately makes violence no longer conceivable? And isn’t this idea nevertheless dependent on the possibility of a ‘peaceful-different existence’, in which everyone – given sufficient reason – can be peaceful, because and insofar as they can each be sufficiently at one with themselves – according to Blaise Pascal’s aphoristic logic, “that all the unhappiness of human beings derives from a single circumstance, namely that they cannot remain quietly in a room” (Pascal 1987, p. 69, Aphorism 139)? In view of the (probably too) high level of abstraction that has been called for, I will therefore try to develop my considerations using a small example with which I am somewhat more familiar – the theorem of the ‘negative recognition balance’, as it has been developed in particular in the work of Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Endrikat

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et al. 2002; Anhut and Heitmeyer 2005) and around which a very effective narrative has long been formed in the theoretical discourse on violence (Sutterlüty 2002). In doing so, I am systematically concerned with a categorical problematization, which, however – or so I hope – could then also have consequences for empiricism. Against the backdrop of the multi-perspectivity of violence called for, for example, in the numerous works of Klaus Wahl (Wahl and Wahl 2013), this approach certainly represents a considerable abridgement; however, it perhaps allows us to problematize the logic operating in the discourse of violence, at least in parts, in an exemplary manner – and then to keep an eye out for alternative forms of thinking. In the following, I will therefore take up the problem of violence in a first thought and discuss it with regard to its possible conceptual version (Thought 1), before I then go much more specifically into the named narrative of the ‘negative recognition balance’ and discuss it in its relation to resentment and violence (Thought 2). However, the recognition-theoretical line of thought it claims requires its own discussion, which arrives at insights – perhaps surprising in parts, but certainly not too self-evident – that I will title ‘Deconstructing Recognition’ (Thought 3). Before returning to the initial question of violence (Thought 5), however, it is necessary to embed the considerations in social theory, which I have placed under the heading of an ‘individualisation trap’ (Thought 4). All in all, I am concerned in my considerations with a categorial problematization that ties in with the systematic limitations and unsuitability of individualtheoretical approaches and pleads for a social-theoretical conception – also of violence.

2 Thought 1: The Problem of Violence and Its Conceptual Frame If one now leafs through common definitions of violence, one notices how difficult it is to conceptualize violence in an unambiguous and exhaustive manner. While some tend to focus on physical injuries, others add the significance of psychological damage; still others expand the circle of thought to include structural issues and the resulting impairments to life as it is lived, so that even at the conceptual level there is more ambiguity and disagreement than unity (Galtung 1997; Wahl 2013). In view of the many ways in which people take their lives for granted, in which it seems to be clear what and when violence is, this may at first be irritating and then also annoying; but the observable vagueness also offers the advantage that in the field of violence one does have to think about phenomena, subject fields and categories as well as founding logics in their entanglement with one another – without this, however, eliminating the ambiguities; In this respect, I will not attempt to develop an ultimate definition of violence here, with which all possible cases of violence could then be (sub)distinguished from those of non-violence.

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The initial consensus seems to be that the phenomenon of violence is not sufficiently taken into account if one attempts to grasp it merely in terms of object theory; both the concept of violence as a “violation of the physical as well as psychological integrity of individuals” and that of “intentional damaging influence on other persons” (Peuckert and Scherr 2003, p. 114) are not clearly distinguishable and must be supplemented at least by the dimension of the will of those affected – i.e. the question of consent and denial or the articulation of a boundary. However, this does not yet sufficiently include what, for example, Klaus and Melanie Rhea Wahl have marked as “historically and culturally variable [normings]” (Wahl and Wahl 2013, p. 17), “which, depending on the context,” identify one and the same aggressive act as “demanded, desired, tolerated, outlawed, or punished” (Wahl and Wahl 2013, p. 17). However, questions as to whether violence necessarily requires actors, and if not, how one could then precisely grasp dimensions of institutional, symbolic and structural violence, are far from being answered. On the whole, however, these conceptual debates – or at least this is my impression – paint a picture that is not quite so blurred: what is generally described as ‘violence’ is not merely what happens against the will of people – whether declared or assumed to be declared – but is more or less deliberately brought about by others and interpreted as coercion, harm or even injury by those affected or their observers (Imbusch 2018). This may then still be marginally fuzzy and need to be reconsidered on a case-by-case basis, but it may yet represent a thoroughly more widely shared working concept of violence. At the same time, however, it fits largely seamlessly into the individual-theoretical narrative according to which the freedom of the one ends where the freedom of the other begins. The fact that I consider this arbitrary separation of the one from the other to be problematic with regard to the problem of recognition – which has been dealt with more broadly elsewhere (Röhr and Ricken 2018) – should not be specifically explained in terms of its plausibility, but should be used as a further point of departure. Systematically, therefore, I find interesting a conceptual distinction proposed by Jan Philipp Reemtsma in the chapter ‘Power and Violence’ in his study on ‘Trust and Violence’ (Reemtsma 2013), distinguishing between “lozierender”, “raptiver” and “autotelische Gewalt” (Reemtsma 2013, pp. 104–124); I am less interested here in the distinction between the different forms into which Reemtsma tries to sort violence,1  In his “Phenomenology of Violence” (Reemtsma 2013, p. 104), Reemtsma distinguishes “lozierende Gewalt” (ibid., p. 108), which removes another body because it stands in the way of pursuing one’s own interests (e.g. in war, robbery and murder), from “raptive violence” (ibid., p. 113), which seizes another body in order to use it for its own interests (especially in forms of sexual violence); he then contrasts both of these with “autotelic violence” (ibid., p. 116), which, unlike the first two forms of violence, does not serve any purpose outside the act(s) of violence, but is rather used for its own sake. 1

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but rather in the figure, which becomes visible in the explanations, of associating violence with the centrality of actors – i.e. with the assertion of one’s own interests against others (without, however, reducing it to this). This characterization seems to me to be significant and further leading for the question of the determination of violence, since it suggests to trace the phenomenon of violence through a reconstruction of its – here: centric – logic. I will come back to this, but I will take a detour and switch to my second thought.

3 Thought 2: Violence and the ‘Negative Recognition Balance’ Theorem In the countless discourses on the problem of violence, an extremely powerful narrative has developed over the last few years around the keyword or theorem of the ‘negative recognition balance’. In the countless discourses on the problem of violence, an extremely powerful narrative has developed over the past few years around the keyword or theorem of the ‘negative recognition balance’, which was developed in particular in the work of the research groups on the theory and empiricism of ‘social disintegration’ and then on ‘group-related hostility towards people’ around Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Heitmeyer 1994; Heitmeyer et al. 1998; Endrikat et al. 2002; Heitmeyer and Imbusch 2012). At the core of this narrative of the emergence of violence and propensity to violence is the assumption that recognition and violence are inversely proportional to each other; thus, the Bielefeld researchers formulate “that group-based misanthropy and behavioural intentions close to violence as well as discrimination are all the more pronounced, the greater the disintegration burdens in different sub-dimensions with the consequence of a negative recognition balance” (Endrikat et al. 2002, p. 40). Here, disintegration marks those objective circumstances and lifeworld experiences that were then empirically surveyed over a total of 10 years (Heitmeyer 2002, 2011), in which integration  – understood as “individual-functional system integration” as well as “communicative-interactive” and “cultural-expressive social integration”, in short: social “participation, involvement and belonging” (Endrikat et al. 2002, pp. 38–39) – becomes precarious due to, in part, more recent structural crises (such as “consolidation and intensification of social inequality, regulatory crises in the form of experiences of meaninglessness or also cohesion crises as an expression of labilisation or dissolution of social relationships”) (Endrikat et al. 2002, p. 37) and is then interpreted as sensitively disturbed or even denied social recognition. If it is no longer possible – according to the researchers – to compensate for the negative situations and experiences by positive experiences in another area, the authors speak of a “negative recognition balance” (Endrikat et al. 2002, p. 53), which they then link – I would say very broadly and closely – with the development of resentment, discrimination and

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readiness to use violence. The connection is asserted in both directions, so that on the one hand negative balances or ‘recognition deficits’ (Möller and Heitmeyer 2004) or even a ‘lack of recognition’ (Heitmeyer 2001) (can) generate prejudice and a willingness to use violence, and balanced or even positive balances on the other hand do not allow the “demonstration of a willingness to discriminate and use violence to arise in the first place” (Endrikat et al. 2002, p. 53). The methodologically, in my opinion, considerably more differentiated work on the development of violent careers by Ferdinand Sutterlüty (Sutterlüty 1998, 2004) also follows this narrative, but presents it somewhat more cautiously, insofar as they limit Heitmeyer’s quasi-causal automatism to the observation that perpetrators of violence have had significantly more experiences of powerlessness and disregard (Sutterlüty 1998, pp.  31, 33–34, 2004, p.  269). The logic of progression reconstructed in Sutterlüty’s studies takes its starting point in multiple (mostly familial) experiences of powerlessness and devaluation (Sutterlüty 2004, pp.  268–271), which lead to self-concepts that are as insecure as they are negative and then, through an “epiphanic experience of violence” (Sutterlüty 2004, p. 268) would (or could) generate new self-efficacy experiences, group affiliations and recognition experiences, as well as new violent action schemata arising from these. To put it briefly, careers in violence are therefore associated with two kinds of experiences of recognition – namely a primary experience of “active disregard” or “passive refusal of recognition” (Sutterlüty 2004, p. 271), and the later, fatally disabling experience of recognition as a “perpetrator of violence” in groups constituted by violence. The figure presented here is much older and – this must be noted – is not coincidentally reminiscent of old theological debates; both in the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius in the fourth century and in that between universalism and nominalism in the fourteenth century, the question was always also whether evil was to be regarded ‘only’ as a ‘privatio boni’, i.e. as a ‘deficiency of the good’, or as an entity in its own right.2 This raises the question, which is still disturbing and largely unanswered today, whether ‘evil’ – ontologically speaking – has its own quality of being or only a derived one.3 At the same time, however, not only an  Paradigmatic for this is the formulation in Thomas Aquinas in his ‘Summa Theologiae’ (1980): “Nullum ens est malum per essentiam, ne participatione, sed per privationem participationis” (prima pars, q. 49.3.c. ad 4 and q. 65.1 ad 2 and ad 3; in German translation: “No being is evil in essence, not even by participation, but by the robbery of participation”). 3  One could also discuss this problem with the novel ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess (Burgess 1962), which was already published in 1962, since it is about seemingly senselessly motivated violence on the one hand and then about the question of free will vis-­ à-­vis evil on the other. Burgess decides – unlike Stanley Kubrick in his 1971 film adaptation of the novel – in favour of freedom and thus the independent possibility of evil. 2

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analytical perspective, but also a constructive-prospective perspective is prefigured, according to which violence could be prevented if there were precisely no ‘lack of the good’ – e.g. of experiences of recognition. The theorem of the ‘negative balance of recognition’, at any rate, ties in with this and presents, in a certain sense, a renewed version of this old metaphysics of order. In the field of pedagogy, the logic thus marked belongs to the standard repertoire of current pedagogical convictions, since here ‘recognition’ is not only presented as a goal, but also as a means of pedagogical action – and then linked in the form that the experience of recognition also leads to mindfulness and the reverse experience of devaluation also leads to devaluing behavior towards others, so that means and goal are closely connected. Despite its widespread use and plausibility in everyday life, this figure of the connection between (dis)integration and recognition has also attracted a great deal of criticism: Again and again, especially on an empirical level, it is objected that “only a few of those affected by such social processes […] become violent” (Wahl and Wahl 2013, p. 28), so that, on the one hand, far too much can be explained, but then, on the other hand, far too little. Moreover, it is also empirically striking that in this logic only certain resentments and practices of devaluation and disregard are targeted and other, equally relevant practices of devaluation, exploitation and reification (on the part of the ‘powerful’) are not (cannot) even be taken into account, because on the one hand they do not correspond to the ‘cliché of the victims of modernisation’ and can hardly be explained by a lack of recognition – rather the opposite. Finally, however, the widespread figure is also theoretically unconvincing, because systematic explanations of the context or even the meaning of ‘recognition’ tend to be lacking and are mostly compensated for rather superficially by reference to the work of Axel Honneth (Honneth 2003a; Honneth 1994) (Heitmeyer et al. 1998; Imbusch 2018).4 With a view to the problem of ‘recognition’, I would therefore now like to systematically address this narrative and thus come to my third thought.

 In order to avoid misunderstandings, it should be noted here that the critique of the figure of the ‘negative recognition balance’, in which experiences of a lack of recognition are adjusted as a breeding ground for non-recognising attitudes and actions, does not assert the insignificance of recognition experiences; rather, the critique is aimed at a logic of exchange or even exchange that is contained in it and, in my opinion, is too simple. Rather, the criticism is aimed at a logic of exchange or even exchange logic that is contained in it and, in my opinion, too simple, and that has long since become part of a pattern – also dominant in pedagogy – of the ‘priority of appreciation’. 4

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4 Thought 3: The ‘Promise’ of Recognition: A Brief Deconstruction The concept – one must now even say the theoretical programme – of recognition has been playing a considerably increasing role in the various debates in social philosophy and the social sciences, but also in educational science, for some years now (Honneth 2018; Nothdurft 2007; Röhr and Ricken 2018). In this context, reference is made largely without exception to the work of Axel Honneth, who as early as the beginning of the 1990s (Honneth 1990) – especially in his habilitation thesis ‘Kampf um Anerkennung’ (Honneth 1992) – outlined the basic lines of a specific argumentation based on recognition theory, thereby initiating what has since become a decidedly broad and interdisciplinary debate. The core of his argumentation is the assertion that ‘experiences of recognition’ – altogether understood as a multidimensionally constituted and equally experienced and granted “affirmation of positive qualities of human subjects or groups” (Honneth 2004, p. 55) – can be regarded as a “practical condition of a positive self-relationship” (Honneth 2003b, p. 308) and thus constitute conditions of “intact identity” (Honneth 2003a, p.  209) and the “possibility of realizing individual autonomy” (Honneth 2003a, p. 213) (for a reconstruction of Honneth’s theoretical figure and its critique from the perspective of educational science, see the work of Balzer 2014). In the debates on the problem of recognition, many aspects of recognition theory have been taken up and discussed – for example, the question of performativity or affirmativity, or of attribution or responsivity, especially in the discussions with Heikki Ikäheimo (Ikäheimo 2002, 2014) and Arto Laitinen (Laitinen 2002), or the question of social justice in the debate with Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Here today – we have done so in more detail elsewhere in the context of an ethnographic project on the ‘linguistics of recognition’ (Ricken et al. 2017) – I would like to limit myself to these two aspects of understanding recognition and problematize them in the context of a brief deconstruction. I begin with the basic meaning of ‘recognition’ as “positive appreciation and affirmation” (Honneth 2004, p. 55), as it has become guiding for Honneth in the ‘original mode’5; for even if with this version one of the basic intuitions of the  To be distinguished from this would be the so-called “elementary mode” or the “existential mode of recognition” (Honneth 2005, p. 60), according to which the ‘certain recognition’ – i.e. the “perception of a certain value of the other person” (ibid.) – would have to be preceded by a non-specific(r) form of recognition, which Honneth calls “sympathy” (ibid., p. 59) or intersubjective attention and prior open-mindedness and adjusts it as an ‘elementary’ condition of the “affirmation of certain qualities or abilities of other persons” (ibid., p. 60). Honneth has since withdrawn this (quite surprising) extension in the context of a “re-centering of the concept of recognition” that has become necessary for him (Honneth 2008, p. 876). 5

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lifeworld understanding of recognition can be taken up, this version of meaning, which is based on positivity or positive affirmation, cannot ultimately be sustained. Jessica Benjamin in particular already pointed out at the end of the 1980s (Benjamin 1990) that recognition cannot be understood merely as appreciation and affirmation, but must also be reformulated with a view to withdrawal and denial. Her argument aims at the fact that recognition is only experienced as relevant when it comes from someone who – also and especially in these acts – proves to be independent; only in this – pointedly: decentering – experience does the other prove to be Other and Other and can thus be perceived as a relevant Other in the first place – and thus not merely as an extension of one’s own desires. To prove oneself independent, however, means at least to withdraw from the centric expectations of recognition of children or even to deny oneself – which then, according to Benjamin, has equally significant consequences on the part of the children and harbours considerable conflicts. The double paradox thus opened up, however, of being dependent on the recognition of others in a recognition-theoretical perspective in order to be able to be or become independent, and at the same time being dependent on others who (must) prove to be independent, can no longer simply be brought into a context with the rather linear logic of ‘appreciation’ and ‘confirmation’. Moreover, Benjamin finally draws attention to the fact that recognition is also misunderstood if it is understood merely as a centric need to experience affirmation by others; consequently, she formulates that recognition is not only the ‘need of a self’ but also the ‘need for (another) self’6 and in this respect includes both ‘wanting to be loved or respected’ and ‘loving oneself’ and ‘respecting oneself’ (Benjamin 1990, p. 83). This second strand of meaning, however, is hardly taken up further in the discourse of recognition. But also the second idea of Honneth’s basic understanding, namely that recognition is a condition of successful autonomy,7 is not so easy to sustain: Drawing on works in power theory – e.g. those of Alexander Garcia Düttmann or Judith Butler (Butler 2005, 2009), who have drawn attention to the fact that  I use here a formulation of Alexander Garcia Düttmann, who in his problematizations of the ‘struggle for recognition’ has developed the duality of centric and decentric as well as also constative and constitutive recognition; cf. in more detail García Düttmann (1997, p. 52). 7  This figure is based on a self-understanding that is very persistent in the world of life, according to which others could then be appropriately recognised if one was ‘at peace’ with oneself. However, this assumes a logic in which first the self ‘is’ in order to then be able to relate positively to others – a figure in which recognition is ultimately only thought of instrumentally, namely as a means to (another) end and as a phase (but not as a structural medium) (cf. Ricken 2006, p. 222 f.). 6

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recognition marks a triadic structure, insofar as it always implies an identification of the Other ‘as someone’ and must therefore then also be discussed as an identifying determination  – Thomas Bedorf in particular has worked out that recognition must fundamentally be conceived as ‘Verkennung’ (Bedorf 2010). The double insight that I am no more ‘the one I can be recognized as’ ‘than the one I am is capable of being mapped in the intersubjective relation’ (Bedorf 2010, p. 125) leads – necessarily and not merely unfortunately – to ‘any recognition misrecognizing the Other as Other […] because it can ‘merely’ integrate him or her into the recognition medium as this or that Other’ (Bedorf 2010, p. 145). And this applies not only to all the acts of recognition that obviously miss the Other(s) – be it due to respective ignorance or even insensitivity – but also to the supposedly “successful recognition” because it must make the Other “an identified Other” and “this [ascribed] identity necessarily limits the Otherness of the Other” (Bedorf 2010, p. 146). In this deconstruction of a simple, linearly structured and positively markable ‘recognition’, however, something also breaks that concerns the ‘recognized subject’ itself. Whoever in his own ‘self’ is elementarily – and not merely complementarily or even subsequently – dependent on others, whoever in this can only understand himself as difference – perceived by others and himself – and furthermore learns or has to learn himself from others who do not even positively recognize and recognize him and her. For this person, traditional selfunderstandings (such as sovereignty) must appear as downright ‘alienating’ categories; they may be understood as ‘regulative ideas’ and assessed as unattainable, but they only confirm the brokenness of the self – and the sense of deficit that is amplified by this (Ricken 2002). Theoretically speaking, however, it becomes questionable whether a subject dependent on the recognition of others can still so easily spell itself out in categories of autonomy and self-determination (Ricken 2009). If one now takes both critiques together, then it becomes clear that both the phenomenon of recognition itself and that of the connection between foreign and self-understandings would presumably have to be at least more differentiated or categorically differently conceived. In doing so, I have tried to show that the recognition-­theoretical background of the keyword ‘negative recognition balance’ is considerably more complicated and, above all, more paradoxically structured, so that the ‘promise of recognition’, as it is then called by Burkard Liebsch, often seems to be one that does not quite fulfil and cannot fulfil what it promises – and thus becomes, as it were, a ‘missed promise’, a ‘promise to speak’ or ‘promise to speak’ (Liebsch 2016).

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5 Thought 4: The Trap of Individualization The considerations developed so far offer a – in my opinion – rather abstract and constitution-theoretical thought, in which it is not yet really foreseeable how this problematic could be connected with the initial question of violence. However, if one embeds the train of thought, which is only hinted at here in its core arguments, in its social contexts, then a different picture – also with regard to the problem of violence – possibly emerges. The guiding principle of this social contextualization is a social-theoretical adjustment, which I try to mark with the keyword of the ‘individualization trap’.8 What is meant by this is a twofold connection: very roughly formulated, ‘individualisation’ – if one follows Ulrich Beck – initially denotes the extremely ambivalent connection between the de-traditionalisation and re-integration of individuals (Beck 1986); connected with this is also the ambivalence of increasing ‘liberation’ through ‘de-traditionalisation’ and ‘social de-integration’ with ­simultaneous – and all the more ruthlessly functioning – social binding and (often now abstract or systemic) dependence. Sociology never tires of emphasizing the ambivalence of ‘individualization’ and rejects interpretations as unclouded ‘gains in freedom’ as misunderstandings. If, however, this definition is linked to a  – in my opinion: undeniable – second strand of meaning, namely that ‘individualization’ cannot be separated from human self-descriptions that increasingly focus on autonomy and identity of the self, then it might be possible to plausibilize what could be meant here by ‘individualization trap’: While the simultaneous and often only contradictorily experienced release and (systemic) reintegration of people associated with individualization is commonly referred to as the ‘individualization paradox’ (van der Loo and van Reijen 1992, p. 194), one can only speak of a ‘trap’9 when the auton This is to (re)take up social theoretical discourses which – in the context of the theory of reflexive modernisation (exemplified by Beck et al. 1996) – have problematised the crises, ambivalences and paradoxes of social modernisation and have been silenced or even considered obsolete in a peculiar way by changing social developments – e.g. that of globalisation (such as the convincing work of Kaus Wahl on the ‘modernisation trap’, Wahl 1989). The theory of reflexive modernization (exemplified by Beck et al. 1996) – which problematized crises, ambiguities, and paradoxes of social modernization and were silenced or even considered obsolete in a peculiar way by changing social developments – e.g. that of globalization (e.g. the convincing work of Kaus Wahl on the ‘modernization trap’, Wahl 1989) – and now resurface and worry after the looming ‘end of neoliberalism’. 9  While a ‘paradox’ usually refers to the necessary simultaneity and irresolvability of a contradiction, one could speak of a ‘trap’ when the structures of perception, thought and action (i.e. habitus formations) associated with an ‘awkward’ (e.g. contradictory) situation – i.e. those that result from it and continue to orient it – contribute to the situation ‘deepening’ or ‘worsening’. 8

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omy and identity expectations and impositions associated with these processes are not only missed or (have to be) disappointed, but are themselves systematically promoted and undermined. In other words: The increase of autonomy and identity expectations, desires and also expectations on the one hand and the experiences of not being able to achieve this – i.e. this promised or suggested completeness and independence – or not being able to achieve it at all on the other hand, are necessarily linked with numerous feelings of lack and deficit of the individuals (which are increased by the semantics of individualization), which are then also expressed in, in my opinion, increased longings for a better life. In my opinion, this can be reflected in an increased longing for recognition by others and a growing sensitivity towards others of not being seen enough or of being ignored or even disregarded. In this logic, however, processes of individualization increasingly promote centric attitudes (e.g. in the need to be recognized), which at the same time at least make difficult, if not structurally impossible, the practice of what makes recognition possible and tangible – namely turning to others in a rather decentralized attitude. The somewhat casual keyword of the ‘individualization trap’ therefore refers to the paradoxical increase in individual promises, demands and impositions while at the same time undermining their conditions of realization and experience, which are oriented towards sociality; by this I also mean social structures and social forms, but first and foremost habitual patterns of perception, thought and action oriented towards sociality. More pointedly formulated: Individualization promotes a centricity (of the self), i.e. an attitude of relating the world to oneself and understanding it as an ‘environment’, which – also driven by systemic experiences of dependency – can turn into a ‘feeling of disregard’ the more this centric orientation becomes effective. In this way, ‘individualization’ generates longings for recognition and experiences of lack at the same time as setting a misleading course – namely, reacting to the experience with even more centricity. The current conjuncture of ‘recognition’ would then perhaps even be both: namely a diagnosis (and feeling) of a lack of sociality, belonging and bonding, and at the same time the motor of the problem of increasing centricity in social interactions. That it is therefore not done with the simple demand for more recognition, as put forward in the discourse on violence, is perhaps now more plausible; but that experiences of recognition are constitutively significant is undisputed.10 The ‘illusion’ of recognition might therefore consist in the fact that it also promises more socially than it is able to deliver; at the same time, it tends to deepen the social structural moments of the current crisis(es).  Crucial, therefore, should be how recognition can still be grasped after this deconstruction; in our reflections on the “linguisticity of recognition” we have formulated a first proposal on this; cf. (Ricken et al. 2017, pp. 216–218). 10

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6 Thought 5: Vulnerability and the Problem of Violence: A Final Thought The considerations presented here may still have been rather freehand and sometimes also latently time-diagnostic (on the problem of time-diagnoses Wittpoth 2001); they are therefore – and not only in principle – particularly open to attack. With them, however, I wanted to attempt to deal with the problem of violence with the help of the distinction between centricity and decentricity. In this context, I understand ‘decentricity’ as a structural moment of the human condition, which can be understood as the reliance and dependence of the self on others, as attachment to and empathy with others, or even as exposure, as Judith Butler has formulated it,11 and which does not merely add to the centrality of our existence that we are familiar with, but rather permeates it from the outset (and vice versa). Decentricity therefore always also means vulnerability or vulnerability, as it has now been called for some years (Burghardt et al. 2017); it cannot simply be translated or transferred into autonomy and identity and therefore requires a different, namely decentric or centric-decentric understanding of human subjectivity (Ricken 2009). With ‘recognition’, it seems to me that a thoroughly suitable theorem has been developed and elaborated, if the structurally decentric logic that can be reconstructed in it is specifically considered and developed – and not merely made to disappear within the framework of individual and autonomy-theoretical lines of tradition. With a view to the ‘question of violence’, however, one could then also consider whether and to what extent this is not linked to the problem of decentricity – this at least was suggested by Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s sortings (Reemtsma 2013). Adjusted in this way, ‘violence’ could be read as a double response to challenging

 In her work on subjectivation and recognition theory, Butler explains her thoroughly idiosyncratic concept of a ‘relational subjectivity’, i.e. a subjectivity related to and constituted by others, as follows: “It would not even suffice to say that I advocate a relational view of the self in place of an autonomous view, or that I attempt to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality. Although I tend towards the notion of relationality, perhaps we do need a different language […] to think about the ways in which we are not only grounded by our relations but also dispossessed by them” (Butler 2005, p. 41). With ‘vulnerability’ on the one hand, and ‘ecstasy’ or desire on the other, she attempts to describe the exposure of the self to others, the associated ‘being-outside-itself’ (ibid., p. 41) as a decentric structure that is precisely not harmonious, not characterized by relational ‘ring references’ of one to the other and back, which can no longer be reconciled with the understandings of subjectivity acclimatized by the Enlightenment as a ‘lying-at-itself’ or ‘being-with-itself’ (also Butler 2008 as well as Ricken 2018). 11

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and unprocessable ‘decentricity’ – both as an attempt to get rid of this form of the self, which is also not particularly respected in society (keyword: vulnerability), to protect oneself and prove oneself strong, and also as a growing attitude of being unable to deal with the decentering logic of others, who simply want something different and different from what I want. It is precisely the confrontation with others, who are not only others (than I am), but also other, at the same time non-­ reversible, but nevertheless dependent self-relationships, that holds the dilemma of not being able to think of the others merely as separate others or dependent selves – a dilemma with considerable conflict potential, if one also thinks of the decentering or dispossessing logic (Butler). Violence would then not only be an expression of a supposedly unbroken centric orientation, but – almost on the contrary – the attempt to somehow escape the structural and insofar not negatable decentricity of the self with and through others. In other words: how much awareness of one’s own insecurity, incompleteness and dependence is necessary in order not to see violence as a solution? Perhaps it would now make sense to turn the initially cited coding of violence between reason and fear around and to connect violence more strongly with centricity – and not only with decentricity, as in the diagnoses of insecurity and fear. It is certainly indisputable that experiences of recognition – that is, having meaning for others who also turn out to be independent – play a major role in this. The open question would then be how much decentricity the problem of ‘recognition’ actually demands of us – presumably on both sides of the recognition relationship – and how we can accept, socially practice and (also pedagogically) promote decentricity. The only thing that would presumably be clear is that this can hardly be achieved merely by increasing the practices of individualisation (also in schools).

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On the History of Fascination with Violence: Mediations of the Immediate Jörn Ahrens

1 Introduction There is a paradox of violence that is not only fundamental to the societies of modernity, but has meanwhile become so normalized that it is hardly perceived as such any more in these societies, both in terms of life and social structure. Violence as a practice of social action, as a mode of interaction, as the basis of institutionalization achievements and the implementation of social power relations, should here lie conceptually and programmatically outside the realm of the imaginable for individuals according to a purpose-rationally oriented practice of socialization – even if its use as an instrument of social deviant action is of course still within the realm of the possible. This difference between possible and imaginable actions is of some importance for the self-understanding of socialization, because society is essentially built on the fact that individuals, in the course of institutionalization, conventionalization, and normativization, fundamentally relinquish existing competencies or renounce their use. Society as an order of things that is not only effective in the life-world can only function if all individuals involved in it integrate themselves into a certain set of framework regulations, which conversely only enable them to become acting J. Ahrens (*) Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_6

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subjects in society. In his theory of structuration, Anthony Giddens summarizes both moments in a highly instructive way by showing that social actors “in their everyday actions […] always and necessarily refer to the structural moments of overarching social systems, which structural moments they thus reproduce at the same time” (Giddens 1988, p.  76). The achievement, still labelled by Popitz as “most strange”, that people at all “bind their behaviour socially, make it socially binding” (Popitz 2006, p. 61), thus goes back to the fact that social structures are in fact fluid themselves, are only “realised” as “practices” and orient the behaviour of the acting individuals “as traces of memory […]” (Giddens 1988, p. 69). Society functions essentially through routines achieved in such practices, which generate confidence in the continuity and reliability of a social reality (Ahrens 2017, pp. 78– 79). The relief in integration consists in no longer having to negotiate conventions, or only in exceptional cases. Within the framework of generally accepted social conventions, therefore, certain actions are no longer conceivable because they can no longer be part of a reality accepted in the lifeworld (Ahrens 2017, pp. 297–301). Conversely, however, all possibilities are still available in principle to potentially redeem those competences that are renounced individually and in favor of socialization requirements. The exercise of violence as a resource for action is one of these. In principle, it would be possible at any time, but it is so strongly domesticated through social institutionalisation and standardisation that its application in the world of life lies largely outside the socially conceivable. A distinction must be made, however, between what is culturally imaginable: violence is actually staged extremely frequently within the framework of cultural narratives and artefacts. As a social practice, violence must today be considered the most outlawed thing in society and culture and, as Hartmut Böhme (2012) recently noted, has meanwhile overtaken sex. The latter hardly has the power to provoke in society and culture any more, because everyday social life is, on the one hand, strongly characterised by an aesthetic of sexualisation or eroticisation and, on the other hand, the institutionalised tolerance towards deviance in the context of sex is now very broadly diversified. The situation is different in the case of violence, which, once it becomes directly physical, quickly appears as a provocation sui generis for the individual integrity of those affected, the applicable moral-ethical standards and the legitimacy of the social order. For this reason alone, acts of violence rarely go unsanctioned. In contrast to sex, there is ostensibly nothing socially positive about violence. Violence is considered destructive, inhumane, irrational, anti-social, while sex has an inherent pleasure and aesthetic that lend its lifeworld forms of presence enormous scope. Sex is individualized to the extent that it tends to be denormativized, though certainly never completely and partially mendaciously. In the field of sex, it could be said, the practice of deconstruction has had immense success, perhaps only there – as a practice in society, sex is now deconstructed.

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Violence, which continues to be prudently, carefully and extremely vigilantly surrounded with restrictions, which is normatively regulated and regimented at an extremely early stage via ethics and morals, and which, in the totality of its forms, is to be excluded as far as possible from society and culture, is quite different. The goal of socialization is thus seen as the complete absence of violence from all life-­ worldly and social-structural processes. Society is well aware that this will not be possible in this completeness and that violence will always remain a component of its reality, but it nevertheless remains the declared goal of socialization in order to implement the intended exclusion at least as effectively as possible. At any rate, this would correspond to the programmatic of a socialization legitimized to a not inconsiderable degree by techniques of domestication of violence. In the following, I will first reflect on the relationship between society and violence, which always remains precarious (1). Following this, I will introduce the concept of the “history of fascination” following Klaus Heinrich (2) and explain that a history of fascination with violence is primarily carried by images of this violence, which are also identified as “evil” in reception (3). Finally, I would like to explain that in the present, the fascination motif also runs along the lines of images, but also acquires a performative quality.

