No More Learning

As illustrated above with the example of Paul, no illumination need be presupposed for this; the result of movedness and commitment is sufficient. The two highest forms of the imitatio Christi are on the one hand martyrdom, which was understood by its observers as a direct transition into the kingdom of God (which is why, according to some authors, martyrs were exempted from any form of further purification in the beyond), and on the other hand the Christomorphic transformation of man that was meant to lead to the point where the logos and caritas take
285
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
Ages, St Francis
was resolve to unify the two extremes of imitatio in his person, which could only be achieved by equating life in utter poverty with
the martyr's agon. 98
The general form of the Christian imitatio contract can be seen in
the choice of apostolic existence as such, which is always based in some wayan a change of subjects. Its schema was defined by Paul in the statement from Galatians 2:20: 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. ' This identifies the imitatio as a two-sided relationship in which one can distinguish between an imitatio subiectiva and an imitatio obiectiva. Via subjective imitation, the imitator refers to Christ himself, or to a first-degree imitator of Christ, such as a martyr or miracle-working saint. By imitating the inimitable, the Christian zealot can himself become an object of imitation by third parties. In the position of the imitable imitator, he follows the call to be exemplary and subordinates his own existence to the formal law of exemplary life. It is in this sense that Eugippus, in the introduc- tion to his Vita Sancti Severini - the life of the fifth-century saint from Mautern an der Donau, in the Austrian Krems district - quotes Peter's command to his deacons: 'Be an example to the flock' (forma estote gregi), as well as Paul's instruction to Timothy: 'Be an example to the faithful' (forma esto fidelibus); in the original Greek, forma is replaced by typos. Hence the Christian teacher is destined not only to be an imitator of Christ himself, but also to take the position of the imitable and make himself available to the communities of believers as a 'formant', a shaping 'type'. Hence the dictum: a Christian is one who makes others Christians. The secular duplicates of this cliche lead to the theses that only those who guide others to education are themselves educated, and that only those who spread enlightenment can be called enlightened. Through the two-sided imitatio, apostolic succession takes on the form of a pyramid game, in which each partic- ipant is at once imitator and imitated - except for the simple believers at the base, who only imitate without being imitated; it is their pre- rogative to fund the advanced with material contributions. They are naturally furthest from the tip of the pyramid, where the advanced jostle one another in the art of the impossible. Among these, next to the declared saints and miracle workers, one also finds the 'type' of abbot, of which the Benedictine Rule states that he has taken over the duty of guiding souls (animas regere), and must one day give account for his wards in fear and trembling. The statesmanship of the monas- tic director, we read, consists in doing the right thing at the right time,
286
MA. STER GAMES
The Philosopher
If we now cast a glance at the fourth trainer figure in our list, repre- sented by the philosopher, we are immediately struck by its fragmen- tation into the erotic, statuary and gnostic types. As Pierre Hadot has shown very eloquently, Socrates embodies the first of these, Marcus Aurelius the second - and, if anyone were suitable to represent the third type alongside these, it would be Plotin, the master of logical ascents above the physical world. We are also indebted to Hadot for a clear reconstruction of the Socratic procedure as seduction in the service of the ideal: by feigning, with a responsible irony, love for his pupil, he gains the latter's love in return - and proceeds to direct it from his person to the insight as such. loO He himself can only love 'upwards', and wishes to teach this way of loving as the only truth- ful one. While the students train with the master, the master trains with the agathon. By conveying a love for the love for the absolute, he resembles - from a distance - certain psychoanalysts who seek to liberate their patients world-immanently to their insane love. Hence: 'Love your symptom as yourself',lOl and: 'Never retreat from its desire' (Lacan). The erotic imitatio philosophi could only be stimu- lated to the extent that the master represented a sufficiently impressive typos of philosophical life. In this sense, one could speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of performance - the death of Socrates wholly confirms this diagnosis. 102 Whereas modern aesthetic per- formance generally remains as self-referential as it is inconsequential, and scarcely encourages imitation,103 the classical form aims entirely for the exemplary. Nietzsche was still able to say that a master only takes himself seriously with regard to his pupils.
The contours of philosophical mimesis come to light even more clearly among the statuary philosophers, who largely identified them- selves with the Stoic movement - Seneca usually calls them simply 'our people'. They embody that type of practical philosophy in the ancient style which made the greatest impression on the public: the figure of the ascetic sage who, against the background of an ontol- ogy of world-divinity, works on equating the ability to live with the ability to die. It was in Stoicism, after all, that the metaphorical equation of philosophical concern for oneself and sculptural work on the inner statue enabled a veritable training consciousness to
287
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
only half in jest, a copyright on the intellectual progress pupil - he even tells him to his face: meum opus es, 'you are my work'. 10S Hence the pupil is doing nothing wrong in offering himself to the teacher as a 'great gift' (ingens munus). 106 At the same time, he reminds his student of the principle that teachers are not our masters, but leaders (non domini nostri sed duces). 107 The Stoic teachers hardly ever permit doubts as to the necessity of studying with a master, even though one can feel the beginnings of the idea of internalizing the master principle clearly within reach. log This could be taken up by more modern schools, which declared the external master merely a temporary augmenter of
the inner one.
The Sophist as Universally Able
It may seem bewildering to conclude this summary overview of trainer figures in the field of the elan of impossibility with that of the Sophist. This confusion is easily removed as soon as one calls to mind that the Sophists, going on their achievements and their own self-image, were by no means simply the intellectual lightweights portrayed in the Platonic counter-propaganda. If one leaves aside the caricatures, it transpires that sophistry, in its essence, was an artistry of knowledge - one could even sayan artistic doctrine of knowing everything and being capable of anything, without which the attractiveness of the philosophical life form in antiquity could not be so readily explained. As contradictory as it might sound: by seeking to make the impossible teachable - far beyond the Socratic-Platonic promise to capture virtue (arete) within a school framework - it produced, as far as Western tradition is concerned, the first comprehensive science of training in the narrower sense of the word. It did this by consistently relating the processual side of upbringing (paideia) and tuition (didaskalia) to the form of training (dskesis and melete). It thus pointed energetically to a principle of progress: the gradualness of increases in achievement, as well as the imperceptible yet effective growth into the more improb- able habitus. Because they viewed learning more as being shaped through interaction and repetitive practice than an active mental grasping of the material, the Sophists were probably the first to place an emphasis on early education in order to ensure the naturalization of the improbable from childhood onwards.
All ability is thus trapped in a circle of diligence: one only does 288
MASTER GAJvlES
what one is one
repeats. In this analysis, - that one
towards an active formation of habit - the agent of increase in the praxis of repetition, namely the only recently discovered network of neuro-rhetorical rules, remains unacknowledged, and is only drawn upon implicitly. For the time being, all didactics is summed up by the admonition: 'Practise, practise, practise! ' - a slogan whose echo one still hears in Lenin's 'learn, learn and learn again', and to which even Rodin's sublime toujours travailler responds from afar. Sophist theory can therefore only constitute a practising praxis of think- ing and imagining. The paradigm of an ability wholly embedded in constant practice is the mother tongue, which we could not master if we had not always been in a seemingly obvious and natural, but in truth quite miraculous circle of ability and application, practice and improvement. This can serve to demonstrate the miracle that is intended to become the school subject: everyone has always spoken in some way or other, but only the Sophist makes an art of his speech like no other - about everything, in every situation, always well and mostly victoriously. That is why it is necessary to climb, with the right teacher, from within the mother tongue to the all-encompassing tongue.
The nub of the Sophist learning model is demonstrated in the Sophist's leap from language competency to general life competency, even applied omniscience. Through the constant company of an artist of ability, the speaking and living master of his school, who knows everything because he speaks about everything, and can in fact do anything that belongs to the higher ability to live, the practising of universal ability increasingly rubs off on the adept, until he too is ready to enter public life as a pan-technically shaped individual who knows everything and can do anything. The things that cannot be anticipated by practice alone, the situative imponderabilities, are heard by the true man of skill in the spirit of the moment (kairos), and even this balancing on the tip of the favourable moment can, within limits, be trained.
