Dialectical literature

Bertolt Brecht considered using the term "dialectical theatre" for what has later become known - more appropriately - as "epic theatre". Such lax usage of the term dialectics is not particular to Brecht, Benjamin also made quite inappropriate references to dialectics. If we were to seek a properly dialectical piece of literature we would have to look at Hölderlin's magnificent elegy Hyperion. That the novel is dialectical is no coincidence since Hölderlin was a good friend of Hegel and they shared ideas and ideals: Lukacs describes - not without irony - how Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling had in their youth planted a tree in honour of the French revolution and danced around it. Lukacs interprets Hyperion as an elegy for the heroic phase of the bourgeois revolution, for the time the bourgeoisie glistened in the light of a grandiose self-deception, as Marx noted: "Its gladiators found in the rigorous classical legacy of the Roman republic the ideals and artistic forms, the self-deceptions it needed to conceal from itself the limited bourgeois character of its struggles and to raise its passion to the height of a great historical tragedy." If reactionary interpreters of Hölderlin (among which Lukacs forgets to mention Heidegger) tried to cleanse him of all historical content (class struggle), Lukacs commits the fault to interpret motifs and characters from Hyperion with a direct recourse to historical circumstances. The path I would prefer - and it is the path I also take with philosophical systems - is to treat the text as a coherent whole in which every element is first of all to be interpreted in context of the work and only then can the work as a whole be put into historical context. In the case of Hyperion the task therefore starts with uncovering the dialectical structure of the work.

The dialectical structure can be found on two levels: 1. the fabula, 2. explicit reflection by the characters. If we first turn to the fabula, we could read the three main characters as a dialectical whole. On one side we have the warrior Alabanda, the fiery youth who inflames Hyperion and moves him to action. On the other we have Diotima, Hyperion's great love, representing nature in its harmony, who has a rather passivizing effect on him. It is these two forces that are fighting inside the protagonist and which determine the state he finds himself in. Upon meeting Alabanda we can find Hyperion speaking these words in revolutionary fervour (first is the original, followed by my less then perfect translation):

Ich will, sagt ich, die Schaufel nehmen und den Kot in eine Grube werfen. Ein Volk, wo Geist und Größe keinen Geist und keine Größe mehr erzeugt, hat nichts mehr gemein, mit andern, die noch Menschen sind, hat keine Rechte mehr, und es ist ein leeres Possenspiel, ein Aberglauben, wenn man solche willenlose Leichname noch ehren will, als wär ein Römerherz in ihnen. Weg mit ihnen! Er darf nicht stehen, wo er steht, der dürre faule Baum, er stiehlt ja Licht und Luft dem jungen Leben, das für eine neue Welt heranreift.

I want to, I said, take a shovel and hurl the manure into a pit. A people, where spirit and greatness do not spur spirit and greatness, has nothing in common with others, who are still human. It has no rights, and it is mere farce, a superstition, to believe such corpses can be honoured like a roman heart were beating in their chest. Away with them! The rotten tree can not stand where it stands, it is obscuring the young life, the ripening new world.

But alas! upon meeting Diotima, we find the same Hyperion speaking these words:

Was kümmert mich der Schiffbruch der Welt, ich weiß von nichts, als meiner seligen Insel.

What do I care for the shipwreck of the world, I know of nothing but my blissful island.

We find the protagonist being subject to the balance of two moments, on one the warrior principle, a disharmonious activating force, on the other love, a harmonious passivizing force. The second level where we come across dialectics are reflections by characters. The way Hyperion envisions the perfect order of the world is fundamentally dialectical. He wants to bring society in harmony with nature once again, and at the core of nature he finds the principle of beauty. How does Hyperion envision this principle? As a balance of contrasting forces, or - may I be so bold to say - of dialectic moments. When describing the ideal people, the Athenians, he says:

Kein außerordentlich Schicksal erzeugt den Menschen. Groß und kollosalisch sind die Söhne einer solchen Mutter, aber schöne Wesen, oder, was dasselbe ist, Menschen werden sie nie, oder spät erst, wenn die Kontraste sich zu har bekämpfen, um nicht endlich Frieden zu
machen.

Man is not created by an extraordinary destiny. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but they never or only late become beautiful beings, or, what is the same, human, if the contrasts are in too sharp an opposition to come to peace.

Continuing, he discovers dialectics as the essence of philosophy (something else Hegel agreed on with Hölderlin):

Das große Wort, das εν διαφερον εαυτω (das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne) des Heraklit, das konnte nur ein Grieche finden, denn es ist das Wesen der Schönheit, und ehe das gefunden war, gabs keine Philosophie.

Only a Greek could find the great word, the εν διαφερον εαυτω (The one that is differentiated in itself) of Heraclitus. It is the essence of beauty and before it was found there could be no philosophy.

For dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onwards the internal forces of the contrasting moments are the driving force of change - as the dialectics of Spirit was the driving force of history for Hegel, so class struggle was the driving force of history for Marx. Heraclitus had thus avoided a problem all prima philosphia had been stuck with - the problem of the prime mover. Heraclitus answered simply that movement had no prime mover, because there is no initial static state that needed to be moved. Change is the perpetual order of the world and this change does not result from a first cause, but from the dialectics of nature, from intrinsic properties of each and every object existing in nature. Compare now Alabanda's opinion on the matter:

Ich fühl' in mir ein Leben, das kein Gott geschaffen, und kein sterblicher gezeugt. Ich glaube, daß wir durch uns selber sind, und nur aus freier Lust so innig mit dem All verbunden.

In me I feel a life that no god has spawned and no mortal created. I believe that we exist through ourselves, and that we are so deeply connected to existence merely by free will.

Other examples of dialectical thought can easily be found, but I will take that I have provided sufficient examples to convince the reader of my point that dialectics are the fundamental structuring principle of the novel. Now we can move one step further, and see at what point Hölderlin surpassed his friend Hegel. I will attempt to prove that Hölderlin's dialectics are not merely subjective as Hegel's, but that it represents a first step towards materialism (of course - historically speaking - it was a step into a blind alley since Marx found the path to a materialist dialectics through Feuerbach). The element that transcends mere idealism is destiny. If for the conservative Hegel the march of spirit towards self-realization is determined only by its own inner dialectics (Hegel had found the decadent protocapitalims of Germany quite comfortable) for Hölderlin it is destiny that opposes the self-realization of the harmonious society. Destiny - of which Hölderlin has but a vague understanding - is the force that opposes the harmony towards which humanity is striving. It is the material force which prevents the subjective dialectics, the self-realization of spirit, to take its course. As opposed to Hegel and the bourgeoisie as a whole, Hölderlin was not prepared to shed the great ideals that propelled the bourgeoisie to power like a worn-out coat. But for him destiny was an arbitrary foreign force, he did not yet understand society as Marx did: for whom the failure of great bourgeois ideals was the natural order of things since they were a tool the bourgeoisie used and that it discarded as soon as it ceased to fulfil its function. Hölderlin can be compared to Kafka and Euripides: for all of them destiny is a foreign element that crushes the individual, but none of them had a full understanding of the material basis of destiny, none of them understood, as Brecht did, that people make their own destiny, that - as Marx had put it: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under given and inherited circumstances. The tradition of all dead societies burdens the minds of the living like a nightmare." If they did, they could have said as Brecht did in the closing lines of the Threepenny opera:

Verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr, in Bälde
Erfriert es schon von selbst, denn es ist kalt.
Bedenkt das Dunkel und die große Kälte
In diesem Tale, das von Jammer Schallt.

Do not persecute injustice too harshly,
outside it will soon freeze by itself.
Think of the darkness and the great cold
in this valley that echoes with wailing.

The metaphor strikes back

Metaphors are sneaky little buggers. True, they might help you get your point across more clearly and vividly and are particularly suited to become part of intellectual world history - few people are unaware that capital lives a "vampire like" existence, that religion is the "opium of the people", that capitalism encloses us in an "iron casing" etc. Of course there are those instances of metaphors gone terribly wrong, like the one about the "base" and "superstructure" which has caused terrible misunderstandings, but there is another way metaphors can, like Frankenstein's "monster", develop a life of their own and take vengeance on their creator. One such unruly metaphor is Plato's cave. Plato meant to illustrate his theory of the double realms (ideas and phenomena), but ended up showing that his theory is logically inconsistent. The main problem of his conceptualization is (as Aristotle showed in his Metaphysics) that it does not show how these two fundamentally distinct realms, the realm of ideas and the realm of phenomena, can have anything in common, how ideas can spawn phenomena as their imperfect images. Even before Aristotle answered that they can not, at least if we understand them as independent spheres, Plato's cave showed the flaws of such conceptualization. In the story Plato describes people in a cave, chained so they can move neither their bodies nor their heads. Behind these people there is a fire and in front of the fire figures are carried to and fro. The imprisoned know nothing of this, but see only shadows of objects being thrown on a wall in the cave. Since they can not see the origins of the shadows, they mistake them for the figures themselves. Ah! but you will notice that all of a sudden we are confronted not with two - as Plato would have us believe - but with three spheres: that of shadows (phenomena), that of figures (ideas) and that of light. The latter has no equivalent in Plato's philosophy, indeed even Aristotle's solution to the problem of incommensurability does not solve it with recourse to the mysterious third element. The metaphor of the cave was centuries before its time, a true prophesy of things to come: it was only Kant who discovered that the subject is the source of light that is joining phenomena and nuomena.