2 Violence and Society The fact that the exclusion of violence from social processes does not function either within the socialization process or with regard to cultural practices, however, remains a constant problem, even if it is consciously held to be unenforceable. From the apparent antagonism between the socially imaginable and the factually possible results that paradox which is characteristic of the ultimately massive presence of violence in contemporary society and its simultaneous ostracism. Without any doubt, violence is and remains a not insignificant part of cultural and social reality, despite all efforts and socio-pedagogical programs to the contrary. Society is inconceivable without the deviant phenomenon of violence, even if this hardly seems desirable in the sense of socialization. It is true that both society and culture derive a large part of their legitimation from keeping the lifeworldly presence of manifest violence within the everyday lifeworlds of their individuals as low as possible, and it is precisely from this that they derive their seemingly successful assertion of continuity, trustworthiness, security and extensive structural freedom from danger. Nevertheless, violence as a component of everyday normality has never really been excluded from society. Living without violence is still an immense social

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privilege in all societies. Rather, violence continuously represents a variable within this normality that should not be underestimated (Ahrens 2017, pp. 73–77). In fact, social reality is essentially based on the fundamentally ever-present possibility of violence as an initially simply existing, to a certain extent anthropologically inherent competence of the subjects. The very fact that it is physically possible for people to use violence means that it remains a factor to be reckoned with in the ­household of socialization. In any case, socialization only follows the already existing and never negatable reality of violence as an option of individual, social action. Especially since, as Heinrich Popitz points out, the use of real violence is a matter of a “dissolution of the boundaries of the human relationship to violence” (Popitz 1999, p. 48), which is namely strongly “unbound by instinct” and largely freed “from constraints and inhibitions of action” (Popitz 1999, p.  48), i.e. lies within the framework of individual availabilities and decisions. What can be noted, therefore, is first of all a release of violence as a physical possibility, and this freedom leads to the necessity of its socialization. Popitz’s classic conclusion is: “Man never has to act violently, but he always can; he never has to kill, but he always can” (Popitz 1999, p. 50). Violence is a resource for everyone, which is why society has the task of limiting and shaping its individual use. The presence of violence in society therefore represents the challenge of socialization par excellence to enforce generally reliable security and normativity against simultaneously social and anthropological competences of individuals, which could be called up at any time and indicate what people could actually do. Violence formulates a subjunctive of latent threat situations for every social normality. In this respect, violence always remains present, at least as a normative negative variable, as a decisive variable within the framework of socialization. Popitz therefore also draws attention to another circumstance that is significant in this context and illustrates the unbroken presence of violence in society and culture. The “norm-boundedness of social behavior” (Popitz 2006, p.  61), he emphasizes, means above all that “social situations are burdened with certain alternatives that seem to be based on some kind of appointments; appointments of which one does not quite know who actually made them” (Popitz 2006, p. 61). There is always an alternative to the norm; the possibility of choosing the action that is actually ostracized always remains in the latency of becoming reality. The justification of the norm, in turn, remains necessarily incomplete, insufficient, because it is necessarily artificial. Conversely, the reality of society is based on a kind of promise of social and cultural institutions to contain, domesticate and neutralize violence. In his reflections on the general constitutional conditions of modernity, Jan Philipp Reemtsma takes up here and states that people resort to the means of violence because they

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possess the freedom to do so; in this respect, every act of violence also means that a decision on the use of violence has been made beforehand (Reemtsma 2000, p.  131). The use of violent competence, this means, ultimately depends on the subject. In essence, it means an action that is directed against socialization. Conversely, this is precisely why “abstinence from violence is the decisive moment of social cohesion in modernity” (Reemtsma 2009, p.  99). In this respect, the ­manifold social efforts to limit and minimize violence in its real presence in society as effectively as possible and thus to ensure at least a largely violence-free normality of social everyday reality and thus also a continuity of the constitution of social reality are perpetuated. Comparatively early, with a view to such problematic situations, Zygmunt Bauman not only saw modernity as characterized by a sharply accentuated ambivalence, but also indicated “the great vision of order” as a metaphysical element of modernity (Bauman 1992, p. 26). Social order could only become an issue if one became aware of how little this order was self-evident and how it was by no means of natural origin, but was itself an eminently social achievement: “Order as a problem only emerged in the wake of disquiet about order, as a reflection on the ordering practices” (Bauman 1992, p.  18). The “other of order”, precisely as a quite unspecific “miasma of the indeterminate and unpredictable” (Bauman 1992, p. 19) left to the imagination, always already appears behind every attempt at order, and one possible accentuation form of this other is, of course, always violence. The resulting striving for a social containment of violence, its consistent and long-term successful capping through patterns of socialization, normative institutionalizations and conventions, and cultural treatments, leads in consequence above all to the fact that within society, as it were, reserves of violence are kept ready. Although sublimely organized and not necessarily made recognizable as such, these special topographies of the social allow above all the individual to live out an ultimately explicit performativity of violence. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning have famously demonstrated this for sport (Elias and Dunning 2003). At the same time, an immense presence of violence in culture can be identified. Violence obviously represents aesthetically, dramaturgically and narratively a significant element in the generation of cultural content. As is well known, culture is essentially a coping with fear on the one hand (Böhme 2000, p. 223) and, connected with this, a sublimation of the potentiality, i.e. the latency of violence, on the other (Freud 1974; Popitz 1999). In this respect, culture takes up possibilities of violence and translates them into imaginative performances (Ahrens 2012, pp. 270–271) of violence. In its equally transcended and, in particular, also aestheticized form as image or narrative, violence can then become an essential component of the performative and symbolic

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canon of culture. In contrast, the appearance of violence experienced as illegitimate within social life worlds remains of rather secondary importance. These would be those forms of violence that have to be labelled as so deviant that they are no longer accessible to the usual accesses of a social normalisation, including and especially a deviance that is always present in society. Such actions of violence that exceed the scope of possibility of even the most pronounced deviant behavior are enormously shocking in each individual case (for example, in terrorist attacks or rampages) and also directly entail social fear behavior. However, they are ultimately accepted as an element of risk within a largely reliably structured, lifeworld normality. As a rule, we even assume with the greatest confidence that it will not be we who become the object of deviant violence, so unlikely does its occurrence normally seem to us. In view of the functionality of society, the continuity, reliability and security communicated by its order, the unavoidable contingency of extreme violence is then quite accepted. The actually relevant presence of violence in the society and culture of modernity is therefore not at all that which questions its order and can be identified more or less unambiguously as deviant, which strikes out without any rules and lastingly disturbs the normalization reality of the living world. Much more relevant than these forms of violence, which in case of doubt are of course extremely spectacular precisely because of their deviance, their unregulated nature and their disruptive potential, is violence that fits into the normality of society. It is not its exceptional variant that is primarily significant when it comes to coming to terms with the relationship of violence to society and culture, but rather its successfully institutionalized, conventionalized, normalized forms. After all, the trivial observation that fuels most of the debates about violence in society, from the animated to the agitated, is quite correct: we are surrounded by a presence of violence, socially, culturally, and especially in the media, which, because of its normalization and conventionalization, especially within the framework of cultural procedures, is largely no longer perceived in our lifeworld. This is where one should start if one really wants to deal with a history of fascination with violence and not merely with its derivatives that obviously disturb the normality of socialization and the fundamental, albeit always central, possibility of its use.

3 History of Fascination The concept of the ‘history of fascination’ (Heinrich 1992) was developed, in a context other than that of violence, by the Berlin scholar of religion Klaus Heinrich. However, he never really elaborated it as a concept, but left it at a comparatively

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rough framework. In contrast to “real history” Heinrich connects with it “what fascinates through real history” (Heinrich 1992, p. 15). In these residues of a cultural fascination, “unresolved conflicts, unresolved tensions, the unsolved problem is always present” (Heinrich 1992, p. 15). Here, a “genre substrate” is present insofar as the elements of fascination are of utmost importance for “the genre’s enterprise of self-understanding” (Heinrich 1992, p. 41). “Reappraising the history of fascination” (Heinrich 1992, p. 39) therefore means working out the epistemological depth layers of phenomena, of what is shown, specifically of cultural artefacts, which shine into the present by means of their representational performances of culture. Culture, one could thus formulate, is in its aesthetic-­performative representational performances the decisive carrier of a presence of violence in society. That which is always transported imagologically is here subjected to an attempt at reconstruction, which seeks to reconstruct, as it were, a history of the reception and mentality of fascination and imagination. To speak of a history of fascination with violence therefore means first of all to establish a cultural continuity for its presence in culture and society, which within cultural history, but also for the forms of socialization, does not necessarily represent a nuisance, as one might think in view of the constant efforts to achieve a social exclusion of violence. It is precisely the ethical and normative rejection of it that translates the positioning of violence into a driving force of culture and society determined via deviance. Violence, moreover, is realized in countless cultural performances. If culture, with Böhme, is essentially the processing of fear, the fear related to possibilities of violence is particularly significant for an imaginary of culture. Through techniques of the imagination, it has a particular part in formulating the horizon of what kinds and intensities of violence appear as imaginable in what fields of culture and society in general, and thus become part of a representative culture. This is significant simply because, according to Popitz, the “anthropological basis of the delimitation of the relationship of violence (…) is the human capacity to imagine” (Popitz 1999, p. 51). The dissolution of boundaries with regard to the otherwise valid social conventions for an effective containment of violence therefore takes place preferably imaginatively. According to Popitz, our imaginative capacity tends to be boundless, which is why there are basically no limits to the imaginative embellishment of violence. Before the active implementation of violence, that is, stands its imagination, the idea that an action is also physically, socially and mentally possible. The paradox inherent in this rejection explicitly aims at a kind of focussing of cultural and social processes on, of all things, the very element that occupies the position of the ostracised in them. The paradox of a presence of violence in the normalization contexts of culture and society, despite its fundamental lifeworldly, structural, and normative-­

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ethical ostracism, would ultimately still be mediable even within the normality of socialization. Ultimately, however, the point is not so much that the mere presence of violence, or rather its representational performance, cannot be mediated in society. On the macro-level of society, this would most likely still be acceptable as one of many contradictions at work in it that cannot be resolved. What is more important is that, as explained above, the presence of cultural and social representational performances of violence actually attain an enormously productive power within culture and socialization.

4 Evil Pictures It is probably characteristic of the history of fascination with violence that it is less event-oriented than image-oriented, which already results from the close interlocking of the history of fascination and imagination, that is, an iconography endowed with epistemic power. Fascination history is eminently not only historicized as image history, but it also realizes itself for the present specifically through the production of images and in dealing with them. It thus works through the fund of culturally and historically established, symbolically and affectively still effective images as well as through an arsenal of contemporary retrievable and connectable imagery. Ultimately, therefore, the symbolic-semiotic level of violence is more decisive than its manifest presence. When violence does break into society in a violent and excessive manner, the disruptive effect it triggers is enormous and considerably irritating (Ahrens 2011). If one takes an inventory of the field on the basis of a social present that is subject to cultural-historical and epistemic influences of fascination without necessarily being determined by them, one notices a remarkable intersection of this violence, especially its images, with a social identification of evil. More recently, Charlotte Klonk’s study of the cultural impact of images shows how much attention is focused not on the acts of violence themselves, but rather on the images that circulate of them and are invested with meaning (Klonk 2017). This is already remarkable because the category of “evil” should actually no longer play any role in modern societies. The idea of evil is so clearly theologically charged and makes so little sense in view of non-determined social relations based on contingency, complexity, interaction, agreement and power that its use in this context must be irritating. Nevertheless, it is precisely in the wake of such acts of violence, which, as explained above, radically exceed the socially accepted horizon of possibilities of deviance, that the vocabulary of evil is used by a large number of the actors. Here it seems to be a matter of experiences of a social evil that is per-

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ceived as such precisely because it has in itself a transcending element. This evil is not derived from the refuges of violence in society and culture, which are primarily defined by a canonized arsenal of images, but rather stems from those extraordinary events of an incursion of unregulated, non-normalized violence into social reality. The aim would be the radical transgression of a commonly accepted social construction of reality, whose normative-ethical parameters seem to be falsified in the act of excessive violence. Evil is then called that which, as deviance in society, is no longer commensurable, no longer communicable. Images, in this alone the epistemic mortgage of every present is revealed, necessarily stand in an ethically marked field. The disputes about an ethics of aesthetics can be traced back a long time and all of them concern in particular the image as a specific, obviously affective and authentically central carrier of information. On the one hand, this tension around image reception and image regulation dissolved in the twentieth century in the face of a largely successful secularization of society and culture and a differentiation of image aesthetics along with its final detachment from transcendentally held framings. In the course of this process, images are symbolically unburdened and detached from a supposedly compelling unambiguity of what they communicate on the level of reception. On the other hand, the discourse around images becomes extremely dramatic in that, via the mass media, which also emerge in the twentieth century, take hold of the whole of society in a new way and, from the second half of the century, enter into a rapid technical development, the reception of media-mediated images once again becomes the focus of the symbolic forms of society. With this development, modernity is led to develop its own pictorial language, which makes it possible to relativize the ambiguity of images just mentioned and to once again cut together unambiguity and signification. In a completely different context and in a completely different way than would be the case in myth or religion, an image aesthetic is now once again moving into the center of perception and socialization as society-forming, decisively carried by the image level of media news formats (Paul 2013). At the same time, it is obvious that even in contemporary practices of approaching those images that depict and represent violence, a historically saturated attitude towards the image is both transmitted and annulled. Image reception thus remains part of a culturally and historically saturated epistemology and at the same time designs novel modes that can go beyond it. This makes it clearer why, also with regard to current social dynamics and recent violent events that have attracted general attention (amok, terror, abuse, etc.), the examination of their image formation and pictorial mediation plays a considerable role in each case. What is remarkable about this is not only the extent to which the discourse about the presence of violence in society, or about violence as a form

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of expression of cultural artefacts, is realised as a discourse about the images of this violence, instead of focusing on the violence that has actually taken place as an act in social space. The experiential value of acts of violence beyond their immediate experience (which must necessarily always be limited to the victims, perpetrators and spectators who are situationally within their radius of action) emerges quite obviously primarily from a socially guided reception of the media images that ­circulate of this violence and thus also at least suggest a certain perspective on this violence. Violence, especially in the real-time media society of the present, is experienced socially and culturally by being translated into images and communicated as images. The image of violence is reversed into the actual relevant presence of violence in society. When Régis Debray states that the cultural ‘need for images’ (Debray 2013) is constantly shifting according to “communicative possibilities” (Debray 2013, p. 266), this includes the substitution competence of images over real events. The images of violence substitute for the violence that really occurred; as in religious imagery, the images substitute for the viewer’s immediate experience as an experience. Remarkably, this process is coupled with the renaissance of a category that has actually sunk culturally because it is transcendentally bound, such as that of evil. Quite openly, exceptionally intense acts of violence are identified and addressed as ‘evil’ in the course of their reception, and, significantly, by all actors in the debate – from journalism to politics and those affected to the human sciences. This identification of a particular variety of violence as essentially ‘evil’, that is, as an indication and agent of a decidedly transcendent category that defies any location in a profane this world subject to the material conditions of socialization, is an astonishing achievement in the generally secularly oriented modern age. The proximity of such acts of violence to evil is also striking to Reemtsma, who assumes that the culture of modernity has “serious problems” in dealing with forms of extreme violence, since these have “become alien” (Reemtsma 2009, p.  119). Evil then takes the place of the ability to justify and fills the lack of “legitimating figures” (Reemtsma 2009, p. 119) of violence. Consequently, what can no longer be provided with meaning and stands outside of rationalization performances is then grasped as evil. Indeed, the classification as ‘evil’ establishes above all that certain actions and events fall outside the normal context of modernity and its institutions. Where this framework is, as it were, negatively transcended, evil can be resorted to as a category that appropriately enables a transcendence of modernity. This movement of a profane and medial transcendence of violence ultimately goes so far as to move away from the actual event and rather focus on the techniques for its documentation and representation, especially in terms of images. The ongoing history of fascination with violence and its urge to transcend belong closely together.

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Evil, which should lie in violence itself, discursively merges with the turn towards an identification of the images of this violence as evil; the images of violence substitute for violence itself. The current discourse on violence is therefore essentially a discourse on the evil images of violence. The images that show violence are themselves received by the public as evil. In fact, they function quite classically as substitutes for actual violence and give its factually only fleeting presence in social reality a long-term duration. This is astonishing not only because it represents a clear departure from a profaned, secularized treatment of images to which such a quality can actually no longer be ascribed. In modern, complex, contingency-based societies, the identification of images as manifestations of an essential evil should no longer be practiced at all. At most, specific accesses to images or stagings of images that can or even must be considered ethically problematic or untenable should be possible. Such an intention is underlined by Hannah Arendt’s assessment that forgetting justifies the evil act, while memory is the first condition of remorse for the perpetrator (Arendt 2009, p. 75), while the image keeps present for society the provocation perpetrated by evil. Rainer Leschke, in turn, speaks of a fundamental “connection between normativity and media form” (Leschke 2001, p.  219). Media and their contents are “structurally normatively” organized (Leschke 2001, p. 224), which, with simultaneous formal differentiation, leads to a “constitutive self-reflexivity” (Leschke 2001, p. 223) of the media system. However, he qualifies, since this normativity remains aesthetically based, it is “at best potentially, but not per se normatively valid” (Leschke 2001, p. 229), which diverts the normative responsibility for the meaning and practice of images in the sense of media society from their producers to the consumers. From this point of view, a regulation of the practice of showing even precarious images with the fascination of violence seems at least problematic, because it falls behind the immanent dynamics of media society and does not do justice to the aesthetic polyvalence of its products. The image labelled as “evil”, on the other hand, has the special property that it does not even have to be fitted into an ethical framing or discussion, but is considered evil in and of itself and conveys a quality that stands precisely before any labelling aimed at a certain ethics. In such images, then, “representation and represented become one” (Klonk 2017, p. 213), the image actually taking the place of what it depicts. To conceal media images, to want to deliberately limit their effect, means above all to tend not to accept one of the essential premises of modern media societies, namely the fundamental openness of images to meaning. In this respect, it would be important to clarify how images of violence can at the same time be determined as evil images. The evil of these images refers to the identification between the showing image and the content depicted in it, in these cases: Images of extraordinary violence. They are thus images of interference, dis-

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ruption and disturbance. Moreover, two levels merge in these images that have never been able to be sharply distinguished in terms of image aesthetics, generically, but which have been specifically kept apart at all times, especially in the public discourse surrounding media content in the modern era. These are the levels of reality and fiction. In the images designated as “evil”, which show the events or consequences of extraordinary violence, fictional images become real on the one hand, but on the other hand real images experience an imagological occupation. The pictorial icons of the New York Twin Towers in flames, collapsing, dissolving into an agony-mapocalypse, also the images of people throwing themselves out of these towers, which have even been given the aestheticizing generic name of Falling Men (Klonk 2017, pp. 226–231), stand for a turning of real events onto a level of imagination and ultimately also of fictionalization that is essentially carried via images. In contrast, a film such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (USA), which in 1994 presents a biting critique of the media’s treatment of the phenomenon of violence, is paradoxically consistently seen as a catalyst for the realization of violence in the present. It is not only in public and political discourses that repeated reference is made to the allegedly violent and violence-­ initiating power of this film; social science discourse also consistently sees in Stone’s film a testimony to real violence that has merely been symbolically pixelated in visual terms.

5 Performativity of the Fascination Motif In the last few years, roughly since the turning point of the millennium with the attacks of 9/11, it can be observed that the qualitative difference between images that are perceived as classically documentary, which are thus attributed a clear reality content, and those that are considered fictional and apparently function imagologically, is increasingly melting away. Both tend more and more towards indistinguishability. With regard to the actually fictional images, this discourse tendency has existed for a long time: fictional images have always been the subject of considerations that have questioned them as to the extent to which they translate into suggestions of reality and have a manipulative effect on their recipients. The general, pedagogically oriented discourse on the effectiveness of popular media has always drawn enormous energy from this direction. Now, however, the process is also being reversed, and this is new, at least to this extent and apart from classical propaganda productions. The fact that news images, documentary images are given the nimbus of the imaginary, of the at least partially fictional, is a new tendency that is becoming even more significant than the first-mentioned thematization of fictional images.

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At first glance, it seems absurd that in the field of images of violence, those of an ultimately fictional violence enjoy far more formal and aesthetic leeway and are more likely to be tolerated than those that show violence classified as real. Efforts to regulate media communication, the question of what may and may not be shown, with regard to media images of violence are primarily directed at images of real violence, which are perceived as much harsher in their potential social effects – in Klonk’s study on the “struggle with images” (Klonk 2017), images of fictional violence are completely absent, as if this did not (any longer) belong to the reality of society. In the meantime, there is apparently a comparatively large consensus that images of fictional violence are also classified accordingly by the audience in their reception, therefore remain manageable in their ethical dispersion and must be assessed as comparatively low-threshold in their consequential effects. The fact that regular media consumption, which today basically represents the social norm and normal behaviour, leads in the medium term to a confusion of reality and fiction is increasingly less assumed. However, this thesis, which is actually outdated today, crops up again and again when it comes to explaining counterintuitive, radical acts of violence. Teenage school shooters, for example, are repeatedly portrayed as having been impregnated by violent media. In principle, however, the recipients of violent media content today are granted considerably more independence, reflection and self-responsibility than was recently the case. Compared to fictional representations of violence, images of real violence are considered much more dangerous, especially since they have been given a whole new nimbus of authenticity via documentation with mobile phone cameras and are easily retrievable almost in real time. What comes to the fore here in particular is the sheer possibility of the violence being documented, since an aesthetic of violence is inevitably barely perceptible in these situationally recorded amateur formats – as in the case of the London subway attacks of 2005, for example, or the attack on the Bataclan music club in Paris in 2015. A film like Natural Born Killers may have furthered the proliferation of such an aesthetic of violence, albeit obviously against its intention. The mere photographing of what happens no longer knows such an aesthetic and therefore also looks comparatively sober and unspectacular. Precisely with this, however, the documentary power grows, which at first seems to say one thing: this reality is not immune to violence; violence is possible and realizable. As a means to one’s own ends, however irrational these may seem to others, it can be extremely purposeful. At this point, therefore, the discourse of fascination transforms from one of epistemology and reception to one of application. Although the moment of fascination still connects to a very deep cultural knowledge of the presence and significance of violence in society and culture, violence is now given a new-seeming accentuation. This concerns the fascination with

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the realization of what actually, categorically and ethically, should have remained only imagination. The affect against the documentary images of real violence is therefore above all the affect against an assumed or predicted, possible role model effect of these images. The images of violence, so the fear of the public and politics, could become manuals for further acts of violence. For this reason, there is more extensive discussion than there has been in a long time about which perspectives on this violence in reporting, especially in the documentation of violent events, are legitimate, i.e. morally permissible or at least required. The “stronger the reference to reality of an image and the more clearly it approaches the situational everyday perception” (Klonk 2017, p. 215), Klonk elaborates, the greater the “need for commentary and further images” (Klonk 2017, p. 215). A broad debate is being conducted in these waters about which images of such acts should be shown, what information about the perpetrator may be revealed, from which perspective the reporting should be done as a whole. Imitators of the violence are feared. The dispersal of the fascination motif in social space, stepping out of mere history and seeking a bloody present, is enormously feared. One might call this the performative turn of the fascination motif, possible only under otherwise affirmed conditions of modern media society, but here apparently threatening to dissolve its normative structural modes. Meanwhile, serious news reporting has long been attuned to such assumptions. This, however, again raises the question of access to the audience, which in this reading is quite classically conceived as an assembly of underage people. Seen in this way, the audience can quite obviously, and following Adorno, still not want for itself (Adorno 1997). In terms of media didactics and media ethics, the recipients of media content continue to be in a state of immaturity. In the present age of ever-advancing digitalization, of remediation and premediation, in which the so-called user should have long since replaced the mere consumer, this is remarkable. Instead, others must continue to do the will of the audience for them. While the ongoing discourse thus describes a clear accentuation of the potential fascination that violence still possesses for society and that essentially shapes its reception history, at the same time this access approaches the mediability of violence itself in a completely new way. Previously, violence as a constant form in society was still the ultimate incommunicable, which was ultimately conveyed to an audience, especially through media channels of fiction, but also of documentation and reportage, and which, with the establishment of modern media societies, has in fact become identical with society. Thus, the authoritative discourse today explicitly revolves around possible and legitimate forms of medial and aesthetic mediation of that which tends to be classified as incommensurable because it radically transgresses the ethical and normative structural boundaries of society.

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Obviously, the subtle work of culture on the motif of violence is no longer to be abandoned at any price. What remains extremely incommunicable at present is the self-evident presence of violence as an essential component of reality, lifeworld and experience. In this context, immediacy also means, above all, that content or images appear socially and culturally as unacceptable and no longer acceptable, which indicates a kind of return of the Rousseauian ‘general will’ in the shaping of media reality. Finally, as always, of course, mediation does take place, since it is precisely the absence of mediation that would constitute the greatest source of danger for destabilizing socialization processes. A mediation of violence takes place in a double sense: firstly, as a didactic communicative access of those media that have to communicate this presence of violence, and secondly, as an intended insertion of the reality of such a presence of violence into institutional processes of socialization and social normalization.

References Adorno, T. W. (1997). Kann das Publikum wollen? In Vermischte Schriften I, Gesammelte Schriften 20.1. (S. 342–347). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Ahrens, J. (2011). Anthropologie als Störfall. Gesellschaftliche Bearbeitungen von Gewalt. Störfälle. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 2, 73–83. Ahrens, J. (2012). Wie aus Wildnis Gesellschaft wird. Kulturelle Selbstverständigung und populäre Kultur am Beispiel von John Fords Film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Ahrens, J. (2017). Die unfassbare Tat. Gesellschaft und Amok. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Arendt, H. (2009). Über das Böse. Eine Vorlesung zu Fragen der Ethik. München: Piper. Bauman, Z. (1992). Moderne und Ambivalenz. Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. Hamburg: Junius. Böhme, H. (2000). Leibliche und kulturelle Codierungen der Angst. In ZDF-Nachstudio (Hrsg.), Große Gefühle. Bausteine menschlichen Verhaltens (S. 214–239). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Böhme, H. (2012). Das Archaische und das Soziale. Entgrenzung und Einhegung von Gewalt im gegenwärtigen Film und im Mythos. Imago Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik, Bd. 1, 9–32. Debray, R. (2013). Jenseits der Bilder. Eine Geschichte der Bildbetrachtung im Abendland. Berlin: Avinus. Elias, N. & Dunning, E. (2003). Sport und Spannung im Prozess der Zivilisation. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Freud, S. (1974). Fragen der Gesellschaft. Ursprünge der Religion. Studienausgabe IX. Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer. Giddens, A. (1988). Die Konstitution der Gesellschaft. Grundzüge einer Theorie der Strukturierung. Frankfurt/New York: Campus.

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Heinrich, K. (1992). Floß der Medusa. 3 Studien zur Faszinationsgeschichte mit mehreren Beilagen und einem Anhang. Basel/Frankfurt/M.: Stroemfeld Verlag. Klonk, C. (2017). Terror. Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden. Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer. Leschke, R. (2001). Einführung in die Medienethik. München: Wilhelm Fink/UTB. Paul, G. (2013). BilderMACHT. Studien zur Visual History des 20. Und 21. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallstein. Popitz, H. (1999). Phänomene der Macht. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Popitz, H. (2006). Soziale Normen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Reemtsma, J.P. (2000). Mord am Strand. Allianzen von Zivilisation und Barbarei. München: Siedler. Reemtsma, J.P. (2009). Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne. München: Pantheon.

Violence in Late Modern Societies: Fury Rooms Jutta Ecarius

1 Introduction The subject of violence-reason-fear is a vast one, and it juts into so many directions of social scientific and philosophical thought that one is startled by the scope and violence of the subject: Where do you start, what do you leave out, and what do you focus on? Is it the violent attitudes and actions of young people or parents that interest us, or events such as one of the attacks in the USA, France or Germany and the helplessness, the horror associated with them? Or is it the question of what constitutes violence, how do we react to it and how does it change social life? IS and terrorist attacks, but also rampage and natural disasters seem to explode late-­ modern life and a new mode of fear germinates, the fear of a terrorist attack when you are on a plane, or the fear of certain places, no-go-areas or a destruction of the environment. With all these events, it is not surprising that resilience research, i.e. the question of how to deal positively with trauma or difficult life situations and what conditions are needed to act resiliently, is booming. Research on feelings, affects and emotions in the context of violence and terrorism is also gaining in importance. How does one deal with such a weighty topic, which is as old as mankind itself? In my contribution, I will first make social theoretical approaches and J. Ecarius (*) Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_7

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then turn to an example, the Fury Rooms. At the same time, I will look at conditions of late modernity and discuss feelings, disciplining and strategic action against this background.

2 Approaches Based on Social Theory Even though there is now talk of an ‘emotional’ or an ‘affective turn’, as for example Reckwitz does (2018, p. 28), it must be stated that feelings – and by this I mean all forms of feelings, affects or emotions1 – do not find any outstanding significance in social theoretical foundations and considerations on the theorization of man and society. From Max Weber to Emil Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, as well as in Niklas Luhmann as well as Jürgen Habermas or Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, one finds the remarkable tendency that the social is associated with normative-­purposeful orders or orders of knowledge. There is a no less widespread tendency to relate formal rationality and modernity (Beck, 1986; Giddens, 1992; Rosa, 2013). Rationalisation as a marker of modernity involves the increasing ability of people to overcome affect and establish control through ‘reflexive’ rationalisation. Feelings, in these approaches, are less subject to social and cultural conditioning; they belong more to ‘pre-social’ bodies. The high significance of rationality, reasonable action, which becomes what is actually human, captivates and displaces the emotional (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1998). In this way, a dichotomy between nature and sociality emerges. This is accompanied by another dualism, that of irrationality and rationality. Through this opposition, emotions or feelings become unacceptable, hardly comprehensible characteristics of individuals, which appear uncontrollable as natural-biological drives and can be assigned to the pre-social body. Discourse, rule-free conversation (Habermas, 1981) and also interactions (Mead, 1991) are largely ‘purged’ of emotions. Or else: emotions are rationalized through education towards the rational subject. They thus appear as the other of rationality, of orderliness and the reasonably calculable. The normative sedimentations of the social, which generate social formations, in a sense exclude emotions, moods and affects by marking them as something to be avoided, especially if they are negative feelings: Anxiety, fear, hatred, envy or aggression. These emotions are excluded as something to be avoided, they are to be fought against, no, they are not to be allowed to arise in the first place.

 In this article, I will not distinguish between affects, emotions, feelings, and moods (Landweer, 2016). 1

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Modern societies are interpreted in essence as those of a progressive rationalization, with which emotional action can be leveled, since feelings appear inappropriate and unnecessary due to the principles of justice and recognition of the other. Elias (1976) formulates this particularly clearly in his theory of the process of civilisation: the modern development of society is one of increasing affect control, the control of the subject from the outside towards internal self-directed affect control. Modernity can thus be equated with the neutralization of affect, replaced by rationality and reflexive renewal in the sense of the democratic. Enlightened reason is not only contrasted with mere emotion, but at the same time regarded as superior and of higher value. Thus a fundamental opposition is drawn between the social as the enlightened (late) modern and the ‘biological-natural’ as the emotional uncontrollable. This dualism and at the same time the higher valuation of the rational are also evident in theories of late modernity. Theoretical concepts about social formations have a conceptual void. The entrepreneurial subject in particular (Bröckling, 2007) is a rational one, whose affects have long since been neutralised, because it is now about an extension of the rational: it is about research, moderation and conscious selection in everyday actions, with friends, at work and in the family, information search in the network, in order to always become faster, better and more perfect. Behind this is the assumption that feelings can be neutralized – whether through counseling, rational reappraisal, recognition of the other, and planned well-being of one’s own. Feelings and affects are more likely to become disorders. Even in private, the making of family (Jurczyk, 2014) is required, negative or ‘bad’ emotions are seen as their greatest potential threat, they are the greatest risk factor for relationship breakdown and also for unsuccessful parenting (Ecarius et al., 2017). Good balancing of interests and seeking agreements, that is what seems to stabilize family at present. With these assumptions, which can be found not only in family research (Ecarius, 2020; Lange, 2020), but also in praxeological approaches such as Bourdieu (1979) or Bröckling (2017), feelings appear as something that colours actions, gives them a particular hue, which can hardly be calculated. Bourdieu, for example, focuses on the analysis of patterns of thought, perception and action that generate a habitus through practice, which in turn guides action, perception and thought. Bröckling (2007) names the entrepreneurial subject, who calculates and constantly improves and, starting from secure locations, seeks and finds new things, thus gaining an advantage. When dealing with emotions in research on violence (Heitmeyer, 1985; Heitmeyer & Imbusch, 2005), the focus is usually on the question of the extent to which emotions serve as accelerators or cheerleaders. Feelings, and especially af-

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fects, are seen as something that is added to actions and also to orders. This ‘coming to it’ is something external to the actions, it does not belong to them, but has its own efficacy, which is equivalent to a naturalised force: ethnic conflicts are fuelled, sexual violence is libidinous, parents who hit or beat are insane. The ‘why?’ is always asked: why do parents become violent, why do people murder others, why do adults commit sexual violence? This ‘why?’ is designed to ask about logics, that is, about actions that ultimately lead to an explanation. Inherent in questions about ‘why?’ is often – even justifiably – a lack of understanding as well as a distancing. Feelings of this kind are thematised as a problem while at the same time distancing oneself. And the question of ‘why?’ calls for reasonable answers to clarify and prevent affects, but also quite often to the call for the prohibition of ‘negative feelings’. In the Iliad, Homer already addressed the anger of Achilles and its devastating consequences, and Plato, too, describes in his Politeia the sexual desires that captivate the mad and wild master and that must be tamed; representatives of the Stoa preach affect control and make emotionlessness the ideal. Moderate emotions are recommended by Epicurus and also in the succession of David Hume. In Christian lore, such threatening emotions are those of the devil or demons. Emotions are described as something alien, something that takes over the direction of human action. Siegmund Freud captured this powerfully when he spoke of the ego no longer being “master in its own house” (Freud, 1999, p. 295). In modern theories, feelings disappear – if at all – in conflicts of interest, distinctions, problems of practice or systems. Even invocations seem to take place beyond affects as a ‘letting oneself be addressed’ in order to improve one’s own actions (Reckwitz 2018). Although emotions occur marginally in situation descriptions, they do not play a main role. Even in a positive way, emotions tend to be hidden in recognition (Honneth, 2003), an authoritative upbringing (Liebenwein, 2008) or in respect. In my opinion, the analyses by Schulze (2012) and also by Sutterlüty (2012) are an exception. Sutterlüty (2012) does not ask why violence happens, so he does not ask why someone goes into a Baptist church and shoots twenty people, or why a suicide bomber blows himself and others up, or why an IS terrorist drives a truck into a Christmas market and ends up at the Memorial Church in Berlin. Sutterlüty (2012), Schulze (2012) as well as Reemtsma (2009) choose a different form of question, instead of a “why?” they ask “how?”. In order to understand such actions, they seek access to people who act in exactly the same way, they analyse their narratives and self-descriptions of how they came to become brutal, to go berserk or to kill. They do not look for reasons as to why something is done, but analyse the

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meanings of narrative descriptions of the course of events and the feelings that are included in actions. Reemtsma takes up this idea and, following Bernd Greiner (2009), deals with extreme perpetrators, those acting in a frenzy, who are also called ‘berserkers’ and appear as possessed. US soldiers who participated in the Mylai massacre can be divided into four types. The extreme perpetrator type, a minority, includes soldiers who act in an extreme manner, but not in a trance, but on command. After finishing the massacres in the most cruel way, they fall back into a friendly mode. Alexander Mitscherlich would describe them as cold or emotionless. But this cold, which is equated with brutal, this coldness of feeling, however, is not to be equated with an absence of feeling. Here it is not a matter of speaking of a turning on or off of emotional impulses and analyzing this as such, but the strong affects, the excessive, the destruction of bodies, is to be placed as a strong emotional impulse in the context of the event (as a specific space) and its assignment. The soldiers had been ordered to kill. The order ‘You shall’ becomes ‘You may’ and in this space, which is named via a military attribution, the possibility opens up for this extreme type to act extremely violently, while the other types – those acting in the opposite direction and those holding themselves back – act differently, although the perpetrator type also kills. In this space opened for killing, the soldiers were allowed to decide for themselves how to behave and if so, how to kill and massacre. Here, it is the command and the space provided that leads to tearing down boundaries of humanity. The license to kill releases from moral concerns. But it also means that this unlocked space is emotionally grasped and filled by the individual subject. It is thus the agent who defines and kills this space for himself, namely in different ways. This space is emotionally grasped and actively shaped by the perpetrator. Roaring, screaming, brutal and murdering is the action. Reemtsma writes on this: “According to everything we know about the course of the massacre, the soldiers in question of the non-extreme majority did not have to restrain themselves for this, they did not have to shake off any obsession, nor did they have to awaken from any intoxication. Rather, their emotion captured this capacity in terms of starting, continuing, and stopping” (Reemtsma, 2015, p. 23). In this respect, affects or feelings are not something external or added, but they are modes of action, thus: action and feelings belong together (Demmerling & Landweer, 2007). Feelings are partly responsible for how we see the world, how we act, and what rational evaluations we make. They are not something else that turns humans into animals, something animalistic as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but are embedded in action and they cause action.

