No More Learning

The diagnostic power of Novalis’ formulations is only today becoming apparent to us in its full scope. Meanwhile, we now know (without the help of even a hint of romantic irony) what the self manages to do in “its” machine, even if this machine is not exactly a self-grinding mill. Modern society has realized at least one of its utopian plans, namely that of total automobilization – the state in which every self that is of age moves on its own at the wheel of its self-moving machine. It is because the modern self cannot be thought of at all without the notion of its movement that the I and the automobile belong together in a metaphysical way, like the body and soul of one and the same unit of motion. The automobile is the technological double of the principally active transcendental subject.
That is why the automobile is the sanctum of modernity; it is the cultish center of a kinetic world religion; it is the sacrament on wheels that lets us take part in something that moves faster than we do. A person who drives a car gets closer to the numinous and feels how their small self expands to a higher self that makes the total world of highways into a home for us and makes us aware that we are called to something more than a half-animal pedestrian life.
From an auto-motorist view, we lived in Messianic time for a little while, in the fulfilled time where two-cycle engine vehicles parked peacefully next to twelve-cylinder vehicles – the messiah ruled with low emissions in his kingdom; with electronic fuel injection and an
10 The Modern Age as Mobilization
anti-locking system, with a controlled catalyst and turbo charger, he brought his subjects into heavenly motion. But not all contem- poraries were convinced that this last kingdom of automobiles was also a paradise on earth. The devil had a part to play and made sure to occasionally turn general self-movement into general immobility. In such moments it becomes clear – even if no one wants to admit it to themselves – that we have long been exiled from the paradise of modernity and will have to learn the post-modern Stop-and-Go by the sweat of our brow from now on. The large-scale traffic jams on the summer highways of Central Europe (and the legendary power outages in New York that can make us feel nostalgic) are thus phenomena of historico-philosophical importance and even have a religio-historical significance. It is through them that a piece of false modernity fails and in them that we encounter the end of an illusion – they are the kinetic Good Friday when all hope for redemption through acceleration becomes lost. On those scorching afternoons in the funnel of Lyon, in the Rhine valley hell near Cologne, or wedged in at Irschenberg, Europe’s longest parking lot, where 1. 5 miles of unmoving hot steel stretches out in either direction, dark historico-philosophical insights rise up like exhaust fumes and people begin to speak in tongues, uttering something critical about contemporary culture; obituaries of modernity waft from the side windows and, regardless of their educational level, those trapped in their vehicles begin to suspect that it cannot go on like this for much longer. Another “era” looms on the horizon. Even those who have never heard the term “post-modernity” are already familiar with what it entails on those afternoons spent in traffic. And in fact, this can be reformulated in terms of cultural theory: wherever unleashed self-movements form congestions or vortices, they generate the beginnings of an experience where the modern active turns into the post-modern passive.
What can we gain from these flickering observations that could lead to a serious theory of the present? They accomplish enough for what is to follow if they help build up suggestions that generate the next step forward. That step is to openly appoint the term “mobili- zation” as the core expression to explain and describe the basic process of modernity. Without hasty consideration of the inevitable horror at such a choice of concept and its inherent consequences, it is first a matter of strengthening the evidence that modernizations always show the character of mobilizations in a kinetic way. Of course, one could proceed inductively and discreetly with so-called “infantry” methods, collecting countless peripheral descriptions of the current status-lapsus-quo of the processes in the bio- and noosphere in a slow accumulation of evidence: the number of
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revenue billionaires is multiplying; the butterflies of our childhoods are no longer there; the trajectories of long-distance tourism and arms budgets are showing a significant upward trend; the popula- tions in modernizing countries are exploding while those in already modernized countries are stagnant; the holes in the ozone layer above the poles are aggressively widening; sneaker sales are flour- ishing while those of surf gear are sinking; trees in low mountain ranges are becoming discolored and forming brush-like crowns; South African fruit can presently be found at Bavarian Sunday markets; the air time of Soviet nuclear bullets is 120 seconds from the Urals to Bad Godesberg, and so on. But the endless number of such statements only makes sense if they find a common denomi- nator in the term “mobilization,” which makes an essential assertion about several separate processes: the essence of what is happening today are proceedings of mobilization. The very diversity of varied interpretations of modernity is what forms it according to a kinetic model since that model can be identified as that of a mobilization.
It is very right to take offense at the military connotations of the term at first. Mobilization is a category belonging to a world of wars – it encompasses the critical processes by which dormant combat potentials are brought to readiness for action. The aversion towards the concept referred to by the term, and even more so the disgust towards the actual procedure, must not make us blind to the fact that the kinetic foundational model of this process – as self-actualization for deployment – is by no means specific only to the military but rather expresses the foundational principle of modern self-moving enterprises as a whole. The aesthetic shudder as a response to the word could easily seduce us to abandon the only term that makes the dynamic model of modernization nameable. We are unable to avoid thinking of certain notorious works by Ernst Jünger in this context, who famously already in the early 1930s dislodged the phenomenon of mobilization from its military-specific meaning in order to apply it to the process of modern society as a whole. For half a century now these state- ments have been lying on the trash heap of intellectual history – unused, scandal-ridden, unacceptable, but above all untested, hated rather than refuted, unchosen rather than outdated. There is a reason for the general reservations against Jünger’s reflec- tions, which have been suspected of being fascist. Whoever would adopt his cold, evil optic for an analysis of late modern processes even on a trial basis risks experiencing a historico-philosophical Damascus. Far beyond Jünger’s intentions, the category of mobili- zation can liberate insights that are not compatible with the sleep of the just in the project of modernity. The ominous formula of
12 The Modern Age as Mobilization
“total mobilization” prepares the still scandalous and, yes, even almost unbearable realization that a political-kinetic fundamental process exists in the modern world whose tendency is to de facto neutralize the morally important difference between work and war and increasingly override the once existing distinction between rest position and deployment. This is precisely the uncanny process of mobilization – to bring everything considered a power reserve to the “front” and drive any potential forward towards realization. Jünger is that evil man whom we will always quote from a great distance – though of course never without respect for his perceptual capacity;7 but his exercises generated a previously unobtained definition of modern technology as the “mobilization of the planet via the figure of the worker. ” Of course, the latter does not describe the Marxist subject of history, the proletariat, but rather the planetary subject of mobilization, trembling from over-fitness, the pain-hardened, matter-of-fact high-performance type in his dedicated effort to the self-exalting, readying, forward- and perhaps future-looking action system (whether we call it a company, class, people, nation, bloc, or country is already irrelevant on this level of action).