In its own way, then, Sophistic education goes beyond the physical - its concept of 'metaphysics' is unmistakably a form of artistry. Sophistic artistry formulates the existential antithesis of helpless- ness. The cultivation of never-helpless individuals is the goal of all such paideia. Nothing comes closer to the practical ideal of the polis citizen, and even more the polis politician, than the image of a human who is always in training and knows how to help themselves in any situation. This is why, if we look closely, we always enjoy watching
289
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
news
and same reason, wen-built effectively
delivered speech always concerns us. It reminds us of the humanly possible in the closest proximity. While the untrained human falls silent in their lack of means, the Sophistic teacher shows the trained adept how to find the words to overcome suffering due to amechania, lack of means and helplessness, in any situation. 109
As much as this education places the emphasis on gradual growth into artistic superiority to all challenges, it is equally a performative, indeed a theatrical matter. Nowhere is this clearer than in an anec- dote about Gorgias: one day he came to the theatre in Athens, which was fully booked, ready to improvise a random speech, and boldly called out to the audience: 'Name any subject! ' (probdllete). l1o To understand the meaning of this appearance, one must realize that Gorgias acted very self-confidently, but in no way inappropriately, as he was genuinely willing and able to give a sample of his pan-sophical and pan-rhetorical skill in any given situation. It was with a similar gesture that until the end of the eighteenth century, some pianists would appear and elaborate spontaneous dissertations in notes for their audiences on random 'themes', like sophists at the piano - in this sense, the young Mozart was one of the great sophists in music history, albeit one who largely called out his own themes, assum- ing he did not leave this to the librettist. Franz Liszt too, the inven- tor of the solo piano recital (1839), was still wont to improvise on spontaneously chosen themes before a large audience. For the piano sophists, the nature of their profession and the manner of its exercise meant that all learning had to be wholly embedded in the praxis of practice. l1 1 As far as the magic of the pan-sophical and pan-technic habitus cultivated by the Sophists is concerned, it extended very much further than one would think after Plato's defensive battles against the challenge of their position. It was Aristotle, no less, who did the Sophists' pretensions the honour of taking their aim of saying some- thing about everything at face value - in this sense, he was more an imitator of Gorgias than Plato. He paid tribute to his own teacher by replacing the pan-rhetorical habitus by the pan-epistemic one.
I shall conclude these observations by noting that the Sophistic idea of universal ability experienced an unexpected resurrection in the twen- tieth century - in the form of the deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida. This, in its basic procedure, is nothing other than a reinstate- ment of sophistic omniscience in the form of omni-commentary or immanent omni-refutation. As we know, the key to the Sophistic art
290
MASTER GAMES
m
speaker forge
entire theory, and subsequently employing the technique of rebuttal (antilegein) - this, as Plato showed, was also the method of Socrates. Antilegein starts from the foundation of knowing-equally-well - which is already secured through the other's exposition, though often only borrowed from it - and directly ascends to the level of knowing- better. This is always simple to attain if one considers how easily one can prove the inevitable existence of weak points in the first text; such passages can be found almost effortlessly, even in the discourses of the masters, by recalling the selection that underlies every decisive thesis. It seems that Gorgias, the all-knowing, and Socrates, the all- not-knowing, were reunited in Derrida to launch a neo-acrobatic form of sophistic knowledge art, or a philosophistical sophism that required constant practice and existed only in practice. It was as good as certain that a new academic reaction would resist this.
The Profane Trainer: The Man Who Wants Me to Want
It is only a short way from the figure of the noble sophist - which, for the reasons detailed above, I wanted to place closer to the spiritual-artistic teachers than the pragmatic ones - to the second group of trainers. I will speak briefly here of such teachers who concern themselves with passing on more specialized techniques and praxis-related complexes of abilities. It is an obvious choice to begin with the athletic trainer, as this embodies the most striking figure in the field of technically transmittable improbability. Like every trainer, the athletic one has a supportive procedure best described as the tech- nique of interlocking motivation. While every athlete has a decent portion of will to success of their own accord, it is nonetheless the trainer's duty to implant in this will a second will - their own, which heightens the first and helps it to rise above its crises. Through the alteration of the willing will by such a willed will, the athlete can be carried to heights of achievement that could never have been reached without the interlocking of the two wills. Athletism, then, is the original practice field of harnessed spontaneity that later - in a mono- theistic context - bore such strange fruit as the scholastic discussions on free or unfree will (de libero vel servo arbitrio). This problem was solved on the sports field long before philosophers entangled them- selves in it. Theologians who, seeking to penetrate the mystery of the contradiction between human freedom and divine omnipotence, teach
with a an speech, even an
291
EXAGGERA TlON PROCEDURES
want wants us to want, no longer in doing so, they a successor to the athletic trainer. The definition of the trainer is that they want the athlete to want what they, the trainer, want for them. 112 Needless to say, the athlete is meant to want something that is not entirely
impossible, but fairly improbable: an unbroken series of victories. 113
The Master Craftsman and the Two Natures of the Work of Art
The second type in the pragmatic field is embodied by the crafts- man, or, philosophically put, one in command of a professional- everyday teehne. With aptitudes of this type, one no longer sees once they have been routinized and trivialized (and on Greek soil, even 'Philistinized') that every single one of them came from a slow, cumu- lative revolt against helplessness, a quiet rebellion against the forlorn- ness, lack of means and lack of cunning for which the Greeks coined the profound word and spirit name Amechania - absence of meehane, lack of tricks and true, of leverage and tools. In this sense, all crafts- manship constitutes a collective and anonymous counterpart to one of the twelve labours of Hercules, these pan-technic acts of heroism whose unmistakable purpose was to prove that it is in man's nature - or a demigod's, in this case - to master seemingly insurmountable tasks. Whoever has no interest in craftsmen should therefore be equally silent about heroes. From the perspective of the ability to do something, heroes, craftsmen and finally also politicians belong much closer together than the Old European doctrines of action, which were usually aristocratically inclined, were able to recognize - even Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1957/8), admirable in all other respects, paid far too great a tribute to traditional distortions by pushing the activity of making, let alone of mere working, rather grossly into the second and third positions, far behind action, that is to say the political behaviour of humans.
In the light of this, it had to be considered not merely a great aca- demic, but in fact intellectual-historical deed when Richard Sennett recently attempted to liberate the crafts from the disdain they were shown by philosophical theory, and restore to these fundamental, yet unnoticed factors their due rank among the phenomena of the vita aetiva. 114 The principle of craft is based on the coincidence of production and practice - finally recognizing this again is what makes Sennett's venture on activity-theoretical terrain so significant.
292
MASTER GAMES
eo ipso
its lack of originality. a presupposes
one can give repetition, much maligned in modernity, a new mark of honour. Anyone who attempts this must prove the reconcilability of the repetitive-mechanical and the personal-spontaneous - an under- taking that leads directly to a praise of individually embodied memo- ries, and thus what one could, quoting Nietzsche, call 'incorporation' [Einverleibung], or, invoking Ravaisson, the system of acquired abilities.
Anyone who remembers the curriculum of the older craft profes- sions knows that no one is born a master. According to this cur- riculum, an apprentice had to be initiated into the techniques of his profession for at least seven years before he could take the final examination. After this, the journeyman perfected his art for another five to ten years, and only after twelve to eighteen years of teaching and practising could he consider the production of his final master- piece. According to an old rule of thumb, at least ten thousand hours of practising 'praxis' are required to become a decent craftsman or a reasonable musician;115 if one includes higher levels of mastery, one can safely double or even triple that number. Until recently, what we call 'genius' merely referred to cases in which these average practice times were spectacularly shortened - recall musical child prodigies: the music history of the last three centuries would be barely conceiv- able without them. In the end, a genius-aesthetic plague befell entire populations of artists who were anything but Wunderkinder, yet wanted to push this shortening as far as the complete omission of practice.
