Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle 3030731057, 9783030731052

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Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle Christopher Britt · Eduardo Subirats

Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle “Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle combines an expressionistic revelation about the intellectual collapse of the West with a nostalgic view of a forgotten American humanistic tradition.” —Paula A. Boettcher, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany “I love the critical and poetic fantasy that informs Eduardo Subirats’ writing, and I am likewise delighted by the elegance of Christopher Britt’s analysis of American intellectual history. This is just the sort of energy we need, if we are going to find a way through and beyond our civilizing crisis.” —Inmaculada Kangussu, University of Ouro Preto, Brazil “In the barren panorama of Latin Americanism, Eduardo Subirats stands out with two works of immense analytical importance: the reconstruction of the political theology of colonization in The Empty Continent, and the hermeneutical analysis of some of the greatest Latin American literary works of the 20th century in Myth and Literature.” —Fernando Solana, University of Guadalajara, Mexico “Intellectuals in a Society of Spectacle outlines the history, psychology, and logic by which Western civilization is realizing all the nightmares of Orwell, in which war will indeed be peace, and slavery indeed be freedom. The spectacle, which we enact by pretending to watch, is an epochal sacrifice of knowledge to power. Conceived over decades in universities in the collapse of Western triumphalism, the spectacle of culture war is a sadomasochistic Tarantella of self-denying humanists and omnipotent technocrats in a charnel-house of voluntary servitude.” —Paul Fenn, co-author of Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction

Christopher Britt • Eduardo Subirats

Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle

Christopher Britt Romance, German & Slavic Languages George Washington University Washington, DC, USA

Eduardo Subirats Spanish & Portuguese New York University New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-73105-2    ISBN 978-3-030-73106-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 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. Cover credit: PhotoAlto / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: An Obscene Absence

A global virologic pandemic that has rapidly morphed into political and military confrontations; a sputtering world economy whose paroxysms further exacerbate existing social divisions; ecological catastrophes with irreversible repercussions for the entire planet; the collapse of postcolonial megalopolises; the worldwide expansion of lethal wars under the banner of freedom; millions of humans held captive in militarized concentration camps; the electronic fragmentation of the masses … and, as the crowning jewel of this multifaceted disaster, the obscene absence of the postmodern intellectual. In New York, Berlin, and São Paulo the intellectual tradition of literary and philosophical humanism that once inspired Ibn Rushd and Spinoza, Goethe, or Emerson has since evaporated into the politically correct gibberish of a system of academic reproduction of knowledge which, because it is subject to the positivist epistemologies of instrumental reason, remains blind to the ongoing ecological, economic, and social crises that have characterized the contemporary age since the nuclear holocaust of 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Homo academicus enforces intellectual silence with a nominalist litany of human rights and identity politics. This is why there is no longer any philosophical reflection, why there is no longer any social consciousness, why there is no longer any experience of either the origin or the end of human civilization. The consequence of this academic confinement of the intellectual, and of the resulting isolation and enfeeblement of intellectual life is the emergence of a mass of millions of people who have lost their moral and v

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intellectual autonomy and become incapable of judging reality for themselves. Reduced to the most banal functions of consumption, and relentlessly exposed to electronic manipulation by increasingly primitive systems of totalitarian propaganda, these globalized masses have become entirely absorbed by the mega-production machines of the society of spectacle. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of postmodern societies and accounts for the paralysis of thought that characterizes contemporary engagements with the ongoing crises and wars of our time. The four essays arranged under the title Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle aim to revive the tradition of philosophical humanism that the postmodern spectacle has debased, silenced, and erased. With this aim in mind, Eduardo Subirats dialectically reconstructs the negative consciousness of the modern intellectual and its suppression through censorship and exile, while also recuperating the memory of a vast array of humanistic traditions that span cultures and civilizations, from the enlightening philosophies of Al-Andalus to the playfulness of the Situationist International in 1968. For his part, Christopher Britt questions the voluntary servitude that motivates tyranny in the society of spectacle while seeking to recuperate a tradition of humanism in the United States that runs contrary to American imperial apologetics. Princeton, NJ, USA Washington, DC, USA November 3, 2020

Eduardo Subirats Christopher Britt

Contents

1 Besieged Existence  1 Eduardo Subirats The Involution of Intelligence   1 Verkeerte Wereld   4 Night on Bald Mountain   6 Besieged Intellectual   8 The Great Desertion  14 Chronicle of an Abdication  16 Theatrum Mundi  20 The Last Intellectual  23 Intellectuals and Enlightenment  24 Let Newton Be! and All Was Light!  26 Spectacle  28 The End of Discourses; The Triumph of Linguistics  34 Anti-humanist Humanities  37 Forms of Light  42 One Spring Day  44 Voided Void  48 Koyaanisqatsi  49 Works Cited  49

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2 Humanism in an Age of Anti-humanism 51 Christopher Britt Willed Amnesia  51 Bildung and the Self-formation of Humanity  62 The Shameless Sham of Evangelical Humanism  65 The Deceptions of Techno-scientific Humanism  81 Pragmatic Acquiescence  88 The Recuperation of Human Memory  97 A Dangerous Meeting of the Extremes 107 Works Cited 109 3 Intellectuals & Exiles113 Eduardo Subirats Knowledge; Autonomy 113 Unbounded Exile 124 No to Non-Being 132 Consciousness Under Siege 135 Works Cited 138 4 Tyranny of Idiocy139 Christopher Britt The Privatized Man 139 The Paranoid Style 140 Voluntary Servitude 142 Propaganda, Surveillance and Spectacle 146 Culture of Fragment 148 Destruction of Democracy 151 Works Cited 153 Index155

CHAPTER 1

Besieged Existence Eduardo Subirats

The Involution of Intelligence In 1944, one year before the nuclear holocaust1 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the World War II, C.  Wright Mills declared: “American intellectuals are suffering the tremors of men who face overwhelming defeat” (Wright Mills, 292). Today, nearly a century after this diagnosis— and facing a horizon of interminable wars, industrially induced natural catastrophes, and the successive collapse of entire nations—the disappearance of the intellectual as an independent and public conscience no longer strikes a chord in any human heart, nor does it provoke in anyone the slightest desire to lift a pen in protest. The intellectual has simply vanished, gone extinct, and been eclipsed by the same invisibility that has accounted for the disappearance of countless other intelligent species, and of languages and gods, over the course of the so-called historical progress of humanity. In our postmodern societies, the intellectual has become an obscene absence.

1  The signifier “holocaust” has tended to be associated with the Jewish shoah, perpetuated by German national socialism of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I restore the concept of the holocaust to the meaning ascribed to it by Greek etymology: holo-kauston or the “total cremation” of a sacrificial victim.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Britt, E. Subirats, Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9_1

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The growth and expansion of technoscience—which was founded epistemologically by Francis Bacon as an instrument of the European colonial enterprise and which to this day serves to advance the interests of global technological, media and military corporations—has progressively decreased the spiritual intensity, philosophical reflection, and autonomy of human intelligence. What is the use of thinking, if we already have smartphones, 5G, AI? We live besieged by systems of automatic control. Our aesthetic sensibility, our moral conscience, our human intelligence: they have all become subordinate to linguistic controls that grow more efficacious and intimate with each passing day. Our decisions and actions, our conceptual schemes of apprehension of reality and even the most sublime of our ideals and values have been predefined for us by the social networks of communication and control in which we find ourselves enmeshed. Our existence is becoming progressively impoverished. The final memories of the great civilizations of the East are disappearing under the fire and cannons of capitalist corporations, while those of the West have long since become electronic archives and commercial fetishes. Nor are there any independent public frameworks for intellectual discussion and artistic communication. Nor, for that matter, are there any longer any cultural spaces for the development of truly intellectual and artistic lives. In the society of spectacle, there are only stars, red carpets, and a generalized mise-en-scène of empty and meaningless self-aggrandizement. Human intelligence has perished; its decommissioning is touted, over and again, by the glittering postmodern slogans of academic corporations: post-history, post-politics, post-philosophy, post-art, post-subject, post-­ human and so on. But we are not only witnessing an historical movement of scientific-­ technical progress toward a state in which intellectual blindness and ethical impotence will reign supreme: the two threats that Greta Thurnberg revealed in her speech to the United Nations in New York in 2019. The crises of our time cannot only be defined in terms of the so-called dialectic of enlightenment, or what amounts to the instrumental reduction of modern scientific reasoning by the very same systems of logic that sustain the pentagon of power and its political and civilizing mega-machines. At issue is something altogether worse: a profound epistemological reduction of

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knowledge and intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models, and an increasing segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence, along with the development of electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. The dialectic of enlightenment has set in motion an unstoppable process of alienation that is leading to ever-increasing levels of robotization in the organization of the state, the administration of industrial power, and the waging of interminable wars on a global scale. Routinely, we pay witness to how the bureaucracies that govern universities and the mass media mutilate our human intelligence. Our daily communication obeys politically correct linguistic vigilance. We voluntarily subordinate ourselves to the epistemologies of corporate production that sustain the society of the spectacle. Not only do we throw individual knowledge, intuition, imaginative capacity, and intelligence onto the garbage heap of indifference, we also define ourselves as post-humans in relation to the philosophical and aesthetic constitution of humanism, as it was once conceived by Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel), Paracelsus or Erasmus. The new totalitarian systems of our day fill the void created by this abandonment of the ethical singularity of self-consciousness: at one extreme, automatic discourses and artificial, commercial, political and military intelligence agencies; and at the other extreme, a systemic blackmail of humanity that includes the networks and strategies of the planet’s nuclear, biological and climatic holocaust. Human intelligence—which once found its mythological form in the fire cults and enlightenment of the Vedic religions, its spiritual and philosophical expression in Leon Ebreo’s cosmology, and its metaphysical crystallization in Giordano Bruno and Spinoza as an uncreated and creative substance—such a profoundly humanizing intelligence no longer possesses any power, be it moral, political, or even intellectual, in our cultural and educational institutions. It has been stripped of its enlightening purpose; dispossessed of its reflective function with regard to the past, the present and the future; and replaced by artificial languages and computer systems, by their binary logic, their compartmentalization of knowledge, and their abstraction and fictionalization of human experiences. Far from realizing the ideals of progress and freedom that called for humanity’s emancipation from ecclesiastical supervision and censorship in the century of Les Lumières, Western thought has reduced its scope to the dimensions of a nondescript political spectacle. Accordingly, it is now

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incapable either of defining an ethically transparent social project or of building a strategy for the spiritual and material survival of humanity. The withdrawal of the intellectual from public life has created a radical split between human intelligence and humanity’s historical and social reality. Chief among the ethical consequences of this crisis is the constitution of an “impersonal power” of “organized irresponsibility” which lies at the heart of the intellectual void that characterizes postmodern society (Wright Mills). Politically, this process has entailed the internal deconstruction of neoliberal democracies, beginning with the fascisms of the twentieth century and leading up to the digital populisms of our own day. Yet the death of the intellectual as an independent conscience and public voice—as an example of critical intelligence and an illuminating point of public reference—is only an external symptom of the transformation of democracy under the “Pentagons of Power” (Mumford) that animate the “société du spectacle” (Debord) and inform its vast networks of industrially induced biocide and militarily produced genocide. A single difference distinguishes the eastern forms of this capitalism from its western counterparts: The West claims to be the bearer of freedom, the East of communism. The West accuses this communism of being totalitarian, while the East knows that the western ideology of freedom has been the alibi for western imperial and colonial expansion, and its successive ethnic genocides. Both ignore that the only project capable of guaranteeing a working balance between individual freedom and social order and vice versa must seek to integrate the so-called West in accordance with the Eastern concept of balanced opposites: an orientalism that would include not only Beijing, but also the Europe of Ibn Rushd, Leone Ebreo and Goethe.

Verkeerte Wereld2 The last novel. The death of the author. The disappearance of the artist. The evaporation of the intellectual. These did not exactly herald a resplendent age in poetry, painting, cinema and architecture, as the German and French modernists, the Russian constructivists, and the Italian futurists assumed they would at the beginning of the twentieth century. Several 2  Verkeerte Wereld (The World Upside-down) is an oil painting by Peter Bruegel, composed in  1559, which depicts the  daily life of  a  Central European village as  a  world crowded with inconsistencies and conflicts, dominated by chaos and subdued by a diabolic power.

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decades later, postmodernists in New York would repeat these same slogans of the avant-garde. Yet, the end of philosophy has failed to open up the modern mind to a new age of humanistic enlightenment and emancipating reform. To the contrary, these campaigns for “the death of art” and “the end of philosophy” have led us in the opposite direction: toward the thoughtless subordination of thought to the paradigms of techno-scientific genetic engineering and military-industrial prowess, and toward the reduction of philosophical reflection as an ancilla scientia. In the academy, philo-sophy has given up its purported love of knowledge; and in the museums and art galleries the experience of beauty has been supplanted by the fetishism of the spectacle. The death of art and philosophy, the avant-gardes of rupture that repeatedly celebrate the newest of the new, to say nothing of the neo-­ avant-­garde movements of the postmodern and their subsequent post-­ avant-­garde: none of these movements have contributed to the secular and material progress of the human race. Rather they have coincided with the historical condition of modernity that Edgar Alan Poe described in “A Descent into the Maelström” as a vortex swirling down to nothingness. We live under a regime of permanent political, financial, and military conflict. The instability of markets, politics, and the climate and the instability of human existence itself have become the rule. Everywhere, inequalities and social divisions are revealed with increasing violence. This regressive process will be consummated either by the nuclear self-­ destruction of all life on the planet or by its extinction due to industrially induced warming, massive deforestation, and chemical poisoning. This objective insecurity and the subjective anguish that accompanies it serve to legitimize the ever-increasing expansion of systems of electronic surveillance that watch over millions of people in order, allegedly, to guarantee their security in a post-democratic state of exception. Meanwhile, contemporary intellectual consciousness remains encapsulated in an electronic monad of infomercials and digital design that effectively silences all opposition to the fetishistic icons of the society of spectacle. Nietzsche, Tönnies, Simmel, Adorno were the first western intellectuals to point out this impoverishment of experience and its ties to an anti-­ aesthetic and unethical organization of human existence, to a monetary logic that sustains the life of industrial megalopolises, and to an instrumental rationality that regards with utter indifference its destructive consequences for the biosphere and human life. Benjamin called it “Armut

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der Erfahrung”—“the poverty of experience” (1977, pp.  213 and ff.). And he chose the steel and glass of corporate architecture as his paradigm: for on these polished and transparent surfaces, the passage of time leaves no trace. Similarly, the climatic and biological deterioration of the planet, to say nothing of the deterioration of the lives of millions of violently displaced people who must now eke out their existence in concentration camps and conditions of extreme poverty have become a mediated sign devoid of any human expression. These images are trivialized as instances of that complete synthesis of the rational and the absurd, which today presides over the decline of civilization the world over.

Night on Bald Mountain The highest spiritual representation of transcendental power, that which raised modern consciousness to the peaks of rational knowledge, being, and God, was Descartes’ Je. This Je pense can be defined as the logical and ontological principle that sustained the unity and identity of a human subject simultaneously founded on scientific epistemologies and legitimized in the name of Christian morality. Later, throughout the eighteenth and following centuries, this noumenal Self merged with a legal and political subject of history conceived, both in Kant’s philosophy and in Franklin’s political theory, as the divine predestination of industrial civilization toward a universal state of democratic order and perpetual peace. Modern revolutionary philosophies organized individual and political sovereignty, the system of progress, and the legal order of freedom under the mantra Je pense, donc je suis. The Grande Revolution placed the entire universe under the force of its universalizing power. With Rousseau’s revolutionary social program, with Beethoven’s symphonic harmonies or with Schiller’s aesthetic universe, and with many other architects, composers and philosophers, this Je flourished into a true self-consciousness, a Selbst at the center of a new political, moral and aesthetic order that was at once rational and democratic. Faust, according to Goethe’s reworking of the anonymous medieval saga of Dr. Faustus, is, in effect, the myth of an insatiable soul seeking knowledge, power, and erotic union with the absolute: a soul that wants to integrate the myths and cultures of the past into its biographical constitution, from the beauty of Helen to the cosmic knowledge of alchemy. Here is a self that wants to be all things. In this regard, Faust is a modern civilizational hero, the hero of modern culture par excellence.

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His curriculum vitae does not recoil in the face of sexual or criminal violence. He rapes a woman, murders her mother, and evicts elderly people in order to take possession of their land. But these historical shadows of the Je pense only serve to broaden its spectrum of negative attributes across the most enlightened intellectual testimonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Proudhon’s sociology of capitalism to Celan’s poetics of silence, and from Tolstoy’s humanism to Beckmann’s mythological depictions of fascist anti-humanism. The composers, artists, and philosophers of the modern era gave birth to a negative consciousness. By means of their expressionist attitudes and a reflective confrontation with the violent conflicts of the modern world, they produced an existentialist critique of the ethical and cognitive limitations imposed by the epistemologies of instrumental reason. The identifying feature of this negative consciousness has been a resounding No. No to capitalist nihilism; no to the growing divisions and social inequalities of our time; no to continuous wars and genocides; and no to totalitarianism. As the irrationality of the capitalist system and its conflicts becomes more apparent, its political corruption and crimes against humanity become more blatant; and while its political and financial discourses become emptier, capitalism corners, denigrates, and silences independent intelligence and consciousness. Today, this process takes place first and foremost in the media, but it is also at work across our educational institutions. The headlines pronouncing this degradation have been paraded in all four corners of the world with the accompanying cacophony of drums and trumpets: The Last Intellectual, The Death of Public Man, The End of Man, and so on. Let us then consider this final scenario. The illuminating light of reason, a reflection founded on the autonomy of the Je pense, the sovereignty of critical knowledge and the educational functions of the intellectual: they have all been displaced, indeed even replaced, by the jargon of the experts, the micro-analyses of the academics, and the fetishes of the spectacle. Those very same epistemologies which, from Bacon’s critical empiricism to Descartes’ skepticism, had once aimed to liberate thought from the theological dogma of the scholastics, act today as the guardians of an instrumental reason and a destructive science, and as censors of any autonomous reflection that dares to question the coercions and conflicts that this instrumental reason imposes on humanity.

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This evaporation of intelligence and its enlightening functions is the inevitable result of the expansion and standardization of the language of mass media, the nominalist production of the spectacle, and the subsequent emptying out of meaning of all free-floating, indeterminate, and fluid referents. It amounts to the institutional destruction of autonomous reflection, in a world subjected to electronic surveillance and manipulated by corporate systems of control and propaganda.

Besieged Intellectual The University of Paris-Vincennes endured, like an impenetrable military fortress. It had become the final refuge for the transgressive imagination of May 1968, after its implosion. Defended by high walls and a single narrow entrance, this prison-like structure revealed the besieged nature of the university’s educational project. Outside these walls, the police were a permanent and menacing presence. But when you slipped through its narrow entrance, the university opened up like a virtual no-mans-land of transitory liberty. Graffiti and makeshift posters bespoke an intense intellectual and political debate. Feminists and lesbians. Anarchists. Research groups on psychoanalysis and modern critical philosophies. Seminars on madness and capitalism. These were the spaces most frequented by the colorful gathering of students. Here and there, drug pushers beckoned with the promise of exotic experiences. Jazz bands provided an intense emotional beat. It was 1973. The government had cut the university budget. Maintenance workers were on perpetual strike. Campus courtyards and corridors had become veritable garbage dumps, infested with rats. Among the philosophy courses, there was one in particular that generated a great deal of interest and even fascination. It was taught by Professor Gilles Deleuze. His seminars were extravagant, especially in comparison to the ongoing neoliberal sectorization of the humanities, and the subsequent dismemberment of reflection that now characterizes university education the world over. His lectures related virtually everything to everything else, from the letters of a psychotic woman to a few pages written by Levy Strauss, and from the constitution of the rational subject in Descartes to Binswanger’s concept of schizophrenia. Deleuze’s seminars were also extraordinary in terms of the eclectic audience that attended them: philosophy students mixed with psychotic youths, militants of the most disparate ideologies, young mothers with their babies, exiled students from

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fascist Spain. All told, these seminars made for an erotic environment that was open to all sorts of political and sexual fantasies. In the midst of this tangled setting, which was not unlike a postmodern reformulation of Courbet’s L’Atelier du artiste, Deleuze presented himself as a prophet of negativity. Instead of promoting a romantic vision of the artist and of art as capable of restoring humanity’s ties to the natural and mythological sources of existence, Deleuze proffered an ambiguous critique. He rejected the patriarchal centrality of Oedipus in psychoanalysis, but ignored the enlightening character of the Oedipal myth; he phenomenologically analyzed the psychological syndrome of schizophrenia, but treated with studied detachment the political forces and technological rationality that had galvanized this schizophrenic fragmentation of postmodern society. Yet, his impressive aptitude for constructing fantastic intellectual combinations was always on display: in conjunction with a structuralist reconstruction of an archaic ritual celebrated by the autochthonous peoples of the Amazon, he might discuss the adventures of a prostitute from the suburbs of Paris who subjected her upper-class male clientele to a delusional series of sado-masochistic tortures and humiliations. He also engaged in extremely radical critiques of the Germanic intellectual tradition of the first half of the century, from Nietzsche to Freud to Kafka. But the major issues debated in his seminar that year were the Marquis de Sade and President Schreber. We studied Sade’s novels and manifestos because they constituted a violent will toward political and sexual domination, which dramatically violated all the codes of virtue and moral rationality that defined the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle to Kant, and its Christian moral and theological underpinnings. Sade revealed the extent to which a principle of pure sexual pleasure spurred the economic, political, and military powers of modern western civilization. And he exposed its ultimate aim: the destruction of humans, of life, and of the universe. As such, Sade explicitly defined the will-to-power that would, in time, provoke the wars of modern and postmodern industrial genocide. And his literature expressed a conscious revolutionary sexual pleasure in transgressing the historical and cosmic order of Christian civilization, in the sense that Saint Paul or Saint Augustine had once conceived it. But Sade fascinated us above all because his narratives synthesized pleasure and desire into Lust: a hunger, thirst, and ache that ridiculed the pietistic morality underlying Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, for example. He revealed a sexual pleasure that went beyond good and evil,

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linking the will for total power to a desire for total destruction. In so doing, he not only exposed the moral limits and absolutist aims of modern reason, but also the need for a final break with its archaic roots in Christian morality. With Deleuze as our guide, we read Sade as the prophet of modern and postmodern totalitarianisms, wars and genocides. This destruction—which was justified as much by the philosophical and scientific discourses of modernity as its was emblazoned across modern revolutionary political slogans … this revelation of the irrationality of modern scientific and philosophical reason … this prophetic vision of social dissolution that was the ultimate technological and military consequence of the scientific epistemology of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—opened up an unprecedented perspective on the second topic of our seminar: Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nerven Kranken (literally: “Memorable thoughts of a nervous patient”) by Daniel P. Schreber. Schreber revealed to us the psychological structure of the modern subject at that precise moment in history in which the moral, political and cognitive ideals of human reason had fallen into a state of disarray. This fragmented psychological structure announced the subsequent collapse of our civilizational architecture. His prose, although conceptually convoluted and crisscrossed by myriad visionary interpretations of humanity’s future, nevertheless revealed the collapse of the religious and logical-­ transcendental order, represented philosophically by Kant’s three critiques of pure, practical and aesthetic reason and, politically, by the revolutions that Rousseau announced in the eighteenth century and that Marx did in the following century. Schreber’s vision of historical time was not however revolutionary, as in Sade, but explicitly apocalyptic: “As I said before, the innumerable visions I had in connection with the idea that the world had perished were partly of a gruesome nature, partly of an indescribable sublimity” (Schreber 1988, p. 78). Intuitively, Schreber based his understanding of modern history on an archaic cosmology. It coincided in its most elemental categories with the great world cosmologies that sustained the unity and harmony of being— from the cosmos represented by Isis and Osiris in ancient Egypt to the Vedic mythologies and the metaphysics of Plotinus. This is why Schreber emphasized the idea that “the concept of morality exists only within a cosmic order.” But the significance of Schreber’s notion of this moral cosmic order is by no means limited to his utopian visions of legal and political harmony in an age of crisis, fragmentation, and civilizational collapse; of far greater importance is his discovery that this destroyed harmonic

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order can be restored by means of paranoia: “wherever the Order of the World is broken, power alone counts, and the right of the stronger is decisive” (Schreber 1988, p. 66). At the end of the nineteenth century, Schreber contemplated the future of Europe and of the West as a double process that combined the concentration of totalitarian and destructive power, with the fragmentation, decomposition and collapse of languages, of human relationships and of humanity itself. As a patient diagnosed with dementia, Schreber’s life unfolded within the clinically besieged perimeters of Central European psychiatric hospitals in the late nineteenth century. Here, he was subjected to constant clinical surveillance, intellectual and emotional isolation from the world, and the rigors of therapeutic manipulation and control. In the visionary representation of his memoirs, this system of government was fundamentally constituted by networks and rays of energy that pursued, controlled, modified and, finally, supplanted his soul. In the center of these energetic networks and flows, power arose. At issue was a notion of power that he depicted metaphysically and mythologically as Teufelsküche or “the Devil’s Kitchen” (Schreber 1973, p. 161). This Devil’s Kitchen was Dr. Pierson’s hospital. By referring to it as a diabolical kitchen—and not using a geometric metaphor such as, for example, pentagons of power—Schreber underscored a symbolic link to an archaic past, calling attention to the shamanic origins of the kitchens of witches and alchemists. Dr. Pierson’s diabolical kitchen was, however, a scientific kitchen. Schreber reconceived this diabolical kitchen as a laboratory for modern totalitarian power founded on science … precisely on the instrumental sciences of medicine and psychiatry. Politically and theologically speaking, the power that arose in this devilish laboratory was constituted by Schreber’s concept of God. Schreber’s memoirs describe the psychological and social consequences attendant on the expansion of this paranoid and totalizing godly power: tyrannical networks of legal, administrative, and linguistic machinations produce the schizophrenic fragmentation of human existence and reason. Once this disintegrating process of decline and decay has run its course, the divisions separating the remaining disjecta membra generate chaos, exacerbate conflicts, escalate violence, and lead to ultimate destruction. Out of desperation, this split and subsequently weakened human consciousness acclaims the totalitarian power of a messianic leader as the last hope for putting an end to all the ethical and metaphysical disorder.

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Schreber laid bare a relationship of simultaneous polarization and agreement between paranoid systems of surveillance, control and manipulation, on the one hand, and the schizophrenic division and decomposition of the social fabric, on the other. And he conceptualized the speech, logos, and autistic jargon of schizophrenic patients, which emerged from the frictions and clashes between these two complementary yet opposite forces, as the guiding principle behind the historical self-becoming of Reason and Spirit. This polarization of paranoid powers and schizophrenic forces supplanted, in Schreber’s cosmology, the place that the philosophies of the Aufklärung, from Kant to Marx, had assigned to the system of Reason or Vernunft. But he did not however simply replace the function of this logos; he also inverted its meaning. For Schreber, the opposition between schizophrenic fragmentation and paranoid reaction no longer provided the preconditions of freedom; to the contrary, it now led to the emptiness of human consciousness, the void of existence, and the extinction of being. Schreber’s convoluted concept of totalitarianism can perhaps be summed up best in three or four related images. The first of these concerns what he refers to as “attacks on the freedom of human thought” by means of a compulsive system that he calls Denkzwang, which literally means a “cooption” and “coercion” of thought. The result of this system of manipulation and transformation is what he calls “fleetingly produced men” or “fleeing-improvised-men” (flüchtig hingemachten Männer) (Schreber 1988, p. 61). The final expression of this coercive thought or non-thought and non-reflection is human non-expression. Schreber describes it as a “system of not-finishing-a-sentence” (System des Nichtsausredens) (Schreber 1973, p. 240) “My nerves are influenced by the rays to vibrate corresponding to certain human words,” he explains; “their choice therefore is not subject to my own will, but is due to an influence exerted on me from without. From the beginning the system of not-­ finishing-­a-sentence prevailed, that is to say the vibrations caused in my nerves and the words so produced contain not mainly finished thoughts, but unfinished ideas, or only fragments of ideas, which my nerves have to supplement to make up sense” (Schreber 1988, p. 197). Schreber exposes the highest stage of this totalitarianism as a system of biological manipulation and destruction. Its ultimate consequence is the total decomposition of human consciousness and existence. Moreover, he describes how his own body is made to suffer from manipulated mutations of his male sex, and how he is ultimately transformed into a woman.

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Subsequently, his new female body is subjected to numerous violations and humiliations, until it has become weak and is cast aside. In the end, he is placed under a regime of solitary confinement in the security cells of the psychiatric hospital. Schreber formulates the last stages of this post-human development with the following words: “my body, transformed into a female body… was then left for sexual misuse and simply ‘forsaken’ (liegengelassen), in other words left to rot (Verwesung)” (Schreber 1988, p. 63, 1973, p. 111). The pathos running throughout Professor Deleuze’s discussion of Schreber was prophetic. Unlike Binswanger or Jung’s phenomenology of schizophrenia, Deleuze’s schizo-analysis no longer sought to restore a conscious recognition of human existence itself. Nor did he postulate, as Freud’s psychoanalysis had done, that “where it was, I should be” (“wo Es war soll Ich werden”). Deleuze did not try to extend or otherwise expand individual consciousness so that it might again include the oldest and most original symbols and memories of humanity, going beyond the restrictions imposed by modern systems of moral and epistemological censorship. Instead, his Anti-Oedipus, which he wrote in collaboration with F. Guattari, contemplated the other side of this horizon: the Schreberian vision of the decomposition of the system of reason, the splitting of consciousness and the final extinction of the human as an apotheosis or deification. As such, Deleuze and Guattari basically reiterated the existentialist myth of freedom: a freedom construed as the self-awareness of human existence in its confrontation with the emptiness of being and nothingness; a nihilistic freedom that crystallized around the individual’s experience of nausea in the face of being, which Sartre had formulated philosophically and literarily during the World War II. Physically, at the university, we lived besieged in a semi state of exception. A depressing sense of failure and confusion reigned over the entire university. The corridors, the classrooms, the walls and their graffiti: everything pointed to a world in decline and dissolution. And everything recalled that Schreberian Verwesung: a word associated with the processes of destruction, putrefaction and extinction. Students’ routine questions were often interrupted by psychotic voices. The negative dialectic that had once run through Adorno’s critical theory of progress or through Mumford’s critique of the pentagons of power was now shattered. The remaining fragments of micro-intellectual self-referentiality became the incomprehensible discourses of postmodernity. Not once have these discourses completed a conceptually constructed totality around a univocal

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and autonomous meaning. Philosophical thought, the logos, has deconstructed itself into a system of logically disconnected statements in precisely the sense that Judge Daniel P. Schreber identified in his System des Nichtsausredens—a “system of not speaking in complete sentences,” or a “system of not-finishing-a-sentence.”

The Great Desertion The “end of the intellectual” is the slogan which, starting in the 1960s, programmatically encouraged the dissolution of any serious reflection on our historical reality; it invigorated efforts to dismantle philosophical and artistic expressions; and it justified the disappearance of those kinds of criticism and aestheticization that could previously be found in the midst of massive social protests, whether among students, workers, or some combination the two. Today this death of the intellectual is an accomplished fact and a universally assumed banality. One cannot even claim the atonalities and shock effect of avant-garde aesthetics in one’s academic presentations or at literary festivals. Under the triumphant banner of post-­ philosophy, post-art and, above all, the apotheosis of the post-human, the eclipse of the intellectual and the disappearance of the artist preside over the dissolution of western democracies and the reduction of modern culture to a savage form of mercantilism, whose most eloquent expression is the spectacle with its interminable, relentless, profitable wars. This commercial, political, and military spectacle has dissolved intellectual life in the grammatological acid bath of a so-called global culture: its jargons are poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-philosophy, post-­ aesthetics, and posthumanism. Media iconographies have broken the ethical substance of the philosophical, artistic, and political consciousness of humanism—whether it is the ethical substance of artists linked to the tragedies of twentieth century history, like Picasso or Shostakovich, or that of activists of a philosophical, sociological, and literary profile, like Adorno, Anders, or Mumford. In the mega-machines that produce and disseminate this great spectacle of the world, the will to know the truth, the rejection of authoritarianism and corruption, and the criticism of social and regional inequalities, and of the wars that sustain them, have been almost completely annihilated. The independent intellectual, the writer, the public conscience and public voice of self-reflective consciousness—the voice of a Diderot, a Lessing, and an infinity of other modern intellectuals and artists—has

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been transmuted into the voice of a ventriloquist who channels the idolatrous and fetishistic icons and signs of a system of total propaganda: the president’s tweets, YouTube videos of commercialist and terrorist wars, the systematic production of fake news, the indefinite repetition of politically correct phrases, the reduction of literature to fiction and entertainment and so on. Hanging over the heads of the millions of electronically controlled, info-manipulated, and intellectually blinded masses, is the quintessential mockery of democratic totalitarianism: “If you see something, say something”—a seemingly anodyne slogan which nevertheless encourages adherence to a universal system of internalized surveillance, and the final defeat of the intellectual and moral autonomy of human life. This slogan expresses an unmitigated scorn for the human race, because nobody today can see anything except that which the macro and micro screens of global electronic propaganda put before their eyes; nobody can nor should anyone attempt to see except that which has been predefined by the grammatologies and iconologies of the communication systems of the mass media. No one can see anything other than the unreality of the spectacle and its infinitely reproduced metastasis. The intellectual, as an historical and social consciousness, as an illuminating light, has given in and given up. She has resigned her independent recognition of culture, politics, nature, and human existence and limited her vision of the world to the scope and focus of the micro-political formats that are administered by the academic macrosystems and industrial mega-machines of the spectacle. And he has reduced both his intellectual responsibility with regard to humanity and his ethical self-awareness to nothing better than a strategy of resistance that merely requires of him that he “watch and wait.” Today’s post-intellectuals regard the global warming of the planet and its abrupt climatic changes with the same stolid indifference that they contemplate military conflicts and their catastrophic consequences. The same skeptical and cynical impassivity underpins their observation of the forced displacement of tens of millions of refugees into concentration camps, or the electronic control of the entirety of human existence. Simultaneously, this generation of “last intellectuals” and “post-­ artists” has eagerly adopted the new bureaucratic role of the intellectual as a media star, a bestseller, and talking head or expert. Digital networks and institutional channels exalt this new post-intellectuality, and glorify its epistemological and administrative mindlessness, elevating its complete lack of self-awareness to the heights of political heroism.

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The end of the intellectual is the result of a double process of external abduction and internal abdication. First, the political system has hijacked, restrained and annihilated independent intellectual consciousness. It has accomplished this by imposing a regime of administrative surveillance and linguistic censorship. But this external process of abduction is complemented internally, subjectively, by a process of voluntary renunciation of self-consciousness. It is this abdication that fuels the universal nihilism of post-humanity. The corporate elimination of independent judgment and of its public expression has proven so successful that any voices that may once have been deemed capable of expressing a modicum of intellectual or moral independence are now regularly dispelled in the electronic and administrative networks of the spectacle. The ultimate consequence of this twenty-first century involution of the intellectual is the transfer of the powers of independent intelligence to the grammatological standards of propaganda and its politically correct speeches. This epiphenomenon of our time occurs as much in the academy and in the mass media as it does in the theaters of politics and war.

