No More Learning

17 See also Aquinas's discussion of this Psalm in the Summa Theologiae (Aquinas,
1920: 229; Part II. 2nd Part. 19. 7) who, with Ecclesiasticus (1916: Book I, and Book XXV. 12) argues that although fear is appropriate in knowing God, faith is the beginning of wisdom regarding first principles and essence.
18 See Introduction, footnote 11.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 3 Fossil Fuel Culture
Politics aimed at the formation of a reasonable and mature mankind remain under an evil spell, as long as they lack a theory that takes account of the totality that is false
(Adorno, 1991: 28)
Introduction
In this chapter I explore the significance of education in Hegel in relation to some of the issues about freedom, representation and philosophy that are raised by the nature of our modern fossil fuel culture. In particular I will examine education in Hegel in regard to the illusions that endure within fossil fuel culture and to their philosophical significance. I am not con- cerned here with the disputed causes or effects of global warming, or with predictions about when the supplies of oil will run dry. 1 My interest is rather to show how the freedoms made possible by burning fossil fuels have con- tributed to a culture which liberates personal freedom from the relation to the other, to death and to the universal. One implication of this, I will argue, is resignation at the unavoidability of complicity within the representation of this political totality, a resignation that is deemed wrongly to hold no further educational significance.
When I first published a version of this chapter2 I was able to discern its origin in three elements. First, the fuel protests in the UK in September 2000 which illustrated the absolute dependency of the social upon fossil fuels. It was a strange moment as the country moved inexorably towards complete breakdown within only a few days, and equally strange how, just before meltdown, the protesters went home. The second event was the inva- sion of Iraq by American and coalition forces, a campaign fuelled by the relationship between freedom and oil. And third, I remember reading the following introduction to a book written by Peter McLaren, a notable criti- cal theorist and critical pedagogue in the USA, and being struck by just how
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embedded fossil fuel culture is in determining the modern idea of freedom. Having revealed his despair at the possibilities for critical transfor- mation, McLaren ends his introduction with the following:
Living in Los Angeles is like being encysted in a surrealist hallucination. Yet as I look at the city from this cafe? window, things don't seem that bad: Kid Frost pulsates through the airwaves; a 1964 Chevy Impala cruises the street in all its bravado lowrider beauty; the sun is shining bountifully on brown, black and white skin (albeit prematurely aging the latter); my gas tank is full and the ocean is reachable before the heat gets too heavy and the streets get too packed. I'll take Olympic Boulevard toward Venice, searching for that glimmer of light in the eyes of strangers, seeking out that fertile space to connect, picking through that rag-and-bone shop of lost memories, and seizing that splinter of hope at the fault line of the impossible where the foundation of a new public sphere can be fashioned out of the rubble of concrete dreams. (McLaren, 1997: 14)
In this revised and extended version of the article I can now call upon a fourth element. I recently attended a workshop for critical educators from across the world. Its purpose was to re-think how the language of critical education might be revised in order for it to reflect more closely the cir- cumstances of (late) modernity. At one point, a member of the group admitting feeling guilty that, in order to attend such a forum, he had had to enlarge his own carbon footprint by flying half way across the world. It is not this confession that I take to be as significant here as the reaction of the group to the comment. His remark was met with wry smiles and chuckles from all of us who had travelled to the meeting. These were the smiles and chuckles of a collective resignation, that in order to attend such a meeting to consider the plight of the under-privileged and the oppressed, we had to contribute to environmental changes. The smiles and chuckles in effect said: You are right, but what choice do we have?
A justification for this or any such meeting might be made on the grounds that the importance of the subject under discussion merited this small increase in carbon emissions. Nobody expressed the opposite view, that the needs of the environment outweighed the need of the participants to dis- cuss together the needs of the poor. This in itself warns of one of the most important of all barriers to reducing the carbon footprint. Everyone can justify why, for them, every trip they make is important and necessary. The bigger picture is just too far removed from these expressions of personal freedom. I will return to this theme in a moment. Even the foreign holiday
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can be justified in terms of the benefits it will bring the economy in terms of increased effectiveness at work. With this in mind it is doubtful, is it not, that the stage will ever be reached where we are all politically or ethically accountable for our carbon footprints, or that we have to make a case in writing to the guardians as to why our journey is absolutely necessary. For one thing - and I will argue this case in a moment - this is unlikely because it offends directly and unambiguously our modern sense of per- sonal freedom.