A priori, a posteriori or Heidegger contra Kant

Recently I have become interested in the problem of epistemology and Kant's Critique of pure reason seemed like a good starting point. Kant makes quite a convincing point about a priori categories, namely time and space. He claims that these categories are preconditions for any sensory and cognitive activity. Categories should be distinguished from ideas and concepts: that the subject necessarily has an a priori category of time does not mean that it has a positive idea of time (the fact that the idea of time is culturally specific - linear and circular time being two most common examples - would obviously disprove that) but that there necessarily exists a category which allows phenomena to exist in the relationship of before and after. If this were not an a priori category no meaningful interaction would be possible, because we would not be able to conceptualize things like action/reaction, cause/effect, even a notion of self - which is at its core a notion of temporal continuity - would be quite impossible. After proving this point Kant is content to leave the matter as it stands and does not investigate into the origins of these a priori categories. He was wise enough to know that in the context of his philosophical system this endeavour would have been futile. The problem is that it is framed as an epistemological, not ontological, problem. In the context of idealism with its fixation on the primacy of the subject all ontology boils down to epistemology in the end, that is why the answer necessarily eluded Kant.

Fast forward then to Heidegger, a man who could have been a great philosopher, were his tremendous sagacity not coupled with an even greater measure of senselessness. To put it more precisely: a man, who refused to take the obvious step all the inconsistencies and paradoxes of his system called for - the step from metaphysics to materialism - only for the sake of acting as a mouthpiece of the Third Reich, even as the Reich had been long dead. I will be so bold to take this step, the step his servile cowardice prevented him to take, for him. For Heidegger in Being and time then the starting point was not epistemology, he took a broader perspective and claimed that being-in-the-world is antecedent and is a precondition for knowing the world. This allows us to solve the riddle of the origin of a priori categories: they are ontological characteristics of the subject's being-in-the-world, time and space are something that the subject shares with the object, and only by virtue of this commonality can the subject know anything about the world. For Kant a priori categories were something at home in the subject, they were something the subject imposed on the world, no wonder then that the object - the infamous Ding an sich - eluded him. The truth is that a priori categories are not merely subjective and it is this fact which makes cognition possible in the first place. The problem with Heidegger is that upon discovering this fact he ran amok and tried to subsume everything to the realm of Dasein. While there can be no doubt that time and space as physical categories are things society and individuals can have little influence on, Heidegger envisions the whole of society to this be similarly beyond reproach and adds history to boot. His philosophy becomes a giant apology for the status quo, the most ferocious one since Hegel, indeed ferocious enough that Heidegger's epitaph might have read: "No, you must not think everything is true, merely that it is necessary."

sterile sexuality

When Habermas was first writing about the public sphere he used the ideal types of mass and public to define the degree of "publicness" of an opinion. I thought it might be useful to pursue the same path to define an aesthetic public sphere. That is why I am - among other things - reading Freud's mass psychology and ego analysis. In it Freud notes that the libidinous binding force of the mass is unrealizable or zielgehemmt - the pleasure derived is not from fulfillment but from deferment. It is this element that makes the bond permanent: the mass does not satisfy its victims, for if it did, it would cease to exist. It does not disappoint them, for if it did, it would cease to exist. Rather it promises and what it promises is another promise. This is an interesting vantage point to approach the culture industry from since it is this infernal characteristic that makes up for its noxious character: the products of the culture industry are not even vulgar, they do not even satisfy the most base and primitive desires, the way folk culture used to. Rather they induce a perpetual frustration. This is the point a lot of misunderstanding of Adorno originates from: people charge him with elitism since he supposedly favoured elite over popular culture. Far from this Adorno and Horkheimer claimed in Dialectics of enlightenment that the problem of the culture industry is that it is neither high culture that marks the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, nor is it popular culture of those excluded from elite culture, it is imposed on the masses by elites.

The following video by Britney Spears is a good case in point:

Britney Spears - Womanizer (Clip Video)
Uploaded by Britney_Jean_Spears

I do not want those people behind the wheel

In an earlier post I scolded Slavoj Žižek for his position on the economic crisis. His idea was that the bailout is unfair, but in the current system the rich have to be helped for the poor to be saved, so he concluded with: "obey, but think". What irritated me then - and what has irritated me for as long as I have known Žižek's writing - is the reactionary character of someone who has the audacity to present himself as a progressive thinker. Now it would seem that - what a surprise - US banks are using the no-strings-attached 700 billion to buy other banks and not much of the money will trickle down to the people it was intended to help:

Base and superstructure

The metaphor of base and superstructure that Karl Marx used in the preface to his Contribution to a critique of political economy is one of the most often misunderstood metaphors, which is no wonder since a vast number of people don't bother to read anything besides this preface and perhaps Engel's letter to Borgius. Engels was - like Althusser - interpreting this metaphor as a determination in the last instance, a indirect and mediated determination, but a one-way determination none the less. The obvious problem with such a conceptualization is that it negates entirelly the radical political moment of marxism - philosophers would be doomed to merely interpret the world. We should not be taking this metaphor too seriously, since with it Marx was summing up his thinking from the time he was writing his Contribution to a critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. The obvious path would be then to look at this text to make sense of the metaphor. The preface already shows that a one-way determinism is not what Marx meant with base and superstructure. He claims that only by having philosophy reveal the laws of historical development will the proletariat be able to become a revolutionary force - hence the upheaval of the base is dependant upon action from the superstructure. A further point can be made if we look at Marx' critique of religion. He claims that religion is in a functional connection to social praxis:

Religious misery is in a sense an expression of real misery and in another a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the tormented creature, the conscience of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of bleak circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

A second important point is made in the Feuerbach part of the German ideology. Here Marx and Engels claim that social consciousness was originally merely directly registering praxis. As material and intellectual production split, consciousness itself gained autonomy. The important point is that the relationship of base and superstructure is not a constant but historically variable. We could therefore speak of a one-way determinism only in societies that did not yet develop speech and where intellectual production is fully integrated into material production. Since we have instances of technically accomplished cave paintings - that is to say paintings done by someone with artistic training, hence someone who specialized in intellectual work - from as early as the late paleolithic, this pure determinism is a very distant historical state.

Tiepolo and Zuccarelli

As I reread my previous post I realized I had written something that might strike the reader as odd; I attributed to Tiepolo and Zuccarelli the playful rendition of everyday life. Surely this does not hold for Tiepolo who was thematically speaking very much in the baroque tradition: biblical scenes and depictions of the lives of saints are predominant with the occasional mythological motive from ancient Greece or Rome. Zuccarelli fits more closely to my description, but he liked to portray idyllic country scenes, sometimes adding mythical figures like fawns to spice up scenes of bacchantic folly. None of the two painters was interested in depicting the life of the rising bourgeoisie - since most of Tiepolos work was commissioned either by the church or by aristocracy, he was still rooted firmly in the old order of the world. Zuccarelli also had patrons among the aristocracy, but his paintings were obviously intended for a different function, not for public exhibition but for private enjoyment, for the aristocracy that was already under the sway of bourgeois values. Tiepolo's paintings were obviously meant for public use in the context of what Habermas had called representative publicity - the public showcasing of authority. This is revealed in the excessive pathso of his compositions, baroque drama taken to the extreme, but on the other hand the colour palette reveals an entirely different story. Baroque painters had discovered the dramatic effect of light and shadow and even master of colour like Rembrandt in his later years (Johannes Itten noted that Rembrandt's colours are like gems glittering in the darkness) subordinated colour to the effects of light and shadow. If baroque can be characterised as dramatic (deviating from the rationalism of the renaissance and the middle ages), the 18. century is somewhat schizophrenic: on the one hand compositions are nearly bursting with dynamism, everything that was still solid in baroque now melts away, every trace of rationalism and order that the baroque retained is abandoned in favour of drama. The colour palette on the other hand became by far less serious, the dramatic opposition of dark and light gave way to the play of bright colours, harsh contrasts are avoided, there are no uniform expressive planes of colour, everything is in motion, everything is in harmony and everything expresses a joie de vivre. It is this quality of colour that is chronicling the ongoing social transformation. It expresses the very ideal of bourgeois intimacy. Art of the 18. century is a prophesy, it is the trumpet that singalls the by now inevitable triumph of the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois sentimentalism

The other day I was listening to a radio programme, in which a Roman publisher was talking about how Boris Pahor (among other things Knight of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur and repeated nominee for the Nobel prize in literature) was for a long time virtually unknown in Rome. What struck me was not so much the provincialism of Rome, but the words the publisher chose to praise the writer, taken right from the stock of romanticist criticism: he praised the "depth" of his writing and the "sincerity" of his testimony. It made me wonder whether Habermas was right in Theory of communicative action to ban art to the realm of intimate testimony, to be judged according to the criterion of sincerity. Was the historical avant-garde just a fleeting flash of light that made the subsequent darkness all the harder to bear?