Chronicle of an Abdication West Berlin, January 1978. A dark event. Tunix. The Rectorate of the Technische Universität had organized it, using the revolutionary language of May-68. The deans presided over the performance; and its actors staged a diversity of communicative actions and micro-political praxis. The general slogan: “Alternativ denken”—alternative thinking. Any and all alternatives, from macrobiotic cuisine to human rights, were celebrated. The only thing that was prohibited in this event was “dogmatism”: an unspoken, but easily identifiable, allusion to negative dialectics. Evidently, the champion of this contest was not Adorno, nor was it Anders. It wasn’t Mumford, either. Foucault was the appointed hero of the day. His programmatic axis? The end of the “grands récits,” the renunciation of the word and of the logos, and the surrender of fantasy to the domesticated epistemologies of the corporate expert. Its most distinguishing characteristic? The micro-analytic restriction of philosophical reflection, the exaltation of departmentalized knowledge, the cult of fragmentation, the mysticism of electronic communication networks and virtual realities: “It has become possible to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge and from one focus of politicization to another. Magistrates and psychiatrists, doctors and social workers,

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laboratory technicians and sociologist have become able to participate, both within their own fields and through mutual exchange and support, in a global process of the politicizations of intellectuals”—Foucault announced with studied optimism (1976, p. 68). Foucault fulfilled this regressive detournement of the humanistic and enlightened tradition of European thought by unilaterally revealing its counterpart, its negative side. The major premise of the structuralist revolution was to question the epistemologically founded tradition of modern reason, from Kant to Husserl, and from transcendental philosophy to phenomenology. Foucault questioned it and judged it negatively, as a non-­ scientific use of language; because structuralism, after all, had inherited its penchant for linguistic reductionism from nineteenth-century positivism. What Foucault’s criticism indirectly called into question, through the identification of reason with prisons, madhouses and panopticons, was the unity of this scientific logos with a human and humanistic project. What he obscured was the intrinsic relationship between scientific enlightenment— represented by the fathers of modern science, Descartes and Bacon among others—and the legacy of the humanistic philosophies of thinkers such as Vives and Paracelsus. Foucault eliminated this enlightening tradition by revealing the reverse side of humanistic enlightenment: the constant conflict and human suffering that have accompanied the scientific and humanistic logos throughout modern history. But he did so from the point of view of a structuralist epistemology that was complicit with the linguistic and electronic systems of corporate domination that the May Revolution of 1968 had denounced. The new epistemological dictates of structuralism condemned analyses that were global in scope or that purported to reflect on fundamental philosophical questions, thus discarding the great tradition of modern philosophy, from Leone Ebreo to Nietzsche. Abandoning the idea that theory should aim to provide a general vision capable of uniting the passions of the soul with the scientific analysis of reality, structuralism promoted a redefinition of “theory” as an intersection of “lateral connections” among the dismembered fragments of corporately managed knowledge. Foucault’s political-epistemological conclusion? “There is no locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case” (Foucault 1984, pp. 125 and f.). Localization, segmentation, atomization of knowledge. Evaporation of any humanistic criticism capable of revealing the profound significance of

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a literary work like Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes or Die Dreigroschenoper by Bertold Brecht. Here then is the birth of the micro-­ politics of today, with its links embedded in internet networks, and its subsequently micro-departmentalized epistemologies and policies. Tunix was one of the events that triggered the institutional censorship of those intellectuals who sustained the critical theory developed by Horkheimer and Adorno, and of those who shared Anders’ negative prophecy of a total alienation of mankind under the aegis of the military mega-machines of our terminal age. It meant the administrative legitimation of institutional censorship of those who had dared to rise up against the technical identity of the Atomic State and the new electronic totalitarianism announced by Robert Jungk. Tunix unleashed censorship on those of us who had reacted to the degradation of culture, as revealed in the works of Thomas Bernhard. It formed part of the broader dissolution of German intellectual resistance that the liberal government of Bonn had set in motion with its policy of Arbeitsverbote (“Work prohibitions”), which it imposed on those intellectuals who had participated in political actions of resistance and criticism in order to express their sense of humanistic and humanitarian solidarity. But at issue was not only a question of the institutional demolition of any intellectual reflection that presumed to remain independent from the officially sanctioned linguistic codes of the day. Alongside this, a systematic offensive against philosophical and artistic traditions also took place, closing down chairs and cutting out departments whose research agendas did not produce immediate profitability from a strictly mercantilist perspective. This regressive process began with the occupation by the police of the University of Nanterre in 1968; Tunix was its subsequent banalization a decade later. An epistemological, humanistic, and intellectual trivialization of higher education. And the terminal lobotomy of intelligence. Yet the message that Tunix launched from West Berlin—the quintessential capital of the Cold War, as it was both occupied and divided by its respective military forces—went beyond the declaration of an intellectual micro-policy and the consequent abandonment of critical theories. The word “Tu-nix” is a contraction of Tu nichts, which can be translated as “don’t do anything” or as “do nothing at all.” It was the safe-conduct of a philosophical ataraxia and an existential passivity carried to the extreme of a mystical quietism distantly reminiscent of faná-al-faná, which is the double negation of the real in Sufism. Its philosophical constitution took a step back in the direction of the existentialism of Sartre’s La Nausée

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under its three constituent postulates: the fragmentation and fictionalization of human events, an empty consciousness, and the aesthetics of the absurd. The slogan Tunix had a final connotation that was perfectly trivial: its metonymic association with “Tunis” and “Tunisien,” the Germanic signifiers that designated a North African Mediterranean nation that, back in those days, provided the preferred beaches in the Third World where radical young Berliners from the new post-avant-garde could frolic. It had the sex appeal of a distant, colorful, different and mysterious place. A postcard for alternative tourists. A few years before this event, in 1974 to be precise, Richard Sennett had confirmed, from the department of sociology at New York University, the legitimacy of Foucault’s denunciation of philosophical reflection, his defense of micro-politics, and its attendant micro-intellectual crusade. Sennett’s book was published under a title that dripped pathos: The Fall of Public Man. This essay stylized modern cultural history, beginning with the philosophies of the French Revolution and reaching up to McCarthyism, as the saga of a continuing decline. Only, in his analysis, Sennett omitted the theory and praxis of modern totalitarianisms which, from Tziga Vertov to Goebbels and McLuhan, had defined how radio, cinema, and television eliminated autonomous spaces for public life on the basis of the strategies and aesthetics of totalitarian propaganda. This omission of the transformation of the intellectual into an actor, a propagandist and a designer of public opinion, and of his institutional configuration as a totalitarian subject of the correct use of language, remains the sine qua non of the postmodern corporate academy. Sennett also omitted the humanistic tradition of American enlightenment represented by Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Walt Whitman. As such, his historical reconstruction of the modern intellectual, which the postmodern elites of New York in the 1980s embraced with blind enthusiasm, willfully ignored the grand tradition of critical theories put forth by Adorno, Mumford, and Josué de Castro, to say nothing of the literary traditions of resistance to barbarism developed by Kafka, Rulfo and Beckett. And he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about the most forceful intellectuals who had transformed the face of the earth throughout the twentieth century: Rosa Luxemburg, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, and others. Such are the strategies of positivist anti-enlightenment by means of which postmodernism has sought to delegitimize the philosophical

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tradition that links sixteenth-century Latin humanism and eighteenth-­ century Germanic humanism to the critical theories of the twentieth century. In so many words, this is the chronicle that records the intellectual’s abdication and his micro-political suicide. Anyone who is courageous enough to confront it can see this regressive process for what it is: intellectual mediocrity has seized all the politically relevant channels; criticism has been eliminated as dissent; literature has been degraded to journalism; and smartphones have established the epistemological revolution of the micro-discourse and the micro-subject. Faced with these perceived symptoms of the biological and spiritual decline of humanity, there is no longer any need to think.

Theatrum Mundi In the Paris of May, 1968, when the students occupied the Theater de l’Odeon, they hung a banner that pronounced their desire for a real and radical democracy: “Quand l’assemblée nationale devient un théâtre bourgeois, tous les théâtres bourgeois doivent devenir des assemblées nationales.” However, this detournement of the parliamentary theater of democracies in an era of total propaganda, and the desire to transform a degraded political spectacle, has been converted over the years, into its exact opposite. Today, we do not participate in the dramatic theater of national or international democratic assemblies by means of communicative actions that are structurally articulated with our desire for human emancipation and development. Instead, the administration of our political, financial, and military endeavors and of culture in general, has turned our historical reality into a total spectacle. Not only parliaments, but also social crises, political intrigues and even wars have been transformed into insubstantial plays. We are not actors in the parliamentary drama of universal history, as the revolutionary students of Paris in 1968 had hoped we would become. Our entire existence has rather evaporated linguistically into the great spectacle of the world. Iconic fetishism, together with the commercial and political propaganda strategies that define and distinguish this spectacle in terms of its images, rhythms and discourses, have ended up diluting the epistemological limits between experience and information, between reality and fiction, and between truth and falsehood. This means that our condition as spectators, who are already alienated from both nature and our own humanity,

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has been reduced even further to the anthropological category of consumers who are devoted to the collective dissolution of our own moral and intellectual autonomy. This spectacle can be described as a backstage process of autonomous dissolution: a primitive ritual of self-sacrifice whereby one’s own self-­ consciousness gets split according to the divisive categories of willed indeterminacy and autism. This evanescent anthropological condition of the human subject in the age of spectacle and electronic surveillance approximates what Binswanger, Jung, and Neumann defined as “schizophrenia.” The insurgents of Paris in 1968 wanted to return to a kind of democracy where real social conflicts and human dramas could be represented, and in which the public would transform itself by participating in human praxis, in the dramatic sense captured by the Greek concept of the dromenon. In the intervening years, those dreams have turned into nightmares. Today, the national assemblies of old have been transformed into talk shows; and the sense of enlightenment and emancipation once associated with them has dissipated into an iconography of progressive vulgarity, cynicism, and corruption. The entire world has become a financial, technological, and political theater of increasing speed and urgency, and of diminishing intellectual foresight and purveyance. The spectacle is a corporately produced, disseminated, and founded representation of human events, be they historical, ordinary, or political. Under its reified unreality it displaces individual experience, limits the capacity for reflection, and nullifies self-awareness. Spectacle comes from spectare: that which is contemplated as an alienated and alien reality; that which is consumed by the ears and the gaze; it consists of voyeuristic pleasures: a dark glimpse and blindness of both human reality and of the reality of things in nature. In its most banal form, the spectacle is a selfie. But a selfie that must not only be defined as an apparatus of automatic reproduction of individual existence, but also as a representation that through visual glitter and digital precision supplants Da-sein—the presence of an entire human existence in the act of emotionally and intellectually recognizing another existence and the totality of the historical time and space of humanity. The selfie ontologically subverts the order of being and representation. The unreality of its representation suppresses and surpasses (aufheben) the existence of that which is in itself and for itself: a human visage. In the midst of the unreality and virtual reality of the selfie, we dissolve our existence and

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transubstantiate it into image and fetish, and in that fetishistic image, we consume our own extinction. The spectacle can also be defined from the point of view of the history of aesthetic ideas. In this regard, it is a synthesis of the cultural revolution that Tziga Vertov announced in his program for revolutionary propaganda as Gesamtkunstwerk, Kinopravda,3 and the morally corrupt power of the capitalist media that Orson Welles exposed in his film Citizen Kane. Its messages are necessarily trivial, redundant, and repetitive. Its fundamental epistemological postulate is that any hermeneutical distinction between the true and the false is but a residue of stubborn humanistic naïveté. But the spectacle is not only limited to the fictitious representations of the real, whether in a Baroque theater or in a postmodern television; nor is it limited to a falsification of ideologically scattered human experience as pravda or truth. At the same time, it includes the instauration (Versanstaltung) of something as fallacious as the sex appeal of a Miss Universe or the president’s tweets into the category of an ontologically incontrovertible and irrefutable entity. It supplants the enlightening function of experience with the fetishistic rituals of its mise-en-scène. And it eliminates, in its very premises of montage and the production of a consensual electronic reality, all self-conscious reflection as a dysfunctional residue of that dead animal called the human being. Its final consequence is the complete reduction of the human will to the binary logic of a mindless click on a link in some online network dedicated to the consumption of information. The spectacle is more than a propagandistic falsification of social events, in the sense of Marx’s critique of ideologies: a fascist coup d’etat staged as a democratic revolt; colonial invasions represented as wars of liberation; the synthesis of war, destruction, and torture in defense of human rights— and it does not include only CNN, BBC, RT, CCTV—it is that absolute system of reality that electronic networks constitute through their homogeneous and internally organized information of the market’s unremarkable trifles, lackluster half-truths, and ordinary falsehoods. From a negative point of view, the spectacle can also be defined as a system of representations that dilutes experience and individual self-­ awareness in the flow of signs and icons that have been stored, manipulated, encoded and established as idols of fetishistic cults in electronic

3

 “Cine-truth”

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social networks. Le spectacle est la inversion concrète de la vie… le mouvement autonome du non-vivant (Debord 1967, p. 9).

The Last Intellectual Post-68 Paris was dazzled by the critiques of modernity put forth by Foucault and Deleuze. When I arrived as a student at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1974, the humanities remained under the sway of the Hegelian heritage and the romantic hermeneutics, along with philosophers of the phenomenological tradition and professors who, in one way or another, continued to think within the humanist currents that had predominated over European thought prior to the advent of national socialism: Critical theories, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics. For its part, the analytical, empiricist, and positivist school of British scientific philosophy enjoyed unquestionable prestige throughout postwar Western Europe. Its scope of action was nevertheless limited to the sciences, leaving the broad field of the humanities under the mentorship of phenomenology and existentialism, and of Marxism or psychoanalysis. A decade earlier, Sartre had emerged as the undisputed representative of an uncertain humanism that effortlessly replaced the critical humanism of pre-World War II, from Kerényi’s science of religion to the psychoanalysis of Abraham, Ferenczi, Jung and Neumann, to Thomas Mann’s literary theory. The academic machine has systematically erased this philosophical horizon of the humanities. An old professor of aesthetics at Princeton University once told me—back in the 1990s—that as a student in postwar Oxford he had attended heated debates between analytical philosophers and phenomenologists, and that he remembered violent conceptual confrontations between the latter and Marxists. “These were true intellectual battles, and the debates were often chaotic. But in this whirlwind, we often felt the power of formally constructed concepts and we discovered the fascination that only pure categories such as these can awaken in the younger generations.” And he added nostalgically: “Today, in the American university, there is no dissent, there are no disputes, and there is little if any dialogue about contrasting methods and interpretations of our progressively split and broken reality. There can be no controversies where the only language used is that of a corporately administered mono-linguistics.” We live in the midst of an emotional and intellectual impoverishment of education that is without precedent. Under the sign of this triviality, the

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logos of enlightenment dissolves into the gloom of political cynicism, military nihilism, and the crudest, stupidest, simplest propaganda imaginable.

Intellectuals and Enlightenment The modern intellectual developed as a consequence of the second European enlightenment—the first enlightenment had its center in the Jewish and Islamic cultures of medieval Al-Andalus—and was born with the skepticism of the Sephardic philosopher Francisco Sánches, who opposed scholasticism with his Quod nihil scitur (nothing is known). The modern intellectual grew up alongside Montaigne’s skepticism and Erasmus’ Christian humanism and Paracelsus’ pagan humanism. With the cosmological revolution of Copernicus, and the new oriental-inspired humanism of Giordano Bruno, human intelligence replaced the Earth as the axis mundi of the universe, anthropocentrism replaced geo-centrism, and a dynamic, creative and not created conception of the universe replaced the Christian representation of the cosmos as a static and hierarchic order under God’s command. That modern intellectual is the offspring of the metaphysics of Leone Ebreo and Baruch Spinoza, and of Goethe and Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which emphasized the infinite, creative, and uncreated character of being. The modern intellectual also springs from the reconciliation of reason and nature in the romantic classicism of Beethoven, Schiller and Schinkel. This second European enlightenment triumphed politically through the democratic revolution led by intellectuals like Washington and Robespierre and, not least of all, through the anti-colonial and anti-­ imperialist resistance that Lenin, Gandhi or Mao Zedong represented in the twentieth century. The modern intellectual was born with the Enlightenment and triumphed thanks to reason. A scientific, ethical, and civilizing reason. Kant’s philosophical system represents its most monumental architecture. Conversely, the decline of the intellectual has as its corollary the eclipse of reason, as Max Horkheimer formulated it in 1946. Three dilemmas of our terminal age sum up this decadent process of decline: nuclear war, the involution of postmodern democracies, and the industrial destruction of the biosphere. First: in the historical age inaugurated by the Manhattan Project and the subsequent nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the equation “science = progress,” which was transparently true in the project of

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Diderot’s Encyclopedie or Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, has been transformed into its opposite. As Alfred Einstein wrote at the end of the last world war: “The physicists who participated in forging the most formidable and dangerous weapon of all times are harassed by an equal feeling of responsibility, not to say guilt… fear has increased tremendously since the termination of the war” (Einstein 1954, pp. 115 and ff.). Second: the unity of reason, equality and freedom that intellectuals as diverse as Rousseau, Fichte or Tolstoy once espoused, and that also inspired the independence of North America, the French Revolution, colonial movements of independence in Latin America and the social revolutions of the twentieth century, has been completely shattered. It has been replaced by the fake unity of the industrial logos, the empty ideal of world peace, and the even emptier notion of human freedom; this postmodern unity is a mere slogan of global media conglomerates, which has been internally and irrevocably emptied out of any meaningful content. Since World War II, scientific and technological development have been inseparably tied to the expansion of what Mumford theorized as the Pentagon of Power, and to the electronic propaganda and surveillance systems that Goebbels defined as the foundation of the modern totalitarian state. Third: year after year immense tracts of jungle are eviscerated, thousands of species are exterminated, and industrially induced natural catastrophes multiply under the irresponsible complicity of national and global political elites and the indifference of an electronically hypnotized mass of hundreds of millions of people. When the links that unite reason to emancipation become disjointed, any intellectual reflection that would seek to approach human existence from an ethical, political and historical point of view is similarly undermined. Modern consciousness has expressed this helpless condition in Munch’s The Scream, in the anguish and violence that preside over Max Beckmann’s mythological reflections on fascism, in Picasso’s protest against the industrial massacres of the Third Reich and the United States of America, and in the agony of a Prometheus burning in the flames of his own civilizing fire in El hombre de fuego, which Orozco painted on the dome of an orphanage in Guadalajara, Mexico.

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Let Newton Be! and All Was Light! One of the sagas that illustrate the collapse of human enlightenment and emancipation, which once defined the great systems of the Enlightenment, and their reduction to mere instrumental forms, is the experiment that Benjamin Franklin famously conducted with his kite: a symbol that captures the power of modern science over the electrical nature of the mythical force of lightning. Stylized in his own day as the quintessential representation of the new Prometheus of an industrial and democratic era, Franklin nonetheless shifted the complexity of meanings within the enlightening process—from the Apollonian experience of clarity, the prophetic vision of Indra, Agni, and Surya, or the modern revolutionary consciousness represented by Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza or Goethe to a utilitarian, lucrative and imperialist concept of technology—under the imaginary providential regulation of Yahweh, Allah or God. The myth of Prometheus was originally articulated around the signifier pro-methos: the anticipated vision of things, and the pre-vision and pro-­ vision or purveyance of the prophetes, that is, of the interpreter and spokesman of things, according to the Greek etymology of these terms. This Promethean foresight and purveyance were linked to technical knowledge. But the instrumental knowledge of the Promethean technai was intimately related to nature and its mythological representative Gaia, the mother of the Titans. Prometheus’ technologies were thus integrated into a nature that was maternal, generative, and creative. According to Aeschylus, these technologies were also subject to the ethical principle of phil-anthropia or “com-passion” for human existence. The Cartesian Je, in contrast, was born from Loyola’s counter-reformist mysticism. Its constitution was based on the sacred marriage of logical self-awareness and the patriarchal concept of God as absolute Lord of the universe. Its political translation in Franklin’s democratic ideology was theism, which subordinated the instrumental and utilitarian power of capitalism to the omniscience and omnipotence of God the Father. Kant was a pietist. His understanding of the march of history toward perpetual peace was similarly subject to a providentialist notion of power. Accordingly, the techno-scientific domination of the universe was elevated to the category of a divine destiny that combined Apollo’s intellectual clarity with the salvationist will of Christ. Foresight and providence come from the same root: vision, clairvoyance, to see. Both define an experience that combines sensitive vision with

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intellectual reflection. But their meanings differ, as does the myth of Prometheus in Aeschylus and its modern recasting as Franklin. The foundation of providence is the word. Its principle is the constituent logos of being. And it comprises the subsequent linguistic grammatology of patriarchal power. Conversely, Prometheus’ foresight is linked to his mother Gaia, to the magical and creative power of the Great Mother, and to her philosophical formulation by Spinoza as natura naturans. It is inseparable from the eternal cycles of life and death, and from the spiritually and biologically creative power of women and nature. The patriarchal providence that Franklin represented and the foresight linked to the Great Goddesses are antagonistic concepts. The first is the principle of the subordination and mutilation of a dominated world, a passive nature, and a dead life. The providence of the patriarchal society is based on the submission and annihilation of the erotic, creative and infinite nature represented by the Sumerian goddess Inanna, by the Greek goddesses Gaia, Artemis or Demeter, the Egyptian goddess Isis or the Aztec goddess Coatlicue: an understanding of nature as creative and infinite that also informs the cosmological system of the Upanishads, the metaphysics of Spinoza and the epistemology (Erkenntnislehre) of Goethe. Today we are living the final consequences of a providence without foresight: increasingly lethal wars spreading across the continents, industrial destruction of the biosphere and the tangible catastrophic consequences of climate change, the ethical disintegration of nations in theaters of execrable violence that is as much propagandistic as it is financial or military. We live under the regime of an enlightenment that neither foresees nor purveys; instead, it is providential and technocentric. At issue is a spectacular and imperialist enlightenment, one whose canons and cannons have transformed the three basic premises of the Enlightenment. First: The light that illuminated the democratic ideals of the peoples of Europe and their colonial subjects in the Americas, guiding them in their emancipatory struggle against the corrupt absolutist monarchies of the eighteenth century, has been refracted by the mirrors of the spectacle, by the shining light of its political and commercial stars, and by the twinkling fluorescence of its media events. Second: The concept of reason developed by enlightened thinkers such as Ibn Rushd, Giordano Bruno or Spinoza linked science to human survival. Its ethical ties to human existence, which were both physical and metaphysical, have since been broken.

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Third: Enlightenment was once the architecture of a reason that linked the destinies of human freedom with the development of knowledge. Its grands récits have been degraded into the positivist, pragmatist and structuralist cacophonies of our post-human age. At the same time, Les droits de l’homme have been instrumentalized as a justification for military supremacy, imperial power, and political propaganda. Freedom has been fused with the universal expansion of a power that, from a social and ecological point of view, is self-destructive. “The wholly enlightened Earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”4

Spectacle Screens inform us; screens watch us; screens manipulate our desires and expand our senses; screens record, reproduce, produce, and create; screens besiege us; screens build our intelligence and our identity. The entire world has been overrun by the global effects and echoes of these screens. The transformation of society into a spectacle designed to match the enormous scale of the postmodern system of mega-machines, the corresponding reduction of existence to the passive acts of seeing and being seen through screens, and the manipulation of human behavior by means of icons and images all account for the fulfillment of the baroque project of an aesthetic-political power represented as The Great Theater of the World; and it presupposes the realization of the romantic dream of the creation of reality as an integral work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). Three milestones of twentieth-century modernity converge in the processes by means of which the real has been turned into spectacle, human action and expression have been reduced to performance, and human existence itself has been transformed into a mediated, pseudo-real, second nature. The first constituent moment of this modern spectacle is marked by the anti-aesthetic of a particularly aggressive sector of the so-called European avant-garde: Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as Futurism and their association with fascism. These anti-artistic and anti-aesthetic currents comprise a series of postulates and strategies: the will to shock and to break with the traditional or “normal” conditions of the experience of reality, the destruction of the forms and memories of the past, the elevation of fragmentation and collage to the status of a new code of representation of 4

 “Die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.”

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reality, and the various policies governing the use of media to produce a virtual and hyper reality. The famous artists associated with these currents—Tzara, Marinetti and Breton—are spokesmen for an anti-artistic dogma which, as these thinkers reiterated time and again in their manifestos and public provocations, condemns rationality, justifies disorder, and celebrates violence and the absurd. Their banner was “The Death of Art.” All these constitutive aspects of the anti-aesthetic avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century have become commonplace in the electronic systems of communication and visual languages that rule our day. In surrealism, this negative aesthetic acquired the explicit form of a systematic destruction of the artistic and everyday experience of reality. Moreover, it aimed to replace such experience with a new construction that was irrational and hallucinatory, magical, ecstatic and sublime, and that the surrealists defined as a super-reality or a simulacrum. Such was the meaning of the surrealist revolution of Breton, Artaud or Dalí. Today, this symbolic world largely coincides with the most trivial expressions of commercial advertising and political propaganda, of mass consumption and the entertainment industry. The second constituent moment of the postmodern spectacle is rational and constructivist, in the sense of the construction of the universe by Plato’s demiurges or by the Russian constructivists. It includes the production of a second technical nature and a second artificial reality on the basis of algorithms and their multidimensional geometric expression. And it comprises a second reality or nature programmatically defined as an integral work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). In the European historical avant-­ gardes, this integral work of art was grounded in a rationalist or Cartesian aesthetics and was the expression, in this sense, not of any romantic formulations of the total work of art as a work that is theoretically capable of integrating all the arts, but of a logical-mathematical compositional code. El Lissitzky’s PROUN was the most consistent and radical formulation of this productivist program. PROUN demonstrated the grand scope and aspirations of a work of art that, on the basis of the abstract elements included on the canvas, projected an artificial space of undefined virtual dimensions, thus elevating the two-dimensional picture to the constituent principle of a multidimensional, technological, and civilizing reality in its own right. This productive dimension found its most favorable means of expression and realization in architecture. In this sense, we could cite innumerable experiences and architectural programs, ranging from German

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Expressionism and Bauhaus design to Le Corbusier and Hilberseimer’s projects for industrial architecture, which exposed the monetary rationality underlying capitalism’s totalitarian design of spatial and visual languages, from the bedroom to the factory. Today, this same spirit perseveres in the design of virtual cities and in the effective construction of urban megaprojects conceived as fortresses of high technological complexity and efficiency. The poet Paul Scheerbart, one of the pioneers of the aesthetics of modern skyscrapers, together with the architect Bruno Taut, conceived, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a future metropolis of immense and glittering crystalline towers over and against the darkening night shadows of the historic city and its insoluble dilemmas. According to their futuristic fantasy, which was formulated in the context of World War I, this city of glass and steel skyscrapers would be luminous and geometric, and its vibrant glow would herald a new apocalyptic era of profound convulsions and transformations, which they exalted as the epiphany of a new order of human civilization. Metropolis, by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou (1927), is a film that exposes with unequaled clarity and clairvoyance of how the implementation of artificial intelligence and the military organization of the human masses generates the civilizing dilemmas of modern cities. An elemental conflict runs throughout this film. It involves the introduction of a robot dressed as a secularized Mary-Mother of God, and her subsequent transformation into a Pandora who leads the macabre dance of industrial progress, in the sense of the self-destruction and genocides that have accompanied the expansion of modern and postmodern capitalism the world over. The aesthetics of the artistic avant-gardes, like their historical precedent, the military avant-gardes, were based on a negative and nihilistic assumption. At the highest moment of European industrial development, one world was falling apart: it was the world of historic cities, with their insurmountable social conflicts, their continuous wars and their metaphysical yearning for death, as the thought of Nietzsche or van Gogh formulated it during the final decades of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of Strindberg or Freud, among many other intellectuals and artists. Another world rose up from the ashes; it was a crystalline city, with its Cartesian and functionalist architecture: the global megalopolis. Ideal cities built as sparkling crowns, radiant mountains of glass and steel and luminous architectures of mega-industrial dimensions: these

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metaphors traversed the architectural utopias of the 1920s and did not cease their relentless march until, at least temporarily, they found their realization in the luminous architecture of the military spectacles put on by the National Socialists in Germany. The programmatic objective was to realize the absolute, rational and perfect order of an imaginary city and civilization, capable of suppressing, under the weight of its aesthetic fascination and the collective enthusiasm of the sublime, the real crises and the real destruction of Europe’s historical cities. The third constitutive factor of the late-modern spectacle as we know it today is National Socialism, which I here would like to consider in the broadest sense as a universal civilizing project that violently suppresses and destructively overcomes (aufheben) the social and cultural conflicts of late capitalism. In other words, I want to emphasize the point of view from which National Socialist totalitarianism can be assessed as a political revolution that was generated by the innovation of communication technologies. To be more explicit: this third moment is comprised of the intuitions and projects that Goebbels developed over the years in numerous articles and conferences on radio, his experiments with cinema, and the revolutionary idea that the mass media could be used to create popular culture. His program of cultural transformation pointed to fully contemporary dimensions of communication theory, in the sense of systems of effective standardization and human manipulation on a global scale. National-Socialist totalitarianism can and should be reconstructed from the symbolic and ideological point of view of “totalitarian languages.” But what was new and original in Goebbels’ theory of communication did not reside in its symbols, but rather in its technical instruments, and in the strategies of configuring a new human existence through the most advanced means of communication of the time, that is, the radio and the cinema. The synthesis of Krup and Wagner, which Kracauer attributed to Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, was fully realized by the National-Socialist conception of politics as the media production of a new total and totalitarian reality. This triple historical perspective (the construction of reality as a technological and commercial simulacrum, the avant-garde utopia of the integral work of art, and the transformation of historical cultures by the mass media) defines the contemporary notion of the global spectacle as a universally fulfilled Great Theater of the World. The first negative condition for the aesthetic constitution of the spectacle entails the destruction of individual experience of reality, which the

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avant-garde carried out in a series of actions that were in their day scandalous, from the objets trouvées of surrealism to the ready-mades by Duchamp. As its positive conclusion, it includes the staging and aestheticization of individual existence, from videos to the design of everyday spaces, and the production of reality—whether it be a natural cataclysm or a scientific war—as a real work of art. Ranging from the radio propaganda of political leaders at the beginning of the last century to the online construction, in our own day, of war pornography, the spectacle of late industrialism has subverted all the norms, values, and order of our social existence. This subversion does not only undercut eighteenth and nineteenth-century notions of enlightenment and democracy, but also the most intimate rhythms of our emotional lives. On the one hand, spectacle has transformed our individual lives into variants on a thematic performance that has already been designed for us. On the other, it has reduced us to the condition of being passive spectators of a representation that we experience both as belonging to us and being someone else’s. It simultaneously fascinates and terrifies. The assumption that the character of human existence is at best virtual and fanciful, the determination to equate life with a dream, the fictionalization and aestheticization of reality into a mystifying Fata Morgana was an insistent literary and artistic motif of the Baroque, and of the repressive conception of life due to Counter-Reformist Catholicism, which sustained it. Reality was a theater; and life was consequently redefined as the ephemeral virtuality of dramatic acts and actors. This same ideal, which transfigures existence into a universe of delusions and chimeras, and which distorts, fragments, or otherwise simply evaporates our experience of reality, was the central propagandistic motif of the surrealist programs for a new golden age, announced in the 1930s by Dalí and Buñuel. The existential condition of the normal spectator in no way differs from that of a coup d’etat that gets theatrically staged as the triumph of democracy, or from that of a war that winds up being represented as a video-game. Marx’s critical theory, Freud’s analysis of culture, or Simmel’s critique of the monetary rationality that governs life in industrial cities revealed constellations related to this late-modern spectacle. Under the concept of alienation or Entfremdung, Marx analyzed the structural process of impoverishment of human experience linked to the industrial work that underlies the hyperreal production of the mercantile value of objects. The critical theory of that Entfremdung unraveled as the correlate of the de-­realization of human existence in the process of social reproduction.

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In the context of his analysis of daily life in industrial cities, Simmel posed the same phenomenon from the point of view of the theatricality and anonymity imposed by the rationalization and quantification of intersubjective relations in industrialized cities. Both he and Benjamin highlighted the increasing emotional and social abstraction that the anonymous and rational processes of production and consumption carried with them, and the subsequent fetishization of partial aspects of everyday existence. The problem of instinctual renunciation, frustration and aggressiveness, studied by psychoanalysis, pointed in a complementary direction: the growth of violent and destructive psychic forces, which tended toward the disintegration of the human personality and of society alike. But the forms of perception of reality and of human interaction mediated by electronic communication and information systems point to a new and different dimension with respect to the landscapes contemplated by the most critical sociology of the early twentieth century. At issue now is not only the impoverishment of human experience, social disintegration or the extinction of self-conscious existence. What is at stake is its supplantation by the techniques and aesthetics of recognition and production of reality, from 5G to AI. The critique of the industrial production of human consciousness, inaugurated by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1947, on the basis of the social experience of European National Socialism and of the North American cultural industry, constitutes a step forward in the analysis of the modern overcoming of the concept of autonomous consciousness in the sense in which Kant had defined it, that is, as “humanity’s departure from self-imposed immaturity” or Unmündigkeit—a word that comes from the roots mündee, mondig and myndig, which are related to the significance of the “mouth” and, through it, to the exercise of one’s own sovereignty (Kant 1964, p. 493). But Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique ended here: with the problem of the disarticulation of autonomous consciousness under the conditions of advanced capitalism and the critique of modern forms of a technically defined totalitarianism. Today the problem lies in the supplantation and extinction of the human by artificial intelligence, in the same sense that the medieval legend of the Golem imagined it in the Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe. It is a matter of acceding to the patterns imposed by instrumental epistemologies and of yielding, as Schreber’s metaphor would have it, to Denkzwang, to coercive thought; at issue, in other words, is compliance with the forms of behavior that instrumental reason imposes on us.

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In the 1980s, it was often said that the error committed by the authors of the Dialektik der Aufklärung lay in their axis mundi: the ideal of a self-­ conscious and autonomous existence in the sense that the European Enlightenment had defined, from Rousseau to Beethoven and from Goethe to Nietzsche. Such an objection is entirely irrelevant today, when the liquidation of the subject—understood in that ideal sense of freedom and sovereignty linked to modern democratic revolutions—has become a triviality which the monopolies of digital software and administrative propaganda cynically mock. The truly relevant historical limitation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the means of reproduction and communication rather resides in the fact that they omitted what we can see today as the final consequence of its development: the complete transformation of human consciousness derived, on the one hand, from the elimination of its functions of apperception, experience and interpretation of reality and, on the other, from systems of production and technical reproduction that replace both our experience of reality and our very existence.

The End of Discourses; The Triumph of Linguistics In the 1960s, independent thought and art imploded. They were displaced and eventually replaced by empty slogans that declared “the end of ideology” and “the end of grand discourses.” These postmodern slogans were also however the consequence of the intellectual limitations of the political resistance of those years, of the subsequent programmatic vacuum, and of its consequent dogmatic and authoritarian ravages. These limits notwithstanding, the anti-philosophical standard commanded the scholarly and scholastic masses to prohibit any philosophical reflection that dared unite the heavens of modern metaphysics and anti-­ metaphysics with the hells of the “Verdammte dieser Erde.”5 A reactionary avant-garde of postmodernist thinkers used “the end of philosophy” and of its “grand narratives” to undermine the humanitarian idealism that had crystallized during the protests against industrial capitalism, its wars, its social crises, and its spectacles. This academic offensive against negative dialectics essentially disparaged any critical project that questioned the metaphysical foundations of the West, and the ultimately destructive consequences of capitalist expansion. 5

 “The wretched of the earth,” from The International anthem.

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The proliferation ad nauseum of “posts” and “endings” that marked the close of the twentieth century should be interpreted as a sign of spiritual surrender, of social decline, and of artistic and intellectual regression, commonly alluded to by the term Postmodern. Nor should this nihilism of the end times be taken to be anything particularly new. It merely announces the culmination of a regressive process that had been announced already by the leaders of European philosophical thought in the nineteenth century. Four examples of fulfilled negative prophecies: the transformation of the city into a functionalist mega-machine (Tönnies), the reconstitution of the human psyche as an intellectual system organized around binary logic and monetary calculation (Simmel), or the discovery of a political, biological, and symbolic association of human sexual energy with the unconscious desire to kill and destroy (Freud). Indeed, even before these thinkers, Nietzsche had already predicted that the will-to-nothingness and the epistemological emptying of the modernized human soul marked the beginning of the disintegration of the Enlightenment, and announced its necessary consequences: a permanent global war waged with increasingly destructive technologies. Wittgenstein formulated the ultimate consequence of this nihilistic logic in his Tractatus Philosophicus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”6 This imposition of silence—man muss schweigen: one must keep silent—was pronounced from the most abstract peaks of scientific epistemology: logical positivism. This was an imposition of silence that targeted reflection: not to speak, not to express oneself, not to communicate, and to do so in deference, not to the power represented by the latest metaphysical truths, but to the formal rigor of knowledge. The mantra of the Tractatus imposed positivist silence on everything that could not be formulated according to rigorous binary logic, mechanical physics, mercantilist rationality or the epistemologies of artificial intelligence. As concerns human reality, whether understood from the point of view of its psychology or its history, this school of thought was to have nothing to say at all: “one must be silent.” It is interesting to note, however, that Wittgenstein did not emphasize the prohibition of human expression and communication themselves. The emphasis of this sentence does not stress “schweigen” or keeping silent; it falls instead on “man”—on the trans-subjective and anonymous 6

 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

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psychological identity that the word “man” represents. According to this reasoning, hermeneutical, psychological or historical consciousness must be silenced, not as an end in and of itself, but rather as a logical, impersonal and systemic necessity. In conformance with this epistemological imposition of silence, every expression of individual intellectual or artistic creation is discredited as mere fiction, as it is deemed to lack the objectivity of authentic scientific knowledge; similarly, every ethical reflection on individual and historical human existence is determined to be devoid of any epistemologically sanctioned validity. This silence spells the death sentence, encrypted in logical-transcendental terminology, of the intellectual. The lasting effect of this prohibition, which has been assumed by the corporate organization of the humanities, by museums that administer and govern over aesthetic expressions and, first and foremost, by the small, intimate, chummy world of finance and politics, has been the exact opposite of what positivist rationalism presumed it would be. Our daily experience of social and historical reality is not homogeneous, nor is it transparent; it is rather conflictive and opaque. The effect of this prohibition has been to neutralize signifiers and to silence words even before they can be pronounced. The ultimate consequence of this prohibition is a humanity that has grown silent in the face of increasing ecological catastrophes, military crises, and scandals of political corruption. The linguistic manipulation of discourses—in national socialism through the synthesis of radio and cinema, and in the neoliberal era through the electronic media—dissolves the signifiers without which any human can possibly articulate their individual experience of reality with the logical unity of a judgment. As Orwell announced in his novel 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength… This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs” (Orwell 1961, pp.  15, 35). Hugo von Hoffmanstahl formulated the conclusion to this deterioration in A letter: “I experienced an inexplicable discomfort when expressing the words ‘Spirit,’ ‘Soul,’ ‘Body’… the abstract words that language uses naturally to put any Judgment in the light of day melted in my mouth like rotten mushrooms … zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilze” (2014, p. 40).