However, what I want to pick up here in the smiles and chuckles of the participants is what it reveals about attitudes towards both paradox and complicity. The paradox was recognized by all at some level that saving the world on the one hand meant contributing to its pollution on the other. The struggle requires such complicity. There is no way to avoid it. I want to draw out two things here. First, such a reaction signals, I think, to a greater or lesser extent how complicity in paradox invokes resignation. Such a total paradox held for the participants no further education. The paradox is therefore seen as a dead end. It is essentially nothing. It highlights another aspect of this world against which, even though we struggle for change, we must admit our powerlessness. Second, however, this paradox has the potential to educate the master further regarding the nature of this totality and any resignation to it. This is where education in Hegel would begin, in the despair of the totality of our contingency within pre-determined ways of living and thinking, by asking about the political import of the despair, its determination within political conditions, and what it has to teach us about attitudes towards mastery and freedom. But, as is usual, the smiles and the chuckles at the paradox of complicity lasted only a few seconds. In resigna- tion - not admitted to but present in each small shrug of the shoulders - the discussion moved on, moved back to saving the world. The group was able, once again, to put the paradox behind it.
I want to make an unpalatable and perhaps dangerously over-stated comparison here. Let us suppose a guard gets up one morning, breakfasts, says goodbye to his wife and children, and sets off for his day's work in Auschwitz. Let us suppose, also, that at some time during his day it occurs to him, as it well might have done before, that the work he is engaged in is harmful. Might he smile quickly to himself, chuckle, and with a small, per- haps invisible shrug of the shoulders, move on and continue his work? Might he not think, rightly, that present conditions do not allow for any- thing different? If he protests, or deserts, he will likely be shot. Against this cold totality what choice does he have but to continue his work? And having done so, he will, again, be able to find reason for the work he does.
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Is it clear what point I am trying to make here? I am not saying that the carbon footprint of a day's academic work is comparable to the military jackboot of the guard. However, I have at least to admit that I cannot know for certain that environmental changes will not proceed from droughts and food shortages to the destruction of whole communities, whole societies, perhaps even whole races. Rather, what I am seeking to do here is to bring alongside each other the shared attitude of the academic and the officer regarding the absolute totalities of their situation. It is common, and easy, to hold the guard accountable for his actions within a situation which - who knows - he may have had little choice about. It is so often asked of the Holo- caust, how could they, meaning the German people, have let it happen? This question is nai? ve in the extreme. The implication behind the question is this: if I had been in the same situation I would not have taken part, and I would have opposed it. Yet is it not possible, perhaps likely, that at some point in the future the same question will be asked of the West in general regarding world poverty, environmental damage, and warfare: how could they (we) have let it happen? Here the shrug of resignation at the paradox of the totality by the academic may well be put alongside the shrug of the guard. The latter has his resignation focused by the threat of his own death, and dishonour to his family. Modern Western academics usually have no such immediacy. How will they fare when history asks: how could they have let it continue? Surely they must have seen the relationship between the rich, over-fed, over-fuelled and over-indulgent West and the poor, under- fed, under-privileged and under-cast South and East? Will they shrug their shoulders at the paradox of complicity that faced them, and perhaps say, you weren't there; how could you understand? The circumstances now are different to those of the camps, but is the justification for carrying on not horribly similar, and grounded in the failure to address the totality of the paradox of complicity?
If you read the above and find there, somehow, an excuse for the actions of the guard, then you have missed the point I hoped to make. The point here is the need for an education in Hegel regarding the ambivalent nature of totality, paradox and complicity. This education offers neither the stand- point of opposition to, nor a resignation in, despair at the nature of the totality. Rather, it concerns the ways in which the freedoms that fossil fuels have made possible for us in the West have determined that totality, hiding at the same time their role in doing so. I have no doubt that the guard should have preferred his own death to that of the hundreds whose deaths he contributed to everyday. But we do not prefer our own death, or even a slight fall in our own living standards, to the death of the poor around the
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world every day. With an education in Hegel we can learn about our own complicity from the judgements we make about how others should have behaved differently within their own paradox of complicity. I want now, to explore this paradox of the complicity of freedom when it is politically and socially determined and developed as present fossil fuel culture.