To properly understand sentimentalism, we must go back in time a bit. It is inextricably intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie, which during the 18. century discovered a whole new phenomenon, completely foreign to feudal society - intimacy and the subjective experience housed by this sphere of life. As the bourgeoisie was also beginning to take the leading role in the realm of culture, this preoccupation with subjectivity also appeared in art: whether in introspective literature, the predominance of melody in music (one need only think of the emotion-laden melodies of Mozart) or of the playful rendition of everyday life in painting (Tiepolo or Zuccarelli come to mind). Biedermeier of course represents the grotesque peak of this movement - intimacy gone awry - expressing a radically entrenched privatism, fleeing from the gradual decay of progressive bourgeois ideals and their immanent shattering in the reactionary reflexes of 1848.

I do not want to argue that under the sway of sentimentalism critical art is unable to flourish, but there is a danger of intimacy becoming an alibi for the flaws of the world, or as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia 110 - Constanze:

As longing for that which dispenses with labour the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But by constructing the true as unmediated in the all-present untrue it perverts the former and transforms it into the latter. Not only does pure emotion, insofar as it is possible at all in the economically determined system, become a social alibi for the hegemony of interest and acclaims a humanity that does not exist. But the unwilfulness of love itself, even when not a priori practically oriented, contributes to this totality as soon as it is established as a principle.

It is in artists such as Euripides and Kafka that a rising dischord is felt between private destiny and the order of the world. While still staying in the confines of metaphysics - the notion of fate is strong with both writers - the order of the world is no longer seen as inherently just and rational, it is no longer pure form, but takes on an arbitrary and alltogehter alien character. Here we witness the sprouting of the same intellectual seed that Marx planted in German Ideology and Contribution to the critique of political economy, namely the realization that ideas are not the governing principle of the world, or as we could put it in Adorno's terms: recognition of the non-identical. It is from this rupture between form and heteronomy of the non-identical that critical thought emerges as Athena from Zeus' head. Similarly it is at the point where it transcends psychology that bourgeois sentimentalism is critical. No one understood this better than Ivan Cankar, when he described the reaction of children to the letter announcing their father's death in world war one:

That evening something unknown from lands far away disturbed the heavenly light with a violent hand, it struck the hollidays, stories and fairytales mercilessly. A letter had anounced that father "fell" in Italy. "He fell". Something unknown, new, foreign, completely incomprehensible was standing before them, high and mighty, but it had no face, nor had it eyes, neither had it a mouth. It belonged to nowhere; not to this vibrant life in front of church and on the street, not to this warm dusk on the oven, not even to fairytales. It was not happy, but not particularly sad either; it was dead, since it had no eyes to reveal why and from where it came, and no mouth to tell it. Thought stood miserable and shy before this enormous apparition like before a mighty black wall and could go nowhere. It came close to the wall, stood there and was speechless.

Juxtaposition

Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectics of enlightenment:

The subject of the new ideology is the world as such. By elevating wicked existence to the realm of facts it makes use of the cult value of fact. By virtue of such transmission mere existence becomes the surrogate of meaning and justice. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful.

Kafka in Der Prozess:

"No", said the priest, "we must not believe everything is true, merely that it is necessary. "Gloomy opinion", said K. "lie becomes the world order."

Lapsus lingue

I am currently at the Arts, Culture and Public Sphere conference in Venice, organized by the IUAV and the ESA. Yesterday Mark Jacobs gave a very inspiring lecture, where he pointed out three different perspectives from which art can be approached: art as market (the instrumental aspects of expressive practices), market as art (the expressive aspects of instrumental practices) and art as existential (existential and moral issues negotiated and expressed through art). I was captivated enough not to be able to take notes, so I will disappoint you by not recounting his lecture in detail. Yet there is one seemingly insignificant and minute detail that caught my attention, and I will report on it: the omission of Horkheimer from the authorship of Dialectics of enlightenment. One might think of it as nothing more than an accidental slip of the tongue, after all, as Freud noted: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Let us not engage into speculation about the possible latent psychological motivation of the author though - after all I would not like to reproach somebody I hold in the highest esteem with following ulterior motives - what is of interest is the act itself. I noticed the same phenomenon a few weeks ago when a friend sent me an MMS greeting from Berlin with a picture of the statues of Marx and Engels, or to be precise, with the statue of Marx; Engels had been cropped in Stalinist manner. This tradition of strategic concealment of the base has a long history. Plato wrote about dialectics as the highest form of human endeavour, yet never once mentioned that this freedom - the freedom to think, if not necessarily of thought - had been won only at the price of unfree labour of others. In German idealism the spirit hovered above the world, and it took the combined effort of Feuerbach and Marx to ground it in praxis. Similarly it was Horkheimer's enterprising spirit as head of the Institute that enabled Adorno to produce such a vast corpus of work. The bliss of philosophy – which for Adorno lay in the elevation above praxis – can be achieved only on account of others being subject to praxis the more ruthlessly. When thought is trying to escape the "wicked society" as Horkheimer and Adorno had called it in Dialectics of enlightenment, it is actually making this hell a little less bearable for those not as fortunate to be above it. The freedom one is given caries with itself an inextricable responsibility.

objectivity

The claim that objectivity is defined by the absence of subjectivity remains firmly in the framework of idealist subjectivism. The subject remains the measure against which the object is judged, the latter being thought of merely negatively (as the absence of the subject).

How come everything reminds me of you

Yesterday I watched The Grönholm method (the play, not the movie). In a nutshell the play is about a job interview where the interviewee is the subject of an experiment which tries to assess whether he possesses the appropriate psychological traits. He reacts completely ruthlessly in every situation, which impresses two of the interviewers, but the third is not convinced and in the end she proves her point. The interviewee is rejected with the words: "we are not looking for a good person who appears to be a complete bastard, but a complete bastard who appears to be a good person."

To this a quote from Adorno, again from Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:

For the individual to appear physically and psychically fit, it must perform libidinous tasks that can be executed only by deepest mutilation, an internalisation of castration in the extroverts in comparison to which the old task of identification with the father appears as the child's play in which it was practised. The regular guy and popular girl must suppress not only their desire and knowledge but also all symptoms that arose from this suppression in bourgeois times. /.../ No research can reach to the depths of the hell in which the deformations that will later see the light of day as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, as successful adaptation to the inevitable and as an unthinkingly practical sense, are formed. /.../ The absence of nervousness and calmness, already a condition for the acquisition of highly paid positions, are the image of the suffocated silence, which the superiors of human resource chiefs commit politically only later on. /.../ At the core of the dominant healthiness lies death.

Finally somebody who understands

On Paul Krugman's blog I came across this very nice quote from John Maynard Keynes:

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

Marxism my ass!

Another post on post. "Postmarxism" this time. To be more precise, Laclau and Mouffe's insolent claim that Postmarxism needs to offer no apologies, when in fact it is a trojan horse packed with metaphysics, sent to burn the Marxist heritage to the ground. The affirmative character of "Postmarxism" can be clearly seen in four ideas:
1. fragmentation of discourse as an emancipatory movement;
2. conceptualization of the historical character of ideas;
3. discursive character of all social reality;
4. conceptualization of interest;

1. Universality or fragmentation of discourses - truth or dare

The idea that fragmentation of discourses (or "metanaratives" as postmodernists would have it) is emancipatory is naive. It is a move forward from Aristotelian metaphysics that were so dear to medieval scholastics, but it is a movement which stops at the point of Hegelian metaphysics. What is the difference between the two? While scholastic metaphysics hypostizes a certain state, Hegelian metaphysics hypostizes a process (the movement of spirit), what they have in common is their ultimately affirmative character. The intellectual move merely corresponds to the shift from a traditional society to a capitalist one, the latter making perpetual change its driving principle. If Aristotelian metaphysics is the ideological apology of a traditional society, Hegelian metaphysics affirms the capitalist one. Fragmentation of discourses is something that Lukacs predicted quite correctly in History and class consciousness, the chapter titled Antinomies of bourgeois thought:

On the one hand, it [bourgeoisie] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand, it loses – likewise progressively – the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership.

