The
philosophy
of the new matter-of- factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
" In fact, he grasps it as a procedural possibility and as a poetic opportunity.
No matter how his share of subjective cynicism is estimated, he succeeded in making it into a means for representing reality.
In his epoch, he became a master of the cynical tone of voice and, with almost every one of his plays, from Baal to Massnahme (Measure), he established his reputation as a poet who commanded a language that allowed the "times themselves" to speak.
With Brecht, too, the stance recurs that we found at first in Dadaist irony: let- ting oneself be thrown and pushed around by the given state of affairs, which is no longer counterposed by any flimsy ideas or upright poses. More important than self-composure is insight into what really confronts us. "Matter-of-factness" func- tions as a form of going along, of being-in-the-times: Don't fall behind, don't let any resentments grow, don't cherish any old values, but look to see what the state of affairs is now and what is to be done. We cannot live off the good old values, it is better to start with the bad
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new reality.
Obviously, a new quality of irony and a nonaffirmative form of affirmation makes itself felt here. In this irony, it is not a subject that has "stayed clean" that reveals itself, who, distanced, above the fronts, the melee, and the tumult, tries to save its integrity. It is rather the irony of a bashed ego who has got caught up in the clockwork (rather like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) who makes its hands as dirty as the circumstances are and who, in the midst of the goings- on, only takes care to observe alertly what it encounters. With Brecht, too, the pugna- cious irony appropriate to modernity makes itself felt: kynical irony. It does not resist reality with "imagined fancies" but exercises resistance in the form of un- resisting accommodation.
This irony's model piece is provided by Brecht in the famous interjection from the comedy A Man Is a Man. The Transformation of the Packer Galy Gay in the Military Barracks of Kilkoa in Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Five. Interjection
Herr Bertolt Brecht maintains: a man is a man.
And that is something anyone can prove.
But then, Herr Bertolt Brecht also proves
That one can do as much as one likes with a person. Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car Without losing anything in the process.
The man will be approached humanely
He will be requested firmly, without vexation
442 D DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
To accommodate himself to the course of the world And to let his private fish swim away.
And no matter what he is remodeled into,
In doing so no mistake has been made.
One can, if we do not watch over him,
also make him overnight into our butcher.
Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes that you will see the ground On which you stand disappear like snow under your feet And that you will notice about the packer Galy Gay That life on earth is dangerous.
(Erste Stiicke, vol. 2, 1953, pp. 229-30)
For the kynical realist, the idea of human individuality in times in which war machines, metropolitan streams of traffic, and unleashed production apparatuses consume the individual as their "raw material," is no longer a "fruitful hypothe- sis. " Let us try from the other end, free of any metaphysics of individuality and without humanistic nostalgia. "A man is a man. " What scenic arrangement must be set up in order to examine this cynical-critical statement of identity? In his stage experiment, Brecht has the gentle family man become a bloodthirsty fighter, "incensed" by the "wish to sink my teeth" / Into the throat of the enemy, primitive drive, from the family / To butcher the breadwinner / To carry out the assign- ment" (ibid. p. 293). Besides being him-"self," everybody can also be functionally the other, who, with a few tricks, is refitted as a "human fighting machine. " Brecht outdoes the nostalgic lamentations about alienation with a hard commitment to psychological functionalism. The point here is that he does not want to present any reduction of the civilized human to a wild animal but a coolly presented remodeling of the civilian as soldier, thus no "regression" but a mere displacement in which "nothing is lost. " The sole concession to the individual occurs indirectly in that the playwright turns to the audience's intelligence and provokes it into swimming free of conservative inhibitions through the surrender of the cultivated bourgeois "private fish," and into immersing itself in an ugly but vitally seething present. Notes
1. Rathenau herewith stakes out the framework within which neoconservative ideological forma- tions move. They rest on a denial on two fronts: They deny modernity ideologically and the "new-old values practically.
Chapter 19
Artificial Limbs. Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology
Goethe intervenes.
At first it was uninjured survivors who began to sing the neohumanist lamenta- tion about modern alienation and the mutilation of the individual. On the opposed side, kynical vitalists (like the young Brecht, the Dada groups, and many others) tried through their sarcasm to outdo the degradation of the individual that had be- come apparent in the modern social order. They practiced the accusation or the affirmation of mechanized existence as a figure of thought.
