Good and evil, positive and negative, are therein released from their bondage to the autonomous moral subject and
retrieved
in their authenticity for states of Being.
Education in Hegel
But the culture industry posits itself as lacking any such relation to the object or, thereby, as culture, to itself.
It has a relation, rather, to reality as image in what can be mechanically reproduced.
As such, within culture as an industry, it is the loss of aura that is reproduced.
Or, put differently, in the culture industry image begets image.
This marks the end of culture as critique.
Indeed, as we will see in a moment, it marks the end of culture as an educational concept.
The (non) relation, the immediacy of image and reality, has displaced even its own representation in thinking, namely, that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to myth.
It has displaced dialectic with a reality freed from political reference.
It marks also the fate of philosophy within a notion of culture that is stripped of its formative education.
Here representation eschews opposition or nega- tion by rendering all reality equivalent as image.
Appearing as liberal democracy, this representation in fact marks an important development in the spirit of Fascism.
It liquidates opposition by freeing everything (and everyone) from the illusion, now overcome, of the universal.
Image is a form of voyeurism of totality from without, meaning that there is no totality.
As such, freed from any dependence upon the object, image is the new political reality, a reality which knows it is liberated from the political per se.
No wonder then that freedom has greater significance in the choice of TV channels than in voting.
However, the effacing of the dialectic in image and reality does represent its universality to itself, and is therefore also a culture. We will explore this representation now as fossil fuel culture. This means exploring both the representation of culture as freedom and the culture of representation as
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 80 Education in Hegel
freedom. It is this complex complicity that both denies culture and com- mends it.
Fossil fuel culture marks a form of the aestheticization of the political that extends more deeply into representation than that identified by Benja- min in Trauerspiel or in mechanical reproduction. The spirit of seventeenth- century Baroque Trauerspiel was despair and destruction in the face of desertion, a relation of inner anxiety and outer ruin. The Baroque spirit of the twenty-first century masks destruction behind a freedom from desertion. This is the phenomenology of spirit in modern social relations. Unfreedom is experienced as a spirit of mourning which is aberrated in the sense that it is effaced, or, put slightly differently, when the inner and outer corre- spond to each other in a freedom from desertion by the universal. In this phenomenology the inner and the outer are the ideology of ideology and are image and reality, related in such a way as to eschew relation. Freed from a relation to each other, freed from the object per se, this aesthetic rep- resentation is no longer anxiety, ruin, or intrigue felt as the desertion by God, but rather a representation of absolution from that desertion. This representation is the aesthetic of image as reality. It is culture become the immediacy of the representation of this freedom and it is representation become the immediacy of the culture of this freedom. Together they are the form and content of image and reality. Together they are ideology not of freedom but as freedom.
The 'reality' of this freedom is what I am calling fossil fuel culture. It is not just a way of representing freedom; it is also a way of reproducing itself in and for modern experience, as culture without culture. Its representation is its reproduction; its reproduction is its representation. Fossil fuel culture is the circle that knows no negation, only pure return (and pure returns). This self-sufficiency combines the aesthetic with a categorical imperative, forming a (non) culture that is total. Its real power lies in being the condi- tion of the possibility of everything and in securing fossil fuel freedom from dependence upon or even relation to an object. This freedom is freedom from implication and is made possible by the personal independence that is created by the internal combustion engine in particular, and by the burning of fossil fuels in general. Fossil fuel culture is the fetishism of personal free- dom made image and this image become political reality. Without an object which is other than itself fossil fuel culture releases each of us from any rela- tion, debt, guilt, anxiety or fear and trembling. It is the freedom of a godless spirituality, a version of Hegel's spiritual animal kingdom - but not an indi- viduality free from substance by withdrawing from the world, rather, an individuality whose freedom in the world is freedom from substance.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 81
As such, this freedom, or this experience of unfreedom, is actual as the (non) culture of the driver who fills her car up or the consumer who turns on the air conditioning or the central heating. These are the freedoms of fossil fuel culture; freedom to travel without the recognition of nature as other; freedom to shop without the recognition of labour and poverty; free- dom as the master who needs no slaves and who knows no slaves; freedom to burn fossil fuels without having to recognize either inner anxiety or outer chaos. Free, because released from implication. Free as voyeur of a nega- tion which is not mine. Hence, traffic jams are caused by everyone except me; I can watch the destruction of the earth's resources knowing that my life is not to blame; I can watch the struggles for freedom knowing they will never be my struggle. This is the modern phenomenology of modernity, where universality vanishes into image, and freedom is freedom from other- ness per se. It is the logic of civil society par excellence. It is not the fetishism of the particular. It is the particular become image and reality, released from the object. The phenomenology of modernity we can say here is absolute freedom from the concept. As such, fossil fuel culture represents and repro- duces itself in my freedom as a voyeur of destruction (which is, of course, also my own destruction). Never is the aesthetic of destruction sufficiently related to an object for it to become a critique of this fascism of representa- tion. Never, as I switch on the light or turn on my car engine is the truth of this freedom - the aesthetic of destruction - rendered visible or account- able in relation to itself of therefore to the universal.