2. Nailing ideas to history

The historization of ideas is one of the most important epistemological achievements of Marxism (the first chapter of Bürgers Theory of the avant garde gives a splendid account), but "Postmarxism" does not grasp historization in the Marxist sense: instead of the inextricable embeddedness of ideas in social praxis it proclaims the arbitrary character of ideas. For Marx putting ideas into historical context meant quite the opposite: showing how certain ideas are necessarily linked to praxis (those who believe Marx conceptualized a naive determinism of base and superstructure should attempt a careful scrutiny of the first chapter of German ideology and the foreword to A contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right - Marx referred to the latter with his base/superstructure metaphor). In his critique of Hegel Marx found truth in the religious lie that a better world is waiting above the clouds: "religion is a perverted image of the world, because it is a perverted world." Religion is a lie, but the truth of it is in the functional connection with social praxis.

3. Talk is cheap

While the following quote might as well be taken from one of the most naive parts of Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is actually presented to us in the context of "postmarxism":

Thus, form is, at the same time, both the organizing principle of the mind and the ultimate reality of an object.

No need to stress the reactionary character of this statement. Marxism rebelled against the speculative philosophy of German idealism that proclaimed that the ultimate reality of objects is form, Marx demanded that an analytical distinction is to be made between meaningful social formations (which he called the superstructure) and those that were not form (which he called the base). Adorno put it most bluntly in Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:

Were a psychoanalysis of contemporary culture possible; would not the absolute hegemony of economy ridicule every attempt to explain circumstances with a recourse to the minds of their victims and had psychoanalysts not sworn loyalty to them long ago -

Perhaps some basic biology might help us to clarify matters a bit. In Tree of knowledge Maturana and Varela proposed a cognitive theory based on the idea of autopoiesis. According to them no system has direct access to its environment, so all distinction between system and environment is made by the system itself (the "paradox" of re-entry as it was later named by hermeneutics). But this does not mean that the environment as such does not influence the system without the system being aware of it. Laclau and Mouffe fail to distinguish three things: nondiscursive reality (for example the laws of historical development as conceptualized by Marx, or all natural laws), nondiscursive reality being the object of discourse (Marx thinking about the laws of history or natural scientists doing research) and discourse itself becoming the object of discourse (this post for example).

By reductio ad absurdum it can be shown that Laclau and Mouffe de facto negate the existence of social structure (meaning can manifest nowhere else but in the minds of individuals), but at the same time they lose agency, when they say that this non-existent structure is the only thing determining the subject:

For that same reason it is the discourse which constitutes the subject position of the social agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which is the origin of discourse.

It is self-evident that for any social theory that operates with both a notion of agency and of structure, both most be true: that at the same time the structure influences agency and vice versa. Everything else is the most naive reductionism. C. W. Mills made us aware of this problem when he was writing on the sociological imagination.

4. Now, this is interesting

Let us again start with a quote:

"Interests" then are a social product and do not exist independently of the consciousness of the agents that are their bearers.

While this is surely a statement of fact it does not render it any less problematic. When Adorno responded to Popper in the debate that sparked of the so called positivism debate (a little insolently named so by Adorno, Popper namely rejected the term positivist and thought of himself as a criticist) he noted that:

Only to those that can imagine society as different from the existing does it pose, to use Popper's term, a problem; only through what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that is not content - as the majority of its projects is - with fulfilling goals of public and private administration.

Merely affirming existing interests is limiting oneself to administration of the existing. The point Marx was trying to make is that there is such a thing as an objective interest, namely the interest the proletariat would form if it would - ceteris paribus - know the laws of historical development. Since that is not the case the goal of philosophy must be to unveil these laws and enable the proletariat to achieve this objective interest. The thing that is dialectical in Marxism is taking the contradicitons of social reality to construct a notion of a better society.

Laclau and Mouffe ignore the very simple fact that - as Bourdieu showed quite convincingly - the ones that are most disadvantaged are also the least able to understand the factors that put them in such a position due to a lack of cultural capital, therefore unable to come to an informed interest. At the end of the day "interest" is a thoroughly bourgeois concept.

At the end of the day?

Already in 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno predicted this farcical parade in the colours of Marxism: "the weak work has always clung to similarity with others, the surrogate of identity."

Genealogy of a crisis

The crisis had numerous causes, amongst others irrationally high consumer debt and regulation that relied on liberal ideology instead of sane policies, which permitted malfeasance by banks and investors. When the bubble burst a collapse of the banking system caused a severe economic depression lasting for a decade, after which the economy limped on until a world war finally helped it to its feet. No, this is not a science fiction future, just history. But - as the metaphysical Hegel noted - history has a tendency to repeat itself, and - as the materialist Marx added - first as tragedy, then as farce. I can not help myself to find all economical deliberations somewhat farcical, especially their compulsive immersion in means, ends not being seen anywhere on the horizon. When you have a crashed car that was going way too fast into a tight corner on a wet road with a drunk driver behind the wheel, you can certainly find a group of economists arguing whether he should have braked or accelerated, pulled the wheel to this or that side, but the obvious "don't drink and drive" is nothing short of unimaginable. Milton Friedman's analysis of the great depression is just such a virtuoso account of the minutiae of a financial crash - the question why a gang of lunatic investors was let loose to wreak havoc is not asked, and can not be lest the economy should be seen as a political problem in need of regulation (god forbid!). Knowing nothing of economics it is surely pure naivete that makes me believe the Marxist idea that a basic mismatch of consumption and production, the need to artificially create consumption (even by giving consumers loans they will never be able to repay) to match the needs of production is what causes the periodic crises of capitalism. That actually the functioning of Say's law is the problem. Even more naive probably is the idea that regulation of markets (risky loans to consumers and trickstery in financial markets) might be a way to prevent such breakdowns.

Where the hell did this damned subject person go

If the subject is made of language the fish must surely be made of water.

Žižek calls for Gelassenheit

In the latest issue of Mladina Slavoj Žižek comments on the economic crisis. He concludes with a paraphrase from Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?: "Obey, BUT THINK!" He believes that while we are necessarily being exploited in the current society, we should reflect on what sort of society it is that makes this exploitation possible, and not rush heads over heels to arms. There are two significant changes from Kant's original. First of all Kant did not write "think" but "reason", which is not quite as passive as mere thinking, it is at least collective and as such has a certain potential for political mobilization, since it establishes social networks that can be mobilized for protest. Secondly, Kant's hierarchy was reversed, he did not write "Obey, but think", he wrote: "reason as much as you like and on any subject matter; but obey!" Kant did not want to sacrifice obedience to reasoning, Žižek does not want to sacrifice reasoning to obedience. For Kant reasoning is absolute but needs to be put into bounds so as to not interfere with obedience. For Žižek obedience is absolute and needs to be curtailed only as not to interfere with thinking.

Even though Kant seems progressive in comparison to Žižek, let us not be fooled; it is in Nürnberg of November 1945 that Kant's maxim found fertile soil and proved that his moral theory protects us from minor transgressions only at the price of enabling the most hideous atrocities. It was already Hegel who noted in § 318 of his Rechtsphilosophie that the person who was allowed to voice his opinion can be made to endure much worse than the one who was forced to be silent. This is what media theoreticians meant when they wrote about the narcotic dysfunction of mass media and what Hegel mocked as the stance of the beautiful spirit. Sometimes silence is not enough, sometimes obedience is a sin; this is the sometimes when the stuff of nightmares condenses into a point in history - be it Bosnia, Germany, Rwanda, Sudan, Russia or any other of the by now countless places of horror - which is exactly the blind spot of Kant's (and Žižek's) moral theory. It was Kafka who understood the problem of this blind spot better than anybody (save Brecht perhaps). Žižek could just as well be quoting the priest in Kafka's Process:

"No", said the priest, "we must not believe everything is true, merely that it is necessary. "Gloomy opinion", said K. "lie becomes the world order."

His passive affirmation of the status quo is the same that disgusted me in Luhmann. It is the burst of impotent cynical laughter which follows the realization that we are all doomed, the bad laughter that makes surrender bearable. It reminds me of the joke about the Montenegrin on a sinking ship who replies to the Japanese screaming "what shall we do?" with: "can't you Japanese stop thinking about work for one fucking second!" It is similar to the stance Adorno described in Minima Moralia, 106 - Die Blümlein alle:

The sentence, presumably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only property [sic.] which nobody can take away from us, is a piece in the repertoire of impotent sentimental consolation, which presents the resigned retreat of the subject to inwardness as the gratification it is renouncing. By organizing an archive of itself the subject seizes its own experience as property and thereby externalizes it.