If we now want to undertake a new attempt under very different constellations to make the term “mobilization” productive for a new theory of modernity (of course, very differently from Jünger, the order of merit wearer), it will only be promising insofar as we accept the discomfort with the term and place it in the service of a critical perspective. This term will keep alive the memory of the violent core of the major scientific, military, and industrial processes, especially at a time when they are entering a smart phase where violence is becoming informational, cool, procedural, and analgesic. (What is the key phrase of the new phase again? Transfer from heavy industry to fast information? Transition from working society to learning society? The first would probably give off a little soot, the second will be as clean as the toilets in a Swiss motorway rest stop. ) Precisely because the term “mobilization” (owing to the uncanny, even disastrous elements in its meaning) bristles against a total positivism (Jünger’s nerves-of-steel attempt in this direction cannot be repeated), it is more appropriate than any other to describe a “civilizing” mechanism that exploits all modern growth of skill, knowledge, mobility, precision, and effectiveness for processes of crowding out and killing off, for upgrades, expan- sions, self-authorization, and breaches of context. Mobilization as an autogenous fundamental process of modernity leads to the provision of ever-increasing movement potentials for position holding, which precisely by way of the conditions and effects of this deployment make themselves impossible as positions and drift into
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the untenable. It is here that the broad field of kinetic paradoxes opens up for an alternate critique of modernity. Thus, social critique becomes a critique of false mobility.
If, after the debacle of Marxism and the ambiguous fading away of the Frankfurt Schools, there can still be a third version of critical theory of a sophisticated kind, then it is probably only in the form of a critical theory of movement. If it is to be accurate, its therapeutic criteria would consist of the difference between correct movement and false mobilization. Its claim to truth would rest on the recognition that a kinetic spectrum exists that reaches from physiology all the way to politics. A critical theory of mobilization would bridge the gap between the thought process and the actual event on the level of basic terms – there would no longer be any “outside” thinking; the theorist would have to ask herself at every sentence whether what she is doing increases the offering to the idol of mobilization or distinctly subtracts from it. A critical theory can after all only be such, regardless of what its critical semantics convey, if it abandons its kinetic complicity with the movement of the world process into the worst of all possible directions. Thus it has to remain open if such a “third” critical theory can still exist not merely in name but in its full sense. If possible, it would put itself into effect at its outset as a pre-school of demobilization. Only as a still theory of movement, as a quiet theory of a loud mobilization, can a critique of modernity still differ from that which it critiques – all else is a rational cosmetics of participation, a conscious or unconscious nudging forward of already moving trains, a mimesis of the basic process within the process of reflection.
But it is impossible for such a “quiet” critique to generate its own beginning, its own jump out of the urge to act differently. The fact that it cannot do so is one of the riddles that are concealed in the ubiquitous post-modernist babble. Because whatever wishes to come after modernity would have to have gone through such a critique and have brought it to an end – no human being can claim that this is indeed the case with him in any significant way. All that can be said is that we have long begun to gain experience with the so-called “post-modern” passive voice and that it is not a very large step to admitting that we have, above all prospectively, landed on the suffering side of modernity. In this respect, the formula rings true: the more modern, the more post-modern. This is of great importance for the style of a “third” or post-modern critical theory, because in order to understand its own subject, it must have entered the modern scuffle without reservations – otherwise it would never arrive on the flip-side of things. But how this theory will find its way to something truly other from out of the modern Tempo-drome,
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that is something it will first have to explain – no, demonstrate – to us. The question of the possibility of an actually different “third” critical theory thus boils down to the classic riddle of how a quiet in the eye of the storm is possible for beings so thoroughly condemned to action.
One can now understand what it is exactly that the reminder of movement brings us – we get closer to an epistemological abyss where a theory without wisdom is no longer useful even as a theory. Should kinetics of all things become a school of serenity? We can hardly imagine what physicists and metaphysicists would have to say to that. Whatever their objections may be, this is where our entry into the investigation on the passive side of strong self-mobilizations ought to begin – an investigation into the process and progress of that which we have set in motion to speed over and past us. We ask, taking into account what happened, what it was that occurred so differently from what we planned. It turned out so very differently than expected, but what else could we have expected?
Sketches towards an Outline of a Critique of Political Kinetics
Why another critical theory of modernity? And why precisely now, at a time when most people have taken their lives beyond the reach of theories? And if there has to be a bare minimum of intellectual distance to the so-called “status quo,” why not go with Marxism as usual? Why no recourse to the ethical potential of humanity? Why not poetry steeped in ruin at the Wailing Wall of facts? Or at least a fashionable skepticism towards the neoliberal swing of things? No, for the reason that Marxism, appeals to ethics, poetry, and skepticism of this kind are not in line with what is necessary and possible for critique because they themselves function at best as agents of impotent mobilizations and yet do not contribute enough to a fundamental understanding of mobilization events.
The fate of the Marxist social critique exemplifies this more than any other. In their time, Marx and his successors were of the partially justified opinion that they made the causes of modern radical changes in the world transparent with their analysis of capital flow. Additionally, they formulated a revolutionary ethics that saw the strategic core of its “praxis” in the political control over capital; from there, humanity’s emancipation was rigorously to be steered towards a life in general wealth and limitless productivity. Thus, the fathers of socialism openly placed their bets on an ethics of productive mobilization with a humanistic intent. Admittedly, they did not suspect that only one aspect of their construction
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would be rather inadvertently realized, namely that regulatory instances must indeed be incorporated within or placed counter to capitalist processes if one is to prevent the worst for all of humanity. In more modern terms: without a certain, shall we say, “political” cybernetics of capital, the “host organism” that is earth, along with all its historic guests, is at the mercy of devastation. This cyber- netics, should it ever come into play, stems in the long term less from socializations (since these alone lead to the effect of “more of the same, only worse”) than from a consequent ecological curbing of production motives and the demilitarization of profits for the benefit of festive overspending in a general, mutual patronage. 8
In its more assertive days, the old socialist Left tried to morally push its demand for political control over the processes of capital with the formula “socialism or barbarism” to the decision point. This is the point where its revolutionary politics fails when countered with actual historical findings, and the concept of world processes as mere effects of capital flows becomes consequently doubtful. Considering the results so far, very little can be found between barbarism and actual existing socialism to suggest mutual exclusion – however, there is a broad field of instances where they are synon- ymous. Now, it is a legitimate supposition that real socialisms not only had historic bad luck but also were unable to achieve anything better in a world full of enemies. Their mishap, however, is also caused by their fateful commitment to an inadequate concept of the modern kinetics of world change via Marxist analysis. Of course, it is not without reason that Marx saw his reconstruction of modern labor relations in capitalism as already having uncovered the general law of movement of modern class societies. Whatever it is that moves in these societies on a political, cultural, psychological, and ideological level, it can be, according to him, nothing more than a secondary movement that is determined in the last instance by the economic primary movement. This primary movement has exhibited a special legality since the eighteenth century, the age of the industrial revolution: since people’s actions have been largely understood as “material reproductions of their lives” in the capital process, a categorically new phenomenon has emerged that no other age has had to contend with – the phenomenon of “work as such,” the category of “work sans phrase. ” Marx sees this as the capture of human activities in the material life-process through the value creation of capital. The industrial proletariat gives the category of work sans phrase its social shape. But human activity only becomes “work as such” if it belongs to a form of production which in its very essence continually produces further possibilities of production. Marx explains this extraordinary phenomenon by