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3 Late Modernism and Fury Rooms Now what does this have to do with late modern societies whose subject foil is the entrepreneurial self? Here I would like to emphasize two aspects: First, I want to show that Bröckling’s (2007) assumptions about the entrepreneurial self describe a further distancing from affect. And secondly, I will discuss Anger Rooms and Fury Rooms, respectively, which are becoming increasingly popular. According to Rosa (2007) and Bröckling (2017), late modernity is characterized by an acceleration in the social, technical and cultural spheres in the sense of an optimization of the entrepreneurial. Ethnic plurality promotes the compulsion to be morally authentic, with a simultaneous dissolution of hierarchies, temporal processes and constant innovations. The subject is called upon to unfold himself and to set learning as well as educational processes in motion, and no longer only as the unfolding of autonomy, but in the self-organization of the private, professional, and recreational, to obtain the best for himself (Ecarius, 2016). The requirements of an optimization are to “(explore) and (shape) oneself throughout one’s life” (Bröckling, 2007, p. 127). Although the ego is still looking for an authority instance through which it can at the same time delimit itself and perhaps also form an autonomous subject, it does not find this, since a successful coping with life as a norm requires discovering abilities through constant self-exploration, organizing oneself, transferring claims to a good and authentic life into reality in recourse to oneself, and thereby unfolding a sense of well-being. Aubert (2009, p. 98) emphasizes that establishing a relationship with oneself simultaneously means transcending oneself. A central subject norm in late modernity is to constantly reinvent oneself, to avoid stagnation, and to practice dynamism as the core of action. According to Bröckling, this includes creative resourcefulness, a reflexive approach to the new, and the ability to establish a fluid equilibrium. This requires a constant rational examination of oneself, a processing of one’s own actions towards perfection and a strategic handling of self-organized networks (Reckwitz, 2012, 2018). The core of action of the optimised subject lies in selecting, evaluating and deciding. These are rational patterns of action, which at the same time imply that feelings have no place in them. A flexible and change-ready subject in a late-global society with demands of tolerance, openness and integrity contains a disciplining of action. Above all, ‘bad’ feelings are not allowed to play a role; they are to be filtered out of action in a learning process through education and (self-)formation. The entrepreneurial subject loses itself, one could formulate as a threat, if it indulges in its affects, moods, its feelings and emotional fears. Fear or even aggression or helplessness are bad companions for the demand to constantly change and

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to always learn something new. For the invocation means to free oneself from what one likes, but which is of no use to one, what one simply likes without profitable use, or what one rejects or even hates about oneself. The learning self referred to personal responsibility (Helsper, 2015, p. 136) is to be equated with reflexive flexibility, self-organisation and sensible learning. Disciplining thus means above all freeing oneself from ‘unfavourable’ emotions, containing affects and attempting to separate action from feelings, to be or become resilient. At the same time, this seems to provide the certainty of being able to manage personal separations or defeats effortlessly, to move easily in fluid scenes without too many ties, to always take on new things and to always reorient oneself professionally. It is a matter of escaping the hysteresis effect, as Bourdieu (1987) describes it. The thinking, perception and action strategies of one’s own habitus are to be freed from the emotional, which has a binding effect and does not want to let go. Emotions transfigure the rational gaze and emotional needs for security, order and permanence are to be negated, because they hinder the new. Ehrenberg (2012) describes symptoms of illness of the late modern subject. He names depression and burnout: being caught in feelings and overcoming stress not only paralyze the body, but also thoughts and actions. The optimised, authentic and flexible subject wants to free itself from unpleasant and unwanted emotions and feelings and thus singularise itself (Reckwitz, 2018). The less the optimized subject allows itself to be guided by its own feelings, the freer and more open it can reasonably devote itself to the demands of strategically choosing, evaluating what is offered or the situation, and deciding on the right behavior and perspective on the new, building a network and cultivating itself. Only unemotionally does the subject make the best choice for himself among many options, for emotions impede strategies of improvement toward perfect cultivated singularization. At the same time, however, the late modern subject becomes aware that it is confronted with a “hopelessness of its efforts” (Bröckling, 2007, p. 127). For the optimized subject is constantly searching for the right path, and the realization that he does not know his way around and is on his own triggers  – according to Bröckling – “fright” (Bröckling, 2007, p. 127). He feels helpless and seeks help, but gets none. Guidebooks, as we find them today everywhere and for all topics (Duttweiler et al., 2016), in analogue and digital form (Schneewind) or seminar offerings offer the advice seeker and the advice seeker the hope of insights about themselves, to find the right path, the right authentic decision, but ultimately they all only mirror the advice seeker, open up new options according to the motto ‘Find yourself’ or ‘You are what you want to be’ and challenge them even more to decide out of themselves for what is right.

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Involuntarily, feelings of insecurity, fear, anger and shame creep in in the face of one’s own imperfection and the apparent inability to find oneself, envy through comparison with better people and sadness because of one’s own failure. Being thrown back on oneself, but also the challenges of late-modern work and life produce feelings of being alone, of feeling set back, and lead to aggression about oneself and others, about one’s own and others’ inabilities, whether in dealing with others, in traffic, in the family, with friends or at work. In this respect it is not ­surprising that Fury Rooms are becoming increasingly popular. I would now like to introduce them. Fury Rooms: An Example Fury Rooms for rent are also called Anger, Rage, Crash Rooms. The first Fury Room was founded in Dallas (USA) in 2008. More followed in New York, Los Angeles, also in Wroclaw, Warsaw, Hanoi, Seoul and in Germany in Halle or Berlin. But also in Paris and other places all over the world you can find Fury Rooms, which are called like this or similar. If you type ‘Fury Rooms’ into Google, descriptions, ads and You-tube movies will appear. Fury Rooms can be rented or given away as a birthday present. The following description can be found for one of the offers: “The slightly different form of stress management!” Have you ever wanted to smash a whole room, a TV or throw dishes at the wall? Need to blow off some steam? Then our Crash Room is the place for you! Number: incl. max. 3 persons Impact tools: free choice (various axes, hammers; chisels; golf clubs; baseball bats) Rage time: 60 min. Safety: Safety clothing is provided. Age restriction: from 14 years (accompanied by their parents) You can also bring your own items, percussion tools, your favorite music for your personal crash. It is also possible to have this event held at your premises (for an additional cost). There is the Crash Room and the Crash Room Deluxe. “In our small coffee corner we can also offer you some hot and cold drinks. Your Crash Room Team.” These rooms are offered like amusements in the amusement park as fun rooms for letting off anger and hate in secured rooms, for which one first pays, then enjoys oneself, lets out bad feelings without control, may or can experience catharsis – of whatever.

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Also revealing are videos posted on YouTube that visualise what to expect and so try to take the alienation out of such spaces by asking those shown there how they felt and the answers are: ‘It was fun’, ‘I feel liberated’ or ‘I was able to let out my frustration’ etc. Video (Duration: 2 min) The selected video, which stands for many others, shows the media staging of a rage room in Berlin. Not – as one would actually expect – is the topic framed by seriousness, but rather the ‘fun’ is presented. At the beginning, the video shows a moderator and the salesman who rents out the anger room for money (about 150 euros an hour) and knows the problems of his customers such as relationship stress, divorce or difficulties at work, and two attractive women who are willing to be filmed. The room specially prepared for aggression can be seen with furniture and with an arsenal of weapons (hatchets, axes, batons, baseball bats, golf clubs, etc.) with which it may be smashed. The presenter, who begins by briefly chopping up a box herself with a hatchet, giggling as she does so, emphasising the ‘fun’, then talks to the two young women who are in the anteroom to set the mood with a glass of champagne, hinting at a celebration, but the normality of the two young women also shines through: There’s nothing aggressive or otherwise suspicious about you. Occasions are the stolen car and the failed driver’s license with the simultaneous hint of one woman that she is well brought up by her mother and that her mother would never have allowed such a thing. The emphasis is on perfectly normal people who are well-mannered, disciplined to the unexpected, and nonaggressive. And yet there is something that moves her to use the rage room. Only then do we see the two in the rage room, both wrestling over weapons located there and the subsequent destructive rage that can be seen is fierce, which is, as it were, but softened by the moderator with the question of having fun for the viewers. The serious is wrapped up in a funny. The film ends with the young women in protective suits with helmets and gloves destroying televisions, a dresser, boxes, shelves, etc. Feelings that have been put off are allowed to vent – or as one of the two women in the film says, “24 years of aggression let out.” That sounds like more, the relief calls for a next visit.

4 Fenced Tremendous Feelings What is at stake here? How do ‘normal’ people deal with their aggression, what do they do with their experience that feelings are embedded in their actions and in their experiences, but that they have to switch them off or repress them equally, they follow invocations of optimisation. What does this point to?

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The short film first documents a relatively new business idea: rooms that can be rented and in which pent-up anger and aggression can be acted out on objects paid for or brought along  – as one wishes. Here the ‘you must not be aggressive’ ­becomes ‘you may’, with tools provided as ‘weapons’ and protective clothing. The video suggests a release for pent-up anger, frustration and aggression of all kinds, as these feelings are allowed to be vented in the spaces provided for this purpose, which are paid for. Late-modern society appears here as a demanding one that has no place for anger and hatred, or wants to have one. Watching the videos raises incomprehension: How can one be so aggressive, let oneself go like that, and then be happy about the aggression that has been let out? And at the same time, this raises a political question: What programs are needed to contain anger and hatred? The questions often revolve around a why and less around a why. So we have to ask why such anger rooms are used, what do they open up, and what does this have to do with late-modern forms of society? In view of late modern constraints, Ehrenberg (2008) understands depression and burnout as human attempts to break out of them, but feelings such as anger and fear are also to be placed in this context. Anger and fear can result from a helplessness of no longer being able to resist social appeals: Flexibility in professional life, responsible parenthood (Landhäußer, 2020) at every second, staging family as a world of education, finding oneself and being successful at the same time, these powerless invocations, which are to be attained via rational action and self-­ organization, may just lead to aggressiveness and stress experience, but also to fear and helplessness. The normative claim to deal peacefully, appreciatively and justly with others and others, and to always deal well with the accumulation of aggression, the anger about this and that, be it in traffic, while shopping or in conversation with others, and to transfer it into peaceful forms of action, can hardly be implemented at all times and in all places. Fury Rooms seem to offer a solution. In my opinion, they are a sign that the subject feels powerless in the face of the demands of always having to optimize and singularize itself. The invocation to be a peaceful subject and the feeling of anger about – as mentioned in the video  – the theft of the car, the failed exam (also) lead to Anger-­ Rooms, where people are allowed to smash things up as much as they like – under the direction of the person specially assigned to do so. Anger rooms offer a possibility to live out forbidden, repressed feelings, and so it is not surprising that in another video a man is given an hour in the Anger Room by his wife for Father’s Day, in order to ‘really let himself go’. Why do these people do this? They are looking for an outlet to react calmly to theft and failure to pass the test, to remain controlled, namely, just as the mother

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raised the one girl. Inner affect control is juxtaposed with seemingly uncontrollable feelings, understanding and consideration are juxtaposed with lack of ­understanding, frustration and anger. A ‘bought’ space makes it possible to allow anger, to act it out, to live out the negated split-off. The type of aggression and the severity are left up to the actors. The license to destroy is bought. As one interviewee said, one is allowed to be a little crazy – and the users of the Fury Rooms will also have different types of violent acting out of hatred and pent-up rage. The late modern optimized subject evaluates and decides, it stages itself as a cultivated singular Reckwitz (2018). Anger or even fear and depression are bad companions. The requirements are to free oneself from what makes one angry, insecure, anxious. Rational deliberation and cool detachment free us from feelings that entrap and empower us. It is – one could also say – the attempt to escape the hysteresis effect, to reject it and to develop a self-built strategy of thinking, acting and perceiving that leads to well-being and resilient action. With these considerations it can be concluded that the late modern optimized subject differs fundamentally from the modern one. The requirements are no longer to become autonomous in demarcation from established structures, which are to be broken and then consciously justly shaped, but rather in optimization lies a promise and at the same time a call to free oneself from ‘unfavorable’ and ‘hindering’ emotions and thus to objectify oneself, to create oneself. Behind the subject foil of an entrepreneurial and singular subject, there is also the fact that by letting oneself be called upon, emotions could also be neutralised – be it through rationality or counselling and psychological reappraisal. This may also be a reason for the many advice forums, digital and non-digital, that come across as a promise of salvation for a better, resilient life without ‘bad’ feelings, and yet at the same time show the hopelessness, since optimization is accompanied by a dynamization that never ends. A trip to a Fury Room may then be a brief salvation. Theories about late modern societies, even if they explain a lot, have a conceptual void, because as can be seen in the videos, feelings, emotions and moods are constant companions. In these theories, however, feelings are disturbances and potential dangers. In family research, for example, negative feelings are cited as a risk factor for partnership and family breakdown (Jurczyk, 2014; Walper & Wendt, 2005). Good balancing and consideration of interests and the search for agreements is what stabilizes the family. But the call for the constant production of responsible community alone causes stress due to constant optimisation, whereby ‘bad’ feelings are to be transformed through self-analysis into ‘positive’ feelings such as respect, love and recognition. Counselors, psychology, and even the media, who have appropriated the optimization syndrome for good and good, warn against feelings such as anger and hate. Fury Rooms offer a solution to pent-up feelings, practicing a splitting off of ‘bad’ feelings, which are lived out there, enclosed, if paid for.

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Such assumptions, which can be found not only in family research (Konietzka & Zimmermann, 2020) but also in praxeological approaches in Bourdieu or Bröckling, neutralize the emotional. Feelings are, for Bourdieu, amor fati (choice of fate), distinction or symbolic capital. Feelings are understood as something that is added to actions and also to orders, that is the glue for preferences. And ‘bad’ feelings are thematized as a problem of learning and education. The question of why calls for reasonable answers to clarify ‘bad’ feelings. Instead, however, we should ask how feelings and reason combine in action, and to what extent invocations of the optimised subject produce quite their own form of anger, hatred or depression and anxiety because of their disciplinings. But it is not only in action that an excessive demand is evident, but also in sociological thinking: here, too, feelings are largely disregarded. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, beginning with Max Weber (1985), meaningful action is equated with rational action for the organization of society, and the dream of being able to liberate oneself from the rigors of the emotional is expressed in this. But also processes of modernity such as acceleration in the technical and social (Rosa, 2016), individualization, appeals to become a singular authentic subject (Keupp, 2014), lead not only to helplessness and feelings of aloneness, but also to anger, hatred and aggression. In my opinion, social science approaches should increasingly address the question of how affects are discharged in the appeals of a late-modern subject and why it is a taboo not to have one’s emotions under control and how significant feelings such as anger and fear are. The Anger Rooms seem to point to the fact that the subject’s being thrown back on itself causes helplessness in such a way that social structures and demands are experienced as given from the outside and at the same time as internal. It is the subject who is thrown back on himself and has to find his way in a late-modern world – and then uses Fury Rooms to act out ‘negative’ feelings. Perhaps not the worst idea, even if at the same time it raises the question of how society can be made more satisfying.

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Konietzka, D. & Zimmermann, O. (2020): Familie in der Gegenwart: Familienformen und verläufe. In: J.  Ecarius & A.  Schierbaum (Hrsg.): Handbuch Familie I.  Gesellschaft, Familienbeziehungen und differenzielle Felder. Wiesbaden: VS Springer Fachmedien (Im Erscheinen) Landhäußer, S. (2020): Familie und verantwortete Elternschaft. In: J.  Ecarius & A.  Schierbaum (Hrsg.): Handbuch Familie II.  Erziehung, Bildung und pädagogische Arbeitsfelder. Wiesbaden: VS Springer Fachmedien (Im Erscheinen) Landweer, H. (2016): Gemeinsame Gefühle und leibliche Resonanz. In: Eberlein, Undine (Hrsg.), Zwischenleiblichkeit und bewegtes Verstehen. Intercoporeity, Movement und Tacit Knowledge, S. 137–174. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Lange, A. (2020): Familie und Zeitknappheit. In: J.  Ecarius & A.  Schierbaum (Hrsg.): Handbuch Familie I.  Gesellschaft, Familienbeziehungen und differenzielle Felder. Wiesbaden: VS Springer Fachmedien (Im Erscheinen) Liebenwein, S. (2008): Erziehung und soziale Milieus. Elterliche Erziehungsstile in milieuspezifischer Differenzierung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften Mead, G.H. (1991): Geist, Identität und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag Reckwitz, Andreas (2012): Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. Berlin: Suhrkamp Reckwitz, A. (2018): Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Suhrkamp: Berlin Reemtsma, P. (2009): Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne. Hamburg: Pantheon-Verlag Reemtsma, P. (2015): Warum Affekte? In: Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, 24. Jahrgang, April/Mai 2015, Heft 1–2 Rosa, H. (2007): Modernisierung als soziale Beschleunigung: Kontinuierliche Steigerungsdynamik und kulturelle Diskontinuität. In: T.  Bonacker & A.  Reckwitz (Hrsg.): Kulturen der Moderne. Soziologische Perspektiven der Gegenwart. Frankfurt, New York: Campus, S. 140–172. Rosa, H. (2013): Beschleunigung und Entfremdung. Entwurf einer kritischen Theorie spätmoderner Zeitlichkeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp Rosa, H (2016): Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag Schulze, H. (2012) (Hrsg.), Gespür  – Empfindung  – Kleine Wahrnehmungen. Klanganthropologische Studien. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Sutterlüty, F. (2012): Gewalt um ihrer selbst willen? Intrinsische Tatmotive bei Jugendlichen. In: Ecarius, J. & Eulenbach, M. (Hrsg.): Jugend und Differenz. Aktuelle Debatten der Jugendforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, S. 225–244 Walper, S. & Wendt, E.V. (2005): Nicht mit beiden Eltern aufwachsen – ein Risiko? Kinder von Alleinerziehenden und Stieffamilien. In: C. Alt (Hrsg.): Kinderleben – Aufwachsen zwischen Familie, Freunden und Institutionen. Band 1: Aufwachsen in Familien. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften Weber, M. (1985): Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr Verlag

The Violence of the Media and the Media of Violence Jochen Hörisch

Violence and sex have been an irresistible fascination for art, literature and the media from the beginning until today – as a glance at the cave paintings in Lascaux or in Homer’s Iliad immediately shows. However, one is not always on the level of Homer or early cave painting art when it comes to sex and violence, as recently demonstrated by the unspeakable, because in every sense of the word vulgar, case of Harvey Weinstein. The hashtag #metoo initiative that quickly developed in the wake of that case has made it clear that the assaults that have come to light are not, in fact, a single irritating serial offender in a position of power, but a widespread pattern. The mass-media-spread agitation over the Weinstein case is entirely plausible, understandable, and certainly productive: it is intended to, and arguably will, put assaultive men in positions of power in their place. The hashtag ‘metoo’ is already an element of a series; it was preceded by the hashtags ‘yelp’ and ‘no-means-­no’, which were triggered by the hotel bar harassment of FDP politician Rainer Brüderle and the rape by two men reported by actress Gina Lisa Lohfink. Now, the latter case in particular, or even the scandalous miscarriage of justice that landed teacher Horst Arnold in prison for over five years on what was later proven to be a completely bogus rape accusation, provoke inquiries that are as unpopular as they are necessary. Those of the men accused of rape in the Lohfink case were acquitted, the video footJ. Hörisch (*) Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_8

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age available and saved mail and Twitter messages proved consensual threesome sex; Lohfink was convicted of false suspicion. The media coverage of all four cases (Weinstein, Brüderle, Arnold, and Lohfink) was substantial; the one that has lingered least in the collective media memory is the Horst Arnold case. But in this case in particular, it is as excruciating as it is illuminating to quote from the factual Wikipedia article1: ‘Arnold had to serve the entire prison sentence because he continued to deny the crime he was charged with and refused to deal with it in a therapy group for sex offenders. (…) It was only after his release from prison that the school’s women’s representative, Anja Keinath (who had previously supported Heidi K. in the trial), noticed that the alleged victim was becoming more and more entangled in contradictions and lies, which did not only concern the case of Horst Arnold. (…) The brother of the women’s representative, Hartmut Lierow, a lawyer for civil law in Berlin, then made inquiries and researched further inconsistencies in the biography of Heidi K. Lierow found out that Heidi K. had already attracted attention several times by describing life circumstances that were demonstrably false. Her descriptions were so extraordinary that she was no longer taken seriously even by those around her. With these findings, Lierow obtained a retrial at the Kassel Regional Court in 2008, which ended on 5 July 2011 with an acquittal for Horst Arnold on the grounds of proven innocence. The prosecution had also pleaded for acquittal. The court considered it proven that Heidi K. had wanted to eliminate a competitor for an internal school position by making false accusations. It was ‘beyond any doubt’ that Arnold had not committed the rape. The presiding judge stated that the Darmstadt Regional Court had believed the alleged victim in the first trial, even though an ‘in itself hardly credible event’ had been described. In reaching the verdict in 2001, ‘elementary basic rules of establishing the truth’ had been violated. Horst Plefka, the chief detective in charge of the investigation in 2001, testified that he had had doubts about the events alleged by K. from the beginning. However, investigations into K.’s past to check her credibility had been omitted because of fear of an ‘outcry’. Plefka had not been called as a witness in the first trial. Following an appeal by Heidi K., the Federal Court of Justice confirmed the acquittal on 9 February 2012, rejecting the appeal by order, as the review of the judgement had not revealed any legal error. The acquittal of the Kassel Regional Court thus became final. (…) After his acquittal, Arnold fought in vain for adequate compensation for his imprisonment; it was not paid until his death. Nor was he able to achieve reintegration into his profession as a teacher. In order to be reinstated as a teacher, he would have to reapply, the Hessian Ministry of Culture informed him. The ministry saw no reason for an automatic or at least preferential reinstatement of Arnold.  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justizirrtum_um_Horst_Arnold

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Arnold lived on ALG II until the end. On the morning of 29 June 2012, Arnold was found dead in the street not far from his apartment in Völklingen; he had suffered a heart attack. On the same day, the public prosecutor’s office in Darmstadt decided to file charges against Heidi K. for deprivation of ­liberty. She was sentenced – like Horst Arnold before – to five and a half years in prison. Heidi K. – the real name of the woman who ruined Horst Arnold’s life is not publicly known. The names Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Jörg Kachelmann, on the other hand, are known to the media public – and knew them even before they took on infamous dimensions. Philologists notice in these names that the first French first name is both masculine and feminine, but in both cases there is an assonance to the word ‘dominate’, and that in the second case a German-speaking man is now also called Kachelmann. The names of the women who accused these dominant and prominent men of rape are not present in the collective memory. There is no need to specifically recall the events or accusations, they are common knowledge. It is equally well known that both the French top politician with good prospects of becoming the next president of the republic and the universally popular German weather presenter were acquitted of the charge of rape in lavish trials that were followed with extreme media interest. Which did not change the huge loss of prestige, power, time and money that befell both of them. Strauss-Kahn, after being arrested and handcuffed in media publicity, sat in pre-trial detention from May 14–19, 2011, and then was under house arrest until July 1 after paying a six million dollar bail. His political career came to an abrupt end, helped by further public glimpses of his debauched sex life. One of the peculiar circumstances of the Strauss-Kahn affair, which is rarely noticed, let alone discussed in the media, is the suggestiveness of the critical scheme that seemed to be fulfilled: one of the most powerful men of the so-called first world or the West, rich, famous, accustomed to success, moving in elite circles worldwide, director of the International Monetary Fund, rapes a poor cleaning lady who immigrated from the third world in the suite of a New York luxury hotel. It is impossible to determine exactly how much of the outrage that immediately ensued was due to suggestions that the perpetrator came from a Jewish family. You don’t have to be a militant political correctness fan, you don’t have to be a militant feminist, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to be outraged by so much vileness and structural violence turning into physical rape. But you also don’t have to be a professional investigative journalist or a criminologist schooled in all the analytical waters to recognize the grotesque implausibility of the story, which is a little too suggestive. For the simplest and trivially undisputed details of the facts are sufficient to find the rape narrative, legally speaking: the accusation of the crime irritating: a man, 62 years old at the time, forces a woman thirty years younger, power-

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fully built and several centimeters taller (the details accessible in the media for Strauss-Kahn are between 168 and 174 cm, those for the victim 178–182 cm) to perform oral sex. This is the accusation of Nafissatou Diallo, a native of Guinea, who, when asked, denied that the perpetrator threatened with a weapon or used narcotics. It is and remains irritating, even in retrospect, how many of the media that reported on the Strauss-Kahn affair and passed judgement either failed to perceive or did not want to problematise the evident internal inconsistency of the accusation narrative. The emotional outrage against violence apparently eliminated reason, especially among media professionals. At the same time, the grotesque dimension of the accusation had not entirely escaped some contemporaries; but the early indications, for example by Richard Herzinger in the Welt of 16.5.2011  – ‘Strauss-­ Kahn thus occupies in the media perception from the outset the ideal role of the repulsive villain  – the incorrigible lecher who cannot keep his hands off young flesh’ – found little resonance. When the embarrassing quality of the media’s prejudgement became all too clear, a general reflection on the violence of the media did not set in; rather, in view of what became known about Strauss-Kahn’s private life, something like the feeling ‘it’s the right one after all’ prevailed. The cases of Kachelmann, Strauss-Kahn and, most recently, of the musicologist Siegfried Mauser, show in all clarity that the media (at least those in our latitudes) have for many years reacted extraordinarily sensitively to violence – preferably to violence emanating from influential, older, powerful, white men (and that is undoubtedly a good thing, as evidenced, among many others, by the recent, clear-cut case of the Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein!) In doing so, however, the media always run the risk of ignoring the sometimes biography-destroying violence that they themselves exercise when they diagnostically misjudge the facts, sometimes violently, sometimes simply, because they trust grand narratives more than distrustful and unpopular doubts in favor of the accused. The media report on violence, they analyse and criticise the use of violence, and they themselves engage in violence. In times when the traditional print media as well as the public mass media (one is inclined to say: former mass media) are facing a disruptive Internet storm, the hesitation with which media professionals of all stripes react to the sometimes enormous failures of the media and even specifically identifiable media professionals is understandable. To give only two examples: The fact that the grand old man of DIE ZEIT, Theo Sommer, was convicted of tax evasion to a considerable extent and is considered to have a criminal record, and that the fighter for social justice Alice Schwarzer was not inferior to this man in this respect, is booked by many media as an embarrassment about which the singer’s politeness has to remain silent after a brief mention of duty. The two previously

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convicted white-collar criminals (a factually appropriate designation, but one not found in most media) continue to publish blithely (and that is also their right; they may continue to consider themselves a fine Hanseatic and a fighter for social ­justice, respectively) – if they had been politicians, however, they would definitely have lost their offices. Different rules apply to journalists in democratic states than those that journalists apply to politicians. One example of this asymmetry is as present in the collective German memory as the Strauss-Kahn and Kachelmann cases. Grotesquely over-tribunalized in many media (especially by journalists who like to show their press credentials to get something for free or at a deep discount) were the misdemeanors of German President Christian Wulff, who famously spent the night at friends’ houses without paying for it (which well-known ZDF presenter Bettine Schausten always does, as she explained to an amused to dismayed TV audience), financed his house with a cheap loan, received a Bobby-Car for his son in addition when leasing a car and, unlike the aforementioned media professionals Theo Sommer and Alice Schwarzer, received a first-class acquittal in court. The court case against the Federal President was about the accusation of accepting an advantage in the amount of 700 € (acquittal), the tax evader Theo Sommer had defrauded his fellow citizens of 700,000 € (not including statute-barred tax offences, to my knowledge neither Theo Sommer nor Alice Schwarzer have paid outstanding but statute-barred tax debts). It is immediately obvious that public media criticism of the problematic way in which others deal with power and violence is not only necessary, but also brings prestige, influence and economic success and can therefore be pleasant, despite the obligatory hostility from those criticised. Trivially, it is less pleasant to be publicly criticized and even accused of violence. For some years now, the media – not only in Germany – have increasingly had to live with a perception that cannot be entirely pleasant for them: That they not only expose and criticize unjustified violence in its many forms, but also exercise it themselves. That media in reasonably free societies have become the fourth estate, alongside the legislature, executive and judiciary,2 can hardly be denied (lobbying, incidentally, should be counted as a fifth estate). That is why the media, and specifically also individual media representatives who are to be named personally, have to put up with criticism, just like members of parliament, ministers and judges, if they get it wrong a time or two when exercising the power entrusted to them, if they allow unreasonable prejudices to prevail and thus do not cover themselves with glory. These media-critical statements do not come easily to me for – as I assume – quickly comprehensible reasons. Firstly: the right-wing radical polemic against the  Cf. inter alia Meyer, Th. (2015). Die Unbelangbaren – Wie politische Journalisten mitregieren.