Thinking, quite contrary to what Žižek believes, is doomed the moment it is objectified, sundered from action. We can not obey an unfree world and yet maintain free thinking. If we try, thinking is perverted into its opposite, a mere alibi for the violence of the world: the beautiful spirit hovering above the filth of the damned and the blood of the innocent. Thinking can not, if I paraphrase Adorno, endure as a peaceful enclave, it can exist only by actively resisting the world. Žižek regresses to the position of Feuerbach that Marx criticised in the Theses:

Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he [Feuerbach] regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

The distinction between reasoning and obedience is ideological. Thinking is the first and but the first insubordination against a wrong society. The call to obedience does not spare thinking.

What in the name of Marx is a blog?

when we are thinking about new media we must avoid the pitfall of what in marketing has become known as technological myopia. New media phenomena do not only change the existing media landscape, but are also expanding it, collonizing spheres of life that previousl were not mediated. Blogs must be understood in both aspects: at once they are transforming existing conventions of journalism, but at once they are drawing activities that previously were not mediated into the internet: processes like discussion, opinion leadership and so on (the fact that most blogs rely on reporting second hand information and opinions invites the application of the theory of two-step flow of communication). Perhaps we should look at media in an abstract sense, as that which is in between and thereby connects. What blogs are bringing in contact are conventions of traditional journalism on one hand and processes of interpersonal communication on the other. It is this interaction that would be most interesting for research. Claiming that blogs democratize communication misses the point, because blogs only mediated a sphere of communication that used to not be mediated.

Non-places

In the previous post I have outlined Adorno's vision of utopia. This should be distinguished from the way Marcuse used the term in The end of utopia. Marcuse claims that ideals of the emancipated society have often been reproached with being "utopian". He then goes on to prove that an emancipated society is possible - or at least that it is impossible to claim that it is not possible. But Marcuse himself adds to the confusion of terms that critics of critical theory have made use of when accusing Marxism of "utopianism". U-tupia, the non-place, should not be understood as a plan for reality to follow. As Adorno showed the question of whether redemption can ever come is besides the point - but I would go even further and claim that posing this question already distorts the function of utopia. Utopia is a regulatory mechanism, an imaginary vantage point set into emancipated society from which our world is viewed. This is the meaning of non-place: the vantage point of the utopian gaze is beyond the world. Yet because it is never possible to step outside the world this gaze remains bound by it, it remains a historical contingency. In fact it is bound by history the strongest when it feigns independence, thereby regressing to mere ideology. The point of utopia is not to gaze upon emancipated society, but to step into emancipated society and gaze upon the existing. But since every utopian view is historically contingent, each historically existing society constructs a different emancipated society, utopia is not static. Utopian society can not be fixed for all times, but fulfills its functions only if it changes together with the society it mirrors.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne

Adorno concluded his Minima Moralia with an essay contemplating the role of eschatology for critical thought:

The only philosophy that can be responsibly practised in the face of despair, would be the attempt to observe all things as they appear from the standpoint of redemption. Cognizance has no light but that which shines on the world from redemption: all else is exhausted in repetition and remains mere technique.

And even if we agree that: "Compared to the demand thereby laid upon [thinking] the question of the reality of redemption itself is nearly irrelevant," the question of what redemption looks like remains immensely important. From the standpoint of a redemption that is itself repetition of the existing the faults of the world are concealed, affirmed and reinforced, not brought into the light. But what are the predominating visions of redemption but repetitions of the existing? We are forced to ask as Schiller did in Shakespeare's shadows: "Why do you flee from yourself, when it is yourself you seek?" Even great works of art - or perhaps those especially - are not immune, the promesse du bonheur they utter tends to be as far from redemption as the world it is trying to flee. What is most noticeable about the great finale of Beethoven's ninth is that there is not one spark of tenderness to be found in the pompous fireworks of joy. Fleeing from the misery of the world one is struck over the head with it thousandfold. What Adorno wrote about Strauss in part holds for Beethoven:

The misery of the sunrise in Richards Strauss' Alpensymphonie is not caused merely by banal sequences, but by splendour itself. No sunrise namely, not even that in high mountains, is pompous, triumphant, majestic, but appears weak and hesitating like the hope that all might turn out well in the end, and in such inconspicuousness of the mightiest light lies its moving magnificence.

True redemption, whenever it appears, is hard to discern, not because it is hidden, but because it is fragile and tender, not to be perceived in the overpowering racket of trumpets and timpani, but at the border between sound and silence:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:20-21)

True redemption was captured by Mozart in Zauberflöte. Not in Die Strahlen der Sonne though, but in Papagena, Papagena, Papagena. There we can feel true grace, awarded to the weak not because of their merits but in spite of their flaws. Stubbornly adhering to a vision of redemption that is not and can never be earned Zauberflöte opposes the world in the name of a better, a world whose strenght lies in its frailty.

Sapere aude!

Kant demanded free reasoning but forgot that reason itself is not free.

A fragment on love

I do not even measure time in minutes and hours and days and weeks any more, but in hearing from you: every time is a heartbeat and between lies an eternity. It is the same every time, my torture repeated, living for moments that are as fleeting as the silence between them is deafening. Were the heartbeats to stop, what then? Would I die, would I find absolution, would I find apocalypse or apocatastasis? I am just another impotent prick, chasing flashes of light (oh, but what a warm and bright glow you are) like a moth, stumbling and fumbling around spectres of a thousand false moons. To everyone seeing through the illusion we moths do look like complete fools. But know this: their self-assuredness is itself nothing more than illusion.

Is that Marx I smell on you, herr Heidegger?

The parallels that exist between Heidegger and critical theory are striking. One need only compare Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Heidegger claims that we necessarily misconstrue the essence of technology if we look at it as a means to an end or as something people do. While these viewpoints are correct, they are not true - that is they do not grasp the essence of technology. The essence of technology for him is to be sought by following the etymology of the word to its Greek origin techne. Techne meant a way of knowing and through technology for Heidegger the world is revealed in a certain way. Modern technology relates to the world as a Be-stand (quite impossible to translate, some use "standing reserve"), a reserve of energy that can be harboured - in this way the earth becomes the harbinger of coal or oil, while the traditional understanding of the field for the peasant was as something that needed to be nurtured. The danger Heidegger sees is that if this relationship to the world as Bestand is taken to its extreme, humans - who are also part of nature - will relate to each other as mere Bestände, and never be in touch with their essence.

It is quite easy to find empirical equivalents of Heidegger's somewhat perplexing writing. The operation that transforms the world into Bestand is the transformation of use value into trade value. As capital the world can be accumulated and as capital it is used to turn people into Bestände, making it possible to extract more capital from their work. An even more intimate link can be found between Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Adorno and Horkheimer similarly devote their attention to a specific relating to the world - Aufklärung or enlightenment. This stance towards the world is an instrumental one, it aims at dominating nature but the price humanity has had to pay for this control was high: in the process of enlightenment (which is not to be confused with the historical epoch of the same name, the process is broader and only culminates in this epoch) humanity has extended this instrumentalist posture to themselves, domination of other human beings has been inextricably connected to domination of nature. In Heidegger's terms: humans extend the relating as Bestand from nature to themselves.

But let us not be fooled into lumping these quite diverse philosophical traditions together on account of a few common themes. Nietzsche supposedly once wrote that he who sees too many similarities between different philosophical systems should get a better pair of glasses. Let us therefore take a closer look at the differences between these two positions. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that we have come full circle: before the process of enlightenment started, our lives were governed completely by necessity, today they are again. The only change that had happened is that natural necessity has given way to economic one: if caveman was blindly subjected to the arbitrary events in nature he could neither control nor understand, so today we are blindly subjected to the arbitrary events of the economic system we can neither control (and on this point neo-liberals will agree first of all) nor understand. Adorno and Horkheimer turn to a critique of enlightenment only to save it from itself. The ideal remains the same: emancipation, subjecting our lives to our own free will instead of external arbitrary forces. This emancipation is not the telos of history (like Hegel's idea of the self-realization of spirit) nor is it the essence of humanity - whenever it is present it is purely negative, a possibility that was never realized but that can be grasped as such. As Adorno had put it in his answer to Popper: "only to those that can imagine it as different from the one currently existing does society, to use Popper's term, pose a problem; only by what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that does no limit itself, as the majority of its projects does, to projects of public and private administration." What the dialectics of enlightenment is endangering is not any metaphysical essence of humanity, but the never manifested - yet inalienable - right to lead a free life. For Adorno and Horkheimer that, which is, calls upon humanity, but negatively, by revealing itself as what it might become. For Heidegger on the other hand Dasein calls upon humanity affirmatively. As he had put it in Wesen der Technik: "[Gestell] is the way in which the real unveils itself as Bestand. Now we ask: does this unveiling happen somewhere beyond human activiy? No. But it does not happen merely in the human nor essentially through him." Notice the similarity in phrasing between Heidegger and Adorno: they both talk of unveiling (Adorno uses the word ent-hüllen, Heidegger ent-bergen, they both imply that truth is revealed by lifting a barrier that prevents it to be seen), but the crucial difference is that for Adorno truth is revealed through a critical relationship to the world, for Heidegger it is purely affirmative. This is the crucial difference between Adorno's critical theory and Heidegger's metaphysics. The similarities are explained by Adorno in Minima Moralia, 122 - Monnograme: "Not the last of the tasks facing thinking is to put all reactionary arguments against western culture into the service of advancing enlightenment."