To the physically alienated, the mutilated, and the reassembled, such forms
of expression remained in either direction rather alien. It makes a difference
whether one reflects on the loss of individuality as a critique of culture, or ex-
periences how a war (or labor) tears away pieces from one's own ("indivisible")
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body. One source of war statistics says: "Thirteen million dead, eleven million crippled . . . six billion shells and fifty billion cubic meters of gas in four
1years. " How did the armies of cripples who streamed back to their native coun-
tries in 1918 fare? Some, in any case, could say nothing about the reassembling of humans in modernity; they no longer had mouths.
Men with frightening faces, without noses, without mouths; nurses who shrank back from nothing fed these disfigured creatures through thin glass tubes that they poked into the scarred holes of proud flesh where once a mouth had been. (Erich Kastner, Fabian [1931], p. 49)
What Kastner describes refers to the year 1931; fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies. These "creatures," however, were hidden far
443
444 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? National Socialist commentary to the "March of the Cripples" in an exhibition en- titled "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) Munich, 1937.
away in the provinces in lonely houses, away from the surrounding world that had long since begun to rearm.
For those who had been maimed in the war, the war could not really end --even when they did not belong to those disfigured ones who had to be fed through glass tubes. The organ of the mutilated was Der Reichsverband(The Reich Association. Organ of the Reich Association of German War-Injured and War-Bereaved), published in Berlin regularly from 1922 on. That in this periodical voices were also raised that pleaded for a war of revenge against France as soon as possible may appear to us today as a tragic curiosity. The injured and bereaved ex- perienced in a doubly bitter way how the economic crisis that began in 1929 reduced the (in any case meager) compensation from the state, or even threatened to cut it off altogether. The situation became especially acute in 1931 when the emergency decrees of Bruning led to radical cuts in state expenditures, which pro- voked the Reich Association to the most emphatic protests. One can ask oneself how many votes of mutilated survivors were among those Hitler's party was able to attract to its enormous crisis constituency in 1932.
Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psy- chotechnical textbooks: a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs. The optimism with which those teachers of the maimed imbued their charges with a positive attitude and a vital joy in their continued work seems today like a parody. With deadly earnest, grimly humorous, patriotic doctors turned to the cripples: The Fatherland requires your services in the fu- ture, too: one-armed, one-legged men and wearers of artificial limbs can fight again on the production front. The great machine does not ask whether it is ' in-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 445
? 446 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Wheelchair parade for the Fiihrer, 1934.
dividuals" who are here active for it, or units of human and artificial limbs. A man is a man. In the textbooks on the maimed and the writings of the medical-technical industry, a highly apposite image of the human being emerges: Homo prostheti- cs, who is supposed to say a wildly joyful Yes to everything that says No to the "individuality" of "individuals. "
I quote from a one-armed primer from 1915 (which, owing to the tremendous increase of one-armed among the war maimed, had to be reprinted within a month) whose author notes with satisfaction that the influx of new one-armers from the front has given the "old one-armers" new energies. Privatdozent von Kunzberg writes:
The oldest German hero's song, the song of Walthari, relates the duel of the hero with Hagen in which Walter loses his right hand. He binds it, sticks the stump into the straps of his shield and simply(! ) fights on with the left hand. That such a sense of heroism is still alive today in our armies is shown by a small newspaper report from the beginning of June 1915. In the first attack of the Austrian fleet on the Italian coast, torpedo boat 80 had been hit by a shell in the officers' mess, and the right forearm of a reservist, a fisherman by profession, was completely torn off. He bound the stump with a strap and, with the left hand, worked the pump in order to stem the flood of water, without letting out a single cry. There are innumerable such brave men among our military gray and blue boys. . . . Whoever has done his share(! ) with ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 447
two sound arms in the field against the enemy will be able to master his fate and himself with one arm. . . .
The present booklet . . . wants to show him . . . that one- armedness is not the worst thing by a long shot.
. . . How favorably the war-wounded is situated! The honorary pay protects him once and for all from real need. But what a joyless existence would await him if he could not find his way back to work. Idleness is the source of all vices. . .