Thus my identity as a person, my mastery, consists in my having fossil fuel culture relieve me from all social and political relations. It relieves me from my determination as self and other, because it aestheticizes the life and death struggle. Death is reduced to an image, something unreal, some- thing represented in such a way as to have no actual relation to life. Death, and the slave, and the other - the carriers of the meaning of our political education - in fossil fuel culture are entertainment. It means that I am never other because the other is not real. As such I am relieved of any expe- rience in which I learn of myself as the master of fossil fuel culture, or as the destroyer.
This freedom from death will - is - destroying itself. The wars, current and future, for control of oil are destined to be the aesthetic of destruction that Benjamin identified. Indeed, riots and wars for oil in the name of free- dom point towards an almost certain future. The totality of fossil fuel culture, unmediated by the totality of the negative, as suggested above, is its own categorical imperative. It is an imperative which reproduces itself in an aesthetic of destruction. In fossil fuel culture, destruction is freedom.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 82 Education in Hegel
The immediacy of this imperative, feeding itself on the need which it cre- ates, resembles Adorno's critique of culture as pre-digested 'baby-food' (1991: 58). Both offer a dialectic of nihilism emancipated from all needs save those which it reproduces for itself. But fossil fuel culture adds an important dimension to this totality of ideology. It enjoys the fetishism of the object as the fetishism of fetishism itself. Freedom is freedom not only from the object, but also from alienation from the object. As such, fossil fuel culture echoes Adorno's observation that objects pass 'impotently by' (1991: 62). 'Nothing happens any more' (1991: 62-63). 6 The decay of aura has already removed experience from its objects. Image and reality parade as the aestheticization of the political, and freedom from culture is the new culture, fossil fuel culture.
We have seen, at the beginning of this century, that fossil fuel culture claims and will continue to claim the state of emergency and 'restoration' as its own unquestionable imperative. This freedom, this imperative, is absolute godless spirituality, and is evil. It has overcome nature yet it is also in a constant state of emergency in anticipating, knowing, that nature will only yield finite amounts of freedom. Running out of oil, whether as a disruption in supplies or as the end of oil reserves, will play itself out as the allegory of the fallen creature. Fascism will carry the crisis. It will offer the 'sanctuary' (Adorno, 1991: 87) of a dialectic of nihilism, inwardly experi- enced as the yearning for a restoration of itself with the freedom that is deserting it, and outwardly carrying out its imperative for restoration in ruthless fashion such that the dialectic of nihilism becomes the praxis of intrigue. At stake is how fossil fuel culture learns to represent itself as other to itself. Those who refuse this negation, this real loss of abstract freedom, will find in a state of emergency the authority to destroy others by protect- ing themselves. Those who can learn of culture as the representation of representation will learn of their collaboration in the illusions of fossil fuel freedoms and will recognize a relation to the universal. But do not be sur- prised then, when, 'at home', freedom demands armed guards at petrol stations, and 'abroad', it offers destruction to feed the aesthetic. In what may prove to be the coup de gra^ce of fascist culture, through the reproduc- tion of destruction on television and the Web, the categorical imperative of bourgeois freedom will itself be aestheticized. As such, even absolute destruction will not be recognized as a universal event. Ruin in fossil fuel culture is the absence of a notion of culture as representation at all. We are continually learning to enjoy (watching) the recognition that there is nothing we can do. That, above all else, is the triumph of culture as the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 83 representation of Fascism and the fascism of representation, and as the fate
of philosophy.