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‘lying press’ (let’s not forget Donald Trump’s wild outbursts against media that dare to criticise him) is so misguided and, in view of the diversity and quality of the German media landscape in particular, so grotesque that one automatically hesitates to articulate a criticism of the media that could be appropriated by the wrong side. Therefore in all clarity: Everyone, who is even rudimentarily sane, will welcome the fact that the large majority of German print, radio and TV media respects standards of political correctness, exposes misconduct in politics and economy (less engaged in sports), demonstrates and criticizes assaultive to rape-ready men, who don’t know what is appropriate towards ladies, and opposes right-wing radical tendencies and impulses. The alternative, namely to support right-wing populist mood politics, was practiced at the time of the Weimar Republic in the circle of, for example, the Hugenberg press with well-known consequences. The second reason for the conspicuous reluctance of moderate heads to criticise the failures of the classical media press, radio and TV is probably even more serious: the disruptive developments in the media sector caused by the Internet. The classical media such as the press or public radio and television, to say nothing of the theatre and printed books, are having the wind, ah, the storm blown in their faces. The reason for this is obvious: the Internet is causing a structural, logistical and mental change in the media industry that is breathtaking and enormous in every sense of the word. This process gains an uncanny quality from the fact that it is peculiarly anonymous. Criticism of the Internet, unlike criticism of individual media and journalists, cannot really be addressed. The Internet has as little of an address as modernity, money or globalization. One can organize a demonstration in front of a broadcasting station or a press building, but not in front of the central branch of the Internet; one can criticize and insult a director or editor-in-chief – but it is problematic, no: impossible, to articulate and address criticism of the ‘Net’ in such a way that it feels insulted and threatens legal action. This problem of addressees, repeatedly underestimated by cultural and media critics for the sake of its simplicity, is even more acute in the case of media criticism than, for example, in the case of criticism of modernity, money or globalization, which have as little as the Internet an address, a proper name and a telephone number. For media that want to have a wide reach are, as one learns at the latest in the first semester of a media studies course, dependent on personalization. The engineers, computer scientists and programmers who organize the Internet infrastructure and keep it running are peculiarly anonymous, yet anything but powerless. No wonder that representatives of traditional media react uncertainly, disturbed and irritated to the disruptive developments in the media sector. For in addition to heavy economic losses, they are also suffering a loss of prestige and influence that is irritating and mortifying. The nervousness in the debates about the quality of the various media is therefore increasing rapidly. It is striking that the traditional media (as recently

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shown by Spiegel’s scolding of ARD and ZDF and the ensuing reactions)3 are fighting among themselves like tinkers, because the actual addressee of their criticism, the Internet together with the distortions it brings to the traditional media, is not up for discussion. Unimpressed by all criticism, the Internet continues to operate with ever-increasing intensity; in the process, it creates distortions that are as fascinating as they are uncanny. What Marx – to pay homage to him shortly before his bicentenary – elaborated on capitalism in the Communist Manifesto (incidentally, he too has no specific address to which one could effectively complain about him) – also applies in a striking way to the Internet. In the following famous quotation, only the word ‘bourgeois epoch’ has been exchanged for the phrase ‘epoch of the Internet’: “The perpetual upheaval of production, the uninterrupted shaking of all social conditions, the eternal uncertainty and movement distinguish the epoch of the Internet above all others. All fixed, rusty conditions with their entourage of time-honoured ideas and views are dissolved, all newly formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is stable and standing evaporates, all that is sacred is profaned, and men are at last forced to look at their position in life, their mutual relations, with sober eyes” (Marx & Engels, 1959, p. 465). With at least one of his theses Marx was unquestionably right: changed productive forces obligatorily ensure changed relations of production. Which in our context means: the productive force of the Internet has already evaporated the old media relations and will continue to revolutionize them. To name just a few aspects in concrete terms: The music industry as we knew it just five years ago is already unrecognizable in the age of streaming services, along with their payment and distribution models; scholarly publishers with (in this case, to put it cautiously, borderline business models like those of the Elsevier publishing house) will no longer exist in ten years; wanting to publish new large print encyclopedias has been a downright grotesque idea for many years now in the face of Wikipedia; and – despite wild rebellions – the print press and the book market, the book trade, fixed book prices and the copy-right we are familiar with are a discontinued model (not to be misunderstood, I add: Alas, there is infinite loss, but regret to horror changes neither the diagnosis nor the prognosis.). In view of this situation, let us take a look back at the heroic history of the civic democratic enlightenment media. They can be justifiably proud of their achievement. A few key words suffice to recall in the collective memory what we owe to the fourth estate, or more concretely: to clever, incorruptible and courageous journalists: the uncovering of the anti-Semitic plot against Dreyfuss, the Spiegel-Strauß affair, the Watergate scandal, the publication of the Vietnam papers, the (albeit still  see the Spiegel cover story of 7.10.2017: Die unheimliche Macht  – Wie ARD und ZDF Politik betreiben. 3

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unfinished) clarification of the Barschel intrigues – to name just these few examples. They are able to justify, both argumentatively and suggestively, that and why the media in free and open societies have become the fourth power alongside the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. No wonder that the self-esteem of courageous and clever press and media people is well developed: we are the assault gun of democracy, to use Rudolf Augstein’s legendary phrase. But all success stories always come at a price: the classic enlightened media are losing out on the really big scandal stories. For in view of the enlightened countervailing power of independent media in liberal societies, it has simply become much more difficult for sinister forces to violate fundamental laws and decency. And that is undoubtedly a good thing. Intriguing politicians (as well as other milieus such as the business elites) have to expect very tangibly that their illegal activities will be exposed – thanks to attentive, critical media, which cannot be appreciated enough for that very reason. The ironic side effect of this positive development is that even scandals are no longer what they used to be. Critical journalism, however, is systematically dependent on uncovering scandals. And so what is scandalized is often well below the level of starfighter corruption, CIA-supported coup against Allende, or large-scale bribery of parties and politicians. For example, a German president spending the night at a friend’s house without paying for it, or a German chancellor candidate uttering the true sentence that good wine cannot be had for less than five euros a bottle. If, on top of that, an unbearable scandal, namely a series of xenophobic murders like the NSU, was not noticed by the critical traditional media, it is not surprising if they suffer a loss of reputation. Another factor contributing to this loss of prestige is the fact that the classic media in particular have often shown an irritating lack of judgement in recent years, i.e. in times of intensified competition with Internet media of all things. To name another, quite different one after the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case: The traditional media’s reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. intelligence agency NSA’s handling of the Internet. I am among the arrogant heads who profess not to have been surprised by this revelation. But the vast majority of the media was surprised and horrified. So they were incredibly naive, gullible and uncritical beforehand. Did they really believe that US intelligence would not automatically scan the internet on a large scale? If they weren’t so naive, why didn’t they do their research? After all, the exposure of NSA activities was not the result of investigative journalism, rather a critical and courageous NSA employee facing significant sanctions sought publicity. Russia, which gave him refuge, will hardly name a prize for civil courage in the fight against encroaching state organisations after Edward Snowden. In addition to the two aforementioned delicate media developments of recent years (namely, firstly, the tendency to – if you’ll pardon the expression – idiotic and

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self-righteous over-scandalisation and over-tribunalisation, and secondly, a lack of judgement that is as widespread as it is irritating), there is, thirdly, an alignment with, rather than a separation from, the shitstorm tendencies of the mass journalistic blogger and twittersphere. Quality media, what a tautology, only have a chance of survival if they are better, i.e. more complex, more reliable in their judgement, more analytical, let us say confidently: finer than the affective background noise on the Internet. But this is not reliably the case. To give just one, albeit extreme, example – it is not easy for me to even quote such things: Hans-Ulrich Jörges, as a member of the editorial board of Stern (we remember: the magazine that became big through the fanatical SS man and Nazi propaganda man Henri Nannen, and which published the clumsily faked Hitler diaries), wrote on February 16, 2012, at the height of the affair surrounding German President Wulff: ‘With respect, Mr. President, you have no ass in your pants. (…) It’s over. Out. Dead wolf howling.’ Stern editor Jörges probably considers himself to be a well-educated man, confident in his style and judgement, who believes he has rendered outstanding services to our democracy. But he has to take note of the fact that others do not perceive him and his actions in this way and make this known. A classic case of cognitive dissonance. A simple thought experiment will suffice: How would media colleagues react if a high-circulation newspaper or magazine were to read from the pen of its editorin-chief: ‘With respect, Ms. Schausten, Ms. Schwarzer, Mr. Sommer, you have no ass in your pants. It is over with you. You can cry as much as you like. We demand your resignation – without pension benefits’. Anyone who finds such sentences reprehensible for the best of reasons will have difficulties defending Stern editor-inchief Jörges’ remarks about the German president. Jörges probably considers himself an enlightener and a courageous critical companion of our democracy; but he engages in an unspeakably stupid politician-bashing that belittles an entire profession, that of politicians, and drives voters into the arms of the AfD. Which brings us to the fourth aspect of the current media nervousness and irritation (there are certainly many more): whether one welcomes it or laments it in a culturally conservative manner – the relations of criticism have already been slowly but surely readjusted since ‘1968’. Namely in the direction of symmetrization: whether clergyman or politician, whether journalist or professor, whether secondary school graduate or high school graduate – everyone is allowed to criticize everyone with some degree of impunity and must in turn put up with criticism. Certain professions, such as popes, top athletes, managers, celebrities of all kinds, and even journalists, find it remarkably difficult to part with asymmetrical relations of criticism (paradigmatically, for example, Pope Benedict, who had to accept public criticism from the German Chancellor for lifting the excommunication of Holocaust denier Bishop Williamson).

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Now it strikes an alert public that not all, but many journalists are very good at dishing it out, but bad at taking it. Fritz J. Raddatz had little shyness about sharp attacks and little understanding for the fact that his grotesque and systematic blunders caused lasting irritation and amusement. Alice Schwarzer considers it an imposition, even a crying injustice, to publicly report and discuss her tax evasion. Bettina Schausten may not have any real understanding for the fact that many people make fun of her claim in front of millions of TV viewers that, unlike German President Wulff, she always pays when she stays overnight with friends. And Springer boss Matthias Döpfner is irritated and feels misunderstood when his fatal sentence ‘If you go up in the elevator with Bild, you go back down with it’ is criticized by many because it is true and because someone is spilling the beans here that there are indeed powerful media that are not always just the assault weapons of democracy. It is worth remembering a triviality. Journalists are not per se superior to politicians, and literary critics are not per se superior to authors, either morally or cognitively; even they, who criticize professionally, may in turn be criticized. Over-scandalization and over-tribunalization staged on a large scale by the media ensure that more and more bright and independent minds refuse to enter politics. A latent psychotic overobservation that has lost all sense of standards does not advance democracies but threatens them. One-sided-other-sided texts are terrible because they are boring. And yet they are often factually imperative. This is also the case here. All the criticisms cited notwithstanding, the fact remains that we still have a remarkably complex and high-quality media landscape. And so we have a lot to lose. I agree with the rebuttal of media scientist Bernhard Pörksen in the ZEIT of November 8, 2014 against general media disenchantment (‘Lügenpresse’) and for this very reason I try to criticize tendencies that encourage such disenchantment. And I have admiration and understanding for ZEIT editor Susanne Gaschke, who entered active politics, became mayor of Kiel, and after a year literally left politics in tears because the media had treated her so meanly. To remain once again in the media upper league, i.e. with DIE ZEIT: Its editor-in-chief Giovanni di Lorenzo, who is supposed to be one of the best-informed minds in the republic, happily and publicly admitted to the media in the round around Günther Jauch that he had cast two votes in the European elections – after all, he had two passports, one Italian and one German. The proceedings against the election fraudster, who had disgraced himself so many times, were dropped against payment of a fine of unknown amount – a top ­politician with the same profile would certainly have lost his office, unlike the top journalist. So much, since the truth is almost always concrete, about the violence that the media not only criticize politicians, managers and people in power of all kinds, but also exercise on their part. There is only one antidote to media disenchantment: very good, stylish media, blessed with a sense of proportion and immune to self-­

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righteousness, which know how to distinguish between addressable and non-­ addressable violence or criticism of violence. Among the most peculiar discussions of recent years has been the problematization of violence inherent in the medium of language and common ways of speaking. Feminist critiques of language have been successful in raising awareness and changing the way people speak, for example, about forms of address, about expressions such as ‘miss’ or ‘stupid’, or about the resonances of words (such as: that the word ‘girl’ resonates with the etymology of ‘maid’ and ‘maidservant’ respectively, whereas the words ‘boy’ and ‘lad’ go back to ‘squire’ and ‘squire’). The gains in awareness resulting from such discussions are obvious; they contribute significantly to the revolutionary readjustment of gender relations that has taken hold in the so-called Western world over the past three decades. How successful this revolution has been is already evident from the fact that only people over 60 years of age still feel a residual irritation, usually with a positive connotation, about the fact that Germany has been reacted to by a female chancellor for 12 years, that we have a female defense minister, that British prime ministers like Thatcher and May ensure idiosyncratic policies – and that almost everyone regrets that not a woman but a delirious cartoon man was elected president of the USA. Now, successful revolutions that bring down old and discredited elites have, with peculiar regularity, a tendency to enter into mad and destructive phases. Impulses that confront unreasonable violence then often result in violent impulses themselves. This is true, among other things, of the French Revolution and its Jacobean terror of virtue, of the October Revolution and its mass-murdering Stalinist excesses, of the Cultural Revolution in China, of North Korea, where communism has swiftly turned into a ghostly form of neo-Eudalism, of Cuba, where an aging revolutionary passes the country on to his little brother, or of Zimbabwe, where a celebrated fighter for decolonization and freedom becomes a ghostly despot. Structurally, the same is true of the political correctness and gender revolutions. It began – like the aforementioned revolutions – with a plausible and largely successful sensitization against intolerable structural and tangible violence. And it now threatens to become a neo-Puritan-Jacobin-Stalinist violence itself. Many, not only men, but, to put it correctly, also women, members, guests, children, can become victims of this turn from media sensitization against violence into not only media violence.

References Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1959). Manifest der kommunistischen Partei. MEW Band 4. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Meyer, T. (2015). Die Unbelangbaren  – Wie politische Journalisten mitregieren. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Learning from Disasters? About Dealing with Disasters Lothar Wigger

1 Introduction At first, the thematic question ‘Learning from disasters?’ seems to be easy to answer, namely with yes. Lessons are learned from disasters, consequences are drawn from experiences to prevent a repetition, this is to be shown by the example of floods and the handling of the danger of flood disasters in Germany. In a second step, the immediate affirmative answer to the thematic question will be problematized, because events do not induce their interpretation as disasters, nor do human reactions and ways of dealing with them. ‘What one learns from disasters’ is thus neither unambiguous nor self-evident; rather, this learning is interwoven with different affectednesses, heterogeneous discourses and structures of domination. This can be illustrated by the example of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The problem of what can be learned in the face of or from a catastrophe will finally be critically discussed using a museum pedagogical example, namely the special exhibition ‘Red Alert – An exhibition about catastrophes and what one learns from them’ in the Dortmund ‘DASA Arbeitswelt Ausstellung’ in 2017. The learning suggested there, however, falls short and shows a problematic approach to the topic of ‘catas-

L. Wigger (*) Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_9

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trophe’ in its ‘halved rationality’, because it ignores the prehistory of catastrophes, the political decisions, legal regulations and social and cultural conditions.

2 On the Concept of Catastrophe1 The German word ‘Katastrophe’ comes from ancient Greek (from κατά katá ‘down-’ ‘down-’ and στρέφειν stréphein ‘to turn’) and in (ancient) drama and its rules denoted the decisive negative turn of the conflictual plot towards its conclusion, ending with the death or downfall of the central character or characters. In addition to this literary meaning, there is an official definition of catastrophe. A disaster is an event in which the life or health of a large number of people or the natural basis of life or significant material assets are endangered or damaged to such an unusual extent that the danger can only be averted or the disruption prevented and eliminated if the authorities, organisations and institutions involved in civil protection act under the unified leadership and direction of the civil protection authority to avert the danger. (BBK, n.d.)

This definition by the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance2 states that a situation is assessed as a disaster if damage is imminent or has occurred in this situation that can no longer be dealt with by the authorities and institutions responsible in the normal case, but can only be dealt with by higher-­level national bodies. This definition is vague in terms of content (‘unusual extent’) and in this openness is also politically functional, however, insofar as an occurrence is politically assessed according to legal principles and defined as a disaster. In public, the term disaster is used with both aspects of meaning to designate both exceptionally serious damage with many victims and dramatic or tragic events in the sense of a sudden and unavoidable stroke of fate. What is described as a catastrophe is often controversial and thus the subject of public discourse (e.g. ‘refugee catastrophe’), but also a task of scientific clarification. The perspectives and criteria for describing something as a catastrophe vary depending on whether one is affected by or distanced from the event. The use of the word catastrophe and the

 In this chapter I use parts of the text from Wigger, 2017.  The ‘Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance’ (BBK) was established on 1 May 2004, following the events of 11 September 2001 and reinforced by the experience of the 2002 flood disaster, as a new authority, the central organisational element for civil security, bringing together all relevant tasks in one place. 1 2

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different interpretations and evaluations show the different points of view and their different interests. The history of mankind is full of disasters of various kinds. Basically, a distinction is made between natural disasters and man-made disasters. Natural disasters include: Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods and others. Social ­disasters include wars, terrorist attacks, genocide, pogroms and expulsions, economic crises, nuclear, biological and chemical disasters, accidents in transport or factories, and many others. These are examples, as they can be found on the Internet at Wikipedia. Since the 1990s, historiographical research has also dealt intensively with the topic of ‘natural disasters’ (Groh et al., 2003, pp. 13–14)3 and has sought to clarify the terminology. A terminological distinction is made between ‘extreme event’ and ‘natural disaster’: “Every natural disaster is based on an extreme natural event, but not every extreme natural event is a disaster” (Groh et al., 2003, p. 15). The distinguishing conceptual features of a ‘disaster’ are the perception of the event and its impact on people and society. A further distinction is made between ‘natural hazards’ as the possibility of (perhaps avertable) consequences of damage and ‘natural disasters’ as the disaster that has occurred.4 “Natural hazards are enactments of possible futures, while natural disasters are related to the present or the past, but thus always include the loss of past futures” (ibid.). While natural hazards tend to be a natural science field of research, natural disasters are a social science and humanities topic, because the concept of disaster adopts an “anthropocentric perspective” (Groh et al., 2003, p. 16) on events. The compound term ‘natural disaster’ is in this respect in one sense a reference to a human drama and to its causation by natural processes. This does not exclude that humans can be identified as (co-)causers. Epidemics and famines are typical examples of the interweaving of natural and social causes  – at least in modern times – because they are naturally induced (infections, crop failures), but their extent depends on the social availability of scientific-technical and medical knowledge, trained personnel, corresponding infrastructure and, generally speaking, on the economic and social, domestic and foreign political orders. The different courses and effects of epidemics and hunger in industrialized and developing countries, for example, point very clearly to the social conditions of these social crises or catastrophes, which turn out so differently.  The relationship between nature and catastrophe is also currently being discussed in history didactics (von Reeken, 2015; von Borries, 2015). 4  Against the background of this categorical distinction, talk of ‘climate catastrophe’ as a process occurring in the future is problematic. 3

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But also in the case of the other ‘natural disasters’ it can be discussed whether and to what extent they are not also ‘man-made’ disasters. In Europe during the Enlightenment, for example, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was controversially discussed, including whether the consequences of the earthquake would not have been so catastrophic because people had settled there so densely and built high houses (Breidert, 1994). The modes of settlement, economic use and technical equipment also determine the social consequences of other natural events such as floods, avalanches and landslides, volcanic eruptions and forest fires, so that they can only naively be called ‘natural disasters’. The initially simple distinction between two types of catastrophe tends to dissolve, not alone in view of the progress of technical possibilities of controlling nature, but essentially through the insight into the social conditions of all types of catastrophe. “No more natural process, even no more catastrophe, in which man does not have to recognize himself. … Catastrophe has become completely a problem internal to society” (Engels, 2003, p. 141). Wisner speaks of the “myth of the naturalness of” natural “disasters” (Wisner, 2007, p. 18). The strict distinction between natural and social or civilisational disasters thus proves untenable. Nor are disasters singular events with social consequences and effects, even if they occur suddenly and surprisingly for many, but rather they are to be understood as events that have a history of experiences (also of other disasters), expectations and (inadequate) precautionary reactions. They are embedded in a social, cultural, economic and political order (Mauelshagen, 2015, pp. 175–176). In this respect, the study of natural disasters is not a purely scientific task, but an interdisciplinary one.

3 Flood Disasters and Flood Protection For centuries, storm surges and the need for flood protection have shaped life and societies along the North Sea coast (Quedens, 2010, pp. 23, 106–109; Mauelshagen, 2007; Meier, 2012, pp. 78–81; Rieken, 2005). The constant confrontation with the sea and its dangers and repeated experiences of disasters are the basis for precautionary, protective and emergency measures in the knowledge of the risks and in anticipation of renewed or similar hazards. In this respect, learning takes place from the experience of disasters. On the night of 16 to 17 February 1962, Hamburg experienced the worst storm surge in its history, with 315 people dying (Quedens, 2010, pp. 64–67). The city of Hamburg sees this event as a turning point in its flood protection, combined with a critique of the decades-long neglect of dike maintenance and a widespread deceptive sense of security (Engels, 2009):

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• Learning from Disaster

The storm surge disaster of 1962 led to a fundamental reorganization of flood protection in Hamburg and massive investment in it. Since then, all tasks of public flood protection have been completely transferred to the city. Over the last 50 years, Hamburg has worked almost continuously to strengthen its public flood defences, and the dikes have since been raised by around 2.5 metres. Thanks to these efforts, the threat from storm surges is now lower than at any time in history. Since 1962, there have still been a total of eight storm surges with peak water levels higher than those of the catastrophic storm surge on 16 February of that year. No serious damage was caused to the main dike line, and Hamburg now has effective protection against storm surges.5 In addition, in accordance with the EU ‘Flood Risk Assessment and Management Directive’ of 2007, a risk assessment has been carried out for the four protected assets (human health, environment, cultural heritage and economic activities), hazard and risk maps and advisory services have been provided to improve information to affected citizens, and risk management plans have been developed defining the four objectives of prevention, protection, preparedness, and regeneration and recovery, as well as the measures for dealing with the hazards and risks.6 Flood protection will continue to face major challenges in the future, not least due to climate change and the expected rise in sea level (Reise, 2015); in Schleswig-­ Holstein, for example, 93 km of 431 km of land protection dikes are to be reinforced, i.e. widened and raised (MELUR-SH, 2013, p. 47), and in Lower Saxony 125 km of 610 km of mainland dikes (NLWKN, 2007). On the one hand, it remains to be seen whether the implemented and planned measures and the financial resources will be sufficient; coastal protection is considered an eternal task: “Coastal protection will never end” (MELUR-SH, 2013, p. 67). On the other hand, it will be debated controversially, because decisions on prevention always take into account other aspects that are also socially controversial.

4 Nuclear Catastrophes and the Diversity of Reactions The German Energiewende, more precisely the Bundestag’s decision on the 2nd nuclear phase-out on 30 June 2011, is also a reaction to the triple disaster of the earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan on 11 March 2011 with the flooding of the  http://www.hamburg.de/sturmflut-1962/4357752/hochwasserschutz/ [15 Nov 2017].  http://www.hamburg.de/hochwasser/ [04/04/2018].

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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the consequence of the failure of the safety systems and the meltdown in three reactors. This response is considered a striking example of a ‘transnational public sphere’ (Mishima, 2017a); one could speak of learning in globalized modernity. However, apart from Switzerland ­(referendum 21 May 2017) and Taiwan (parliamentary resolution January 2017), no state has followed the German example. In neighbouring France, the country with the largest nuclear share of electricity production, the Macron government has revised the decision of the socialist predecessor government of 2015 to push the nuclear share of energy supply from the current 75% to 50% in 2025 and postponed the partial phase-out indefinitely (FAZ 8.11.2017, p.  20; FAZ 9.11.2017, p. 20). As a result, very different things are learned from nuclear catastrophes. Japan itself, after long domestic disputes between the government, local politicians, courts, anti-nuclear activists and utilities, has six nuclear reactors back in operation as of April 2018, after all nuclear plants were shut down for safety checks in 2013 (Koppenborg, 2017, pp. 258–261). Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan during the nuclear disaster, emerged as a staunch opponent of nuclear energy, but was unable to push through his anti-nuclear policies and was forced to resign as early as August 2011 (Kan, 2015). His party, the Democratic Party of Japan (‘Minshutō’), lost the 2012 lower house elections (and disbanded in 2016), which were won by Shinzo Abe at the head of the Liberal Democratic Party (‘Jiyūminshutō’). Although the majority of the Japanese population is opposed to nuclear power (Koppenborg, 2017, pp.  255–256; Neureuter, 2014, p.  3), Abe, a proponent of nuclear power, was elected prime minister and, after 2012 and 2014, has now been elected for the third time in a row.7 The government wants nuclear power to account for about 20 percent of electricity supply by 2030 (about 27% before 2011).8 The aim of the Abe government is the ‘rebirth’ of Japan after the ‘two lost decades’ of deflation and economic stagnation and after the disaster of ‘Fukushima’, an ‘even stronger new Japan’ is to emerge through far-reaching reforms and economic growth (Abe, 2013a, b). The anti-nuclear political opposition is fragmented, the party landscape is confusing. The small Green Party (‘Midori no Tō’), which was founded in 2012, among others with the support of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen from Germany, but for  Voter turnouts in 2014 and 2017 were the lowest in the post-war period (Heinrich and Vogt 2017, p.  20 f) cf. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/10/23/national/politics-­ diplomacy/election-turnout-likely-second-lowest-postwar-period-estimate-says/ [15.11.2017]. 8  http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/folgen-fuer-tepco-heute-nach-­­ fukushima-katastrophe-14111394-p2.html [15 Nov 2017]. 7

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self-protection does not run in lower house elections, but only in local parliaments,9 is just as invisible to foreign observers as the Communist Party of Japan (‘Nihon Kyōsantō’), which pursues a pacifist and since 2011 an anti-nuclear policy, has been represented for many years with seats in the lower house, upper house and local and regional parliaments,10 and which cooperates with the small Social Democratic Party (‘Shakai Minshutō’)11 and the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (‘Rikken Minshutō’), which emerged in 2017 from the left wing of the disbanded Democratic Party and entered the Lower House as the second strongest party.12 The anti-nuclear movement, which had organized many large demonstrations since 2011 (up to 170,000 participants on July 2012  in Tokyo), has been marginalized in the media and seems to be shrinking and now resigned.13 “It’s not that there are no civil society initiatives, no citizens’ initiatives, no intellectual opposition in Japan. … Only it can be said that in Japan in general many impulses and impulses from civil society are hardly perceived and absorbed by the political and administrative power elite, not even by the broad class” (Mishima, 2017b, p. 223). “In view of the power elite’s intransigence, resignation rather than enthusiasm for experimentation prevails among the public” (Mishima, 2017b, p. 222). There is now a “fog of silence” (Neureuter, 2014, p. 2) over the nuclear disaster and its uncontrolled and unmanaged consequences,14 the continuous radioactive contamination of the air and sea, the areas uninhabitable for decades, the unresolved demolition of the plant and final disposal of the waste (Welter, 2016). The silence has prevailed at least since the Secrecy Act passed by Parliament on December 10, 2013, which allows all state bodies to declare information secret if they fear a threat to national security in its publication (Lill, 2017, pp. 172–173; Wiemann, 2017, p. 184; Neureuter, 2014, p. 35; Kingston, 2014).15 The victims of the NPP accident face the same fate of stigmatization and oblivion as the hibaku https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_no_T%C5%8D [15 Nov 2017].  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommunistische_Partei_Japans [15 Nov 2017]. 11  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sozialdemokratische_Partei_(Japan) [15 Nov 2017]. 12  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstitutionell-Demokratische_Partei_(Japan) [15 Nov 2017]. 13  Mizuho Aoki: Down but not out: Japan’s anti-nuclear movement fights to regain momentum. In. Japan Times Mar 11, 2016. URL: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/ national/not-japans-anti-nuclear-movement-fights-regain-momentum/ [15 NOV. 2017]; http://www.yuno-sato.info/English/image/nuclear_reactors.pdf [04 APR. 2018]. 14  http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/folgen-fuer-tepco-heute-nach-­­ fukushima-katastrophe-14111394 [15 Nov 2017]. 15  Anyone who publishes information declared classified can be punished with up to 10 years in prison. 9

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sha, the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Lill, 2014; Mayer, 2010). The invisible danger of radioactive contamination has not only divided families, colleges and village communities, but apparently the whole of Japanese society (Neureuter, 2014, pp. 180–181; Wiemann, 2016). Over 160,000 residents of the contaminated areas were affected by the evacuation orders (Neureuter, 2014, p. 76). Successive sub-areas were declared habitable again by the government after decontamination work, but less than 20% of the evacuated population have returned, and more than 50% do not want to return,16 because the success of decontamination is disputed and fears have not been allayed (Hirano, 2017). Those affected by the disaster have each drawn individual interpretations and conclusions. The available reports, portraits and interviews (Brandner, 2012, 2014; Neureuter, 2014; Gebhardt & Richter, 2017) show a diversity of opinions and attitudes, experiences and plans for the future, so different things have been “learned” from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. When asked, “What lessons have been learned from 3.11?” (Brandner, 2012, pp.  11–12), then probably “no clear answer” (Brandner, 2012, pp. 11–12) can be found. The many voices in politics and the public, among actors and those affected, show that the question is not whether lessons are learned from disasters, but rather that the most diverse interpretations and consequences follow, i.e. that very different things have been learned. What is disputed, and what needs to be discussed, is what has been learned, what could have been learned, and what should be learned (Mishima, 2017b, p. 225).

5 Catastrophes, Their Prevention and the Acceptance of the Risks of Modernity: A Museum Pedagogical Reappraisal From 04 March to 24 September 2017, the DASA Arbeitswelt exhibition in Dortmund presented an ‘exhibition about disasters and what you learn from them’ under the title ‘Red Alert’. The exhibition was primarily put together by DASA’s cooperation partner, the Parque de las Ciencias from Granada (Spain). The motto

 http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclear-accident/evacuation-­ orders-­and-restricted-areas [15.11.2017]; Kenji Izawa: Most Fukushima evacuation orders end save for no-go zones. In: The Asahi Shimbun, March 31, 2017. URL: http://www.asahi. com/ajw/articles/AJ201703310049.html [15 Nov. 2017]; Lifting Fukushima evacuation orders. In: The Japan Times, Apr 3, 2017. URL: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/04/03/editorials/lifting-fukushima-evacuation-orders/ [15.11.2017]. 16

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of the 2016 exhibition, first held in Spain under the title “SOS.  La Ciencia de Prevenir” (“SOS.  The Science of Prevention”) was a quote attributed to Rainer Maria Rilke: “Solo la historia os librará de la historia”17 in the sense that what we humans have learned from catastrophes and accidents in the past makes our lives safer (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p.  13). Natural hazards and accidents were thematised in the five stations Natural Disasters, Fire, Transport, Work and Industry, and the ‘Human Factor’ on around 2000 square metres (in Granada) and 800 square metres (in Dortmund). Several topics were presented in each of the stations: Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and tropical storms; forest fires, urban fires and fires caused by industrial accidents; then accidents in the mining, chemical and nuclear industries; maritime, railway and road accidents; and, in the station on the human factor, both collective panic and heroic behaviour by individuals. On all topics there was a large number of exhibits and descriptions of examples from older and more recent history. In each case, there were also explanatory panels on the different types of hazards and the causes of catastrophic events, as well as references to new technologies designed to contain natural hazards and prevent disasters. In addition, there were workshops, guided tours,18 lectures, online games, and opportunities to participate and experience, such as an earthquake simulator, a life raft, or a simulator of a car overturning. The exhibition had almost 100,000 visitors and was very successful in terms of visitor numbers, it seems to have been the most successful year in the history of DASA. In some cases, long queues had formed in front of the interactive elements of the exhibition. The exhibition was intended to present the variety of possible disasters and to explain the causes of the disasters, also to show failures and mistakes, as well as to present the appropriate behaviour, the legal consequences and the technological achievements in the management and prevention of disasters and accidents. The aims were to show “how it (disaster L.W.) occurs, how we understand it and what we learn from it” (DASA brochure, p. 3) and “how and where clever minds can prevent many disasters” (DASA brochure, p. 5). What should a visitor learn from this panorama of the “misfortunes and tragedies of world history”? In the DASA Arbeitswelt exhibition, we show what happens when it happens. How do people deal with disasters?