Trading badges

In my opinion one of the greatest movie scenes ever shot is the badge scene in Schindler's list. It is right at the end of the movie when Schindler reflects that what he has done was not enough, that he could have saved more people. He has wasted too much money, he kept the car that would have bought 10 people, and the gold NSDAP badge he wears would have bought at least one more life. At first it would seem that the audience is drowned in a tide of sentimentalism. But something happens that blocks the impending catharis; the tide recedes, yet we are still unable to draw a breath. For when the tide recedes, that which repelled it stands revealed: the grotesque. The schock comes not from identification with Schindler and his remorse that more lives could have been bought, but from the realization that life has a price. A puny badge is equivalent to that which should be beyond all worth. If Schindler's trading at first glance seemed heroic, now we are forced to realize the truth of Adorno's claim: "There is no right life in the wrong."

Aura

Aura is a crucial concept of Walter Benjamin's essay The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The core idea of the essay is that technical reproducibility is dissolving the aura of the artwork by loosening its ties to tradition and ritual and is thereby an emancipatory effect. I have already criticized the technological determinism of Benjamin's essay and now it is time to ask whether the critical concept of aura can be salvaged. What is aura according to Benjamin? The essay lacks a clear definition. He starts by discussing "originality". He writes that with technical reproducibly the originality of the work of art, it's "here and now /.../ it's unique existence in the place where it is present," is dissolving. In this process the Aura, the "unique impression of distance, as close it may be" is also lost. Aura was reproduced by ritual, it was part of the traditional use of art, it had cult value.

What are we to think of the enigmatic definition of aura: "unique impression of distance, as close as it may be" It reminds us of Barthes' description of myth as alibi. He presents us with the image of a train ride during which one is looking through the window: as ones own reflection on the glass and the view through the window are never in the same place, so the mythical (second-order) signifier and signified can not be grasped as a whole. The whole (the sign) therefore acquires the characteristic of an infernal distance, and this distance increases with closeness. Closeness is the modus operandi of myth for Barthes: when we are presented with the image of the saluting soldier, French imperialism is right there, presenting itself as the most obvious commonsensical fact. But at the same time it eludes us with its infernal distance, it jumps just out of reach at the moment we reach for it. What Barthes analysed was aura in the age of technological reproducibility.

Benjamin made the mistake of tackling aura from a purely technological viewpoint. Therefore he could not see that aura could flourish even in face of technological reproducibility. Creation of aura is a process that transcends the creation, reproduction and reception of works of art. In romanticism for example discourses of "genius" accompanied art and made sure it is received with awe for the singular abilities of the artist-god. The culture industry creates stars for the same purpose, although it produces for a mass market and is therefore geared towards the highest level of technical reproducibility and the availability of its products is even enhanced by illegal exchange on the internet. Benjamin exhibited a naive trust in the masses and their need to "bring things close" since - as Barthes has shown - an illusion of closeness is the modus operandi of myth.

But Barthes' brilliant analysis of signifying processes also does not bring us closer to an emancipatory theory of art. In a sense Barthes' analysis is even narrower - and perhaps this is the only reason fewer problems can be pointed out - because his analysis is limited to the structure of myth and ignores the whole context of it's creation and reception, it is completely ahistorical. His belief that by analysing myths they will lose their function was just as naive. A theory that is to have emancipatory potential must take into account social conditions of the production and effectiveness of aura. I see two particularly useful starting points for this endeavour. On the one hand are Adorno's writings on the culture industry and his idea that for art to have a critical potential it's production must have some level of autonomy from social praxis. His search was also for a form, but an emancipatory one: he believed that only that form which actively resists incorporation into praxis can have critical potential. By the very act of resistance it is a prophecy of a world in which "happiness is be above praxis". This is what promesse de bonheur means for Adorno. On the other is the idea of an aesthetic public sphere which is capable of critical reflection on works of art while individualised recipients are easy prey for manipulation.

Night of the living dead

This will be a post on post. It seems we are living in a post world, words with the prefix are springing up like daisies on a spring pasture. Notwithstanding the most obvious objection that adding the prefix post does not say anything substantial: we might as well say that philosophy today is post-scholastic and have it done with, say that we are living in the post-palaeolithic and that our art is post-baroque, the real problem is that the prefix does not only reveal an intellectual confusion, but that it is ideological. It's aim is to conceal a reactionary movement in all spheres of modern life. The process is the same everywhere one looks: take a name of a progressive movement (in either art, philosophy, politics or social sciences), strip it of all progressive tendencies and attach the prefix. A good example is post-modernism in art. The historical avant-garde developed means of expression that aimed at a revolutionary impact: no more and no less than a thorough social transformation by the aesthetic realm. In post-modernism these devices have survived, but have become assimilated by the institution art that the historical avant-garde rebelled against. In this process the avant-garde has been reduced to a set of ornaments, set to adorn a resurrected affirmative culture. And as Adorno noted, culture is the mechanism by which class domination is internalized. It, that can exist only by exclusion, has produced a sphere that promised pure humanity to the select few - it should be noted that just as slave labour was constitutive of philosophy in ancient Greece, so exclusion was constitutive for bourgeois culture. That today all are excluded - the manager, who must subordinate not only his body, but his mind to the dictates of economy, most of all - might fool us into thinking that contemporary culture has become inclusive. Quite the opposite is true: exclusion has becom universalized. Where can one today find a homme de lettre, or anybody cultivating aesthetic sensibility as an entry into the realm of a pure humanity? There is no "high" or "low" art any more - constitutive of "high" art of the bourgeois era was that it transcended social praxis by its promesse de bonheur - a counterfactual vision of a better, a harmonious world. This idea (one can find it in almost all aesthetic manifestos of the time, whether it be Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement, Wordsworth's preface to his Lyrical ballads, Schiller's Aesthetic education, or Hölderlin's Hyperion) was of course ideological when it claimed that the harmony of art was realised in society, but at the same time critical, when it showed the gulf between social praxis and happiness. Bourdieu's analysis of art in Distinction implicitly treats it as equivalent to objects of taste (furniture, clothing, cuisine), which might have caused an outrage in the 19. century, but is today statement of fact: art has been reduced to a mere object of taste, critique to a statement of like or dislike on a 5 point Likert type scale - in short, art has become a mere commodity among others. Post-modern art has retained the affirmative character of bourgeois culture, but what it affirms is no longer a realm of pure humanity set into heaven, but social praxis itself - one need only look at the works of Andy Warhol. What has remained is the ideological moment of affirmation, what has been lost is the critical vision of a better world. Avant-garde techniques are used not to beat the path to a free society, but to soothe the guilty conscience of the sublime fallen from grace.

guilt - some reflections on Kafka's Judgement

Punishment is a theme frequently reoccurring in Kafka's works from Prozess to In der Strafkolonie, but nowhere is its nature revealed to us so clearly as in his short story Das Urteil. Here it is bound up in a seemingly paradoxical web of guilt and an arbitrary use of force. The first object of guilt for Georg is a friend that has emigrated to Russia. Georg ponders the situation of the friend who appears as his binary opposite: while Georg is taking over his father's business and making enormous profits, about to get married to a woman from wealthy background, his friend in Russia is living in poverty, sickness and social isolation without hope of ever finding a spouse. At this point we find Georg has kept all his success concealed from his friend and limited their correspondence to banalities. When he decides to report his engagement to the friend and goes to tell his father another object of guilt is revealed: Georg finds his fading father, already a bit senile, sitting in his dark room, his breakfast hardly touched and wearing dirty underwear (dirt is something that Kafka frequently associates with authority), so he starts to think that he has been neglecting his father and resolves to take better care of him. When he puts the father to bed, the story takes an abrupt turn. Just when the father seems completely passivized, he rises from his bed with fierce force:

»Nein!« rief der Vater, daß die Antwort an die Frage stieß, warf die Decke zurück mit einer Kraft, daß sie einen Augenblick im Fluge sich ganz entfaltete, und stand aufrecht im Bett. Nur eine Hand hielt er leicht an den Plafond. »Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte Kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich.