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Anti-humanist Humanities Academic departments of literature in which literary works cannot and should not be interpreted; psychology departments that have abandoned modern phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions for the benefit of psychopharmacology and artificial intelligence; institutes of philosophy in which reflection on the great philosophical systems of thought, including their relationship with our past and future, has been supplanted by micro-­ analyses and scientific-technical epistemes; departments of classical Greek and Latin cultures, and of oriental studies, that have been completely dissolved; entire sections of artistic and literary studies trimmed down to such an extent that all that is left of them is a disfigured remnant. The specialized and scholastic training of teachers, the absence of general normative categories around the enlightening meaning of education from the point of view of the development of human sensitivity and intelligence, the general subordination of educational systems and networks to the formats of electronic communication, the progressive deterioration of both rigor and hermeneutic fantasy, the suppression of philosophical reflection in all academic practices: these are some basic points of reference in the landscape of ignorance, mediocrity and arrogance that characterizes the best and the worst universities in the United States, Brazil or Germany. The end of the humanities? Post-humanities and anti-humanists? As a concept, humanism is rather complex. Its origin can be traced back to the first European enlightenment in twelfth-century Cordoba, with thinkers such as Ibn Rushd and Maimonides in the vanguard. The artists and intellectuals of fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe were humanists who opened the doors of European memories to the ideals of the Greco-­ Roman world and to Eastern traditions. Paracelsus, who was a magician and an alchemist, a philosopher, astrologer, and doctor, as well as an implacable critic of the imperialisms of his time, was in the most rigorous sense of the word a humanist. Another notable figure of the sixteenth century was Erasmus, whose critique of the dogmatic prerogatives dictated by the imperial Roman Church set the stage for a liberating Christian morality. The next stage in the historical definition of secular and philosophical humanism is represented by the great names of modern German philosophy: from Schelling to Adorno. In this contemporary sense, Martin Buber’s ethic, which is simultaneously secular and mystical, or Ernst

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Bloch’s expressionist philosophical system articulated around the rational principle of hope or Prinzip Hoffnung, are also humanistic. Fascism and the world wars destroyed this humanist tradition precisely because it was motivated by an enlightening and revolutionary will. The two milestones representing the genocidal logic of the West in the twentieth century, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, imposed an abrupt end to the ethical principles that supported the concepts of science and civilization of the British Enlightenment, the French Les Lumières and the German Aufklärung. The values of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Droits du homme et du citoyen were instantly diluted in a world of mounting military confrontations and theaters of terminal biological destruction. The paradise of democratic social equality flourishing in nature, the logos that Spinoza and Beethoven so fruitfully represented, was internally divided and finally collapsed. That is why the humanism of the twentieth century is decidedly negative: Freud and the vision of humanity driven to destroy itself for the sake of satisfying an erotic drive associated with the will to technological and political domination: a sacrifice of humanity on the altars of the god Eros, who himself has submitted to the power of a Todestrieb or “death instinct.” This negative humanism reaches a culminating artistic expression in Kafka’s novel The Trial or in the schizophrenia that Judge Schreber depicted in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. And over the course of the twentieth century, the great tradition of western humanism dies. This end time, and the corresponding disintegration of Western civilization, which we witness today in climate crises, biological crises and military conflagrations throughout the world, is not, however, the undisputed divine destiny that its global administrators claim it to be. And the massive destruction of languages, gods and cultural memories of ancient peoples in the four corners of the world is not the implacable will of some absolute God who has providentially defined the destiny of Western civilization. This logos of History does not mean that we are doomed to a fatal fall in the apocalyptic kingdom of nothingness that Christianity has reiterated since Saint John. Humanistic reflection on the human condition cannot ignore the negative perspective of a biologically, politically, and militarily threatened future. But it also cannot sit idly by in the absence of foresight and purveyance that characterize neoliberal reason. You cannot remain in a state of paralysis when faced with a Voided Void. The humanism of Kafka’s anguish is a model worth keeping in mind. All his characters presuppose this end

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time. But Kafka narrates with perfect realism a will that aims to resist this nihilistic principle, even when it is but a final protest in the face of death. His final words in The Trial are revealing in this respect: “Wie ein Hund!” (Kafka 1990, p. 312). In its most archaic and pure expression, the negative humanism of this positive resistance against the complete dissolution of human cultures is represented today by the shaman Davi Yanomami. His existential resistance is based on a sensitive and supersensitive relationship with nature as a principle of being and as a sacred reality. Its spiritual apex is the harmony of the human and the uncreated and creative cosmos. In the most developed expressions of this sacred being, both in the Vedic and Hindu religions, and in Buddhist cosmology and anthropology, this micro and macrocosmic unity is expressed in a myriad of male and female gods, representatives of the creative force of love, of the destructive power of death, and of the eternal cycles of life and death. One of the most elementary and eloquent contemporary intellectual expressions of this humanism that resists the self-destruction of humanity can be found in Robert Junk’s testimony of the modern nuclear state founded on the ashes of the holocausts of Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Modern humanism is also a re-awakening of the hidden memories of antiquity. At issue here is the highest spirituality of the Buddhist and Taoist traditions, together with the myths of the Mother Goddesses uncovered on the psychoanalytic couches of C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann. In this regard, humanism is a reconstruction of the intimate dialogue between myth and logos, and between religion and philosophy, which Karl Kerényi formulated in his Humanistische Seelenforschung. It comprehends as well the mythological humanism and enlightening power that Thomas Mann opposed to the fascist myths of the West. This humanism, which I have tried to depict in four broad strokes, should govern, today more than ever, the meaning of our systems of higher education. But in the administrative centers of this educational system there is nobody who takes, or even seems capable of taking, this step. They do not take it, in the first place, because the figure of the intellectual as self-reflective consciousness of our historical time has been suppressed and supplanted by the micro-intellectual; and this has occurred with the approval of that same corporate administration of knowledge that rejects the humanist tradition. The administrated micro-intellectual lacks a universal consciousness; he lacks an individual will of his own; and he has condensed the field of his reflection to the physical dimensions of his

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laptop. He has abandoned the two most elementary criteria of moral and intellectual independence: to never acknowledge the territories and jurisdictions of administrated knowledge, and to always trespass, with the creative force of the imagination, its blind rituals of bureaucratic control. The micro-intellectual is a disciplined cog in the inscrutable mega-­ machines of knowledge. He is, at the same time, both the requirement and the privileged favorite of this very same corporate machine that produces knowledge by segregating it into linguistically guarded fields of study. Together with his deconstructive function and the resulting dissolution of humanistic knowledge into micro-knowledges and micro-logistics, the micro-intellectual speaks the uniform metalanguage of the post-­ humanist humanities: the politically correct language of queer studies, feminism, transgender studies, multiculturalism, human rights, and cultural studies. This segmentation and limitation of the micro-intellectual’s field of vision and self-reflection is accompanied by a hyperinflation of the virtual world in which everything—from biological reproduction to scientific warfare, and their resulting waste lands—is reduced to metaphors, allegories, signs, and fictions, among other entelechies. Over the last two decades, this internal division of knowledge has become the breeding ground for a new scholasticism. Its fundamental postulate has been the Biblical principle of the grammatical constitution of being from its signifier in Genesis 1:3. According to this premise, the work of art is pure rhetoric. From archaic gods to infomercials, everything is speech and text. Music, painting, and literature are not an intellectual and spiritual reflection of the social, historical, and cosmic reality. Nor do they constitute an experience that is at the same time individual and collective. Nor are they traversed by a will to create, transform, transgress and express the events of human life. They are nothing more than linguistic conventions. Of all the negative consequences of this hermeneutical reductionism, the most destructive by far is its dogmatic claim to scientific objectivity. According to this reductionist logic, a rigorous investigation of a cultural event or artistic expression must necessarily be a reproductive reconstruction; it can never entail an illuminating, liberating or creative heuristic. The assumption underlying this logical-transcendental claim of objectivity is that the past can be positively fixed once and for all as a terminal, definitive and immovable object, thus shutting the doors, once and for all, on any creative reflection on the future that is based on a recollection of our memories of the past: an act of creativity that is inherent to all

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hermeneutics that are humanistic and profoundly concerned with the significance of human life. This anti-humanist and anti-human vacuum, with its automated jargons and grammars that are devoid of any historical, philosophical, or artistic referents, is not, however, just an intra-academic problem. It rather defines the principle objective that motivates the regressive process of our techno-scientific, western and capitalist civilization considered as a whole. Today, this vacuum fulfills the same social functions that the religious and political ideologies of the nineteenth century played in the cultures of Europe and the Americas. It is the emptiness of the redemptive cross of Christianity combined with the emptiness of the capitalist ideology of human liberation through progress. And it is the Voided Void that Liebeskind conjured in his ethnocidal gas chamber in the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin and Michael Arad in the bottomless depths of the black omphalos of Ground Zero-Manhattan. These politically correct jargons and speeches replace the literary, artistic and intellectual experience of reality with signs, metaphors, allegories and images that are completely autonomous with respect to that reality itself, just as if they were the a priori categories and schemas of the Critique of Pure Reason. But unlike Kant’s formal categories, institutional languages are endowed with a motivating force that is much more powerful than the reflective experience of any individual. This is why their use is fundamentally rhetorical and their function is propagandistic. It is why the icons of feminism have been used globally as means to legitimize bloody military occupations; and why human rights are hoisted like banners in the continuous crusades and wars of the West. Cultural Studies, which postulate the interpretation of works of art on the basis of categories and schemes that are exogenous to those works themselves, constitute the supreme philosophical expression of this hermeneutical catastrophe. According to these postulates, it would be perfectly legitimate to write an entire doctoral thesis on the latent homosexuality in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s dialectical relationship, with no other basis than a grotesque scene in Sierra Morena in which the former undresses in front of his vassal. On the basis of the same logic, the censorship of a doctoral thesis on the trickster as the mythological nucleus of Don Quixote can be rationalized, since from the mutilated anti-humanist perspective of cultural studies the definition of the trickster is mythological and, therefore, must remain in the dark.

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But these methodological limitations are only a secondary consequence of the departmentalized micro-politics associated with these anti-­humanist jargons. In the end, the primary objective of cultural studies has little to do with the sociological whims and preferred identities of its practitioners. What matters is that they negate the ability of any literary or artistic work to effectively reflect the human condition and its historical reality. The sustaining aim of cultural studies has been to usurp the independent voice of the intellectual and place it under the tutelage of self-­ proclaimed institutional experts. Nor should we ignore its penultimate collateral damage: the proponents of cultural studies constituted themselves as experts precisely by turning their backs on the dislocation of critical intellectuals, which in 1968 had extended itself throughout the humanities, from anti-psychiatry to the critique of the society of spectacle. The objectives of this anti-humanist demolition of critical intelligence were of course always pious: to sequester and negate intellectual intentionality, to domesticate and neutralize the historical and political commitment of theory, and to vaporize the will-to-transformation of the humanist intellectual, which has always been intimately related to any authentically literary, philosophical, or artistic thought, from Don Quixotte to Doktor Faustus.

Forms of Light The gods Agni, Prometheus, and Quetzalcoatl represent three principle objectives of enlightenment: knowledge, education, and emancipation. Agni created fire as the means of physical survival and spiritual enlightenment. By means of a furtive trick, Prometheus stole the sacrificial fire of Zeus in order to forge the technologies that would allow human civilization to arise. Quetzalcoatl elevated this human civilization to the heights of the arts, writing, science, and philosophy, and devotion to the divine. It was on these solid mythological foundations that the modern intellectual of the West built the philosophical ideology of universal enlightenment. Socrates provided an historical model of enlightenment. This Athenian philosopher created maieutics as a method of knowledge that was articulated in terms of one’s own memory and intelligence, and organized around an enlightening experience of such knowledge. In one of his dialogues, he went so far as to transform an uneducated slave into a geometer and mathematician through this same maieutic pedagogy. Furthermore, Socrates created an intellectual community that pursued

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philosophical knowledge in its highest expression: hermeneutical rigor, an ethical system, and a political order founded on perfect laws. It was the moral example of the intellectual as representative of the ethos in the polis and the cosmos; representative of the physical and metaphysical order of a cosmos that Hinduism and Buddhism have defined with the category of dharma. One of the more important aspects of the intellectual, if not the most fundamental, is his criticism; his resistance to injustice and oppression; his willingness to say No. Throughout modern history, this criticism and resistance have at times been quite effective; other times, they have withered. None of the great transformations of the modern era—from the cosmological revolution of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno to the mystical and revolutionary uprisings of Thomas Münzer or Tupac Amaru to the modern political revolutions led by Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Mahatma Gandhi—could have taken place without the lights of rational knowledge and ethical criticism that these same names represent. On countless occasions, this criticism, this ethical and metaphysical character of protest, this decision to say No, has confronted dark systems of domination, their means of censorship, and strategies of destruction. The failure of the artist, the end of the intellectual, the death of the spirit and their replacement by mere simulations: these are the trophies of this war of darkness against enlightenment. Both the mythological figure of Prometheus and the Socratic method are famous examples in the intellectual history of the West, not only of such confrontations, but also of the intellectual’s defeat at the hands of these forces of darkness. A vengeful Zeus ordered Prometheus to be chained and subjected to eternal tortures; while an Athenian court sentenced Socrates to death by poisoning. In modern Europe, that same dark star was formulated by Hölderlin with his Empedocles: the enlightening prophet who, pursued by the mob, throws himself into Etna, leaving behind one of his espadrilles as the last testimony of his vision. The intellectual has been an emancipatory figure who has transformed, over and over again, the blind becoming of history and given it a human sense and meaning. For this reason, he has been the object of intrigues and conspiracies, which have often ended in exiles, prisons, and even death. Giordano Bruno is a paradigmatic example: he endured seven years of imprisonment and torture in the dungeons of the Vatican, where, after having his tongue ripped out of his mouth because he had defended the

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conception of a creative, but uncreated, harmonic and infinite cosmos, he was sacrificed in the bonfires of the Inquisition. In our contemporary world, the intellectual is necessarily a negative consciousness. Philosophically his thought has been configured from critical theories; sociologically, he has been confronted with the differences between races, social classes, genders, peoples and nations; ethically he has collided with an impoverished and increasingly damaged daily reality. This negative conscience has been articulated through a series of voices of protest, both in philosophy and in the arts, against a divided society and reality, against the instrumental postulates that govern their production processes, and against the global power of destruction administered by the political, financial and military mega-machines. The intellectual consciousness of our end time says No to a society subjected to an instrumental reason that regards with utter indifference the ecological and human damage due to its expansion. It says No to a civilization founded on electronic entertainment and surveillance. No to the perpetuation of wars. The modern intellectual gives voice to a resounding No that can only be compared to Kassandra’s prophetic prediction of the destruction of Troy: a negation of negation that ends up being fulfilled because no one either understands or listens to it.

One Spring Day “I see two great civilizing forces that anticipate the future of humanity,” pronounced a professor at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, to an audience of graduating students. It was the end of 2019. “One of these forces is self-destructive, self-dissolving and self-annihilating,” he stressed with an emphatic gesture. Today we are witnessing the universal signs of this global dissolution. Class conflicts, ethnic clashes, wars of religion, biological attacks. Imperial wars of territorial control and contention in the four corners of the world. Technological wars for control and monopoly of electronic propaganda and surveillance networks. Bloody wars of submission and plunder of entire nations. Wars to infiltrate the legal and illegal networks of trafficking. Massive destruction of cities and ecosystems. And, above all, the great spectacle of the commercial, military and electronic replacement of the world. This process of self-dissolution is nourished both by the formal rationality and the material irrationality that drive the march of postmodern capitalism toward a technologically brilliant but humanly catastrophic future.

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On the other hand, we have the centripetal forces of the electronic concentration of power, and the anonymous networks of manipulation and control of human existence; and we can clearly foresee its global expansion through corporate propaganda and information systems, and through electronic surveillance and punishment agencies.

The audience reacted to these words with uneasiness and some agitation. It would be wrong to say that they were completely hostile to this dark vision of the historical present. But they were definitely not in support of it. Regardless, they couldn’t simply deny the professor’s brazen arguments. Some of his negative remarks, such as the allusion to climate and biological catastrophes, or the indefinite expansion of a global war against terrorism, were already familiar to them. But this audience could not cease consuming signs, not even for a moment. The younger ones among them seemed rather fascinated by the magical powers of electronic gadgets, and felt protected by their hand-held universal surveillance cameras. What is more, there was a problem with the language that the professor spoke, and with his cold tone and distant gaze as well. After all, the clear reflections that he was seeking to share, which expressed a desire to penetrate to the darkest depths of the past and the present, are infrequently found in the small-minded world of academia. And, when all is said and done, it is also true that the most difficult task that any young man or woman can face, either emotionally or intellectually, is to reflect on the truncated, mutilated, and interrupted character of our present era. The professor closed his talk with a resounding declaration: “The global price of this disorder is the massive destruction of natural and urban habitats, and the forced displacement and migration of millions of human beings. The consequence of this involuntary process is conflict of all kinds—ethnic, religious, social, and economic; and the subsequent expansion of both traditional and modern forms of control: from military concentration camps, which today hold more than seventy million human beings globally, to universal electronic surveillance, through laptops, cameras and smartphones.” In the conference room, the nervous tension that these words generated could be felt for a few moments. A depressing heaviness hung in the air, mixing with everyone’s recognition of their own intellectual

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limitations, of their socially impotent condition, even or precisely in the face of such extreme crises. “The terrible, industrially-induced, ecological and humanitarian catastrophes that characterize our time are and always will be inevitable,” added this intellectual. “The democratic possibilities of human control over the global causes of this concatenation of catastrophes—which directly affect food cycles, the survival of megacities, the preservation of self-governance and the survival of humanity itself—are, at best, precarious. Such is the case despite or precisely because democracy today depends on corporate economic and institutional interests, and an all-too-human will to power.” The professor paused at this juncture to document his conclusions based on a hemispheric example: the migratory crisis in Mesoamerica and its dire consequences, on both sides of the Rio Grande. This is a crisis that affects the lives of millions of survivors, and a geographic region that includes people everywhere between Bogota and New York. But the professor underlined the causes of this crisis in open disagreement with the tendency to conceal them allegorically: a combination of climatic devastations generated by the succession of major storms and droughts in Central America; and the corrupt and authoritarian regimes that obey the dictates of global financial and political networks. He then continued: “The consequences of these regressive processes are foreseeable and predictable. Food chains will break down and the new geopolitical frontiers of hunger will be radicalized. The masses of displaced people will increase and their military confinement in concentration camps will intensify. Social and military conflicts will likewise diversify and intensify. Full propaganda and electronic surveillance will become increasingly necessary as the everyday experience of world disorder becomes more acute and unsustainable. Finally, the values and codes of democratic conduct, deconstructed under the lobbying power of the corporate and military mega-machines, will dissolve like vapor in the midst of the increasing digital control and expansion of electronic propaganda, surveillance, and systems of punishment.” Suddenly, the professor jumped up and, without any preamble, offered a Prinzip Hoffnung.7 This hopeful vision began with a digression on the different civilizing constellations of techno-scientific and industrial development, from the Paleolithic to the current era of global warming. And he 7  Das Prinzip Hoffnung (“The Principle of Hope”) is a work by Ernst Bloch that was written between 1938 and 1947 during his exile in the United States.

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placed a great deal of emphasis on the noble Greek arché of Promethean philanthropy, which defines technology as a means toward human development. He then distinguished this Promethean humanism from the military conception of progress, which is based in a strictly cumulative economic principle, and a negative concept of power as control, containment, and punishment. Finally, he pointed to the substantial difference between the human science symbolized by the mythological fire of the Vedic god Agni and a satanic and evil science, whose modern expression par excellence is the nuclear bomb. With this distinction in mind, the professor proceeded to define a rigorous ideal of enlightenment. He affirmed the autonomy of the individual’s reflective experience of all things—be they natural or manmade—as the “sacred foundation” of enlightenment. “Enlightenment is knowledge and autonomy; it is also the open communication of this knowledge in the face of a natural and political reality that is increasingly threatening to undermine the existential and spiritual autonomy of the individual,” he pronounced with a decisive gesture. And he then called on his audience to reformulate the abstract categories of freedom by integrating them into an individual and collective ethical responsibility, and into a system of solidarity in the sense of the philanthropy that Aeschylus attributed to the ultimate god of enlightenment: Prometheus. Next, he outlined an educational project. He titled it “Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction.” At one extreme, he pointed to the need for a critique of the imperialisms of yesterday and today, without any unprincipled theological or political distinctions. At issue, he argued, was not merely a theoretical critique, but one that is real, functional and pragmatic. A critique, in other words, of the evident threats that the imperialisms of yesterday and today pose to the survival of world cultures and of humanity itself. At another extreme, he pointed to the need for a redefinition of freedom and democracy in an era that is dominated by the corporate production of the times and spaces of an artificial, manipulative, and alienating reality: the spectacle. With this criticism of the spectacle and its corporate power, he sketched out the profile of a critical theory of modern totalitarianisms. As a happy ending, the professor briefly defined the role of the intellectual as an educator who guides his pupils, whether by means of musical, literary, artistic or philosophical composition, toward the highest spiritual values of his age. In this respect, he clarified he was referring specifically to Eros and the feminism of the future.

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Discreet applause arose in response to these declarations … that one spring day on the campus of the University of Campinas, Brazil.

Voided Void Emptiness and nothingness. The experience of anguish and nausea when faced with the future of human history in an era of global warming. Ever-­ increasing global financial and military tensions and a globally paralyzed politics. This has been the fundamental experience expressed in music, literature and art since 1945. In the sixteenth century, the mystical formula of this emptiness was the concept of nonada under which Saint Teresa of Avila consummated her marriage of the Christian soul with the absolute spirit. In the twentieth century, its metaphysical expression par excellence has been the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre. Being-for-­ death and being-for-nothing, and the subsequent experience of nausea in the face of the void of existence, were thus elevated to the epiphany of absolute freedom in an age of genocides, nuclear war, and massive environmental destruction. In the twenty-first century, the same confrontation of our existence with nothingness is represented by Libeskind’s Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, and by Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence at Ground Zero in Manhattan. In the Jewish museum there is an “Axis of Destruction” that crosses its expressionist spaces and culminates in the Holocaust Turm, the warning tower that crowns its architectural composition. A massive steel door leads into this tower built like a gigantic sacrificial fireplace. The trapezoidal construction of its interior space and the clash of light at one end with darkness at the bottom generate a powerful upward dynamic that beguiles the visitor, transporting him for a moment beyond his material existence to the sacred universe of human sacrifice and death. In one corner lie, thrown in heaps on the ground, the masks or souls of the slain men and women. The light streaming from above seems to raise them in an indefinite process of transubstantiation. The construction of this space makes us perceive the emotion of emptiness. We are overcome by the sensation that it absorbs us, until we evaporate into nothingness.

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Koyaanisqatsi In the oral literature of the Hopi, the memory of which has been destroyed by successive waves of Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon missionary colonialism, koyaanisqatsi designated a terminal situation of disorder and disintegration that, in the first place, affected the religious values and customs of the community, but which, at the same time, included the interruption of the reproductive cycles of nature, ultimately threatening the existence of humanity and of the entire cosmos. Conceived from this point of view, which is at once cosmic and spiritual, Koyaanisqatsi signifies a radical imbalance of the self. Under the influence of this disequilibrium, humanity ends up destroying itself (Malotki 2002, 124 and ff.). (Translated by C. Britt)

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. 1977. Erfahrung und Armut. In W.  B. Gesammlete Schriften, vol. II. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag. Debord, Guy. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet Chastel. Einstein, Albert. 1954. Ideas and opinions. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. I. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. ———. 1984. In The Foucault reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New  York: Pantheon Books. Horkheimer, M., and Th.W. Adorno. 1947. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Amigo Verlag. Kafka, Franz. 1990. Der process. New York: Schocken Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1964. Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? In Werke in Sechs Bände, ed. I. Kant and W. Weischedel, vol. VI. Frankfurt a. M. Kluge, Friedrich. 1953. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kopenawa Yanomami, Davi. 2013. The falling sky. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Malotki, Ekkehart, ed. 2002. Hopi tales of destruction. London: University of Nebraska Press. Orwell, George. 1961. 1984. Penguin Putnam Inc. Schreber, Daniel Paul. 1973. Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. Frankfurt a. M: Verlag Ullstein. ———. 1988. Memoirs of my nervous illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo. 2014. Ein Brief. Hamburg: Wallstein Verlag. Wright Mills, C. 1959. Power, politics and people. New York: Ballantine Books.

CHAPTER 2

Humanism in an Age of Anti-humanism Christopher Britt

Willed Amnesia No matter what the event—be it a global pandemic like Covid-19 or the use of pesticides at a local community garden—Americans are sure to polemicize it. Over the course of the last fifty years or so, political culture in America has become so divided that Americans now separate predictably along hardened partisan lines: Red states versus blue states; Big-­ business neoliberals versus big-government socialists; Creationism versus evolution; The anti-vaccine movement versus modern epidemiology; White Anglo-Saxon fundamentalist evangelical megachurches versus multicultural and multiracial liberal universities … ad infinitum. In spite of the evident ideological rift and virulent rhetoric that separate the two sides of this long-disputed Culture War, these warring parties are much closer to each other in outlook than either would probably care to acknowledge. America’s Culture War is grounded on shared anti-humanist suppositions. Thus, rather than conceive of this cultural and ideological rift as a war, we would do much better to understand it as a prolonged bout of paranoid shadow boxing. Frightened by the shadows of America’s techno-scientific inhumanity—shadows that extend from as far back as the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the more recent medically indorsed torture of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—the American psyche has split itself in two. In order to sustain their respective claims to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Britt, E. Subirats, Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9_2

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innocence, each half transfers onto the other its unshakable sense of shame, guilt, and resentment. The name of this game is to blame. The parties aligned along either side of this partisan divide agree that the culprit behind America’s perceived moral decline is modernity. Accordingly, those on the right proudly present themselves as anti-­ modernists, while those on the left proclaim to have moved beyond modernity altogether, referring to themselves smugly as postmodernists. In either case, they accuse the self-assured hubris of enlightened humanism for sinking America into the vortex of moral and political decadence from which it now seems incapable of escaping. Progress has always been a mainstay of modern humanist thinking, from the rationalist visions of universal human peace and prosperity set forth in the eighteenth century by Kant and Condorcet to the positivist evolutionary schemes devised by Comte and Spencer in the nineteenth century. Reason, according to this tradition, was supposed to free mankind from both the superstitious tyrannies of the mythological mind and the political tyrannies of absolute sovereigns, while also empowering mankind, by means of modern science and technology, to command the powers of nature and determine the ultimate course of human history. Conservatives, however, have tended to view this notion of progress as a secular plot designed to undermine traditional family, communal, and religious values. For their part, progressives have come to understand the universal values associated with humanity’s progress toward enlightenment as a hypocritical subterfuge by means of which European and North American imperialists have surreptitiously sought to mask social and political inequality, imbalanced power relations, and the plutocratic will to dominance of the 1% over the 99%. It is on this shared ground of anti-humanist views of reason that the two extremes meet. They are both suspicious of science: be it the science of biology that right-­ wing deniers of evolution and global warming feverishly denounce, or the sciences of humanity—the so-called human sciences—that left-wing deniers of reason’s emancipating power compulsively condemn. But when it is viewed in the context of US history, this suspicion of science and modernity betrays a will to amnesia. The Evangelical Denial of the Natural Sciences In the nineteenth century, as America expanded westward in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny and its economic might grew on the strength of the

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industrial revolution, evangelicalism combined with modern science and capitalism to create a new synthesis: the idea of America’s providential enlightenment (Britt 2018, p.  38). On this view, the United States of America was thought to have been divinely sanctioned to become a global empire and the guarantor of both perpetual peace and universal prosperity. At issue in this new synthesis was a notion of science that had been associated, from the time of Francis Bacon, with the techno-scientific domination of nature and the expansion of Christian empire across the globe. Aspects of this synthesis were visible already in the intellectual life of colonial New England, where the Puritan clergy cultivated religious virtue alongside scientific knowledge (Hofstadter 1962, p. 61). It was at work as well in the grandiose notions that the Founding Fathers promoted with regard to the historical significance of the United States. Franklin, for instance, spoke of America as the world’s “only honest empire,” Hamilton conceived it as a “republican empire,” while Jefferson envisioned it as an “empire of liberty.” These Founding Fathers agreed that American empire was destined to spread the light of reason and democracy across the globe (Immerman 2010, p. 5). With the advent of evangelicalism after the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, and the subsequent waves of revivalist renewals that would follow over the course of the nineteenth century, the providential aspect of this American synthesis came to predominate over the enlightened, rational, and scientific. Unlike the Puritans, for whom scientific and humanistic learning remained important avenues for enhancing religious virtue, revivalists regarded the life of the mind, and rationality in particular, with suspicion. In their quest to recover the spirit of primitive Christianity, they emphasized both a literal understanding of the Bible as the embodiment of truth and an approach to religious virtue that was highly personal and charismatic. Eager to discredit the clergy of institutionalized congregations by denouncing them as “cold and unregenerate,” many revivalists preachers claimed that “not learning but the spirit was important to salvation” and so they set about “commissioning laymen—lay exhorters, as they were called—to carry on the work of conversion” (Hofstadter 1962, pp.  68–69). This meant, among other things, that they “tended to be entrepreneurial and populist, with decentralized denominations and innovative independent organizations” (McAlister 2018, p. 5). Thus, it was on the basis of this openly anti-institutional, anti-­ intellectual, and populist credo that evangelical fundamentalists took on the task of evangelization. First, they would seek to win over the masses,

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many of them semi-literate or even wholly illiterate, in America; and then they would turn their attention to the rest of the world. For in their view, the Kingdom of God was to have no borders (McAlister 2018, p. 290). The religious revivalists of the 1830s and 1840s preached the regeneration of American society in preparation for the millennium. Accordingly, they consecrated America as the New Israel, ascribing to it the power to inaugurate Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth (McDougall 1997, p. 81). Toward the latter half of the nineteenth century, this millenarian understanding of America’s role in universal history combined with enlightened political rhetoric to give shape to the nationalist myth of Manifest Destiny. By integrating America’s experiment of liberty and self-­ government with God’s divine sanction to conquer and colonize the whole of the continent, the myth of Manifest Destiny mobilized Americans not just for continental expansion but for overseas empire as well. This distinctly American synthesis of evangelical zeal and imperial expansion has remained intact to our own day. Let us not forget how, in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration declared that the United States would embark on a “modern crusade” against the “axis of evil” (Bush 2001). Armed with the advanced technology of modern science, the administration set out to “shock and awe” the enemies of America into submission. But while the overwhelming military power that was brought to bear on these enemies was the product of the modern scientific and technological advances made possible by modernity, the moral and political language that justified the use of this power was decidedly pre-modern, providential, and evangelical. Modernity, scientific reasoning, and technology have contributed immensely to the success of the evangelical civilizing project and the creation of a would-be godly kingdom without borders. Over the past one-­ hundred and twenty-five years, as America grew to become a global hegemon, evangelicals have managed to construct an international and multiracial faith community that encompasses the global South, from Uganda to El Salvador and from South Korea to Brazil. In no small measure, this is due to the zeal with which evangelicals participated in America’s imperial expansion—from their proselytizing incursions into the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to their interventionist missions in 1960s Congo and their ongoing and ever-­ expanding presence in the erstwhile Catholic strongholds of Central and South America. The Kingdom of God that they have created may have no borders, but “American evangelicals have yet to craft a politics made to the

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measure of the [modern] world” (McAlister 2018, p. 290). They regularly bemoan their persecution at the hands of a secularized, multicultural, and democratic society whose tolerance they cannot, do not, and will not tolerate. This is true not only as concerns abortion and same-sex marriage but also, and perhaps even more so, the protection of Muslims within the borders of the United States. Fundamentalist evangelicals see Islam as the primary persecutor of Christians around the world. Indeed, they believe that Christian martyrdom remains a “pervasive phenomenon” and it is through this persecutorial lens that they envision a Christian global conflict with Islam (McAlister 2018, p. 289). Interpreting the political conflicts and economic crises of our time as religious conflicts that threaten to undermine the Kingdom of God, evangelicals cannot stomach the apparent indifference with which many of their better educated, scientifically minded, and secular compatriots regard them. In much the same way as they had rejected the ministry of institutional congregations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for being cold-hearted intellectuals, today they reject as liberal elites those who would presume to engage them in rational discussions about Islam, vaccines, or global warming. In spite of all the histrionic acrimony, the historical record demonstrates just how disingenuous evangelicalism’s disavowal of the secular culture of America’s modern democracy actually is. American evangelicals may want to wish the past away, but there is no denying the central role that they have played in the expansion of American empire or vice versa the role that this empire, which is largely based in the techno-scientific superiority of the American military-industrial complex, has played in evangelicalism’s spread throughout the world. From this perspective, evangelicals are less the persecuted martyrs they like to think they are and more the conquerors and colonizers of a Kingdom of God that not only recognizes no borders but also recognizes no limits whatsoever on America’s destructive military and economic might. The Postmodern Rejection of the Human Sciences A similar amnesia and sense of victimhood informs the politically correct identity politics of the left. This heightened sense of persecution, or what Markell conceptualizes as a “politics of recognition,” animates most postmodern movements of collective identity—movements that have been organized around ethnicity, race, language, culture, gender, and sexuality

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and which seek to secure equal respect and esteem for the diverse identities borne by members of pluralistic societies (Markell 2003, p. 2). While the historical links that tie such postmodern movements of identity politics to a rejection of enlightenment, science, and participatory democracy may not be evident to those who identify with these movements, there are no extraordinary powers of perception required to identify these links and locate them properly in their historical context. The identity politics of the left grew out of the post-structuralist critique of the human sciences, which itself grew out of the humanist critique of modern science associated with Romanticism. Romantic thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries opposed the scientific rationalization of human nature promoted by the Enlightenment. They argued that the over-emphasis on the reasoning capacity of humanity served to cripple rather than to empower people. In opposition to this overly rationalized vision of humanity, thinkers such as Herder, Humboldt, and Schiller envisioned human beings “as oriented toward a telos conceived as the harmonious development of all of their various capacities—including, notably, not merely rational but also sensuous and emotional capacities—into a balanced, unified whole” (Herdt 2019, p. 82). Herder, for instance, argued that each culture was capable of arriving at its own peculiar form of perfection or completeness (Herdt 2019, p. 86). For his part, Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that human beings are neither purely rational nor purely sensual. For him, there is a third element in human nature that relates these other two capacities to one another and unites them into a single whole: the imagination (Herdt 2019, p. 120). In keeping with Humboldt’s understanding of the mediating and harmonizing function of imagination, Schiller championed aesthetic education as the proper means to humanity’s self-formation. This was the case because, as he understood it, aesthetic education requires the development, first of all, of “our receptivity to the complex particularities of the world” and, second, of “our active capacity for imposing form via rational comprehension” (Herdt 2019, p. 127). For these romantic thinkers, it was thus not science, but rather art that would allow individuals to fully develop their minds and become, if not thoroughly enlightened, at least engaged in an enlightening process of self-formation. The humanistic tendencies of this romantic critique of Enlightenment rationalization would reach unprecedented clarity in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche developed an aesthetic philosophy based in the irresolvable

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opposition in classical Greek tragedies between an Apollonian will-to-­ order and a Dionysian will-to-chaos. This opposition, he argued, exposed the full spectrum of the human condition. At issue in this theory of tragedy was a process of aesthetic self-formation that Nietzsche identified with the regeneration of noble moral values. The meek, timid, and compliant moderns, he believed, needed to be more like the noble Athenians: proud, mirthful, and independent. But it was not until his Genealogy of Morals (1887) that Nietzsche openly denounced modern science as a secular extension of the Judeo-Christian pessimism, asceticism, and nihilism that he understood to characterize modern decadence. His critique aimed to free humanity from modern science because, as he understood it, science was a secularized form of the ressentiment that had once accounted for the Judeo-Christian revolt in morals. In opposition to this aggrieved moral system of good and evil, Nietzsche held out the hope for a regenerating revolution in morals capable of overcoming the decadence that modernity had inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It was with this profoundly humanist aim in mind that, in his 1885 Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche provocatively proclaimed the death of God and stylized a new ideal of human vitality, that of the Übermensch or Superman. After an arduous process of moral transvaluation, by means of which he would overcome the ascetically mutilated forms of his weakened and sickly modern humanity, Nietzsche’s Superman was to emerge as a revitalizing and life-affirming force. With this radical critique of modern scientific reason, Nietzsche aimed to show that modern European societies, by emphatically opting for the scientific values of instrumental rationalism, had systematically precluded the life-affirming values that could regenerate humanity to a state of health—not unlike that which it had enjoyed in classical Greece, before the Judeo-Christian tradition had managed to undermine classical notions of nobility. The Nazis, famously and infamously, misinterpreted Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman as a philosophical justification of anti-Semitism, German national-imperial jingoism, and totalitarianism. But they were not the only ones to subject Nietzsche’s critique of reason to such an anti-humanist and anti-democratic interpretation. Postmodern French intellectuals of the 1960s constructed a would-be perspectivist Nietzsche whose critique of reason was thought to have culminated in the idea that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” As such, they used Nietzsche to advance an epistemological skepticism that was so extreme it could deconstruct, efface, and ultimately erase the differences between fiction and reality,

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truth and illusion (Wolin 2004, p. 35). Significantly, they turned this radical “hermeneutics of suspicion” against French democracy itself. The Third Republic’s political and military failures, compounded with the ignominies of collaboration under Vichy, suggested to many French intellectuals of the 1960s that the totality of their proudly humanistic, enlightened, and democratic intellectual and political traditions had collapsed (Wolin 2004, p. 219). Not unlike the Nazis in the 1940s, or the Soviets in the 1950s—whose brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 dispelled all fantasies among Western Marxists that the Soviet Union wasn’t also totalitarian—liberal democracy in the 1960s became shrouded in suspicion. From Lacan to Lyotard to Derrida, postmodern French intellectuals came to view democracy itself as a kind of “soft totalitarianism” that was effectively suppressing otherness and difference by privileging the “public reason” and “common good” championed by the bourgeoisie (Wolin 2004, p. 14). The post-structuralist thinker most responsible for this re-­interpretation of Nietzsche as a radical perspectivist was Foucault. In Foucault’s eyes, Nietzsche’s critique of modern scientific reasoning demonstrated that “truth is a thing of this world” and that it must therefore be understood “as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements.” (Foucault 1987, p. 74). Truth, for Foucault, is an assertion of perspectival power; it is a statement that is made from within a modern discourse that is anything but impartial or objective. As such, truth is “linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it” (Foucault 1987, p. 74). On this view, truth winds up being “even more insidious and dangerous than outright claims to power, insofar as, under the guise of objectivity, it systematically strives to mask and conceal its biases” (Wolin 2004, p. 41). At issue in this perspectivist critique of reason is not only the status of truth however; it also involves an anti-humanist rejection of human exceptionalism, historical agency, and political sovereignty. Foucault works out the anti-humanist implications of this radical re-­ interpretation of Nietzsche in his 1966 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Here, Foucault develops a critique of the modern “episteme” that gave rise to the human sciences. Central to his critique is the idea that “before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist … He is a quite recent creature,” he sustains, “which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years

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ago” (1994, p. 308). Tied to this notion of man as a fabrication of the knowledge produced by the episteme of the human sciences is a rejection of the humanist idea that humanity is exceptional, complex, and an agent of history. For Foucault, the notion that humans are capable of shaping their own history is a mere byproduct of linguistic bewitchment: “man is not himself historical … he constitutes himself as subject of history only by the superimposition of the history of living beings, the history of things, and the history of words” (1994, p. 369). According to this way of understanding the modern order of things, when humanists speak of “man’s irreducibility,” of his “invincible transcendence,” or even of his “excessively great complexity” they are speaking of nothing other than a chimera (1994, p. 366). Such is the case, according to Foucault, because the human sciences are a furtive attempt to dominate and rationalize humanity by negating reason’s doubles, its “Others.” Modernity, as Foucault understands it, is defined by what he calls the “analytic of finitude,” which is comprised of doubles that arise in the three areas that the human sciences presume to study and regulate: life, economy, and language. His main contention in this regard is that scientific reason is a mechanism of oppression that works its uncanny magic by way of exclusions, constraints, and prohibitions. Thus, the empirical understanding of life advanced by modern science excludes the transcendental; the Cartesian subject of reason that organizes modern economic modes of production constrains the unthought; and the notion of modern humanity’s historical origin in the Enlightenment prohibits the idea of language’s indeterminate and retreating origin. By means of these omissions, the human sciences have created an image of man that silences, ignores, or otherwise marginalizes the unreasoning aspects of human life and experience. Significantly, Foucault carries out this post-structuralist critique of reason with an anti-humanist zeal comparable only to that of his structuralist predecessor Lévi-Strauss, for whom the goal of the human sciences “was not to constitute, but to dissolve man” (1966, p. 247). From here it is but a short step to Foucault’s repeated intimations and declarations throughout The Order of Things that “man,” as he is conceived by the human sciences, “is a face doomed to be erased in the course of history,” that “man is in the process of disappearing,” and that “one can certainly wager that man [will] be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (1994, pp. 313, 385, 387). Modern man will retreat from life, economy, and language back into the sea of the unconscious and unreasoning

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unthought: the very same mythical sludge from which he first emerged in a reasoned attempt to reach enlightenment. This thoroughgoing cynicism about reason has helped to lay the groundwork for the claims to essential identities that characterize political correctness in America today. Insofar as these claims are essentialist, they are utterly unreasonable and ahistorical. They assert the existence of unchanging essences that are subject neither to historical nor to evolutionary change. They just are; they exist. This existence is not human per se, for insofar as it denies the capacity of human beings to form themselves, to grow, to learn, to invent and create their humanity anew, the purported existence of these essentialist identities is itself the expression of an anti-­ humanist attitude. It is nevertheless on the basis of these essentialized identities that groups aligned on the left often frame their political claims in a larger context of perceived inequality and injustice. They assert group distinctiveness and belonging in an effort to gain power and recognition. The effectiveness of such politics, although its practitioners more often than not deny it, requires the conditions established and maintained by the enlightened political ideals of democracy, freedom, and tolerance: the very same values that they associate with the “soft totalitarianism” of liberal democracy. This politics of recognition is tied to representative systems of democratic self-governance; it is, in this sense, a cultural reworking of political representation. What such a politics of cultural representation does not envision, however, is a participatory democracy in which the agency of independent, self-forming human individuals and cooperative collectivities is paramount. Haven’t You Heard? Man Is Dead! The key to understanding the resolve with which evangelicals and postmodernists reject humanism is that, from their anti-humanist perspective, the modern humanist tradition rests on an instrumental notion of reason. At issue is neither Plotinus’ depiction of reason as the One nor Spinoza’s understanding of nature as a rational and moral totality. Instead, anti-­ humanists fixate on an impoverished notion of reason that effectively strips it of all these vital connections to cosmic moral unity and further reduces it to the status of a mere instrument, a means to an end, a justification for the accumulation of power and wealth. At issue, in other words, is the rejection of reason insofar as it instrumentalizes humanity. The outcomes of this instrumentalization are indisputably horrifying. To appreciate them

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fully all we need to do is recall the terrors of the twentieth century—from the trench warfare and use of weapons of mass destruction in World War I to the stock market crash of 1928, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Holocaust and nuclear annihilation of World War II—and add to these horrors the terrors of ongoing destruction in our own time: global warming, global pandemics, global economic crises, global war, and millions upon millions of forcibly displaced people and refugees, more so in fact than at any time since the end of World War II. Faced with all this destruction, is it any wonder that evangelicals and postmodernists would question their alliance with techno-scientific reason and denounce its obvious moral depravity? Indeed, from this perspective, their rejection of science and technology would seem to align with humanist values. But they both throw out the proverbial baby of moral, aesthetic, and political reason along with the dirty bathwater of techno-scientific instrumentality. The evangelicals sacrifice reason to enthusiasm, while the postmodernists sacrifice reason to unreason. Together they form a culture that extols anti-humanist values. In this brave new world, anyone who dares to stubbornly cling to the humanist ideals of moral and intellectual independence is left with little if any room in which to exercise his or her human agency. We’re expected to choose between the all-mighty God of the fundamentalist Christians and the impersonal epistemes of the fundamentalist post-structuralists. On both fronts, this anti-modern and anti-humanist culture is cynical, pessimistic, and deceptively nihilistic. Man is dead. Humans no longer make their own history nor do they create meaning for, in, and through their lives. And as far as these anti-humanists of the right and left are concerned, this is all for the better. Over the course of the last twenty years, this celebration of the death of man has found myriad cultural expressions in America. The animal rights movement, for instance, has asserted that animals have moral rights and propagated the term “speciesism” not only to denounce the admittedly arrogant and ultimately destructive idea of human supremacy over all living organisms but also to reject the idea of human exceptionalism outright (Khapaeva 2017, p.  177). Two other movements—transhumanism and posthumanism—have also contributed greatly to the rejection of human exceptionalism and “the dissolution of the boundaries between humans, animals, and monsters in the popular imagination” (Khapeva 2017, p.  177). Transhumanism, which emerged toward the end of the 1970s among scientists and engineers, promotes the idea that humanity’s

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purpose is to create an artificial intelligence that will permeate the universe. In popular culture, the transhumanist imagination has given rise to the sci-fi genre of cyborg adventures, where beings with both organic and biomechatronic body parts and brains engage in a noble war of conquest against a morally depraved and intellectually stunted humanity. This genre of popular novels, films, and television series present an image of humanity as a “transitional species” that is destined to give way to “god-like machines of incalculable intelligence” (Khapeva 2017, p. 177). For its part, posthumanism, which is a movement among those scholars in the humanities who have come under the spell of post-structuralist nihilism, aims to erase the presence of humans from philosophy and the humanities altogether (Khapeva 2017, p. 177). Posthumanism has likewise found its way into popular culture, where the trend over the last twenty or so years has been to produce and disseminate novels, films, and television series in which zombies and other un-dead monsters replace humans as the preferred protagonists of a posthuman future imagined as truly multicultural, tolerant of differences, and considerate of the inherent dignity of the monstrous, the mutilated, and maimed. Here, in this arena of popular culture, the two extremes of left and right meet. Together, and in spite of their impassioned repudiation of each other, they create the dystopia of a suicidal state that appeals to the ethos of guilt and sacrifice of the evangelical credo, while also satisfying the nihilism of postmodernist rejections of human exceptionalism. This multifaceted celebration of the death of humanity, which ranges from the self-­ righteousness of animal rights activists or evangelicals to the self-satisfied cynicism of post-structuralists or transhumanists, comprises an aestheticized, or better yet anesthetized, apocalyptic vision. This is an apocalypse that has been reduced to the destruction of the end times, but stripped of all hope for a more human future. Alternatively, we might choose to think of this anti-humanist culture as a Pandora’s box that must be reopened so as to liberate hope for the reemergence of humanity on the very same sandy beach on which Foucault once gleefully imagined the disappearance of the face of man.