 “Only history will save you from being history” (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 13).  There were 278 guided tours (á 60 min) and 11 workshops (á 60 min) for ‘Alarm Stage Red’, and 5 guided tours (á 60 min) for ‘Alarm Stage Green’ (interactive tour). 17 18

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Sometimes all we can do is react, because natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions just happen. Sophisticated technology helps here to keep the damage to a minimum if the worst comes to the worst. Other accidents can be prevented: Laws specify the precautions that must be taken – for example, to prevent industrial accidents from happening in the first place. Regulations are not always enough; some things have to be trained. Those who are well trained make fewer mistakes and can act with foresight. Targeted training is therefore indispensable for many professions. … To prevent the next catastrophe from happening in the first place. (DASA brochure, p. 2)

Information, education and prevention are, in short, the intended learning objectives. Not only the public and an interested general audience were addressed, but also school classes and especially young people in vocational training, the last aspect of the quotation seems to indicate. The educational impetus and the preventive intention, also with regard to the attitude and behaviour of each individual, can be seen in the brief comments on natural disasters and fire in the programme brochure on the Internet: Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes … We live on a geologically active planet. The earth’s fragile crust separates us from a glowing stream of magma that can come to the surface at any time. But over time, humans have subjugated the earth – and settled in “fault-prone” areas: At the foot of volcanoes, in places where the earth easily goes out of joint, or in places that are particularly prone to storms. If we do not take nature into account, we have to live with the risk of catastrophes. Or we will have to learn to develop clever protective mechanisms, to use the predictions of science and research with pinpoint accuracy and to recognise the peculiarities of our planet. Only in this way can we survive permanently on earth. (DASA brochure, p. 3) Fire fires our imagination: bonfires, hearths, campfires, fiery passion. But what happens when fire breaks out uncontrollably and a tiny spark suddenly ignites? 96% of all fires are caused by human activity: forest fires, charred homes, ruined factories and countless lives are a reminder of the destructive power of flames. But we can all do something about it. “Red Alert” shows how fire protection professionals work and what we can learn from them to prevent fires. (DASA brochure, p. 4)

The examples and exhibits cannot be presented here in detail, nor can the details of the scientific and technological knowledge presented be explained. However, the limits and problems are to be shown on the basis of the question of what one does not learn about catastrophes in this exhibition, or more precisely: what is left out or covered up in the explanations, although it is important for understanding and for the great goal of preventing catastrophes. Any exhibition is selective, not only in the choice of available exhibits, but also in the perspective on the subject and its presentation. Thus, this exhibition is char-

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acterized by the Spanish origin and perspective and the fire, centrally the forest fires, is a station and not, for example, the water as floods and inundation. The selection of disasters focuses on natural hazards and accidents in industry and ­transport, but not wars, displacements and genocides, economic crises and immiseration, famines and epidemics. Perhaps the claim to systematicity and completeness is misplaced, but the omission of politically, economically or socially induced catastrophes corresponds to the extensive omission of political, economic and social aspects in the presentation and explanation of the examples presented and in the reflection on practical consequences. The explanations and technological improvement perspectives, the legal consequences and individual behavioural advice are scientifically sound and thoroughly rational, but it is a ‘halved rationality’ that can be called ‘positivist’ (Habermas, 1972; Honneth, 2003), because it takes the catastrophic events and accidents as facts and reflects neither the historical developments and structural conditions, nor the political-legal preconditions and socio-economic contexts; here are some examples. The commenting panel on the Fukushima nuclear disaster claims that “not everything is predictable. Japan is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and is a country where everyone is aware of the danger of earthquakes. Therefore, all buildings are built to be earthquake-proof. However, unpredictable nature has once again shown its cruelest side” (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 87).19 The particular severity of the tsunami, which destroyed coastal defences and caused many casualties despite functioning early warnings, is undisputed, but TEPCO placed the NPP near the ocean for cost reasons and did not build the protective dikes high enough – despite expert opinions to the contrary and knowledge of the risks of nuclear power plants in such an exposed location (Mishima, 2017b, p. 217; Neureuter, 2014, pp. 24–27). “Unpredictable” are the forces of nature, but the catastrophic consequences are not.20

 The texts of the commenting panels in the Dortmund exhibition have not been published. Since they are the translations from Spanish and English, respectively, of the 2016 exhibition of the Parque de las Ciencas in Granada, the references below refer to the English texts of the Spanish exhibition catalogue, insofar as the plates are printed. 20  “Unforeseeable natural disaster” was the term used by TEPCO managers and government spokespersons, since under this condition Japan’s 1961 “Act on Compensation for Nuclear Power Damage” exempts from otherwise existing liability for damages (Neureuter, 2014, p. 24). “A Japanese court has found contributory negligence on the part of the state and the operator Tepco in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The Fukushima District Court ruled that the government had failed to ask Tepco to improve safety measures – despite knowing about a risk from a possible tsunami as early as 2002.” (Die Zeit 10.10.2017; http://www.zeit.de/ gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2017-10/fukushima-tepco-staat-nuklearkatastrophe-mitschuld [15.11.2017]). 19

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The commentary on earthquakes reads: Earthquakes are natural events with one of the strongest destructive forces … It is not possible to predict earthquakes, but we know where the earthquake risk is high and the probability of an earthquake occurring within a certain number of years. And yet we build near the areas. (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 20)

The reasons for building and living in these areas are not reflected upon, it is taken as fact. The commentary then refers to the ‘development of earthquake technology that can be used to design and construct earthquake-resistant buildings’. Whether and how social resources are available or provided for this is left open, including which social groups can and cannot inhabit these buildings. Now it is not that the different living conditions in the world are not addressed. Among the most harmful effects of globalization is the fact that many companies are able to relocate their production facilities to countries where laws and poverty allow them to disregard basic safety and health regulations for their workers. The risks are thus transferred to workshops with cheap labour (textile factories). (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 76)

The question of why companies endanger the safety and health of their workers with their production of goods remains unanswered, as does the question of why the international transfer of risks is possible. Drilling through the earth’s crust of our planet has its price and history shows that this price was also paid with human lives. … Through history-making moments like … the Industrial Revolution, enormous infrastructures were created with thousands of workers. The mining of new supplies through tunnels and galleries that reached deeper and deeper into the earth increased the risks in this industry many times over. But this also meant overcoming a technological challenge. (Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 80)

No secret is made of the fact that work in mines is arduous and dangerous and has cost the health and lives of many workers, but the technological challenges are emphasised in a non-specific way, while the economic reasons and cost calculations, including the associated social struggles and political confrontations and their history, are not addressed. On two panels ‘Living with Risk in the USA’ and ‘Living with Risk in India’ both countries are compared, in both of them underground coal seams have been burning for decades, in the USA the population has been resettled  – apparently

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after prolonged domestic political disputes – whereas in India the financial means for resettlement are lacking, so that the people there have to live with risks of ­disease and death. In these panels, too, the existing distribution of economic wealth and political order in the world is taken as given by fate. The flyer says about the station ‘Industry’: We live in a globalized world in which the production and exchange of goods and services around the globe have taken on enormous proportions. We are building gigantic industrial plants, creating adventurous infrastructures and searching for ways to satisfy our ever-increasing hunger for energy in the most remote areas of the earth. In doing so, we are not only challenging the laws of nature. We are also challenging the factors of “time” and “competitiveness”  – increasing the pressure of industrial processes that can have devastating effects on safety. We accept living in a society full of risks and side-effects and try to counter these eventualities with sophisticated sets of rules. And yet, how easily does a technical error or the famous “human error” happen? (DASA brochure, p. 5; Parque de las Ciencas, 2016, p. 63)

The enlightenment about the always possible occurrence of catastrophic events leads to a reflection on inevitable social processes and unavoidable risks of contemporary life. Anticipated political decisions as well as economic principles and consequences of an economic order of global competition are taken for granted, and the resulting safety risks and accidents are then attributed to the failure of man or technology. Basically, man is regarded as a risk factor, and technical development is seen as not yet advanced enough, regardless of the respective social structures and living conditions. So what does the exhibition learn from disasters? “Risk and destruction threaten our everyday lives. But we also use our abilities to plan wisely and shape actively. We research and make predictions that give us a little more security – sometimes just enough to escape disaster” (DASA brochure, p. 7). Disasters are seen as always possible and as existing risk, combined with optimistic encouragement to behave wisely and to trust in science and technical progress to improve our safety – knowing that risks remain and that there will be no hundred percent safety. But this perspective of positivistically bisected rationality fails to recognize that disasters have always had a history, that so-called risks are always also the results of active policy design, economic calculation with resources, and the application of science and technology. Looking back on catastrophes, one can then likewise learn what one did not want to acknowledge, accept and learn in previous history in terms of reasons, causes and alternative courses of action. The motto (Rilke quote) conceals the exhibition’s obliviousness to history and blindness to society.

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6 Conclusion Now it may seem inappropriate to accuse the explanatory panels, which contain only a few, only three to five sentences, of abridgement. I have no information on whether the guided tours have told more about the exhibits and possibly problematized them, nor on how the teachers have integrated the exhibition visits into their lessons and processed and discussed their students’ impressions. It seems to me that the exhibition’s positivistically halved rationality poses a fundamental problem in dealing with catastrophes that goes beyond the question of how much explanatory text can be expected of visitors. The exhibition organizers claim an ‘action-­oriented transfer of knowledge’ with vivid things and as little text as possible, above all with interactive elements, in order to attract visitors to a museum in the first place, because the public wants to be entertained. The question arises, however, whether the museum presentation of catastrophes and their presentation with an enlightening and pedagogical intention does not have to do more than satisfy the entertainment needs or perhaps also the sensationalism of the visitors. Such an ambition should go beyond the presentation of technological possibilities of disaster management and accident prevention to offer explanations of the causes and reasons for the social conditions of possibility of catastrophic events.

References Abe, Sh. (2013a). Wirtschaftspolitische Rede in der Guildhall der City of London. In: Neues aus Japan Nr. 104 (hrsg. v. Botschaft von Japan) Juli 2013. (URL: http://www.de.emb-­ japan.go.jp/NaJ/NaJ1307/abe.html [15.11.2017]). Abe, Sh. (2013b). Japan ist wieder da. In: Neues aus Japan Nr. 100 (hrsg. v. Botschaft von Japan) März 2013. (URL: http://www.de.emb-­japan.go.jp/NaJ/NaJ1303/rede_washington.html [15.11.2017]). BBK (Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe) (o.J.): Katastrophe. URL: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Infothek/Glossar/_functions/glossar.html?cms_ lv2=19756&cms_lv3=64796. Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK) (o.J.). Katastrophe. URL: http://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Servicefunktionen/Glossar/_function/glossar.html?lv2=496 8170&lv3=1956350 [15.11.2017]. Brandner, J. (2012). Reportage Japan. Außer Kontrolle und in Bewegung. Wien: Picus Verlag. Brandner, J. (2014). Zuhause in Fukushima. Das Leben danach: Porträts. Wien: Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau. Breidert, W. (1994). Die Erschütterung der vollkommenen Welt. Die Wirkung des Erdbebens von Lissabon im Spiegel europäischer Zeitgenossen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Politics of Anger Micha Brumlik

1 The Great Irritation Fear is the key – and not just fear, but equally its siblings: anger, rage and hatred. So this fall, book titles that take on these feelings are exploding – I’ll name just three titles: For example, the filmmaker Alexander Kluge has published a book dedicated to Japan with the painter and draughtsman Georg Baselitz, entitled ‘World-Changing Anger’ (Baselitz & Kluge, 2017); the Indian political scientist Pankaj Mishra has just published a book critically opposed to Rousseau, ‘The Age of Anger’ (Mishra, 2017), and the historian of emotions Uffa Jensen – who works at the Berlin Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism – has just published a study on anti-Semitism called ‘The Politics of Anger’ (Jensen, 2017). But all this is not just a product of the media and discourse, no – all this merely reflects a typical trait of social, societal reality – in France, for example. So says the review of a new novel by French author Christine Angot about the situation on the streets of Paris: And in between, violence slams into everyday life with vicious regularity. Anyone walking the streets of the Marais in the summer evenings could be caught in a flood of shouting, kicking and shoving youths who wished capitalism dead and reinforced M. Brumlik (*) Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_10

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this wish with baseball bats, which they smashed into every third shop window from the Boulevard Voltaire down to the Bastille. The hatred of the police and the bourgeoisie comes from the suburbs, the banlieu, where police officers spat at the 22-year-old black man ‘Theo’, insulted him, rammed a baton into his anus and sold the crime as an accident. (Hilmar Klute on Christine Angot ‘The Wasp’ in the SZ of 09.10. 2017)

But it is by no means only about France. On September 9, a Swiss journalist, Dominique Eigenmann, who is neutral and therefore more or less objective, reports in the bourgeois Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger on a street scene in Torgau, in the German state of Saxony. “Resist”, “Traitor to the people!” “Merkel must go!” – Angry men and women held up posters with many exclamation marks, to which they booed or shouted “Get lost!”, honked their horns or blew their whistles so deafeningly that the public address system could hardly cope. (Tagesanzeiger, 09. 09. 2017, p. 6)

No, the political situation in the West is not good. Islamist terror and the refugee crisis are calling the political order into question – at least in Europe – in a way that was not the case even in 1989. Back then, in 1989, the eastern part of Europe simply caught up with the West in a revolutionary way, without its political order becoming questionable – on the contrary. Today leading journalists and political experts are trying to explain away the ‘refugee crisis’ and Islamist terror and thus remove the worrying, even frightening character of both. Yet it seems impossible to pinpoint the exact causes. This is evidenced by the terminology chosen by professional contemporary analysts: for example, in his stimulating long essay ‘The Idea of Socialism’ (Honneth, 2015), social philosopher Axel Honneth evokes a ‘malaise about the socio-­economic condition’ (Honneth, 2015) or a lack of ‘historical sense’ (Honneth, 2015), while sociologist Heinz Bude has produced an inspiring volume on ‘The Feeling of the World. On the Power of Moods’ (Bude, 2016). The sociologist Hartmut Rosa, in turn, hitherto known as a critic of universal acceleration, has just published a voluminous study on a ‘sociology of the world relationship’ under the title ‘Resonance’ (Rosa, 2016). ‘Discomfort’, ‘feeling’, ‘mood’, ‘emotion’ and ‘resonance’  – these are terms that at first seem diffuse; terms that were not known in this way in a social theory based on hard and clear concepts, categories that seem just as fuzzy as what they are at least supposed to describe, if not explain: The present state of society, at least in the ‘Western’ part of the world. This invites further associations: In the early summer of 2016, the Literaturhaus of the City of Munich hosted an extensive exhibition on Thomas Mann’s epochal novel ‘The Magic Mountain’. The

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exhibition documented the social and geographical location of the ‘Magic Mountain’, a lung sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – including its reclining chairs, its X-ray machines and surgical torture instruments. Begun on the occasion of his wife’s stay in Davos in 1913, Thomas Mann had to interrupt work on the text at first, finally completing it after the First World War. The penultimate chapter of the novel, ­published in 1924, after the horrors of the First World War, is entitled ‘The Great Irritation’ and gives expression to it: What was there? What was in the air? Quarrelsomeness. Crisp irritability. Nameless impatience. A general tendency to venomous exchanges, to outbursts of rage, even to scuffles. Fierce quarrels, unbridled shouting to and fro sprang up every day between individuals and groups, and the characteristic thing was that those not involved, instead of being repulsed by the state of those just seized, or putting themselves in the way, rather took a sympathetic interest in it and inwardly abandoned themselves to the frenzy as well… One envied those just active the right to shout at the occasion. A tugging desire to do the same tormented body and soul, and whoever did not have the strength to flee into solitude was drawn irrecoverably into the whirlpool. (Mann, 1950, p. 973)

Although this was written in retrospect from the situation of the early years of the Weimar Republic, it precisely captured the attitude to life in the last years of the old Europe. Stefan Zweig, in his autobiographical review written at the beginning of the Second World War, ‘Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers’ (Memoirs of a European), written at the beginning of the Second World War, Stefan Zweig described the same thing: “There was no panic yet, but there was a constant restlessness; we always felt a quiet uneasiness when the shots rattled from the Balkans” (Zweig, 2003, p. 229). Again: ‘restlessness’, ‘unease’, ‘irritability’. One might wonder what it means that contemporary social science makes use of such terms, that is, that it no longer seems to be able to explain conceptually the causes of what it is trying to grasp categorically. It was to be learned from sociological systems theory that sociology is also only a part of what it is trying to understand: Society. It is possible, however, that the fuzzy categories also express a – whatever that may be – fuzzy state of society as a whole. In that case, however, it can be assumed that behind all these terms  – from ‘unease’ to ‘mood’ to ‘resonance’  – there is a common inkling, namely that Europe, the Europe of the second half of the twentieth century, together with its hopes, is approaching its end, just as the old Europe of the nineteenth century was at its end long before 1914, without being able to grasp it.

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2 Philosophy of Feelings Where sociological explanations do not suffice at first, it is indispensable to deal reflexively with basic concepts and phenomena, i.e. to undertake conceptual explanations – and that means nothing else than to pursue philosophy. But then – and this is the guiding assumption of this attempt – it is necessary to pursue the idea that feelings can be evoked, directed and consciously used, i.e. that politics can be conducted with them. For some time now, philosophy has been trying to get to the bottom of this unclear phenomenon conceptually (Demmerling & Landweer, 2007; Nussbaum, 2017). I understand by ‘feelings’ intentional, initially spontaneous and holistic, always evaluative, mostly reactive statements of individual or several people about persons, things as well as inner and outer states. Unlike thoughts or arguments, feelings usually, not always, occur suddenly; that they always represent evaluative statements need not be specifically emphasized, but that they are holistic, holistic in character. Feelings are intentional – they are always directed toward something in relation to something or someone else. Thus, one is angry at someone because …; is angry at someone because …; is sad at … or lustful at …. Using the example of disgust, the phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai has elaborated six features of defensive feelings: Their object-area, their intentionality, their state of being, their immediacy or originality, their – last but not least – body-boundness as well as their response character (Kolnai, 2007, pp. 8–9). The thesis, which I will try to develop further in the following, is therefore that – since feelings as body-bound phenomena of expression are contagious – they can be consciously generated and connected with an intention – in such a way that the reactive defences thus generated are no longer accessible to an argumentative examination of the correctness of their intentional content, have a sealing-off effect. First, however, the bandwidths, commonalities, similarities, as well as the inner connection of those feelings in which the political is currently expressed must be discussed. For this purpose, a basic distinction known from the psychology of feelings must be taken into account – it distinguishes between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’. Affects’ are immediate, spontaneous and without prior thought, immediately perceptible, always also physical changes of state; if these changes of state last longer and are consciously perceived as such, one speaks – at least in educational psychology – of ‘emotions’, which can, of course, also be suppressed from consciousness (Ciompi, 1997; Hülshoff, 1999). In this sense, the original effect of all affects directed negatively against others is ‘rage’, which – brought to consciousness – can become ‘anger’, which in turn – in the

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absence of subjective concern  – can turn into ‘indignation’. In ‘anger’, however, which always extends to the actions of others, not to their essence, the will is expressed to retaliate against perceived injustice. This retaliation – according to philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2017) – can take three forms: (1) harm to a ­perpetrator, i.e. revenge, through which the harm inflicted is generally not healed (2) impairment of the public status of those who have inflicted evil – i.e. measures that have a limited compensatory effect but ultimately remain limited, and (3) – for instance in the sense of general prevention under criminal law – measures that prevent the repetition of evil deeds. On the forms and limits of the impairment of the public status of persons, the historian of emotions Ute Frevert has written a recently published book ‘Die Politik der Demütigung. Sites of Power and Powerlessness’ (Frevert, 2017). Longer-lasting subjective ‘anger’ (Demmerling & Landweer, 2007, pp.  287– 288) is directed against people or states and, if related to specific persons, can express itself as an always conscious ‘hatred’ (Kolnai, 2007), which in turn, if the possibility to act it out is not given and made permanent, can turn with a certain weakening into what since Nietzsche has been called ‘ressentiment’. Peter Sloterdijk described this feeling in his book ‘Zorn und Zeit’ (Sloterdijk, 2006), which was first published 11 years ago and has received too little attention: This begins to form when avenging anger is prevented from direct expression and must take the route of deferral, internalization, translation, distortion. Wherever feelings of recoil are subjected to the compulsion of postponement, censorship, and metaphorization, local stores of anger are formed, the contents of which are stored solely for later emptying and retranslation. (Sloterdijk, 2006, p. 132)

3 Politics of Feelings In this sense, the so-called identitarian movement takes up the resulting demand,1 philosophically founded by Peter Sloterdijk (2006) and politically turned by his former assistant Marc Jongen, to rehabilitate intense emotions in political discourse against supposedly detached sobriety and thus also boredom; even more, to desublimate the always smoldering resentment back into anger and rage. With recourse to the ancient Greek word ‘thymos’, Sloterdijk calls for a ‘thymotic’ politics. This is currently being followed by the Austrian activist of the identitarian movement Martin Sellner and his German counterpart Walter Spatz in their talks on the topic of ‘Gelassen in den Widerstand’ (‘Serene resistance’):

 http://www.zeit.de/2016/23/marc-jongen-afd-karlsruhe-philosophie-asylpolitik

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“Our goal is spiritual agitation. We want to set hearts on fire, to set something in motion, to ask the decisive questions anew, more deeply and with political consequences. The spiritual restlessness, the dormant furor teutonicus, the eternally uncivilizable, primeval German fever that radiates toward us from Germanic primeval forests as from Gothic cathedrals, is gathering in us. Our opponents know this, and they are afraid. They know of the possibility of spontaneous eruption and regeneration. And they know that we are no longer walking into their traps, that we have outgrown their templates and their harnesses. I believe”, Sellner concludes this political creed, “we live in a time of choice. I believe that our work as a circle, in thinking and listening to being, is organically bound up in the political struggle of a mass movement, in the political work of a party”. (Sellner & Spatz, 2015, p. 90)

At best, it can be considered certain that these political currents will not disappear again overnight, but that they are an almost necessary concomitant of globalisation and digitalisation and thus of the irrevocable decline of the working class in Western industrialised countries, as recently analysed by the Frankfurt (Oder) sociologist Andreas Reckwitz in his ‘Society of Singularities’ (Reckwitz, 2017).

4 Sociological References Certainly, it was by no means only members of the US white working class who brought Donald Trump to power. And yet it was also, and not least, precisely those workers and the unemployed – and it is precisely here that the real fright for the left lies: with Trump’s historic success, Norbert Hofer’s election victory in the Austrian presidential elections, which was happily avoided, and Marine Le Pen’s plan to become French president, which in any case is not entirely without chance, it is clear that substantial sections not only of the industrial working class no longer seek their salvation in internationalist-oriented socialist or social democratic parties, but in closed-off nation states, in xenophobia and protectionism. Thus Trump’s victory signals the truly irrevocable end, this time, of a political utopia proclaimed a good 150 years ago by no less a figure than Karl Marx. Alongside an illusionless, almost jubilant assessment of the bourgeoisie’s victory, Marx proclaimed a political hope that ascribed to the communists – as the vanguard of the working class – the role of a final abolition of all injustice: Drawing the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less hidden civil war within existing society to the point where it breaks out into open revolution and by the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie the proletariat establishes its rule,” Karl Marx and his comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels wrote in the “Communist Manifesto.” “The progress of industry” they continued “of which the

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bourgeoisie is the will-less and unresisting bearer, substitutes for the isolation of the workers by competition their revolutionary union by association. With the ­development of great industry, therefore, the very basis on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates its products is pulled from under its feet. It produces above all its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (Marx, 2004, p. 607)

So much for the optimistic prognosis of Marx and Engels at the time, which is, however, counteracted by the present: Today it can be observed that the class called to revolution by Marx and Engels – the working class – has itself become the core of those political forces which Marx and Engels had called ‘reactionary’ in the Manifesto. This is shown not only by election results from the Netherlands to Hungary and Poland, from Baden-Württemberg, where an above-average proportion of trade union members voted AfD, to the Free State of Saxony, where 25% of eligible voters recently went on record as intending to vote AfD and the AfD became the strongest party in the Bundestag election. Whether one looks to France or to the Netherlands, to Austria or to East Germany: It seems as if the right-wing populists are the real workers’ party. If one asks about the causes, the much-discussed autobiography of the French intellectual Didier Eribon ‘Return to Rheims’ (Eribon, 2016), as touching as it is analytically clear-sighted, can provide an answer. It depicts the life of a man turned intellectual who turned his back on his working-class French communist family in the glamour of the capital, only to reconnect with his mother and siblings after the death of his father – twenty years later. Politically, this rencontre comes as a shock to him: all those who used to feel attached to the French Communist Party are now on record as voting for the far-right ‘Front National’ of the Le Pen family. The now somewhat slowed rise of the ‘Front National’ therefore also marks the end of the line for party communism based on the working class. The end of a development, however, that had been in the offing for almost a hundred years. All this proves once again that the structural theorist Marx, against the revolutionary theorist Marx, is more right than he could have liked. Nevertheless, his structural insight into the processual contradiction of production relations and productive forces remains unbroken: If one understands globalization by relations of production and digitalization by productive forces, then it is precisely this tension that must lead to the agonal end of the industrial working class, at least of the West – a working class that is currently seeking its salvation in a semi-fascist Bonapartism. Combined with the regularly recurring crises of finance capitalism and a creation of value that is based less and less on the appropriation of surplus value and more on transactional profits, thus producing a ‘post-growth capitalism’, the result is what the Frankfurt sociologist Oliver Nachtwey has called a ‘descent society’ (Nachtwey,

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2016) and what he captures in the metaphor of an escalator moving downwards. This is in contrast to the still optimistic metaphor of Ulrich Beck, who compared the societies of the West, which are regulated by the welfare state, to elevators in which, despite the greatest differences between the riders, everyone nevertheless rides upwards. In ‘descent societies’, however, some allow themselves to be driven apathetically downwards, while others run recklessly upwards in panic, only to be driven irrevocably downwards. This seems to be a global problem, and certainly a problem for the middle classes replacing the industrial workforce worldwide. Three years ago, under the heading ‘Is Capitalism Dying?’, four researchers working in macrosociology and history: Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derlugian and Craig Calhoun developed various scenarios for social developments in the next four decades, which do not consider a fundamental transformation of the capitalist basis of current societies to be completely impossible. In our context – the question of possible forces of change, formerly one spoke of the ‘revolutionary subject’ – Randall Collins’ reflections are of particular interest: As mechanization shrank the working class, capitalism was saved by the rise of the middle class. Today, computerization, the Internet, and the flood of new microelectronic devices are decimating the middle class. Can Collins asks capitalism survive this second surge of technological rationalization. (Collins, 2014)?

This is not the place to review Collin’s careful analysis of the crisis in detail. Admittedly, in the context of social consciousness-raising, his ‘way out’ scenario to save capitalism is of particular interest: Education certificate inflation and other, covert Keynesianisms. The growing proportion of educational certificates, which brings about short-term relief for the labour market, admittedly produces its own dialectical dynamic: School and college degrees are a currency that values social prestige and is traded as access to jobs. Like any currency, it leads to inflated prices.-in this case, to an increasingly competitive supply of upper-middle-class jobs. The inflation of education has a momentum of its own; for the individual graduate, the best response to its declining value is to acquire even more education. (Collins, 2014, p. 67)

5 Extremism of the Middle Since Seymour M. Lipset’s book ‘Political Man’, published in 1960, political theory has been familiar with the phenomenon of an ‘extremism of the centre’ (Lipset, 1960), which  – as research into contemporary history has been able to prove  – played a decisive role in the rise of the NSDAP.  What anti-Semitism was then,

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Islamophobia is today. Let there be no misunderstanding: Anti-Semitism here and Islamophobia there are by no means the same thing: they stem from different historical-­cultural starting points and have taken on very different material violence. This is proven by the singularity of the National Socialist murder of six million European Jews. As different as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are, however, on the side of those who adhere to a form of ‘group-related misanthropy’ (Wilhelm Heitmeyer) they take on the same function: an apparently rational justification of resentment and sheer hatred: “Islam,” according to the AfD’s election manifesto adopted in April 2017, “does not belong to Germany. In the spread of Islam and the presence of over 5 million Muslims, whose numbers are constantly growing, the AfD sees a great danger for our state, our society and our order of values”. (Wahlprogramm der AFD 2017)

The AfD therefore consistently demands the abolition of chairs of Islamic theology at German universities and the banning of the call to the muezzin and minarets, because they are an expression of Islamic imperialism. Occasionally, it is pointed out that anti-Semitism has never been able to point to a phenomenon comparable to Islamist terror – which very much has something to do with Islam; to this, of course, it must be countered that anti-Semitic propaganda since the Empire has not only turned against Jewish immigrants, but has always pointed to the fact that there were an above-average number of Jews among the leaders of the dreaded Bolsheviks. So, as much as the AfD and its electorate are an expression of a pan-Western European mood, they also inherit the racism that is deeply rooted in Germany’s political culture – and this in the face of a history that left the population of eastern Germany, in particular, little opportunity to experience a liberal culture. In fact, since the founding of the German Reich in 1871, there were only fourteen years in which democracy could be lived in the eastern parts of the country: between 1919 and 1933. Before that, from 1871 to 1919, the East Germans lived in the authoritarian state of the Kaiserreich, from 1933 to 1945 under the Nazi state, then from 1945 to 1989 under a communist party dictatorship; it is only in the last thirty years, since the fall of communism, that they have been living under circumstances that can be called democratic at all – and this in the face of experiences of loss and dispossession that make many long for the return of authoritarian conditions. In contrast, however, it should be pointed out that despite this lack of a liberal background culture, especially in the autumn of 1989, there was an admirable grassroots democratic uprising, by no means only in the metropolises of Berlin and Leipzig, but also in the provinces in Plauen, for example.

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The AfD is thus structurally proving to be a contemporary modified predecessor of the NSDAP.  This does not apply to all its members, perhaps not even to the majority of them, but in the case of the AfD it is true that as a party it is always more than the sum of its parts. It is a party that wants to replace anti-Semitism with Islamophobia and the discredited leader principle in Poland and Hungary with plebiscitary, totalitarian democracy.

6 Politics of Feelings “Politics of anger”, according to Uffa Jensen, “is by no means exhausted in the strategic use of feelings against others. The fundamental difficulty concerns the meaning of feelings in politics as a whole: With what feelings do we engage in politics? How do we react emotionally to politics and when” (Jensen, 2017, p. 10)?

An apt example of the political use of feelings was provided by the Greens after the Bundestag elections: for example, Robert Habeck, who went on record on 30 October: “Left-wing liberals have always resisted reaching people with their feelings. We are the reasonable ones. But reason can also quickly appear too cerebral” (‘Bite for bite’ taz of 30.09.3017, p. 3). It is hardly a coincidence that in the same issue the party placed an advertisement with Petra Kelly’s picture, quoting her: ‘We must act not only with the intellect, but also with the heart’. Of course, a more or less, in the broadest sense, ‘left-wing’ public is keen to protect some of the publicly displayed anger from the accusation of irrationalism – especially when it comes to the original phenomenon of that German ‘politics of feelings’, the ‘angry citizen’, as the SPIEGEL editor Dirk Kurbjuweit first called it. According to research by the Göttingen Centre for Democracy Research headed by Franz Walter, its ideal type is the retired graduate engineer (Walter, 2013, p. 352). According to Bernhard Shaw, for instance Ansgar Lange in a conversation with Franz Walter, ‘old men are particularly dangerous because they don’t care about the future’. This was apparently also true of that German protest movement which takes place primarily in the milieu of childless citizens or older citizens who have since been relieved of the worries of raising children. Citizens who have a lot of free time can afford to maintain and cultivate their rage and institutionalize it as anger – after all, they have a lot of free time. Thus, the ranks of the agitated include a particularly large number of househusbands, part-time employees, freelancers, students, pastors, and teachers, but also – see Shaw – a large number of early retirees, pensioners, and retirees.

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Significantly, however, the ironic viewers of the political are composed overwhelmingly of men, single, without children, with unusually large professional open spaces, Walter said flush.2

Committed members of civil society, on the other hand, are trying to protect Stuttgart’s ‘angry citizens’ from such sceptical observations. For example, Jürgen Lessat published a long article in the print edition of the weekly newspaper ‘Kontext’ on October 7, in which he weighed up whether current right-wing populist agitators found their origin in the ‘Stuttgart 21’ protests. Gerd Landsberg, the chief executive of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, is of the same opinion – after all, the cry of ‘pack of lies’ could be heard again and again in Stuttgart. Movement researcher Dieter Rucht, at any rate, believes that it is important to distinguish between reactionary and enlightened variants of angry citizens, including mixed forms (Lessat, 2017, p. 2). If this is true, the negative feelings mentioned turn out to be evaluative statements with a comprehensible, normative-cognitive content, i.e. those analyses of feelings that Martha Nussbaum advocates with her ‘neo-Stoic’ concept (Demmerling & Landweer, 2007; Nussbaum, 2001, 2017). The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2017) recently argues that “valuations” and “valorizations” constitute a new formation of social developments, especially in the field of culture.

7 Return of Glory Now, at least the demonstrations of rage against Angela Merkel in Torgau and elsewhere in eastern Germany, which were mediated by the media, showed that it is by no means only men with higher degrees who demonstratively took their anger to the streets. Of course, even if there were many women among the protesters, it is true that they were generally people over the age of 50. Feelings are contagious, and a politics of anger can – regardless of the motives represented in each case – from Stuttgart 21 to the protest against Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, tie in with what the ‘philosophy of feelings’ regards as the ‘original anchoring’ of a feeling, an ‘anchoring’ that is later ‘condensed’. Insofar as Andreas Reckwitz’s aforementioned assumption is correct that singular evaluations play an increasingly stronger role than collective standardizations, self-images and self-­ assessments or devaluations also become an increasingly important topic. For de http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/studie-ueber-wutbuerger-alt-stur-egoistischa-784664.htm 2

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cades, this topic has been discussed in continuation of Jürgen Habermas’ reading of Hegel, especially by Axel Honneth in the context of a theory of the ‘struggle for recognition’ (Honneth, 1992). Most recently, critical social theory has explored these ‘experiences of struggle’ in greater depth, for example in Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance (Rosa, 2016). Do the ‘angry citizens’ suffer from too little resonance? To a certain extent, yes – but it would be important to specify this form of lack of resonance in more detail. If one takes the ideal type of the retired graduate engineer postulated by Franz Walter as an example for heuristic purposes, then in addition to the critical life event of retirement in any case, the gradual decline in strength as well as erotic attractiveness and sexual activity, the impression related to the political system will also arise that those in power do not appreciate supposedly unquestionable expert knowledge and thus alone trigger resignations and slights. In his book ‘Zorn und Zeit’ (Anger and Time), Sloterdijk (2006) noted the suppression of thymotic emotions – emotional foundations of Western culture, at any rate, which reach back to antiquity, to the wrath of Achilles sung about by Homer. Another, new attempt to reactivate forgotten, ancient conceptions is based on the study by the director of the ‘Centre for Political Beauty’, Philipp Ruch: With his study ‘Ehre und Rache. Eine Gefühlsgeschichte des antiken Rechts’ (Ruch, 2017) is no less than an attempt to point to the fundamental significance of a wide variety of concepts of honour that are still relevant today. In connection with Reckwitz’s analysis of a return of singularities and thus valorizations of individual existence as well, the motif of ‘mortification’ as a social quantity thus enters sociological consciousness. And with it the question not only of the struggle for recognition, but also of the endurance of supposed or real humiliation, and it is no coincidence that the most recent, the very most recent studies of a history of emotions take up this very theme: Ute Frevert’s study ‘The Politics of Humiliation. Sites of Power and Powerlessness’ (Frevert, 2017). Frevert notes – quite in line with Reckwitz – that humiliation and shaming have by no means significantly increased in recent times, however: What has changed, rather, is public and private sensitivity. Where it still occurs, shaming as an act of psychological or physical violence is given a moral-judicial ban. Whether someone feels concretely shamed or humiliated is irrelevant to this. What constitutes humiliation is instead derived from the symbolic codes and cultural systems of interpretation of a society or a social group. (Frevert, 2017, p. 232)

The politics of anger, rage, and resentment consists, consequently, in connecting to the respective anchors of existing feelings of shame and condensing them in a systematic, contagious, and inter-attractive way.3

 On shame, see Brumlik, 2002, pp. 65–81.