The phenomenon of craftsmanly mastery is of paradigmatic signifi- cance for an understanding of both the ancient and the modern vita activa, as it marks the beginning of the process whereby the artistic mirabile became commonplace. Whether the craft is ship-building - a discipline Plato enjoys weaving into his discussion of the nature of techne - surgery, pottery or goldsmithery (Sennett, as a critic of the modern fragmentation of abilities and demoralization of mere job work, is especially fond of the last of these116), the respective crafts- men are producers of artifices that overstep the circle of natural things in varyingly conspicuous ways. Because of their standardized, serial and everyday character, these works of 'art' have mostly ceased to be an object of admiration, though that does not stop their production from requiring a substantial amount of practice, experience, care and vigilance. This activity in the field of an anonymized and degraded artificiality provides the ideal conditions for a type of production
293
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
on
tion. It stimulates a in agent
and expands their competence to perform this very work to the same extent that they immerse themselves in the production of the object or effect. 1 17
This explains why every conscientiously performed work of crafts- manship can be of spiritual surplus value. When, in the European cities of the late Middle Ages, a massive wave of lay religiosity devel- oped that would culminate in the devotio moderna of the fourteenth century and the Reformation of the early sixteenth century, this was scarcely connected to the supposed affinity between capitalism and Protestantism of which Max Weber had made too much in his well- known study, and far more to the blatant analogies between monastic exercises and those found in the workshops. The practising work of the crafts - the Parisian Livre des metiers listed over one hundred and fifty guild-based artisan 'professions' as early as 1268118 - had to produce a type of personality that would become increasingly aware of its potential spiritual equality with professional clerics. Just as ora et [abora had long been the rule for most monks, the more up-to-date maxim labora et ora presented itself urgently to the secular brothers of artisanallife. There are also many sources documenting direct moves of individual craftsmen from monastic workshops to urban ones, meaning that the transfer of the spiritual habitus - the self-moulding of the actor in regular, vigilant activity - to the larger artisanal milieu could even take place by the shortest route on occasion. In this sense, the workshops are not simply the places where pure 'equipment' [Zeug] is called into existence; they are at once plantations for a form of subjectivity suspended between production and contemplation, mints for self-assuredly pious singularities. Occasionally this spark flies back into the religious field, as with the British Methodists, who applied the craft of devout enthusiasm to their own psyche. ll9
From here, it is only a short way to the secession of the arts from the crafts - that most activity-theoretically relevant spectacle of the Modern Age before the onset of the one even greater drama: the crys- tallization of modern 'labour as such, labour sans phrase',120 the labour without qualities in which Marx found the systemic definition of the proletarian condition as an illusion-free self-sale of the univer- sally available 'commodity of labour power'. 121 Like all secessions, this one too serves the purpose of a heightened subjectification, in this case the boosting of the craftsman's ability to that of the artist. What distinguishes art from craftsmanship is its resolve to display the ability to art as such in the piece of work (opus). Sennett illustrates
294
MASTER
Benvenuto
Saiiera, 1540-3), which he crafted for Francis I in over three years of work. Such objects no longer tolerate everyday use; they force the user to yield to the compulsion to admire that is fashioned into them.
It was only after protracted dogmatic quarrelling that the two natures of the work of art were laid down with the appropriate clarity: wholly craft or wholly mirabile. With the one side each work remains the creation of the profession through and through, and with the other it testifies to the irruption of the supra-artisanal into the workshop. The two natures exist unmixed alongside each other and are recognized through different receptive capacities. All the upgrad- ings of both the master status and the concept of the masterpiece that have animated discussions about art and artists since the Renaissance are connected to this. Just as art means the re-conquest of the wonder- ful from the position of the workshops, the artist's existence implies restoring the creative, almost godly competency within the workshop - with the side effect that for almost half a millennium, Europeans have been subject to a constant inner mission by theologians of crea- tivity and their critical deacons, though also a slightly later Arian122 or humanistic-materialistic counter-mission whose message is that even the greatest works of art are no more than higher products - that is to say, simulations of something higher - and even the greatest artists are only human.
Professors, Teachers, Writers
I shall conclude this overview with a summary description of the three remaining types of pragmatic teaching licence: the university profes- sors, the teachers at the primary and secondary schools of modern nations, and finally Enlightenment writers and politico-culturally committed journalists. From a historical perspective, these authorized teachers and speakers are largely involved in a drama that could be described as the progressive self-abolition of the privilege of educa- tion, or the democratization of the elites. In a process drawn out over several centuries, many of them - never without opposing tendencies complicating and deflecting the course of the development - devoted themselves increasingly explicitly to the aim of rendering the trainer obsolete through the training. They reinforce the depersonalizing tendency of toughening exercises by shifting the emphasis from the person of the teacher to the learning field (the faculty, the school, the
295
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
most
easier to identify retrospectively as early as Gutenberg's time, even in the age of manuscripts.
If one looks back at the figure of the Old European professor, one immediately notices that he was never meant to be, nor ever wanted to be, more than a character mask of his subject, and how little he was initially expected to make any original contribution to the advancement of his science. Until recently, an original professor was a contradiction in terms - and still is today, essentially, except that the contradictions now have slightly better living conditions, especially in the humanities, where teachers are allowed to speak not only professorially, but also (within limits) enthusiastically and expressively. The name 'professor' already indicates the vocation to reproduce and pass on whatever the state of the art required, and if the bearer of such a title received an honorarium from the state, it was in acknowledgement of the energetic unoriginality with which he was able to teach his subject as a whole. Professors belong to an economy of ordinated secular knowledge in which the professorial chair is strictly superior to its holder, just as, at the next highest level, the priority of the faculty over the chair is never in doubt. The faculty is the impersonal self of a discipline, whereas the individual professors act de facto and de jure as mere personifications of a teaching and learning process that has long been supra-personally institutionalized. If the chairholders can look back on qualification processes of twenty to thirty years, they constitute the average in their discipline. In their totality they form a collective subject that, at the start of the Modern Age, was given - not without reason - the title res publica litteraria, the scholars' republic. 123 To explain the nature of its task, one would first have to point to the expanded reproduction of cognitive capitals with which academic life concerns itself. One would perhaps have to emphasize even more that this res publica ultimately constituted a crypto-Platonic political body: the replacement of the simple pyramid of the 'philosophers' kingdom' with the complex polyhedron of the 'philosophers' republic'. The former sought to guide a city that would have been governable via a completed science of principles against the background of a static nature; the latter is based on the self- administration of a polity exposed, both in terms of principles and nature, to an unforeseeable dynamization.
If one is prepared to understand the faculty, the university and the scholars' republic as collectivizations, anonymizations and perfections of the master function - and this means judging the 'Enlightenment'
296
phenomenon
MASTER GAMES
one can trainer
namely writers and journalists. They carry toughening process on which the res publica of the knowing is based to the respective wider levels - first into the classrooms, from which tomortow's literate indi- viduals capable of judgement and action will emerge, and then into the public media that serve the communication among today's society of the knowing. From this perspective, the teachers are character masks of the school system, just as journalists are personifications of the press - so they too, if they wanted to see themselves in that way, would serve a positive dynamic of collectivization that sought to expand a particular quality to the level of 'society' as a whole, a quality long believed to be afforded only to the few: that of mastery, be it the solving of a factual problem or the art of living as such. But as long as the collectivization of mastery - in philosophical terms, the self-determination of 'society' (as if 'society' could possess a self) - does not take place, individuals would do well to continue practising as if they were the first who will reach the goal.