Bildung and the Self-formation of Humanity Whereas evangelicals and postmodernists correctly identify the modern hubris of human progress as the primary source of our civilization’s moral decadence and its persistent regression toward ever-increasing forms of

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economic and political tyranny, neither of them provides an effective system of values for the historical self-determination of humanity. Confronted as they are by the destruction and crises of our time, and overcome by an overwhelming sense of desperation and powerlessness, they pessimistically and cynically embrace nihilism. While it may be misguided to hope that like Daedalus we can rise above this labyrinth of cynicism and soar to freedom, or that like Theseus we can slay the Minotaur of nihilism and follow Ariadne’s thread back out of the labyrinth and into her loving embrace, we must not abandon all hope for either freedom or love. Our age surely is, as Günter Anders conceived it in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a “terminal age” in which “technology has actually become the subject of history, alongside of which we are merely ‘co-historical’” (1979, p. 1). There can be no turning back from it nor is there any escape. We must live with the knowledge that our technology now has the power to destroy all life on the planet. But this realization need not preclude us from exercising our powers of emotion, sensuality, reason, and imagination in an attempt to realize the hope that, even in this terminal age, it remains possible for us to live fully human lives, both individually and collectively. In the American context, this hope requires that we critically reconstruct the torturous history of anti-humanism in American life and that, along the way, we seek to recuperate what remains of the long-since denigrated, belittled, and maligned tradition of humanist thought in America, which runs from Payne to Emerson and from Whitman to Mumford. In order to bring about this shift in the values that currently animate America’s political culture, it is imperative that we distinguish this humanistic tradition of liberal learning, which aligns with the German tradition of Bildung, from the profoundly anti-intellectual tendencies in America that have presumed to replace it with their own forms of pseudo humanism: the so-­ called humanism of evangelical Christianity and the would-be humanism of techno-scientific pragmatism. Broadly defined, Bildung names both a process of education, cultivation, and self-development, and the end result of that process (Herdt 2019, p. 2). As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose educational philosophy would lead to the foundation of Germany’s first research university in Berlin and subsequently serve as the model for both public education and liberal arts colleges in the United States, the aim of Bildung was to develop all of a person’s faculties and drives in harmonious balance with one another such that each person might realize his or her full potential.

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“Clearly,” as Jennifer Herdt observes, “this was a vision rooted in a broadly Aristotelian understanding of the flourishing of each natural kind in the realization of its ergon, with human beings flourishing as they live lives of virtue, governed well by practical reason” (2019, p.  2). This process of self-formation should not, however, be confused with “the pursuit of self-­ interest, maximal desire-satisfaction, or mere negative liberty,” associated with the utilitarian premises of British and American liberalism (Herdt 2019, p. 2). Instead, Bildung involved the pursuit of a good that was conceived at once as being both personal and communal. Theorists of Bildung, like Schiller and Goethe, agreed with Humboldt that freedom was essential to humanity’s self-realization. This was not merely a matter of freedom from external constraints; nor was it simply a liberty for self-indulgence; rather, it involved the freedom to form the self both independently and in communion with a collective of similarly self-­ forming individuals (Herdt 2019, p. 112). The sort of education that they believed could “rightly form self-formers” was aesthetic. Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man provided a fresh philosophical perspective on the value of such an education, while Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship provided a new literary paradigm: the Bildungsroman or novel of self-formation. In both instances, art was conceived as being integrally bound up with freedom, of both a moral and political nature. “The Bildung generation … did not flee from politics into the compensatory joys of poetry and philosophy. Rather, they took up the politically vital task of forming persons capable of taking an active role in shaping and governing their collective existence, understanding this as part and parcel of the formation of humanity” (Herdt 2019, p. 4). In our own time, Edward Said has defended this tradition in conjunction with what he calls democratic criticism. In opposition to the post-­ structuralist “insistence that real events are at most linguistic effects,” Said espouses the “humanistic ideals of liberty and learning” (2003, p. 10). He argues that the “shallow but influential ideas” of the post-structuralists concerning humanity’s inability to determine its own history are “contradicted by the historical impact of human agency and labor” and concludes by stating unequivocally: “Change is human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities” (2003, p. 10). He elaborates further on this idea when he explains that “the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally” (2003, p. 11). And in a final assault on Foucault’s

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anti-humanist rejection of human exceptionalism, he remarks: “Humanism is the achievement of form by human will and agency; it is neither system nor impersonal force” (2003, p. 15). Linking up this understanding of humanism with democracy, Said asserts that “to understand humanism at all … is to understand it as democratic, open to all classes and backgrounds, and as a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation … humanism is critique … that gathers its force and relevance by its democratic, secular, and open character” (2003, pp. 21–22). And as a final nod to the tradition of Bildung he declares: “The essence of humanism is to understand human history as a continuous process of self-understanding and self-realization” (2003, p.  26). Keeping this understanding of humanism’s deep ties to participatory democracy in mind, we can now proceed to consider, in turn, the two forms of pseudo humanism that have effectively usurped its place in contemporary American culture and replaced the humanist values of liberty and learning with the profoundly anti-humanist and anti-­ democratic values of mindless conformity and willed ignorance: the faux humanism of evangelical fundamentalists and the ersatz humanism of techno-scientific pragmatism.

The Shameless Sham of Evangelical Humanism Nietzsche’s psychologically penetrating analysis of Christian morality reveals the decidedly anti-humanist values that lie at Christianity’s core. Underlying the surface of this religion’s altruistic sentiments and egalitarian tendencies, Nietzsche identifies a poisonous mix of guilt and self-­ sacrifice (1982). Guilt, according to his conjectural history of Christian moral values, is an internalization of the spiteful ressentiment with which debtors once regarded their lenders. Relatively powerless as these debtors were to exact any effective recourse against their lenders, and overcome by a persistent and corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred, the debtors determined to seek revenge. They did so by means of a “slave revolt” in morality. By turning the aristocratic system of values upside down and inside out, these rebellious debtors were able, in due time, to convince their lenders that it was wrong, indeed even evil, for them to exact payment from the humble, meek, and powerless. Thus, for Nietzsche, this egalitarian revolt in moral values amounted to a vindictive effort to poison the happiness of the more fortunate. Not only the debtors, but the lenders too, now perceived themselves as guilty. This uniformly internalized guilt,

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Nietzsche reasoned, developed in due course into a sickly desire for self-­ punishment. The Christian idealization of asceticism intensified this will to self-mutilation. Ascetic self-discipline was thus transformed into a thoroughgoing form of self-condemnation and self-sacrifice. As Nietzsche sees him, the guilt-ridden Christian turns against himself with self-sacrificial vehemence, ashamedly convinced of his own humanity’s fundamental worthlessness. These Christian notions of guilt and ascetic self-sacrifice are permeated by pessimism regarding humanity’s ability to improve its supposedly fallen nature; and they underscore the anti-humanist character of the moral values inherent to Christianity. Paul’s epistle to the Romans is the quintessential expression of this Christian nihilism. In his epistle, Paul admonishes the Romans to separate themselves both from their gods and their laws. They must acknowledge that they are who the new light of the Christian law reveals them to be: they are sinners and they are guilty. He then proceeds to promise them that they shall be purified of this guilt and that their minds shall be renewed, but only if they adopt his faith in Christ’s power of sacrificial redemption. In order to be saved, they must convert. They must poison their minds with guilty desires for self-punishment. They must hate and want to destroy themselves. They must sacrifice who they once had been in order to be born again and arise anew in the midst of the brotherhood and community of Christ. The Rise of Evangelicalism and the Fall of Puritanism Evangelicalism in the United States has also always and already been inspired by this proselytizing mission. Not unlike Paul, evangelicals have sought first and foremost to expand membership in the universal church of Christ. In addition to believing that the Bible is authoritative and true, that humans are inherently sinful and in need of personal salvation, and that the only path to such salvation is recognizing that Jesus died for humanity’s sins, they also believe passionately in evangelizing the world (McAlister 2018, p.  5). “Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” commands Jesus in the book of Matthew (28:19). This Great Commission, as evangelicals refer to it, has characterized the way that evangelicalism operates in the world, not just as a system of beliefs but also as a means to practical Christian living (McAlister 2018, p.  5).

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Evangelicals are committed, as a matter of passion, to teaching others about their faith and gaining converts to their way of life. Downplaying the role of rationality in religious life and seeking direct emotional communion with God, evangelicals have tended to embrace “religious enthusiasm” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 56). The etymology of the word “enthusiasm” is particularly revealing of evangelical beliefs and practices. It comes from the Greek theos, meaning god, which in the form of enthous means “possessed by a god or inspired.” Because evangelicalism stressed enthusiasm, its preachers did not need to be trained in the scholarly art of hermeneutics; to understand the word of God, they did not even need to know how to read; all that was required of them was inspiration and a certain willingness to become, or at least appear to have been, possessed by the Holy Spirit. Their sermons came by the “immediate impression of the Holy Ghost putting a long chain of thoughts into their minds and words into their mouths” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 70). Healing and speaking in tongues were believed to be proofs of such spirited enthusiasm (McAlister 2018, p. 6). By privileging enthusiasm over hermeneutics, the evangelical movement that arose in nineteenth century America was able to adjust to the shifting demographic conditions of the United States and appeal to the increasing number of immigrant groups who had come to America representing “a wide range of confessional commitments that had grown up in post-Reformation Europe” (Hofstadter 1962, p.  81). Moreover, as the nation expanded westward, its increasingly diverse population was separated from the established congregations of the East coast. These demographic realities led to an uprooting of traditional church establishments and cultivated tolerance for religious multiplicity and liberty, ultimately giving rise to Protestant denominationalism and the emergence, in America, of evangelical Christian churches organized on a voluntary and popular basis. As Hofstadter argues, the growing disparity between the established Protestant congregations of New England and the revivalist evangelical denominations of the South and ever-expanding western frontier can be understood as a kind of revolt of the disinherited against the wealthy and powerful. In America, he explains, “the possessing classes have usually shown much interest in rationalizing religion and in observing highly developed liturgical forms. The disinherited classes, especially when unlettered, have been more moved by emotional religion; and emotional religion is at times animated by a revolt against the religious style, the liturgy,

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and the clergy of the upper-class church, which is at the same time a revolt against aristocratic manners and morals” (1962, p.  56). In Nietzschean terms, we may think of what Hofstadter describes here as tantamount to a populist and evangelical slave revolt within the broader slave revolt that is Protestantism, which, if we were to extend this metaphor ad absurdum, we could also think of as a slave revolt against the initial slave revolt of Catholicism, which began with the teachings of Jesus in the first century CE. In any event, what matters is to understand that each ensuing wave of revivalist awakening in American religious life coincides with the internal logic of what Nietzsche conceived as the Judeo-Christian slave revolt. These revivals, which outwardly aimed for ever-increasing purity from institutionalized dogma and practice, were internally motivated by a spiteful spirit of anti-intellectualism. The result, time and again, has been “the subordination of men of ideas to men of emotional power or manipulative skill” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 55). The original European colonizers of what would become the United States were of course the Puritans, who had grown impatient with the Church of England’s piecemeal reforms and had come to Plymouth, Massachusetts seeking to purify their Christian way of life. The Puritans, however, were anything but anti-intellectual. As a religion of the Book, Puritanism placed a “strong emphasis upon interpretation and rational discourse and eschewed ranting emotionalism” (Hofstadter 1962, pp.  60–61). The Puritans expected their clergy to be distinguished for humanist scholarship and “intended their ministers to be educated side by side and in the same liberal curriculum with other civic leaders and men of affairs” (Hofstadter 1962, p.  60). Indeed, the Puritan clergy spread enlightenment as well as religion; they fostered science as well as theology; and they sought to provide models of personal devotion to the life of the mind (Hofstadter 1962, p. 61). They were to all intents and purposes the first generation of American intellectuals. With the Awakenings of the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Puritan age in American religion came to an end and the evangelical age began (Hofstadter 1962, p. 74). This shift was characterized by the decline of learned clergy who attended to the needs of established congregations and the rise of unlettered and itinerant preachers, belonging mostly to Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist denominations. “The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 86). In order to comprehend

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the demise of Puritan intellectualism and the energetic growth and popular appeal of the evangelical revivalist awakenings, it is important to recall the attitude that many Americans had with regard to Europe. For many, Europe represented corruptions of the past which could only be surmounted in America. The evangelical denominations had a similar view of the Christian past, which they saw, not as a source of valuable institutional forms and practices, but as “a process of corruption and degeneration in which the purity of primitive Christianity had been lost” (Hofstadter 1962, pp. 82–83). The explicit aim of these recurrent revivals was thus to recapture this purity by returning to a more primitive sort of Christianity; implicitly, this meant the relentless and vindictive discrediting of human learning. With their religious enthusiasm and primitivism, the evangelicals strove to acquire a purity purer even than that of the Puritans. Yet anti-­ intellectual primitivism and enthusiasm were not the only instruments the evangelicals used in an effort to win new converts. To that end, they also founded any number of “mission societies, Bible and tract societies, educational societies, Sunday-school unions, and temperance organizations … These agencies were prepared to assist in a crusade … whose ultimate purpose was to convert every American and then quite literally, the world” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 89). The tensions between the high-brow Puritanism of New England and the low-brow evangelical enthusiasm and primitivism of the South and West would eventually find their way into the broader intellectual and cultural life of America. Among the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin attempted to strike a balance between the two by advocating a system of education that combined the useful with the ornamental. This combination, however, would favor the useful and profitable over the ornamental, anticipating the utilitarianism that would henceforth predominate in American public and private, elementary and collegiate education. In addition to being a public citizen, scientist, inventor, politician, colonial agent, revolutionary, ambassador, and statesman, Franklin was also a printer and businessman. And it was in this guise, as the author and printer of Poor Richard’s Almanac, which ran continuously for twenty-five years, from 1732 to 1757, that he presented himself as a business-minded mediator between the intellectual and anti-intellectual strains in American life. In the nineteenth century, Franklin’s good-willed, yet ultimately self-­ serving, promotion of business interests in the service of national prosperity would be rejected by romantic thinkers associated with the Transcendentalist movement, particularly Emerson and Thoreau. They

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rejected Franklin’s utilitarian educational values and his heroic regard for the businessman in favor of an educational ideal that owed a great deal to the German notion of Bildung. But their transcendentalism owed just as much to the religious enthusiasm and purifying primitivism of American evangelicals. In their high-brow quest for primitive simplicity and enthusiastic union with nature, they expressed a persistent preference for the wisdom of intuition over rationality. By combining evangelical enthusiasm and primitivism with the aesthetic education espoused by the theorists of Bildung, Emerson and Thoreau forged a uniquely American outlook on the value and meaning of a self-formed life. Emerson called it self-reliance; Thoreau, civil disobedience. But for all their effort, energy, and even self-­ sacrifice the Transcendentalists proved unable to dissuade their fellow countrymen from the great “pragmatic acquiescence” to the utilitarian values of business, industry, and empire that came to characterize intellectual life in America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Benjamin Franklin: The Businessman as Mediator Franklin advocated a sober Protestant ethic, not for spiritual ends per se, but rather in the interest of accumulating private and common wealth, which, as a businessman and a Deist, he took to be rational and universal ends in themselves. Heir to a secularized Puritan culture of enlightenment reason, Franklin initiated a variety of projects for both self-edification and social betterment that were grounded in ascetic discipline. Hence, on a personal and individual level, his insistence on the cultivation of frugality, temperance, and industry; while, on a social level, he embraced enlightened reason, which infused his regard of humanity’s ability to improve itself through education with an almost Panglossian optimism. Franklin’s was an educational ideal, in other words, that began and ended with the moral fortitude of a modern-day stoic. He did not aim merely to educate good men, but men who could increase the wealth of the nation and aid America in its providentially ordained imperialist mission to spread enlightenment and modern democracy across the Americas and the world. For this reason, his educational philosophy always privileged the useful over the ornamental. It was in his “Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania” of 1749, that he first laid out the principal tenets of his educational philosophy. “The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both

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of private Families and of Commonwealths” (1962, p.  128). While he believed that the primary task of education was to “supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country” (1962, p. 128), he also held the view that education, like most everything else in life, had to be approached with an eye to what was immediately and directly useful: students, therefore, should “learn those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental, Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended” (1962, pp. 133–134). Thus, to one side of this equation, we find the ideals of public service and civic virtue associated with the idea that education should prepare the nation’s youth for political leadership; to the other, a practical concern for vocational savoir faire and economic self-interest, which Franklin associated with the increase of the nation’s economic wealth (1751). As concerns his views on self-formation, these are perhaps summarized best in his Autobiography, where he reproduces a table of virtues he devised as a young man in an attempt to achieve moral equanimity. In addition to listing thirteen principal virtues –temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility—, he also catalogues the precepts associated with each of them. Temperance, for instance, is complemented by the precept “Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation;” industry is paired with the precept “Lose not time. Be always employed in something useful;” and the precept for humility reads simply “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” giving a decidedly secular twist to his compendium of moral virtues (1962, p. 30). The common denominator running throughout this program for stoic self-improvement is the ascetic self-discipline of “constant vigilance” required in order to “guard … against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations” (1962, p. 31). As with Weber’s “this-worldly asceticism,” which is central to his analysis of how the Protestant ethic, and in particular the Calvinist philosophy of work as a sanctified calling, gave rise to capitalism, the aim of Franklin’s vigilant ascetic discipline is not driven toward achieving union with God, but rather with achieving and expanding human dominion over nature. From this perspective, Franklin’s ascetic values express just the sort of work ethic that the budding middle-class financial and industrial capitalists of his time hoped to find in their laborers: dependability, temperance, industry, humility, order (Weber 1930, pp. 47–53). His greatest influence as a promoter of public education was due, however, to the publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack. It was here that he

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presented, in neat little charts and ledgers that mimicked the book-­keeping habits of an industrious capitalist, the moral economics of what Bier has characterized as Franklin’s secularized Protestant ethic of “cost accountancy life” (Bier 1970, p.  187). Indeed, as the foremost expression of Franklin’s views on public education, the Almanack embodied his idea that the public interest could be served at the same time that he furthered his own business enterprise. Nothing could have made him happier as a patriotic American. As is evinced both by his enduring commitment to public education as a fountainhead of moral self-improvement, communal betterment, and the economic wealth of individuals and the nation, Franklin did hold intellect and its social and cultural functions in high regard. Still, his preference for the useful over the ornamental, the particularly utilitarian approach he took to public education, and the ascetic values that undergirded both his notion of self-improvement and public service, helped cultivate the seeds of the utilitarianism, materialism, and anti-intellectualism that would come to characterize American political culture from the nineteenth century to our own day. Emerson: Enthusiasm and Self-reliance In his famous essay of 1841 titled “Self-Reliance,” Emerson conceived the utilitarian and largely anti-intellectual values that had come to dominate American life as a kind of moral decadence: “the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times” (1981, p. 147). As he understood it, this anti-intellectual mediocrity and the contentment with economic prosperity that excused and justified it, had robbed Americans of their heroic inclinations, creativity, and originality. “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose” (1981, p.  151). Self-reliance was Emerson’s remedy for this intellectual timidity and moral sense of shame. It is important to point out that this sense of shame is not tied to any Christian sense of original sin or guilt. To the contrary, Emerson associates it with the “sins” of his own time: by reducing the meaning and value of his life to material comfort, by submitting himself to the ascetic discipline of factory labor, Man had violated his own intelligent nature and mutilated himself. Thus, insofar as self-reliance was meant as a remedy, it did not aim, the way that Christian ascetic practices do, to punish Man for his fallen nature; the idea, rather, was to free

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Man so he might dedicate his energies to developing a harmonious balance of all his creative and perceptive capacities. Emerson defined self-reliance, which was a constant theme in his essays, as a combination of self-trust, non-conformity, and originality. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius” (1981, p. 138). His idea, in no uncertain terms, was to tap this “genius,” with which the life of every individual is potentially imbued, in order to regenerate not just individuals, but all of American society. What Emerson called genius coincided with the transcendental order of things. “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity” (1981, p. 150). Here, then, is how Emerson used the religious enthusiasm of the evangelicals as a call to intelligence. Here too is how he used evangelical primitivism. Through intuitive communion with nature, Man is able to uncover his primitive “aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded” (1981, p. 149). It was on the basis of such self-­ reliance that Emerson aimed to “work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men” such that society might generate, not only new forms of knowledge, but an entirely new type of self-reliant man (1981, p. 157). Emerson elaborates further on the intellectual merits of his idea of self-­ reliance in his essay of 1837 “The American Scholar.” In addition to being a declaration of American intellectual independence –“Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close”—this essay provides a critique of the mechanization of labor and instrumentalization of knowledge, so characteristic of the “sluggard intellect of [the American] continent” and its “exertions of mechanical skill” (1981, p. 51). As against the slavish scholar who learns only from books, the American scholar, a self-reliant intellectual and not a mere scholastic dogmatist, labors to unify knowledge. Emerson first presents this unifying mission in the form of what he calls the “Fable of the One Man,” according to which all forms of knowledge had once been united in a single knower: “Man Thinking.” Emerson’s “Man Thinking” is a poetic metaphor for the balanced and harmonious knowledge associated with the process of Bildung. In the modern era, however, “the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, —a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (1981, p. 52). “Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing … [he] sinks into [professions such as] the farmer, instead of [rising to the occasion of becoming] Man on the farm” (1981, p.  52). In

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order to overcome this fragmenting instrumentalization of both knowledge and its knowers, Emerson argues that the scholar must confront a series of challenges, which in spirit are not unlike the heroic twelve labors of Hercules. The first labor faced by Emerson’s self-reliant American scholar is to settle for himself the meaning of nature. Perception of the laws of nature, he argues, is tantamount to perceiving the laws of the mind (1981, p. 54). In this way, “The ancient precept, ‘Know Thyself’, and the modern precept ‘Study Nature’, become at last one maxim” (1981, p.  54). Here, once again, we find Emerson using the evangelical notion of enthusiastic communion with nature to advance his idea of true or complete knowledge as consisting of both intuition and scientific reasoning. The second trial or labor consists in adopting a proper relation to the past. “The scholar of the first age received into him the world around … It came into him life; it went out from him truth” (1981, p.  55). This process of “transmuting life into truth” must occur in all ages, reasons Emerson. “Each age … must write its own books” (1981, p. 56). But this independence of mind has been overlooked and neglected in the modern era by those timid thinkers and “bookworms” who regard the past with servile reverence (1981, p. 56). In opposition to this antiquarian servility, he posits what he calls the “active soul” of “genius” which is “progressive” and like Prometheus “looks forward” and not backward as do “books, colleges, schools of art, and institutions of any kind” (1981, p. 56). Here, again, Emerson turns the anti-intellectual logic of evangelical enthusiasm on its head. Like the evangelicals, he criticizes institutional forms of learning for being cold-hearted, drab, and dead. But unlike them, his appeal to enthusiasm is intended as a call to intelligent self-formation. The final labor that Emerson’s self-reliant scholar must undertake consists in acquiring a life of action. The scholar should be, he argues in this sense, “covetous of action,” by which he means engaging “in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions” (1981, p. 61). The outcome of these heroic labors is a comprehensive understanding of human life and its active, creative impact on the world. In this sense, Emerson’s scholar must aspire to become a “university of knowledges” (1981, p. 70). Emerson’s self-reliant scholar embodies the educational ideals associated with the notion of Bildung. What is more, this education of the

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scholar by nature, books, and action is meant to prepare him for performing his public duty, which consists in opposing the pervasive self-interest of mid-nineteenth century American political culture—“He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism” and “raise himself from private considerations” —such that he may breathe the life of “illustrious thoughts” back into the public life of the democracy (1981, p. 63). Emerson’s self-reliant American is, in this sense, self-forming both as an individual and as a member of a broader self-governing collective. Thoreau: Primitivism and Civil Disobedience Thoreau would take Emerson’s high-brow evangelical spirit of self-reliant enthusiasm to new primitivist extremes. In Walden, which was published in 1854, Thoreau reflects on the experiment in self-reliant living that he carried out over two years, from 1845 to 1847, when he removed himself from his home in Concord, Massachusetts in order to build a small cottage at Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, who had agreed to allow his friend and protégé to live there in exchange for minimal labor: mostly the clearing of a small parcel of land and the chopping and stockpiling of wood. Here, living the life of an ascetically disciplined hermit, Thoreau dedicated himself to developing knowledge of his own humanity, which he believed could only be attained through enthusiastic communion with nature. At issue in this quest for self-knowledge, however, is not just a high-brow form of evangelical primitivism, but also an educational ideal that links Thoreau’s radical experiment in self-reliance to the tradition of Bildung. While his pursuit of self-formation on such a radically individualized level would seem to bely a determined indifference to politics and collective life, Thoreau’s educational ideals did not entirely preclude politics. In 1846, while he was living at Walden Pond, Thoreau was jailed for having refused to pay a local poll-tax which, he reasoned, violated his moral objections to the United States’ war of imperial conquest in Mexico. In his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau placed the moral conscience of the individual above the rule of law, arguing that justice could be achieved only by that government “which governs not at all” (1960, p. 235). His primitivism was thus political in orientation. It was a quest for the purest form of government imaginable: anarchy. Thoreau’s embrace of evangelical primitivism and the self-disciplining ascetic practices attendant on it was not motivated by either an anti-intellectual or an anti-humanist

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ideal, but rather by a fervent defense of the moral and intellectual exceptionalism of each and every individual. As had been the case with Emerson, who proposed self-reliance as a regenerating remedy in the face of the perceived moral and political decadence of his time, Thoreau also conceived his experiments in self-reliance and civil disobedience as a critique of decadence. In Walden, Thoreau developed “a political asceticism that aimed to contribute to the revision” of the “vicious political economy” that informed the modern life of “penitent labor” in Concord, Massachusetts: the penitent labor, that is, of indebted farmers who, although they had inherited their land, were reduced to working as involuntary servants in order to pay off their mortgages and property taxes (Balthrop-Lewis 2019, p. 318). The basic problem that Thoreau aimed to solve by means of his radical solitude was nothing short of the civilizational decadence of the modern era. “It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.” (1960, p. 23). In this regard, he pointed not only to the degraded state of farmers in Massachusetts but also to the condition of chattel slaves in the Southern States for proof that “squalidness may consist with civilization” (1960, p. 24). He wanted no part in a society that hypocritically prided itself on liberty, equality, and democracy while its institutions of governance actually enabled slavery, inequality, and empire: “the whole enterprise of this nation … is perfectly heathenish—a filibustering toward heaven by the great western route. No; they may go their way to their manifest destiny, which I trust is not mine” (quoted in Hofstadter 1962, p. 240). In this sense, Thoreau insisted that his experiment with self-reliance should serve as an example “mainly to the mass of men who are discontented” with the utilitarian values and political expediency of the modern era (1960, p. 10). Rather than “idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times,” he argued, they ought to follow his example and seek self-improvement through isolation, communion with nature, and the economic and moral rigors of a self-reliant, ascetic way of life. “None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty” (1960, p. 9). Voluntary poverty. Such is the profoundly monastic dictum of ascetic discipline that informs the educational model that Thoreau offers his readers in Walden. In his pursuit of a moral education capable of transcending the expedient and gross materialism of his time, Thoreau wound up elevating

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isolation to the highest rank of moral virtue. In this respect, Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond “occupies a critical juncture in the long and rich history of the solitude of hermits” (Schmidt 2012, p. 67). It modernizes an early Christian tradition of asceticism which drew on Hebrew Scriptures, was profoundly suspicious of all social relations, and reversed the classical valuations of city and wilderness (Adler 2006, p.  12). “Desert—in the sense of wild and uncultivated rather than specifically sandy or rocky space—became newly valorized as the spiritual/intellectual center of a cosmopolitan monastic movement and, by extension, of an expanding Christian world” (Adler 2006, p. 12). Central to this monastic life was precisely the kind of ascetic discipline to which Thoreau subjected himself during his time at Walden Pond. “Thoreau takes up an ascetism that he carefully documents in his book: he eats mainly bread, rice, potatoes, and (for a while) fish, and drinks only water” (Nightingale 2008, p. 119). It is by means of this asceticism, which Thoreau puts on full display in the pages of Walden, that he seeks to portray himself in heroic terms as a priestly man who has entered into a new mode of relation to the divinity of the natural world. In this sense, Thoreau identifies himself as a sort of mediator between modern men and the natural world, a “sojourner in civilized life” (Nightingale, 116). Significantly, Thoreau’s self-representation as a mediating hero and Transcendentalist priest is rendered in the Emersonian terms of the self-­ reliant scholar. “To be a philosopher,” he asserts in this regard, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically” (1960, p.  9). While there is certainly an element of Franklin’s stoic utilitarianism at work in this moral definition of the philosopher as one who must lead a life of simplicity and dedicate his efforts to discovering practical solutions to the problems of modern life, insofar as it emphasizes independence and self-trust based in an enthusiastic communion with nature and the cosmos, it owes a great deal more to Emerson’s conception of the self-reliant American scholar. Politically, Thoreau chastised his contemporaries for siding with the economic expediency of imperial tyranny that was corrupting the freedoms and duties of America’s fledgling democracy. In his famous essay on “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau denounced the ease and indifference with which his fellow Americans accepted both the institution of chattel slavery in the Southern States and the U.S. invasion of Mexico and presented

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himself as an “honest man” whose “peaceable revolution” of civil disobedience others should follow (1960, p. 239). His peaceable revolution as an honest man would, as is widely known, take the somewhat laughable form of his refusing to pay a toll-tax, for which offense he was incarcerated, for only one night, in the jailhouse of his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. The brevity of this incarceration notwithstanding, Thoreau claimed that his time in Concord’s jailhouse had given him new insights into the decadence of American political culture. “I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted … that they did not greatly propose to do right … that in their sacrifices to humanity they ran no risks, not even to their property; that after all they were not so noble” (1960, p. 251). The expedient materialism and moral depravity of his fellow Americans resulted, he argued, in apathy, complacency, passivity, and cowardice (Paul 1960, p.  233). He associated this expediency with “merchants and farmers … who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity” (Thoreau 1960, p. 239). And he viewed their acquiescence to slavery and conquest as an obstacle to regeneration. In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, he aimed to introduce “a standard higher than social right and authority –the moral law” (Paul 1960, 233). Accordingly, Thoreau placed the moral conscience of the individual above the rule of law, arguing that justice will be achieved only by a government “which governs not at all” (1960, p. 235). “There will never be a really free and enlightened State,” he reasoned with anarchistic conviction, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (1960, p. 256). If in Walden, Thoreau’s radical individualism seems at times to flirt dangerously with the narcissistic isolation of a natural enthusiast and the political indifference of a distrustful hermit; in “Civil Disobedience,” it is nevertheless revealed as an anarchic political ideal that exalts the moral and intellectual independence of man over and against the corrupting coercions of government. Thoreau’s defense of the moral conscience of individuals as a standard that is higher than social right or government expresses his commitment to a radical sort of political primitivism. Not unlike his primitivist quest to enter into an enthusiastic communion with nature, or the primitivist quest of the evangelicals to return to a purified form of Christianity, Thoreau’s anarchism is a quest to return to the most primitive form of government imaginable: that of a government which

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governs not at all. Unlike the anti-intellectual primitivism of the evangelicals, Thoreau’s anarchic primitivism posits the humanist values of moral and intellectual self-reliance. His primitivism rejects the guilt and sacrifice associated with the profoundly anti-humanist values of evangelicalism and embraces instead the regenerating value of independent self-formation by means of a self-guided and self-reliant education. Evangelical Imperialism Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the acceptance that the evangelical spirit of enthusiasm and primitivism had gained at all levels of American cultural life led to evangelicalism being adopted as the ipso facto “official religion” of U.S. imperialism. Josiah Strong, an evangelical preacher and one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement, which sought to remedy the pervasive social ills brought on by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, was also the author of the widely read and influential book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (1885). In this book, Strong unabashedly preached that the “Anglo Saxon is the great missionary race” and that “the English and American peoples” must be looked to “for the evangelization of the world” (1963, p. 201). Like other US empire builders of his day, Strong held an “unapologetic belief in white ascendancy drawn from social Darwinism, which applied the concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’ to international affairs” (Grandin 2006, 17–18). Accordingly, Strong argued in his book for Americans to become the keepers of the world’s supposedly inferior races: “The Anglo-Saxon … is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper” (1963, p. 200). Strong projected this paternalistic vision of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority into the future, speaking with missionary zeal of America’s impending imperial expansion: “this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond” (1963, p. 214). This was all part of what Strong referred to as “God’s plan to people the world with better and finer material” (1963, p. 214). Only a decade later, in 1898, evangelicals would in fact accompany the US troops that invaded the Philippines in a purported effort to liberate the Filipino people from the double tyranny of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic church. They did so with the intention of saving the Filipinos from the decadence to which the Roman Catholic church had condemned them and regenerating their faith in Jesus by offering them

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evangelicalism’s unique mix of enthusiasm and primitivism. As such, the evangelical missionaries in the Philippines imagined that, by replacing the Catholic friars of Spain, they were radically changing the religious life of the Philippines. But from the perspective of the Filipinos themselves, this supposedly radical shift amounted instead to the establishment of a continuum of transferred imperial religious power (Schmidt-Nowara 2006, pp. 176–177). This was the case not only for Filipino nationalists, who like Rizal, Bonifacio, and Aguinaldo were committed to the Katipunan revolution for national independence, but also for Filipinos who were involved in popular millenarian religious movements that were inspired by the autochthonous belief in the payson: a syncretic understanding of the passion of Christ that promoted belief in redemption and resurrection in this world (Schmidt-Nowara 2006, p. 174). In their battle for the hearts and minds of Filipinos then, the evangelical missionaries did not need to compete only with the Catholic friars but also to contend with the payson movements, which the evangelicals disparaged as anarchic. In a similar vein, US imperialists would depict the Filipino revolution for independence as a form of anarchy that justified the US conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Rather than acknowledge the extent to which these revolutionaries looked to the American Revolution as an example, US imperialists viewed the Filipino revolution as a “degenerate profligacy” (Kaplan 2002, p. 118). The racial prejudice and cultural chauvinism of many of these imperialists helped justify this strategy to dispossess the Filipino nationalists of their revolution. It was precisely in these terms that Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, sought to justify the US invasion of the Philippines. “The Philippines,” he wrote, “offer … a grave … problem. Their population includes half caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit” (1904, p. 7). Thus, he reasoned, much as Josiah Strong had done a decade earlier, that Americans had a responsibility to act as the keepers of inferior peoples. “If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves” (1904, p. 8). Evangelicals have resorted to this sort of imperialist rhetoric time and again over the course of the twentieth century as they’ve sent their

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missionaries across the globe in a fanatical and impassioned effort to expand the Kingdom of God. That this evangelical quest for empire has been driven not only by racial prejudice and cultural bias but also by a deep-rooted sense of anti-humanist nihilism, is borne out by the obsession that evangelicals have developed with the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. Their fascination with Israel stems from a certain dispensationalist interpretation of Biblical prophecy, according to which a series of specific events must occur before the Second Coming (McAlister 2018, 72). The first of these is the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. Then, as the end times approach, an Antichrist is supposed to arise, claiming to bring peace. Christians are then supposed to be lifted into heaven in an event called the Rapture, following which the Antichrist is to oversee seven years of tribulation marked by economic crises, natural disasters, and unbridled human suffering. At the end of the tribulation, Israel, threatened by a confederacy of most of the nations of the world, is to face down its enemies in the final, terrible battle of Armageddon, during which Christ himself will return to fight for Israel. Afterward, there is to be a millennial reign of one thousand years of peace (McAlister 2018, 72). In short, fundamentalist evangelicals support Israel because they are looking forward to the apocalypse. They don’t see the destructive force of America’s imperial expansion and its terrorizing global war on terror as impediments to their Christianity and its purported altruistic sentiments. They are the crusaders of today, as willing to visit sacrificial violence on the civilized world as were the crusaders of the pre-modern era. In order to save their own humanity from its imagined fallen nature and guilt, evangelicals are eager to sacrifice the humanity of everyone else.