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References Baselitz, G. & Kluge, A. (2017). Weltverändernder Zorn. Nachricht von den Gegenfüßlern Berlin: Suhrkamp. Brumlik, M. (2002). Bildung und Glück. Versuch einer Theorie der Tugenden. Hamburg: Philo & PhiloFineArts. Bude, H. (2016). Das Gefühl der Welt. Über die Macht der Stimmungen. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Ciompi, L. (1997). Die emotionalen Grundlagen des Denkens. Entwurf einer fraktalen Affektlogik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Collins, R. (2014). In I. Wallerstein et al. Stirbt der Kapitalismus? Fünf Szenarien für das 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag. Demmerling, C. & Landweer, H. (2007). Philosophie der Gefühle von Achtung bis Zorn. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Eribon, D. (2016). Rückkehr nach Reims. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Frevert, U. (2017). Die Politik der Demütigung. Schauplätze von Macht und Ohnmacht. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Honneth, A. (1992). Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Honneth, A. (2015). Die Idee des Sozialismus. Versuch einer Aktualisierung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Hülshoff, T. (1999). Emotionen. Eine Einführung für beratende, therapeutische, pädagogische und soziale Berufe. München/Basel: Reinhardt. Jensen, U. (2017). Zornpolitik. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Kolnai, A. (2007). Ekel, Hochmut, Haß. Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Lipset, S.M. (1960). Political Man. The social bases of politics. New York: Doubleday. Lessat, J. (2017). Wut ist nicht gleich Wut. In 2Kontext vom 07.10.2017, S. 2. Mann, T. (1950). Der Zauberberg. Stockholm. Marx, K. (2004). Die Frühschriften. Stuttgart: Kröner. Mishra, P. (2017). Das Zeitalter des Zorns. Eine Geschichte der Gegenwart. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Nachtwey, O. (2016). Abstiegsgesellschaft. Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2017). Zorn und Vergebung. Plädoyer für eine Kultur der Gelassenheit. Darmstadt: WBG. Reckwitz, A. (2017). Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Ruch, P. (2017). Ehre und Rache. Eine Gefühlsgeschichte des antiken Rechts. Frankfurt/M./ New York: Campus Verlag. Sloterdijk, P. (2006). Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

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Sellner, M. & Spatz, W. (2015). Gelassen in den Widerstand. Ein Gespräch über Heidegger. Schnellroda: Verlag Antaios. Walter, F. (Hrsg.) (2013). Die neue Macht der Bürger. Was motiviert die Protestbewegungen. Reinbek/Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. Zweig, S. (2003). Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer.

Is It OK to Punch a Nazi? Aggression and Generativity in Ubiquitous Resistance Holger Schulze

1 Introduction On the day of the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, Richard Spencer (2008), one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called Alt-Right, was interviewed on a street corner within earshot of the big event. Amidst the hubbub of Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters, he visibly struggled to focus on the interviewer and coherently recite his talking points, the importance of the reinterpreted Pepe The Frog comic book character, the stereotypical demarcation from the neo-Nazis who would supposedly hate him, and generally the current boom of the Alt-Right, for which the Trump election represented a high point: Now all these political ideas he would espouse would be taken seriously and hopefully implemented. While Spencer is now reciting this, amidst the din of counter-demonstrators, shouters, and the occasional Trump supporter, a person in a black hoodie rushes at him: An excellently humiliating jab with a clenched fist to the right side of Spencer’s face hits him, causing him to half topple to the side, make a makeshift recovery, and walk away worried, fearful, supported and cared for by his fellow protesters. The video recording of this brute blowback against an increasingly disinhibited group of cheerful and confident racists was H. Schulze (*) Universität Kopenhagen, Kopenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_11

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immediately distributed, edited many times and set to music again and again. The fist blow against this styled figurehead of the New US Right, the so-called Alt-­ Right, was cut to a whole series of music pieces, current, older, classics, to beats and tutti. So Richard Spencer had to suffer this fist bump while in the video the orchestral and vocal upbeat in Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On sounded right on time with the fist bump, or of Freude Schöner Götterfunken in the fourth movement of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s ninth Symphony. The fist hit him with Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA, looped in repetition to Queens We Will Rock You, Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl, or Pharrell Williams’ Happy, to The Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize or also, rhythmically most complex probably, to Frank Zappa’s Black Page#2, a piece of music with high metric complexity as well as polyrhythms, polymetres and nested triplets.

2 The Spencer Blow Again and again, this brute fist-bump was re-dubbed, edited, uploaded, compiled, and passed around. Richard Spencer, an agitator who had just explained and praised the power of memes on the part of the Alt-Right in an interview, immediately became a meme himself in the torrential keyboard propaganda of the Net: in a short film that probably documented one of the most painful and humiliating defeats in his political life for the foreseeable future on the Net. This blow became a tangible, a visible and audible sign of resistance through this many repetitions and rapid circulation, a notorious Spencer blow. The video, which lasted barely a minute, immediately embodied a liberating battle cry, a violent resistance to the sadistically provocative Hail Victory! -shouts of the new fascists. We laughed at the stupid Nazi jerk who finally got an official smack in the face here – at a time when news of assaults, torchlight parades and hate crimes against immigrants, against religious minorities of various faiths seemed to be increasing daily and only a horrible end seemed realistic and likely. We laughed at the violent pain inflicted on a representative of the opposite political party – a representative who himself incessantly asserted in well-camouflaged paraphrases an alleged superiority of the so-called ‘White Race’ and therefore called (supposedly for self-protection) for oppression, for purges and pogroms, indeed for the establishment of a White Ethnostate. This is exactly what an appropriate and resounding form of resistance to such misanthropic and exterminationist hate propagandists had to look like, right? Wasn’t this aggressive form of catharsis the best thing that could happen to the public struggle for democratic decorum? Or is such a thought paradoxical in itself: wanting to dissolve, avert, reverse violence through counter-violence?

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In the form of this audiovisual counter-strike, a substitute action, perhaps also a trial action, was carried out in any case: How could a tangible and actually effective resistance be successful? A resistance that did not wait for liberators from outside, for allies, for soldiers of a political mindset or ideology more congenial to us? This liberation and perhaps catharsis could be experienced through this video: A liberation that perhaps only Quentin Tarantino had managed so recently with his cinematic catch-up slaughter of the Nazis and their leader in a Paris cinema anno 1944 in the parallel world of his film Inglourious Basterds (2009). Such a great, longed-for and hitherto barely attainable liberation was embodied precisely by this Spencer hit: A liberation from the preponderance of new audiovisual symbols, moving images, verbalizations, reinterpretations, iconic heists, and propagandistic invective that had been piled up by the new far-right in the months before – and whose bulwark grew ever higher as a result, by a torrent of hatred and oppressive lust, fueled and fueled in no small part by websites like the Daily Stormer, Breitbart, the Alt-Right, by new genres of music like fashwave – which grew out of the vaporwave genre (Born and Haworth 2018; Glitsos 2018; Love 2017; Smith 2018), and of a barely-ending plethora of ever-new hate collages that mocked immigrants, proudly adorned them with swastikas like badges of honor, used the symbolism of death camps, book burnings, gas chambers, trains to death camps, fascist markings of their victims as provocative imagery. How could this torrent of aggression be countered? How could it be steered into a generatively different trajectory? The 2016 presidential campaign was a precedent of such meme wars. The representation and articulation, the acting out of resistance in images, films and sounds thus entered a new phase. And after months of stunned, depressing, and rather helpless complaining, name-calling, and terrified staring at the memes of the new fascists, resistance was now for the first time effectively visible, possible, doable, and spreadable, an empowering encouragement, a heart-strengthening in the anti-­ fascist struggle: The Spencer blow thus became an audio-visual sign of this resistance, an emblem, the finite joy of variants flourished and articulated this desire, this willingness, this longing and desire for resistance. With this resistance in the playing field and to the rules of the game of memes, through counter-troll armies and counter-speech on this new battleground of political argument and propaganda, just all of this was apparently finally ratified: Political argument, the vilification and ridicule of political opponents, their ceaseless humiliation, the torrent of counter-­replies and snarky retweets, posts and shares was thus now to take its cue from all political camps. So social media and networks, individual audio-visual artefacts, the broadcasts of many profiles, avatars and user accounts would now shape the political debates of at least the twenty-first century (even if the networks of the 2010s might be as irrelevant in the 2020s or 2040s as those of the 2000s)?

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3 New Propaganda or Radical Cultural Break? More than 2 years after Election Day, this 2016 meme campaign and its aftermath are still being rehashed. It seems unclear to this day whether the scramble for images, attention and cultural hegemony is merely shifting the familiar political ­battlegrounds on which a putative ‘alt-left’ now has to fight just as valiantly and attempt to steal back the so-called ‘meme magic’ of the Pepe collageurs around the “Church Of Kek” (Nagle 2017, pp. 15–16) to steal back; or whether, above all, a fundamentally illegitimate and defensible transgression of all ethical boundaries towards threats of violence and towards audiovisually acted out acts of violence, indeed rape, even executions of political opponents was hereby permitted and socially established. Can this opening of audiovisual violence, rage, hatred into the ubiquitous public sphere ever be reversed? Those who gleefully shake with laughter at the Spencer slash are not already walking the seductive tightrope of the new, misanthropic memewar regime? The first, a more pragmatic interpretation of memewars as merely a new political battleground led Matt Goerzen to the equally pragmatic and combative call for the memes of production to finally be used for the political goals of left-wing parties: While the right is now consolidating itself in a position susceptible to attack, the left has now at least begun to make inroads into adopting the techne that has been proven so effective by its adversary. (Goerzen 2017, p. 108)

If Goerzen were correct, then in retrospect the Spencer blow would only have been a very appropriate and timely prelude to political debate in the twenty-first century. There would be no need to make a fuss about it, after all, it would only be images and texts and sounds – and these were still the means of political propaganda, but now merely somewhat more dynamic and with a clearly more powerful circulation apparatus and an audience millions of times larger; an audience that, moreover, always also consists of prosumers of these memes, producing consumers according to Alvin Toffler’s far-sighted and self-fullfilling prophecy of the 1970s (Toffler 1970) – and thus contributors to the incessant and omnipresent production of propaganda. The second, however, and in this much more troubling interpretation, as a permanently destructive eruption of violent fantasies, an irreversible cultural rupture as it were, leads Angela Nagle to a net-shock prayer at the end of her impressive (if not uncontroversial; Holt 2017; Beran 2017 analysis of the ‘online culture wars’ in Kill All Normies: The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything we could have possibly imagined and it doesn’t look like there is any easy way out of the mess that has been created. Suddenly, how far away the utopian Internet-centric days of the leaderless digital revolution now seem, when progressives rejoiced that ‘the disgust’

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had ‘become a network’ and suddenly burst into real life. Now, one is almost more inclined to hope that the online world can contain rather than further enable the festering undergrowth of dehumanizing reactionary online politics now edging closer to the mainstream but unthinkable in the public arena just a few short years ago. (Nagle 2017, p. 119)

In this case, the memified Spencer blow would merely further legitimize the outbreak of violence, possibly spiraling it ever higher to new heights. As most recently, for instance, when the president himself – as if it were a scene from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Wallace 1996) – scattered a meme showing him in the 2007 World Wrestling Entertainment match, with the head of his defeated opponent, beaten to the boards by himself, replaced by the logo of CNN, on all occasions reviled by him as ‘Fake News!’ Kill All Normies! is now the daily ritual of Two Minutes Hate in Oceania? In both interpretations, however, by Goerzen and by Nagle, an aggravation and a heating up, a brutalization of the public debate is observed; a greed to go further and further into an ever higher outrage pre-text, which is deplored from all sides, gladly with crocodile tears – but to which apparently all sides then contribute just as gladly and gleefully. Questions of democratic theory arise as to how, under these conditions, a political discourse such as that established in the bourgeois public sphere with its structural transformation described by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1962) can be maintained at all, as well as a question about the broader and more difficult-to-tolerate effects that probably accompany uninterrupted networking, digitization, and mediatization of all contexts of life (Castells 1996–1998; Hepp 2012; Van Dijk 2012). In this paper, however, I would like to turn primarily to some questions at a middle level; questions of concrete, sensory use, the transformation of daily life, and the emergence of new political practices, drawing on analyses and figures of thought from sound studies, that is, cultural studies of sound (Schulze 2012, 2018a, b; Papenburg and Schulze 2016): What forms of violence are acted out audiovisually and kinaesthetically in viral videos, GIFs and memes? How do these viral contributions to political discourse selectively and successively change this discourse as such? And finally: Which paths of political resistance are thereby paved, established or renewed?

The question raised in the title of this article, whether it is also good and right to give a Nazi a fist bump, this question I will thus answer neither ethically-morally nor resistance-theoretically or as a contribution to practical anti-fascism. Rather, the question as such is the tangible symptom  – as I will show  – of a profound change. The brute memes – whether produced by the alt-right or the so-called ‘alt-­ woke’ – are a reality of political discourse in the early twenty-first century.

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4 Alt-Right Vs. Alt-Woke So what is the alt-right? And who or what would the ‘Alt-Woke’ be? And even more fundamentally: Do the Alt-Right and the Alt-Woke exist at all – and if so, in what form? The name of the Alt-Right derives in its make from the early Usenet newsgroups of the 1980s, which from 1986 onwards used the prefix ‘alt’ or ‘alt-’ as a signal for alternative, non-mainstream discussion topics not previously represented in that newsgroup’s hierarchy; a marker that quickly attracted deviant to extremist discourse, niche interests, topics and discussion groups. The association with unusual, if not deviant, topics and authors is now echoed in the Alt-Right neologism. The use of the term alt-right has been documented since 2010, and by 2016 at the latest – in the wake of the US presidential campaign – the term became familiar to both an American and an international audience (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos 2016). In her partly controversial but definitely foundational book on alt-right online activism, Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle outlines their political agenda through the usual talking points and endlessly repeated claims and demands that preoccupy them: The alt-right is, to varying degrees, preoccupied with IQ, European demographic and civilizational decline, cultural dfecadence, cultural Marxism, anti-egalitarianism and Islamification but most importantly, as the name suggests, with creating an alternative to the right-wing conservative establishment, whom they dismiss as ‘cuckservatives’ for their soft Christian passivity and for metaphorically cuckholding their womenfolk/nation/race to the non-white foreign invader. (Nagle 2017, p. 12)

To this day, the status of the term alt-right is disputed by almost all sides: does this grouping actually exist as such – or is the word alt-right not rather a label gratefully taken up by journalists, which can be used and exploited well journalistically, but to which hardly any sufficiently consistent association of politically interested citizens, ambitious activists or even politically active persons corresponds: is there really more to it than just an ‘informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals’ (Caldwell 2016)? Nagel adds to this with the help of the always willingly mansplaining internet pedants: In its strictest definition though, as an army of Internet pedants quickly pointed out, the alt-right term was used in its own online circles to include only a new wave of overtly white segregationist and white nationalist movements and subcultures, typified by spokespeople like Richard Spencer, who has called for a US white ethno-state and a pan-national white empire modeled on some approximation of the Roman Empire. (Nagle 2017, p. 11)

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The form of expression of the Alt-Right are thus above all all variants and extremes of contemporary Internet activism; i.e. filling comment columns, harassing accounts with rejected political views, mocking, even just annoying (i.e.: ‘trolling’), provoking, and ideally getting these accounts to remain silent or shut down: ‘Delete yourself!’ is therefore one of the most popular verbal formulas of aggression to finally confirm the victory over the hostile political position with the destruction, or more precisely: the digital suicide of its profiles and protagonists (Anders and Stegemann 2018). The claim that the Alt-Right stood for a new and different, a provocatively alternative thinking of the present, a thinking that seeks to shake the supposedly post-1968 powerfully established and inexorably prevailing social consensus of liberalism, feminism, the ecology movement, and sexual self-­ determination, a thinking that wants to end the alleged self-denial of European-­ American identity of citizens of the northern hemisphere – all these claims of a return to traditional, old-European and honourable values can hardly be substantiated on the basis of the forms of action, the destructive spirit and the hate propaganda; as much as these returnees and this provocation is generally colocated in journalistic texts and representations of right-wing populists. The actions of these New Thinkers are evident in the oldest resentments of patriarchal-authoritarian forms of rule that have been established and dominant for millennia. In times of manic centrist efforts to achieve a balance in the spirit of the – now often refuted – so-called theory of extremism, the extremist counterpart was also immediately named in the USA, which must be fought just as vehemently: Aren’t left-wing extremists at least as threatening hate actors on the Internet and in public spaces as all right-wing extremists? The term used for this was partly Antifa – whereby the origin of the abbreviation from the word and resistance of anti-fascism simply seems to have been completely forgotten in the discourse about it; but partly it was the word: Alt-Woke. Woke from awoken, awakened, woke from the sleep of reason that gives birth to the monsters of fascism, racism, sexism, intersectional discrimination. This word woke was and is used, sometimes mildly ironically, for people who, after years of an ordinary and non-reflective consumer-citizen existence as a normie, now seem to suddenly recognize the injustices, the inequalities, the forms of oppression and structural violence in everyday life, and therefore incessantly articulate their references to the whole spectrum of intersectional discrimination and oppression, as through racism, sexism, handicapism, ageism or classism. The ironic emphasis here is primarily on the convert nature of such statements and the forced self-­ presentation as a person who seems to have finally understood these injustices – which have, after all, existed for far longer. While the term Alt-Right is used quite proudly and militantly as a self-designation of its protagonists, Alt-Woke is

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b­ asically more of a term of vituperation or even derision; it is only gradually also accepted affirmatively in the course of a self-confident over-affirmation and associated resignification of such derision (Anonymus 2017a, b). In a 2017 manifesto as well as compendium, alt-woke is now defined conceptually and programmatically as follows: What Is #AltWoke? #AltWoke is: The Catalytic Left. Post-Landian Left-­ Accelerationism. Team Reza Negarestani. ‘The Dark Insurrection.’ Direct action hacktivism. Free market socialism. Apocalyptic communism. Intersectional xenofeminism. Environmentally conscientious nihilism. Libidinal Marxism. Platform stacktivism. IoT urban policy. High post-post-structuralism. The corporate undercommons. Gratuitous neologism and nomenclature trolling. Lifestyle branding as political ideology & vice versa. (Anonymus 2017b)

5 Sensological Anti-Politics However, the analysis of the articulations and techniques of resistance of the alt-­ right and alt-woke seems incomplete if it is examined merely in terms of ideology or online activism. These terms seem to suggest that it might be a circumscribed, neatly contained, and ergo negligible phenomenon. If this were so, it would in fact not be activism at all: after all, it is the drive and goal and task of activism to bring a concern from a limited field of action (here: the net; classically: the demonstration, the leaflet, the radio/TV broadcast) into ideally all areas of daily life. In this respect, the net of the 2010s is indeed an almost ideal transmission medium. The news feeds and timelines in social networks, as well as their connection to thousands to millions of potential and individual readers, viewers and viewers, they not only spread word, image and sound content circumstantially and at least exponentially – this spreading means directly a seat of these sound, image and word contents in my, her and his daily life, at the workplace, while commuting, gambling, drinking beer, watching TV, in the cinema or the shisha bar. A broadcast in these networks is almost immediately directly there, where classical propaganda first had to move laboriously: places that were by no means always interested in propaganda in the past. Now the laconic propaganda of GIFs and posts, edited videos and livestreams is everywhere, omnipresent, ubiquitous. But what terms and concepts of change of such propaganda and its strategies of enforcing an ideology can be used to understand such ubiquitous communicating? In the 1990s – still entirely under the impression of the truly destructive regime of media entrepreneur and arch-patriarch Silvio Berlusconi – the Italian p­ hilosopher Mario Perniola had proposed a series of concepts and terms that seem all the more

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pertinent a good 20 years later. In Del Sentire (1992; Engl.: On Feeling 2009), Perniola traced how, by means of power techniques that were already observable and analyzable at the time, attempts were made to ridicule a factual and substantive discourse, the effort to struggle argumentatively for a solution to social, economic, or political problems – and any conversation was nipped in the bud. This style of non-argumentation, this fundamentally destructive form of empty communication, not only has a long history and a much more recent, modern history of its spread and use: this anti-communication, or more precisely: decommunication, is above all a (and perhaps the most important, as it is the most effective) power technique of the present – or in the words of the media sociologist danah Boyd: “the ability to hack the attention economy” (Boyd 2018, p. 20). To describe this technique of power, Perniola coined a new term, modelled on that of ideology – but replacing the ‘idea’ with the ‘senses’. Perniola refers to the ideology of our present, based on the various apparatuses and networks for transmitting broadcasts in various sensory media: sensologia or sensology. It is the ideology of our time. Unlike in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, this ideology is no longer conveyed primarily through written works and doctrinal buildings, it is not, so to speak, an ideology of concepts, a conceptology or concettologia; rather – beginning already in the twentieth century and fully developed now in the twenty-first  – it operates primarily through the media of the senses. Rather, it operates primarily through modes of action, through sensory stimulus-­ response patterns (‘ready-fields’) and corresponding technical apparatuses, which, as power apparatuses, transform perception and sensory experience, sensory consciousness, for the benefit of a power entity that acts through them. The sharp demarcation between these two forms of ideology can, of course, only be maintained structurally, as Perniola also admits: Many examples of the survival of classical ideologies of the nineteenth century in our time could be found, just as significant precursors of sensologies as power techniques could also be found in the nineteenth and earliest twentieth century. Perniola’s examples here are largely taken from the field of the television and tabloid world of the Berlusconi regime in Italy; but social media agitation and the derailing, whataboutism, and vituperative disparagement of the other person that is omnipresent on the Net offer even more coherent examples of this. An anti-­ communication in the sense of Perniola’s sensology has, as already indicated, precisely no actual solution to a social or political problem as its goal; a debate conducted in a balancing manner is rather immediately destroyed, torn to shreds and sneeringly beaten to a pulp. The goal is, above all, the preservation of power by the anti-communicators. These then of course have no political programme or ­proposals for solutions – apart from their maintenance of power (or a seizure of

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power). The effect of this anti-communication qua attention-occupation can be shown, for example, by looking at three rulers who currently or historically use or used these sensologies: Silvio Berlusconi, of course, but also Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Berlusconi achieved this through the television dominance of his conglomerate called Mediaset, the always denied but in fact repeatedly observable influence on female journalists and broadcasts of the state broadcaster RAI, the flooding of the television market with shows offering mainly quiz games and soft eroticism – money and sex to distract the needs of the proles, using a term from Orwell’s 1984; in Putin’s propaganda of physical toughness, victorious relentlessness, atavistic masculinity of him as a person (fishing, hunting, horseback riding, judo, etc.), and in his own personal life. pp.) can likewise be found such motifs of dispersal of any discourse, intensified still further in the question television programmes which stage him as the supreme tribune of the people – but which in fact present above all his unassailability, all-embracing concern, strength and inevitability, his ridiculing of all foreign machinations for so-called ‘human rights’, which admittedly can be enemy propaganda alone, (what else?); and finally, the countless despicable tweets and hate speech, hate actions and hate products that Donald J. Trump ceaselessly sent out before and after his election to the presidency – and in whose slipstream was effectively hidden every conceivably cruel piece of legislation: Against minorities, against the underclass (which, after all, supposedly elected him, indes refuted many times), against the old, the sick, against children and their survival on an ecologically destroyed planet. It is anti-politics that these three protagonists embody. Sensological antipolitics means: the senses are clogged, the social media channels are blocked with articulations of outrage. This creates a painful imbalance not only of public attention and concrete activist strategies; the imbalance exists above all in the fundamental concerns and an activist self-image of the two groups of protagonists, in which presumably the familiar differentiation into clientele party and program party returns mutatis mutandis. On the one hand, there are protagonists who, in order to maintain their clientele in power, primarily put on a kind of sensological provocative performance in order to dominate public space and thereby secure power – with the battle cry ‘Épater le bourgeois!’ The more strongly and directly these normies, biscuit or bourgeois feel provoked and lapse into the desired spasms of indignation, the more successful is this form of agitation, which above all seeks to brand any discourse on concrete political positions, current issues and legislation as a somewhat remote private pleasure and tending towards deviant and lonely punditry. In contrast, the side working against it clearly has the worse cards. Because unlike the trolls’ patronage propaganda, the ideal of a balancing, consensus-oriented

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discourse still prevails even among the representatives of program propaganda – which admittedly also likes to troll and tease, annoy and pester its opponents. Even if propaganda is carried out here with all means on the net, including bot armies and perfidious viral artefacts, it is still intended to talk about selected, socially urgent issues – in order to ideally reach a consensus-oriented, balancing position in the discourse. Alone this search for a, so to speak, discursively satisfying conclusion of the discussion for all participants, alone this goal already seems laughable on the part of the clientele propaganda: ‘Isn’t it always only about the egoistic interests of individuals? Why this silly effort for everyone? Don’t make fools of yourselves? You’re just egoists too!’ To the protagonists of anti-politics and anti-­ communication, it apparently seems completely inconceivable that actors in the political space – be it institutions, streets and squares, on the net or in the private sphere – could be concerned with anything other than merely private interests and the fulfilment of clientele needs. The goal of a program party to organize in a reflected and differentiated way, both juridically, historically and also prognostically coherent the daily life in a society of citizens in a balance of interests, is in a sense wiped away without a second thought as itself propaganda. It does not seem credible to the anti-politicians that politicians actually have anything in mind other than their personal benefit. And as much as, psychologically speaking, personal interests are admittedly not absent from political action, at least a basic need for such a balance is evident in the concrete, organizational and balancing actions of not a few politicians of the old type. But, when this need is no longer even assumed or understood or believed? In what political constellation do we then find ourselves? Is it then even legitimate to speak of political discourse as such, or are we rather bobbing and floundering in a post-discursive or at least interim-discursive anomie of the political? In the political transformation pains of digitalization?

6 The New Street Fights Back to the initial questions of this post. I begin with the first question: so what forms of violence are acted out audiovisually and kinesthetically in viral videos, GIFs, and memes? It seems that violence is indeed a driver of these viral artifacts and memes. But not solely a violence of resistance, which was described at the beginning at the Spencer blow – that would possibly still be a halfway legitimate expression of fear, of justified self-defence and protection of potential victims of violence. Above all, the violence is exercised by the so-called Alt-Right, in that a still comparatively young, public space is occupied here just as powerfully, as if

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protection money were being collected here, as if new partisans were being acquired, as if annoying subjects had to be driven out of here. For the comment columns, the chat rooms, the timelines and the ephemeral Messenger logs are definitely to be regarded as public space: Linguistic or audiovisual action that takes place here has the character of a stage, the actors sometimes give themselves stage names and aliases with particularly martial and aggressive references, in order to be able to represent, act out, and missionarily push their greatest concerns even more clearly in the encouraging intensification of the mask. Violence is admittedly articulated far more easily under the masks of the alias than in the much-vaunted plain names  – but even these serve to drive the wedge of hatred, contempt and mockery, persecution, the threat of deportation, imprisonment and execution ever further and ever deeper in the course of general disinhibition in the direction of anti-Semitism, sexism and racism, one’s own anti-politics and anti-­communication. It is a sadistic lust of which Judith Butler also wrote in the days after Trump’s election: We are now seeing how misogyny and racism overrides judgment and a commitment to democratic and inclusive goals – they are sadistic, resentful, and destructive passions driving our country. (Butler 2016)

But acting out violence is not merely a playful exercise in loosening up, a fun flirtation with extreme positions, not just an Épater Le Bourgeois! – as it is still being danced to this day with a contrarianist desire for distinction by net columnists and elegant editors-in-chief everywhere. This violence is changing the public conversation about politics and what a common life might look like. So the second question is now to be answered: How do such viral contributions to political discourse selectively and successively change that discourse as such? As shown by Nagle and Boyd, driven by quite different epistemological interests, it must first be confirmed that the changes in discourse are not occassional and temporary, but substantial and presumably permanent. For the changes in behavior and articulation in the public net-space are not minor, and the technical preconditions will presumably not dissolve into nothingness the day after tomorrow. However, the opposite can be assumed, which again suggests other future developments: While the technical possibilities of networking will presumably continue to solidify and stabilize, other regulations of state, interpersonal and situational form will also develop. The old notion of netiquette will probably not experience a renaissance; but just as malicious and slanderous pamphlets, some of which were also excused as satirical but often agitational, from the first foothills of the ­Gutenberg galaxy faced a backlash of regularities, just as publishers and publishing

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ethos emerged at that time, control bodies and gatekeepers sought to protect themselves from complete falsehood and slander, so too will presumably similar cultural regulatory institutions and practices develop in the years and decades to come. The process of cultural history and civilization, they are by no means finished and solidified. New transformations force new changes in behavior and other cultural forms and social formations. On the formation of sensological antipolitics, it is to be expected, a sensological critique will also form: Criticism will no longer examine propositions and tracts, programmatics and ideologies alone, but equally modes of action and habits of perception, sensory interventions and sensological distractions and disruptions. A greatly expanded concept of discourse will develop, which goes far beyond the ‘linguistic-cognitive dimension of social experience’ (Gilbert 2004); actions, sensory interventions, peryeption effects will then not only sometimes be included as in the classical concept of discourse – but they will possibly move into the core of the discourse. Linguistic-cognitive dimensions then appear as marginalia and occasional outgrowths of sensological power-acting. In the words of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: The main consequence of a break with the discursive/extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/reality opposition, and hence a major enlargement of the field of those categories which can account for social relations. Synonym, metonymy, metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted. Rejection of the thought/reality dichotomy must go together with a rethinking and interpretation of the categories which have until now been considered exclusive of one or the other. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 110)

I come to the third and final initial question: Which paths of political resistance are thereby paved, established or renewed? If sensologies – and in extreme cases even sensological anti-politics – determine and play a decisive role in the sensory discourse of public space, if the targeted, tendentially terroristic clogging of channels for a thoughtful and balancing confrontation represents the main strategy, then a strategy of counter-clogging sometimes appears tragic and helpless, but also as an almost logical and coherent consequence of the anti-political confrontation. An ossified and sclerotic situation that presumably requires a powerful change, an intervention, will not be changed by non-intervention and non-action. But what promises the greatest possible form of generativity, the least frictional and the least aggravating and all-harming? How can hardening in hatred be resolved as promptly and directly as possible? Regrettably, this contribution to this anthology cannot offer a patent solution either. But various perspectives of dealing with the senso-

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logical antipolitics of the destruction of conversation and its genuine desire to exploit the transformational pains of digitalization to bring about an anomie of the political, possibly also for the comprehensive self-enrichment to a new phase of primordial accumulation in the Marxian sense, appear. For the public space of the net is still in the making, regulations of adequate force are – in comparison to other cultural-historical formations  – hardly established globally, raids and new kingdoms are carried out and founded without interruption. But what is needed to establish new regulations of an institutional nature that could actually intervene here? One way seems indeed to be to understand political discourse as ubiquitous – like all other medial and networked forms of communication, of economy, of the arts, of living together. Thus the resistance that forms here is not compartmentalized in parties, trade unions, civil rights organizations  – but presumably just as ubiquitous. Increasingly, it makes little sense to talk about whether someone is online, networked or logged in – just as it would make little sense to ask someone whether they are connected to the water, electricity and waste disposal networks. This connectivity increasingly appears as a de facto prerequisite for citizenship. The problems this raises are not small – non-use, age limits, limits to abilities etc. pp. – but the generative aspects seem all the more important, at least for our questions in this article: social engagement in the twenty-first century may no longer be limited to local club meetings, demonstration marches or voting in national elections. Acting in comment columns and timelines, in aliases and on the profiles of others is at least as much to be recognized as a public action in the space of the political. It is there that the ubiquitous, sometimes more sensological or ideological, argument about social developments occurs. The comment columns are the new streets and the battles of words in them, the dispute over positions and views are the new street fights  – fortunately initially bloodless and without superficial collateral damage. On the basis of the classification and analysis of memes in the public discourse of the 2010s, it is thus indeed possible to state the development of a cultural rupture arising from new forms of propaganda. This significant change in political discourse can possibly neither be stopped nor redirected, but can at most be selectively hemmed in by regulation. Consequently, the aggression of anti-­ politics will not be brought to an end without further ado; it will, however, possibly bring about a different form of generativity in political and also sensological discourse, which at present still hardly seems conceivable. Sound studies researchers in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century will finally have to decide on this.