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linking the anthropological motive of self-production both to the economic motive of profit (i. e. investment return) and to the agonal motive of competition. An explosive mixture of motives emerges from the alliance between self-preserving self-sufficiency, pursuit of profit, and competition that lends the modernizing movement its impetus. The decisive mechanism in this new arrangement is indeed the suspected “self-exploitation of value” – that work of alchemy which organizes an activity in such a way that its result consists of the increase in ability to carry out the activity. Wherever the modern “work sans phrase” sets the rhythm, not only is a given form of life reproduced “economically” (in other words, in terms of home or palace economics), but also an increase in productivity becomes part of the primary product of production. This is precisely in accordance with the kinetic formula of mobilization. The self- exploitation of value as production of productivity is one of the many ways in which the modern mobilization loop begins to turn into movement that leads to more movement. Marx was right to describe capital which circulates around its own self-propagation as a demiurgic processing magnitude that forces the concrete lifelines of workers to march to its abstract rhythm for the sake of its self- sustaining self-propagation. But he gives far too little attention to the kinetic foundational process of modernity as the general movement towards more movement. Marx attributes the fact that “in modern times” everything moves further, faster, and more inten- sively to the dynamics of capitalist modes of production and uses confusing schemas of primary and secondary movement (i. e. base and superstructure) to interpret it as a problem that is sui generis. In reality, the capital process would never have begun if it had not been sustained by independent, parallel, and preceding structures of self-actualization and self-intensification. It is no coincidence that Marxist interpreters of early modern emerging movements continue to be perplexed by the riddle of “primitive accumulation. ” This perplexity necessarily remains as long as we insist on under- standing the accumulation process in economic terms. In actual fact, the problem of accumulation leads to the core of modern kinetics, which is in turn – we’ve already said it – inseparable from the secret of subjectivity. We find more promising clues if we reject the question of primitive accumulation of capital and turn our attention to that of primitive accumulation of subjectivity – always provided that we are right to see it as not just a “metaphysical” phenomenon (which it also is in a certain sense) and not address it merely as the seat of intelligible and creative capacity, but above all to recognize the agency of self-movement towards movement in it, which is as puzzling as it is world-shaking. We would then be
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dealing with the primitive accumulation of a “kinetic energy” which – always mediated by subjective initiatives – repels itself from the world as first nature, turning it into pure raw material, energy source and substrate, which is then used by the kinetic energy to construct a New World from mobile artifacts on top of it. (In chapter 3, we will identify the nature of this kinetic subjectivity and connect it to the tension between a birth through a mother and a self-birth through one’s own efforts. )
Wherever the modern kinetic model of success (movement towards increased mobility) begins to operate within a sector of activity, wayward contributions to the great dawn of the New World are created; a dawn where Europe is split off from its archaic, antiquated, and pre-modern way of being, followed by vast parts of the rest of the world. It is likely that classical Greece acted as a prelude to it: in sophistry, we can see the first signs of the devel- opment of intelligence into sport and in the Olympic games, a cult-like intensification of physical exercise. After that, the kinetic genie in a bottle seems to have been corked for a millennium and a half; it is only underground that the energies continued to rumble, having been exhausted in tribal feuds, migrations of peoples, Hunnish wars, Saxon slaughters, Germanic missions, politics of the first Reich, agriculture, livestock farming, monastic immersion, hermitage, simple reproduction. Then: the great initial spark. It seems to begin in the monasteries of the high Middle Ages, where the true factories of primitive accumulation of subjectivity are to be found. What is deployed here in the religious exercises of ascetic self-intensification – autogenic movement to increase movement, concentrating on concentration, immersing oneself in immersion, praying for work, working at being able to pray – has its analog in the various sectoral movements towards increasing self-powering mobility; in the accumulation of scientific knowledge which can only retain its status as valid knowledge if it is organized as research, that is, cognitive mobilization; in the self-exaltation of modern territorial states which soon reveal themselves to be transport states and arm themselves as nation states; in the dynamic of military mobilization, which has always been an arms race, that is, a battle for ballistic and kinetic advantages; in the self-dramatization of fit bodies that surrender to the ecstasy of increased movement almost as if entering a cult; in the self-erotization of sexual subjects who practice arousing their ability to be aroused; in the self-deification of the individual as artist, who revolves around the creation of their own creativity in a constant, expressive mobilization. In all of these fields and sectors of human mobility, self-mobilizations are being played out that span over several centuries, and the economic process
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is certainly their most willing medium, most unilateral driving force, and most versatile accomplice; in it, movement towards more movement pushes through industrial and monetary processes as well with an irresistibility that is sui generis. But the Marxian “value” that generates additional value per capitalization is in reality more a kinetic than an economic phenomenon; its parameter is the power to move, and its content, in turn, tantamount to being able to move.
A view of mobilization as a fundamental process of modernity has only recently been coming to light, not because anyone claims to be more insightful than the great social theorists of previous centuries but because the “thing itself ” has appeared on the stage of recognizability for the naked eye to behold. It is only for us, in view of the late modern effects of acceleration, that the phenomenon of pure mobility has become real and conceivable. In analogy to Marx’s vision of the Fundamentals, a categorically novel phenomenon seems to appear for the diagnosis of the late twentieth century: “mobility as such,” “self-movement sans phrase. ” This postulates not only a third industrial revolution, with all that has been done to the reality of modern life by electronics, nuclear technology, and computer science, but also modern politics with its arms races, mass movements, and initiatives from above and below; it also assumes modern tourism and its conception of the world as service counter and landing strip; the cable-equipped screens, too, and the new disarray of love with its urban theater of separation, night clubs, computer games, and consoles in children’s rooms; jogging in the park and athletic cults in the stadiums, disposable bottles, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Captured Music. . . It is only once the self-movement sans phrase has directly forced its way into everyone’s reality of life as a real category that the dynamic motif of a society made up of self-mobilizing subjects can be designated as such in the tone of calm critique without the diagnostician having to rise to the status of a prophet. And it is only recently that we have been forced to perceive in philosophical hindsight as well that Marx and Nietzsche said the same thing – the will to self-appropriating self-production and the will to power (as an initiative to enforce an interpretation of the world) are two alternate formulations of the same creative large-scale attack of the acting spirit on “matter,” of the same kinetic nihilism that apprehends what exists as source of energy and construction site, nothing else.
We can differentiate three basic tendencies or categories of the modern fundamental process of mobilization, which has in the meantime absorbed the entire way of the world. The great self- movement towards more movement takes place first as a tendency towards motorization, installation of autonomous process units,
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and continuous acceleration of them (“tachocracy”); second, as a tendency to relieve, numb, and disable the functions of a subject that are too sensitive, slow, and oriented towards truth (automation through desensitization or elimination of context); third, through progressive eradication of distances and imponderables in coinci- dence with strategic appropriation of the other (logistics). In these three executing aggregates, the world as a hitherto inert resource for automobile system-subjects becomes processed, codified, made ready-to-use, and de-realized. De-realization is the psycho-social result of a systemic “self-realization” where the outdated term “reality” logically shrinks to the residual function of the not-yet- mobilized. For a few years now, American “deconstructionists” have been whispering the new message to each other: there is nothing outside the text;9 only the naïve still cling to the antiquated fiction of the “external referent. ” Even epistemology shows glimpses of the impending short-circuit between kinetics and semiotics – the world is logically ripe for evaporation.