End of culture
There is a second way in which the spirit of Fascism represents itself; this is as the culture - or, really the lack of culture - of specific forms of philoso- phy. The term 'post-modern' refers to the state of emergency brought about in and through the dialectic of enlightenment. The totality of the latter is the experience of desertion by the universal and objectivity, and marks phi- losophy as the site of the ruin. In turn, this absence even of the possibility of resistance produces in consciousness a capitulation to the culture that represents this resignation. The ideology of the ideology of this culture is that it is representation without a notion of itself as culture. 7 Thought is denied its own expression as thinking, the dialectic of enlightenment ceases to 'examine itself' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: xv) and thought is reduced to predatory voyeurism. Thus the culture of philosophy is the representa- tion of Fascism and the fascism of representation. Or, the same, the culture of philosophy is become representation without dialectic, without negation and without its difficult or aporetic relation to the universal.
As Adorno and Rose both note, representation is essential to philosophy for it is the dialectical relation between thought and being representing itself as thinking, as knowledge, and as philosophy. 8 The 'transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of individual words' (Adorno, 1973: 11), says Adorno, is the work of representation within philosophy. The 'more' is itself a mediation of that which expresses it. It is the relation, the difference, the dialectical experience of the more and 'the in-itself of this more' (1973: 12). But both Rose and Adorno draw attention to the ways in which phi- losophy 'would abolish representation' (Rose 1996: 55). Rose states, 'the translation of modern metaphysics into ontology involves, first and last, the overcoming of representation as the imperium of the modern philosophical subject, and as the false promise of universal politics' (1996: 55). This, she says, converges with 'the inner tendency of Fascism itself' (1996: 41). Ontology cannot discern between evil and positivity because ontology 'can only read experience as identitarian' (1996: 56). Thus, ontology reads 'the insistence on ground . . . [as] the process involved in the Nazi myth of racial superiority' (1996: 56) and refuses the experience of the modern subject its lack of iden- tity, its dialectic of enlightenment. Resignation before the desertion of truth and its consequent evil of posited identity characterizes 'the new
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 84 Education in Hegel
ontology' (1996: 56). It cannot distinguish between self-identity as fixed and as fluid because it denies the experience of the relation. Without the experience, evil 'makes itself at home with itself' (Adorno, 1973: 26).
Adorno makes a similar case to Rose. In philosophies of the 'authentic', 'the authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority' (1973: 5). This form of absolute godless spirituality, complicit with the language that it strips of representational significance, offers itself as a refuge from the false promise of universal politics. However, it is, says Adorno, a refuge where 'a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation' (1973: 5). Rose notes that the new ontology gives 'Being to beings, who live and die' (Rose, 1996: 55). Adorno, more directly, observes that in relation to a phi- losophy where 'simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing' (1973: 21), beings could 'hardly do anything other than exist' (1973: 13). The jargon of authenticity marks the state of emergency for philosophy now, not because of the desertion of the universal from the creaturely, but from its absolution from desertion in Being. The year 1933 marks the state of emer- gency that responds to the ruin of universal politics and the philosophical subject by denying their formative significance.
Good and evil, positive and negative, are therein released from their bondage to the autonomous moral subject and retrieved in their authenticity for states of Being. Thus, says Adorno,
positive and negative are reified prior to living experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation. (1973: 21)
In terms of education in Hegel, this is to say that the jargon of the authen- ticity of Being posits the meaning of life and death as a voyeur of their struggle and not as the result of that struggle and the illusions it carries.