297
CHANGE OF TRAINER AND
REVOLUTION
On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns
The Science of Reversal
To conclude this investigation into the structure of orthodox retreats to the practising and artistically heightened life, I shall cast a brief glance at a phenomenon without which the ascetic radicalisms discussed here would remain a mystery: I mean those moments of existential concentration, self-collection and reversal that, from a religion-historical perspective, one calls conversions. It should be clear by now that these certainly cannot be considered merely 'reli- gious' events. Rather, they belong to the overall inventory of ascetic behaviour from the recessive position - that is to say from the stance that develops in response to the absolute imperative. They take on a 'religious' semblance through the combination of practising or radical-ethical behaviour with the language games of the sacrifice, regardless of whether one performs these outwardly or inwardly. Sacrifices of the first kind have always been made with blood and fire, and those of the second kind as the renunciation of the will and transformation of desires. 124 While sacrificial thinking supplies the symbolic code for operations of violent exchange, the practising life as such provides the foundation for all civilizations, especially those based on internalized forms of sacrifice.
In the following, I shall cast a second glance at the processes that I have described in terms of secession and recession, detachment from the social environment and withdrawal into oneself. Dealing more closely with the phenomena, it now transpires that these categories are not adequate for identifying the first ethical movement. The spokesmen of the great ascetic caesura were never content to label their behaviour
298
TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
as mere as a retreat
or an evasion of real, even though own statements intent do not lack such turns of phrase - recall such widespread distancing metaphors as flight from the world (fuga mundi), flight from the times (fuga saeculi), passionlessness (apdtheia), detachment (vairagya) or refuge in the Dharma path. The last great symbol of distance of this type is the 'Angel of History' in Walter Benjamin's interpretation, which backs away step by step from the flood of disasters, its eyes fixed in disbelief on the world scene. The concern of the most resolute secessionaries is not simply a fascinated retreat from a reality that no longer invites participation, but rather a complete reversal - a turn away from the superficially manifest, which means a turn towards something that is better, true and real on a higher level.
What I would like to sketch here cannot be more than a small prelimi- nary study towards the general science of reversal that was insepara- bly bound to the older radicalisms of the practising life. Only through this doctrine of philosophical and ascetic conversion do secessionary and recessive operations gain an object and a direction, and it is no secret that even modern revolutionary teachings still constitute the more distant derivatives of the oldest statements on beneficial turns and salvatory changes of direction. This means that there is a move- ment of all movements without which the concept of truth, according to this tradition of thought, cannot be adequately conceived. 125
This movement, which is not only retreat but also turning, was first accounted for in the ancient occidental tradition by Plato. In his account, the critical movement initially appears as a purely cognitive act meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out, a change of sight from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place 'without turning the whole body' (holo to somati). 126 This marks the first explicit reference to the motif of the integral turn. Analogously, the same faculty must 'be wheeled round, in company with the entire soul' (hole te psyche), from seeing to becoming, until one has learned to pay attention only to the eternally existent, and to prefer and endure the brightest part (phanotaton) thereof: the sun of good. Needless to say, the 'turned' soul takes the whole human being with it in its subtle movement. This redirection of sight and existence must not occur by chance and merely once, however, but be developed into a veritable 'art of turning around' (techne periagoges), or an asceticism of complete existential reversal. This is based on the assumption that those to be turned have their full cognitive apparatus, but that this is
299
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
mostly III a
posture. philosopher this from own experi-
ence, for has discovered the cave's exit. He understands what it means to have turned himself around and ventured outside. What he has achieved should not, he feels, be impossible for his fellow humans. Never is he, the first orthopaedist of the spirit, more gener- ous and more of a stranger to the world than when, as here, he pro- jects his own character onto others.
All Education Is Conversion
The implications of these seemingly harmless reflections are literally monstrous: they constitute no less than the first sketch for a doc- trine of subversion which holds that pedagogy more platonico must virtually be defined as an integral science of revolution. The licence to teach in this field is acquired thus: an individual pioneer of the new way of seeing escapes from the collective cave into the open, and subsequently - initially with inevitable reluctance, overcoming himself - feels ready to descend once more to the wrongly directed in the shadow cinema and explain to them how to access these lib- erations. In this sense, Platonic pedagogy is a pure art of conversion - revolutionary orthopaedics. Purely because the philosopher is already a 'convert', one who has been turned around and the first of his kind, can he make it his task to pass on the turn to others. If he simply remained enlightened on his own behalf, he could bask in his private happiness; if he is seized by concern for the state, however, he must abandon privatism and seek to share his illumination with the many.
Pierre Hadot calmly encapsulates the surplus flowing from radical reversal: 'All education is conversion. '127 One must add: all conver- sion is subversion. In the instruction to this movement lies an inex- haustible 'revolutionary' potential, at least as long as it does not content itself with individual reversal. At the start, after all- because of the strict parallelism between the psyche and the polis - it always had to be concerned with the universalization of turning, and sought to include virtually all members of the commune it meant to reform in the other way of living. It was only the later philosophical schools - the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists - that made private tuition a central concern. For them it became a sign of wisdom to content oneself with the conversion of individuals and give up on the incorrigible many - hence their belief that there is no wisdom
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no certain consent 'cruelty life'. abandoned plan to reform souls and the state at once - not only because they no longer wanted to believe in the parallelism between the two factors, but also because they began to recognize in the state that cold monster which, they were
convinced, could not possibly be the valid analogue of the soul. There were good reasons for the timing of the individualistic retreat from Plato's over-enthusiasm, from this excess of missionary zeal that denizens of the Modern Age would term 'utopian'. The doctrine of periagoge, the turning around of the soul (which was later often combined with the term epistrophe), was in fact the first explicit version of the absolute imperative 'You must change your life! ', framed in the exhortation to turn one's entire being towards the spir- itual side. This imperative was first formulated in a holistic variation that led to numerous severe misunderstandings. In its deep structure, the Platonic doctrine of learning by the sun of truth had remained an occulted sacrificial theory - related in this respect to the ascetic systems appearing in Asia at the same time - as the turning around of the soul could ultimately only be defined as a relinquishment of the particular in favour of the general. 128 The consequence was that this version of the absolute imperative was affected by two profoundly misconstruable factors. The first was the verb, in that 'change' here meant something along the lines of 'sacrifice oneself to the general', and the second lay in the possessive pronoun, in that the adepts were secretly dispossessed of 'their' lives, which were instead handed over to the true whole that was yet to he created. You are in the world for the sake of the whole, not vice versa - this is the correspond- ing admonition in Plato's Nomoi. 'We do not belong to ourselves', we are still told today in traditions of this type. This is the origin of anthropotechnic tendencies that pervert the absolute imperative by reading 'life' instead of 'your life' - though here, on the terrain of antiquity, the word 'life' admittedly has more political than bioscien- tific implications. Compared to this, the apolitical spiritual systems of late antiquity were absolutely right to insist that individuals should be taken seriously as individuals. Only for that reason had they been concerned to initiate them into the craft of life, concern for oneself, lege artis. Like an ancient anticipation of the modern restriction of the right to arrest (the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act of 1679), they undo the individual's helplessness before the whole and assert its inalienable claim to a self-determined life, even if, as prisoners of reality, they are forced to accept certain curtailments of their right to
freedom.
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followers put the idea of universal conversion back on the agenda of modernity, with the known consequences - predominantly bloody consequences that, taken as a whole, go back to the amalgamation of the Graeco-Germanic philosophy of liberation and the ideas of the French Revolution. I will show in chapter 11 how his amalgam led to an anthropotechnics that was intended to help produce the New Human Being, this time as the product of a political conversion that did not rule out the rebuilding of the body - and still, questionably enough, in line with holistic concepts of 'society', where it is only ever a small step from the over-elevation of the whole to the sacrifice of the part.