The Deceptions of Techno-scientific Humanism As a representative of the American Revolution and a Founding Father, but also as an eager practitioner of the New Science and inventor of, among other things, the lightning rod, Benjamin Franklin was viewed by his contemporaries as a hero. A famous epigram, attributed to the French economist and statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, captures this adulatory regard for Franklin’s outsized heroic labors: “He seized the lightening from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants” (Franklin 1962, p. 2). This assessment of Franklin as a modern-day Prometheus and liberator would nevertheless give way to a less laudatory assessment of his achievements. As Danielle Carlo has shown, Franklin would be recast in Shelley’s

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1818 novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, as the symbol of enlightenment trickery, overreaching, and monstrous arrogance: the epistemological arrogance, no less, of assuming that modern man could steal fire from the gods, dominate nature, and pay no significant price for this trickery; and the moral monstrosity, which would first lead Edison to promote execution by electrical shock as humanitarian and, in due course, also lead American political and military leaders to justify the atomic annihilation of human life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a humane means to ending World War II (Carlo 2012, pp. 176–186, 223–247). This critique of techno-scientific humanism involves a critical reappraisal of the providentialist underpinnings of modern science as first conceived by Francis Bacon. In his Novum Organum, Bacon defended the process of inductive reasoning, which we today associate with the scientific method, as the only “proper” source of enlightenment (1955, p.  479). This method, based as it is “in the light of nature and experience,” is Bacon’s new organ for thought; and it is also precisely that which promises to set men free from the intellectual tyranny of scholasticism, or what Bacon refers to as the Idols of the Mind, and enable them to use the boundless power of nature in order to produce new arts and technologies that will improve the lot of the common man (1955, p. 480). In his Nova Atlantis, Bacon combines this techno-scientific notion of enlightenment with the idea of a providentially sanctioned campaign to enlarge “the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible” (1955, p. 563). This scientifically cultivated and technologically advanced world is meant to benefit all of humanity, increasing their health, comfort, and overall happiness. In order to complete his utopian vision of techno-­ scientific humanism, Bacon makes this expansion of human knowledge coincide with trips of exploration and discovery that favor the imperial dominion of the enlightened over the unenlightened (1955, p. 564). Inspired by Bacon’s utopian vision of a techno-scientific empire of liberty, John Locke proposed a theory of property that would establish a moral link between science and technology, on the one hand, and industry on the other. As a liberal, Locke defended the right of individuals to be free from the coercions of tyranny; but as an imperialist, he also defended the liberty of “industrious” people, that is, the British, to conquer foreign lands: both those lands that were inhabited only by barbarians—which for Locke amounted more or less to the entirety of North America, where he had a claim to a significant tract of land in the Carolinas—or those lands that had been conquered by people who were not industrious and had

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therefore neglected to improve the land with their labor—which for Locke essentially summed up vast areas of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Locke’s theory of property thus combines negative freedom with positive freedom. Negative freedom is at work in what he calls the Law of Nature. “The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: And Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind … that being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (1996, p. 271). Positive freedom is at work in the Biblical injunction to improve the land through labor to which Locke also appeals. “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labor and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life” (1996, p.  291). Accordingly, Locke argues, God gave the land “to the use of the Industrious and Rational (And Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Contentiousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious” (1996, p. 291). Locke’s theory of property thus shifts the ground on which virtue lies from the political realm to the economic, opening the floodgates of enlightened self-mastery to the imperial mastery over other lands and people. In America, this moral synthesis of techno-scientific reasoning and industry would, from the time of Franklin onward, come to be embodied by the heroic persona of the businessman. Not unlike the evangelicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the businessman in post-­ Independence America would promote values in American life that were profoundly anti-intellectual and fundamentally anti-humanist. “If evangelicalism and primitivism helped to plant anti-intellectualism at the roots of American consciousness, a business society assured that it would remain in the foreground of American thinking” (Hofstadter 1962, p.  49). Indeed, the history of the United States is, to a certain degree, synonymous with the pursuit of riches. Just as the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of Central and South America had come looking for silver and gold, British “venture capitalists promoting the first colonies in Maryland and Virginia divided the landscape into the shares of a joint-stock deal” (Lapham 1988, 36). For their part, the founders of the Puritan enterprise in Massachusetts Bay believed that grace revealed itself as property; and even the revolutionary War of Independence had at the outset less to do with Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” than with Boston ship-owners’ demands for “Liberty, property, and no stamps” (Lapham 1988, 36–37). For its part, the Constitution of the United

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States, which was largely written by men who represented the monied interests of the merchant north, enshrined a concept of liberty that favored property over people. The Bill of Rights was only amended to the Constitution several years later, as a grudging concession to those who thought that America’s democracy required liberty for people and not only property (Atwood 2010, p. 59). Of course, business in America has never been motivated by greed alone. Avarice is not, in the main, the only source of the anti-­intellectualism of America’s business ethos. As Tocqueville noted, “In democracies nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce,” and businessmen engage in it, “not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit” (1969, pp. 642–643). Business, in this regard, appealed to men of imagination, action, and ambition. The ethos of the businessman was, in fact, to become so pervasive that professionals of all sorts, from doctors of medicine to evangelical preachers, felt obliged to adapt the mores, standards, and attitudes of the businessman. Profit certainly was one of these standards, but so was a no-nonsense practicality and utilitarianism. Consequently, this business ethos “isolated and feminized culture by establishing the masculine legend that men are not concerned with the events of the intellectual and cultural world” (Hofstadter 1962, p.  50). This dismissive attitude toward the life of the mind and the cultivation of the arts as being merely ornamental combined, in the mind of America’s businessmen, with the idea that men should concern themselves primarily with the useful technologies derived by engineering from the natural sciences. Hence, not only greed but also a spirit of practicality account for the anti-intellectual and ultimately anti-humanist attitude of the American ideal of the business society. Understandably, one of the perennial complaints of humanists in America has been that most everything in American life winds up revolving around the glistening sun that is business. In the nineteenth century, Thoreau denounced the economic expediency that led small farmers and businessmen in his community to regard with utter indifference the suffering of slaves in the South and Mexicans south of the border. His answer in defense of humanist intellectual and moral values was to advocate for direct communion with nature and civil disobedience. In the mid-­ twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno would similarly criticize the complacency with which Americans acquiesced to their lives being valued strictly according to their economic fate. “In this country … people judge

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their own selves by their market value and find out who they are from how they fare in the capitalist economy. Their fare, however sad as it may be, is for them not something external: they acknowledge it … ‘I am a failure,’ says the American—and that is that” (2002, p.  175). Their answer, in defense of humanist values, was to criticize this business mentality and show how the profit motive had effectively turned culture into an instrument of mass deception and domination. “The deception is not that the culture industry serves up amusement but that it spoils the fun by its business-minded attachment to the ideological clichés of the culture which is liquidating itself … The hiding places of mindless artistry, which represents what is human against the social mechanism, are being relentlessly ferreted out by organizational reason, which forces everything to justify itself in terms of meaning and effect” (2002, p.  114). For his part, C.  Wright Mills would likewise criticize the economic expediency and political indifference of the middle classes. He showed that, as the economy shifted from small businesses and independent entrepreneurs to corporate giants and monopoly capitalism, the middle class of white-collar workers had ceased to organize their lives around the guiding democratic principles of liberalism and had instead settled for the “political idiocy” of a thoroughly privatized life that was dedicated to the pursuit of a kind of empty happiness that was as culturally trivial as it was historically inconsequential (1956, p. 328). But the full extent to which these business values were also anti-humanist values was not revealed until Mumford developed his critique of what he called the “megamachine.” According to Mumford, technology has always been an inseparable part of human cultural development. Early technology was part of the larger culture and was “broadly life-centered, not work-centered or power-­ centered” (1970, p. 9). The modern megamachine, by contrast, is exclusively oriented toward the accumulation and concentration of power as it ruthlessly exploits humans for the purpose of exercising power. The first historical instance of this megamachine was the machine that the ancient Egyptians built—a machine that consisted of enslaved and instrumentalized human beings—in order to erect pyramids that honored death, not life. As a theoretical construct, the megamachine is thus intimately associated with authoritarian and tyrannical forms of governance. In its original form, the megamachine assured obedience by violently coercive means. In our own day, argues Mumford, the pyramid of hierarchical coercion has been replaced by the pentagon as the primary symbol of exploitation. Only now, under the aegis of this pentagon of power, the megamachine

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no longer relies on violent coercion to assure obedience. Its methods, while just as ruthless, rely more on psychological manipulation. These differences notwithstanding, the basic characteristics of this contemporary megamachine remain true to those of the original. These include: “exactitude in measurement, an abstract mechanical system based upon science, concentrated political and economic power reinforced by ideology, and enormous physical productivity” (Long 2002, p. 176). “The final triumph of technocratic society,” writes Mumford in this regard, “would be the consolidation of every human activity into an autocratic and monolithic system” (1970, p. 303). What Mumford calls the “myth of the machine” is the widespread perception that the benefits produced by this megamachine are greater than the human costs it exacts. This is the basic fallacy that underpins the pseudo humanism of techno-science and the business mentality that champions it in the name of human freedom, progress, and happiness. Significantly, Mumford traces this widespread perception of the imagined benevolence of the modern megamachine to what he calls the “megatechnic bribe.” In this sense, Mumford argues that “megatechnics offers an immense bribe, which is bound to become bigger and ever more seductive as the megamachine itself proliferates, conglomerates, and consolidates” (1970, p. 330). He describes the outcomes of this bribe in terms that underscore the alienation of modern man from his own humanity. For the sake of material and symbolic abundance through automated superfluity, these machine-addicts are ready to give up their prerogatives as living beings: the right to be alive, to exercise all their organs without officious interference, to see through their own eyes, hear with their own ears, work with their own hands, to move on their own two legs, to think with their own minds, to experience erotic gratification and to beget children in direct sexual intercourse—in short, reacting as whole human beings, in constant engagement with both the visible environment and the immense heritage of historic culture, whereof technology itself is only a part (1970, p. 332).

Mumford’s critique of alienation corresponds with the humanist values of the Bildung tradition. The machine addicts he describes here, in addition to failing to develop all of their capacities in a balanced and harmonious manner, also fail to exercise their innate freedom to form themselves in communion with a collective of similarly self-forming individuals.

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But for all the criticisms of the business ethos and of the anti-humanist tendencies of techno-scientific humanism that these humanist thinkers developed and presented, they ultimately proved unable to disenchant the masses of the myth of techno-scientific happiness with which America’s wily businessmen had deceived them. In our own day, this moral synthesis of techno-scientific reasoning and business practices serves as a justification for the free-market fundamentalism espoused by neoliberalists. In the “Statement of Aims” published by the Mount Perelin Society—the original neoliberal think-tank that was established by, among others, Hayek and Friedman—we find an impassioned defense of humanist values: Over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.

Such sentiments would seem to coincide rather seamlessly with many, if not all, of the values associated with the Bildung tradition. And yet wherever in the world neoliberal “shock doctrine” practices have been implemented—from Chile to Russia and from Poland to Argentina—the result has been to undermine these humanist values and impose a regimen of economic austerity that has caused incalculable damage to the lives of those millions of unfortunate people who must now live out their lives in destitute poverty, without any social or economic safety net in place to help sustain the very same human dignity that the Mount Perelin Society’s “Statement of Aims” claims to defend (Klein 2007). Here again, the humanist principle of liberty is made to favor property over people. The fact that in America today neoliberalism passes for humanism is a travesty that cannot be laid alone at the feet of humanist intellectuals like Emerson, Thoreau, Mills, and Mumford. That their humanist critiques of the anti-humanist values of America’s techno-scientific business ethos fell on deaf ears is due in no small measure to the influence that the pragmatism of thinkers like William James and John Dewey had at the start of the twentieth century. It is to them and to their acquiescent disposition toward

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the megamachine of modern science, technology, and industry that we must now turn our attention.

Pragmatic Acquiescence In the course of American intellectual history, the school of thought most directly associated with the instrumentalization of reason is Pragmatism. Indeed, to the term pragmatism, Dewey, who was by far the most popular of the pragmatists, actually preferred the use of the term Instrumentalism. Echoing William James’ pragmatic dictum that “all our thoughts are instrumental, and mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma,” Dewey argued that, because actions have goals built into them, thinking and acting are inseparable (quoted in Menand 2001, p. 358). It was only by means of this instrumentalized integration of thought and action, believed Dewey, that philosophy could “recover itself” and “become a method … for dealing with the problems of men” (Menand 2001, 362). As a pragmatist, Dewey held that knowledge was always and already contingent on and relative to the developmental interaction of humans with their world. Knowledge needed to adapt itself to problems as they arose in experience. Accordingly, he embraced the scientific method of experimentation as the best way to solve problems democratically. Dewey’s life, which spanned 93 years (1859–1952), coincided with a seemingly endless parade of American wars: the Civil War, the Spanish-­ American War, World War I, and World War II.  Against this turbulent historical background, Dewey sustained a life-long belief in democracy, which he conceived as a “practice of associated living on the basis of tolerance and equality” and which he believed promoted “a better quality of human experience, one which is more widely accessible and enjoyed, than do non-democratic and anti-democratic forms of social life” (1938, p. 12). Known for his life-long advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered that the institutions of civil society and, in particular, the nation’s schools required democratizing reforms. It was for his work at the University of Chicago, where he developed his Laboratory School, that Dewey became known as a pioneer in the field of education. Toward the end of his life, he parlayed his reputation as an educational reformer into work with the American Philosophical Association, the American Association of University Professors, of which he was a founder and first President, the Teacher’s Union, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

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As a pragmatist, rather than assign to either intuition or reason the ability to perceive the organic integration of knowledge, he identified experience –understood as a “unified biological activity of adapting to the environment”—as this integrating force. It was thus on the basis of experience that he would develop the theories on education that he applied, first in his Lab School at the University of Chicago (1894–1904) and later while teaching at Columbia University (1904–1930). What he was aiming to accomplish through his lab school was “to work out in the concrete, instead of merely in the head or on paper, a theory of the unity of knowledge” (quoted in Menand 2001, p. 320). Insofar as experience provided this unity by combining thought and action into knowledge, Dewey sought to demonstrate, as he explains in his 1938 Experience and Education, “the necessary connection of education with experience” (1938, p. 9). As he understood it, traditional education, with its emphasis on rote memorization, did not prepare students for intelligent participation in democracy. But “the methods of science,” on which he claimed to base his educational philosophy, did “point the way to the measures and policies by means of which a better social order can be brought into existence” (1938, p. 35). The central curricular problem for Dewey’s pragmatic approach to educating America’s youth was “to select the kind of present experiences” for his students that would “live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (1938, p. 9). The idea, in so many words, was to provide opportunities for students to develop new habits of mind and sociability that would in time enable them to participate meaningfully in the all-important business of self-governance. Dewey sought to accomplish this aim by expanding experience on the basis of problem solving. In this regard, Dewey’s pragmatic approach to education aimed to “mobilize the interests of the child, to make good use of his need for activity,” to concern the minds of teachers with “a more adequate sense of the child’s nature,” to dissuade teachers from being “arbitrarily authoritative,” and to “develop the child’s capacity for expression as well as his ability to learn” (Hofstadter 1962, p. 360). As laudable as its intentions were, this approach essentially instrumentalized the aims of education. Dewey, who insisted that problems are the stimulus to thinking, did not see such goal-oriented instrumentalization of education as a problem in itself. But it was. Dewey’s inability, or downright refusal, to assess the practical limits of his pragmatic program for educational reform ultimately led to the dissolution of the curriculum in schools across the country. His

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followers, much to Dewey’s consternation, used his educational philosophy to attack “the ideas of leadership and guidance, and the values of culture and reflective life, in favor of certain notions of spontaneity, democracy, and practicality” in the classroom (Hofstadter 1962, p. 362). At its extreme, this led to a dumbing down of public education so extreme that progressive educators wound up favoring vocational education, centered around curricula that focused on agriculture, business, and home economics, while only making “provision” for “those having distinctively academic interests and needs” (Hofstadter 1962, p.  336). Whether because Dewey’s thoughts on education remained largely inaccessible to his readers—his style of writing was after all notoriously clunky and obtuse—or because the progressive educational reformers who championed his educational philosophy purposefully misinterpreted it to suit their own designs, the fact remains that Dewey’s pragmatic approach to educational reform ultimately helped to strengthen the already well-­ established utilitarian, business-oriented, and anti-intellectual trends in American education. The practical failures of Dewey’s approach to educational reform notwithstanding, his philosophy of education reveals the intimate relationship that existed in his overall philosophy between science and democracy. He sustained the view that the scientific method was democratic at heart and that democracy itself could benefit from implementing this method in its political deliberations. As he puts it in his 1935 Liberalism and Social Action, “the office of intelligence in every problem that either a person or a community meets is to effect a working connection between old habits, customs, institutions, beliefs, and new conditions” such that “freed intelligence” may “direct social action” (1991, p.  56). Only the scientific method, which instrumentalizes thought as a means to solving problems, can direct social action intelligently and overcome the crises of the modern era. “The crisis in democracy demands the substitution of the intelligence that is exemplified in scientific procedure for the kind of intelligence that is now accepted … Approximation to use of scientific method in investigation and of the engineering mind in the invention and projection of far-­ reaching social plans is demanded” (1991, p. 75). It would be wrong-headed to claim that Dewey was completely blind to the abuses to which his much-lauded scientific method for intelligent social action had been put in his lifetime. To the contrary, he acknowledged them. “When I say that scientific method and technology have been the active force in producing the revolutionary transformations society is

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undergoing, I do not imply no other forces have been at work to arrest, deflect, and corrupt their operation” (1991, p. 77). He clarifies his understanding of these historical limits of science and technology to solve the world’s problems by invoking the “prophetic vision of Francis Bacon” according to which the “subjugation of the energies of nature through change in methods of inquiry” leads to “the betterment of the common human estate” (1991, pp.  76–77). The first half of this vision viz., the conquest of natural energies, “has well-nigh been realized,” he suggests. But the second, which contemplates improvements in the “human estate” of the common man, has not. This failure, he claims, is not due to science or technology in and of themselves. Instead, Dewey identifies capitalism as the culprit. “The application of science, to a considerable degree, even its own growth, has been conditioned by the system to which the name of capitalism is given, a rough designation of a complex of political and legal arrangements centering about a particular mode of economic relations” (1991, p. 77). Acknowledging as much, he nevertheless rejects the Marxist critique of capitalism, because it “emphasizes the idea of a struggle between classes, culminating in open and violent warfare as … the method for production of radical change” (1991, p. 80). As a post-Hegelian philosophy of history, communism claims to have knowledge of the inevitable outcomes of the dialectical progress of history. “Insistence that the use of violent force is inevitable limits the use of available intelligence, for wherever the inevitable reigns intelligence cannot be used” (1991, p. 80). Here then is the sense in which Dewey’s commitment to democracy and democratic methods of social problem solving is revealed in a humanist light: “the measure of civilization is the degree in which the method of cooperative intelligence replaces the method of brute conflict” (1991, p. 82). Yet, by privileging science over all other forms of knowledge, and by reducing reason to an instrumental function, he unwittingly couched his humanism in relativistic terms that could easily be turned toward anti-humanist ends. It was precisely in this sense that Mumford regarded Dewey’s pragmatism as a “great acquiescence” to the crude capitalist ethos of the Robber Barons of the early twentieth century. If Transcendentalism had “resulted in a headache,” argued Lewis Mumford in his 1926 The Golden Day: A study in American Experience and Culture, the “pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis” (1926, p. 166). In his estimation, all that the instrumentalizing philosophy of James and Dewey amounted to was “an act of grand acquiescence” (1926, p.  166). Their philosophical outlook rejected the “process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the

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rough chaos of existence” that Mumford associated with the “mission of creative thought” (1926, p.  166). To the pragmatists, this humanizing mission “no longer seemed a genuine possibility;” and so, rather than “gathering into [their perspective] all the living sources of the day … and recasting these … into new forms and symbols,” such that “life might flourish,” they “bowed to the inevitable … swam with the tide; and went as far as the tide would carry” them (1926, pp.  166–167). This grand acquiescence was the expression of the general cultural currents of the time, a period of cultural and intellectual “shrinkage, a lapse, a devitalization” (1926, p. 166). It expressed, in other words, the decadent spirit of the Gilded Age, which, as Mumford puts it, “had tarnished quickly” so much so that “culture could not flourish” (1926, p. 182). The publication of this critique of pragmatism in 1926 would set the stage for a decades-long intellectual confrontation between Mumford and Dewey (Long 2002, p. 170). Their disagreement centered on differences concerning the notion of “unity of knowledge.” Whereas Dewey defined unity of knowledge in instrumentalist terms, Mumford sought to integrate “an organic value theory,” which was inspired by the ideas of the pioneering Scottish ecologist Patrick Geddes, with Veblen’s “theory of technological and institutional change” (Long 2002, 168). From this perspective, Mumford accused the pragmatists, and in particular, Dewey, of having accepted the utilitarian and commercial aspects of America’s Gilded Age at the expense of the humanist values of education as Bildung. In this regard, Mumford argued in his 1946 Values for Survival that “our problem is not, as some educators [i.e., the pragmatists] once thought, to adjust our education to the needs of a changing world: the problem is equally that of adjusting a changing world to the basic needs of education: meaning by education the harmonious cultivation of the entire personality, operating within the medium of a common culture, and within the frame of a growing community … Our aim [ought to] be that which Leibniz thought he discerned in the universe itself: the achievement of the maximum variety compatible with the maintenance of order” (1946, pp. 204–205). In his 1926 The Golden Day, Mumford’s critical portrayal of Dewey begins with the Nietzschean observation that Dewey’s writing lacks the “happy mental rhythm” of an original “style.” Dewey’s pages, he asserts, “are as depressing as a subway ride–they take one to one’s destination, but a little the worse for wear” (1926, pp. 255–256). As for the actual content of his philosophy, Mumford is likewise unimpressed by its overall lack of

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originality. Dewey, Mumford explains, “is at home in the atmosphere of Protestantism, with its emphasis upon the role of intelligence in morals; in science, with its emphasis upon procedure, technique, and deliberate experiment; and he embraces technology with the same esthetic faith that Mr. Henry Ford embraces it. Above all, Mr. Dewey believes in democracy … In [him] the American mind completed, as it were, its circle, and returned to its origin, amplifying, by the experience of a century, the essential interests of an Edwards, a Franklin, a Paine” (1926, pp. 256–257). In fairness to Dewey, Mumford acknowledges that he “has been a severe and just critic of conventional education” but objects that “his criticisms have been conducted with an unqualified belief in the procedures of common sense and technology, because these procedures have led to practical ‘results’” (1926, p. 257). This critique of Dewey’s instrumentalization of education notwithstanding, Mumford still acknowledges “the great service that instrumentalism has performed” by helping to crystalize in philosophic form “respect for cooperative thinking and for manual activity—experiment and invention” (1926, p. 258). And he even applauds Dewey for demonstrating the sense in which “thought is not mature until it has passed into action” (1926, p.  259). “[I]t has been Mr. Dewey’s great merit to … open the way to a more complete kind of activity, in which facts and values, actualities and desires, achieve an active and organic unity” (1926, p. 260). The intellectual and cultural deficiencies in Dewey’s philosophy are, however, too great; and they lead Mumford to censure him for his “too easy acceptance of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century framework of ideas;” his failure to criticize doctrines and authors closest to his utilitarian outlook and his resulting disregard for doctrines and authors who are far from him; his “democratic indiscriminateness” and regard for art as merely an instrument of moral education; and his embrace, finally, of the “deeply anesthetic and life-denying quality of the utilitarian philosophy” (1926, pp. 261–263). Dewey’s pragmatism either subordinates imagination to practical expediency or it canalizes imagination into the practical channels of invention, which leads, in the end, “not alone to the conquest of the physical environment but also to the maceration of human purposes” (1926, p. 266). For his part, Horkheimer would also censure the anti-humanist tenor of Dewey’s pragmatism. For Horkheimer, Dewey embodies the pragmatist tendency to refuse the method of dialectical reasoning that animates critical theory. Unlike Dewey’s instrumentalization of reason, which equates the scientific method with democracy, the dialectical method

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reveals the sense in which modern science and modern democracy have tended historically to converge with the totalitarian tendencies of communism and fascism. The fundamental problem with Dewey, in other words, is his voluntary naiveté and willed amnesia apropos the history of modern science and technology. Underpinning Horkheimer’s analysis of the pragmatic instrumentalization of reason is a dialectic which, in The Eclipse of Reason, he formulates in terms of an instrumentalization of reason that has undermined reason itself: “The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason; in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself, the source and power of their own efforts … We might say that the history of reason or enlightenment from its beginnings in Greece down to the present has led to a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological entity” (2013, pp.  17–18). Pragmatism, as Horkheimer understands it, represents the most extreme version of this suspicion of reason’s ability to liberate humanity from ignorance and unite its diverse forms of knowledge in the form of a universal objective truth (2013, p. 19). Having lost its “autonomy, reason has become an instrument … Its operational value, its role in the domination of men and nature, has been made the sole criterion” (2013, p. 21). For its part, argues Horkheimer, “pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all sciences and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after the production on the conveyor belt” (2013, p. 50). He compares this degraded and instrumentalized state of reason to the transformation of reason into stupidity, portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s negative utopia of a Brave New World. Here, observes Horkheimer, is portrayed “a system of prohibition of thinking” that “must end finally in subjective stupidity, prefigured in the objective idiocy of all life content” (2013, p. 56). Horkheimer sees Dewey as a thinker who “attacks anti-naturalism” or “supernaturalism” because it has “prevented science from completing its career and fulfilling its constructive potentialities” (2013, p. 60). Dewey’s rejection of dialectical reasoning basically boils down to saying that any philosophy that is not based in the scientific method must be relegated to the historical dung heap of metaphysics (Wheatland 2009, p. 130). Dewey, in other words, considers the dialectical method of reasoning that informs and animates Horkheimer’s critical theory, to be metaphysical. Indeed,

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Horkheimer acknowledges as much when he writes: “The adversaries of neo-Thomism,” among whom he includes Dewey, “justly point out that dogmatism sooner or later brings thought to a standstill” (2013, p. 70). But Horkheimer then turns the tables on Dewey, inquiring: “But is not the neo-positivist [i.e., the pragmatist] doctrine as dogmatic as the glorification of the absolute? They try to make us accept a scientific or experimental philosophy of life in which all values are tested by their causes and consequences. They confer responsibility for the present intellectual crisis upon ‘the limitation of the authority of science, and the institution of methods other than those of controlled experimentation for discovering the natures and values of things’” (2013, pp. 70–71). For Horkheimer, Dewey is the metaphysician; for he fails to consider that “like any existing creed, science can be used to serve the most diabolical social forces, and scientism is no less narrow-minded than militant religion” (2013, p. 71). As proof of this, he points, much as Mumford does, to the advent of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. “There is no clear-cut distinction between liberalism and authoritarianism in modern science,” asserts Horkheimer (2013, p. 72). The profound naiveté of pragmatism’s regard for the saving powers of science, Horkheimer argues, can be explained by its dogmatic identification of truth with science (2013, p. 72). But Dewey never actually worked out this correlation between the scientific method and truth, he argues. “Perhaps Mr. Dewey gives the main motive for this irrational predilection when he writes: ‘Modern methods of experimental observation have wrought a profound transformation on the subject matters of astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology’ and ‘change wrought in them has exercised the deepest influence upon human relations’” (2013, pp.  74–75). He then adds, denouncing Dewey’s historical gullibility: “If Dewey means to say that scientific changes usually cause changes in the direction of a better social order, he misinterprets the interaction of economic, technical, political, and ideological factors. The death factories in Europe cast as much significant light on the relations between science and cultural progress as does the manufacture of stockings out of air” (2013, p. 74). By raising, in this context, the specter of the Nazi death camps, Horkheimer underscores the sense in which his critique of Dewey’s instrumental rationality also involves a broader critique of pragmatism’s ideological ties to the theory of the totally administered society (Wheatland 2009, p. 118). Insofar as pragmatism is “the complement of modern industrialism,” argues Horkheimer, it is consistent with the socioeconomic order of

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monopoly capitalism. Ultimately, Horkheimer proclaims the pragmatist faith in science and in its facts to be totalitarian (Wheatland 2009, p. 130). As an alternative to this pragmatic acquiescence, Horkheimer defends the dialectical method of reasoning as a genealogical method, not unlike Nietzsche’s, which reveals the very concept of “fact” to be “a product of social alienation” (2013, p. 82). Accordingly, he argues that “the task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development … but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore its relativity. The so-called facts ascertained by quantitative methods, which the positivists are inclined to regard as the only scientific ones, are often surface phenomena that obscure rather than disclose the underlying reality” (2013, p.  82). Since, according to Horkheimer, all facts are mediated by history, they must be regarded with doubt and subjected to the critically reconstructive method of dialectical reasoning. In this way, Horkheimer’s critical theory aims to recover and preserve the non-instrumental mode of reasoning that is part of the humanist legacy of the Enlightenment (Wheatland 2009, p. 137). Faced with these challenging critiques of the pragmatic acquiescence, a cadre of New York intellectuals who were writing in the 1950s and 1960s would come to Dewey’s defense by attacking Horkheimer, in particular, and the dialectical method of Critical Theory in general. Chief among Dewey’s attack dogs was Sidney Hook, an erstwhile Marxist who had converted to the pragmatist credo. With the unparalleled zeal of a recent convert who is determined to prove the conviction of his new beliefs, Hook derided Horkheimer and his circle at the New School as forlorn elitists who failed to understand and appreciate American culture. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno understood kitsch and popular culture to be a deceptive ruse by means of which the plutocrats of the capitalist system aimed to dominate the masses, Hook maintained that popular culture “marked the democratization of culture and not the totalitarian leveling and control of art” (Wheatland 2009, p.  134). Moreover, he rejected Horkheimer’s dialectical method of reasoning as a sort of metaphysical nonsense that ran contrary to the scientific method that characterized the American way of thinking. Echoing Goffing’s understanding of differences between how Americans and Europeans thought about the world, Hook insisted that “the European mind was hierarchical, systematic, and abstractly conceptual in its analysis of the world, whereas the American mind was lateral, free-wheeling, and concretely empirical” (Wheatland 2009, p.  135). As

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such, he extolled the virtues of the scientist as a role model for democratic citizenship. For Hook, scientists lived and worked according to “the code of honest, free inquiry, the code of critical, inter-active, evidence based, universalistic, antiauthoritarianism” (Wheatland 2009, p.  135). Hook considered this pragmatic and scientific approach to be the “cornerstone for the cosmopolitan identity of New York intellectuals” who, like him, had disavowed the Marxism of their youth and had grown to embrace American democracy and free-market capitalism. Hook’s patriotic rejection of critical theory as the unscientific, un-­ American, radical rhetoric of European cultural elitists amounts to a second pragmatic acquiescence to the anti-humanist megamachine of America’s military-industrial complex. Although the faculty of the New School in Manhattan continue to offer courses and publish essays and books that draw inspiration from critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno, their method of dialectical reasoning, by means of which they sought to recuperate the liberating power of reason, has today been mostly abandoned and relegated to the dust heap of history. In its place, American intellectuals now commonly embrace the all-American anti-humanism of either neoliberalism or postmodernism.

The Recuperation of Human Memory At the same time that, in New York, apologists for America’s pragmatic acquiescence were busy dismissing Horkheimer and the other critical theorists as forlorn European elitists, French intellectuals in the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s were busy dismissing Sartre as a humanist. Not surprisingly, these were the same intellectuals—among them Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida—who would soon become the principal promoters, respectively, of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism. Under the spell of Georges Bataille’s critique of reason as a force that promotes a “homogenous society” that is standardized and that systematically represses the forces of vitality that lead to cultural creativity, these French intellectuals sought to break decisively with Sartre’s antiquated “humanism”—his defense of “subjectivity,” “reason,” “freedom,” and “philosophy of history” (Wolin 2004, pp. 155–159). Ironically, it would be these post-structuralist and postmodernist thinkers who, by rejecting humanism and embracing anti-humanism, would in the end acquiesce to the pessimism borne out of the perceived failures of the student revolts of 1968. This pessimism concerning the ability of men and women to endow

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history with meaning led them to abandon all hopes of revolutionary change and to settle instead for resistance (Fenn 2018, p. 97). In the American context, this resistance theory fed into identitarianism and the politics of recognition, to the point that we now see curricula in the humanities and social sciences organized around interdisciplinary studies that promote an educational ideal that aims not to teach students how to think critically, but to resist the political horrors and injustices of our time. Such resistance involves the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that have taken hold in the humanities and social sciences across higher education in the United States today. Resistance by means of suspicion is a three-step process that leads toward anti-humanism. The first step involves the reduction of all texts, whether they are conceived as literary works of art or sociological events, to a structure of imbalanced power relations. The second, which is a direct result of the first, amounts to the politicization of all criticism, whereby the critic’s task is to denounce abuses of power and empower the powerless. The third encompasses the celebration of the death of man, which in its more extreme manifestations takes the would-be subversive form of sanctioning systematic cruelty and other crimes against humanity the way that de Certeau, for instance, identifies resistance with thuggish criminal gangs in the slums of Paris or New York (Fenn 2018, 102). To restrict criticism to this policing task—whereby analysis and interpretation devolve into an unmasking of the hidden will-to-power of the modern subject, the cogito, and meaning is restricted to the arbitrary domination by the logos over all that which Reason deems to be unreasonable—is also to reduce the life of the mind to a state of constant vigilance that verges on the paranoid. It is to strip it of the imagination, reason, emotional force, and psychological depth with which meaningful readings and constructive criticism occur. In the final analysis, this “hermeneutics of suspicion,” while presuming to enable political resistance, strips us of the very thing that such resistance is supposed to safeguard: our intellectual and moral independence. This process of resistance through suspicion expresses a deep sense of pessimism about the ability of men and women to use their critical understanding of the world in order to bring about meaningful changes in their lives, whether as individuals or as members of a broader collective of similarly independent and critical thinkers. Such pessimism informs the political struggle for recognition that resistance theorists commonly pursue. There are, no doubt, plenty of reasons to sympathize with this activism

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and the demands it makes for justice raised by political movements organized around ethnicity, race, language, culture, gender, and sexuality. But there are also plenty of reasons to suspect that this shift away from a politics of redistribution, which traditionally focused on the satisfaction of interests and the equitable distribution of material wealth, toward a politics of recognition, which is refocused on securing equal respect and esteem for the diverse identities borne by members of pluralistic societies, has encouraged anti-humanism. As Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, when the left in America abandoned the working class in pursuit of the Clinton’s “third way” acquiescence to Wall Street and multinational corporations, this created an opportunity for the right to step in and usurp the left’s traditional role as the defenders of working-class interests (2004). But the right displaced these interests from the economic to the cultural sphere, feeding the fire of America’s so-called Culture War and pitting the victims of history against each other. Those on the right and those on the left have each played into the anti-humanist tendencies of this situation. The result has been the destruction of the American working class’s once economically ascendant way of life. Workers have been robbed of their portion of America’s prosperity in order to help the rich become richer. In exchange, the plutocrats on the right have offered them the glamor of authenticity and the narcissism of victimhood. On the left, the collective bargaining powers of class unity and solidarity have likewise been replaced by a politically correct politics of recognition. Ironically, this too serves the interests of American business. As the psychologists and marketing experts who lead the advertising firms in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles know only too well, subversive counter-cultural movements are cool, among other reasons, because they help businesses sell and make more money (Britt 1978). The culture industry, as Horkheimer and Adorno argued in the aftermath of World War II, is a form of mass deception that undermines collective solidarity in the name of Mammon. By settling for a politics that aims to gain official recognition of historically victimized collective identities, the political correctness of the left has in essence settled pessimistically for cultural representation and turned its back on participatory democracy. In the realm of higher education, the privileging of distinct group identities over the notion of humanity has driven the ever-expanding plethora of interdisciplinary studies—cultural studies, women studies, Latin American studies, ad infinitum—that now serve to fragment rather than to

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unite knowledge in America’s universities. While the overall aim of these ever-emerging areas of study is surely laudable—after all, it is objectively and historically true that women, African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, homosexuals and transsexuals have been and continue to be the subjects of violent repression and are typically not treated as full-fledged human beings—the micro-political fragmentation of knowledge that these studies have brought about ultimately undermines the humanist ideals on which the modern university was originally founded. When we consider the etymology of the word “university”—which combines the Latin prefix uni- or one, with the nominal form (versus) of the verb vertere, which means to turn—we can better understand that the core mission of the university everywhere, always, and already is to become a place where many distinct forms of knowledge can be turned into a comprehensive whole. Like the universe itself, universities unify diversity. It is for this reason that universities, as opposed to technical schools, institutes, and academies, must include in their curricula robust programs in the humanities. For, it is only by means of the historical study of art, literature, philosophy, religion and other manifestations of culture, that advances and setbacks in science and technology can be properly contextualized, theorized, made part of the whole, and imbued with a profound sense of their contributions to our modern civilization and its myriad discontents. The trouble is that post-structuralists see in this humanistic unifying ideal a logocentric will to totality that reduces diversity to sameness. Likewise, evangelical fundamentalists and other conservatives see in this humanistic endeavor a wrong-headed and overly optimistic evaluation of knowledge as a power capable of improving a human nature which, according to them, is fallen, wicked, guilty, and capable of redemption only by means of faith in Jesus’ self-sacrificial crucifixion. Either way, both sides agree that the university should not be a space for the exercise of moral and intellectual independence associated with the humanist tradition. Each is as willing as the other to fragment the university in order to meet their political objectives. The university is, as far as they are concerned, an instrument. Politicians of all stripes use the knowledge that professors produce. Indeed, the corporativist climate that has overtaken the administration of university life in recent years openly and aggressively posits the profit motive as the bottom line. By means of administrative discipline and the constant threat of budgetary cuts, university administrators determine what kinds of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and invention are to be valued, encouraged, and rewarded, what kinds are