Losing the object
Hegel's claim that 'religion and the foundation of the state are one and the same' (1984: 452) is a philosophical statement about philosophy's own con- ditions of possibility. Philosophy is the thinking in which consciousness represents objects, including itself, to consciousness. In this broken middle of form and content, and of thought and being, philosophy depends for its representation of itself on prevailing political configurations of the object. Philosophy is just such a political configuration. The dialectic which repre- sents philosophy to itself is therefore always between representation and the political. The representation of the political includes the determination of representation by the political. The configuration of the political is already its representation in thought. We might say here that representa- tion is already political, and that the political reverts to representation. The way that this dialectic is itself represented in thought as an object is its 'culture'. 'The work of culture (Bildung),' says Hegel, is 'the production of the Form of Universality' (Hegel, 1956: 417; 1970: 496). Not only does phi- losophy have 'the condition of its existence in culture (Bildung)' (1956: 68; 1970: 92), culture itself is the appearance of freedom, the relation of state and religion, as it is represented in consciousness. There is, here, a dialectic within a dialectic. Thought, itself a relation of state and religion, is philoso- phy within the culture of this relation. There are two representations here; one is of the political, the other is of the relation of representation and the political. The latter is the culture of philosophy. 3 In what follows, I want, very briefly, to explore two things: first how the culture of ideology has developed since the critiques of Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin; and second how this is reflected in philosophy. I will argue that the relation of representation and the object within both the culture of ideology and the culture of philosophy are currently configured as fossil fuel culture and the end of culture, respectively, and that implicit in both is an aesthetic of destruction, or fascism. I will then turn to the concept of illusory being in Hegel to illustrate the educational significance of education in Hegel regarding the paradox of complicity.
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In the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of critique, fascism is the representa- tion of unmediated consciousness.
It is, therein, a culture without its representation in philosophy as culture. This 'representation' is served by the liquidation of opposition, both physical and intellectual, the imperative to conformity, the mythical superiority of race, the fetishism of ideology, and by the erasure of the universal. Adorno and Horkheimer in particular reflect upon this total domination of thinking by way of the culture indus- try. They note, for example, that 'the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry' (1979: 126), that the culture industry 'has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product' (1979: 127) and that 'no independent thinking must be expected from the audi- ence: the product prescribes every reaction' (1979: 137).
They argued that three factors in particular contribute to the dominance of conformity and resignation. First, the film determines the equivalence of the audience. Each is interchangeable with any other such that there are no others. Second, the culture industry is iatrogenic, (re)producing condi- tions it claims to overcome. Not only is free time highly mechanized, but even the pleasure and joy offered in free time by the culture industry have become ideological; the less they satisfy, the more they reproduce the appe- tite for them. Third, the aesthetic of representation has separated itself from the object such that the consumer worships the image of the event more than its reality. When no exchange is required, fetishism is released from objects and is traduced into an aesthetic representation of itself.
Put these three factors together and you have a very powerful picture of the inner workings of Fascism. Thinking, removed from its negative rela- tion to the object, is representation become the aestheticization of the political. The bourgeois person, removed from the political recognition of being object to himself, as to other, becomes an unmediated singularity and ripe for incorporation into an aesthetic of authenticity. Fascism thrives within the separation of thought from object and of person from negation, positing these illusions of independence as mastery at the same time as refusing recognition of their determination in the relation (or in this case the non-relation) of state and religion. To the critical consciousness separa- tion of inner and outer are 'torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up' (Adorno, 1999: 130). This unresolved yet dis- avowed dualism defines the illusory mastery of the bourgeois. Every advance of pseudo-individuality, of a posited unity between the separated parts, 'took place at the expense of the individuality in whose name it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve to pursue one's own particular pur- pose . . . at odds with himself and everyone else' (1979: 155). Such a man 'is already virtually a Nazi' (1979: 155), freed from responsibility to the other
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as to the universal because, through 'the miracle of integration' (1979: 154) he is all others.
Walter Benjamin arrives at similar conclusions from a very different direc- tion. Two of his most important critiques of representation are on allegory in German Baroque Trauerspiel and on mechanical reproduction. Both critiques work within the dialectic of form and content, or representation and philosophy.
In his study of the Trauerspiel Benjamin illustrates how the relation of state and religion is represented in allegory. The Counter-Reformation saw the inward anxiety regarding salvation related to the external world deserted by God. In this 'hopelessness of the earthly condition' (Benjamin, 1985: 81) the Baroque ethic consists of an inner asceticism, the beautiful soul, and a political ruthlessness, the intriguer. One of the key elements here is the way that negation is represented in and as mythical, universal ornamentation. This representation then grants to itself emergency powers by which to restore, and repeatedly fail to restore, the universal. Allegory is not just the representation of the content of the fallen world. It is itself the form of the separation between the creaturely and the divine. As such, it is both the representation of the political and the culture of that representation. Allegory marks the aestheticization of a world without salvation where mon- ument, ornamentation and ruin are the representation of the political, the politics of representation, and the culture of their relation. This representa- tion, this Baroque culture, is, according to Gillian Rose, 'the spirit of fascism, or what Fascism means' (Rose, 1993: 196). 4 It is negation become immediate, or the aesthetic of destruction. It is, dramatically, where the I has its being as destruction. It is, says Benjamin, a 'godless spirituality, bound to the mate- rial as its counterpart, such as can only be concretely experienced through evil' (Benjamin, 1985: 230).