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. Work is the duty of a citizen, a contribution to the Fatherland. . . . Even the single working hand cannot be done with- out. . . . (pp. 1-2)
. . . After a diligent stay at a school, some get on better than they did before the injury, (p. 3)
. . . You have nothing to hide. We no longer live in times when one could suspect a perjurer or thief behind a handless man. You have lost your hand, not under the hatchet of a henchman, but in a holy struggle. You are allowed to be always and everywhere proud, look everyone straight in the eyes and thereby cause wretches and the tactless(! ) to blush. Most people view the war-injured person as a living monument(! ) of our hard times to whom they give thanks silently(l).
To gain independence in every respect is the first commandment, the highest aim of the one-armed man. Never allow yourself to be helped}. There must not be any activity from which he shrinks back; . . . through . . . continual practice he will master it. One-armedness will become a matter of course; it loses the horror of a loss that cannot be overcome. Some ex- perienced one-armers say that they would not know what to do with a sec- ond arm if suddenly, through a miracle, they were given back the lost arm.
. . . Look around you to see if there is someone in your circle of ac- quaintanceswhohasbeenmissinganarmforatime. . . . Thereareprob- ably some in every town. You just have not noticed them yet. (p. 5)
In one of von Kunzberg's footnotes there is also this:
You observe also the bagpipe player at the annual fair who simultane- ously beats the drum with an elbow, works another instrument with his foot, or a mounted kettledrummer who controls the reins with his feet, etc. You can also learn something by observing animals.
The joyful cynicism of patriot medicine does not touch solely on "hardship cases. " Its way of thinking is not related solely to exceptional existential circum- stances. Medical artificial limbs and the mentality of the robust robot, which is offered along with them only, bring a widespread way of thinking to light. War loosens the tongue of the latent cynicism of domination, medicine, and the mili- tary. Under its influence, the military and production apparatuses admit their
448 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? The title page of Kiinzberg's primer.
claim to use up the lives of individuals in their service. The human body in the society of labor and war had already long been an artificial limb even before one had to replace damaged parts with functioning parts.
In the Weimar years, technology presses in on the old humanism in a provoca- tive way. In this period, the conceptual association of "the human being and tech- nology" becomes a compulsive connection, from the heights of bourgeois philos- ophy down to school essays. The schema for thinking is this: Technology takes the "upper hand"; it "threatens" to degrade human beings; it "wants" to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will hap- pen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technol- ogy. The image is approximately that of a seesaw. On one end sits the threatening,
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm.
The philosophy of the new matter-of- factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old
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town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm
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trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit- only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the
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lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation- ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
With Brecht, too, the stance recurs that we found at first in Dadaist irony: let- ting oneself be thrown and pushed around by the given state of affairs, which is no longer counterposed by any flimsy ideas or upright poses. More important than self-composure is insight into what really confronts us. "Matter-of-factness" func- tions as a form of going along, of being-in-the-times: Don't fall behind, don't let any resentments grow, don't cherish any old values, but look to see what the state of affairs is now and what is to be done. We cannot live off the good old values, it is better to start with the bad
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
new reality.
Obviously, a new quality of irony and a nonaffirmative form of affirmation makes itself felt here. In this irony, it is not a subject that has "stayed clean" that reveals itself, who, distanced, above the fronts, the melee, and the tumult, tries to save its integrity. It is rather the irony of a bashed ego who has got caught up in the clockwork (rather like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) who makes its hands as dirty as the circumstances are and who, in the midst of the goings- on, only takes care to observe alertly what it encounters. With Brecht, too, the pugna- cious irony appropriate to modernity makes itself felt: kynical irony. It does not resist reality with "imagined fancies" but exercises resistance in the form of un- resisting accommodation.
This irony's model piece is provided by Brecht in the famous interjection from the comedy A Man Is a Man. The Transformation of the Packer Galy Gay in the Military Barracks of Kilkoa in Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Five. Interjection
Herr Bertolt Brecht maintains: a man is a man.
And that is something anyone can prove.
But then, Herr Bertolt Brecht also proves
That one can do as much as one likes with a person. Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car Without losing anything in the process.
The man will be approached humanely
He will be requested firmly, without vexation
442 D DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
To accommodate himself to the course of the world And to let his private fish swim away.
And no matter what he is remodeled into,
In doing so no mistake has been made.
One can, if we do not watch over him,
also make him overnight into our butcher.
Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes that you will see the ground On which you stand disappear like snow under your feet And that you will notice about the packer Galy Gay That life on earth is dangerous.