Only on the horizon of an omnipresent mobilization do we see that there can only be one kind of appropriate critique for such a reality that works towards a pervasive awareness of movement. Yet this is again formulated to be misunderstood, because this work towards awareness must not move forward but take a step back in order to gain distance and disconnect from the process of acceleration. Only hesitantly do we call the critical aspect of this mobilization theory after a classical model: the critique of political kinetics.
This critique claims the ugly and seemingly merely physical and subhuman concept of movement for the humanities, social sciences, and history in basic conceptual terms. We can only imagine what kind of reception the critique of political kinetics will receive when we recall what kinds of arguments and faces were made by the beautiful souls of the nineteenth century in response to the Marxist impertinence of accepting the term “work” as a funda- mental category of historical anthropology. All we know is that this time the Marxists have joined the beautiful souls and bourgeois pragmatists as part of the great coalition of mobilizers: the Marxists because they are the first to understand that the critique of kinetics is only possible from a post-Marxist position that views “dialectical materialism” as just a particularly faded form of modern mobili- zation folklore; the beautiful souls because they are at least not inspired by such an ugly theory while they engage in their favorite occupation, the dawn of a New Age and the Human Potential Movement; the pragmatists because they in any case suppress any thought that could even remotely question their axiom of economic growth at a rate of 3% per annum.
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Now, no one can be under the illusion that anything more can be called into question through a critique of political kinetics than just the growth rate of an industrial civilization that is racing – with the force of a train that’s been accelerating for centuries – into the unknown. Whoever raises the question of kinetics does no less than to call into play the problem of whether and how this train can be brought to a halt, or at least diverted somehow. And it is a matter not of whether individuals can get off the train (of course they can, provided they are the right kind of individuals), but of whether modernity as a whole can free itself from a way of being that is ontologically determined by the formula “being-towards-movement. ”
These questions are too fundamental to be left to fundamen- talists. Therefore, the critique of political kinetics exposes a working framework that can potentially be joined by every thinking and praxis that contributes in some way to the study of movement and to the exercise of the right kind of mobility. The critique of political kinetics will be a working title for the studies of a trans-disciplinary post-university “college. ” It can begin its exercises wherever the correctness of human and systemic movements needs to be examined. Like all other university-like entities, the trans-discipline for the awareness of movement requires power-neutral terrains to which the executives and stakeholders of the mobilizers have no access – it is the best tradition for the protection of theory since the European high Middle Ages. But since the operation of almost all currently active universities in this world has evolved into pre-schools of mobilization and cognitive subcontracting companies for the “attack of the present on the rest of all time,” the critique of political kinetics has to look for other spaces in order to hold its studies. Whether this will take place in the New Social Movements, the centers for alternative culture, para-academic start-ups – that is not a pressing matter for the time being, and besides, these are also not the only possible alternatives. It is pressing, however, that the trans-discipline of the critique of movement cultivate polyvalent new brains of the societies in which the knowledge of demobilization from a variety of fields is instantiated. For all of us who come from the mobilization process, this knowledge will seem difficult to handle, implausible, and frustrating because the critique of political kinetics can under no circumstance be the theoretical conscience of a “praxis. ” Some will say that its bizarre and absurd result is to describe real processes in such a way that initially there is “nothing to do” – inasmuch as all those who are eager for action will make fools of themselves before doing what is to be done first, before hesitating, before stepping back to perceive more precisely, before ceasing with what has always been
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done, before imperceptibly becoming open to the correct movement. We can guarantee that anything else will once again yield blind mobilization, however magnificent the slogans of action may sound.
Though critique of political kinetics has its basic starting point in post-Marxism, we may not extrapolate that it relates to the insights of the socialist tradition in a destructive way. What carries weight compared to that tradition is the expansion of the conceptual field from production to mobilization, on the one hand, and the amendment of the prognostic symptoms of kinetics, on the other. One has to make the effort to once again study The Communist Manifesto in the way the text has for a long time now deserved to be studied: as the Magna Carta of aggressive kinetic nihilism, in which modernity declared for the first time what it is and what it wants. But a critique of kinetics will no longer be able to participate in Marx’s euphoria in the face of the observation that in a world through which capital pulsates “all that is solid melts into air. ”10 In this phrase, we can completely hear Marx as a thinker of mobili- zation – it is not for nothing that he has provided half the world with rationalizations for making history. But he is also a thinker of mobilization because his great terminology machine – especially the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production – is only built for the purpose of demonstrating the blastability of the inert conditions that still offer oppositions to the unleashing of effective production and the ultimate evaporation of assets. Marx’s work- messianic vision is directed at a state of society where the activity of productive selves only has its own issues to deal with – removal of real resistance, total appropriation of the other, self-appropriating self-creation twenty-four hours a day. In its own way, a critique of political kinetics will indeed also know a “dialectic,” namely that of the forces and conditions of movement; only it will not lament the fact that the conditions “still” inhibit the full use of the forces but rather dryly note, if need be, that the forces of movement are in any case not too far from “evaporating” all conditions in which conven- tional movements on our part have been possible. The critique of kinetics, too, will point out – in accordance with its derivation of post-modernism from the effects of a second passivity – that there is a growing organic compound of the masses of self-movement and therefore also a tendentious decline of the advantages of movement, but it would never occur to it to prognose a “revolutionary situation” from these observations; similarly, catastrophe-loving speculations about the connection between total system collapse and the rising up of the masses are foreign to it. What this critique does emphasize is nothing more or less than a crisis-induced opportunity for an evolutionary recall of the false mobilization forays. 11
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Just as the percentage of fixed capital permanently proportionally increases in the capital process, so too the dead automated centrifugal masses continuously swell in the world-wide mobilization of systems and increase their dominance over the gestures of living mobility to the point of oppression. Moreover, the same is true of the independent scientific research companies where the self-movement of theoretical apparatuses ensures that the act of thinking plays as good as no role in relation to what is thought. These extraordinarily uncanny operations are expressed by the concept of automation as inadequately as by the term “alienation” – our classical vocabulary is of no help to us whatsoever in the face of such new process-related realities. Movement is the great unthinkable in our languages.