The Catastrophe Before Damascus
In the meantime, the motif of reversal - which had initially been primarily the domain of political theory and the philosophical art of living - had been monopolized by religious interpretations. Their paradigm was the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, com- mented upon countless times. There are two accounts of this defining moment in the Acts of the Apostles: once in autobiographical form as part of Paul's defence speech before the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 22), and once in the third person (Acts 9).
Both versions emphasize that Paul was 'turned around' through the event on the road to Damascus, transformed from a persecutor of Christians to an envoy of Christianity. In the personalized version, the story is as follows:
'About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, "Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me? "
'''Who are you, Lord? " I asked.
"'1 am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting," he replied. My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me.
'''What shall I do, Lord? " I asked.
'''Get up," the Lord said, "and go into Damascus. There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do. '" (Acts 22:6-10)
The third-person account of the same events, which is located near the beginning of the acta apostolorum, contains only one substantial variation: it emphasizes that the companions stood by speechless because they heard the voice, but saw no one (Acts 9:7).
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IS even we are light years away Platonic reflections on the
of the soul and its guidance from the cave of collective sensory illu- sions. There is no reference to the concerns of Greek rationalism or the turn towards the sun of truth. The light that dazzles the zealot on the road to Damascus is a mixture of midday demon and hallucina- tion. The story is already set firmly on the terrain of a magical concep- tion of the world (Spengler even assigned it to the atmospheric space of the 'Arabian' cultural soul) whose mood is defined by apocalyptic expectation, salvation panic and a miracle-hungry supra-naturalistic hermeneutics. Most of all, it displays the spirit of a zealotry that is ready to leave for any destination, and which barely seems to care whether it heats up in one direction or another. Placed against the background of the philosophical concept of conversio or epistrophe, Paul's experience is by no means a conversion, which would have completely changed his personal habitus. Nor was it for a moment a realization, but rather the encounter with a divine voice that has no qualms about manifesting itself in this world. Taken as a whole, what happened to Paul is no more than the 'reprogramming' of a zealot in the precise sense of the world. The term is justified because the 'oper- ating system' of Paul's personality could continue to be used more or less unchanged after the reversal, but now freed up for an extraordi- nary theological creativity.
The conversion of Paul therefore belongs in an entirely different category of 'turnings' that display an apostolic-zealotic character, not an ethical-'revolutionary' one. The theological tradition provides the term metdnoia for this, whose general tendency is best formulated as 'change of heart', with 'penitence' as the heightened Christian form. 129 From a psychodynamic perspective, the term belongs in the force field of the inner collection that seems appropriate before or after great events - whether after a personal or political defeat that forces a re-evaluation of one's decorum, one's guiding maxims in life,13° or in anticipation of an imminent event that is apocalyptically foreshadowed. Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon, in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end. It is no coincidence that the era of the European Reformation, which was swarming with people who wanted to get serious, was another heyday of the dark belief in astral influence and the fear of end times. The modus oper- at1di of metanoia is not the turning around of the personality, but rather the collection and heeding of the long-known, which, for lack of an immediate occasion, one had previously avoided examining in
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PROCEDURES
full depth.
Jewish dissidents
ample opportunity to understand that they essentially had the more coherent interpretation of the tradition already, and that they were the ones who had given the messianic element of Jewish doctrine the most exciting of all possible readings.
What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, then, was a meta- noetic episode that led to a reorganization of consciousness from the perspective of a newly formed centre of the highest conviction. This constitutes a process that William James, in the chapters devoted to 'conversions' in his classic Gifford Lectures of 1901 ('The Varieties of Religious Experience'), sought to interpret using a suggestive general schema: in the subliminal consciousness of the subject, a new epicen- tric personality core prepares itself and merges with the hot spot of operative self-awareness at an opportune moment, bringing about an intense transformative experience. 131 The application of this model to the case of Paul immediately yields a consistent picture; in practice- theoretical terms, he had already 'trained with the opponent' for some time. His exercises in hostility towards the Jesuans had put him in suf- ficient form to cross over to the position of his previous adversary at the right moment. He had long formed a clear, albeit still unwelcome idea of this adversary's strengths on the pre-conscious level. In this context, it seems significant that in the 'autobiographical' version of the scene on the road to Damascus, he already addresses the speaker who calls him from above as 'Lord' (kyrie), even before he has identi- fied himself as the Jesus he had been persecuting. Everything would suggest that his second person was waiting for this interjection.
From this point of view, Paul was not a convert, let alone a 'revo- lutionary', as is claimed in recent neo-Jacobin interpretations of the Pauline phenomenon,132 but rather an opportunist - in the sense of Machiavelli's theory of opportunity - who, in spite of himself, had long since recognized the high spiritual chances of the new doctrine he had initially fought. He had understood, at first intuitively and later explicitly, that only a messiah who genuinely came could help the politically hopeless and intellectually stagnating Judaism of his time to escape from its rut. Naturally he had never remotely intended to found or set in motion 'universalism', or even a subjective varia- tion thereof; he simply applied himself to reformatting an elect group (much like the professional revolutionary of the Leninist cast, who were always more elitist exterminists than inclusion-friendly univer- salists, and like the no-longer-numerous successors of Robespierre in France). It is characteristic of 'conversions' of this type that they
304
pursumg Jesuan sect, would have had
OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
occur more t o an pre-consciously recognized a completely new doctrine - James quotes extensively from the accounts of heavy drinkers who, through a form of religious self-collection (usually in a Protestant environment with strong conversion stereotypes), had managed to ally themselves with their existing, but previously powerless better judgement and thus distance themselves from their addiction.
There Is No Conversion: The Augustinian Paradigm
In this context we have an opportunity to re-evaluate Oswald Spengler's strong thesis that essentially, conversions do not exist - only re-occupations of vacant positions in the fixed structures of a culture's field of options. 133 The basal soul atmosphere of an advanced-civilized complex remains identical through all superficial changes of confession, he argues, and what seems like a U-turn from the outside can, in reality, never be more than an ultimately arbitrary variation (albeit occasionally a far-reaching one for present and future generations) within a clearly demarcated space of possibility. Hence in spiritual matters too, the saying applies: plus (4 change, plus c'est la meme chose.
The suggestiveness of this claim can best be explained using the example of the second conversion hero in Christian tradition, Aurelius Augustinus, who, in his Confessions, famously stylized the entire story of his youth as a protracted hesitation before his 'con- version' in 386. In his case, Spengler's theorem seems supremely plausible. One can easily use his life story - like those of countless analogous confession-changers and serious-getters - to show that no trace of a 'conversion' ever took place in the deep structure of his personality. Rather, within an age-old orientation towards the world above, he simply changed addresses, or the Great Other, the transcendent trainer, several times - from Manichaeism to Platonism, from Platonism to philosophical Christianity, from philosophical Christianity to a theocentrically darkened cult of submission. He was no anomaly in this; as early as the second century AD, 'conversions' to philosophy had taken place among the educated members of the Roman ecumenical community, and these were organically continued in adoptions of Christianity - in the case of Justin the Martyr, for example, the Catholic patron saint of philosophers.