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References Anders, R. & Stegemann, P. (2018). Lösch Dich! So organisiert ist der Hate im Netz, Funk & Kooperative Berlin (online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvKjfWSPI7s). Anonymus (2017a): Alt Woke Manifesto (online: http://tripleampersand.org/alt-­woke-­ manifesto/). Anonymus (2017b): Alt Woke Companion (online: http://tripleampersand.org/altwoke-­ companion/). Beran, D. (2017). “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him”, in: medium. com, 14. Februar 2017 (online: https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-­the-­skeleton-­ key-­to-­the-­rise-­of-­trump-­624e7cb798cb). Bokhari, A. & Yiannopoulos, M. (2016). “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To the Alt-Right”, in: Breitbart 29.3.2016 (online: www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-­ establishment-­conservatives-­guide-­to-­the-­alt-­right/). Born, G. & Haworth, C. (2018). “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre”, Music and Letters 98(4), 601–647. Boyd, dana (2018). “How An Algorithmic World Can Be Undermined. Keynote Lecture”, in: re:publica 18, 1. Mai 2018 (online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTl0yyPqf3E). Butler, J. (2016). “A Statement”, in: e-flux 1. November 2016 (online: https://conversations.e-­ flux.com/t/a-­statement-­from-­judith-­butler/5215). Castells, M. (1996–1998). The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Volume 1–3. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Gilbert 2004 https://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/8/7. Glitsos, Laura (2018).“Vaporwave, or music optimized for abandoned malls”, Popular Music 37(1), 100–118. Goerzen, M. (2017). Die Meme der Produktion. Texte zur Kunst 106, 87–108. Habermas, J. (1962). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hepp, A. (2012). Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holt, M. (2017): “Review: Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle”, in: arkbooks.de, 7. November 2017 (online: http.//arkbooks.dk/review-kill-all-normies-by-angela-nagle/) Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985): Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Love, N. S. (2017). “Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect, and the Alt-­ Right”. New Political Science, 39(2), 263–268. Nagle, A. (2017). Kill All Normies. London: Zero Books. Papenburg, J.G. & Schulze, H. (2016). Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion. Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT-Press. Perniola, M. (2009). Über das Fühlen. Del sentire. Aus dem Italienischen von Sabine Schneider. Berlin: Merve. Schulze, H. (2012). Sound Studies. Eine Einführung. In S.  Moebius (Hrsg.), Kultur. Von den Cultural Studies zu den Visual Studies. Eine Einführung. (S. 242–257). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

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Schulze, H. (2018a). Ubiquitäre Literatur. Zur Partikelpoetik des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts. In V. Dörr & R. Goebel (Hrsg.), Literatur in der Medienkonkurrenz. Medientranspositionen 1800 – 1900 – 2000. (S. 161–183). Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag. Schulze, H. (2018b): The Sonic Persona. An Anthropology of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Smith, Jack (2018): “This is fashwave, the suicidal retro-futurist art of the alt-right”, in: Mic 12.1.2018 (online: https://mic.com/articles/187379/this-­is-­fashwave-­the-­suicidal-­retro-­ futurist-­art-­of-­the-­alt-­right). Caldwell, Christopher (2016): “What the Alt-Right Really Means” The New  York Times 2.12.2018 (online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/what-­the-­alt-­ right-­really-­means.html). Spencer, R. (2008): “The Conservative Write” in: Taki’s Magazine: Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar (online: takimag.com/article/the_conservative_write).

Filmography Tarantino, Q. (2009): Inglourious Basterds. New York: The Weinstein Company Toffler, A. (1970): Future Shock. New York: Random House. Van Dijk, J. (2012). The Network Society. London: SAGE Publications. Wallace, D.F. (1996): Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Right-Wing Populism as Political Therapy: Emotional Dynamics of Social Declassification Cornelia Koppetsch

1 Introduction Since the turn of the millennium, diagnoses of threats to the middle class have also caused quite a stir in Germany.1 Real incomes are stagnating, job insecurity, precarious employment situations and phases of unemployment have become a realistic scenario for more and more employees (Castel and Dörre 2009). And while the upper and lower margins are drifting further and further apart, the distortions within the middle class are also growing, as even university graduates are affected by insecurity and precarious employment conditions (Tölke and Hank 2005; Manske 2007, 2009). In view of such findings, there are also growing concerns  For example, it is reported that after decades of growth, the middle income class is shrinking again (Grabka and Frick 2008) and that fears of unemployment and social decline are growing (Groh-Samberg et al. 2014; Lengfeld and Hirschle 2010; Herbert-Quandt-Stiftung 2007; Vogel 2009, 2011; Heinze 2011; Mau 2012; Burkhardt et al. 2012). Social cleavages and glaring income inequalities are interpreted as signs of a crisis of the middle class (Bude 2008; Castel 2000; Kronauer 2002; Castel and Dörre 2009; Bude and Willisch 2008; Busch et al. 2010; Lessenich 2009; Koppetsch 2013). 1

C. Koppetsch (*) Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_12

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about the integration potential of society. A stable and prosperous middle class has always been regarded by sociologists such as Ralf Dahrendorf, Seymour M. Lipset and Theodor Geiger as a guarantor of political and social stability. This also raises political questions. If the middle class now ceases to be a place of security and stability, will society then become more susceptible to extremes and political extremism (Münkler 2010)?

2 What Are the Causes of the Rise of Populist Right-­ Wing Parties? The Federal Republic of Germany, and later also the united Germany, seemed immune to serious successes by right-wing populist parties for a long time due to decades of economic prosperity, but also as a result of the intensive confrontation with the consequences of National Socialism. The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was also a surprise for many because right-wing populist currents and parties in other European countries were also initially considered a temporary phenomenon that would soon disappear again (Jörke 2017). Such a view is no longer plausible at the latest with Trump’s election as president of the USA in November 2016.2 From today’s perspective, Germany is merely a latecomer to a development that is already further advanced in other Western countries. However, it is still unclear which factors have contributed to the rise of populist right-wing parties.3 The theses put forward so far are mostly based on the consid In Europe, the 2014 European elections marked a watershed, bringing record results for many European right-wing populist movements, with the share of the vote accounted for by rightwing populist electoral parties more than doubling from 5.1% to 13.2% (Inglehart and Norris 2016). That the Front National in France or UKIP in the UK could rise to become the strongest party in their respective countries seemed unthinkable until now (Hillebrand 2015, p. 7). 3  While some very good political science analyses of the political potential of right-wing populist parties already exist (Mouffe 2007; Kriesi et al. 2006; Kriesi and Pappas 2015; Priester 2013; Hillebrand 2015; Cuperus 2015; Jörke and Selk 2015; Tormey 2015), a sociological analysis of the social and cultural background of the rise of right-wing parties is still lacking (Knöbl 2016). Political science analyses usually explain the rise of populist parties and movements by referring to internal political changes in the system of representative democracies, according to which the cartelization and compartmentalization tendencies of established parties and social elites have led to resistance from groups that do not see themselves represented in this system. But such a view does not do justice to the complexity of the emergence of populist right-wing movements, as well as to the social effects of their systems of thought and belief. A sociological analysis would have to go beyond this and examine the overarching mental, cultural and socio-structural power relations in which contemporary right-wing populism is embedded. 2

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eration of isolated individual factors and are founded on two different explanatory approaches. Either economic conditions, social divisions are considered the main cause of right-wing populist mobilization successes. Or the electorate is said to have a collective mental disorder – such as authoritarianism, xenophobia – which is sometimes attributed to unfavourable socialisation conditions (in the working class), sometimes to the incomplete coming to terms with two dictatorship ­experiences (in East Germany), sometimes to the mental sediments of authoritarian capitalism (Heitmeyer 2010). But both assumptions, apart from the fact that they always assume that the causes lie with ‘the others’, i.e. either with the ‘outcasts’ or the ‘authoritarians’, are not valid on closer inspection. The authoritarianism thesis falls short because, according to the Leipzig Centre Studies (Decker et al. 2016), authoritarian attitudes and group-related misanthropy have not increased in recent years (Küpper et al. 2015, pp.  21–24). Their share in the population has been around 20 percent for about two decades. Moreover, this explanatory approach cannot explain the conditions under which authoritarian and xenophobic personality disorders form political protest movements. But the division theory also falls short, because it is mostly narrowed down to economic factors and only takes a look at the ‘precarious classes’. A look at the socio-structural composition of the electorate shows that it is by no means exclusively and not even primarily the obviously unsuccessful and disadvantaged who vote for the AfD, but that voters can be found in all social situations (Vehrkamp and Wegschaider 2017). The connection between the change in orders of inequality and political mobilisation from the right is far more complex than previously assumed. (a) Based on the assumption that a well-integrated, prosperous middle class is the main protection against political extremism, it would have been expected that right-wing populist and extremist parties would have experienced a rapid rise in popularity in countries that have been particularly affected by the financial and euro crisis since 2008, by unemployment and austerity. Yet in the 2014 European Parliament elections, the right-wing parties performed best or made their strongest gains precisely in those countries that were comparatively little affected by the immediate consequences of the crisis: Austria, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. The only exception is Hungary, which was hit hard economically and where the far-right Jobbik achieved the fourth-best result (Decker et al. 2015, pp. 14–15). (b) Against this backdrop, the success of the right-wing parties in Sweden and Denmark, which are among the most egalitarian European societies by

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European standards, with the most secure welfare systems in the world and the highest levels of education, comes as a complete surprise (Inglehart and Norris 2016, p. 12). (c) But even within societies, the findings are ambiguous and complex. For example, support for right-wing populists is found across all social classes, ­including to a not inconsiderable extent among academics and the highly qualified – this is particularly evident in Germany and the USA.4 (d) If the thesis that the supporters are predominantly globalisation losers with low incomes and low education is correct, it would also be incomprehensible why classical distribution issues, such as social justice and redistribution, are only taken up secondarily, if at all, by the populist right-wing parties. The common feature of right-wing populist voters is not the demand for redistribution, but the rejection of liberal migration and refugee policies. To put it pointedly: why do the supporters of the right-wing parties protest against immigrants, asylum shelters and Islam and not against capitalist relations of exploitation?

3 Right-Wing Populism as a Political Therapy for Social Declassification It should not be denied that the supporters of right-wing populism are predominantly declassed or ‘losers’, as indicated not only by various empirical findings (Hilmer et al. 2017; Cramer 2016; Hochschild 2016), but also by the fact that right-­ wing populist protests are directed against the established and elites. However, it is precisely the figure of the loser that poses a particular challenge for sociological analysis, as this is a hitherto misunderstood variable in the games of democracy. It is indeed plausible to see populism as a movement that encourages the losers to turn not only against the winners, but also against the rules of the game. However, there is no automatism here: no declassification, no slight, no matter how serious, necessarily leads those affected to question the rules of the game, sometimes violently. The prerequisite for this is a specific view of social conditions. And this is expressed in emotions, with which individuals endow their world view with subjective meaning (Hochschild 1997). Emotions represent social standpoints and  Moreover, supporters of right-wing populist parties in Western and Northern Europe are not increasingly found among the precariat, i.e. the long-term unemployed, welfare recipients or low-income earners, but disproportionately, though by no means exclusively, among the lower middle class (Oesch 2008; Inglehart and Norris 2016, p. 27). 4

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modes of interpretation. Populist right-wing movements thus tie in with emotionally based interpretations of events, which is why their supporters cannot be dissuaded by rational arguments. So what are the emotions that can be mobilized by right-wing populist protest movements? To answer this question, an extended concept of social descent will be developed in the following. In social structure analyses, downward mobility is primarily defined as intra- or intergenerational downward mobility based on indicators such as education, occupation and income. In5 contrast, it will be argued here that social descent is not limited to income loss, but can involve different forms of declassification, i.e. loss of status. Moreover, it should be noted that socio-structural situations as well as mobility processes do not provide direct information on electoral or party preferences. As a mediating element, specific coping constellations are required that influence the habitus, attitudes and views of the declassed. These will be reconstructed here from the perspective of the sociology of emotions.  Current studies on intragenerational downward mobility, for example, conclude on the basis of highly aggregated data that there has hardly been any increase in social downward mobility in recent years. If one follows the analyses of the socio-economic panel, then there is little evidence for the underlying assumption here that social descents have increased sharply due to the flexibilisation of employment relationships and the increasing heterogeneity and de-standardisation of employment histories (Stawarz 2015). According to this study, the rate of occupational downward mobility increased insignificantly from two to three percent from 1985 to 2002 in the West. In the East, downward mobility peaked at nearly nine percent at the beginning of the 1990s, only to drop to three percent as well (Drasch 2009). Similar findings can be seen in the results of Petra Böhnke (2006), who was able to show that social downward mobility tends to be concentrated in the lower strata, while members of the middle strata would be afraid of downward mobility but would generally be spared permanent unemployment or a drop into the lower income strata. But this is implausible for two reasons. In view of the increase in company-related redundancies and restructuring measures and the expansion of insecure and atypical employment relationships since the 2000s, it can very well be assumed that downward occupational mobility has become more frequent, although it probably cannot be adequately captured on the basis of the available highly aggregated data and with the indicators used. For example, downward mobility is defined in the analyses of the SOEP as “the change of an individual to an occupation that has a lower prestige than the occupation held in the previous year or before a period of inactivity” (unemployment or parental leave) (Drasch 2009, p.  35). Income drops and downwardly mobile job changes within one’s own occupational group cannot be captured in this way. Moreover, they convey a one-sided and hardly accurate picture of downwardly mobile career paths. This is because the strongest polarisation tendencies are currently apparent within and no longer primarily between occupational groups. The growing inequalities between occupational groups have been overlaid by inequalities within an occupational field and can far exceed the former in extent (Rosanvallon 2013). 5

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The theses are: (a) Populist right-wing parties offer a political ‘therapy’ for various forms of ‘experiences of decline’ that cannot be reduced to economic issues.6 Nor can these be adequately captured in terms of an ‘escalator down’ model, but are to be conceptualised here in terms of ‘declassification by falling behind’. Different forms are to be distinguished. The causes of falling behind include, firstly, the hysteresis effects introduced into the debate by Pierre Bourdieu (1982). Here, social relegation or loss of status results from losses of validity of incorporated attitudes, dispositions, attitudes. While social conditions have changed, the habitus remains attached to its conditions of origin and no longer functions under the new social circumstances. Subjectively, this variety of social descent experience is not experienced as an ‘escalator down’ but rather as alienation, a ‘culture shock’ as it were. Secondly, experiences of decline in the sense of declassification by falling behind also include losses of hegemony induced by the ascent of previously inferior groups. Here, it is not the affected group that has fallen behind; rather, the loss of status results from the rise of previously inferior groups. A prominent example of this is represented by various groups from the industrial middle class, including skilled workers, craftsmen, small tradesmen, farmers, small entrepreneurs, etc., whose once hegemonic ways of life have been devalued, both at the national level, vis-à-vis the rising academic middle class, and at the international level, vis-à-vis the middle classes of the catching-up BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). For while income inequalities have grown within the Western world, many Asian countries in particular have moved beyond the status of developing  This assumption can be supported by the empirical results of a recent study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. According to this study, the AfD vote is not an exclusive phenomenon of particularly low-income living conditions, even if an above-average proportion of workers among AfD voters is striking. Rather, the political explosiveness lies in the fact that the AfD, unlike the NPD, for example, succeeds in appealing to the lower classes (up to 1500), the lower middle classes (1500 to 2500) and those from higher material backgrounds (over 4000 EUR net income) in a social bracket movement. The common denominator of voters mobilised by populist right-wing parties, as the various empirical studies on subjective images of society and the self show, is not socio-economic decline, but the feeling of personal degradation, the feeling of belonging to the social losers. This feeling can be fed by very different experiences of devaluation and is not tied to a specific situation. AfD voters rank themselves low in society or experience social relegation compared to their parents for different reasons and regardless of their real income (Hilmer et al. 2017, p. 6). 6

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countries to create a new global middle class (Milanovic 2016). This constellation forms a central pillar of right-wing populist mobilization, as it overlaps national and class-specific declines in status. Thirdly, declassification through falling behind can also result from the devaluation of hitherto profitable entitlements from predicates, titles, qualifications and competences. For example, the emergence of new elite predicates, such as the title of high potential awarded by companies and the MBA awarded at elite universities, has devalued the traditional diplomas of business administration courses at “ordinary” universities. What these three experiences of relegation have in common is that they are not the responsibility of those affected, most of whom have not moved at all themselves, but must rather be attributed to shifts in the evaluation or positional structure of the system as a whole. It is not individual failure but expropriation that is at the centre of this type of declassification: the rules of the game and the standards of evaluation, the rating agencies as it were, have changed and the patterns of living, entitlements and rights acquired at an earlier point in time lose their validity, come into conflict with the changed orders, as a result of which those affected lose substantial parts of their “capital”. (b) The political therapy offered by the right is neither ‘coaching’ nor ‘empowerment’ directed at the individual (Bröckling 2007), but rather a rehabilitation therapy and aimed at defending the traditional institutions or establishing such social orders that are supposed to bring back the lost stakes and investments and thus restore the status of the declassed. (c) The therapy consists essentially in the symbolic rehabilitation of the status of the declassed through the generation of an alternative image of society, an alternative morality, i.e. through social reclassification offers. Here, again, three varieties can be identified. This form of political therapy can take place (a) as political heresy, i.e. as a social paradigm shift in the sense of a radical departure from the prevailing social order. This paradigm shift involves an exit from liberal (ortho)doxia by means of offering alternative, anti-liberal views of society, which include a new moral economy (e.g., paternalism instead of social redistribution; social closure instead of openness; hierarchy instead of equality; coherent order instead of pluralism; a conservative instead of a progressive anthropology, etc.); and a new symbolic order (e.g., a new social order); and striving for a new symbolic order; (b) as symbolic re-sovereignization through the symbolic re-establishment of classical hegemonic relations, for instance between the sexes, between generations, or between social majorities and minorities on the basis of heroic ideals of masculinity, patriotism, and finally (c)

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through the defense of specific ‘minorities’ or outsider groups. Depending on the group concerned in their respective establishment prerogatives, the minorities are quite different outsider groups, such as rising ‘career women’ or migrants making ostensibly ‘unjustified’ claims, refugees, Muslims, and so on. The common feature of the various outsider groups is that, from the point of view of those affected, they each make unjustified, or – as often colocated in populist anti-genderism campaigns, for example  – exaggerated claims to equality. The defence against and exclusion of outsiders then enables the ­transformation of one’s own status losses into categorical exclusions of others in the style of established/outsider figurations (Elias and Scotson 1990). (d) However, turning to the new right-wing movements presupposes a specific emotional conditioning, because different reactions are possible to declassifications. For example, feelings of inferiority or shame are typical emotional reactions to declassification (Neckel 1991), but they cannot be mobilized politically. Feelings of inferiority always involve an admission of subjective inferiority and thus promote the self-attribution of failure. It is not for nothing that the feeling of shame has been regarded in social theory since Norbert Elias as the motor of civilization processes, because it indicates the transformation of foreign constraints into self constraints. The situation is different, however, with feelings of envy, which can only be civilised as long as they can be contained by morality. In modern society, this is shaped by orders of justice, such as norms of performance justice or distributive justice. These help, as Sigmund Freud already knew, to restrain self-interest. On the other hand, as soon as the impression arises that comparable, or even hitherto inferior, others unfairly have what I desire, the individual no longer feels bound by the rules of the game and norms that generate social inequalities but can no longer justify them. Under neoliberal conditions, however, there is an exhaustion of orders of justice and previously valid norms of distribution and performance (Koppetsch 2013). The result is anger or indignation, feelings that are typically mobilized by populist protest movements. (e) What is proposed here is a re-reading of the concept of the descent society (Nachtwey 2016) in the prism of right-wing populist mobilization: the topic is not precarization, but subjective losses of status and validity in their various manifestations. Different social groups are affected, each of which is to be considered in its specific figurations of social declassification. This is by no means to suggest that economic factors are irrelevant. However, they are not a cause or condition of decline, but merely one of several dimensions of social declassification.

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(f) The current right-wing populist mobilization does not tie in with an already existing class subject, but is rather to be understood as one of the vectors of the transformation of class structures, because it forces the formation of specific political subjects. The invocation of very disparate groups under the unspecific collective singular of the ostensibly homogeneous ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ aims at an identity-political form of community formation through solidarity within and demarcation from the outside. Populist right-wing parties generate their political subject by recourse to a national collectivization offer: the persons addressed as “the people” are constituted in this invocation as a community, as a “community of fate” for the very first time.

4 The Politics of Anger: Resentment and Protest Parties So let us note: populist right-wing parties do not appeal exclusively to precarious classes or holders of low incomes or education, but mobilise a wider spectrum of social positions. Yet there is no direct link between the humiliating experiences of social relegation and right-wing populist mobilisation. No declassification, no matter how severe, generates political counter-movements on its own. The new right-­ wing parties are only effective where they succeed in tapping into specific emotions and making them politically useful. In this sense, populist right-wing parties act as political anger entrepreneurs who develop social narratives in which individual grievances are socialized and individual anger potentials are put at the service of common ideals and long-term political goals. Which emotions can be mobilized by right-wing populists? In addition to feelings of envy, which in contemporary societies can hardly be sufficiently tamed due to the growing erosion of norms of equality of opportunity or performance equity (Neugebauer 2007; Neckel 1991) and which can therefore turn more quickly into anger or indignation, the spread of resentment represents a further emotional basis for populist mobilisation, which can be found in particular among those groups who are forbidden the direct expression of anger, hatred and indignation. Resentment tends to erase the given, for it condemns what it secretly desires. Inhibition often transforms the original affect into diffuse feelings of hostility. According to Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1992 [1887], p. 26), the resentment-driven negation of the originally affirmed objects and values ultimately leads to the formation of an alternative morality, an order of “losers.”

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Resentment is one of the misunderstood and often underestimated emotions. They are usually the last link in a complex chain of illegitimate emotions and they arise above all where negative feelings have to be concealed, denied or repressed, precisely because rebelling against the powerful or catching up with the successful and winners has become completely hopeless. Underlying the feeling of resentment is then a powerless desire (Scheler 1978 [1912], pp. 11–14). Hence the proverbial toxicity of resentment: Max Scheler speaks of a self-poisoning of the soul, and Nietzsche aptly writes that beneath resentment the “soul squints.” The “toxicity” is expressed, for instance, in the fact that the ‘winners’, i.e. the privileged, are declared inferior to the bearer of ressentiment, paradoxically precisely because they possess the coveted good, such as talents, successes, beauty or wealth. But not only the bearers, but also the good itself is disparaged. As in the well-known fable of the fox, the grapes do not hang too high (and are thus unattainable), but they appear too sour. Nevertheless, resentment not only harms its bearers, but also offers numerous moments of relief. The bearer of resentment belittles the desirability of the good as well as the privileges of its bearers: one is convinced, for example, that a colleague owes his enormous successes to achievements that in reality prove his all-­embracing incompetence. In this way, one relieves oneself of feelings of envy and inferiority. The effects of resentment are particularly far-reaching where, due to recurring rejections and experiences of powerlessness, it has congealed into an attitude that shapes views and attitudes in a fundamental way. Such a solidified resentment expresses itself, for example, in the moralizing negation of the prevailing order as a whole and the vehement demand for new social images and rules. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his famous writing ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, ‘exposed’ Christianity, in which, as is well known, humility and charity, consciousness of sin, as well as the rejection of worldly pleasures, etc., are preached (the last will be first), as a prototypical loser morality. And Rousseau, too, can be considered a thinker of resentment, albeit involuntarily, because he takes the disappointment of his futile pursuit of career, admiration and love in mid-eighteenth-century Parisian society as the starting point for a morally critical unmasking of the leading social classes. Against what he sees as the decadent and “overcivilized” people of the Parisian “Monde,” Rousseau formulates his anthropology of the natural man and the noble savage (Gebauer 2004, pp. 764–767). It is obvious that the social and world views of the supporters of populist right-­ wing movements have also absorbed the spirit of resentment and erect a ‘loser’ morality, an alternative social order, in opposition to the spirit of progressive neo-

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liberalism, which is perceived as decadent. The right-wing populist and right-wing conservative critique is not, after all, directed at a delimitable political field, but at the social order as a whole, proposing an alternative social order against the liberal conception of man and the world. This should contain less individual autonomy and more subordination to the collective, less openness and more closure, less self-­ realization and more public spirit. Moreover, the right-wing view of society is directed against the liquefaction of social categories and positions, for example in the area of gender relations and social hierarchies. And to the extent that liberal orders lose moral support, the right’s image of society becomes more plausible. The popularity of populist right-wing parties does not simply stem from their ­propagandistic successes, but from the complex interplay of declassification, emotions and the considerable loss of legitimacy of liberal orders of proof and success. Support for right-wing movements and their ideologies therefore not only fulfils relief functions for the bearer of resentment, but also contains society-changing potential through the famous ‘inversion of values’. It allows personal impotence to be transformed into moral outrage, the triumphs of the victors into shame, and shame into revenge. Envy of the advantages of the ‘winners’ is then replaced by accusations of their blatant presumption, their (sexual) laxity and moral decadence. The declassed then have the feeling of losing social esteem despite their demonstrable superiority and moral ‘greatness’. This attitude makes it possible to cling to one’s own group charisma and to demand the reestablishment of group honour – for example, male honour, the greatness of the nation or the professional ethos that has been undermined by modernisation processes. Such patterns of interpretation also underlie the hate comments on “gender mainstreaming” and transgender toilets in blogs and social media, which can be understood as attempts at re-­sovereignization. According to this, today it is no longer women but men, not homosexuals but ‘straight’ people, not foreigners but natives, ‘normies’, Germans, whites, etc., who are disadvantaged. Through the absurd preferential treatment of the ‘fringe groups’ or ‘minorities’, one has now become a victim of social degradation oneself. Whether resentment can actually be successfully stirred up or served by right-­ wing populist parties depends not least on whether the respective stigmatized outsiders – for example migrants, refugees – represent interdependent outsider groups and are thus perceived as competitors for coveted goods, for positions of power in society, jobs, housing, social benefits or state allocations. This also explains why refugees are stigmatized especially in structurally weak regions of Germany and particularly in eastern Germany, where people are more likely to receive state transfer payments and thus depend on allocations from public coffers. Here, the

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question of who belongs in the first place, i.e. who is entitled to state support in the first place, takes on central importance. Access to cheap housing and jobs should also, from the point of view of the Eigengruppe, be reserved primarily for the long-­established. The mere possibility that the immigrants could benefit from state subsidies as ‘ineligible’ recipients or be favoured on the labour market increases the feeling of declassification and culminates in the assertion that ‘the refugees’ are favoured by the government over the long-established.7 Resentment does not necessarily have to come from the right, it can also be fed from the left. And the reestablishment of group honour and collective pride also had a central significance in the raising of ‘classical’ workers’ consciousness, in the political struggle of the left, for example. However, this framing narrative has become meaningless today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for two reasons. First: The working class in its original form no longer exists – it was integrated into the middle class in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Today, the social structure is underlayered by a new service proletariat, most of which is no longer tied to companies and consequently no longer represented by trade unions and works councils (Staab 2014). Not least because of the market-liberal reforms implemented by the SPD at the turn of the century, the new underclass can no longer be credibly represented by social democracy. On the other hand, collective class cultures no longer exist in their classical form, oriented towards specific occupational categories, as they no longer have a milieu-based, lifeworld foundation. Let’s summarize the key findings again: (a) Not economic deprivations and precariousness, but experiences of social declassification are at the centre of late modern processes of decline and these are experienced relationally. Declassification can, but need not, be accompanied by material losses or economic decline. This circumstance has so far been neglected due to the strong focus on questions of market and economy. The decisive factor here is the social trajectory,8 i.e. the third dimension in Bourdieu’s  What is particularly revealing is the tendency to reproach the outsiders with attitudes and behaviours that are part of the established’s own repertoire of attitudes and often enough bring praise here. Thus the refugees are often accused of being ‘economic refugees’ and thus of having left their country because they expect an improvement in their economic living conditions in a foreign country. 8  Bourdieu determines the connection between class and classification and the dynamic structure of relations between class fractions on the basis of three dimensions: First, the volume or amount of total economic, cultural, and social capital available; second, the structure or composition of capital; and third, the social trajectory or career of individual groups or social collectives. 7

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social space.9 Descent-oriented trajectories produce hysteresis effects, i.e. a habitus that remains attached to its conditions of origin. It is thus necessary to include relational positions and the change of positional structures more strongly than before in the study of class conflicts. If this is done, it becomes apparent that waves of descent in rich, Western societies have increasingly led to declassification even in middle and even privileged social positions. (b) Experiences of social declassification in contemporary societies can no longer be processed and interpreted within the traditional framework of class society,10 but also no longer primarily as a system of gradual gradations and social distinctions – for example of more or less income, education, status, etc.. These are often replaced by categorical distinctions in the sense of we/they distinctions: A binary image of winners and losers, for example, is characteristic of the way underprivileged population groups view contemporary society (Neugebauer 2007). This semantics promotes populist mobilization successes and is supplemented by another system of categorical distinction as populist actors gain in importance. Thus, ethno-national demarcations have increased in post-class societies, as have exclusions in the style of established-outsider figurations. Thus, binary oppositions can also be found in the political field: the West versus Islam, cosmopolitans versus populists, gender feminists versus Alice Schwarzer racists, the decent people versus the decadent elites, nativists versus globalists, the old-established versus immigrants, etc.

 Bourdieu illustrates the influence of trajectories on habitus using the example of the psychoand sociogram of different fractions of the lower middle class, i.e. the petit bourgeoisie (Bourdieu 1982, pp. 500–504). While the rising, new petty bourgeoisie, which is active in medical-social care professions or as popular cultural mediators, can draw symbolic and material gains from cultural modernization processes, the descending petty bourgeoisie, as the oldest fraction of the middle class, is in each case particularly threatened by economic and occupational structural developments. According to Bourdieu, the new petty bourgeoisie is therefore one of the groups with progressive world views and liberal ways of life, while the traditional petty bourgeoisie mostly clings to outmoded ideas of norms and categories of perception, harbours pessimistic ideas about the future, and is resentful of the modern professions as the bearers of modern lifestyles. The observations made by Bourdieu are still valid today. 10  There are various reasons for this: socio-professional categories have lost overall relevance due to the de-standardisation of gainful employment and the differentiation of occupational and performance profiles. Often, inequalities within an occupational field exceed those between occupational classes (Rosanvallon 2013). In the present, socio-professional identities are once again being replaced by categorical affiliations along we-groups. 9

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(c) Liberal milieus are not exempt from this form of re-tribalization of social distinctions. From a cosmopolitan perspective, AfD supporters embody the “other” of modern society, namely the opposite of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, liberalism. This relationship can be considered as “othering” with the schema of anthropologist Edward Said. Concretely, this means: One highlights oneself and one’s social image in which one classifies right-wing populist attitudes as a-moral (liberal vs. authoritarian, modern vs. anti-modern attitudes, cosmopolitans vs. globalization losers, etc.). In the process, the attributions of others often oscillate between demonization and trivialization. Sometimes the supporters of the right-wing parties are presented as dangerous fascists and sometimes like ill-tempered children who are plagued by irrational fears and f­ eelings of powerlessness. The message is the same: AfD supporters are portrayed as people with serious character or moral deficits.

References Böhnke, P. (2006). Am Rande der Gesellschaft  – Risiken sozialer Ausgrenzung. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Verlag. Bourdieu, P. (1982). Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bröckling, U. (2007). Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bude, H. (2008). Die Ausgeschlossenen. Das Ende vom Traum einer gerechten Gesellschaft. München: Carl Hanser. Bude, H. & Willisch, A. (Hrsg.) (2008). Exklusion. Die Debatte über die Überflüssigen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Burkhardt, C., Grabka, M.M., Groh-Samberg, O., Lott, Y. & Mau, S. (2012). Mittelschicht unter Duck? Gütersloh: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung. Busch, M., Jeskow, J. & Stutz, R. (Hrsg.) (2010). Zwischen Prekarisierung und Protest. Die Lebenslagen und Generationsbilder von Jugendlichen in Ost und West. Bielefeld: Transcript. Castel, R. (2000). Die Metamorphose der sozialen Frage. Eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit. Konstanz: UVK. Castel, R. & Dörre, K. (Hrsg.) (2009). Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung. Die soziale Frage am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.: Campus. Cramer, K. J. (2016). The Politics of Resentment. Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cuperus, R. (2015). Wie die Volksparteien fast das Volk einbüßten. Warum wir den Weckruf des Populismus erhören sollten. In E. Hillebrandt (Hrsg.), Rechtspopulismus in Europa. Gefahr für die Demokratie? (S. 149–158). Bonn: Dietz.

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Righteous(d) Anger: On the Medial Semantics of a Political Feeling Imke Rajamani

1 Introduction In the 1970s, the Angry Young Man became the most popular hero figure in Indian cinema. In numerous box office hits, he fought corrupt politicians, foreign criminals, lazy policemen and deluded judges. In the process, action films loaded with political messages developed and popularized anger as a patriotic and altruistic concept of emotion in the service of law, justice and righteousness. The paper shows how righteous(d) anger in mainstream cinema was transformed from an emotion embedded in socialist state ideologies to an instrument of political mobilization in the service of Hindu nationalist movements. The analysis specifically addresses the connection of righteous(d) anger to victim status and citizenship, critiquing how this semantic complex, established as a political tool for the recognition of subaltern groups, is also used by dominant groups and governments as a means of defending power and privilege. In this way, the text points beyond the Indian example in the context of theoretical reflections on the relationship between anger and democracy. Anger is an ambiguous political concept: in his essay ‘The Politics of Anger’, Peter Lyman describes anger as ‘the essential political emotion’ (Lyman 1981). I. Rajamani (*) Falling Walls Foundation GmbH, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 J. Ecarius, J. Bilstein (eds.), Violence – Reason – Fear, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40886-2_13

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As a political emotion, anger is constitutive for democracies: anger initiates debates, mobilizes political participation and is thus the motor for progress and democratization. In her essay “The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in political Life”, Mary Holmes (Holmes 2004, p. 127) agrees with Lyman and adds that anger can also become a danger to a political system, namely whenever it is suppressed. Similar positive comments about the function of anger as a democratic emotional practice have also been made recently by some intellectuals and politicians. ­Diplomat and political activist Stéphane Hessel (2011) called on Europe’s citizens to be ‘outraged’ against the mechanisms and consequences of financial capitalism (Hessel 2011), in the process presenting anger as an emotional impetus for a new politics of compassion and pacifism. Oskar Lafontaine (2002), a politician who describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist’, also finds it right that, in the face of increasing social inequality in Germany, ‘anger is growing’ and pressure on the government is increasing. And the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk proposed in his work ‘Anger and Time’ (Sloterdijk 2006) to renew and strengthen democracy by means of ‘anger without resentment’ (Sloterdijk 2006). These positive theories of rage and anger are contrasted with a position that can currently be heard as a reaction to the rise of populist movements in Europe and elsewhere: democracy needs more reason and less emotion; rage prevents rational debate and thus democratic consensus-building. In political science and the history of ideas, this position is assigned to liberalism or liberal rationalism, which is distinguished by its ‘emotion aversion’ from other democratic schools of thought such as republicanism, radical democratic or socialist democratic positions (Schaal and Heidenreich 2013). In the normative debates on the effect of anger on democratically constituted societies, democracy must therefore be thought of in the plural – as must anger, which is by no means a universal emotion and, as an instrument of political communication and political action, can have different semantic patterns and practical forms of expression. Like all emotions, anger is ‘historical’ and ‘historically powerful’, it has a history and it changes history (Frevert 2009). This paper introduces righteous(d) anger as a political concept of emotion whose semantic structure, narrative logic and imagery have been strongly popularized in the second half of the twentieth century. In the spirit of a ‘conceptual history beyond language’ (Pernau and Rajamani 2016), the analysis approaches righteous(d) anger as a multimedia composed emotion concept, constituted by images and sounds as much as by language and narratives. How concepts of emotion are changed and thus open up or close ‘political spaces of action’ (Steinmetz 1993) is shown here using the example of the figure of the Angry Young Man in Indian action films, who popularized righteous anger in India and thus provided the impetus for new political feelings and actions.