Considering all of this, we can anticipate the contours of what a critique of political kinetics might entail. It does the groundwork for a critical theory of modernity that could use expressions of movement to describe how mobilization problematically sublates all Old World stock through mobilization and to criticize it through exercises in demobilization. There is no indication that something of this sort will be successful – except the success itself, for which it is impossible to decree any indubitable criteria. In any case, the point of departure for this critique is the observation that the departure of modernity towards an independent conscious life for all has largely lost itself in a rather blind kinetic passing on of the sometime initiated process congeries. The cost of the impressive yields of modern possibilities for self-movement and self-actualization in many fields is an incalculable and increasingly unbearable self-surrender to the subsequent automatic, self-lapsing processes. If we are right to imagine the immediate future as a time when the growing risks of disaster rapidly actualize, it is because we can already formulate the basic kinetic scheme of every possible accidental disaster: they will be the hetero-mobile result of countless self-mobilizations. A singular and dark inevitability emerges from the interaction between countless automatizations. And as concerns our much-vaunted future from a systemic point of view, its secret lies entirely in the variations of this great inevitability. Among these variations, we can determine two kinds of extremes: one leads to a relative cessation of mobilization as a whole via the mutual deceler- ation of partial processes (a great commendation to the obstacles? ); the other drifts into the exponentiation of mobilizations through interactions to become an eco-kinetic inferno. And our process- consciousness? What role does it play in this world theater: that of the hero, the fool, or just a powerless audience member? If every- thing is really heading towards a fatal end, then our conscious self can take heart in the fact that it plays all the roles of the endgame
The Modern Age as Mobilization 23
at the same time so that it can be the audience of its own dramatic morphing from mobilization hero to process fool until the curtain falls. In the relatively benign version, on the other hand, subjects would be faced with a remarkable experience of themselves. In a time when modernity could save itself from itself, subjects, too, would stop moving as ontological agents of movement towards more movement. They would then know from their changed way of being that they are not the agents of mobilization but the “guardians” of real movement.
The Prospect of an Asian Renaissance: Towards a Theory of the Ancient
Wherever [the European] Mind prevails, there we witness the maximum of needs, the maximum of labor, capital and production, the maximum of ambition and power, the maximum transformation of external Nature, the maximum of relations and exchanges.
All these taken together are Europe, or the image of Europe.
Moreover, the source of this development, this astonishing superiority, is obviously the quality of the individual man, the average quality of Homo europeus. It is remarkable that the European is defined not by race, or language, or customs, but by his aims and the amplitude of his will.
Paul Valéry, “The European”12
It is an open secret among experts that for more than a hundred years now a large part of Western intelligence has been “Asianizing,” as they say. Therein, one could perceive an ironic game that an object of cognition plays with its subject. In the world of intelligences, the discoverer is always exposed to a counter-discovery by those who have been discovered. For the bourgeois world between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the interest in the East began under the sign of colonialism, which soon brought about an intel- lectual world trade. It was through the generation of early romantics that Asian imports were first brought to a theoretical level and incorporated into a generous synopsis of world cultures. A world conversation about world literature is what the cheerful mission statement of a romantic ecumenism proclaimed, in which Persian poetry and translations of the Upanishads were passed around as evidence of the actually metaphysical activity of the world soul.
But it did not end with philological flirtation. For the actual East, being discovered by another spirit turned out to be a date
24 The Modern Age as Mobilization
with destiny. What first began as discovery and then turned into conquest, mission, and instruction of the East soon pulled the old East into the mobilization of the planet along with it.
Japan has given the world a model of self-liquidation in its final form, committing a seppuku for the sake of industry and history that will remain forever astonishing. Old Asia probably disappeared from the earth one day in the course of an epochal self-colonization, only surviving in the libraries of Western-inspired Indology, Sinology, Japanology, not unlike the way Old Europe has only survived in classical philology, medieval seminars, and period dramas.
This process must be formulated in an exaggerated way in order to correctly assess the Western Asian cult in all its strangeness. As the real East throws itself into industrial, scientific, political, and military mobilization in order to leave its old ways of thinking and being behind, the West is experiencing a cultural Asianizing for which there is no historical precedent – unless one wanted to accept the pervasion of the Roman Empire by Greco-Hellenic curricula as an analog. In this case, one would have to cite the cynical motif of conquering the conqueror; Horace’s Graecia capta ferocem victorem vincit is still on the tip of the last humanists’ tongues – after all, the verse (“Conquered Greece took prisoner her rough conquerer”13) proves how conspicuous it was even in a Roman setting to have a victor bow to the superiority of the vanquished.
Nevertheless, the topos of conquering the conqueror is not suitable for deciphering the inflation of Asianizing motifs in the current Western cultural scene. If we look through the historical arsenal for a prototype for current events, the only phenomenon that lives up to the occidental enthusiasm for Asia is that of a cultural renaissance. 14 We will argue in a moment that the phenomenon of “our” great Renaissance which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages can probably only be understood in light of today’s Asia cult.
Renaissances are visualizations of old culture in a new context. A Renaissance shows its genius in finding the ability to step into something entirely unprecedented under the cover of its enthusiasm for a prominent antiquity. The unprecedented newness can emerge precisely by drawing inspiration from a great precedent – it seems as if enthusiastic repetitions are the great vehicle of innovation. In this way, Renaissances always owe their prolificacy to a passionate misunderstanding of the old by a newness that does yet not speak its name. Only through an intense misrecognition do antiquities get brought back to a new life – one that is not their own, but rather the fluorescence of the still necessarily self-misrecognizing current life.
What the Grecomania of the Italian Renaissance and then again of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant for the
The Modern Age as Mobilization 25
self-forming of modern bourgeois society is by now culturo-histor- ically evident. But what it might have to do with the more recent Asiamania is still an unrevealed secret for most contemporaries – many come to take this (certainly conspicuous) phenomenon to be a fashion trend or an episodic exoticism. Thus, it would seem, they make good use of their fundamental right to live in ignorance of the major events of their time. But this does not change the fact that things are being negotiated in the Asiamanic phenomena of the present time which get to the heart of the world process, insofar as we are able to know something about it. When the West imagines itself to be in a sunken East and channels Asian antiquity as a master model of culture for life in the present, it is searching for possibilities of a future for itself within a foreign past. Nothing other than this was precisely the case back in the great European Renaissance, which rarely suspected the profound differences that separated it from its ancient Greek models. Today’s Asianizing Renaissance similarly delves deep into old Eastern worlds of wisdom to create pathways towards the new, the unprecedented, the inacces- sible for late modernity, whose corruption seems threatening, if not entirely incurable. For many, Asia is the cipher that offers shelter to a concept of the inconceivable.
Initially, we can draw four conclusions from this. The first is that a post-Christian era has begun within the Western hemisphere that could not possibly find the terms it would require to under- stand itself within the scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Following in the footsteps of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, the Young Conservative diagnostician Otto Petras already summarized this situation in 1935 in the form of a still impressive intention “to show that Christianity – the most formidable history-shaping movement of our time – has exhausted its formative power and that we live in a Post-Christianity understood in a deeper sense than the calendar’s AD. ”15
Secondly, modernity, thus left to its own devices – at least according to the conviction of skeptical interpreters – has used up its moral reserves and has no counterforces to deploy that could intercept its own fatal drift. Enlightened secularism, with its dual commitment to self-determination and large-scale technology, is disappearing, it seems, before our very eyes in global neglect – things run as they please and initial intentions are no longer of concern. Thirdly, the attempts of the last Central European generations to invoke livable forms of neopaganism from Germanic, Celtic, Greek, and Latin religious antiquities have proved to be straw fires that sometimes burned off with barbaric fumes and rarely on a level higher than that of spiritual party conversations. Thus, anyone who
26 The Modern Age as Mobilization
is interested likely knows that under present conditions one might perhaps make a rural commune with that homemade raw substance of Old European and pre-Christian elements, but no longer a terri- torial state. Fourth, a turn to the East (for Americans, it is not a turn anyway, but a continuation on their old Western course, only through water) brings into play no less than a world-cultural alter- native to the Greco-Judeo-Christian path that retains its quality as alternative even when the actual contemporary Eastern hemisphere modernizes itself beyond recognition by adopting Western mobili- zation techniques.