The usual situation of succession has been turned on its head: the fading father that is to be succeeded by his son - one might interpret the putting to bed as a symbol of burrial, especially since the father rejects the act with the words: "you wanted to cover me /.../ but I am not yet covered" - suddenly rises while the son fades. The seemingly powerless father becomes ever more energetic as his accusations accumulate, while his son is fading at the same pace. The energies of father and son are bound in a zero-sum game. The father reveals that he has been the informant of the friend and accuses Georg of betrayal. Another point of his accusation is the most paradoxical one, at one point it seems that the very fact of succession (which the father acknowledged as a fact of nature earlier in his seemingly passivized state) is a sin against the father:

Und mein Sohn ging im Jubel durch die Welt, schloß Geschäfte ab, die ich vorbereitet hatte, überpurzelte sich vor Vergnügen und ging vor seinem Vater mit dem verschlossenen Gesicht eines Ehrenmannes davon!

The verdict the father delivers at the end of his accusations is damning - death by drowning:

Und lauter: »Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch! – Und darum wisse: Ich verurteile dich jetzt zum Tode des Ertrinkens!«

Georg rushes out of the room to fulfill his sentence - he runs to a busy bridge and throws himself into the water, his last words being: "Liebe Eltern, ich habe euch doch immer geliebt"

The first question that merits an answer is what is the nature of the fathers' authority. The father has no means to force Georg to fulfill the verdict, certainly he can not use physical force, the most likely explanation seems that there is an agreement on guilt between them - the guilt Georg felt weekly when composing the letter to his friend and one that the father attached his judgement to. Yet when we judge this by conventional moral codes there is no real cause for guilt, rather for compassion: nothing in the story suggests that the friends miserable state is Georg's fault. The other sin, the sin of succession, is likewise not one of his own, if anything it is a sin of the father. The first sin, the one of doing well, is a consequence of Georg succeeding his father in business - again it seems the sin is on the side of the father. The only moral transgression Georg is objectively guilty of is his existence, for which the father acts at once as the actual perpetrator, judge and jury. The moment the father mounts the accusation is at the point when Georg is about to enter maturity (financial independence, marriage) and at which point he has become distinguishable from his heritage - hence only now the judgement can be spoken by the father without being spoken against himself. The judgement is a representative one - in it the son takes the role of the sacrificial animal, being slaughtered in place of the father.

The notion of guilt Kafka portrays is one that is perfectly in accord with the one Walter Benjamin attributes to capitalism in Capitalism as religion: "A situation that is so inextricable creates guilt." Benjamin's formulation is at least as puzzling as Kafka's. How can something that is inextricable - hence beyond responsibility of any and all involved actors - produce guilt, which feeds on responsibility. But this paradoxical situation is one that all Kafka's characters have to deal with when they face the law, be it Georg, Joseph K. or the man from the countryside. As Benjamin elucidates: "This cult [of capitalism] is thirdly culpabilizing. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a religion that does not atone but produces guilt. In so doing, this system of religion stands in the wake of an enormous movement. An enormously guilty conscience, which does not know how to atone, seizes on the cult, in order not to atone for its guilt but to make it universal, hammering it into consciousness until finally and above all God himself is included in this guilt, so as finally to interest him in atonement." This is exactly the world Kafka's story paints: a world in which individual actions are sundered from the moral framework, from guilt and atonement, and the law does not sanction individual actions but sanctions in spite of them. Guilt is something that has become universal, one is implied in it merely by being. And Kafka makes it absolutely clear that death is not a refuge from guilt. When Joseph K. dies he feels as if shame - but why should he feel ashamed, he always felt he was guilty of no crime - was to outlive him. Similarly the executioner in Strafkolonie is refused a cathartic death because of a malfunction in the machine. His failure is double: firstly he feels that he will not be able to uphold the commandement "be just!" and secondly he is refused to even justly punish himself for failing justice.

Das Urteil is a judgement on a world in which being is a sin. In the purest form it achieves what Brecht presumptuously ascribed to his epic theatre - it poses a moral problem in such a way that it cannot be interpreted away, it can not be reconciled by pure reasoning. It calls for action: only through action can the paradoxical strands of the story be woven into a whole, only social change can achieve what literary criticism must fail to do. The judgement Kafka here speaks is on the world that has made coldness its driving force - as Hannah Arendt noted, evil is banal, and as Adorno rephrased: everything that is banal is evil. We see Georg at the point of awakening from his moral solipsism and that is what the father means by saying that in being an innocent child Georg was an infernal human:

Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!

Georg was guilty of succession, he was guilty of perpetuating the social injustice and living in a moral vacuum - "bisher wußtest du nur von dir" - you knew of nothing but yourself! You have made the bourgeois principle of indifference your own and never questioned it! The world Kafka presents us is one where there is no innocence, or rather: where the greatest innocence is at once the greatest sin. A world in which a rupture has sprung up between success and achievement, a world that has reached its grotesque peak in the form of concentration camps where the only reason one survived was because someone else died. As Brecht had put it in To those who come after us:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance, I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost)

affirmative culture

I have already proposed the idea that art can be approached through the framework Marx had developed for the critique of ideology. I argued that role playing games were revealing a specific subjectivity of the contemporary individual and through analysis of this subjectivity a critique of society can be practised. The problem is that this critique of ideology is a critical destruction: for Marx religion was to be destroyed by critique so that it would not be able to comfort people suffering under the given social circumstances and with the abscence of consolation the need for change will rise.

Now I would like to play with another, more affirmative idea of criticism. I will start from Adornos premise that art had a dormant emancipatory potential, a promesse de bonheur. He believed that the harmony and beauty of bourgeois art held a dark mirror to society in which its faults were revealed and a vision of a better world was made possible. In contemporary society for him this was no longer possible - in a world that continually reproduces mass murder, torture and terror the promise of harmony has lost all credibility. Therefore he believed that contemporary culture could only be negative, not affirmative: it could only show society as untrue and broken, but no more show the promise of paradise society could potentially be. Culture industry on the other hand functioned by assimilation to the status quo, to the broken individual such as he has become under the untrue society and even dared to justify this with a recourse to democracy (people are buying, ergo: we are giving them what they want). The question is whether we can find a middle path between this total rejection of the world and complete assimilation to it.

The key is an aesthetic public sphere. The idea has been neglected in favour of the political one, but in Structural transformations Habermas assigned a very important role to a literary public sphere, which was crucial to the formation of a bourgeois public in three ways: 1) it was instrumental in the formation of the fora of the political public sphere like salons; 2) in it the bourgeoisie honed their debating skills; 3) through aesthetic exchange the bourgeoisie formed a specific subjectivity that was the stepping stone for their political activity; The idea I want to defend is that only through the workings of an aesthetic public sphere can art redeem its emancipatory potential. If is to do so it must avoid two pitfalls: assimilation to the existing state of society that makes art perform an ideological function, and a complete isolation from society that while preserving the emancipatory potential, does nothing to realize it. If art is to be a critical force it must go beyond the understanding of it's audience, if it is to have some transformatory potential, it must challenge, it must perturb, it must violate. It is naive to expect that this challenge can be faced by isolated individuals, only by critical reflection on art in a public sphere will they be able to go beyond their current subjectivity.

Philosophy of despair

I believe two anecdotes are illuminating the nature of critical theory particularly well. One is supposed to have happened in California still during the war. At a party Adorno presented the idea that his philosophy was a message in a bottle. The question what the content of the message was was answered by Fritz Eisler in broad Viennese accent: "Mir is' soooo mies!" (I feel sooo bad)

Another is reported by Benjamin in his Kafka essay: In a conversation Kafka had with Brod he had the idea that we are all suicidal, nihilistic thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as the evil demiurge and creation as his sin, which Kafka denied vehemently:"No, nothing like that, we are just the result of a mood, a bad day." "Then there is still hope." Brod concluded from this, at which moment a broad smile crept across Kafkas face:"Hope? Of course! Endless hope, just not for us!"

These two anecdotes reveal a stance towards the world that John Berger has called stance of undefeated despair. Despair shines thorough both anecdotes like a black dawn, a sense that in any conceivable way all is lost. This sense of despair is coupled with an almost boundless hope, a hope for a better world we will never see. That is why Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their philosophy as a sort of time-capsule: it would preserve the emancipatory potential of philophy for a future time, when it would be possible to redeem this emancipatory promise. Like bacteria that form a protective coating when the environment is hostile, so culture was to isolate itself from the social environment, because the world in which Ausschwitz happened for Adorno held no possibility of realizing the emancipatory potential of bourgeois culture. Curiously enough this idea reveals a trace of affirmative fatalims - a belief that things will in and of themselves turn towards the slightly better, a trace of metaphysics that Adorno despised so much.