At no point in these multiple rebuildings of his edifice of convic- tions did Augustine go through a complete epistrophe; he simply
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
m beginnings bit by he attained a personally con- densed and completely embodiable form of ascetic rejection of 'this world'. Nor did the famous 'take up and read' [toile lege] contain any new discovery, merely a reminder of familiar motifs that had ripened within his 'epicentric personality' for the inner takeover. Thus, in ideal-typical purity, he embodied the qualities of the 'sick soul' or the depressively 'divided self', of which William James showed how, not infrequently, it also achieves the collection of its powers in a gradual
or sudden unification without any religious turn. 134 In psychological terms, what converts have often described as the effect of grace mani- fests itself above all as a personal energy gain as a result of increased integration. Such integration takes place when the entire system of mental drives is subordinated to a unified perspective of purpose. It is due to this effect that all partial forces now work together under the direction of a previously latent new centre of conviction. Such a 'united' subject experiences itself as simultaneously called-upon and moved: the movebo effect135 manifests itself in it with twice the strength. In the case of Augustine, the 'unification' seemed to have been reached at the moment when he achieved the concentra- tion of all partial energies in the gesture of Christian-Platonic self- abandonment. The candidate's long hesitation, furthermore, proves that during his time, a complete conversion to Christianity had to be undertaken as an entrance into a training camp surrounded by ascetic horrors, the Byzantine asketeria or the Western monasterium. It was thus never purely a matter of the 'faith' so often invoked by Paul, but rather the total subordination of the person to the harsh practice law of the imitatio with fatal results - or the monastic metaphorization thereof. It seems only consistent, then, if the initial eutonic balance
between philosophy and religion in Augustine's early writings gave way in time to his bleaker late theology.
The originality of Augustine's 'conversion' is only evident in the determination with which the convert managed to elevate his trans- formation to the exemplary level. His Confessions are the first model of Christian performance literature - the transformation of a life story into a lesson in grace. What helped Augustine most to carry out this performative turn was his Christian radicalization of the Platonic doctrine of the psyche's original malposition. In Augustine's vision, what Plato had described merely as the factual fixation of those trapped in the cave on the shadow play on the cave walls - in neutral terms: the priority of empirically oriented perception over reflective insight among worldlings - is immediately declared a consequence of
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND
sm: a creature turned away creator, to origin. From that point on, sinful egotism governs all actions, as life in perversion always means idolizing the things one should be using (sensual and worldly things) and using the things one should honour (spiritual and godly things). 136 The perverted creature, according to Augustine, cannot perform the complementary reversal to undo the resulting metaphysical damage by its own strength - it would remain incur- ably fixed in its fallen position, its abandonment of origin, if God Himself did not accommodate it in the person of Christ and enable its re-converSlOn.
Spengler was certainly exaggerating when he rejected the possibil- ity of conversion within a given culture out of hand, but there were good reasons for his objection, as the vast majority of actual conver- sions take place not in the mode of an epistrophic total reversal, but of a transition to a more or less natural alternative; ultimately, a truly radical change only occurs upon taking the advanced-civilized path as such, which trains mortals for the high forms of vertical tension by injecting them with the madness of longing for the impossible.
Seneca defines the individual-revolutionary character of this turn late on, but clearly, when he declares: Desinamus quo voluimus velie! 'Let us cease wanting what we previously wanted! '137 The will to want differently sets in motion the permanently tense concern for the new, unaccustomed and improbable stance. One could say something similar about the doctrine of Epicurus, which, in its way, meant practising the break with the vulgar modus vivendi. Because wisdom implies emancipation from the mistaken faith in the predominance of Tyche or Fortuna, it aims for a radical departure from ordinary concerns: where there was fear of the gods, there shall now be fear- lessness. This already heralds the Enlightenment - the conversion of the spirit to a use of one's own life without religious intimidation. Religiously encoded conversions, on the other hand, usually only display the character of a switch to an alternative cult system with rearranged compulsions. This process can generally be imagined as a shallow operation - even the striking inversion figure 'Burn what you worshipped and worship what you burned' in no way makes the pro- cedure more inward; it merely formulates the directive to give Christ the ritual attentions previously reserved for Wotan, or whatever forest, wind and mountain gods one used to follow. With numerous other religiously coded conversions too, one observes most of all the metanoetic shifts of emphasis within a heavily prestructured field.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
one can conversio. From a distance,
Freudian maxim 'Where there was id, there shall be ego' reveals its membership in the group of metanoetic practices where the change of living habits is accompanied by a change of subject, that is to say a reallocation of the guiding figure to the place of the Great Other. Here the id corresponds typologically to the murky category of demonic possession, and the ego to monotheistic brightening.
Conversion as Change of Trainer: St Francis and Ignatius
From a practice-theoretical perspective, conversions of the meta- noetic type amount to a change of trainer, as the converts generally submit not only to an altered moral regime - and eo ipso a new Great Other - but also a new practice plan. The personality structure as such, however, is usually kept throughout the change. Thus the long- habitualized zealotry of Paul 'after Damascus' was reassigned from Pharisaic to Jesuan principles - and subsequently expanded with Christological supplements of his own making. Certainly it makes a difference whether one trains with Gamaliel, the rabbinical teacher, or with Jesus, the resurrected. One would be doing an injustice to the people's apostle if one reduced the opus Christi he set in motion exclusively to its zealotic element. In submitting to Christian doc- trine in the matter of love (agape or caritas), Paul had experienced a notable expansion of his personality. And the success story of Christianity would simply be unthinkable without Paul's stretching of the horizon of chosenness (which, as noted above, must not be confused with universalism).
The metanoetic forms of reversal would consistently prove the most far-reaching for the further development of Christianity as the most important practice field and habitus generator in the transitional space between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Alongside these, the real initiatic sacrament - baptism - remained a momentary and external matter. An effective remoulding of human beings does not depend on a singular gesture; it can only succeed as a result of lasting self-curatorial efforts. The interpretation of baptism as rebirth lends the act a symbolic depth that does not have any adequate correlate in terms of internalization.
The extent to which Christian metanoia amounts to a change of practice system and trainer figure is shown not least by the two
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
most popular conversion legends of the high Middle Ages and early Modern Age: those of St Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola. If one examines the turn of the young Francis, it was anything but a sudden leap into the Christian camp. In a certain sense, the youth had long been prepared for the later turn, whose immediate cause was the well-known conflict of authority with his father, since internalizing a robust form of knightly idealism and an elegant, quasi-Proven~al rhetoric of courtly love - commentators often refer in this context to his mother's French descent. It was when Francis seemingly turned 'against his own origins' in his spectacular renunciation of paternal authority that he began to consolidate them all the more. In the symbolic area, it was only a small step from the noble dames of trou- badour poetry to the 'Lady Poverty' whom he now served, and simi- larly, the elegant upper-class Platonism underlying the courtly cult of ladies and honour (which had visibly affected the middle classes of Assisi) was not far from the people's Platonism offered by late ancient and medieval Christianity.
Once again, the novelty lies purely in the decision - in the focus on the one thing that collects individual power where 'there is need'. The young Francis was unmistakably seized by the zeitgeist: the Christianity of the early urban period was looking for a superstar. With the role of poverty's troubadour, he had found a position that allowed him to transpose the imitatio Christi into an allegory of courtly love. By learning to draw sweetness from bitterness, he gained leeway for the release of mental energy to compensate for the constant depression of the coming centuries: the growing scandal of involuntary poverty in an era that was increasingly devoting itself to wealth. By practising self-denial for the sake of Lady Poverty, he created surplus powers from the weakest point - albeit at a price that already made his contemporaries shudder. He paid this price in the form of a triumphant self-chastisement that would not rest until total imitation, the emulation of the crucified through the duplication of his wounds, had been achieved. Thomas of Celano put his finger on the critical point: 'Nothing else could spring up in that soil, since from the first that wonderful cross claimed it for its own. '138 For the imitator Christi, this inevitably meant that he must live no longer than his model: without the imperative of following the Lord even in the duration of his life, his deliberate self-attrition would have been inconceivable. The pantomime of his death shows how much he was still thinking in the traditional terms of the ascetic agon and Christian athletism:
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
his serious illness that was to an end with he had himself naked upon naked ground, so in that final hour when the enemy could still rage against him, he might wrestle naked with a naked enemy. He waited without fear for his triumph, and with his hands clasped he was grasp-
ing a crown ofjustice. 139
For Francis and his followers, the thought form of imitatio went so deep that the small congregation surrounding the dying man even cel- ebrated the Last Supper - coming dangerously dose to blasphemous parody. In this imaginative field, the reappearance of the deceased to some friars in a transfigured state was naturally a must: it was recog- nized that his person and that of Christ had merged into one and the same person - an indication that intense supra-naturalisms appear in the form of fields and develop in spaces of synchronously practised suggestibility.