Benjamin's other celebrated example of the aestheticization of the politi- cal is mechanical reproduction. As the ruin of objects represented the loss of the relation to the divine, so the decay of the aura of objects represents the loss of relation to the object. Both are the aesthetic of destruction, or the spirit of Fascism. Both are the melancholia and mourning of the deserted and the violence of the politician. Both are destruction, inner and outer, enjoyed as an end in itself. As Benjamin writes, the self-alienation of mankind 'has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruc- tion as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic' (1992: 235).
A third critique of the relation of state and religion as Fascism is provided by Rose in her essay 'Beginnings of the day: Fascism and representation' (Rose, 1996). Against the piety of those who mystify the Holocaust, who
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deem it ineffable and unrepresentable, Rose offers the chiasmus of the fascism of representation and the representation of Fascism. As with Adorno and Horkheimer in relation to ideology, and as with Benjamin in relation to allegory and mechanical reproduction, Rose is arguing for the insistence of the dialectic between power and its forms, and the cultural representa- tion of this dialectic. The representation of Fascism is fascist when its own power is effaced or when its mediation between subject and object spares the audience 'the encounter with the indecency of their position' (Rose, 1996: 45). She distinguishes between the educational value of the film Schindler's List as informative, which it achieves, and its refusal to implicate the audience in the crisis, a crisis which it makes 'external' (1996: 47). Here, she argues, sentimentality overcomes complicity because the audience is denied the ambivalence of the 'pitiless immorality' (1996: 47) that deter- mines the whole. Thus Schindler's dilemma becomes congratulatory and the audience views the whole from the viewpoint of 'the ultimate predator' (1996: 47) who can survey the cycle of life, or the totality of culture, as voy- eur. In this case, the fascism of the representation of Fascism is not only the aestheticization of the political; it is also the law-establishing violence of this aesthetic. Its ideology and the decay of aura are implied in Rose's critique of the fascism of representation and the representation of Fascism.
Rose does not make these observations in order to illustrate the impossi- bility of representing the Holocaust. On the contrary, she is illustrating the persistence of the baroque spirit in modernity. The spirit of Fascism persists in the representation of Fascism and it persists in the way that it aestheticizes political/religious experience. The objectivity of negation in which the experience of the whole is commended becomes, in the fascism of the rep- resentation of Fascism, an aesthetic of Being, absolved from the agon of representation and therefore, from possible resistance. Without the dialectic of representation and culture, or power and its forms, without the 'persis- tence of always fallible and contestable representation [which] opens the possibility for our acknowledgement of mutual implication in the fascism of our cultural rites and rituals' (1996: 41), there is no engagement with the difficulty of universal politics. All that remains in this fallen state is the praxis of despair, or intrigue. The ruthless predation that carries us to the cinema is rewarded with the representation of itself, again, and we leave baptized, again, in the holy waters of voyeurism, of the decay of aura. The movie pro- vides enjoyment because it reinforces the Baroque spirit that took us there in the first place.
How, then, can representation represent its own contestability? For Rose, 'the risk of the universal interest . . . requires representation, the critique of
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representation, and the critique of the critique of representation' (1996: 62). For Benjamin it is the politicization of art that is required. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the self-destruction of the mythical representation of enlightenment 'must examine itself' (1979: xv). Each of these in their own ways shows how the relation to the object in modern culture threatens dis- traction and destruction in the spirit of Fascism, yet also commends the re-education of the philosophical consciousness that experiences the repre- sentation of the object and the political as its own culture. They do not commend a 'restoration'. They commend the education in which the dia- lectic becomes its own object in and of itself as learning.