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only to be tolerated, and what kinds will simply be made to suffer neglect due to their unprofitability. In effect, the university has been ruined by the anti-humanism of America’s business-driven Culture War. We need to rescue it from this destruction. We can do so first, by making clear the extent to which the Culture War is a false debate carried out on the common ground of anti-­ humanist values and, second, by troubling ourselves to frame and promote a humanist curriculum. Harold Bloom’s defense of the “Great Books” tradition represents an attempt to do so from the right. But the idea of humanity that animates his program, like that of E.D. Hirsch’s notion of “cultural literacy,” is astoundingly chauvinistic, giving credence to feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial critiques of the “Great Books” curriculum as the final justification put forth by old dead white men for their own culture’s heritage of empire building, pillage, and rape (Hirsch 1987, p.  10). Surely, the human experience, which involves the history of the entire species and the myriad cultures and civilizations to which it has given rise over the millennia, requires a much broader definition of what counts as “great” and worthy of our “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1987, p. 205). On the left, Harney and Moten’s notion of the “undercommons” is another surreptitious way of accomplishing a humanities curriculum whose aims are to counter the chauvinism of the “Great Books” curriculum. In their 2013 essay “The University and the Undercommons,” they provocatively assert, in language that is typical of resistance theorists, that “[t]he only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” (2013, p.  26). These two disgruntled academics, who self-identify as “subversive intellectuals,” argue that this criminal relationship is their only choice, outside of leaving the university altogether, because, although “it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment,” it also “cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge”(2013, p. 26): a place of refuge, that is, for those intellectuals and passionate seekers of truth who have stolen into the university “under false pretenses, with false documents, out of love” for teaching and learning and the life-long process of personal and cultural maturation that is enlightenment (2013, p.  26). “In the face of these conditions,” they contend, “one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (2013, p.  26). By going “underground” and occupying the

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“undercommons,” they maintain that intellectuals who work in the corporate university should take advantage of the refuge that the university still provides, even to its most disgruntled workers, and use this sanctuary to create a place of independence where enlightenment may be “stolen back” by those who have been systematically neglected because their labor is not particularly lucrative (2013, p. 28). Neglect, from the Latin neg, which means not, and legere, which means to choose, defines what Harney and Moten have in mind when they write about professionalization. Professionalized academics do not choose enlightenment; rather than aspire to a unifying diversity in knowledge, they choose to know ever more and more about still less and less; they choose, in no uncertain terms, to specialize and become experts in their field. By accepting the epistemological and disciplinary logic that animates this division of labor, professionalized academics exemplify what Harney and Moten refer to as the “privatization of the social individual through negligence” (2013, p. 34). This destructive negligence lies at the core of the corporatized university’s mission, which consists in pushing negligence to its ultimate consequence: the elimination, by means of the increasing professionalization of both faculty and students, of any and all attempts at enlightenment. In place of any broadly defined project of enlightenment, the corporatized university imposes a profit motive on those who work in it, from the administrators and their ever-increasing number of support staff, to the faculty and their students. “The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor” (2013, p. 29). By embracing this economic profit motive and the quantitative values of modern technological efficiency, the corporatized university has effectively undermined the qualitative goals once associated with the enlightenment ideal of an all-around education. This pragmatic instrumentalization of knowledge, which is modeled on the development of modern science and technology, is the epiphenomenon of our time: an “eclipse of reason,” as Horkheimer argued, that has placed the quantitative values of acquisition and accumulation over and above the local interests and needs of biological, communal, historical life. And yet there is something perturbingly cynical about Harney and Moten’s facile identification of “subversive intellectuals” with refugees. In our time, when there are upwards of 70 million people in the world who are either internally displaced or living as refugees, to romanticize the figure of the refugee as “radical” betrays a bad conscience. Harney and Moten are not, of course, alone in this. Ever since the publication in 1972

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of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where the figure of the nomad is elevated to the status of an icon that represents the quintessentially schizophrenic postmodern condition, it has been common among deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and postmodernists to celebrate fluidity and hybridity, multiplicity and mobility as the key values associated with the postmodern “diaspora.” “De-territorialized identities” are a common theme that runs throughout this characterization of the postmodern era. “According to this view, ‘de-territorialization’ paradoxically occurs as diasporic peoples root themselves physically in their ‘hostlands,’ but refuse (or are refused) assimilation to them, producing a sense of dual belonging and cultural consciousness that resists locating identity fully in either home or hostland” (Spiegel 2009, p. 12). But rather than celebrate the resulting fluidity and hybridity of these de-territorialized identities as emblems of postmodern resistance to homogeneity and totality, postmodern thinkers may want to refocus instead, or at least also, on the trauma that ordinary people experience when they are violently displaced from their homes. Their situation is not merely some “post-structural paradox;” the refugee camps they inhabit are not just “contact zones” that exhibit the “internal contradictions and indeterminacy” of their would-be “postmodern predicament.” Their lives are on the line. And the camps they inhabit are full of misery, poverty, and hunger. In connection to this suffering, the fact that “subversive” postmodern intellectuals would identify with the displaced and preach resistance to them is not only cynical and narcissistic; it is also downright misanthropic. But what is even more disturbing and incongruous in all this is that Harney and Moten don’t ever actually spell out an actual positive program for curricular reform. To the contrary, they merely claim that all that must be done is what already is being done by them and other subversives like them who have “stolen” into the university under “false pretenses” and thus sustain a “criminal” relation to the corporatized university. Criminal resistance does not a revolution make. It is, in the final analysis, the ultimate, terminal, pragmatic acquiescence to an institution that is fully bankrupt. A humanistic alternative must be found to both the “Great Books” curriculum and the more recent shift toward the postmodern diaspora of micro-political studies in resistance, not in order to save the university per se but, more importantly, our humanity. What we need is a fully independent humanistic intellectual project. We can ground such a project on what Markell calls the “politics of acknowledgment.” “In this picture,

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democratic justice does not require that all people be known and respected as who they really are. It requires, instead, that no one be reduced to any characterization of his or her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty or invulnerability” (2003, p. 7). In place of the positive and essentializing group identities that permeate the Culture War in America, here Markell advocates for negative identities, along lines similar to what Appiah theorizes as the ethical identities of liberal “rooted cosmopolitanism” (2005, p. 271). Unlike the politics of recognition in which positive identities must engage in their struggle for recognition—a struggle that Markell associates with the Hegelian Master-­ Slave dialectic—the politics of acknowledgment in which negative identities engage is based on an appreciation for human finitude, not in the sense that Foucault conceives such finitude when he speaks of the “analytic of finitude,” but rather as Arendt does when she refers to the practical limits imposed upon us by the openness and unpredictability of the future or what she conceptualizes as the non-sovereign character of human action (Markell 2003, p. 64). The key difference worth noting here is between a politics that is based in representation and one that is based in human action and agency. The one settles for resistance, hoping against hope that this will ultimately win it recognition by the state and a place at the banquet table of representative democracy. The other promotes participatory democracy, of the sort that Arendt associates with the non-sovereign, spontaneous, political life that erupts in the midst of revolutions (Arendt 1990, p. 257). It may strain the imagination to think that an intellectual project based in the affirmation of human agency is in some way revolutionary—after all it has always been this, or something very similar to it, that has served as the foundation of humanistic study, from Ibn Rushd and Maimonides in twelfth-century Córdoba to Petrarch and Bocaccio in fifteenth-century Italy to Erasmus in sixteenth-century Holland to Vico in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Naples—and yet the profoundly anti-humanist tendencies of American life have made it so. All of these thinkers associated with the tradition of humanistic learning, as well as the theorizers and practitioners of Bildung in Germany and the United States, held in common the belief that only by means of rationality, textual analysis and translation, could one acquire a true understanding and appreciation for humanity’s agency throughout history. At a minimum, an independent intellectual project for humanism today would need to be based on this hermeneutic tradition. Conceived in this way, hermeneutics entails the

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detailed analysis of texts in their historical contexts, where the study of the one helps illuminate the other and vice versa, in a constant back and forth that enriches our understanding and provides us with opportunities to reflect morally, aesthetically, and philosophically on what the language, art and music that we have set before us for study reveal to us about our past, our present and prospects for a future in which life and truth may yet outweigh the power of death and lies. In defense of this humanistic practice of hermeneutics, we should recall Mumford’s critique of the anti-humanist values of techno-scientific pragmatism, and do so specifically in light of the post-structuralist turn toward language. Whereas the post-structuralists see language as a “prison house” that uses us, abuses us, constrains us, dominates and mystifies us with its arbitrary and ultimately impenetrable systems of signification, Mumford understood that, if there was one tool that set humanity apart from other animals, it was language. Only for him, language is not some impersonal force that uses us; it is instead the tool we use in the process of our self-­ formation as individuals who share our capacity for language with a similarly self-forming collective of speakers and listeners, writers and readers. Language does not alienate us from our humanity, it is that profoundly human medium by means of which we come to understand and share in the cultivation of our humanity (Mumford 1970, p. 96). Another example of humanistic agency we would do well to recall involves the International Situationists’ critique of the society of spectacle, which infused the student revolutions of 1968 with vital energy. As against the pessimism with which the post-structuralists, postmodernists, and deconstructionists regarded the events of 1968, in Debord and Vaneigem we discover a hopeful vision of a fully human life in the midst of our terminal age. Debord’s theory of the society of spectacle constitutes what is perhaps the clearest and most severe analysis of the miseries, divisions, and estrangements that characterize our time. At the core of his critique is a process of ontological and cultural regression that involves, first, a downgrading of being into having, and then, a still further reduction of such having into appearing (1995, p. 16). In other words, what predominates in the society of spectacle, and what circulates through its economic networks of exchange and what drives its perpetual global growth are not the things and ideas that real people labor to make and use in order to satisfy their needs and desires, but abstracted images and words that have been emptied out of any meaningful content and made to stand in the place of reality. But the spectacle is not merely “a collection of images” projected

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into the public arena; rather, as Debord explains, “it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1995, p. 12). This mediation, as Agamben clarifies in his glosses on Debord, is best understood in terms of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. From this perspective, the mediation carried out by the spectacle amounts to “the commodity’s last metamorphosis, in which exchange value has completely eclipsed use value and … achieve[d] the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over life in its entirety” (Agamben 2000, p. 75). The human intellect, isolated and alienated both from the world at large and from life in general, becomes rationally instrumentalized, morally lobotomized. Debord conceptualizes this extreme situation as an instance of the materialization of ideology into a distorted consciousness of reality, a generalized autism and organized schizophrenia (1995, pp. 150–151). Spectacle leads to the “obsolescence of man,” as Anders puts it, or, as Vaneigem argues, to the “crumbling fragmentation” of a human life that has been reduced to a mode of survival (Anders 1979, p.  1; Vaneigem 1965, p. 50). As Vaneigem understands it, the oppression inherent in the society of spectacle “reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves, but also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them is also the false bond that unites them with power, reinforcing this power and making them choose it as their protector, as their father” (1965, p. 51). In opposition to the tyrannical oppression of this false unity, which reduces life to mere survival, Vaneigem envisions a revolution of everyday life. In this regard, he argues that the “will to live draws its vitality and its coherence from the unity of a threefold project: self-realization, communication and participation” (1965, p. 108). Although our age is a terminal age, Vaneigem’s idea of revolutionary life nevertheless provides us with examples of play, love, and creativity and, above all else, participation. There is no clearer alternative to resistance than revolution; no better alternative to representation than participation. The International Situationist’s critique of the spectacle involves the identification of and commitment to values for survival that are based in critical, spontaneous, and collective action, not identity. We can think of this revolution of everyday life as a re-articulation of humanist values. What is more, as an intellectual project, this life-affirming stance involves the recuperation of the past, of memory, and of experience. Whereas spectacle strips life of its original meaning and inherent value, humanism restores the significance of individual and collective experience.

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It would seem that in this day and age, Bildung necessarily involves a process of personal and cultural maturation that cannot escape the forms of structural alienation imposed by the global capitalist economy and the forms of psychological isolation and social fragmentation imposed by the society of spectacle. This does not, however, preclude us from reuniting life to its past cultural forms and, on the basis of what we can learn from this careful study of the past, project human agency into the future. In less abstract terms, this means recuperating the experience, memory, and life of all those human beings who, over the millennia, have struggled through learning to achieve some modicum of enlightenment. In terms that are still less abstract, we can recall what Lewis Mumford had to say about education in 1946, in the midst of a World War that would include his beloved son among its innumerable victims: the uniformities of science were purchased by a disregard for man’s complex, many-sided experience: by a contempt for his historic heritage, by a readiness to disparage, as purely subjective, that which could not be reduced to measure, and then to dismiss the subjective itself as unreal. Poetry, music, religion, painting, philosophy … were steadily segregated, as disorderly, indeed as disreputable elements, in a sort of red-light district of the mind: a reminder of human infirmity rather than of human wisdom. Treated as social outcasts, these realms of the personality rapidly lost self-respect and responsibility; and they had relatively little influence, accordingly, over the workaday activities of decent citizens (1946, p. 198).

Let us then seek to not be like these dehumanized “decent citizens” and instead embrace our responsibility to promote an educational ideal that seeks to develop the human personality as a balanced and harmonious whole.

A Dangerous Meeting of the Extremes America’s Culture War is grounded on shared anti-humanist suppositions. Its very persistence through time—the Culture War has been building momentum now for the better part of the past fifty years—would seem to confirm the time-honored political maxim that les extrêmes se touchent or the extremes meet. The modern age provides plenty of historical antecedents to this meeting of the extremes. We can limit ourselves to two paradigmatic examples. The atrocities of the French Revolution and in

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particular of Robespierre’s reign of terror gave rise to a counter-­ Enlightenment backlash that, in the name of order, promoted the more traditional forms of monarchic and ecclesiastical tyranny. Similarly, in the aftermath of World War II, the totalitarian nature of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes revealed how much these otherwise opposed political ideologies had in common. As Arendt demonstrated in her penetrating study of totalitarianism, the Nazis and Soviets shared in common the profoundly anti-humanistic nihilism of modern political movements, which in order to sustain their motion are always and already seeking to eliminate their perceived enemies, not only those external to the movement but also its own internal enemies. Totalitarian movements thus contain the seeds of their own perdition. Their nihilism is, in this sense, suicidal (Arendt 1973, p. 478). The Culture War in America today is a meeting of ideologically opposed minds who nevertheless agree that what matters most, as far as the future of our civilization is concerned, is that human intelligence, insofar as it is not only a source of power but also of vulnerability, be completely eliminated. For this reason, what should matter to us most about the cultural and political divides that are fragmenting American society today is not the spectacle of the Culture War per se, but the struggle of humanism to survive in this age of anti-humanism. Since they have become overwhelmed by the anti-humanist values of the society of spectacle, we can no longer look to either our political or educational systems to provide environments favorable to the exercise of human intelligence, creativity, and freedom. The tendency everywhere, whether a presidential election or a faculty assembly, is to squelch independence of mind and insist instead on conformity, uniformity, and efficiency. The bottom line is not human self-­ becoming and fulfillment, but that humans should labor, individually and collectively, to fulfill the lust for accumulated power and wealth of our society’s megamachines. By recalling the self-reliance that Emerson espoused, the civil disobedience that Thoreau promoted, and the values for survival that Mumford embraced, we can begin to reclaim our human intelligence and the human, all-too-human, future that the anti-humanists mean to deny us.

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McAlister, Melanie. 2018. The kingdom of God has no borders: A global history of American evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press. McDougall, Walter. 1997. Promised land, crusader state: The American encounter with the world since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. Menand, Louis. 2001. The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mills, C.  Wright. 1956. White collar: The American middle classes. New  York: Oxford University Press. Mount Perelin Society. Statement of aims. https://www.montpelerin.org/ statement-­of-­aims/ Mumford, Lewis. 1926. The golden day: A study in American experience and culture. New York: Horace Liveright. ———. 1946. Values for survival. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. ———. 1970. The Pentagon of power: The myth of the machine, volumes one and two. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1982. The portable Nietzsche. London: Penguin. Nightingale, Andrea. 2008. Auto-hagiography: Augustine and Thoreaus Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series. 16(2): 97–134. Paul, Sherman. 1960. Walden and civil disobedience, Ed. Boston: Riverside Press. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1904. The strenuous life. New York: Review of Reviews Co. Said, Edward. 2003. Humanism and democratic criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2012. Restless souls: The making of American spirituality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 2006. The conquest of history: Spanish colonialism and national histories in the nineteenth century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Spiegel, Gabrielle. 2009. The task of the historian. American Historical Review: 1–14. Strong, Josiah. 1963. Our country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College. Thoreau, Henry David. 1960. Walden and civil disobedience. Boston: Riverside Press. Vaneigem, Raoul. 1965. The revolution of everyday life. Online at theanarchistlibrary.org Weber, Max. 1930. Protestant ethic and capitalism. London: Unwin Hyman. Wheatland, Thomas. 2009. John Dewey’s pit bull: Sidney Hook and the confrontation between pragmatism and critical theory. In The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wolin, Richard. 2004. The seduction of unreason: The intellectual romance with fascism: From Nietzsche to postmodernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Intellectuals & Exiles Eduardo Subirats

Knowledge; Autonomy The coming together of human knowledge and autonomy in the Copernican discovery of the “revolutions of the heavenly spheres,” which represented both a reform of thought and a renewal of humanity, left its imprint on the character of philosophers, scientists, and modern intellectuals. One can observe that new confluence of knowledge and freedom in their artistic, literary, and scientific output. Yet the changes in the intellectual landscape inaugurated by the new human sciences were not merely an emancipation of thought from ecclesiastical and monarchic control. Philosophers and scientists such as Luís Vives, Sebastian Franck, and Paracelsus conceived of the new knowledge as a medium for an explicit critique of feudal absolutism, Christian imperialism, and the human suffering and misery that these institutions imposed per totum orbis terrarum. Vives questioned the brutality of the imperialism of the Cross. Franck spoke out against the European wars of religion. Paracelsus (1952, p.310 ff.), physician, botanist, astrologer, and metaphysician, bitterly denounced a Roman papacy that, while professing to spread the doctrine of Christ throughout the world, employed death and slavery to achieve its ends and indulged in orgies of corruption and contempt for the Christian masses. All three thinkers based their opposition to Christian absolutism on a

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belief in the autonomy of reason, in the capacity of humanity to build a historical world in accord with the divine harmony of the heavens. From Judah Abravanel to Giordano Bruno, the humanism of the sixteenth century sustained a belief—even to the point of enduring the ultimate consequences of holding such a belief: persecution, torture, and death—in the possibility of reestablishing this accord between the historical world and the cosmos. Similarly, the new humanism held out the possibility of restoring spiritual order through a millenarian tradition that integrated Vedic philosophy with the cosmology of the Egyptian magi and with Talmudic wisdom, a tradition that dialogued simultaneously with Sufi mysticism, the Cabala, and modern astronomy. Works such as the Encyclopédie and the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen are late products of this unification of human knowledge and autonomy. The institutional ambiguity of the intellectual—privileged by nobles and kings, and indeed by the Renaissance church itself, and at the same time subject to persecutions and exile—is inherent in this two-fold foundation. The unification of knowledge and liberty elevated the humanist to a level of understanding “like that of the prophets,” as Abravanel wrote when he fled from Spain (Sloush 1928, p.19). But at the same time, the autonomy of knowledge signifies domination: “scientia et potentia humanae in idem coincident,” in Francis Bacon’s formulation. The very same unity of knowledge and autonomy that raised Erasmus and Bruno to the rank of intellectual and social reformers of thought and society also conferred the status of “useful” knowledge on the new sciences, whose “fruits,” mythologically identified with the divine feminine and with the fecundity of nature, Bacon had already assigned to the category of capitalist lucre derived from industrial enterprises and colonial expansion. The grand systems of modern philosophy are the architectonic expression of the fragile equilibrium between scientific reason and technological, economic, and social transformations, transformations linked to the ambivalent human meanings of industrial and postindustrial progress. One of the highest expressions of the unity of knowledge and freedom is found in Goethe. In his botanical and mineralogical studies, as well as in his critique of Newtonian physics, Goethe combined a rigorous theory of scientific knowledge with humanity’s most ancient literary and philosophical wisdom. But Goethe’s project, which saw its poetic crystallization in the figure of Faust, was nonetheless destined to sink both politically and epistemologically on the shoals of the mechanical conception of nature, which superimposed itself on the “Spinozian” interpretation of plant

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morphology, and on Goethe’s “romantic” theory of color as well, without any stronger rationale than its congruence with the imponderables of mechanical production and the progress of instrumental reason. Moreover, the economic and political conflicts at work in Goethe’s Faust announce the reasons for the project’s interior dissolution, a truth formulated explicitly in later versions of Faust, including Nikolaus Lenau’s in the nineteenth century and Klaus Mann’s in the twentieth. In the end, capitalist progress carried off the beatific vision of cosmic and social harmony contemplated by modern science in the age of Paracelsus and Kepler. It abolished the dialogue between muse and machine that positivists still dreamed of in the great European industrial expositions of the nineteenth century and dissolved the unity of human knowledge and autonomy on which the socialist revolutions of that same century were built. From the moment that American Independence and the Grande Révolution evolved into the political and military apparatus of a new secular and technocratic imperialism and the industrial revolution converted scientific epistemology into an instrument of neocolonial subordination on a global scale, from the moment that the learned work of education and enlightenment was shifted into a global system of cultural production and media-transmitted contempt, the modern intellectual has become socially secluded, linguistically fractured, and internally divided. Hölderlin first represented this crisis in the figure of Empedocles, pursued by brutalized masses who could not comprehend the emancipatory value of his critique. An unbroken strand of testimonials to the resulting solitude and desolation stretches from Goya to Munch to Beckman. Marx, Bachofen, Nietzsche, and Freud, each set about to transform the constituent political and metaphysical elements of the decadent and imperiled civilization in which they found themselves. With the radicality of Renaissance humanists or Enlightenment philosophers, they embraced a wide spectrum of disciplines, including epistemology and natural philosophy, hermeneutics and anthropology, and social theory conjoined with literary and aesthetic criticism. Their work restored the unity of knowledge and human freedom found in Spinoza or Bruno. All of them attested to the need for social and cultural rebirth that could put an end to the suicidal march of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial capitalism, and to the cultural decadence that capitalism brought in its wake. Marx reshaped the legacy of a European socialism that had struggled to reestablish harmonious relations in the social and natural realms. Bachofen uncovered matriarchal cults that had stood in non-destructive

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relationships to nature and had preserved democratic traditions eliminated by the patriarchal order. Nietzsche fixed his gaze on the regenerative possibilities of Greek art and philosophy which Christianity had laid to waste. And Freud developed a method for reeducating a modern consciousness that was choked with guilt, anxiety, and internal division. The twentieth century has seen an uninterrupted series of reforms and revolutions that have sought to create an alternative to the globally devastating effects of colonialism, to the proliferation of warfare, and to social differences of ever-increasing enormity and social conflicts of ever-­ increasing intensity. In a manner that is as much aesthetic as philosophical or social, this tradition of resistance has redirected the waters of artistic and philosophical thought through a profoundly transformative channel. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the liberation of India and China from colonial rule, the national independence movements that arose across the expanse of Africa, and the revolutions in Mexico and Cuba have stood as historic milestones in this endeavor. Out of the crucible of these social changes a new type of intellectual emerged. Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Mahatma Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, and Che Guevara all started as writers, philosophers, or journalists and subsequently converted their awareness of the inhumanity of industrial capitalism, and of colonialism, into a social praxis that included methods for political enlightenment, strategies for resistance to authoritarian political systems, and a vision of human solidarity. At the same time, the twentieth century has also been assaulted and held captive by an unbroken succession of totalitarian systems, imperialist wars, and genocides. Along with a concentration of power in the hands of corporations and the military, the twentieth century has witnessed the development of a complex institutional machinery of propaganda, ideological control, and control effected via mass media. One consequence of the development of this machinery has been the coercion and persecution visited upon intellectuals. Soviet Stalinism, European National Socialism, American McCarthyism, and the various fascisms of Latin America have all offered, on a grand scale, a veritable montage of violations of intellectual autonomy, some flagrant and others covert. The inevitable outcome has been the constant infringement of intellectuals’ rights, their permanent exile, and their infinite silence, ultimately resulting in the quarantining of the intelligentsia, heretofore excluded from a public reality monopolized by political authorities, from the commercial means of communication, and from the corporate domain of the techno-sciences.

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The new concentrations of power have, for their part, been accompanied by new techniques of production, new systems of propaganda, and the astonishing growth of information technologies that have altered the forms and idioms of intellectual praxis. The unity of knowledge and moral consciousness that once formed the backbone of intellectual praxis has long since disintegrated into a thousand fragments. Intellectuals are now experts and specialists. The scope of their responsibility is limited entirely to instrumental activities, their role reduced to a type of professionalism subject to corporate vigilance and departmental discipline. The conditions of the academic and industrial production of knowledge locate the intellectual within a circumscribed system of micro-domains that, in the best of circumstances, tolerates ethics only as a means to institutional legitimation. In the final analysis, the micro-political networks governing intellectual conduct strangle the expert to the point of complete intellectual nullification. It is for this reason that the academy continues to validate the disappearance of critical discourse, the paralysis of reflective consciousness, and the alleged messianic arrival of the postintellectual. But the intellectual’s destiny does not end there. If corporate dominion molds an expert who is pedestrian and disciplined, then in a complementary manner, the culture industry casts the intellectual in the role of professional performer. The former sacrifices all socially responsible communication in the name of professionalism; the latter sacrifices all conceptual and moral rigor for the sake of a mindless cultural spectacle. Both are ruled by the same norms of monetary rationality, but whereas the technocrat is submerged in administrative anonymity, the cultural performer is exhibited throughout the global village with all of the fetishistic glamor once reserved for media stars. This is the stigma borne by modern intellectuals. Throughout the twentieth century, one attempt after another to organize a democratic and egalitarian society has been crushed. Again and again, political contempt has triumphed over the mass of humanity reduced to impotence and hopelessness. Continually and impassively, we have countenanced concentration camps and refugee camps, the implementation of organized torture and rape, the genocidal use of weaponry, and the dislocation of entire populations by military force. We have been confronted directly with the most extreme forms of human degradation. From the World War I to the global war on terror, modern and postmodern intellectuals have witnessed all of these epiphenomena of capitalist civilization in ever growing proportions. And every time the same pattern of silence, indifference, cowardice,

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and retreat is repeated; the same stance of implicit collusion and explicit cynicism with regard to totalitarian policies and corrupt regimes is enacted; the same complicity and silence are duplicated and sealed with the politically correct semiotics of sublime patriotisms, impeccable democracies, or perfect communisms. Julien Benda described the affiliation of European intellectuals with nationalist political movements, which opened the door to fascism and Stalinism, and ultimately to the World War II, as “le trahison des clercs.” But since that time, the charge has acquired global resonance, and its reach now extends far beyond the limited political spectrum that was the concern of Benda’s original essay. The passivity displayed both by intellectuals and the academy in the face of the ascent of fascism in the 1930s, the muteness of professionalized intellectuals in the face of the development of nuclear and biological weapons during the Cold War, and the complicity of the “global professor” in the face of the ecological and social destruction of the Third World, are successive examples of an intellectual consciousness thoroughly immobilized by fear, diminished by opportunism, intimidated by patriotic and nationalist populisms, and contaminated by decadent aestheticism. No modern depiction has made the poverty of the intellectual—a poverty of many dimensions, moral, artistic, sexual, and political—manifest in a more disturbing fashion than Klaus Mann’s Mephisto. Mann’s novel sought above all to portray both the precarious position of intellectuals who opposed the National Socialist state in Germany and the human vicissitudes caused by persecution, banishment, and exile. But Hendrick, an actor and the novel’s protagonist, makes manifest something else that is as dismal as the persecutions and genocides perpetrated by modern fascism: the paralysis of the intellectual faced with the coercive power of the state, and the transformation of an independent artist into an agent fully incorporated into and identified with the performatization of fascist political machinery. Mephisto testifies to the annihilation of the modern intellectual as a sovereign consciousness at the very moment in which he is triumphantly elevated to the summit of global power as spectacle (Mann 1936). The historical situation perceived by Mann should in no way be discounted as a simple nightmare of a now defunct authoritarianism. His novel, along with the ban it was subjected to in the postwar years and its subsequent cinematic recuperation by Istvan Szabó, make bring to light a

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very contemporary problem.1 Mephisto describes the transformation of intellectuals and artists—once mediators of a social process of apprenticeship and of liberation in the sense described by humanists such as Leibniz and Diderot—into stars of the cultural industry, politico-artistic fabulists, and producers of politics as work of art. The classic model of this process is still undoubtedly the theory of culture developed by Goebbels—the executive producer of National Socialist propaganda and the man who first connected film production and modern communications to the military-­ industrial complex and its political representatives, all under an aesthetic conception of political power as absolute spectacle. McLuhan too might be viewed as a minor postmodern pseudo-prophet who recycled the romantic visions of older European fascisms, reshaped by modern technological changes such as Sputnik and the television, and presented them in their North American guise of democracy as talk show. In any case, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the fascist project of staging politics as spectacle, with its attendant universe of semiologically manufactured triviality, has crystallized into a globally triumphant second nature whose consequences are found in the landscapes of genocidal wars and in the deterioration of humanity. At the site where culture is diluted in a variety of commercially degraded productions, where the design, production, and promotion of spectacle invades every expression of human existence, there too the intellectual has ceased to function as an independent intellect, as a socially oriented consciousness, as a moral exemplar, or even as a public figure. Klaus Mann’s vision was prescient in this respect as well. His 1949 manifesto Die Heimsuchung des europäischen Geistes describes a postwar Europe entirely in ruins and utterly foundering in historical time, a Europe that had lost its faith in progress and watched its most sacred hereditary values collapse. The concepts Mann used to describe portrayed this historical condition were eloquent in themselves: “permanent crisis,” “rubble and ruins,” “dislocation…” These metaphors have a long history within a European intellectual tradition, stretching from Nietzsche to Adorno, that recognized of the phenomenon of cultural impoverishment depicted by Mann. Mann adds a new dimension to their observations: Heimsuchung—a word that designates the condition of being persecuted, captured, and entrapped within one’s own walls—a word that ultimately alludes to complete political and moral defeat (Mann 1993, p.21 ff.). 1

 The novel was published in the DDR in 1956 and banned in West Germany until 1981.

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The figure of the modern intellectual has been molded by a series of revolutions that have shaped the modern world in general as well. Jefferson and Paine were philosophical voices raised against colonial European power. Miranda, Bolívar, and Martí were men of letters who envisioned the liberation of the peoples of Latin America. Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Marx devised categories of thought intended to overcome the cycles of social destruction set in motion by nineteenth-century capitalism. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg defined a political means of resistance to modern imperialisms. The new political will of the Blanquistes and the Saint-­ Simonians, of anarchists and communists, of Third World national liberationists and partisans of various anti-colonial fronts, all are encompassed by one word, a military metaphor: the vanguard. Intellectuals assumed the role of pioneers in the march of history toward the final emancipation of the proletariat, the condemned of the earth, the masses of humanity assembled by industrial capitalism and then made superfluous. Their critique of society and their vision of history were conceived under the banner of justice. Theirs historical spirit was animated by Jewish humanism and messianism, strengthened by the heretical eschatologies of medieval revolutionary Christianity, and then secularized by the scientific rationalism and anti-clericalism of the encyclopedists. The conceptual framework for a rational harmony between the natural and historical worlds, together with the strategies and tools for its political realization, all flow together in the consciousness of the modern intellectual. Nobody has defined the idealism of this revolutionary consciousness as fully as György Lukács has, in his classic work Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. According to Lukács, scientific knowledge of the conflicts experienced by society, together with the moral will to emancipate humanity from its chains, gave revolutionary intellectuals a normative function. Their social criticism and their ability to orchestrate a collective process of enlightenment and subsequent emancipatory action signaled the birth of a new historic consciousness: “the consciousness that does not develop into a completely passive spectator … nor into the power of a subjective arbiter” (Lukács 1968, p.252). According to Lukács’ social theory, once the governing intellectuals’ liberating function reached its fulfillment, once the project of establishing a community of the free and self-aware subjects of a humanized history reached its completion, the intellectuals would renounce their detached stance and dismantle their transcendental epistemology for the sake of democratic self-rule.

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By the end of the twentieth century, though, the construction of a global order under corporate control, together with the global extension of colonialism and the concomitant propagation of war on a planetary scale, has revealed the opposite historic tendency. And intellectuals have not been immune to this inversion. Intellectuals have been devoured by administrative and financial bureaucracies; vaporized by the productive systems of instrumental rationality; and transfigured by the fetishistic glory of media spectacle. The principle of autonomy that had defined their noble humanist past, their function as social liberators during the Enlightenment era, and their tenaciously reformist thought has been derailed by the rocky scarps of the post-political, the post-historical, the post-human, and the end of philosophy. Ultimately, the autonomous and liberating characteristics of the intellectual vanished without a trace into the vacuity of the administratively domesticated knowledge industries, into the deconstructionist labyrinths of academic production and reproduction. The intellectual dependence on corporate and governmental administration identified by Charles Wright Mills in the middle of the last century, and the parallel fossilization of the intellectual in the figure of homo academicus described by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1980s have in the meantime effectively become a fait accompli (Bourdieu 1984). Professionalism and specialization, the codes of administrative discipline, the universal subordination of intellectual activity to the principle of economic return, all have conspired to create the moral apathy, the pandemic of theoretical mediocrity, and the sonorous public silence that characterize intellectual life at the start of the twenty-first century. The norms of administrative efficiency and profitability have enclosed the corporately organized knowledge professions within the limits of a blind technocratic pragmatism, in the case of the technical-scientific faculties, and within a tightly circumscribed field of irrelevant intertextualities, in the case of the humanities. Within the academy now, it is deemed impertinent to protest the corporate monopolization of information, the ecocidal and genocidal effects of industrial biology, or the degradation of democracy into spectacle. In an age of massive commercialization and trivialization of culture, to debate the crisis in the sciences or at the institutional frontiers of the humanities is to take a considerable risk. To question the globalization of violence or the devastating policies enacted in the developing world is a dangerous transgression. Socially responsible reflection in an age defined by atrocities, the massive denigration of human rights, and the construction of global systems for the totalitarian control of civil society, profanes the

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hallowed neutrality of the lecture hall. Thinking is not politically correct. Faced with the manifest absence of meaning in the discourses of economic development, industrial progress, and national security, the academy and its “last intellectuals” have become mute witnesses to their own eclipse. When there is nothing to say, when nothing can be said or no one wants to say it, the best remaining option is to talk about language. The fetishization of language, which began in 1960 with the Saussurian school of the Parisian left and culminated in the deconstructionist hysteria at Yale University, compensates for the muteness of intellectuals in the face of the crisis of legitimacy in the postmodern sciences. None of the great dilemmas of modern critical theory have escaped this omniscient semiological customs-house. According to its axiomatic precepts, the Freudian unconscious is a grammatical construction of the subject, the struggle between the classes merely a meta-historical allegory, the corporate control of information a fata morgana and a system of simulacra. Everything begins and ends in discourses, constructions, representations, performances, allegories, and semiotic strategies. Nuclear war is an ambiguous referent, global warming merely an interdisciplinary hypothesis, the irreversible destruction of cultures across the planet a matter of semiotic hybridism. The ultimate consequences of this linguistic turn among intellectuals have been the propagation of systems, the proliferation of jargon, and the fragmentation and decay of academic discourse, until what results is a fraudulent chatter that makes the pedants ridiculed by Bruno in his dialogues seem dignified by comparison. Moreover, the semiotic vaporization of critical theory has gone hand in hand with its micro-political dismemberment. Feminism, queer theory, cultural studies, studies of subaltern subjects and local identities delineate the space in which postwar European critical theory has been dismantled and scrapped. These developments have eliminated any genuinely theoretical perspective on the various conflicts that are springing up at the start of the new century; meanwhile, ponderous critiques of representation and tedious analyses of performance continue to echo throughout the academy. The banners of pluralism and multiculturalism have also waved superciliously over the rhetoric of the global academy. The watch-words, dressed up in the avant-garde sex appeal of the ethereal newest left, never advance beyond eclectic semiologies of hybrid representations. Under the cloak of such banalities, technocratic monolinguism, corporatized spectacle, unidimensional political thought—not to mention military armaments and the global violence they fuel—continue to circulate effortlessly off campus,

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the consequences of which have been devastating in every way for those cultures that are not white, Western, or Christian. Ultimately, one cannot ignore the extent to which the academy’s institutionally circumscribed and philosophically irrelevant thought has been characterized by two fundamental attributes: the nonexistence of any genuine intellectual agenda, and the resulting absence of any authentic political projection. In the context of classic totalitarianisms, Klaus Mann laid open the fatal dilemma faced by the modern intellectual: a disjunction between political opportunism on the one hand, and autistic isolation on the other. C.  Wright Mills denounced the vaporization of the intellectual by the machinery of production, by bureaucratic apparati, and by the entire corporate system, a phenomenon visible from public administration to the industrial laboratory. Having endured the mutilation inflicted by McCarthyism, the intellectual has now been utterly devoured by the structures of academic administration, resulting in the sub-departmental deconstruction of the intellectual detailed by Russell Jacoby in his account of his long agony on the campuses of North America (Jacoby 1987). The commercialization of intellectual production by the cultural industry has reduced the intellectual’s creativity to the lower limits of mercantile triviality and media manipulation. At the same time, in the developing world, the combined effects of criminal dictatorships, of the destruction taking place under the auspices of the World Bank and the countries’ own national universities, and of the colonization of the most vital indigenous artistic and intellectual traditions as sub-products of the Western culture industry, all foreshadow a violent denouement (Volpi 1998, p.327 ff.). In this age of “organized irresponsibility,” in which great decisions devolve upon corporations and anonymous bureaucracies, the intellectual as an exemplary individual consciousness has been ruthlessly cut down (Mills 1963, p.298). The deconstruction of intellectual discourse, the subordination of intellectuals to the stereotypes of industry, and the enlistment of intellectual activity as a productive component in various cultural industries, in financial and or administrative mega-machineries, have mired intellectuals in a condition of conspicuous impotence. They do not see, or do not want to see, the disaster that befalls them. Thus, even when intellectuals are confronted directly with the crisis of our time, their institutional confinement drives them into passivity and emptiness. Like the Angel of History depicted by Benjamin, the intellectual can do nothing. In our age, the electronically dispensed blindness of the global village forms a necessary condition for the survival of corrupt political, military,

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and financial leaders; hence, intellectuals’ expertise regarding structural conflicts of ecological or social origin, their full awareness of the systemic irrationality of economic policies and economic development programs, and their scorn for mass media reduce them to a condition of marginality.