The case of Ignatius of Loyola also shows all the hallmarks of a classic change of trainer under the sign of metanoia. Although these are already distant from the sacred expressionism of the perform- ance artist Francis, the conversion mechanism manifests itself here in strictly analogous forms. In keeping with the code of honour during that period, the structure of the young noble's personality was fully developed, and his horizon of ambition saturated with the popular concepts of knightly life and the lady cult. After the catastrophe of the battle of Pamplona in 1521, which left the thirty-year-old officer crip- pled and removed him from the ranks of the pretenders to worldly fame, he too was seized by the spirit of the age, which this time sug- gested an imitatio Christi in militant forms. Ignatius changed trainers, switching from Amadis of Gaul, the hero of the chivalric novel, to Christ - who now appears in the form of a divine general who can only be imitated by earthly elite troops.
I have discussed the unforeseeable consequences of the Ignatian turn for the further history of Catholic and more general forms of subjectification at greater length elsewhere. 140 They are inseparable from the modernization of practice - in this case, from the transfer- ence of the military training principle to the new roles of religion- political achievement, which were formed on the battlefields of the Counter-Reformation. What makes Loyola'S place in the history of subject techniques so exceptionally significant is that all earlier layers of autoplastic practice had successively been sedimented within it in complete clarity: what began with the drill of the Greek and Roman soldiers, and was continued by athletes and gladiators before
310
secrets in the existence
leading to the strongest surge in newer psychotechnic exercises. This time, however - corresponding to the humanistic milieu with its neo-rhetorical rupture - it was in the form of a theatre of the imagination in which the practising person, following strict instructions, convinces themselves of their own worthlessness and immeasurable guilt before the saviour. In their time, the Jesuit exer- cises, this autogenic training in contrition over thirty hard days and nights of utmost concentration, obviously formed the newest layer in the stratigram of Old European practice cultures, whose older and most ancient layers lead back to the beginnings of heroism and ath- leticism. Recent neuro-rhetorical research, incidentally, shows that the 'artificial' affects produced in exercises are physiologically indis- tinguishable from natural ones.
The almost instrumental grab of the Jesuit technique for the trust- ing psyche, which itself turned meditation into a training camp, explicitly heralded the beginning of what would later be called the 'Modern Age'. Its inhabitants developed into 'modern people' to the extent that they convinced themselves they had discovered the secret of self-determination in exchanging absolute dependence on God for human self-assertion. We will see that nothing could be further from the truth.
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III
The Exercises of the Moderns
For indeed this is the time above all ages that are past both to hope, and to attempt, greater things.
John Amos Comenius, A Reformation ofSchooles, 1642
PROSPECT
The Re-Secu/arization of the Withdrawn Subject
On the Power of the Slogan
'To hope, and to attempt, greater things':1 one of the strengths of the modern world is that it was never at a loss when it came to proclaiming slogans through the mouths of its protagonists by which participants in excessive crusades could identify one another. Now, two hundred years later, what the Florentine goldsmith and humanist Lorenzo Ghiberti said to his co-conspirators in the early fifteenth century, at the start of their argonautical journey to the shores of universal art - 'Men can do all things if they Will'2 - has almost become self-evident to the artistic and technical virtuosos, the modern people of skill, the entrepreneurs of their own lives, as well as the increasingly numerous prefects for the life of the others. Despite all periodically recurring cycles of historical discouragement and calls for self-reduction, the proud motto of the Modern Age would never be entirely forgotten; even the Soviet educators from the time of change around 1920 still repeated this revolutionary-optimistic thesis in every register, though perhaps adding the qualification that aside from the resolute will to act, the social conditions must also be given.
The great Comenius (1592-1670), founder of Baroque pedagogy and idea provider for the construction of modern large-scale learning machines, knew what it meant to undertake greater things after so many wasted centuries: grace is great, but technology applied to man is even greater; and election takes us a certain distance, but the new art of education takes us further. Where there had been the exception, there would now be the rule. Now was the time to apply the letter- press to young souls and print annual volumes of students who would emerge like prize specimens from the erratum-free human publishing
315
THE EXERCISES THE
no
,. ,r""'f'r as a typographaeum
a appara- tus that would populate the world with masterpieces of human print. He thus presented an idea that could be newly acknowledged by the media theorists of the late twentieth century - although these would speak less of the subject being printed in a press than of its mental for- matting. The early twentieth century revealed its concerns when Leon
Trotsky lectured in the style of the enthusing hardware ideologue:
Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society, man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product. 3
According to the revolutionary cult of science, completion could only take place in the mints of the New Human Being which the Soviet state was planning to create. The periods after Trotsky showed that work on the human being continued in quite different treatment centres. The semi-finished product man has its dangers that resist reprocessing, whether into educated man, the 'overman' or the New Human Being. But at least, since the end of the Second World War, the news has been all over town: 'Man has reached the point of treat- ing the human race as material. ,4
The New Zeitgeist: Experiment with Humans
The path to the age of production, which culminated in the pro- duction of the producer, began long before the twentieth century. Whenever there was progress along this route, it was announced with great pomp that humans were becoming 'accessible' to themselves. It seems that the effective centre of modern currentnesses consists in continuous reports on the growth of the radius of human availability to oneself and one's kind. Such novelties have always - below the level of general rejection stemming from their potentially disturb- ing nature - evoked affirmative and negative passions. Indeed, the appearance of anything truly new on this front was followed by apocalyptic declarations, most recently around the year 2000, when the decoding of the human genome was imminent. Tempus est, Comenius wrote on the wall in fiery letters in 1639: 'It is time' - this formula continues to determine agendas for the futurized world to this day. The most pressing item on these agendas is the systematic production of human beings who meet the highest standards of
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PROSPECT
- we are Europe, when the zeitgeists
the word Zeitgeist only entered modern German vocabulary around 1800). 'Anthropomorphism' - at the time, this still meant an unimpaired image of God. For the passionate reformatory theo- logian, it encompassed universal knowledge of the three great books of being: nature, the human soul and the Holy Scripture. s Humanity was now to go into serial production in order to populate every area of this continent - and later the planet - with individuals at the level of the humanly possible. Patience with the old inadequacies had come to an end: it was time for humans to cease being an outgrowth of moral coincidence. We, the meanwhile impatient self-sculptors and man-sculptors of the technological centuries, could no longer wait until some individual deigned to break with their conventional existence and create a heightened, exemplary life through metanoia, asceticism and study. In future, the young creatures in the human gardens of the Baroque state would be cultivated on high trellises to become well-formed specimens of their kind. 6
The new educators believed that they knew how to overhaul each individual's coincidental weariness of their previous life: the whole system of moulding humans was arranged metanoetically - indeed, the basic order of the 'pedagogical province' itself bespeaks the impulse to pre-empt the late remorse of individuals through the early training of all. This 'anthropogogics' reveals a naive perfectionism whose elan still fed the later Enlightenment. Here discipline is aligned with the quest for perfection, duty with voluntary agreement, and study with inner surplus. It is only a secondary concern to reflect on the necessity of facing the wilder outgrowths of humanity with the means of guarding and punishing?