Elective affinities

Andy Warhol and Leni Riefenstahl. Seemingly the hypothesis of an elective affinity between these two artists is bizarre. Once we search deeper the very adverse is revealed. I was having a discussion with a friend on the merits of Warhol and he claimed that Warhol's achievement was taking banal or ugly, even terrifying (electric chairs for example) objects and making them seem so beautiful that people actually wanted to hang them on their walls. That is the moment Leni Riefenstahl came to my mind: what was her greatest achievent but making the horrors of Nazism seem so beautiful that - if possible - people would be nailing them on their walls. This was only part of the phenomenon Walter Benjamin called aesthetization of politics, a most radical antidemocratic force. Leni Riefenstahl took the driving principle of Nazism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made and aesthetic principle of it: her films have perfect symmetry, rigid rhythm, nothing idiosyncratic or non-identical (like the Jew) is allowed to enter, the people are all so similar that it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other - all except for the führer, who is allowed his idiosyncrasy only because he encompasses the whole. Warhol took the driving principle of capitalism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made an aesthetic principle of it: his paintings aestheticize the workings of a mass society in which all is reduced to economic functions, in which all is tradeable, in which all is expendable and hence worthless. Just like Nazism, capiatlism had made humans only cogs in the mechanisms of the whole and just like Leni Rifenstahl Andy Warhol has functioned as an ideologue for this process.

Barroco by Tomaž Pandur

The sublime with a guilty conscience.

How Duchamp killed the artist

One of the most controversial instances - "work" would hardly be applicable here - of art remains Duchamp's Fountain. It is surely idiosyncratic for a number of reasons. Adorno wrote about the tension between artefactuality and transcendentality that is present in every work of art and the Fountain is special because it implodes this tension. In history we can find works of art that attempted to hide their artefactuality, for example contemporary productions of the culture industry, or romanticist art that sought to hide the process of production with recourse to ideas of "inspiration" and "genius". The historical avant-garde flaunted artefactuality openly, the institution of art became a focus of reflection, but still the tension persisted, the transcendental character was not eliminated. Duchamp's Fountain goes beyond that, the artefact (an urinal) is not a signifier, but a gesture. The difference is that a signifier points to something in a certain aspect, while a gesture points to it in its totality and idiosyncrasy. If I referr to a "table" I point to the aspect of this object that it shares with all other objects of the same name and by virtue of which they are equivalent. A gesture points to the very specific object with all its idiosyncrasies. The Fountain points to the process of it's own creation as an instance of art, at the space in which an urinal becomes the Fountain. The actual artefact is merely pointing to the process of it's creation, artefactuality taken to it's extreme becomes transcendence. It is the avant-garde in it's purest form, ideal type become flesh. It exhibits unbreakable resistance to the institution of art, in fact the strength of resistance increases proportionally to the force of incorporation. The greatest example are the "replicas" that were made of the urinal and which are displayed as replicas of the Fountain. In one sense this is a vain attempt since the content of the Fountain is not the artefact but the process of its initiation into a work of art and that can not be replicated. In another the replicas are true children of the Fountain - they no longer point to the process of initiation but to the resistance of the institution towards such reflexivity and its vain attempts of suppressing it. Just like the father in Kafka's Judgement the Fountain rises with fierce force just when the replica thought it passivized (I could not find a translation and am not confident enough to attempt one myself, therefore I must apologize to the reader for giving the quote only in german) :

Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich!

Those familiar with the story will know that the father is in no way an emancipatory force, he is a fierce tyrant. It seems we must submit the Fountain to closer scrutiny. It rebels against the institution art and brings the artefactuality of the work of art to the fore, this is its anti-mythical impulse that should be praised, but in the end it turns out to be the mouthpiece against a bad world in the name of one even worse. It rebels against the fact that in myth the artefactual nature of the work of art is concealed (in contemporary movies by the culture industry all aspects of craftsmanship are concealed) but in so doing it sacrifices the subject. Bourgeois aesthetics thought of the artist as a singular genius and thus concealed the social circumstances of the production of art. Duchamp dispenses with this hypocrisy by dispensing with the artist; there is no place for the artists in The fountain, he creates nothing, only selects. The artist becomes nothing more than an agent of the death drive, the need for complete assimilation with the surrounding, indeed the radicalised version of the dialectic of enlightenment. The seemingly radical work is revealed to be nothing more than a radicalised version of the status quo.

Throw your motherfuckin fingers in the air and wave them motehrfuckers like you just don't care

Avid Hip-hop fans will have recognized Snoop - at the time still Doggy - Dogg's take on stock phrase of old school hip-hop. They will also recall that a stock of phrases that was constantly being reused and recombined was a crucial characteristic of old school hip- hop, a phenomena that survived well into the 90s: for example Jay-z's début album Reasonable doubt (released in 1996) features a lot of quotes from older hip-hop songs. For example 22 twos refers to Can I kick it by A tribe called quest, Dead presidents refers to one of the greatest verses in the history of poetry (from Nas' The world is yours):

I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me

Just by the way: I use this verse to explain Habermas to my students (the two types of political representation characteristic for critical and manipulative publicity). Then there is a quote from Snoop dogg's Murder was the case from Doggystyle in the track D'evils, then there is some quoting of LL Cool J, ODB, and very prominently also Scarface. This is the interesting bit: When Nas recorded The world is yours the chorus was an allusion to the same movie (Tony Montana is inspired by an advertisement that reads "The world is yours" and has a globe made for his house featuring the same slogan) and in the music video a few scenes are taken over from Scarface. The fact that one moment we see Nas in the bathtub scene from the movie and the next moment a child watching this same scene on television shows us that montage here is used reflexively in the tradition of the historical avant-garde.

Intertextuality in hip-hop is not limited only to text, it is also a key stylistic element of the music. The break came with a technological innovation - namely sampling - towards the end of the 80s that enabled DJ's to cut a short part of another song (called a sample), loop it and use it in their music. This can be done very lavishly (like is the case with kitchsy MTV hip-hop of today) or minimalistically, a great example of the latter approach is Heute Nacht by the german rapper Torch:



Here montage is clearly audible, samples are not even looped, but follow one another successively.

To recapitulate: stylistic characteristics of Hip-hop involve use of a stock of material (phrases, samples from music), which are edited (an author was expected to add something innovative to the stock phrase to rise above mediocrity, today music samples are often digitally edited) and through the principle of montage composed into a new whole.

All that has been said has implications for the analysis of the impact of digital editing and distribution techniques (what is sometimes referred to as new media) on art. Walter Benjamin in his essay The work of art in the age of it's technical reproducibility (the translator mistakenly wrote "in the age of technical reproduction" - compare a recent book by Weber on Benjamin's abilities for a comprehensive explanation why the suffix -ibility matters) proposes that we must analyse the impact of new media on art with a view to tendencies in artistic circles that try to achieve with old technology what only the new one makes fully possible. If Benjamin had followed this suggestion himself more closely he would have not made himself vulnerable to justified accusations of technological determinism (among others by Adorno in their correspondence) and been proven wrong by the culture industry which reproduces aura effortlessly by marketing techniques such as branding even in an era of advanced technical reproducibility. Another major problem with Benjamin's essay is that it lumps all forms of art together under the heading of "the work of art"; technical reproducibility of written text was possible since Gutenberg as every technique of mass reproduction like radio, photography and cinema has a different history - it simply can not be justified to treat all art as homogeneous when talking about technical reproducibility of artefacts.

Hip-hop needed digital technology to fully realize the potential that lay dormant. Crucial stylistic elements are echoed in the logic of digital media: since digital media break up content into bits of data, these bits can easily be separated, filters can be used on them and they can be recombined into new units (the famous copy-paste operation familiar to all computer users). It is not true that this was not possible before, just that it was much harder to say apply a filter to analogue media (film sometimes had to be hand-edited one frame at a time, with music the absence of frames made even this luxury unattainable). This has lead to a brief efflorescence of hip-hop music during what is referred to as it's renaissance (roughly '89 to '91) and continued throughout the first part of the 90s; after 96 it stared to fall to pieces because the workings of the culture industry finally gained complete control of production. The main stylistic change has been that montage is no longer used as a reflexive technique in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, but as a latent mode of construction: just as with modern movies that use digital editing, modern hip-hop presents a shiny seamless façade (Roland Barthes once noted that the seamless façade of the Citroën DS was the essence of its mythical character), the affirmative nature of bourgeois culture walks again devoid of its soul, a limp and lifeless zombie, polished to a shine by the workings of the culture industry. If, as Adorno noted, in every artwork there is a vibration between its nature as a product and as something transcendental, the culture industry forcefully destroys this vibration by hiding the nature of the product and trying for complete transcendentality. And the illusion of complete transcendentality is, as it always was, ideological; it takes the form of myth as analysed by Barthes: a perpetual alibi in the service of the status quo.

This shows that a broader view on technology is needed - Benjamin's problem was that he treated technology too narrowly. Technology are not just the tools we use, it is also social organization of labour and the production and reproduction of systematic applicable knowledge (techne in greek). Artefacts do not have a life of their own outside of this tripartite constellation, and such a broader view can shed some light on the question why "technological reproducibility" has not led to the emancipation Benjamin had hoped for.