Unbounded Exile In his Retablo de las maravillas [The Altarpiece of Marvels], Cervantes presents an allegory of society as spectacle. His protagonists are a company of performers of comedy and farce. One day, they arrive in a certain village and announce that they will present a miraculous show; the show will include biblical episodes, an appearance by the Grand Turk, even an attack by a terrifying bull. But the company of actors imposes one condition: only men and women of clean blood can attend the show. In Catholic Spain, to have clean blood is to be free of Muslim or Jewish lineage. Everyone accepts the challenge. Everyone turns up at the theater. Everyone acclaims the miracle. Everyone enthusiastically applauds an empty stage. Suddenly, a soldier appears. No one expected his arrival, and no one recognizes him. Like Cervantes himself, he carries within himself memories of voyages to distant lands. But he has arrived late for the performance, and he knows nothing of the stipulations regarding who can witness its hyper real visions. Without hesitation or doubt, the foreigner exclaims that there is nothing to see on the stage, that the miracles are a farce, that the spectacle is an empty sacrilege. The crowd hears the affront; it rises up and cries with one voice: ¡Basta: de ex illis es! ¡De ex illis es! ¡De ex illis es! ¡Dellos es, dellos, dellos es!… ¡Basta: dellos es, pues no ve nada!’ (Cervantes 1921, p.151) [‘That’s enough! He is ex illis! He is ex illis! He is ex illis! He’s one of them, one of them! That’s enough! He’s one of them, so he sees nothing!’]

Cervantes denounces Hispano-Christian racism and calls into question the very concept of faith, which has been recast as obedience by means of ecclesiastic intimidation. The foreigner who sees that there is nothing to see embodies the cognitive structure and the enlightening social function

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of the modern intellectual. Cervantes’ comedy also marks the intellectual as a negative consciousness. The intellectual’s reflective critique is founded on a double negation: it is the denunciation of emptiness; the negation of nothingness; a “no” to non-being. This critique of the emptiness of representation, of the falseness of propaganda, of the nothingness of spectacle, also encompasses a social dimension, inasmuch as it lays bare the constitutive principle of a false national consciousness—the connivance of an entire people with the subterfuge of purity of blood. On top of, or perhaps beneath, all of that, Cervantes places the intellectual under the stigma of “ex illis.” The intellectual is a foreigner, one of the others: the exile. “Ex illis” is not the etymological root of the word “exile,” but it signals the social stigma, the constitutive wound of exile. Banishment and extradition, like ostracism, expatriation, and exile, are words that designate social exclusion and segregation, and hence the confinement and isolation of the intellectual. Indeed, not only do these words denote the reflective consciousness’s dislocation in social and political space, they also reveal precisely the excision of that consciousness from its historic time, together with the deep wound that results. Exile defines modern intellectuals’ social isolation, their politically and linguistically besieged condition, and consequently their social impotence and existential precariousness. How has this excision of the intellectual consciousness from modern cultural history come about? Cervantes’ comedy is illuminating in this respect as well. The segregation of the intellectual, first as a foreigner, then as an exile, and finally as an outlaw—the three phases experienced by the soldier in Retablo de las maravillas—is shown to be a consequence of an absolutist political system, one that founds its patriotic identity on the compulsory principle of imperial Catholic universalism and, equally, on an illusory—and hence necessarily genocidal—ethnic identity. This politico-theological definition of exile generates series of important ramifications. One is the system of persecution by means of which national identities have been forged. Another is the epistemological and mystical “body” of inquisitorial torture, which constitutes yet another chapter in the transcendental configuration of Christian “ethnicity.” Today, it is necessary to emphasize anew the truth that all nationalisms and patriotisms are built upon proscription, deportation, and exile as their necessary constituent conditions.

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On the other hand, these persecutions and banishments give rise to migration of intellectuals in search of social spaces that are more open. The social and cultural deterioration that ensues from this banishment of intelligence, from this exile of cultural idioms and memory as well, is another germane consequence of the politico-theological definition of exile. Cervantes in particular throws this false principle of Hispano-­ Christian identity into sharp relief in his oeuvre: a principle that demanded the sustained performance of sacramental acts and acts of faith; that succeeded in extirpating Hispano-Judaic spirituality and Hispano-Islamic mysticism from Spain; that persecuted the scientific and philosophical humanism of the Renaissance with fire and blood; that continued to sponsor inquisitorial orgies right up until the moment of the Great Revolution; and that never ceased satiating, by means of its incessant witch-hunting of liberals and romantics during the last two centuries, its hatred of anything reminiscent of the open spirituality it had wiped out. The bloody historic panorama of Western progress prompts one final line of inquiry: What kind of energy lit the bonfires in the first place? What was the source of the original flame that set off this continual destruction of life, knowledge, tradition, and sacred sentiment? What profound rancor has nurtured and continues to nurture the thirst for the destruction of everything that is most noble in the cultures of the past? Why have spiritual men and women been systematically eliminated throughout the expansion of Christianity and the West? The persecution of liberals in the Soviet Union, the suppression of intellectuals in the United States by McCarthyism, the exile of the intellectual vanguard by European fascism, the persecution and mass extermination of intellectuals in Latin America under the auspices of the Cold War: all of these examples seem to point to an intimate relationship between the exile of the intellectual and modern totalitarianism. But to contemplate exile from this exclusively political point of view would be as limiting as viewing it solely from the legalistic perspective of human rights, as confining as interpreting it as an anomalous episode in comparative literature. What, then, are the deep sources of this radically enslaving and annihilating force that has persecuted, banished, expatriated, and eliminated both enlightened mystics and learned intellectuals, both shamans and rabbis? Why are the instruments of torture and the cells of the Inquisition a constitutive moment in the paradigm of the exiled modern consciousness?

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If a singular model of the persecution, dismemberment, and destruction of spiritual legacies and their intellectual leaders throughout the history of the West is provided by the Christian Church, then an important source for understanding the original meaning of the Christian exile of the intellect is provided by its founder Paul. Two or three citations from Nietzsche will be illuminating in this respect. Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, which is at base a critique of Pauline theology, is motivated by three primary considerations. The first, and undoubtedly the most important, is the dialectic of sacrifice and transcendence out of which the kyrios kristos, the Messianic Lord, is constructed. Nietzsche focuses on the sense of nothingness affixed to the cross of being as the absolute principle of Christian transcendence. Nietzsche’s second critique of Paul concerns his allegorical falsification of biblical history, his tergiversations regarding its most universal spiritual values, and his subversion of the Judaic conceptions of the cosmos and of being. But Nietzsche raises still another objection to Paul: his exile (Nietzsche 1955). Paul’s biography is the biography of an archetypal exile. From Tarsus to Damascus, from Antioch to Ephesus, from Jerusalem to the capital of the Empire—the city that was his final destination, the city in which he sowed discord and disorder—wherever he went he was accused of betrayal by Jewish communities and of undermining established custom by gentile communities. Wherever he went, in the end he was persecuted as a divisive presence, beaten and stoned as a meddler, and ultimately driven out as a malefactor. And yet his sectarian mission grew in visionary intensity as each new persecution purified him, enabling him to conceive of a perfect community of the factious, an ekklesia founded on the sovereignty of the Messiah, the kyrios kristos. This erratic existence, an existence of being repeatedly banished and outlawed—that is to say, the original condition of Christian exile—was based on four firm principles: the concept of an absolute and original debt; the transcendence of being affected by means of the sacrifice on the cross, the suppression of Jewish law and memory, and the establishment of the new faith as a system of credit based on the settlement of debts after death. In every pre-Christian religion, from the cosmological Celtic and Mayan religions to Buddhism, the cross is, together with the circle, a symbol of the unity, plenitude, and harmony of being as conceived from the point of view of its conflict and dynamism. But Paul lifted the messianic and transcendental meaning of the torture, agony, and sacrificial death of Jesus—a death effected through the cruelest and most humiliating method

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of intimidation and slaughter applied to the political enemies of the Empire—onto this same cross of being. And it was on the site of this messianic, or, more precisely, Christological, sacrifice that Paul built the architecture and the logos of a new consciousness, a new humanity, and a new universal spirit of history. Paul thus established a new ekklesia in space and time, a sui generis entity that refused to accept the contingent being of human communities, of their spiritual memories and knowledge, of their laws and sacred forms of life. Culpability, or more precisely, the narrowing of the multiple meanings encompassed by the Bereshit to a single and absolute postulate of debt, this was the great Pauline concealment. In the first instance, this guilt or debt thrusts death into the Edenic heart of being; at the same time, it raises an absolute barrier between the human and the divine and between consciousness and the cosmos. But according to the Pauline politico-­ theological program, the cancellation of this originary debt through grace (karis)—that is to say, justification through the sacrifice of the Messiah (kristos)—can only take place within the space opened by a rupture with the Law (nomos), which Paul identifies with sin (Romans, 6,14; Galatians, 5,4). And that rupture entails the abandonment of Jewish memories and forms of life, as well as the Jewish conception of being and of the cosmos, the full sense of which is encompassed by the notion of halakha. This is the blackmail imposed by the Pauline concealment. From the absolute and original debt, a new obligation arises as a necessary condition for reconciliation with being and with the divine: the abandonment of traditional norms of life, first for the Jews, then for the gentiles, and ultimately for all of humanity. This is also what exile signifies for Paul: a fraudulent double condition—the separation of consciousness from being (oussia) as a consequence of the principle of debt, and the simultaneous separation of human existence from its communities and its ways of life (halakha) as a condition for the settlement of the debt by means of sacrificial grace. This Pauline Christological exile is the point of departure for Paul’s concept of transcendence: a new humanity, the heavenly Jerusalem, the power (dynamis) of the Messiah over all sovereignties (arche), authorities (exousia), powers (dynamis), and dominions (kurietes) in the present and future of all of humanity (Ephesians 1, 19–21). The Pauline double exile carries within itself the category of the second Moses, enthroned as the founder of a new divine people (Taubes 1993, p.58). It is the foundational condition of the Christian “ethné” (Ephesians

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2, 14–16; 1, 22), not least because it establishes the Messiah as the principle of absolute power, universal judge, and the spirit of history, the meaning of which has been reformulated time and again in the papal bulls of the imperial Christian era, in philosophical systems of universal history and, equally, in the use of the notion of one world as its ultimate secularized rendering in colonial corporate propaganda.2 This exile ultimately crowns itself with the conciliation of the heavens and the earth under the sign of pleroma kairos: the divine plenitude of historic time (Ephesians 1, 10). Exile from the community and from being is likewise the ontological condition of the syllogistic constitution of the je pense. The Cartesian rational subject is the logical definition of a consciousness cut off from its eyes, its hands, and its body. It is a logical subject segregated from its own existence, a subject that severs all of its links with nature and community. Its descendant, Kant’s transcendental logos, is itself the result of the dislocation of thought from the community of speakers, from their interests, and from their forms of life. De nobis ipsis silemus are the opening words of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft: the universal capacity of the transcendental Kantian consciousness ignores itself as a contingent existence; it is in exile from society and cut off from the very nature that it dominates. Similarly exiled is the intellectual as defined by Marx, the intellectual as universal historical consciousness, as revolutionary leader, and as the apostle of the universal egalitarian community. Marx’s doctrine of a universal revolution that would ultimately suppress all class differences is itself heir to the Pauline doctrine of a community of Jews and gentiles mingling together in the universal church under the sign of Christ (Agamben 2005, pp.30 ff.). The same postulates of separation from being and the suppression of community drive the aesthetic of the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century. Both the Dadaist anarchists and the futurist fascists silenced cultural memory as zealously as the Christian iconoclasts did. Functionalism— with its utopias, its crystalline cities and its skyscrapers whose radiant towers illuminate the firmament—affirmed the structural and material bases of absolute abstraction from nature and from being. The idealized geometric cities envisioned by the pioneers of modern architecture were 2  The concept of the Christian ekklesia as a uniform “Third Race,” distinct from Judaism and paganism, was formulated in Patristic literature and was rooted in Paul’s political theology (Tomson 1990, 3). It was also the criticism that Hellenistic and Roman intellectuals directed at the Christian sect during the first two centuries of its history (Harnack 1902, 197 ff.).

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the metastasis of the celestial Jerusalem depicted by Paul. Moreover, the artist installed in the historical avant-garde by Malevich and Mondrian rose from the ashes of history and from the devastation wrought by modern industrial warfare, and thus the avant-garde held itself up linguistically and theologically as the inaugural moment of a spirit of redemption bestowed by a transcendent, universal, and absolute normative power. The separation of consciousness from the linguistic community and the postulation of an absolute origin by always reiterated history and writing “degree zero” redefine intellectual exile as a constituent principle of Christian civilization, as the force that configures the discursive identity of that civilization, and as a sacred institution. Intellectual exile is likewise the point of departure for the modern utopias of nation, republic, or communism, and for the postmodern global village as well. Exile is the metaphysical condition of the subject of universal domination. In his commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben articulates an interesting series of etymological associations. For example, he mentions klesis in the sense of calling, of messianic vocation—klesis as a private call in a reflexive dimension, as revealed in the miraculous conversion of Saul into Paul by divine will when his horse tossed him to the ground. But while klesis signifies a divine call, it also anticipates Beruf, which, in barely secularized languages like Castilian, must still be translated by coupling the meaning of mystic vocation, corresponding to the word “Ruf,” with the sense of being a missionary by profession: “professional vocation.” This meaning is further associated with an ascetic monastic discipline that makes visible a secret link between the professional concept of the modern intellectual and Pauline Christology. Finally, Klesis also signifies the investment of a priestly class through the abandonment of the law, and it is thus related to the construction of an ekklesia conceived as the community of the called, of those bound together by the sacrificial suspension of the law and the sacrificial conversion of being. In short, the condition of modern intellectual is the necessary apostolic and missionary consequence of the Pauline inversion. Agamben’s commentary on the Pauline origins of modern exile permits us to understand the defection of modern intellectuals in the face of the great modern political crises as indeed constituting a “trahison des clercs” in the literal sense of the word klesis: cleric and clergy. It permits us to understand the defection as a clerical abandonment of the contingent being of society, with its conflicts and memories, for the sake of an idealized transcendental city. What Agamben ultimately makes evident is the intimate relationship

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between this ecclesiastical vocation on the one hand and spiritual theocracy—or the theocratic universalism of the spirit—on the other, a relationship that extends from Paul to the Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history (Agamben 2005, pp. 20 ff., 98 ff.). At the time of its formation, this exiled intellectual consciousness was a divine soul; it elevated itself to the summit of eternal spirituality and ultimately transformed itself into the self-conscious subject of the universal history of reason. In Paul, this exiled consciousness is evidently bound to the dream of a transcendent community and a universal empire. The Augustinian utopia of the City of God is an expression of this same Christological ideal. Baroque mysticism, philosophic and artistic humanism, scientific rationalism, and modern philosophies of social revolution all share certain fundamental traits—the heroic grandeur of the individual consciousness, of an exiled group advancing in the vanguard—with the errant wanderer Paul. But modernity is faced with the reverse of Paul’s celestial exile. Modernity witnesses the collapse of this principle of domination into an abyss of solitude, anguish, and emptiness, an abyss in which nothing can give meaning to the culpability that underwrites the transcendence of being, to its failed redemption, or to its wretched consciousness. Der fliegende Holländer raises the clamor of its fanfare to this Christian consciousness. Wagner’s mariner is the embodiment of the infinite freedom and the absolute individualism delineated by Fichte and Hegel. In this eternal pilgrim, Christian exile is carried out to its most extreme consequences: the Dutchman’s dominion extends over an ocean without borders, and his existence rises to an intangible dimension of being and time. Yet the Dutch mariner is also a capitalist subject. His mythical ship is a metaphor for infinite technological power. Over the course of his interminable adventures across the perilous seas, he accumulates treasures from every culture. He is for that reason also the colonizing subject; his eternal existence grants him the absolute power that belongs to death. But in contrast to the Christian interiority of Paul, Ignatius of Loyola, or Luther, and in contrast to the Cartesian rationalist or the phenomenological secularization of this interiority, the absolute character of the Dutchman’s subjective power and infinite consciousness no longer blazes under the sign of grace, of unity with the absolute. The meaning and destiny of Wagner’s mariner are the death, nothingness, and the void. Exiled from the very nature he subdues, exiled from the community he has dissolved in his infinite consciousness, and exiled from his own existence,

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which he has transformed into a mere instrument of his chimerical wanderings, his empty consciousness no longer desires anything except for its own extinction. The same social separateness, the same mortification of contingent being celebrated by baroque mysticism as the splendor of the absolute subject, dissolves this subject’s consciousness in the center of cosmic catastrophe.

No to Non-Being Cervantes’ Retablo de las maravillas does not take up in any way the Christological dialectic of sacrifice and transcendence, of exile and redemption, that is at work in the bloody reign of the spirit of history. Quite the contrary: at the dramatic culmination of the work, the crowd exclaims, “Dellos es… pues no ve nada” [“He’s one of them … so he sees nothing”]. “To see nothing”: to say no to the nihilistic spectacle of a transcendent being that in actuality encloses the mystery of the void within itself; no to the spectacle of a negative and false nothingness; no to the negative spectacle of devalued and subverted being. This is the double negation that defines the soldier’s enlightening action. The soldier knows that the village knows that there is nothing on the stage. But instead of acclaiming it as a theophany, a deus ex machina, a spectacular miracle, the soldier rejects this nothing. The soldier, as intellectual, places his reflective negation of the emptiness of being in opposition to the spectacular sacramental affirmation of transcendence and the justification of being. This negation in turn calls into question the order of Western and Christian false consciousness. For this reason, it has to be an outsider who enacts the negation. Only those who have received the stigma of difference, of otherness, are truly foreigners and exiles. By these means are they despoiled of being: a consciousness that knows itself to be nothing and nobody is a consciousness in exile. But the negation of its being is precisely the spiritual condition that enables this consciousness to negate nothingness. Cervantes’s intellectual is a foreigner and an exile, but not in the sense of one who deserts the community of the law, halakha, or dharma. On the contrary, he represents the negation of that negative consciousness, the double negation of the isolated consciousness and the alienated community. Where the horizons of this reflective exile lie becomes clear in the definition of the modern intellectual presented by Günther Anders in his interpretation of Franz Kafka’s literary oeuvre. The two primary

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categories he employs are Entfremdung and Verrücktheit. The first, the concept of “alienation,” proceeds from Marx and makes manifest the double condition—exiled from being and despoiled of existence—that obtains under the conditions of labor, social coexistence, and biological survival created by capitalism. To this referent, Anders adds certain other related concepts: Befremdung, Enstellung … distanciation, the estrangement from and deformation of reality viewed precisely as facets of the same process of capitalist alienation. Entfremdung, like alienation, makes manifest a pathology of modern consciousness: it designates the excision of consciousness from the real and its division from itself as well. Verrücktheit, the other concept Anders uses to define to condition of the contemporary intellectual, radicalizes this pathological, schizophrenic dimension of modern consciousness. But in addition, verrücken connotes distancing, parting, turning one’s back. According to Anders’ interpretation, Kafka constructs a gaze founded upon displacement and distancing, upon estrangement and a separation from all that exists. Only in this sense is he able to reflect the insanity, the schizophrenia, that reigns in industrial civilization (Anders 1951, p.15 ff.). The Kafkaesque intellectual is thus also an intellectual in exile, but in an entirely different sense from that inaugurated by Paul: this intellectual resides precisely in that unique point of view capable of disarticulating the charismatic subject of transcendence, particularly the transcendence conceived by Christian theology. The most eloquent examples of this are found in those works with animals as protagonists: the chimpanzee in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie, the beetle in Die Verwandlung. The reflective intellectual must assume the extreme alienation of animal irrationality in order to manifest the horror of the rational human world. But in Cervantes’ comedy, the soldier does more than denounce the irrationality of Christian reason and capitalist reason. On the night of this false nation, which constitutes itself sacramentally in the theater of marvels, Cervantes not only says no to spectacle through the character of the soldier, but also reawakens the spectators to the very cultural memories that the spectacle obliterated. In this way Cervantes sketches the elements of a concept of Aufklärung that does not close itself off, as Kant’s did, from the autonomy that pure reason possesses as the exiled constituent principle of consciousness, community, and being; instead it remains open, as Herder’s did, to the memory of origins. Through his comedy, Cervantes presents himself as the intellectual who says “no” to non-being in order to open consciousness to knowledge of the origins of being.

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There are four possible responses to the question of memory and to the question of the hermeneutics of being and its origins: those modeled by Karl Marx, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Sigmund Freud, and Paul Klee. The most important component of Marx’s thought from a contemporary perspective is certainly not its Pauline dialectic, the postulated revolutionary conversion of existence into a reign of the spirit in which all differences of race, class, language, memory, and norms of life vanish. The only component of Marx’s theory that still has force is his critique of Entfremdung. It is a critique of humanity’s banishment and estrangement from nature, from community and memory, viewed as a constitutive moment of the spirit of capitalism. From this point of view, Marx rejects Paul’s theology to the extent that he conceives of the salvation of humanity as transpiring not through the alienation of its own nature and memory, but rather through their re-appropriation. For Marx, liberty is not to be found in the negation of “man” in the name of a purportedly authentic being-for-death, to recall the metaphors operating in Heidegger’s Christian nihilism. The emancipation of humanity, alienated and exiled as the global proletariat, consists for Marx in the reintegration of humanity into a historic community, in the reestablishment of humanity’s own nature, and in the regeneration of its norms of life. In this sense, it might be said that Marx reintegrates a liberated humanity into a historic community and into the reality of its own historic contingency, the same reality that the psychoanalytic theories of Georg Groddeck and Freud call “Es,” and that comprehends the biological, physiological, historic, and spiritual substructures of human existence. With regard to Bachofen, it is possible to make a similar point. His work Das Mutterrecht uncovers the cultural base consisting of mother goddesses that lies beneath the subsequent patriarchal religions and juridical systems. But the fundamental question marked out by Bachofen is not simply concerned with those same goddesses or their icons; rather, it is concerned with the conceptions of time and the cosmos, the unity of humanity and being, that they guaranteed. In the face of countless expressions of the disequilibrium and chaos that follow from patriarchal domination and its theological subversions, Bachofen’s archeological reconstruction recovers forms of productive exchange between humanity and nature, models of social organization and conceptions of the sacred capable of preserving the harmony of being. Freud should be viewed from this same perspective. What is at issue is not his theory of the unconscious, but rather his analysis of the libido and

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its relation to the primordial principle of energy: Eros. It is to this notion of Eros that Freud’s critical theory owes its importance. By situating neurotic and psychotic constructions of consciousness, psychic traumas, and even social organization itself on the foundation of this principle of energy, which is also spirit, Freud introduces into modern reflection on the world a philosophical tradition that achieves the sublimity of the Vedas and the Song of Songs, of Renaissance Platonism and the Iberian Cabala. In so doing, Freud devises a newly harmonic conception of the unity of humanity and being. Klee represents the lyrical and metaphysical reconciliation of alienated consciousness with being. His work reestablishes a visual, physical, and spiritual unity between human eyes and the colors, materials, and emblems of the poetic and pictorial universe.

Consciousness Under Siege The postmodern liquidation of the reflective intellectual traditions of the twentieth century has provided justification for the micro-political deconstruction of rationality, which in turn has been irresponsible in the face of post-human strategies for economic genocide, for biological and electronic domination, and for nuclear holocaust that have arisen in modernity. When the identity of human knowledge and autonomy coincides with systems of destructive exploitation and brutal domination on a planetary scale, intellectual reflection is suppressed. The identity of philosophical criticism and social reform that was central to the work of modern intellectuals from Spinoza to Marx has drifted into a system of electronic hyper-information the ultimate consequence of which is the paralysis of the historic consciousness. This media-induced, and academically induced, impotence has restricted the intellectual to an inactive function of delivering irrelevant testimonials to random human or ecological horrors. In previous eras, exile delineated the jurisdictions of national political authorities, but it has now been generalized throughout the space of global control, encompassing everything from television channels to academic departments and to their own “ready-made” idioms. It is no longer possible to speak with any rigor of the exiled intellectual because exile has become a universal condition. Hence, the metaphors favored by contemporary academic jargon: borders and frontiers, transcultures, displaced subjects, hybridisms; hence also the contemporary intellectual gaze, polarized

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between the micro-politics of subalternity at one extreme of the global discourse, and the production of the post-human at the other extreme. In the best of circumstances, a minor intellectual presence is tolerated in the irrelevant position of marginalized dissidence, from which it can offer a micro-political critique that does not question aggregate systems in their full amplitude. A Nobel Prize winner can protest the systematic rape of women along the US-Mexico border as a gender issue, for example, as long as silence is maintained regarding the corrupt military and global-­ financial networks of which these crimes are but traces. By means of the degraded media figure of the “left-wing intellectual,” the culture industry and the academy carry out the ultimate validating function of staging scenes of freedom of expression in the midst of the spectacle of a politically mutilated democracy. An independent intellectual—an academic at a global university in the West, for example, or a journalist at a local media enterprise in the developing world—necessarily faces a crucial dilemma: censorship and confinement or administrative instrumentalization and media exploitation. The cultural politics of the twentieth century offer countless examples of intellectuals liquidated by the same media that they themselves employ as experts and advisers. Such is the case in the paradigm of the American postmodern: Citizen Kane. Kane represents the synthesis of financial power and the power of spectacle. Under his zeitgeist, we see the baptism of a new type of intellectual, the postmodern agent of negated negativity, the anti-human post-subject shaped by structuralist positivism, the ascetic-­ semiotic renouncer of reality, the exalted priest of the nothingness of the void. And yet everything appears to work in favor of this great absent figure. On every side, meetings, conferences, and congresses are held for intellectuals and about intellectuals. Describing the public role of writers or artists at the beginning of the twenty-first century entails recognizing that their glory is celebrated everywhere. Their photographs appear on the front pages of newspapers; the Internet publicizes their biographies; both television and the academy maintain a veritable cult of the intellectual. As the intellectual’s institutional confinement and divided consciousness pass across the stage of cultural spectacle, they are miraculously transfigured by the semiologies of glamor and excitement. The transfiguration of intellectuals into media stars is not contradicted by their evident social desertion; their transfiguration actually complements the desertion. The very same media that turn the intellectual into a

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public fetish also silence the intellectual in the face of the great dilemmas of our time. It is often forgotten in this connection that the function of the intellectual, whether in academic departments or in the information complex, is not one of reflection. The spiritual universe represented by Andy Warhol or the Nouvelle Philosophie is fictitious transcendence. It is spectacle. The debasement of the intellectual as “public man” occurs in direct proportion to the valorization of the journalist as the performer of reality. While the former is privatized and consigned to the roles of commercial author and corporate academic, the journalist is exalted as the meta-author of the culture of spectacle. Journalists are to grant significance to any given piece of news or current of thought, to decide hierarchies of values, to establish focal points for both intellectual and anti-intellectual attention, and, consequently, to channel, concentrate, and discharge the media-­ absorbed masses via electronic conduits. The power of journalists is absolute because the “miraculous” function of producing reality in all of its possible meanings devolves entirely on them. Of course, at the same time, this performative function subordinates journalists to political and financial bureaucracies; their independent judgment and activity are restricted to an even greater extent than are those of academics, whose institutional confinement at least guarantees a modicum of irrelevant freedom. Nonetheless, institutional subordination is not the principal restriction faced by journalists. The journalist’s professional work is ultimately governed by the epistemological boundaries of information, which do not reside primarily in censorship or in propagandistic manipulation. Even in those cases, or perhaps precisely in those cases, in which a journalist’s clean intellectual conscience enables him or her to reveal true crises, extreme crimes, social disasters, or evident abuses of human rights—as we see happening throughout the global village today—the journalist’s most radical testimony still will not challenge the condition of passivity that structurally defines the information media. When it comes to reports on genocide, or video clips of torture and executions, the greater the journalist’s professional integrity—delimited as always by the formats and idioms operant in the communications industry—the more apparent the journalist’s complicitous position as a narrator, as a betraying witness, as an onlooker reduced to impotence, becomes. The paradox of journalism in a society founded on spectacle is that professional competence as meta-author of the real is nevertheless not enough to move journalists beyond the same “watch ‘n’ wait” condition that already condemns their humanist and techno-scientific counterparts to a state of irresponsibility and aphasia.

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The intellectual: unlimited exile. Stranger to political and corporate power in this age of contempt and destruction; alienated from a culture of prêt-à-porter forms, categories, and values; expatriated from various pre-­ designed idioms; censured, confined to heavily monitored channels of information and fields of culture; bystander to the spectacular wreck of the bloody spirit of history; expelled from the sacred origins of being; condemned to testify to the annihilation of the human. And yet it is still necessary to say no to non-being; no to exile; in the silence of being. Translated by James A. Lorié

Works Cited Agamben, G. 2005. The time that remains. A commentary on the letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anders, G. 1951. Kafka. Pro und Contra. Die Prozess-Unterlagen. München: C.H. Beck. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Homo academicus. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Cervantes, M. 1921. Retablo de las maravillas. In Comedias y Entremeses, ed. Cervantes, vol. I. Madrid: Biblioteca Universal. Harnack, A. 1902. Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums. Leipzig: J.C.Hinrich’sche Buchandlung. Jacoby, R. 1987. The last intellectuals. American culture in the age of academe. New York: The Noonday Press. Lukács, G. 1968. Geschichte und Klassenbesusstsein. Georg Lukács Werke. Frühschriften II. Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand Verlag. Mann, K. 1936. Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag. ———. 1993. Die Heimsuchung des europäischen Geistes= The Ordeal of the European Intellectuals. Berlin: Transit. Mills, C.W. 1963. Power, politics and people. New York: Oxford University Press. New American Standard Bible. 1997. New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. 1955. Der Antichrist. In F.N.  Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. II. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Paracelsus. 1952. Der Krieg als Sünde, insbesondere der weltanschauliche Krieg. In Paracelsus Sozialistische und sozialpolitische Schriften, ed. Kurt Goldammer. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Paulus. Ephesians, Romans, Galatians. https://www.blueletterbible.org Sloush, N. 1928. Poèsies hébraiques de Don Jehuda Abrabanel. Lisboa. (No publisher is indicated). Taubes, J. 1993. Die Politische Teologie des Paulus. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Tomson, P. 1990. Paul and the Jewish Law. Assen/Maastricht/Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Volpi, J. 1998. La imaginación y el poder. Una historia intelectual de 1968. México: Biblioteca Era.

CHAPTER 4

Tyranny of Idiocy Christopher Britt

The Privatized Man Tyrants arrogate sovereignty, reducing everyone around them to a state of idiocy. Idiocy: not in the contemporary sense of the word, which we use to designate people who are imbeciles, incapable of learning, and thus condemned to a state of unalterable stupidity; but rather in the sense that the ancient Greeks used this word to classify people who had been banned from participating in the public life of the polis because they had placed their private interests and concerns above the common good. Depoliticized, the idiot is denied any and all opportunities to exercise political power. His life, for what it is worth, has been relegated to the realm of domesticity, where he may pursue a happiness that is as culturally trivial as it is historically inconsequential. The idiot, as C. Wright Mills once put it, is quintessentially a “privatized man” (1956, p. 328). The passionate force with which a tyrant seizes the sovereignty of those around him suggests that he is motivated by a profound urge to eliminate everyone else and establish himself as the only one. Politically, as Agamben argues, this move involves the declaration of a “state of exception,” whereby the tyrant places himself above the law in order precisely to assert himself as the sole sovereign (2005, p. 2). In a somewhat more profound, psychological, and mythical sense, the tyrant’s seizure of sovereignty corresponds to his desire to become the only survivor: the invulnerable

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Britt, E. Subirats, Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9_4

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one: the one who has been chosen by providence to be completely free: positively free to do as he likes, and negatively freed from all constraints on his will-to-power. This “illness of power,” as Canetti theorizes it, is not unique to the tyrannical mind; tyrants share it with those who suffer from paranoia (1993, p. 448). On this view, paranoid delusion is a precise model of modern political power: that is, of a “power which feeds on [the idea] of the crowd and derives its substance from it” (1993, p. 441). No doubt, this is among the reasons why theorists of tyranny, from Aristotle to Montesquieu and from Tocqueville to Arendt, have tended to focus on how tyrants infect crowds with the hatred and fear that motivate their paranoia. Nonetheless, it is just as important to invert the relationship and focus attention on how these crowds nourish and sustain the tyrant’s paranoia. Tyrants are driven by their paranoid delusions of grandeur to ban everyone else from participating in the public realm of politics, thus creating a crowd of idiots; this crowd, in turn, surrounds the tyrant, threatening to enclose him in an impenetrable, and therefore also inescapable, bubble of idiocy. Consequently, in order to comprehend the overall structure and inner workings of tyranny, it is not enough to observe how, by means of oppression, tyranny creates a state of idiocy; it is also necessary to appreciate the extent to which idiocy re-creates tyranny in its own image. Idiots embolden tyrants to become blatantly idiotic, encouraging them to appropriate the power and resources of the state for personal gain. Idiots celebrate such appropriation because it privatizes and depoliticizes the state, which in turn helps them to see the abdication of their own sovereignty in a complimentary light: as an act of historic foresight, as a duty and civic responsibility, as a substantiation of their freedom to pursue the happiness, prosperity, and security that tyranny offers them in exchange for their acquiescent, compliant, and venal submission.

The Paranoid Style “To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every real seeker after power” (Canetti 1993, p. 443). To be, as Canetti puts it, “the only one left standing in a field of corpses,” here, in its crudest form, is the most profound urge of the tyrant (1993, p. 443). This desired annihilation of everyone else is the tyrant’s final solution to the dangers he imagines that people everywhere pose to his inviolable sovereignty; believing

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he lives in a dangerous world, he wills to become dangerous to that world. And even though this delusional projection of hatred can never fully divert unto other men or women the death he fears will fall upon him, the tyrant nevertheless tends to succeed in getting others to help him appear as though he were invulnerable to death: as though he were the messiah, a self-sacrificing god destined to resurrect from the dead. Tyrants accomplish this political feat primarily by means of coercion: specifically, the coercion and manipulation of crowds. Generally speaking, this involves the use of two distinct crowds, which the tyrant pits against each other. First, there is the crowd that is made up of the tyrant’s perceived enemies. He angrily watches as they gather together in some far-off distance and begin to move toward him in seemingly endless and repeating caravans, threatening with their mere existence to tear down the walls he would build to keep them at bay. He also watches fearfully as they pool together within those walls, like slithering monsters in a swamp, threatening to undermine the fortifications meant to defend his sovereignty. In opposition to these seemingly ubiquitous enemy hordes, he mobilizes the second crowd. This is the crowd of idiots, which he uses both in order to defend his status as the only sovereign and to extend and increase his imperium. In true paranoid style, the tyrant fashions his enemies at once as the professed object of his hatred and the imagined source of his fear. The mass of idiots, insofar as they recognize the tyrant as the only sovereign, identify with his hatred and fear of the enemy crowds. As Richard Hofstadter observes, this “paranoid style in politics” is the expression of “angry minds,” whose proclivity for “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” helps sustain the illusion that the tyrant’s paranoid delusion is grounded in reality (1964, p. 77). Everything else, as the saying goes, is “fake news.” As Arendt demonstrated in her classic study of totalitarian movements, tyranny exercises power by establishing and maintaining rivalry between these two crowds: the enemies and the idiots. The totalitarian movement, in order to maintain its momentum, must constantly identify new internal enemies and, with the help of its secret police, strive to eradicate them (Arendt 1994, pp. 422–423). Together, these two opposing crowds form what Canetti refers to as a double crowd (1993, p. 67). In order for this double crowd to subsist, neither of the two parties to the rivalry must be permitted to completely overwhelm the other. They must be more or less equally matched, if tyranny is to stand any chance at prolonging its monopoly on sovereignty and achieving longevity.

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The coercive force by means of which tyrants and their underlings seek to reduce the size and strength of the enemy crowds often involves cruel and unusual punishments. There are three forms of cruelty that particularly reveal the paranoid style of tyrannical politics and its fixation on enemy crowds: displacement, which results in massive homelessness; the containment of enemy masses in concentration camps, where, as prisoners, the enemies of the tyrant are reduced to slavery; and torture and censorship, whereby the humiliation suffered by the victims of torture is forced, by means of censorship, onto the silenced masses who become complicit with the torturer. To the extent to which these extreme forms of coercion mutilate their victims physically, psychologically, intellectually and morally—that is, to the extent to which they pulverize their victim’s psyche—they help sustain the tyrant’s delusional sense of himself as the only one, the only sovereign. It is always from among the ranks of the idiot crowd that tyrants find volunteers who are willing to displace, enslave, torture and censor. These “true believers,” as Hoffer calls them, are eager to commit these horrendous acts of cruelty because this unleashed violence enables them to reduce their enemies to a degraded state of mutilation that mirrors and amplifies their own idiocy, making both it and themselves seem stronger, freer, and more knowledgeable than they truly are.

Voluntary Servitude It is not however only by participating in such extreme coercive practices that idiots help the tyrant sustain his sense of himself as the only sovereign. Indeed, unlike the true believers who volunteer for such dangerous work at the vanguard of tyranny’s paranoid delusions, the vast majority of idiots are happy to contribute to the maintenance of those delusions of grandeur from the relative safety of the rearguard. And if they are able to make a good living at it, all the better! Here, in the relative safety of the rearguard, can be found the logistical experts, the morally obtuse yet technically adept engineers, the propaganda spinners, the smiling priests, the ever-so-­ helpful bankers and many other sycophants, among them prize-winning poets, revered professors, and trusted journalists. Each and every one of them is happy to contribute, in his and her own little way, to sustaining the apparent truth of the real lie which is found at the core of the tyrant’s paranoid delusion: that by declaring himself the sole sovereign and thus fragmenting society into opposing crowds the tyrant unites his subjects.