Dominant within philosophy then is the effacing of its formation within the baroque spirit of desertion, an effacing which is mourning in denial of itself. The dialectic of enlightenment has been traduced into the ideology of the ideology of philosophy and has resigned itself to the notion of totality that it gives to itself when it is no longer attached to itself as its own object. This fetishism of philosophy is again the inner tendency of Fascism. It destroys opposition, defines totality as equivalence, liquidates experience and the individual, posits illusory being as essence, separates thought from experience, aestheticizes the political, and, through the equivalence of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 85
unmediated singularity, reinforces the particularity of bourgeois freedom. In short, it suppresses 'the risk of the universal interest' (Rose, 1996: 62). 9
So, if the spirit of Fascism dominates not only the political reality of free- dom but also its image in and as philosophy, then might we conclude that culture itself, the representation of the relation of state and religion, is fas- cist through and through? Has modern bourgeois subjectivity become its own ideology, its own duplication? Has the dialectic irretrievably lost its substance, its political significance, to the un-dialectic of the immediacy of image and reality? Are we without an object of experience altogether? If autonomous thinking is resigned, if the dialectic is eschewed in favour of authenticity, and if fossil fuel culture becomes its own ideology of ideology, then the familiar question raises itself - can anything be done? This is the kind of question Adorno felt the need to defend himself against. In 'Resig- nation', he notes that critical theory was criticized for not producing a programme of action. His response was that resignation lies not in the rec- ognition that individuals are formed and deformed by culture and cannot change this 'merely through an act of their own will' (Adorno, 1991: 171). Rather, resignation is reserved for those who find relief from the cognition of impotence by action. As such, 'the feeling of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking' (1991: 174). The question of theory and practice, however, is borne of the same ideology of ideology, the same fascism of representation and representation of Fascism that it would overcome. This is both its strength and its weakness. The fact that we are implicated in political and philosophical cultures is our formation, our deformation and our re-formation. This notion of totality is qualitatively different from a fascist notion of totality as conformity and equivalence, for here culture retrieves itself as its own object.
Any return of the object of thought to itself as thinking, or as our philo- sophical education, is not the overcoming of fascist culture, but it is the philosophical re-education regarding a notion of totality that fascist culture attributes to itself. To know fascist totality is to know complicity, even in going to the pictures. And to know complicity is to know how to think the dangers, the violence, of guarding our 'particular interests' (Rose, 1996: 62). In the cinema as in the traffic queue, the aestheticization of the political is politicized by the negation of the particular for whom traffic or the audi- ence is everyone except himself. These are strange places to experience the universal, but then, they are cultural experiences. 'We are always staking ourselves in the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representa- tion throughout the range of quotidian practices and cultural rituals' (Rose, 1996: 61). It is an educational matter, then, to learn to comprehend them
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 86 Education in Hegel
differently, not in the kind of cultural studies which only deals in 'close ups of the things around us by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects' (Benjamin, 1992: 229) but by the form and content of philosophical think- ing that can retain the relation of such experiences to the object as to itself. Such philosophy is representation and as such is both the fascism of repre- sentation and the representation of Fascism.
Illusion
Another way of stating the education described in the previous paragraph is as education in Hegel. If this education was seen above as able to survive the end of culture in the quotidian experiences of the traffic queue and the cinema, and even in turning on a light bulb, it also persists in an equally unlikely way in Hegelian philosophy. Education in Hegel is present for itself in the shapes that insist on its disappearance.
The education in Hegel that forms the substance of each chapter in this book has its ground in one of Hegel's most difficult ideas, that of the groundlessness of illusory being. As we will now see, illusory being is death in life, dependence in independence, and the other in the self. In each of these relations the illusion is that there is no relation. Education in Hegel retrieves this relation while recognizing that even such retrieval is grounded in the groundlessness of illusion. The significance of illusion here is that it can retrieve for philosophical thought an object where it appears that no such object exists. In the concrete case of fossil fuel culture - where the object has been assimilated into the aesthetic of fossil fuel freedom, and where the paradox of complicity has nothing to set itself against, and where paradox and complicity thus melt away without substance - this means that philosophy can find an otherness to the totality of its freedom.
The political significance of illusory being is that the illusory mastery of the bourgeois is still a substantive self-re-formation, because illusion here is itself determinative, or educational. The logic of essence in Hegel's Science of Logic is really the logic of the illusions of essence. Being is saved for itself when essence makes it its own. As such, essence holds itself to be the inde- pendence of being. But essence, like all mastery, avoids the dependence of its mastery upon an other. It avoids its own vulnerability by exporting other- ness beyond itself, failing here to recollect otherness within itself. This illusion is concrete as the subjective reflective thinker, for whom reflection is autonomy. As such, the mastery of this essence is a positing of life as without death, or of essence as without nothingness. It is, as we saw in Chapter One above, life understood from the point of view of the victor in the life and
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 87
death struggle. It is really only a non-essence, a merely illusory essence, an illusory mastery. As the truth of the master is the slave so, here, the truth of illusory being is really the nothingness of being that it rejects as other than itself and to itself. In one manifestation the awareness of the illusory foun- dation of essence here is scepticism. This is because reflection, aware of itself as illusion, believes itself unable to think the truth of anything, for each thought that it holds to be true will be undermined by the groundless- ness of all thought. Thus it appears that scepticism is as far as thought can go. The mastery of such scepticism is really a violence against itself, where thought attacks thought. When this is believed to have no educational import for thought, scepticism becomes the aesthetic of destruction. This, as we saw above, characterizes the illusion of fossil fuel freedoms, that totality is null and that actions therefore have no other.