Fossil fuel culture
These three critical perspectives share the view, then, that a critique of total ideology can be sustained against its inner tendency to render critique nugatory. However, this commonality in Rose, Benjamin, and Adorno and Horkheimer can hide a significant reconfiguration of the structure of ideology which demands, now, a re-examination of the representation of the political and the politics of representation. As a contribution to this, I suggest that the absolute godless spirituality of fascist culture can be dis- cerned in two further features of modern bourgeois society. The first appears in exploring the relationship between developments in the struc- ture of ideology and the status, literally the reality, of the object. I will argue that, in three interrelated movements, ideology and its form as culture have re-formed our relation to the object. This re-formation moves first from the dialectic of enlightenment to the ideology of ideology5 and then to what I will term fossil fuel culture. The second feature lies in the appearance of the end of culture. Culture here terminates all relations to itself, that is, all edu- cational significance. It is in education in Hegel that the educational import of culture is retrieved. In the first of these features, which we will explore in this section, we will see the disfiguration of culture as freedom from an absent universal. In the second feature, discussed in the following section, we will see this disfiguration of culture appearing as the end of culture, 'end' here referring to the termination of the education that comes from having itself as its own object. Implicit in both is a concept of freedom which embodies an aesthetic of destruction. The symbol of a death's head cited by Benjamin as 'the heart of the allegorical way of seeing' (1985: 166) lives on in both the bourgeois conception of freedom and in its representa- tion in thought.
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The dialectic of enlightenment stands as a critique of the form and content of bourgeois ideology. It revealed the abstraction of the object from its process of production in thought and the fetishism of this knowledge of abstraction. It sought no absolution from this totality of the reproduction of fetishism in thought for there was, of course, no form of theory that could withstand the market place. Critique collaborated in the conditions of the possibility of its object. As such, the dialectic of enlightenment included within its own contradictory logic the fetishism of the object, the critique of this fetishism and the critique of the critique of fetishism, the latter marking the recognition of the return of enlightenment to myth. The point of continuing to implicate critique in this way was, as Adorno and Horkheimer remarked in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the enlighten- ment must continue to examine itself. The culture of ideology, its representation of the universal, the critique of that representation, and the critique of that critique could still be known as culture. As such, culture continued to commend itself as the impossibility and possibility of the cri- tique of ideology. Culture, as contradiction, still carried political significance; its phenomenology, its being experienced, was the representation of the political and the politics of that representation. In reproducing bourgeois social relations the culture of the dialectic of enlightenment retained a notion of the universal, of totality, in and as culture and as such retained the import of culture as our philosophical education.
The stakes regarding the critique of ideology were raised again in Adorno's formulation of ideology as image and reality in his specific critique of the culture industry. The sophistication of his analysis is not found in the vulgar idea that the culture industry merely socializes consciousness. Culture as industry, or mass objectification, is not best read within a model of base and superstructure. The latter is itself an example of the effacing of its own implication within the totality, and, in turn, is a reduction of culture to bifurcation without immanent or philosophical significance. Rather, the political significance of Adorno's critique of the culture industry lies in its modification of the dialectic of enlightenment. We noted above Adorno's observation that exchange value, the 'social' relation between fetishized objects, was no longer tied to objects of exchange. The freedom of the image from the object means, as we saw, that the ticket to the game is worshipped more than the game 'itself'. In his critique of the culture industry Adorno extended the scope of this observation. The fact that reality is separated even from its appearance as an object means that this fetishism, as reality, can be mechanically reproduced in many different ways. The result is that in and through cultural reproduction, reality - already an image - becomes
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the image of itself, or what Adorno calls the 'ideology of ideology' (1991: 159). Thus says Adorno, 'reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication' (1991: 55) and 'image on the other hand turns into immediate reality' (1991: 55). In a mode of social relation which is central to the persistence of the baroque spirit in modernity, reality is already image and image is already reality. Note here that image does not 'revert' to reality as in the formulation of the dialectic of enlightenment. This change marks the development in the form of bourgeois ideology. It has effaced from its structure any trace of dialectic. Here reality and image are the one immedi- ate (non) relation.
This marks, then, a different relation to the object for experience than that reproduced in the dialectic of enlightenment. In the latter the relation to the object is repeated abstractly but abstraction itself becomes an object in and for experience and is thus returned to its being known in experi- ence. In this dialectic culture can still be the recognition of its formation in and as self-examination. But the culture industry posits itself as lacking any such relation to the object or, thereby, as culture, to itself. It has a relation, rather, to reality as image in what can be mechanically reproduced. As such, within culture as an industry, it is the loss of aura that is reproduced. Or, put differently, in the culture industry image begets image. This marks the end of culture as critique. Indeed, as we will see in a moment, it marks the end of culture as an educational concept. The (non) relation, the immediacy of image and reality, has displaced even its own representation in thinking, namely, that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to myth.