What does it indicate that in the crisis of late modern Western world this phenomenon – here referred to as an Asian renaissance – is interlaced with it? If a logic of the Renaissance really exists, then the new Asiamania should be read as a sign that creative members of post-Christian civilization hope to come to an understanding of themselves by grasping at antiquity once again – but this time not so that it can be appropriated as one’s own antiquity, but as antiquity in a foreign form. This time, the illusion of a “memory” of something that once belonged to us is not being sought. Today, an Asian antiquity rising to the rank of exemplarity has to do not with what is foreign or one’s own, but with the very spirit of the ancient as such. In other words, we have become so uncanny to ourselves through our modernization that the old, strange sounds of the Far East suddenly begin to sound like an old, familiar idiom. And although it is obviously not a native language that touches us so suggestively in this respect, it could – after many twists and turns – become a sister language to the mother tongue. To put it differ- ently, once again: the destruction of our own traditions by way of modern analytics has stripped our lives down to the stumps – that is, all the way down to the anonymous awareness of the fact that we find ourselves in a world that is both foreign and our own at the same time. This design-making awareness that is thrown into being can now learn the language of Buddha as well as that of Plato in order to clarify its strange position to itself insofar as it experiences every language as a foreign one. From now on, it only knows itself as that which cannot know itself and cannot name itself – and if it can, then only in the form of a persistent self-misrecognizing, of an essential theatricality. From the anonymousness of this existence, the path to Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu is no longer than the path to Parmenides or Augustine, the ascent to Plotin and Hegel no steeper than the one to Nagarjuna and Shankara, the path through Aristotle no drier than the one through Patanjali, the entry into the way of being of Meister Eckhardt no more mysterious than that of Master Dogen. Whether of Eastern or Western origin, the same
The Modern Age as Mobilization 27
exhausting improbability looms over these old names and doctrines, the same fascinating strangeness. Precisely because modernization has evaporated our Old European traditions and identities by way of progressive mobilization, the most foreign ancient tradition is no longer more foreign than the one that has until recently been our own.
It is in this context that the punchline of the Asian Renaissance in the modern West becomes clear: it makes us so pointedly aware of the question of the ancient preconditions of the modern enter- prise that while we can underestimate, misunderstand, combat, and disregard it, we can in the end no longer shake it off. As long as these times remain modern, they will be haunted by the question of the compatibility of human life processes and modernity itself. Since human culture is demonstrably very old and modernity very new and unsubstantiated, it is not a secondary task to find out if modernity is an outdoing of the ancient by the means of the modern or if its modernity puts a final end to antiquity. This question has become so urgent that the difference between the familiar and the foreign no longer plays any major role in these matters. Since the most foreign traditions are no longer more foreign to us than our own, it becomes clear how much our path towards the unparalleled has put all of the Old World nature and culture reserves up for negotiation. Because it is by now undeniable that a universalizing modernity exists in the form of “mobilization as such,” the question of “antiquity as such” pushes itself to the forefront almost violently. Then what is it that we take with us from antiquity on our trip into the unprecedented? Which dowries from the ancient world still create a link between past and future? What provisions will future generations live on during their continued exodus? How do the vessels in modern outer space stay in contact with the ancient ground controls?
These very questions indicate that the Asianizing Renaissance goes far beyond the events of the Grecizing Renaissance in the early bourgeois mobilization time; it is both more than and different from a mere cultural quote that will unleash something unprecedented in allusion to an authentic antiquity. Because it already emerges after this unleashing and already has an impression of what modernity can be, it poses the question more radically than the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and seeks the ancient as something that is not just as a pretext for the modern. Since the world belongs to the moderns anyway, the moment has come to inquire about the possibility of the ancient as ancient. Modern Asiamania is a Renaissance to the extent that it sides with those antiquities – whether ancient culture or nature – that create conditions for New World adventures. Thus,
28 The Modern Age as Mobilization
the new Asiamanically encrypted “Renaissance as such” asserts the authority of the ancient in two ways: on the one hand, it stresses that modernity would not exist if it could not – as user and consumer of pre-modern resources – depend on that which it (in an ultimately self-destructive way) exploits without regener- ating; on the other hand, it proves that the New World enterprise fundamentally overwhelms the ancient precepts since modernity follows the drive to carry out an infinite project on a finite basis. It obeys this drive if it has constituted itself metaphysically as being-towards-movement. This is actualized through us in the production of expanded productivity, in the will to a further reaching will, in the imagining of heightened imagination, in the creation of more comprehensive creativity, in short, in the movement towards movement ad inifinitum. As being-towards- movement, modernity is defined as “mobilization as such,” in other words as being-towards-self-annihilation.
The “Renaissance as such” that we see at work in the Asianizing activity of the more sensible West equals nothing less than an ontological sign change.
For if there is a common denominator for the currents of ancient Asian thought, it is that they grasp the meaning of being as a being-towards-stillness-within-movement. Even where, as in yoga, one works with the highest mobilizations of forces in the sense of a mystical physiology, the focus of consciousness is always on the advancement towards stillness within strength. The Asianizing tendencies in the West are perhaps only awkward tentative attempts in this direction – they express the intuition that nothing less than an ontological sign change will suffice to take the fatal thrust out of the “processes of modernization. ” Nowadays, whoever looks for a language of demobilization will most likely find it in the ancient Eastern realm, where different dramaturgies have been developed for the kinetics of the will to live than in the Western mobilization civilization. And it is only by borrowing from such languages, which irritate us with their frustrating wisdom, that it is possible to point, however awkwardly, to what needs to be said in the midst of the worldwide movement towards movement. The unthinkable impertinence that is heard by modern ears in old Asian “quietist” keys is aimed at the kinetic demission of mobilizing systems and subjects. But can we seriously imagine our de-automobilization? Can we conceive of a way of being where the system-subjects would no longer be driven forward by their self-advancement propellers? Does a prospect even exist for us where the powers of the subject generate something other than otherworldly acceleration, enrichment, research, and empowerment?