But scepticism is at best only one third of a triadic philosophical educa- tion. The harder education, now, is that regarding how illusion can be substantive, and can be educative as self-determinative. This determinate substance is already content10 within scepticism but not yet recognized or disturbed as such. This content(ment) is carried in the illusion of life as something without nothing, of life without death, of ground without also groundlessness. Reflective subjective essence enjoys this as the idea of itself as completely separate from nothingness. Here, mastery and scepticism are the one reflective freedom. Politically, in fossil fuel culture, this freedom is total in the exclusion of otherness from all sovereign masters. It defines what a 'free' man is, masking the groundlessness of this definition in and by the illusion that fear, death, or other have no part to play here. As such, essence as illusion has no object that can compromise it, for it is related to all externality as freedom from it, and internally, it is related to itself by the absence of such objects. What fossil fuel culture adds to this illusion, as we have seen already, is that externality is in fact no object and that fossil fuel freedom has no responsibilities except to itself. Its actions have no object but themselves, and these are aesthetic.
How, then, can the inherent instability of such political illusion become an object to itself in such a way as to know its freedom re-formed against itself? The philosophical education here is of illusory being learning that, as reflection, it is the reflection of nothing. This contains a crucial ambigu- ity. As the reflection of nothing it is nothing. As the reflection of nothing it is something. It is what it is: the reflection of nothing, grounded in groundless- ness. This education is open to two misrecognitions of current interest. The first is that this self-mediation, in undermining essence, lends itself to the hope for some form of intersubjective middle between reflective subjects,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 88 Education in Hegel
often conceived as mutual recognition. The second is that this self- mediation is seen to impose itself as an infinitely reproduced difference from itself that eschews all identity thinking, including that grounded in intersubjectivity and the logos. Both of these responses are less than and more than the philosophical education that illusion contains. They both posit something other to illusion, rather than see their own complicity within the totality of the other also as illusion. Both responses, the positive over- coming of illusion and the unknowable (excessive) condition of its possibility, essentially posit that of which they are already the return. Suppressing this education leaves only what Hegel calls external reflection.
It is to education in Hegel that we now turn in order to understand better the philosophical education that illusion commends. It contains within it immediacy, mediation, and the Aufhebung. As immediacy it is the posited sovereignty of the reflective subject. As mediated it is brought into relation with death, with that which is other to itself, and in this case it is where something is brought into relation with nothing. How it understands itself in this relation is the actuality of social and political relations. In fossil fuel culture the relation to death is the relation of freedom without a real object, and where the universal aspect of any action is represented to the voyeur as being without relation to it and thus liberated from responsibility for it. As such, fossil fuel culture is denuded of any educational significance regard- ing the relation of the universal to personal freedom and hides also the way in which culture achieves this. The truth of fossil fuel culture is that nothing happens. It will require education in Hegel to retrieve what happens when nothing happens.
What happens when nothing happens is that education happens, and this education is both the theory and the practice of the relation of life with death, of self with other, and of freedom with its object. Illusion is just such an education. Essence has an independence that is merely posited: it is illu- sory being. When illusion learns of itself as illusory being this is not an overcoming of illusion. It is the truth of illusion known as illusion in illu- sion. This is the nature of the Aufhebung here. It knows to know the ground of illusion and the negation of the ground of illusion to be the same ground- lessness. This does not resolve the two groundless elements of illusion and its negation. Rather, it is their being learned. What is the 'same' here is that neither of them, neither illusion nor its negation, are the same as them- selves. It is in illusion that essence is both already other to itself and that what is other to it is not essence. Illusion is this truth for itself and it is in our philosophical education that illusion is both the theory and practice of this truth - its formation, its negation, and its re-formation in this recollection.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 89
The truth of illusion is the truth of the negation of the negation, the truth that is groundless. It is this notion of truth that can retrieve the missing uni- versal from within the end of culture and within fossil fuel freedom.