It is high time to clear up a misunderstanding to which Foucault contributed: it is not in the prisons and places of oppressive super- vision but in the frequently strict schools and academies of the Modern Age, along with the craftsmen's workshops8 and artists' studios, that the main human orthopaedics of modernity is carried out - that is to say, the moulding of the young by the standards of Christian-humanist discipline. The real aim of the departure to the age of arts and technologies was to train ever new generations of virtuosos. Certainly, the disciplinary imperative shows its second face in the 'heterotopic' background inhabited by the droves of 'infamous humans' (in the age of absolutist population politics, they inevitably constitute a massive group) - and this face must be mentioned by anyone seeking to reconstruct the 'birth of the prison' from the spirit
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THE EXERCISES OF THE
to concept in to penitentiary, repressive and surveillance-state meanings on which Foucault placed such deliberately exaggerated emphasis in the writings of his middle period. 9
Anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with all phases of the production of the New Human Being, at any rate, must probe as far back as the seventeenth century, even to the turbulences of the Reformation - and further still, to their preludes in late medieval mysticism. Whoever wanted, like the young Gorky - clearly under Nietzsche's influence - to 'write "man" in capital letters' almost unknowingly joined a tradition that had begun with the recruits of Christ in the Egyptian desert monasteries and the Pauline communi- ties in Greece and Asia Minor, those pneumatic aggregations through which the Holy Spirit, supported by the exercises in crucifixion of the flesh, was meant to bring about a 'new creation'. 10
The early Christians began to transform their whole lives into an experiment in order to resemble the God-man: nos autem in experi- mentis volvimur, Augustine writes in his Confessions - only God always remains identical to himself, whereas we are tossed from trial to trial. l1 Modern humans augmented the ascetic experimental- ism of the ancients with technical and artistic, then finally political experimentalism. The task they set themselves, in all seriousness, was to rewrite the text of the human condition - partly with updated Christian-humanist procedures, partly following the guidelines of post-Christian and post-humanist schemes of existence. The essay and the experiment are not merely literary and scientific procedures; they shaped modernity's style of existence as a whole - and, after 1789, also that of major politics and the national and global economy. An experimenter is someone who takes a chance every time, convinced that the new is always right. Needless to say, the American president Theodore Roosevelt placed himself in the same tradition when he invoked the 'great work of uplifting mankind' in 1899, exchanging the Christian world mission for civilizatory messianism. 12
Modern Unrest
The beginnings of the turn towards greater things were already several centuries in the past when Comenius launched the campaign of universal education (panpaedia) in response to the apocalyptically interpreted confusion of the Thirty Years War. In the human zoo of
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lowed an unrest that would never much speculation as to the origins of the new zeitgeist and Weltgeist. Some sought to locate them in the mysticism of Northwest European towns or in the early capitalist economy; connections have been posited with the development of the clockwork mechanism, or with the double- entry bookkeeping of the Venetians, propagated by the Franciscan priest Luca Pacioli in his 1494 book on arithmetic, which was read throughout Europe. The Faustian soul was taken as the metaphysical source of modern restlessness, while Doctor Faustus, that man of infi- nite skills and 'far-famed Sorcerer and Master of the Black Art' who pawned his soul for the sake of heightened self-enjoyment, was con- versely declared the personification of credit, that fifth essence which grips honest debtors to the marrow and drives them over land and sea in ever-expanding trajectories. Modern unrest was also attributed to the shock of spatial expansion resulting from Atlantic seafaring and the discovery of the New World, as if the global mobility of the floating capital on the oceans had reproduced itself in the attitude towards life in the most obscure mainland towns. 'The primary fact of the Modern Age is not that the earth revolves around the sun, but that money flows around the earth. '13
In the following, I will show that the specifically modern unrest in the field of shaping humans - which, in its most recent offshoots, is still and more than ever ours - stems most of all from endogenous, that is to say practice-historically or ascetologically relevant sources. Looking back on the programmes and workshops of the practis- ing life in the premodern world, it becomes clear: the realization among Marx and the Young Hegelians that 'man produces man' can only be understood in all its ramifications if one looks behind the word 'produce', which was borrowed one-sidedly from the modern working world and its industrial procedures, and also perceives the universe of practising behaviour, training and routines of conscious and unconscious keeping-in-shape, among which, ironically enough, one must also include the phenomenon of getting-out-of-shape through the wrong training and exercises in neglect. This conces- sion seems more acceptable in the case of athletes and monks than farmers, factory workers or handymen. Nonetheless, even the most intense activities of a working type constitute one of the many masks of the practising life. Whoever lifts it sees through the mystifications of the productivistic era and sees the omnipresence of the practice aspect amidst work phenomena. Then it becomes demonstrable, down to the smallest detail, how the active mould themselves through
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regularly repeated activities. It is necessary to understand why and through what repercussions on his own existence man can effectively be considered the producer of man.
Autoplastic Action: Circulus Virtuosus
The basic information about the production of humans through humans is made explicit via study of the vita activa; the pragmatists of the nineteenth century realized this. By studying the active life, they uncovered the basic anthropotechnic law: the repercussions of all actions and movements on the actor. Working places the worker in the world and marks them with the stamp of their own acts by the short route of a practising self-shaping. No activity evacies the principle of retroactive influence on the operator - and whatever reacts to earlier events also affects later ones. The act produces the actor, the reflection the reflected, the emotion the feeler, and the test of conscience the conscience itself. Habits shape the virtues and vices, and complexes of habits form 'cultures'. The European seafarers who circumnavigate the world are still discovering peoples with their own ways of life, some of them bizarre, on the most distant islands; the anthropologists on board recognize the power of practice systems in the local customs and describe these autoplastic rules of human shaping, in analogy to corresponding European phenomena and, for want of a better term, as 'religious' rituals.
The practising life is not limited to a simple reproduction of actors by their actions, however. All expansions of ability circles, all increases extending to the furthest caves of artistry, take place on the basis of self-shaping through practice.
The mystery of why achievements tend towards growth under certain circumstances has not been fully solved to this day; for some forms of ascending spirals, however, more precise descriptions are available. In the field of physical strength increase, for example, the explicit description of the supercompensation mechanism in modern sport physiology has brought about a far-reaching expansion of understanding. The newer sciences of training have been able to show in detail how, after heavy strains, the muscular apparatus can restore its strength to a level higher than its original fitness status - assuming it is granted the necessary recovery time. The rhythms of regeneration hold the secret of the overexertion that leads to higher performance levels. This phenomenon has been intuitively comprehensible since time immemorial, and had already been exploited for intensive train-
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ancients were appear if regen-
eration rhythms are disregarded. 14 With increases in mental and fine motor performance, supercompensation is augmented by a form of superadaptation. This ensures that nervous and kinetic systems accommodate certain regular stimulations through a form of pre- emptive willingness to execute - thus even highly improbable move- ments such as prestissimo runs on the piano or a conjurer's tricks ('prestidigitator' literally means 'fast-fingerer') can be imprinted on the bodily memory and stabilized as a virtuosic habitus. Here it is the anticipatory intelligence in particular that is stimulated. Recent research in the fields of learning theory, neuro-motorics, neuro- rhetoric and neuro-aesthetics consolidate and vary didactic intui- tions that originate in early asceticisms and artistries. All somewhat advanced civilizations make use of the observation that every active person is dyed in the lye of their activities until the miracle of 'second nature' takes place and they perform the near-impossible almost effortlessly. 15
The highest theorem of explicit training theories, then, is that ability subjected to persistent furthering tension produces, almost 'of its own accord', heightened ability. Through exact descriptions of the circulus virtuosos, it becomes explicable how accomplishment leads to higher accomplishment and success to expanded success. The Jesuan axiom 'everyone who has will be given more'16 is not evidence of an early Galilean capitalism, but rather one of the oldest formulations of the circle of success, also known in sociology as the 'Matthew effect'. Whoever is able will be granted more ability. It is not without reason that successful people from the most diverse fields believe they can learn from one another at a distance; they intuit that virtuosos from all kinds of disciplines emerge from comparable circles of increase.