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A patriot, altruist and compassionate citizen, the Angry Young Man outraged at the injustice meted out to the poor and hard-working people of India in numerous successful films of the 1970s–1990s. Anger was thereby portrayed as the logical consequence of a keen sense of moral and political rectitude. Representing a community scarred by violence and despotism, the Angry Young Man fights for justice and civil rights, following his own laws of righteous and right-making anger. The protagonist in Shahenshah (Ruler 1988) promises at the beginning of the film’s plot: I am not merely the arm of the law. I will be the law itself. Such a law that catches the evildoers itself, interrogates them itself, and judges them itself.1

How did this vigilant rage-citizen hero relate to the political order of the ‘world’s greatest democracy’ (Guha 2007)?

2 Righteous(d) Rage in Defence of Democracy The film Zanjeer (Chains 1973) marked the beginning of a turnaround in India’s political history of emotions: Anger was considered a bad, unpatriotic emotion, inimical to Indian progress, in the ideology supported by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru since 1947. Zanjeer, on the other hand, presented anger as a patriotic virtue and showed how it could be used to transform one from victim, outsider and disappointed citizen to hero. In this way, he appealed to the predominantly male mass audience of action cinema in the 1970s. The film about a young policeman who himself becomes the victim of a crime and defies justice, law and emotional norms to put a stop to a criminal entrepreneur became an exceptional success at India’s box office and is considered the ur-text of the Angry Young Man genre. The film was released in the midst of a political crisis. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, communal violence, corruption and increasing crime dominated the headlines. Disappointment grew with the Congress Party, which had been in power since independence. It had failed to deliver on its promise of prosperity and peace made in 1947 when the state was founded. The political order of the Indian nation-­state was built on three ideological pillars: socialism (planned economy), democracy (as the concept of political constitution) and secularism (as the cultural premise for the peaceful coexistence of India’s religious communities). Since the death of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964, this state ideology, also known as Nehruvianism,  maiṅ qanūn kā bāzu nahiṅ. ḳhud qanūn banungā. aur esa qanūn jo ḳhud mujrimon ko pakaḍegā, ḳhud mukadmā sunnegā aur faislā bhī ḳhud karegā. 1

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has been increasingly challenged by strengthening opposition movements of diverse ideological orientations. Maoists, proponents of the market economy, and Hindu nationalists were all sawing away at the pillars of the political order. In addition, the opposition accused politicians of the Congress Party of elitism. The target of this criticism was also Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, who had taken over as prime minister in 1966. The Cambridge and Oxford-educated elites, the charge went, had lost touch with the Indian people and sensitivity to the plights of ordinary people. Instead of solving India’s social and economic problems, they were preoccupied with power games and their own enrichment through corruption. Clashes between opposition movements and the state security forces increasingly escalated into violence (Kohli 1990). In 1975, Indira Gandhi responded to the government crisis by implementing the Emergency laws. The National Emergency lasted for 21 months. During this period, Indira Gandhi ruled autocratically and was responsible for numerous human rights violations. After the Janata Party (People’s Party), which was formed from several opposition groups, failed to form a stable government from 1977 to 1979, the Congress Party was re-elected as the strongest force in 1980, and Indira Gandhi again held the office of prime minister. In the protracted crisis, the Congress Party defended its policies with populist rhetoric. In this, it was supported by the Angry Young Man, which demonstrated on a daily basis in the cinema that anger and violence were righteous and rights-­ creating means when it came to defending India’s democracy, socialism, and the country’s pluralist-secular cultural policies. One example is the Hindi film Coolie (suitcase carrier 1983) with actor Amitabh Bachchan in the role of the angry hero: When Zafar, a criminal capitalist with political ambitions, destroys a dam and floods a village, Iqbal loses his parents and his middle-class home at the age of ten. The image of the dam is symbolically chosen. For Nehru pushed the construction of mega dams in the 1950s for power generation and as symbols of national progress. The Prime Minister famously praised the structures as “temples of modern India” (McCully 2001, p. 2). As a victim of the tsunami, the child Iqbal, through this symbolic image, also represents a victimized Indian nation deprived of its future prospects of prosperity and progress by Zafar’s act driven by cold rage and greed. Iqbal grows up with his uncle who works as a baggage porter in a Bombay railway station. From his victimhood, Iqbal evolves into the Angry Young Man who rebels against injustice and defends the poor against the arbitrariness of the rich. His anger is semantically coded as hot, altruistic, patriotic, and an instrument of social progress. It is an expression of compassion and righteousness. The figurative and narrative juxtaposition of the hero’s good hot anger and the antagonists’ bad cold anger thereby fits into an overall aesthetically designed, nehruvian, anti-­capitalist ideology. Three scene frames illustrate how the film conceptualizes Iqbal’s rage as a patriotic sentiment in defense of socialism, democracy, and secularism (Fig. 1):

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Fig. 1  The Angry Young Man as a socialist national hero. Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie 1983. (Source: Coolie. India 1983. directed by Monmohan Desai and Prayag Raj. DVD Time-N-Tune 2003)

1. Socialism The first scene image shows the angry hero Iqbal with a hammer and sickle, which he is about to use in his fight against the millionaire and corrupt supervisory board official Om Puri and his son Vicky: “These [hammer and sickle] are tools and weapons for us. They can fill our bellies and slash the bellies of your kind.”2 The baggage-carrying community of Bombay’s railway stations has raised money under a government scheme for the subsidised construction of a housing colony.3 The official in charge and allied entrepreneurs are now trying to cheat the righteous, hard-working slum dwellers out of their money and build a luxury real estate project on the site they were promised. The angry suitcase-bearers storm the millionaire’s mansion, destroy the furnishings and harass the govern “yah hamāre hathiyār hai. yah hamārā peṭ pāl sakte haiṅ aur bhī tum jaisoṅ kā peṭ bhāg bhī sakte haiṅ!”. 3  The government programme in the film is a reference to the Twenty Point Programme to improve the lives of citizens suffering from poverty or at risk of poverty. Indira Gandhi had launched the programme in 1975 during the Emergency laws. In 1982, the programme was revived, ‘housing for the people’ and ‘improvement for slums’ were items 14 and 15 in this list of measures. The production of the film Coolie took place at the time of the much commented and criticised revival of the programme in the media, which had been associated with violence against slum dwellers in the past. 2

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ment official. The violence of the scene is legitimized by righteous(d) anger of the coolies and trivialized by comedy elements. A fight ensues between the hero Iqbal, dressed in his bright red traditional uniform, and the millionaire son Vicky, dressed in a western white tuxedo. The particularly strong colour contrasts between red and white created by the Eastmancolor process support the meaning of the scene as a battle between socialism and capitalism, a sense of tradition versus westernisation, rich versus poor, a sense of community versus egoism, anger and emotionality versus calculation and cold-heartedness. Iqbal wins and the suitcase carriers get new houses. The hot, red, loud, socialist and solidarity anger of the proletariat is a virtue here in the struggle against corruption and capitalism (Fig. 2). 2. Democracy The battle between Iqbal and Vicky continues on the electoral stage. While Iqbal is running for the ‘party of the poor’ (garīboṅ kī partī), he is opposed by his opponent for the ‘party of the rich’ (āmīroṅ kī partī). In this scene, the ­suitcase bearers in their bright red uniforms form the centre of the assembled Indian people. The suitcase bearers have previously been presented as a com-

Fig. 2  The socialist rage bourgeois as the centre of Indian democracy. Election campaign scene in Coolie 1983. (Source: Coolie. India 1983. directed by Monmohan Desai and Prayag Raj. DVD Time-N-Tune 2003)

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munity characterized by pluralism, tolerance, and friendship. They comment on the speeches of the two opponents with emotional gestures, their righteous(d) anger forming the emotional centre of the democratic debate. They signal agreement with Iqbal’s speech about the victimization of the hard-working people who are exploited by the rich and would be deprived of their civil rights by corrupt officials. They turn away from the rich arguing that the poor could only live thanks to the kindness of the wealthy. When the rich realize that they do not have the people on their side, they sabotage the progress of the event by cutting off Iqbal’s microphone and threatening the people. The semantics of anger as becoming loud, raising one’s voice, publicly denouncing injustice, communicating discontent, and thus living out political participation are at the heart of the scene here. By turning off Iqbal’s microphone, the rich disrupt the process of democratic opinion-making and the performance of proletarian rage – in the film, the heartbeat of democracy. Following the election rally, the action-packed climax of the film occurs as the hero defeats the enemies of the Indian nation, the Indian people and the righteous Indian citizen – the Angry Young Man Iqbal Fig. 3. 3. Secularism In the final fight, Iqbal is badly injured. Four bullets from Zafar’s pistol are lodged in his chest. While the wounded man is operated on, his friends and family pray for his survival as Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. With each prayer, one of the bullets lands clinking in the silver kidney dish. At the end of the film, the recovering hero thanks his ‘brothers and sisters’ for their prayers that would have raised him from death to life. The hero’s speech blurs fiction and reality. For the scene also shows actor Amitabh Bachchan thanking his fans for their prayers of recovery. Bachchan had suffered a life-threatening injury during the shooting of Coolie. In the balcony scene, he wears the symbols of India’s four largest religious communities on silver chains on his chest: ohm for Hinduism, crescent and star for Islam, the cross for Christianity and the khanda for Sikhism. The ideology of secularism in Nehruvianism did not primarily refer to the separation of religion and state, but to ensuring the peaceful co-­existence of all religions through a culture of mutual tolerance. The character of the Angry Young Man, who in this film was born a Muslim, grew up in the care of a Hindu, and eventually became engaged to a Christian, is an ideal embodiment of this secularism. The film Coolie motivated speculation as to whether Bachchan was planning a political career, which the star denied for close to a year. After Indira Gandhi’s as-

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Fig. 3  The Angry Young Man as the embodiment of secularism. Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie 1983. (Source: Coolie. India 1983. directed by Monmohan Desai and Prayag Raj. DVD Time-N-Tune 2003)

sassination on 31 October 1984, Bachchan had his childhood friend, Indira Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi, change his mind and was elected as a member of the Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha) by the voters of his birthplace Allahabad. In the election campaign, the Congress party benefited from Bachchan’s star and screen image. The actor of middle-class origin and iconic Angry Young Man appealed to voters of all classes alike. Bachchan’s body and appearance-his face, the sound of his deep voice, his fist-had become key signifiers of righteous(d) anger through popular cinema films themselves. As the iconic embodiment of this patriotic emotional concept, Bachchan now acted as a champion of socialism, democracy and secularism beyond the screen. The figure of the Angry Young Man can thus be understood as an emotion-­ historical supporter of the Congress government, a legitimising figure of its popu-

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list measures in defence of Nehruvianism, including the violence emanating from the organs of state in the process. He defended the nation as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) of righteous citizens who had been victims of crime and social injustice, and showed that it was necessary for a patriotic hero to circumvent weak laws, the inefficient judiciary, and corrupt judges by taking vigilante action against the nation’s enemies. This narrative bolstered the government’s populist rhetoric and created acceptance for measures to concentrate power with the prime minister. From the late 1960s onwards, Indira Gandhi and her party repeatedly fought conflicts with judges and courts who considered the populist-socialist reform programme unconstitutional. One point of contention, for example, was the nationalization of banks, which is also the subject of the film Coolie, when suitcase bearers are cheated out of their savings deposits in a privately organized chit fund by a criminal businessman. The judges, Gandhi argued, were “reactionary forces” who prevented the government from “improving the lives of the majority of people in India” out of self-interest (Guha 2007, pp. 473–474). In 1973, the PMs finally effected the appointment of A.N. Ray, a lawyer loyal to the government, to the post of chief justice. The bourgeois newspapers criticized Indira Gandhi for her attack on the democratic principle of separation of powers and warned citizens of a new political climate of autocracy. The Angry Young Man, on the other hand, defamed the Indian judiciary in numerous scenes as inefficient, corrupt, ignorant and elitist. Justice needed vigilantism and strength  – both of which characterized Indira Gandhi’s style of government (Carras 1980). Moreover, the action movies and government communications use the same enemy images: Smugglers, liquor dealers, rich businessmen, greedy capitalists, and corrupt middle-management officials. During the Emergency Laws, scores of political prisoners disappeared into India’s jails on charges of trafficking in liquor and smuggling; the Congress regime dismissed mid-level civil servants who were politically critical in their anti-corruption campaigns. Even before political prisoners in India’s jails were tortured and executed without trial in so-called ‘encounter’ operations, Angry Young Man films glorified police violence and torture against these enemies as the inevitable outburst of patriotic rage of every upright public servant.4 In the cinema, the audience could learn that political crises had to be solved with an iron hand. Righteous(d) anger was not a selfish emotion, but a gesture of  In his documentary film ‘Prisoners of Conscience’ (1978), political activist and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan documents the violence of the Congress government in a particularly impressive way through interviews with former political prisoners. 4

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altruism and compassion for all those affected by social injustice. Accordingly, Indira Gandhi also staged herself as a defender of social justice and democracy with populist anti-poverty programs, the slogan “garībī hatāo” – “beat poverty”, and the hard line against opposition movements (Guha 2007, p.  565; Bhargava 1988). The popularization of anger as an expression of compassion and as a national virtue made possible the concept of the angry, vigilant, and defensible state  – a state that staged itself and its ideology in the role of victim in order to justify its violations of applicable law and the exercise of violence as a heroic defense of democracy and the imagined majority will of the people against extremist oppositionists. The popularization of righteous(d) rage as a patriotic practice through cinema first opened up this semantic field for political communication – and thus created a new scope for action. Historian Willibald Steinmetz (1993) argues that the politically ‘sayable’ opens and closes spaces for action of the ‘doable’. This thesis, which focuses on language, can also be extended to other media of communication and meaning-making, such as what can be shown in images and films. The images of the Angry Young Man as a righteous and right-making patriot and model democrat allowed Indira Gandhi to be staged and perceived as a defender of democracy and justice, despite her increasingly anti-democratic political reforms and measures. The popularization of rage in the words, images, sounds and narratives of the films promoted vigilantism, autocracy and violence. But the actors did not understand this as an end in itself, but as reason and necessary harshness in the service of the democracy to be saved. Once the current governmental crisis was overcome and the enemies of democracy (or opposition to Congress) defeated, tolerance, trust, and solidarity would once again render righteous(d) anger obsolete as a style of government. This hopeful semantics of anger disappeared in the mid-1980s, favouring the spread of Hindu nationalism.

3 Righteous(d) Rage and the Mainstreaming of Hindu Nationalism When Amitabh Bachchan ended his film career for the time being in 1984, the now most popular and highest paid actor left a gaping hole in the star system of popular Hindi cinema. This allowed a new generation of male actors to establish themselves in the Angry Young Man genre. Sunny Deol and Nana Patekar were among the most successful second generation Angry Young Men. The narrative and aesthetics of the films also changed. The films became even more action-packed and

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heavier firearms and explosives were used more often. Script writers and directors drew much inspiration from Hollywood action movies starring Sylvester Stallone (e.g. Rambo/First Blood 1982). At the same time, the emotional concepts, moral narratives and political slogans changed towards Hindu nationalism. Krantiveer (Revolutionary Fighters 1994) starring Nana Patekar as Angry Young Man was one of the most successful films calling for a radical change in the Indian state and its ideological foundation: Pratap Narayan Tilak comes from a family of patriotic freedom fighters. The name Tilak is meant to establish a parallel between the film’s main character and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), the national hero and “militant Hindu nationalist” whose writings legitimized violence as a means of fighting for independence and called for the murder of employees of the British colonial power (Guha 2011, pp. 107–118). But Pratap does not live up to the expectations of an adolescent patriot. He drinks, smokes, is cheeky, and prefers gambling to school. When his mother finally expels him, he is taken in by Laxmikant, the landowner of the Laxmi Nagar housing colony in Bombay, where Pratap henceforth works as a rent collector. About 10 years later, Laxmi Nagar is threatened by a real estate project. With the help of corrupt politicians and policemen, the greedy businessman Chattursingh Chitah plans to build a luxury resort for wealthy foreign tourists. The villains will use any means to drive away the inhabitants. They threaten women and children and divide the hitherto peaceful Hindus and Muslims of the neighbourhood by instigating brutal riots. At first, Pratap is a cynical commentator on the events, laughing at Megha, a journalist whose research and articles try to get people to protest against lawlessness and corruption. However, Pratap soon becomes an Angry Young Man. He learns that Chattursingh Chitah once raped Megha and killed her parents, and eventually the powerful gangster murders Pratap’s foster father. Pratap awakens to personal feelings of revenge, compassion for Megha, and a desire for justice and a future for Laxmi Nagar and its people-feelings that combine in the concept of righteous(d) rage. In carefully planned assassinations, he shoots Chattursingh and his aides. Pratap is sentenced to death in a trial designed to showcase the inefficiency and weakness of Indian justice. Standing under the gallows, he delivers a blazing speech about the state of his country and berates his fellow citizens: You have grown accustomed to living in slavery. First you served the kings, then the British, and now the crooked politicians and gangsters. […] The journalist wanted to start a revolution. With the power of the pen, she wanted to put an end to the present darkness. Who understood her words? You are all dead, living corpses! Who was sup-

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posed to wake her up? I am awake! And now I go, having done good work. […] The lawyers, the uniformed men, the politicians have sold their righteousness. […] Our neighboring country [Pakistan…], which is like a tiny bug, dreams of destroying our country. They can dream this dream only because they know that we are all corpses in this country. No one here has any compassion for their own homeland. […] Oh, go ahead and do whatever you want. But I don’t want to live like a eunuch!5

Just as Pratap is about to put the noose around his own neck, two officials deliver a pardon letter from the prime minister. Since the convict had acted as an exemplary patriot, he is to be forgiven for his deeds. The people celebrate their hero. The film ends with a close-up of a bonfire on a marble pedestal, emblazoned with the words: ‘This is the beginning’. In Krantiveer, two emotion-historical changes can be clearly traced: An increased distrust of the regulatory “system” as a whole and the change of righteous(d) anger from a concept of defending Nehruvianism to an instrument of political mobilization along the lines of Hindu nationalist ideologies. Whereas in the earlier films the distrust was directed at individual corrupt officials and the judiciary, now it is directed at the status quo as a whole. In the early films of the genre, the Nerhuvian state was seen as weakened by individual corrupt officials and a minority of unpatriotic citizens. In the Angry Young Man films since the mid-1980s, faith in the state, the nation, and the people is lost. The underlying mood of the films is pessimistic, providing a foundation for growing resentment (Jensen 2017, p. 15). Their metaphorics no longer propose to heal the ailing Indian state, but to create a new strong, authoritarian and defensible state apparatus. The semantics of conservative revolution come prominently to the fore. The rhetoric of war against Pakistan – the external enemy aligned with the internal enemies of the nation (unpatriotic citizens, Muslims) against India – fits into this picture. References to the socialist image of India are omitted in Angry Young Man films of the second phase. The colour red, still used with high symbolic power, is now no longer an aesthetic signifier to link anger and socialism, but anger and Hinduism – the red forehead sign (tilaka), the red-coloured devotional objects used in prayer. Democracy and secularism are interpreted in terms of populist Hindu  “tumko gulāmī karne ki ādat paḍe hī. pahale rājā-mahārājāo ki gulāmī ki, phir angrezoṅ ki, ab chun gaddāra neta or gundoṅ. […] kalam valī baai kranti lāna chāhti thi…kalam ke zor par kāle vartmān ko khatam karna chahtī thī… kaun samjhā uskī bāt ko? sab sāle murde, zindā lāshe… kise jagāti vho? main jāg gayā…kuch achhā kām karke jā rahā huṅ… […] yha khānūn vale, vardi vale, neta…jinhone apnā imāndārī bec diyā […] ek pissū jaisā hamārā yh paḍosī mulk… hamāre desh ko toḍne ka sapna dekhte hī. Vh yh sapna dekh sakte hain… kyoṅki mālum hai ki yahan murdo ka desh vatan ke liye kisī ko koi hamdardī nahiṅ. jiyo bhai, jīo, jaise chahiye vaise jīo. Maiṅ yh hījrā ki zindagī jīnā nahiṅ chāhtā!”. 5

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nationalism. Democracy is when the Hindu majority can build a nation-state based on Hindu traditions and morals. Secularism, he said, is when Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, as minorities, profess this state and Hinduism as the guiding culture. So it is a Muslim family man who has to be lectured by Pratap in Krantiveer in the wake of religious riots. Pratap smashes his own finger and the Muslim’s finger with a stone and mixes their blood in his hand: ‘Which blood is Muslim blood, which blood is Hindu blood?’6 Pratap rubs the blood on the man’s head, saying prayers of both religions. Blood and soil, he says, are what united the Indian people. The man apologises for his communalist thinking. This ideology of blood and soil is typical of Hindu fundamentalist arguments in connection with their historical image of India as a country of Hindus, whose population was subjugated and religiously divided by Muslim (Mughal rule) and Christian (British rule) rulers. With the help of Hindutva (Engl. ‘Hindu-ness’) as the ideology of the state, Indians would have to reunite their country. This also refers to the partition of British India into the states of India and Pakistan. From the Hindu fundamentalists’ point of view, the territories of both states belonged to a country that traditionally belonged together (Banerjee 1991). In Coolie, one could still see scenes of prayer and celebrations of different religious communities. In Krantiveer, it is exclusively Hindu prayers and festivals. Here the deities Shiva and Durga dominate, both associated with righteous, divine wrath. Pratap uses a celebration in honour of the goddess Durga to make the attempt on Chattursingh’s life with a machine gun disguised as a musical instrument. Wearing traditional garb and with the blood-red tilaka on his forehead, he opens fire in the face of the goddess of vengeance. Second, the films increasingly aim to mobilize anger. In the early Angry Young Man films, the people could rely on the angry hero to deliver justice; the people chose a strong, angry representative. While Iqbal, representing the people’s community, removes the bad guys from an otherwise functioning democratic system, the coolies empower Iqbal with their hope and approval. The Angry Young Man films since the mid-1980s expand the hero narrative. Everyone can and must become a hero by means of righteous(d) anger, so that the Indian people can free themselves from their collective victim role. This ideology is also evident in the physicality of Angry Young Men and its framing. Amitabh Bachchan was a physical exception as the angry hero. At 1.88 metres tall, he was by far the tallest actor of his generation. His powerful deep voice is also inimitable. These features of physical superiority were used by directors and the stunt and fight choreographers to give the hero a larger-than-life image.  “batao, musilman ka khūn kaunsa, hindu ka khūn kaunsa?”.

6

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The heroic rage based, among other things, on given physical superiority could not be copied. Sunny Deol and Nana Patekar, on the other hand, represented the young angry everyman. In particular, films such as Ghayal (Wounded 1990) and Ghatak (Deadly 1996) show how the victimized young man achieves his muscular body through training, body building and hard physical work. The superiority in courage and strength of the new Angry Young Man is not naturally given, it is hard earned and learned. With discipline, patriotism and motivated by righteous anger, the young man can transform himself from victim to heroic model citizen. Righteous rage thus rehabilitated violated masculinity – on an individual and national level: Pratap proclaims in his graduation speech that he cannot live as a “eunuch” (napunsak) adapted to the political system. Similarly, the film Ghayal proclaims that public servants and citizens adapted to the current system denied their masculinity (mardānki), were weak (kamzor), and were socially emasculated (napunsak) by the decadent and feminized ruling elite of a ‘rotten system’ (saḍā huā system). The empowerment of the individual man as a rage-citizen would strengthen the Indian nation. Film magazines of this period contain numerous advertisements for martial arts clubs and bodybuilding equipment. At the same time, cinematic semantics were now specifically directed at the growing middle class, young men with good personal qualifications for social advancement and fear of unemployment. This group was addressed, for example, by the mobilization film Ankush (Anstoß 1986). The main character, also played by Nana Patekar, sums up: After all, the well-educated middle-class guys are getting hit from two sides today. Only two kinds of people get jobs today: those at the bottom who do the hard physical work and those at the top. The life of the people in the middle (bīce se bīc vale log) has become like the life of the eunuchs (bīc vale, people of the middle, transgender).7

The quotation names a real fear of the future: If the young man has no job, he cannot marry and cannot start a family. Thus he is denied a higher social status. Organizations such as the Shiv Sena in Maharsthtra (Shiva’s Army), for example, did not blame India’s critical economic situation for the high unemployment among young men in the cities, but rather over-foreignization, the reservation policy in colleges and in the civil service for members of the lower castes, and initiatives for the equality of Muslims and women. Corruption would see the remaining educa-

 “yah zyādā paḍhe-likhe ab donoṅ taraf se māra gayā hai. āj kal to do hī logoṅ ko kām milta hai: jo bahut nīce hai, mazdūrī karte hai, ya to bahut uṅce. bīce se bīc vale logoṅ ka hāl to bīc vale jaise hogayā.” 7

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tion and jobs going to the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite. The film Ankush recommends, ‘Don’t ask for your rights, grab them!’8 More and more filmmakers now saw themselves as political activists, giving voice to the ‘thousands of economically disenfranchised youths’ (Jacob 2009, pp.  138–139). For example, the Angry Young Man became the ‘most powerful symbol of mass identification for the Shiv Sena’, which promised its young members to mould them into patriotic heroes.9 The Shiv Sena organised film screenings of Ankush and Krantiveer as recruitment events. In the 1980s, the organization evolved from a regionalist-chauvinist party into a major promoter of Hindutva nationalist ideology, notorious for its Islamophobia and propensity for violence. Political scientist Jayant Lele (1995) describes the Shiv Sena as one of the most efficient organizations in mobilizing, controlling, and unleashing anger and angry mobs. In interviews conducted by sociologist Gérard Heuzé (1995) in the early 1990s, young Shiv Sainiks justified their joining the organization with phrases very similar to those used by Angry Young Men in cinema: ‘I wanted to fight for justice’; ‘You join the Sena because you have to do something [against injustice]’; ‘We had to defend the people’.10 Members of the Shiv Sena were involved in the bloody clashes between Hindus and Muslims in 1992 and 1993 in various districts of Bombay. Around 900 people, two-thirds of them Muslims, died in the riots. Krantiveer’s scene of neighbourhood violence makes direct reference to the Bombay Riots and presents gangsters, corrupt politicians and the unthinking Muslim as triggers for violence. The 1992 and 1993 riots took place in the wake of protests by Muslims demonstrating against the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu fundamentalists. The Shiv Sena had also called for the demonstration against the existence of the mosque, which allegedly aroused such strong patriotic feelings of grief and anger against Islam in India that it resulted in the spontaneous destruction of the mosque. To this day, the organizations involved deny planning the destruction (Appadurai 2006). The role of Hindu fundamentalist organizations in the bloody clashes between Hindus and Muslims is concealed by the film Krantiveer and even presents righteous(d) anger and Hindutva as the solution to the conflict.

 “hak māṅge mat, chin lo!”.  “[…] the most powerful mass symbol of identification for the Shiv Sena” (Heuzé 1995, pp. 224–225). 10  “I wanted to fight for justice”; “You go to the Sena because you want to do something”; This situation is so unbearable, “I had to act”; “We had to defend the people.” (Heuzé 1995, p. 217). 8 9

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The Shiv Sena uses the concept of righteous(d) anger popularized through cinema to legitimize political violence, as a means of defending privilege and the cultural dominance of the Hindu majority. Since the mid-1980s, political organizations espousing Hindu fundamentalist ideas have grown. Hindutva has become mainstream in political discourses. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was able to form the government as the strongest force in parliament from 1998 to 2004; since 2014 it has been back in government and provides the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

4 Righteous(d) Rage: Victimhood: Citizenship Anger holds opportunities and dangers for democratic systems. Historian Ramchandra Guha writes about the growing culture of protest and mobilization in India in the 1980s: From a formal political point of view, it looked as if Indian democracy was being decomposed and dismantled. From a “social” point of view, however, Indian democracy seemed to be deepened and enriched. (Guha 2007, p. 545)11

Righteous(d) anger has characterized Indian political history in the ideological plural since the 1970s: In the movements of Adivasis and Dalits – people belonging to disadvantaged castes and descendants of India’s indigenous peoples who demanded their civil rights to political recognition, education and participation; during workers’ protests for higher wages in the Great Mumbai Textile Strike, 1982; in the arguments of high-caste young men in the anti-mandal movement who protested with public self-immolations against the Mandal Commission Report-based reservation of education and jobs for disadvantaged social groups (such as Dalits, Adivasis and other low castes) in 1990; in campaigns by political parties across the spectrum, from the socialist-democratic Congress to the Hindu fundamentalist Shiv Sena. Righteous(d) anger mobilized people into political action and expanded the plurality of political voices and interest groups. As India’s civil society became more colourful but also more fragmented, righteous anger strengthened those actors who opposed pluralism and tolerance. Hindu fundamentalist ideas and a disenchantment with pluralism became majority-owned.

 Viewed from the more formal, purely political side, it appeared that Indian democracy was being corroded and degraded. If one took a more “social” view, however, it appeared that Indian democracy was, in fact, being deepened and enriched. 11

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Political movements use different practices to express, demonstrate and feel their anger. They ranged from peaceful protests and production of political films to assassinations and self-immolation. The anger of the Shiv Sainik and that of the Adivasi thus did not feel the same. Nevertheless, all these protest movements shared acting on the semantics of righteous(d) anger, victimhood and citizenship that had also become the most popular concept of political sentiment through cinema: the demonstration of anger was considered justified, patriotic, heroic and reasonable when citizens demanded political change for greater justice in the name of the people or the nation. Films even increasingly propagated from the 1980s onwards that only those who responded to economic, social and political ills with anger were likely to feel like true Indians, patriots and righteous citizens. Popular films also narrated righteous(d) anger as a mechanistic consequence of mental suffering and or physical pain, thereby portraying people and communities in victimhood as the better citizens in numerous anger narratives, while those who do not suffer are paraded as complicit in unjust policies. At the same time, the intensity of the demonstration of anger has been understood as an indicator of a community of interest’s level of suffering – the louder the protest, the deeper the wound. Raising one’s voice against injustice and demanding justice for oneself and one’s peers was understood as a civil right in popular films and political movements alike. If the state institutions did not respond to the demands of the protesters, this was understood as a renewed violation of the civil rights of an already suffering ethnic group and mobilized more anger. As co-constitutive semantics, righteous anger, victimhood and citizenship fuelled political contestation – debate and violence alike. For India’s mobilized civil society now consisted of several groups competing with each other on various issues. As a political instrument of subaltern groups, such as the Dalits, anger certainly worked as a political tool for greater social justice and democracy. By improving this social group’s access to education and work, their political presence was strengthened. Similar to the protesting workers, they constitute a disadvantaged group in the sense of Peter Lyman’s and Mary Holmes’ positive theories of anger, directing their protest ‘from below’ against ‘those above’, citizens and workers against the elite. However, anger as a political emotion has not only one thrust (see also East 2004). In the case of Indira Gandhi’s politics during the National Emergency, righteous(d) anger was directed from ‘above’ to ‘below’, from a government against opposition citizens. In the case of Hindu nationalists, who portray India’s Hindus (nearly 80% of the population) as a national community threatened by alienation and minority politics, righteous anger serves as a tool to defend the privileges of a dominant ethnic group.

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As a political emotion, anger is complex, diverse, and mutable. It is felt and demonstrated by a wide variety of interest groups: By minorities against elites, by elites against minorities, by governments against citizens, by citizens against governments, and by one social interest group against another. In Indian history  – which is certainly not a special case in this regard – anger has been deployed by actors of a wide spectrum of political ideologies, right and left, populist and realpolitik. It is not per se an anti-democratic sentiment, but holds both opportunities and dangers for pluralistic societies and democratic systems – dangers especially when the semantic logic of righteous(d) anger, victimhood and citizenship is not questioned and used as a moral justification for violence and the destabilization of democratic institutions.

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Filmography Ankush. Indien 1986. Regie: N. Chandra. DVD Eagle Home Entertainment 2010. Coolie. Indien 1983. Regie: Monmohan Desai und Prayag Raj. DVD Time-N-Tune 2003. Ghatak. Indien 1996. Regie: Rajkumar Santhoshi. DVD Eros Entertainment 2007. Ghayal. Indien 1990. Regie: Rajkumar Santhoshi. DVD Moser Baer India 2007. First Blood. USA 1982. Regie: Ted Kotcheff. DVD Lionsgate 2004. Krantiveer. Indien 1994. Regie: Mehul Kumar. DVD Shemaroo 2011. Shahenshah. Indien. 1988. Regie: Tinnu Anand. DVD Spark Worldwide 2008. Zanjeer. Indien 1973. Regie: Prakash Mehra. DVD Spark Worldwide 2005.