The Modern Age as Mobilization 29
These questions do not comprise disclaimers for modernity after-the-fact owing to bad experiences with it. They are as old as modernity itself; indeed they are inseparable from the superb upswing of early Romanticism, in which an offensive modernism, sustained by the élan of self-outdoing, inquired beyond itself in its best philosophical moments. Novalis’ phrase – “One is greatly in error if one believes that antiquities exist. Antiquity is only now coming into being”16 – already holds the key to the post-modern Renaissances. What emerges out of the new antiquities are shadows that belong to the light of modernity. The more modern, the more post-modern – there is no way around this formula. Aside from an imperceptible boundary, nothing can survive the impulse of modern self-mobilization ad infinitum unchanged unless it be through the boundless generosity of post-modern patronage for the benefit of “Renaissances” as such.
2
THE OTHER CHANGE: ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL SITUATION OF ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENTS
. . . one man is a fool – two are a new humanity!
Robert Musil, The Enthusiasts1
Every age has its own style of being dissatisfied with the world. And every dissatisfaction that becomes self-conscious contains within itself the seeds of a culture.
Today’s dissatisfaction with the world shows unmistakable traits of panic. Those who do not sense the panic are not up to speed – presumably they live off-site, in an asynchronous cave, having been spared, sparing themselves any exertion, living on a private income, perhaps happy as well, transported into a province out of reach from the news. To avoid panic, one would have to trust one’s small good fortune. One would have to have the old psycho- logical immune system that uses immediate worries to protect itself from big questions. But immunity to panic is rare nowadays, as is any believable unworldliness. Whoever reads the newspaper and eats mushrooms is already contaminated. Even those who are constructive-minded can get no further than a little bit of positivity against a panicked background. Goodwill no longer has a common denominator with the course of the world.
All of this says that panic is not a symptom of mass hysteria, nor does it present a personal case of the nerves. Speaking in classical terms, it is a constitution of the objective spirit, articulating an adequate relationship of the intellect to the matters at hand, and should the spirit lose its composure at what it discovers, it is right
The Other Change 31
in this matter. It is the same with the panicked spirit as it is with Lessing’s Father Galotti: if you don’t lose your mind over some things, you have no mind to lose. Panic proves to be the obligatory way of being of a consciousness that delves into its time – into our time. And that is why panic cannot be adopted or discarded like an external code, the possibility of inciting or appeasing it being illusory; its very nature is to be beyond manipulation because it is older than all calculation – ultimately, panic is not born of scare- mongering but the other way around.
In panic, we discover a fundamental feature of the truth about the present historical moment, and even more so an aspect of the truth about the brittle historicity of contemporary existence. If we are gripped by panic, then it has become clear to us that historical time dies with us – in such a way that at its end, barely anything will have happened. Our history – all that we are and have – will one not too distant day not have anyone for whom it is something that has happened. That is why panic arises – and insofar as it arises, it is the intelligent tinge of the moment in which we realize how time trickles away for us into the realm of might-as-well-never-have- been. Something would only have happened to us if a future exists that retains its past – our present – as its origin. Such retention has been the great work of the civilizational imagination which ensured that what has been “remain as happened. ” To remain as having happened means to enter into memories. But since we cannot rule out the absence of a future that remembers us, panic seeps into the signature of the present time as an inevitable feature of it. Before the panicked world-view, the entire historical context disintegrates and the usual impermanence of things suddenly turns into a panicked impermanence. It is as if a black hole appeared in time into which all that has happened within time disappears. Vertigo in the background, a tear in the film of representations, a flavor of unreality and emptiness – and panic is the form in which the end-times are “there” for the insightful zeitgeist from now on. Put simply, panic is the post-Christian, neo-pagan version of the apoca- lypse; it arrives at the same time as the re-actualization of Greek motifs from the ancient fund and occupies the space left open by the receding Judeo-Christian interpretations of the last things. Ever since time has run out for historical messianism, the bell of panicked worldly experience has tolled once more.
This explains why today’s style of dissatisfaction with the world can be nothing other than a panicked one. What is not explained, however, is whether a panicked consciousness that pushed through to self-affirmation could be the stylistic principle of a post-Christian culture. Even less is said about the question of whether the
32 The Other Change
movements that present themselves as alternatives contain enough mental substance and lifestyle to bring about an alternative culture from their new attitude to the world in which the attitudes to life and interpretations of being human would take shape for the coming millennium. Only one thing is certain: the macabre undertone in the phrase “panicked culture” is not without reason. 2
This undertone not only insinuates the shift from religious apoca- lypse to post-religious panic, but it also foreshadows with an uncomfortable realism the coming era as a kind of earthly purgatory where sinners who can still be rescued must undergo dire courses of treatment. For one can only describe the due learning processes of the kind found at the level of great social and political systems in terms of a diabolical autodidacticism. In this view, the histori- cally moved planet appears to be something between hell and adult education, where the poor souls have to memorize the conditions for their own survival through a disastrous self-study.
In connection with these scandalous reflections, we engage those employed at the alternative front in a historical conversation. Why? Because it must be shown how the most militant dissatisfactions with the actual have a share in a very old history of dissatisfaction with the state of earthly affairs. The current alternatives are to some extent the partners and to some extent the heirs of epochal alternative movements whose beginnings date back to the “rise” of advanced civilizations. Consequently, today we are dealing not only with trivial efforts to reform bad global conditions such as fill the history books, but also with a completely newly constructed and organized alternative to a previous alternative movement. Ecologists, autonomists, fundamentalists, the neo-religious, Green pacifists – all of them get caught up in a very distant history of revolts and revolutions, where an older dissatisfaction with the world has already created its classical expression of it. To positively define the philosophical locus of today’s alternatives, we must distin- guish between two kinds of alternativity: the first (or metaphysical) type of disagreement with the world, which aims for transcendent beyond-worlds or utopian counter-worlds; and the second (or poetic) type of disagreement with the world, which sees the track that shows the way out in reality itself.
Panicked Culture – or: How Much Catastrophe Does a Person Need?
Let us begin with a succinct thesis: today’s alternatives are already the children of catastrophe. What differentiates them from earlier
The Other Change 33
generations and makes them the most likely candidates for a panicked culture is their expert-like approach to the potential disasters that surround them. From a historical perspective, the alternatives are likely the first humans to cultivate a non-hysterical relationship to a possible apocalypse. For the first time ever, we do not have to imagine doomsday scenarios to see the writing on the wall. The current situation takes care of that sufficiently. Nowadays, the apocalypse calls attention to itself as if its name were in lights on Broadway. With dry professionalism, it writes its own letter of announcement. Apocalyptic alarm no longer presupposes religious uproar; warnings of the end-times do not imply that prophetic individuals have declared themselves to be the mouthpiece of transcendent revelations. The current alternative consciousness is characterized by what we might call a pragmatic attitude towards catastrophe. The catastrophic is now a category that no longer belongs to visions but to perception. Nowadays, anyone can be a prophet if they dare to say anything at all. In any case, catastrophe needs less an announcement than a transcript – linguistically, its place is not among apocalyptic promises but among the daily news and committee reports. The writing on the wall appears in ordinary language and the only thing that belongs to modern doomsday prophesies (aside from a spray can) is empirical data, such as that pertaining to the events of the year 1986, which has already attained symbolic features with its series of fatal accidents.