(Erste Stiicke, vol. 2, 1953, pp. 229-30)
For the kynical realist, the idea of human individuality in times in which war machines, metropolitan streams of traffic, and unleashed production apparatuses consume the individual as their "raw material," is no longer a "fruitful hypothe- sis. " Let us try from the other end, free of any metaphysics of individuality and without humanistic nostalgia. "A man is a man. " What scenic arrangement must be set up in order to examine this cynical-critical statement of identity? In his stage experiment, Brecht has the gentle family man become a bloodthirsty fighter, "incensed" by the "wish to sink my teeth" / Into the throat of the enemy, primitive drive, from the family / To butcher the breadwinner / To carry out the assign- ment" (ibid. p. 293). Besides being him-"self," everybody can also be functionally the other, who, with a few tricks, is refitted as a "human fighting machine. " Brecht outdoes the nostalgic lamentations about alienation with a hard commitment to psychological functionalism. The point here is that he does not want to present any reduction of the civilized human to a wild animal but a coolly presented remodeling of the civilian as soldier, thus no "regression" but a mere displacement in which "nothing is lost. " The sole concession to the individual occurs indirectly in that the playwright turns to the audience's intelligence and provokes it into swimming free of conservative inhibitions through the surrender of the cultivated bourgeois "private fish," and into immersing itself in an ugly but vitally seething present. Notes
1. Rathenau herewith stakes out the framework within which neoconservative ideological forma- tions move. They rest on a denial on two fronts: They deny modernity ideologically and the "new-old values practically.
Chapter 19
Artificial Limbs. Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology
Goethe intervenes.
At first it was uninjured survivors who began to sing the neohumanist lamenta- tion about modern alienation and the mutilation of the individual. On the opposed side, kynical vitalists (like the young Brecht, the Dada groups, and many others) tried through their sarcasm to outdo the degradation of the individual that had be- come apparent in the modern social order. They practiced the accusation or the affirmation of mechanized existence as a figure of thought.
To the physically alienated, the mutilated, and the reassembled, such forms
of expression remained in either direction rather alien. It makes a difference
whether one reflects on the loss of individuality as a critique of culture, or ex-
periences how a war (or labor) tears away pieces from one's own ("indivisible")
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body. One source of war statistics says: "Thirteen million dead, eleven million crippled . . . six billion shells and fifty billion cubic meters of gas in four
1years. " How did the armies of cripples who streamed back to their native coun-
tries in 1918 fare? Some, in any case, could say nothing about the reassembling of humans in modernity; they no longer had mouths.
Men with frightening faces, without noses, without mouths; nurses who shrank back from nothing fed these disfigured creatures through thin glass tubes that they poked into the scarred holes of proud flesh where once a mouth had been. (Erich Kastner, Fabian [1931], p. 49)
What Kastner describes refers to the year 1931; fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies. These "creatures," however, were hidden far
443
444 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? National Socialist commentary to the "March of the Cripples" in an exhibition en- titled "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) Munich, 1937.
away in the provinces in lonely houses, away from the surrounding world that had long since begun to rearm.
For those who had been maimed in the war, the war could not really end --even when they did not belong to those disfigured ones who had to be fed through glass tubes. The organ of the mutilated was Der Reichsverband(The Reich Association. Organ of the Reich Association of German War-Injured and War-Bereaved), published in Berlin regularly from 1922 on. That in this periodical voices were also raised that pleaded for a war of revenge against France as soon as possible may appear to us today as a tragic curiosity. The injured and bereaved ex- perienced in a doubly bitter way how the economic crisis that began in 1929 reduced the (in any case meager) compensation from the state, or even threatened to cut it off altogether. The situation became especially acute in 1931 when the emergency decrees of Bruning led to radical cuts in state expenditures, which pro- voked the Reich Association to the most emphatic protests. One can ask oneself how many votes of mutilated survivors were among those Hitler's party was able to attract to its enormous crisis constituency in 1932.
Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psy- chotechnical textbooks: a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs. The optimism with which those teachers of the maimed imbued their charges with a positive attitude and a vital joy in their continued work seems today like a parody. With deadly earnest, grimly humorous, patriotic doctors turned to the cripples: The Fatherland requires your services in the fu- ture, too: one-armed, one-legged men and wearers of artificial limbs can fight again on the production front. The great machine does not ask whether it is ' in-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 445
? 446 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Wheelchair parade for the Fiihrer, 1934.
dividuals" who are here active for it, or units of human and artificial limbs. A man is a man. In the textbooks on the maimed and the writings of the medical-technical industry, a highly apposite image of the human being emerges: Homo prostheti- cs, who is supposed to say a wildly joyful Yes to everything that says No to the "individuality" of "individuals. "
I quote from a one-armed primer from 1915 (which, owing to the tremendous increase of one-armed among the war maimed, had to be reprinted within a month) whose author notes with satisfaction that the influx of new one-armers from the front has given the "old one-armers" new energies. Privatdozent von Kunzberg writes:
The oldest German hero's song, the song of Walthari, relates the duel of the hero with Hagen in which Walter loses his right hand. He binds it, sticks the stump into the straps of his shield and simply(! ) fights on with the left hand. That such a sense of heroism is still alive today in our armies is shown by a small newspaper report from the beginning of June 1915. In the first attack of the Austrian fleet on the Italian coast, torpedo boat 80 had been hit by a shell in the officers' mess, and the right forearm of a reservist, a fisherman by profession, was completely torn off. He bound the stump with a strap and, with the left hand, worked the pump in order to stem the flood of water, without letting out a single cry. There are innumerable such brave men among our military gray and blue boys. . . . Whoever has done his share(! ) with ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 447
two sound arms in the field against the enemy will be able to master his fate and himself with one arm. . . .
The present booklet . . . wants to show him . . . that one- armedness is not the worst thing by a long shot.
. . . How favorably the war-wounded is situated! The honorary pay protects him once and for all from real need. But what a joyless existence would await him if he could not find his way back to work. Idleness is the source of all vices. . .
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. Work is the duty of a citizen, a contribution to the Fatherland. . . . Even the single working hand cannot be done with- out. . . . (pp. 1-2)
. . . After a diligent stay at a school, some get on better than they did before the injury, (p. 3)
. . . You have nothing to hide. We no longer live in times when one could suspect a perjurer or thief behind a handless man. You have lost your hand, not under the hatchet of a henchman, but in a holy struggle. You are allowed to be always and everywhere proud, look everyone straight in the eyes and thereby cause wretches and the tactless(! ) to blush. Most people view the war-injured person as a living monument(! ) of our hard times to whom they give thanks silently(l).
To gain independence in every respect is the first commandment, the highest aim of the one-armed man. Never allow yourself to be helped}. There must not be any activity from which he shrinks back; . . . through . . . continual practice he will master it. One-armedness will become a matter of course; it loses the horror of a loss that cannot be overcome. Some ex- perienced one-armers say that they would not know what to do with a sec- ond arm if suddenly, through a miracle, they were given back the lost arm.
. . . Look around you to see if there is someone in your circle of ac- quaintanceswhohasbeenmissinganarmforatime. . . . Thereareprob- ably some in every town. You just have not noticed them yet. (p. 5)
In one of von Kunzberg's footnotes there is also this:
You observe also the bagpipe player at the annual fair who simultane- ously beats the drum with an elbow, works another instrument with his foot, or a mounted kettledrummer who controls the reins with his feet, etc. You can also learn something by observing animals.
The joyful cynicism of patriot medicine does not touch solely on "hardship cases. " Its way of thinking is not related solely to exceptional existential circum- stances. Medical artificial limbs and the mentality of the robust robot, which is offered along with them only, bring a widespread way of thinking to light. War loosens the tongue of the latent cynicism of domination, medicine, and the mili- tary. Under its influence, the military and production apparatuses admit their
448 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? The title page of Kiinzberg's primer.
claim to use up the lives of individuals in their service. The human body in the society of labor and war had already long been an artificial limb even before one had to replace damaged parts with functioning parts.
In the Weimar years, technology presses in on the old humanism in a provoca- tive way. In this period, the conceptual association of "the human being and tech- nology" becomes a compulsive connection, from the heights of bourgeois philos- ophy down to school essays. The schema for thinking is this: Technology takes the "upper hand"; it "threatens" to degrade human beings; it "wants" to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will hap- pen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technol- ogy. The image is approximately that of a seesaw. On one end sits the threatening,
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm.
The philosophy of the new matter-of- factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old
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town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm
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trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
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ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit- only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the
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lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation- ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