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All of which calls into question the passivity that theories of tyranny commonly assign to the privatized and depoliticized masses. The assumption seems always to be that tyranny dupes these masses into abdicating their sovereignty. Although idiots do exhibit some of the signs of psychological, emotional, intellectual and moral mutilation typically found among those who have been forcibly displaced, enslaved, tortured and censored, they are quite unlike these victims of tyranny’s most extreme coercive practices in that they, the idiots, abdicate their sovereignty willingly. Idiots do not experience the displacement of their sovereignty as a punishment, but rather as a reward and proof of their imagined political virtues. One way to conceptualize the willingness with which idiots abdicate their sovereignty is by means of masochism. According to this point of view, idiots abdicate their sovereignty willingly because they have been seduced by the idea that tyranny can satisfy their desire to be dominated. But, as Deleuze points out in his psychoanalytic study of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, it is not masochism but rather sadism that exalts the father and considers him to be beyond all laws (1989, p. 60). The masochistic fantasy, in contrast, is fixated on the humiliation of the father (1989, p. 60). The masochist voluntarily enters into what Sacher-Masoch calls a “contractual relationship” with his symbolic mother, so that she may beat, humiliate, and ridicule the likeness of the father in him. What is more, Deleuze argues, the “specific impulse underlying the [masochistic] contract is toward the creation of a law,” a law that excludes the father; whereas, in the case of sadism, the overriding impulse is, as the Marquis de Sade demonstrates, to “institutionalize the law” and thereby, according to Deleuze, “degrade all laws,” establishing “a superior power that sets itself above them” i.e., the father, the tyrant, the one who places himself above the law in order to become the only lawgiver (1989, p. 77). The masochist fantasizes his own rebirth, one in which the father, the tyrant, will play no part (1989, p. 66). Conceived in this way, masochism does not account for the willingness with which idiots abdicate their sovereignty in favor of the tyrant. The sadist, on the other hand, fantasizes about the destruction of the entire family, such that the father, who represents nature as an anarchic force, can be restored to his mythical place above the law (1989, p. 60). But such sadistic fantasies, while they surely help to illuminate some of the more profound urges of tyranny, do not help explain why the privatized and depoliticized masses voluntarily abdicate their sovereignty.

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Another, certainly more productive, way of thinking about why idiots willingly abdicate their sovereignty, handing it over to a tyrant whose paranoia makes him relentlessly cruel, is La Boétie’s notion of voluntary servitude. La Boétie theorizes voluntary servitude as the mark of friendship. “Friendship is a sacred word,” he writes in this regard, “a holy thing; it is never developed except between persons of character, and never takes root except through mutual respect; it flourishes not so much by kindnesses as by sincerity. What makes one friend sure of another is the knowledge of his integrity: as guarantees he has his friend’s fine nature, his honor, and his constancy” (1576, p.  24). On this view, idiots enter willingly into their state of voluntary servitude because they perceive the abdication of their sovereignty as the kind of ennobling sacrifice often required of friends. Idiots perceive tyranny, not as an occasion for sadomasochistic degradation, but as an opportunity to prove their friendship, their loyalty, their love and sense of honor and duty. To them, the tyrant is a friend; he is, as they say, “one of us,” which of course helps to explain why they applaud his corrupting privatization of the power and wealth of the state. “His power and wealth,” they tell themselves, “is ours.” And in an effort to prove their point, they encourage the tyrant to become ever-more like them: privatized, depoliticized, venal and corruptible. The trouble nevertheless, as La Boétie understands it, is that the tyrant is not their friend. Indeed, the tyrant is practically incapable of friendship, for he is “elevated above others and having no companions, he finds himself already beyond the pale of friendship” (1576, p. 24). And so, it would seem that idiots enter into a state of voluntary servitude because they share the hatred and fear that motivate the tyrant’s paranoid delusions of power and confuse the intimacy of being his accomplices with the integrity of friendship. This fundamental confusion is not without its own damaging consequences. While it would surely be an exaggeration to contend that voluntary servitude damages idiots in the same way that tyranny’s cruel and unusual punishments damage the victims of displacement, slavery, torture and censorship, it nevertheless proves illuminating to compare them. For idiots, insofar as they confuse complicity with friendship, also become vulnerable to certain kinds of psychic mutilation. Displacement. As Gunter Anders argues, idiots experience a kind of homelessness, which is not entirely unlike the forced displacement experienced today by the world’s more than 70 million refugees and internally displaced people. The homelessness of the forcibly displaced leads them to either seek to return home or to establish a new one in a cruel and

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war-torn world that conspires to make both of these alternatives near to impossible. Insofar as tyranny displaces the sovereignty of the idiots it creates, they too live in a homeless state. To them, home is everywhere and nowhere. Anders theorizes this state of idiotic displacement as a schizotopia, or “spatial dual existence” where “staying at home takes place in the outside world” (1979, p. 56). At issue in this double place, which is simultaneously no place in particular and every place at large, is the increasing privatization of the public realm. Symptomatically, idiots occupy this schizotopia by shamelessly “carrying on in public as they do at home” (1979, p. 55). Slavery. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reconstructs the dialectical process by means of which the ressentiment of slaves brings about an inversion of values. What had once been thought to be good, because it was noble and life-affirming, becomes evil; and what had once been thought to be bad, because it was slavish and cowardly, becomes the new good. This new good, he further demonstrates, establishes a tyranny— that of the Christianized slaves and their gay science, ushering in a modern age of cultural decadence and moral nihilism. Similarly, the hatred and fear that motivate paranoia help idiots bring about their own inversion of values. Whereas modern enlightenment reviles tyranny and affirms as good the idea that individuals should govern themselves, idiocy inverts this order of modern democratic values, affirming that democracy is evil, while hailing tyranny as the new good. Torture and censorship. The aim of torture, some have argued, is to gather information (Hilde 2008, p. 197). But torture is notoriously unreliable as a means of information gathering (Hilde 2008, p. 202). And the true believers who conduct torture in the name of the idiocy that tyranny creates know this only too well. The actual aim of torture, as Scarry, Rorty, and Calveiro argue, is humiliation. Torture aims to get its victims to say what they do not want to say so as to turn them into traitors (Britt 2008, p. 82). Likewise, censorship is commonly held to be a means to control the flow of information. But it too is notoriously ineffective at achieving this alleged goal. Its aim is, rather, to generalize among the masses of the tyrant’s perceived enemies the same humiliation experienced by the victims of torture. Tyranny can torture people only one at a time; but it can censor multitudes simultaneously. By acquiescing to the shameful silences that censorship imposes on them, the silenced masses effectively become complicit with tyranny’s regime of torture and censorship. But in the case of idiocy, the opposite is true. They are the agents of what Diana Taylor

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theorizes as “percepticide” (Taylor 1997). Expressive of this self-blinding, is the pride that idiots take in knowing that torturers can force dissidents to forswear their sovereignty and be forced to betray themselves by swearing allegiance to the tyrant. Idiots also share the prejudice of the censors, who consider all those who would dare to “speak the truth to power,” as nothing better than deceptive liars and split-tongued connivers of half-truths. Of the various mutilations that tyranny visits on its victims, idiocy stands out then, not because it is harsher than the punishments reserved for tyranny’s perceived enemies but, to the contrary, because it is comparatively mild, seemingly innocuous, even anodyne. Actually, it is out of friendship that idiots willingly abdicate their sovereignty. What they desire most is that the tyrant should become their friend and, considering his unique status as the only sovereign, they expect that he will sacrifice himself for them. In this regard, friendship is the vehicle by means of which idiots intend to “escape from freedom,” as Fromm puts it. But it is not freedom alone that idiots fear; what they fear and resent is the vigilant consciousness, the constant worry, anxiety, and stress associated with self-­ governance, maturity, enlightenment. Like a herd of childish sheep, they want a sheepherder who will protect them from the wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions so that they may continue to eat, to fart, to shit, to drink, to piss, to screw, and to procreate, without a care in the world but the pursuit of their own trivial, inconsequential, and ultimately futile happiness. In this sense, idiots truly are the unenlightened ones, those who, as Kant famously defines them, exist in a state of “self-incurred immaturity” (1991, p. 54).

Propaganda, Surveillance and Spectacle All of this suggests that, if idiocy is the result of any coercion at all, it is of a relatively soft sort. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This childhood adage succinctly captures the sense in which tyrants use language, as opposed to cruel and unusual punishments, to softly cajole the unenlightened masses and keep them enraptured by tyranny’s paranoid delusions of power. It should be noted, however, that political propaganda takes advantage of the silences created by torture and censorship; this silence amplifies the voice of the tyrant, helping it to become ubiquitous. So, while it may be true that the coercion to which idiots become subject by reason of their voluntary servitude is of a

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putatively harmless nature, the sticks and stones of tyrannical cruelty lie just beneath the surface. In this sense, behind every one of the tyrant’s slogans, there is a command, an implicit threat: “Declare that what I say is true … or else.” Of course, propaganda, as we know it today, is not by any means limited to politics. There are commercial and cultural forms of propaganda as well, which help to create the illusion that in the privatized and depoliticized state in which they live, idiots are free to choose between one news show and another, one brand of toothpaste and another, one presidential candidate and another. These are not the liberties exercised by enlightened and self-governing individuals, but rather the trivial and innocuous choices of people who have no other freedom. Horkheimer and Adorno theorize these anti-enlightened forms of cultural and commercial freedom as mechanisms for mass deception (2002, p. 94). For his part, Foucault speaks of the “disciplinary society” and its “generalizable mechanism of panopticism” (1991, p. 216). In our day and age, when every idiot has at his or her disposal a laptop computer or cellphone, the political, cultural, and commercial deception and surveillance of the privatized masses has grown exponentially, to the point that the tyrannical urge for total domination is practically at hand. In this sense, idiots today do not merely live in a disciplinary society, but in what Debord calls the “society of spectacle” (Debord 1995). “A spectacle,” in this Debordian sense, “includes political, commercial, and cultural forms of propaganda. But what distinguishes it from mere propaganda is the fetishistic transformation of its languages and performances into a single, absolute, and universal reality” (Subirats 2017, p. 7). This universal reality, as Zuboff argues, has recently taken on the aspect of what she calls “surveillance capitalism,” by which she means the gathering of information, by large tech companies, of the personal information of their users so as to package it and sell it to the highest bidder: advertising firms, governments, criminal rings. What is crucially important about this new phase of capitalist exploitation is that, “beyond strip-mining the intimate lives” of their users, these corporations “seek to shape, direct and control” consumer behavior, transposing the “total control over production pioneered by industrial capitalism to every aspect of everyday life” (Bidle 2019). This drive for total control by means of propaganda, surveillance, and spectacle may be soft in comparison to the cruel and unusual punishments traditionally used by tyrants to minimize the threat posed to them by their enemies, but inasmuch as it aspires to total control—and

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not just to the control of dissidents but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the total domination of the idiots that tyranny creates, it too is capable of inflicting permanent damage. Spectacle leads to the “obsolescence of man,” as Anders puts it, or, as Vaneigem argues, to the “crumbling fragmentation” of a human life that has been reduced to a mode of survival (1965, p. 50).

Culture of Fragment “A spectacle is a system of reality constructed by means of images that are internally organized as a web of homogenous information, propaganda, and falsehood. And it is this representation itself that dilutes reality and the ethical world of human actions and experiences into the mystical pseudo-­ reality of a system of signs and icons that bears no relationship to experience or life” (Subirats 2017, p. 6). A spectacle, in other words, is a paranoid delusion, a tyrannical delusion of totalizing power. Idiots participate in this grand illusion, not merely as passive spectators or bystanders, but as its protagonists. Proto (first) and agon (to struggle): as the protagonists of the society of spectacle, idiots are the ones who struggle first and foremost to maintain the illusion that, by means of their voluntary servitude, they have secured the tyrant’s friendship and can therefore rely on him for protection from the worries, anxieties, and stress associated with enlightened self-government. The spectacle, while severing their immediate relationship to experience, life, and truth, inverts reality, such that the tyranny that separates them from one another, from what they are in others, and from themselves, appears instead to unite them among themselves, within themselves, and, most importantly, to the tyrant (Vanegeim 1965, p. 63). “Fragmentary power carries fragmentation to the point where the human beings over which it holds sway themselves become contradictory” (Vanegeim 1965, p. 65). In order to overcome these internal and external contradictions, idiots project unity back onto the source of their fragmentation: the tyrant. Thus, tyrants and idiots become locked in a closed cybernetic circuit that perpetuates its twisted paranoid logic, as if they were all trapped in a spiraling vortex of perpetual motion. The tyrant separates himself from everyone else, thus creating a crowd of privatized and depoliticized idiots; the idiots, in turn, identify with the tyrant, treating him as their friend, uniting themselves to him; and this, in turn, requires the tyrant to again commit to fragmenting the perceived unity by

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resorting to coercion, seduction, and mediation. Spectacle, in this sense, is an imagined unity that fragments. This “culture of the fragment,” to borrow Bamford’s terminology, relies on technologies of communication: in the case of medieval and early-modern Spain, which is the focus of her analysis, it is a matter of manuscript culture; in our own day and age, it is a matter of the mass media (Bamford 2018). Anders argues that, in the aftermath of the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we have entered a “terminal age” in which “technology has actually become the subject of history, alongside of which we are merely ‘co-historical’” (1979, p. 1). This is the first sign of what he calls the obsolescence of man: humanity’s central role in history has been pulverized. A second feature of this terminal age concerns the anachronism of our traditional moral constructs: “Today’s moral imperatives arise from technology and render the moral postulates of our ancestors ridiculous” (1979, p.  7). The third feature, which is directly related to the idiocy that tyranny cultivates, concerns the entertainment industry or what Anders calls “terrorism” (1979, p. 91). Entertainment is a form of terrorism in that, with its apparent lack of seriousness, it disarms those who consume its products; it deceives them into believing that it is innocent and that they therefore can innocently consume it. But what it is selling and what they are consuming is “un-freedom” (1979, p. 93). “Of all the powers that form and deform us today,” writes Anders, “there is none whose penetrating force can compete with that of entertainment” (1979, p. 92). In this sense, he adds: “Dictatorial systems that still cannot dispense with their rubber truncheons or threats of liquidation are now pathetically archaic, and in any case incomparably less terrible than those that can now abandon themselves to entertainment” (1979, p.  92). Such is the case because entertainment shapes every aspect of everyday life: “Our current way of laughing, walking, loving, speaking, thinking or not thinking, even our way of being ready for sacrifice: all this we have learned … almost exclusively from the radio, magazines, movies or television; in short: through ‘entertainment’. If in other times entertainment was just one of many ‘forces of socialization’ and, certainly, not one of the most significant ones, now it has rapidly ascended to a monopoly position” (1979, p. 92). The consequence of this monopoly, for the individual, is that it robs him or her of any and all immediate relationship to life and experience. On a mass scale, the consequence of this mediated, constructed, interrupted experience is conformity. Idiots experience this conformity as unity; but in truth it is, Anders argues, rather an

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impoverished uniformity, wherein “the lines of demarcation have disappeared: the lines between spontaneity and coercion, between activity and passivity, between needing something and being compelled, between the interior and exterior worlds, between one person and another” (1979, p. 108). Conformity is the false unity forged by tyranny’s paranoid delusion of singular oneness. At issue, then, in what Anders analyzes as entertainment is nothing more and nothing less than oppression. As Vaneigem understands it, the oppression inherent in the society of spectacle “reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves, but also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them is also the false bond that unites them with power, reinforcing this power and making them choose it as their protector, as their father” (1965, p. 51). Entertainment and spectacle—this culture of the fragment—provides the false bonds that unite idiocy to tyranny. In opposition to the tyrannical oppression of this false unity, which reduces life to mere survival, Vaneigem envisions a revolution of everyday life. In this regard, he argues that the “will to live draws its vitality and its coherence from the unity of a threefold project: self-realization, communication and participation” (1965, p. 108). Idiots, however, are not interested in any such revolution. Nor do they conceive of themselves as the victims of this or any other sort of conspiracy emanating from the centers of tyrannical rule to establish total domination over them. The only conspiracy in which they believe is the one that tyranny sets up for them: their enemies are the tyrant’s enemies. Inasmuch as they share their tyrant’s paranoid suspicions, hatred, and fear, they look to the tyrant for protection. Their most profound desire is, not to live, but to survive. And this is what links their paranoid idiocy to the tyrant’s paranoid will-to-power: survival, longevity, the desire to see the sun rise again and again … and again. Only, whereas for the tyrant survival involves outlasting everyone else, for idiots it is rather a matter of securing enough prosperity so as to meet their basic needs. To them, the requirement that they abdicate their sovereignty is not a sign of oppression but rather a sign that they have been invited to participate in and partake of everything that the society of spectacle has to offer. Locked in step, as they tirelessly march onward in pursuit of survival, the tyrant and his idiots merge together, forming a uniform crowd of idiotic tyranny and tyrannical idiocy.

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Destruction of Democracy The political consequence of this tyranny of idiocy is the destruction of democracy. One of the ideologies that justifies this destruction is neo-­ liberalism. As Hofstadter observes, the basic elements of contemporary right-wing paranoia in the United States of America can be reduced to three contentions. First, a conspiracy to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government and pave the way for socialism or communism. The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by the enemies of capitalism that American policy consistently sells out American national interests. The third contends that the entire apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans (1964, pp. 81–82). The other ideology that justifies this destruction is so-called revolutionary socialism. As evidenced by Maduro’s Venezuela, the basic elements of left-wing paranoia can also be reduced to three contentions. First, a conspiracy to undermine the state-controlled economy and its redistributive programs of social justice, to bring the economy under the direction of international neo-liberal organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, and thus pave the way for free-market fundamentalism. The second contention is that the political opposition has been so infiltrated by the imperialist enemies of the socialist revolution that it threatens to undermine it. The third contends that the entire apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal socialists. Tit for Tat. Here we pay witness to a Cold War ideological conflagration that would appear to have no end in sight. Whereas liberalism celebrated the rational self-interest of homo economicus, neo-liberalism celebrates the paranoid self-interest of idiots. And whereas communism and socialism once celebrated the emancipation of the working class, their proletarian revolutions, whether in Russia, China, or Venezuela, have served instead to create the state of exception by means of which tyrants could take over these revolutions and establish themselves as sovereign. As Tocqueville argues, the rise of these tyrannies, whether of the right or the left, is one of the inherent dangers of modern democracy. “There is a very dangerous phase in the life of democratic peoples,” he writes in this sense; it arises “when the taste for physical pleasures has grown more rapidly than either education or experience of free institutions.” The time

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then comes, reasons Tocqueville: “when men are carried away and lose control of themselves … Intent only on getting rich … they find it a tiresome inconvenience to exercise political rights … Such folk think that they are following the doctrine of self-interest, but they have a very crude idea thereof, and the better to guard their interests, they neglect the chief of them, that is, to remain their own masters.” Here, Tocqueville characterizes idiocy as mob mentality; it is the crude, uneducated, and reckless selfishness of the profiteering masses. The moral and political danger inherent in this idiocy of the selfish masses, he further argues, is that it summons tyranny. “If, at this critical moment, an able and ambitious man once gets power, he finds the way open for usurpations of every sort … A nation, which asks nothing from the government beyond the maintenance of order, is already a slave in the bottom of its heart. It is a slave to prosperity, and the road is free for the man [i.e., the tyrant] to tie the fetters” (1969, p. 540). Idiocy, reasons Tocqueville, results from a bribe. In exchange for prosperity, the masses accept the imposition of a regime of security that places undue restraints on their civil liberties and political freedoms. Selfishly satisfied with a life of consumption and happily relieved of the burdens of self-governance, the idiot masses create their own tyrants. This tyranny of idiocy ties people to their servitude by reason of their very satisfactions; this tyranny’s strength derives, mostly, from the material enjoyments it can provide, and less so from any violent imposition of fear or terror. Insidiously, it imposes a delightful servitude: a tyranny that pleases as it degrades. To our dismay, freedom today is still used as an instrument of domination. The liberties we enjoy are deceptively binding: free competition at administered prices, a free press that censors itself, free choice between the brands and gadgets that monopolies impose (Marcuse 1991, p. 7). These are not the liberties enjoyed by an enlightened people, but by a people who would be more aptly described as idiots. In the end, people with a nearly limitless potential to control their lives and achieve both intellectual maturity and political autonomy choose merely to busy themselves with the petty gratifications of their professional and private lives (Boeche 1996, p. 368). Indeed, the development of this myopic self-centeredness into the prevailing political mood of the day has meant the deterioration of republican self-rule and the gradual but persistent convergence of modern democracy with the autocratic, populist, and totalitarian tendencies of our unenlightened age of destruction.

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Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anders, Günther. 1979. The obsolescence of man, volume II: On the destruction of life in the epoch of the third industrial revolution. https://libcom.org/library/ obsolescence-man-volume-2-g%C3%BCnther-anders Arendt, Hannah. 1994. The origins of totalitarianism. New  York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing Company. Bamford, Heather. 2018. Cultures of the fragment: Uses of the Iberian manuscript (1100–1600). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bidle, James. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – We are the pawns. The Guardian, February 2. Boeche, Roger. 1996. Theories of tyranny from Plato to Arendt. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Britt, Christopher. 2008. Torture, tongues, and treason. In On torture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Calveiro, Pilar. 2012. Violencias de estado. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno. Canetti, Elias. 1993. Crowds and power. New  York: Continuum Publishing Company. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1969. Democracy in America. Garden City: Doubleday. Debord, Guy. 1995. The society of spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Coldness and cruelty. New York: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and punish. New York: Random House. Fromm, Erich. 1969. Escape from freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Hilde, Thomas. 2008. Information and the tortured imagination. In On torture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hoffer, Eric. 2010. The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: Harper Perennial. Hofstadter, Richard. 1964. The paranoid style in American politics. Harper’s Magazine, November. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. An answer to the question: What is enlightenment. In Kant: Political writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Boétie, Etienne de. 1576. The discourse of voluntary servitude. Trans. Harry Kurz. Indianapolis: Indiana: Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund. org/title/2250 Marcuse, Herbert. 1991. One-dimensional man. Boston: Beacon Press. Mills, C.  Wright. 1956. White collar: The American middle classes. New  York: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The body in pain. New York: Oxford University Press. Subirats, Eduardo. 2017. Prometheus’s descent of golgatha as sisyphus. In Spectacle of enlightenment. Washington, DC: Accountable Publishing. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing acts: Spectacles of gender and nationalism in argentina’s ‘dirty war’. Durham: Duke University Press. Vaneigem, Raoul. 1965. The revolution of everyday life. Online at theanarchistlibrary.org. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Index1

A Abravanel, Judah (Ebreo, Leone), 3, 114 Adler, Judith, 77 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 33, 34, 37, 84, 96, 97, 99, 119, 147 Aeschylus, 26, 27, 47 Agamben, Giorgio, 106, 129–131, 139 Agency, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 104, 105, 107 Age of destruction, 152 Amaru, Tupac, 43 Amnesia, 52, 55, 94 Anarchy, 75, 80 Anders, Günther, 14, 16, 18, 63, 106, 132, 133, 144, 145, 148–150 Anti-humanism, 7, 51–108 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 104

Arendt, Hannah, 104, 108, 140, 141 Artaud, Antonin, 29 Atwood, Paul, 84 Augustine, Saint, 9 Auschwitz, 38, 39 Autonomy, vi, 2, 7, 15, 21, 47, 94, 113–124, 133, 135, 152 Avant-garde, 5, 14, 28–32, 34, 122, 129, 130 B Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 115, 134 Bacon, Francis, 2, 7, 17, 53, 82, 91, 114 Balthrop-Lewis, Alda, 76 Bamford, Heather, 149 Bataille, Georges, 97 Bauhaus, 30 Beckett, Samuel, 19 Beckmann, Max, 7, 25

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Britt, E. Subirats, Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9

155

156 

INDEX

Being, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 21, 24, 27, 28, 32, 39, 40, 44, 45, 55, 56, 58–60, 62, 64, 69, 71, 73, 74, 79, 83–86, 89, 100, 103, 107, 119, 127–135, 138, 144, 148–150 Benda, Julien, 118 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 33, 123 Bernhard, Thomas, 18 Bidle, James, 147 Bier, Jesse, 72 Bildung, 62–65, 70, 73–75, 86, 87, 92, 104, 107 Binswanger, Ludwig, 8, 13, 21 Bloch, Ernst, 38, 46n7 Bloom, Harold, 101 Boeche, Roger, 152 Bourdieu, Pierre, 121 Brecht, Bertold, 18 Breton, André, 29 Britt, Christopher, vi, 53, 145 Britt, Steuart Henderson, 99 Bruegel, Peter, 4n2 Bruno, Giordano, 3, 24, 26, 27, 30, 43, 114, 115, 122 Buber, Martin, 37 Bush, George W., 54 Business ethos, 84, 87 Businessmen, 84, 87 C Cabala, 114 Calveiro, Pilar, 145 Canetti, Elias, 140, 141 Capitalism, 4, 7, 8, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 45, 53, 71, 85, 91, 96, 97, 115, 116, 120, 133, 134, 147, 151 Carlo, Danielle, 81, 82 Castro, Josué de, 19 Celan, Paul, 7

Censorship, vi, 3, 13, 16, 18, 41, 43, 136, 137, 142, 144–146 Cervantes, Miguel de, 18, 124–126, 132, 133 Che Guevara, Ernesto, 19, 116 Christian absolutism, 113 Christianity, 38, 41, 53, 63, 65, 66, 69, 78, 81, 116, 120, 126, 127 Civil disobedience, 70, 75–79, 84, 108 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 24, 43 Courbet, Gustave, 9 Culture War, 51, 99, 101, 104, 107, 108 D Dadaism, 28 Dalí, Salvador, 29, 32 Da-sein, 21 Death of art, 5, 29 Debord, Guy, 4, 23, 105, 106, 147 Debt, 127, 128 Deleuze, Gilles, 8–10, 13, 23, 103, 143 Democracy, 4, 14, 20, 21, 24, 32, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 65, 70, 75–77, 84, 88–91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 104, 118, 119, 121, 136, 145, 151–152 participatory vs. representative, 60, 104 Descartes, René, 6–8, 17 Destruction, 3, 8–13, 22, 24, 27–29, 31, 38, 43–45, 48, 61–63, 99, 101, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 138, 143, 151–152 Dewey, John, 87–96 Dialectical method, 93, 94, 96 Dialectic of enlightenment, 2, 3 Diderot, Denis, 14, 25, 119 Displaced subjects, 135 Displacement, 15, 45, 133, 142–145

 INDEX 

Don Quixote, 18, 41 Droits du homme et du citoyen, 38 Duchamp, Marcel, 32 E Ebreo, Leone, 3, 4, 17, 24 Education, 8, 18, 23, 37, 39, 42, 56, 63, 64, 69–72, 74, 76, 79, 88–90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 102, 107, 115, 151 Einstein, Alfred, 25 Ekklesia, 127, 128, 129n2, 130 El Lissitzky’s, 29 Emancipation, 3, 20, 21, 25, 26, 42, 113, 120, 134, 151 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, v, 19, 63, 69, 70, 72–79, 87, 108 End of philosophy, 5, 34, 121 End of the intellectual, 14, 16, 43 Enlightenment, 3, 5, 10, 17, 19, 21, 24–28, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 42, 43, 47, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 68, 70, 82, 94, 96, 101, 102, 107, 115, 116, 120, 121, 145, 146 Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction, 47 Entertainment, 15, 29, 44, 149, 150 Entfremdung, 32, 133, 134 Enthusiasm, 19, 31, 61, 67, 69, 70, 72–80 Erasmus, Desiderius, 3, 24, 37, 104, 114 Evangelicalism evangelical humanism, 65–81 evangelical imperialism, 79–81 Exile, vi, 43, 46n7, 113–138 Experience, v, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 20–22, 26, 28, 29, 31–34, 36, 40–42,

157

46–48, 59, 82, 86, 88, 89, 93, 101, 103, 106, 107, 143, 144, 148, 149, 151 Expressionism, 30 F False consciousness, 132 Fascism, 4, 25, 28, 38, 94, 116, 118, 119, 126 Faust, 6, 114, 115 Fenn, Paul, 98 Fleetingly produced men, 12 Foucault, Michel, 16, 17, 19, 23, 58, 59, 62, 64, 97, 104, 147 Fragmentation, v, 3, 9–12, 16, 19, 28, 100, 106, 107, 122, 148 Franck, Sebastian, 113 Frank, Thomas, 99 Franklin, Benjamin, 6, 26, 27, 53, 69–72, 77, 81, 83, 93 Freedom, v, 3, 4, 6, 12, 13, 25, 28, 34, 36, 47, 48, 60, 63, 64, 77, 83, 86, 87, 97, 108, 113–115, 131, 136, 137, 140, 146, 147, 152 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 13, 30, 32, 35, 38, 115, 116, 134, 135 Fromm, Erich, 146 Fundamentalism, 87, 151 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 19, 24, 43, 116 Genocide, 4, 7, 9, 10, 30, 48, 116, 118, 135, 137 Gesamtkunstwerk, 22, 28, 29 Goebbels, Joseph, 19, 25, 31, 119 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, v, 4, 6, 24, 26, 27, 34, 64, 114, 115 Grandin, Greg, 79

158 

INDEX

Great Awakening, 53 Great Books, 101, 103 Great Mother, 27 Groddeck, Georg, 134 Guattari, Felix, 13, 103 Guilt, 25, 52, 62, 65, 66, 72, 79, 81, 116, 128 H Halakha, 128, 132 Harney, Stefano, 101–103 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 56, 133 Herdt, Jennifer, 56, 63, 64 Hermeneutics of suspicion, 58, 98 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 30 Hilde, Thomas, 145 Hiroshima, v, 1, 24, 38, 39, 51, 63, 82, 149 Hirsch, E. D., 101 Hoffer, Eric, 142 Hofstadter, Richard, 53, 67–69, 76, 83, 84, 89, 90, 141, 151 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 43, 115 Hook, Sidney, 96, 97 Horkheimer, Max, 18, 24, 33, 34, 84, 93–97, 99, 102, 147 Human intelligence, 2–4, 24, 108 Humanism, v, vi, 3, 7, 14, 20, 23, 24, 37–39, 47, 51–108, 114, 120, 126, 131 Humanistic hermeneutics, 41, 105 Humanities, 8, 23, 36–42, 62, 64, 98, 100, 101, 121 Human rights, v, 16, 22, 40, 41, 121, 137 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 56, 63, 64 Husserl, Edmund, 17 Huxley, Aldous, 94

I Ibn Rushd (Averroes), v, 4, 27, 37, 104 Ideology, 4, 8, 22, 26, 34, 41, 42, 86, 106, 108, 151 Idiocy, 94, 139–152 Immerman, Richard, 53 Imperialism, 37, 47, 79–81, 113, 115, 120 Instrumental reason, v, 7, 33, 44, 115 Intellectual, v, vi, 1–5, 7–21, 23–27, 30, 34–37, 39–47, 53, 55, 57, 58, 61, 68–70, 72, 73, 76–79, 82, 84, 87, 88, 92–98, 100–104, 106, 113–138, 143, 152 International Situationist, 105, 106 Irrationality, 7, 10, 44, 124, 133 J James, William, 87, 88, 91 John, Saint, 38 Jung, Carl Gustav, 39 Jungk, Robert, 18 K Kafka, Franz, 9, 19, 38, 39, 132, 133 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 9, 10, 12, 17, 24–26, 33, 41, 52, 129, 133, 146 Kaplan, Amy, 80 Katipunan revolution, 80 Kepler, Johannes, 115 Kerényi, Karl, 23, 39 Khapaeva, Dina, 61 King, Martin Luther, 19 Kingdom of God, 54, 55, 81 Klee, Paul, 134, 135 Klein, Naomi, 87 Klesis, 130 Koyaanisqatsi, 49 Kracauer, Siegfried, 31

 INDEX 

Kropotkin, Pyotr, 43 Kyrios kristos, 127 L La Boétie, Etienne de, 144 Lang, Fritz, 30 Language, 8, 16, 17, 19, 23, 36, 40, 45, 54, 55, 59, 74, 99, 101, 105, 122, 134, 146 Lapham, Lewis, 83 Le Corbusier, 30 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 92, 119 Lenau, Nikolaus, 115 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 59 Linguistics, 2, 3, 11, 16–18, 27, 34–36, 40, 59, 64, 122, 130 Locke, John, 82, 83 Long, Stewart, 86, 92 Loyola, Ignatius of, 131 Lukács, György, 120 Lumumba, Patrice, 19, 116 Luther, Martin, 131 Luxemburg, Rosa, 19, 43, 116, 120 M Maieutic, 42 Manhattan Project, 24 Manifest Destiny, 52, 54, 76 Mann, Klaus, 115, 118, 119, 123 Mann, Thomas, 23, 39 Marcuse, Herbert, 152 Markell, Patchen, 55, 56, 103, 104 Marx, Karl, 10, 12, 22, 32, 106, 115, 120, 129, 133–135 Marxism, 23, 97 Masochism, 143 McAlister, Melanie, 53–55, 66, 67, 81 McCarthyism, 19, 116, 123, 126 McDougall, Walter, 54

159

McLuhan, Marshall, 19, 119 Megamachine, 15, 85, 86, 88, 97, 108 Megatechnic bribe, 86 Memory, vi, 42, 49, 97–108, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134 Menand, Louis, 88, 89 Micro-intellectual, 13, 19, 39, 40 Micro-politics, 19, 136 Mills, C. Wright, 1, 4, 85, 87, 121, 123, 139 Modernity, 5, 10, 23, 28, 52, 54, 57, 59, 131, 135 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, 24 Moten, Fred, 101–103 Mount Perelin Society, 87 Mumford, Lewis, 4, 13, 14, 16, 19, 25, 63, 85–87, 91–93, 95, 105, 107, 108 Munch, Edward, 25, 115 Münzer, Thomas, 43 N Nagasaki, v, 1, 24, 51, 63, 82, 149 National Socialism, 23, 31, 36 Nazis, 57, 58, 108 Negative consciousness, vi, 7, 44, 125, 132 Neoliberalism, 87, 97, 151 Neumann, Erich, 21, 23, 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 9, 17, 30, 34, 35, 56–58, 65, 66, 68, 96, 115, 116, 119, 127, 145 Nightingale, Andrea, 77 Nihilism, 7, 16, 24, 35, 57, 62, 63, 66, 81, 108, 134, 145 O Orozco, José Clemente, 25 Orwell, George, 36

160 

INDEX

P Paracelsus, 3, 17, 24, 37, 113, 115 Paranoia, 11, 140, 144, 145, 151 Patriarchal providence, 27 Paul, Saint, 9, 66, 127, 128, 129n2, 130, 131, 133, 134 Paul, Sherman, 78 Performance, 16, 28, 32, 122, 124, 126, 147 Philanthropy, 47 Philippines, 54, 79, 80 Picasso, Pablo, 14, 25 Plato, 29 Pleroma kairos, 129 Poe, Edgar Alan, 5 Polis, 43, 139 Politics of acknowledgment, 103 Politics of recognition, 55, 60, 98, 99, 104 Posthumanism, 14, 61, 62 Post-intellectual, 15, 117 Postmodern, vi, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 19, 22, 24, 25, 28–30, 34, 35, 45, 55–60, 101, 103, 117, 119, 122, 130, 135, 136 Postmodern intellectuals, v Poststructuralism, 14, 97 Poverty of experience, 6 Pragmatism, 63, 65, 87, 88, 91–95, 105, 121 Primitivism, 69, 70, 73, 75–80, 83 Progress, 1–3, 5, 6, 13, 24, 30, 41, 47, 52, 62, 86, 91, 95, 114, 115, 119, 122, 126 Prometheus, 25–27, 42, 43, 47, 74, 81 Propaganda, vi, 8, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 34, 44–46, 116, 117, 119, 125, 129, 142, 146–148 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 7, 120

Providential enlightenment, 53 Puritans, 53, 68–70, 83 R Ready-made, 32, 135 Reason, v, 7, 10–13, 17, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 38, 43, 44, 52, 53, 57–61, 63, 64, 70, 74, 83, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97–100, 102, 108, 114, 115, 117, 131–133, 140, 146, 152 Representation, 6, 11, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 60, 99, 104, 106, 122, 125, 148 Resistance theory, 98 Romanticism, 56 Roosevelt, Theodore, 80 Rorty, Richard, 145 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 10, 25, 34 Rulfo, Juan, 19 S Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 143 Sacrifice, 38, 48, 61, 62, 66, 78, 79, 81, 117, 127, 128, 132, 144, 146, 149 Sade, Marquis de, 9, 10, 143 Sadism, 143 Said, Edward, 64, 65 Sánches, Francisco, 24 Sartre, Jean Paul, 13, 18, 23, 48, 97 Scarry, Elaine, 145 Scheerbart, Paul, 30 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, 6, 24, 56, 64 Schizophrenia, 8, 9, 13, 21, 38, 106, 133 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 77 Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, 80 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 9–14, 33, 38

 INDEX 

Science, 7, 11, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 38, 42, 47, 52–60, 68, 74, 82, 84, 86, 88–91, 93–96, 98, 100, 102, 107, 113–115, 121, 122, 145 Self-consciousness, 3, 6, 16, 21 Self-destruction, 5, 30, 39 Self-reliance, 70, 72–79, 108 Sennett, Richard, 19 Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, 14 Simmel, Georg, 5, 32, 33, 35 Sin, 66, 72, 128 Slavery, 36, 76–78, 113, 142, 144, 145 Socrates, 42, 43, 71 Sovereignty, 6, 7, 33, 34, 58, 104, 106, 127, 128, 139–141, 143–146, 150 Spectacle, vi, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14–16, 20–22, 27–34, 42, 44, 47, 105–108, 117–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 132, 133, 136, 137, 146–150 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 103 Spinoza, Baruch, v, 3, 24, 26, 27, 38, 60, 115, 135 Stalinism, 116, 118 Strong, Josiah, 79, 80 Subirats, Eduardo, vi, 147, 148 Sufism, 18 Surrealism, 28, 29, 32 Surveillance, 5, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 21, 25, 44–46, 146–148 System of not-finishing-a-­ sentence, 12, 14 T Taubes, Jakob, 128 Taut, Bruno, 30 Taylor, Diana, 145, 146 Techno-scientific humanism, 81–88

161

Terminal age, 18, 24, 63, 105, 106, 149 Terrorism, 45, 149 Theatrum mundi, 20–23 Third World, 19, 118, 120 Thoreau, Henry David, 69, 70, 75–79, 84, 87, 108 Thurnberg, Greta, 2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 84, 140, 151, 152 Todestrieb, 38 Tolstoy, Leo, 7, 25 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 5, 35 Torture, 9, 22, 43, 51, 114, 117, 125–127, 137, 142, 144–146 Totalitarianism, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 19, 31, 33, 47, 57, 58, 60, 108, 123, 126 Transhumanism, 61 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 81 Tyranny, vi, 52, 63, 77, 79, 80, 82, 108, 139–152 U Undercommons, 101, 102 University, 3, 8, 13, 19, 23, 37, 51, 63, 74, 88, 89, 100–103, 122, 123, 136 V Vaneigem, Raoul, 105, 106, 148, 150 Vertov, Tziga, 19, 22 Vives, Luis, 17, 113 Void, vi, 3, 4, 12, 48, 131, 132, 136 Voluntary servitude, vi, 142–146, 148 von Harbou, Thea, 30 von Hoffmanstahl, Hugo, 36

162 

INDEX

W Wagner, Richard, 31, 131 Warhol, Andy, 137 Weber, Max, 71 Welles, Orson, 22 Western civilization, 9, 38 Wheatland, Thomas, 94–97 Whitman, Walt, 19, 63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 35 Wolin, Richard, 58, 97

World War, 1, 13, 23, 25, 30, 38, 61, 88, 99, 107, 108, 117, 118 Y Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, 39 Z Zuboff, Shoshana, 147