What can the expression “panicked culture” mean? Does panicked experience even allow for culture? To the extent that culture must be built upon expectations, repetitions, certainties, and institu- tions, does it not presume the lack, indeed the exclusion, of the element of panic? We vote for the opposite to be the case. It is only through proximity to panicked experiences that living cultures are possible – it is only the occasional experience of the extreme that exposes the temperate human region where we can cultivate what we are competent to do. One of the attributes of the Greek Pan was to be the god of the midday hour when the shadows are at their shortest and the world is dashed to the ground by light, holding its breath in his presence. The modern term “panic” forgets this connection between presence, revelation, and fright – the only thing it remembers is the kinetic motif of directionless escape. Above all, it no longer knows what is most important: bearable human life is always an island within the unbearable, and the existence of islanders is only ensured through the discretion of a subtly present ocean. The world that we are assured of is thus always placed against an either (Judeo-Christian) apocalyptic or (pagan) panicked background. But modernity wants presence without tears. It sees
34 The Other Change
culture only as a state of being where the existence of faucets answers the question about the origin of water, just as the problem of the origin of “truth” is taken care of through the dealings of scholars. A panicked culture would be immediately recognized by its respect for faucets; after all, it is possible that when you turn one on, the ocean comes out. It would be no different with the sciences, especially since they have been generating things for a long time now under which the world has the same right to cower as humans and animals once did under the panicked Greek light of midday.
A few questions are now inevitable. Does alternative culture then need catastrophe? Does it secretly approve of disasters, as people sometimes fear to be the case? Does it have to be addicted to calamity because only this creates a climate where alternative ideas gain popularity? Is catastrophe essential for the introduction of a new movement, like a teacher who eventually convinces even the most stubborn minds of his or her lessons? Do humans need catas- trophe because they must be educated and can only be educated by the school of worst possible scenarios? Consequently, are the real hopes of alternative movements not linked to disaster-didactic calculations – provided it is true that only a visual instruction of the worst can usher in a turn for the better?
It was in the days of the Harrisburg nuclear accident on Three Mile Island in 1979 that I really understood what disaster didactics meant for the first time. As the out-of-control reactor boiled and everyone held their breath to see if this infernal machine would explode, I noticed an uncanny phenomenon in myself and in others. Of course, no one could have any doubt about the devastation that an explosion of the nuclear reactor could cause, nor could anyone guarantee that what seemed to be a safe distance from accidents of this kind was actually safe. And yet at the time of Harrisburg, there was an option in the air in favor of the catastrophe; one could sense a sly sympathy with the explosive substances in the reactor casing. It was as if the deadly radioactive substances not only represented a physical quantity, but also contained a culturally critical message that deserved to be released. The small, immoralist neurosis in the face of the defective nuclear reactor was therefore not just a milieu-specific perversity, not just a sign of pyromania or evidence of an inclination towards the macabre within the human nervous system that is characterized by ever stronger stimuli to gain arousal. In it, a whole way of thinking came to light together with its dubiousness. Within its own logic, the option for the explosion was nothing more than an educational hypothesis about the didactic and mind-changing energies that radiate from actually occurring disasters.
The Other Change 35
Only through Chernobyl did the underlying disaster-pedagogical implications of Harrisburg come to light. Indeed, if the worst has to occur before relearning can begin, then, from this perspective, the Harrisburg incident was “not bad enough. ” Because the big explosion failed to materialize, the Harrisburg disaster could not reach the level where disaster didactics develops its grim calcula- tions. It is the level where one believes that compelling connections between misfortune and insight can be formed. According to this dicey logic, such connections arise through an absurdly magnified application of the basic idea that those who do not listen will have to learn the hard way. In fact, disaster-pedagogical thinking promises that even the greatest calamity can be referred to a human scale – that is, into the field of sensible measures for preventing its repetition – through subsequent learning. Consequently, after Harrisburg, the term “warning disaster” made a career for itself in the vocabulary of alternative movements – a term that encapsulates the hope that disasters might penetrate our otherwise unteachable minds like probes and ignite new insights within them. 3
This desperate theory of learning shines a light on the state of the enterprise that has been calling itself Enlightenment since the eight- eenth century. It began as a utopia of an unforced guidance towards better understanding. By using the soft logic of an autonomous thinking that listens to the “voice of reason,” it wanted to eliminate the violence that cuts deep when it comes to learning the hard way. In the meantime, however, even the well-meaning old Enlighteners are not very far from adding disaster to the curriculum of humanity as the last pedagogical tool, if it is really the only way that something can still be learned. Thus, we can see how classical Enlightenment, with its concept of truth based on argumentation, has been pitifully put on the defensive. No one seriously believes that something essential can still be reached on the path of listening. “Let learning the hard way be welcome; for listening has failed. ”4 There are more than a few tireless members of the old Enlightenment troop who are already at the point of being glad if at least one treatment of learning the hard way in the face of disasters that cut deep could contribute a little bit to the establishment of truth in the “civilizing process” at the very last moment (oh, this word that burns the tongue! ). And thus emerges the strange affective pull towards actually occurring doom. The catastrophe will show them! The real present calamity apparently closes the gap between argument and disclosure, bridging the distance between the appeal to the imagi- native consciousness and its overpowering with existing evidence. The catastrophe is thus the apt reversal of a miracle – no wonder, and why is it not one? Because it is a direct consequence of what the
36 The Other Change
deluded activists are up to. The real present catastrophe thus attains a formidable truth-theoretical function: it complements the mere argument and brings massively into presence what can otherwise only be imagined. By bridging the evidence gap between listening and learning the hard way, the didactic catastrophe places the epiphanic truth of an event above the discursive truth of the imagi- nation. And thus the problem of learning from disasters leads to the logical center of enlightenment and modernity. Modernity is, after all, the enterprise where human intelligence is not content with just giving voice to right pronouncements about the world; it can only be satisfied if it has actively ensured that the right things happen to the world as a whole. But this active concern for what is right is in the most radical crisis. For if now even human-made catastrophe ought to impose a tax on learning how to do things right, then it is a fatal testament to the way that modernity has strayed from its conception of learnable right action under the guidance of success and truth. 5
The hope for a way to learn from the worst thing at the very last minute is difficult to distinguish from despair about the possibility of learning at all.
Four brief comments will illustrate the risks and limitations of disaster-didactic thinking below. It is only from the failure of this desperate learning theory that the reason why alternative cultures will only be possible as a panicked culture becomes plausible. These observations are commentary on the question that is on the lips of every contemporary: what more needs to happen before something happens? Practically oriented, it could also say: how big would a catastrophe need to get before it radiates the universal flash of insight that we are waiting for? From what point on would disasters be the self-evident grounds for radical mentality-changing insights? How bad does it have to get before it can get any better? Does it have to get bad at all? Does the underlying link between misfortune and insight have validity?
It is clear from the very first remark how problematic an answer to these questions would be, indeed how problematic the questions themselves are already.