Education in Hegel teaches that it is in the illusions of the master in fossil fuel culture that the latent fascism of this objectless political form becomes unstable and collapses. But without the philosophical education that illu- sion does have substance, that in the recollection of illusion something does happen, there will remain only the end of culture, an empty repetition of illusion without meaning. And this latter captures completely the stand- point of fossil fuel culture. Education in Hegel is a re-formed relation to the paradox of contingency and to the other that is hidden within fossil fuel mastery. It asks of us that we learn to do justice to aporia and not to aban- don it as a dead end. Doing justice to fossil fuel culture means complicity as education and not, as in the academic workshop, complicity without educa- tion. It is the retrieval of such a concept of implication which provides for rather than effaces the relation to the universal.
Nevertheless, the ideology of fossil fuel culture provides the current and most likely the future form and content of representation, of thinking. As the oil runs out, so representation of the universal in fossil fuel freedoms will become increasingly difficult. Each time I drive my car the universal is ideologically represented. Each time I cannot drive my car the universal will assert itself. But without learning how this assertion is another representa- tion of freedom, another politics, and another understanding of thinking, the universal will remain unthinkable within fossil fuel freedom. It is not just a question of new and renewable sources of energy. It is also a question of renewing political and philosophical education regarding the nature of fos- sil fuel freedom. To renew energy sources in order only to repeat fossil fuel freedom will repeat eternally the crisis that feeds our fascistic desires. There may not be long to wait before the fascism of the representation of fossil fuel culture meets the universal that it eschews in a war for its own survival. Even that, however, may not be enough to retrieve its universal significance from the spectacle of war.
Notes
1 Though I note that at the time of writing some are arguing that OPEC has exag- gerated the levels of oil reserves.
However, the effacing of the dialectic in image and reality does represent its universality to itself, and is therefore also a culture. We will explore this representation now as fossil fuel culture. This means exploring both the representation of culture as freedom and the culture of representation as
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 80 Education in Hegel
freedom. It is this complex complicity that both denies culture and com- mends it.
Fossil fuel culture marks a form of the aestheticization of the political that extends more deeply into representation than that identified by Benja- min in Trauerspiel or in mechanical reproduction. The spirit of seventeenth- century Baroque Trauerspiel was despair and destruction in the face of desertion, a relation of inner anxiety and outer ruin. The Baroque spirit of the twenty-first century masks destruction behind a freedom from desertion. This is the phenomenology of spirit in modern social relations. Unfreedom is experienced as a spirit of mourning which is aberrated in the sense that it is effaced, or, put slightly differently, when the inner and outer corre- spond to each other in a freedom from desertion by the universal. In this phenomenology the inner and the outer are the ideology of ideology and are image and reality, related in such a way as to eschew relation. Freed from a relation to each other, freed from the object per se, this aesthetic rep- resentation is no longer anxiety, ruin, or intrigue felt as the desertion by God, but rather a representation of absolution from that desertion. This representation is the aesthetic of image as reality. It is culture become the immediacy of the representation of this freedom and it is representation become the immediacy of the culture of this freedom. Together they are the form and content of image and reality. Together they are ideology not of freedom but as freedom.
The 'reality' of this freedom is what I am calling fossil fuel culture. It is not just a way of representing freedom; it is also a way of reproducing itself in and for modern experience, as culture without culture. Its representation is its reproduction; its reproduction is its representation. Fossil fuel culture is the circle that knows no negation, only pure return (and pure returns). This self-sufficiency combines the aesthetic with a categorical imperative, forming a (non) culture that is total. Its real power lies in being the condi- tion of the possibility of everything and in securing fossil fuel freedom from dependence upon or even relation to an object. This freedom is freedom from implication and is made possible by the personal independence that is created by the internal combustion engine in particular, and by the burning of fossil fuels in general. Fossil fuel culture is the fetishism of personal free- dom made image and this image become political reality. Without an object which is other than itself fossil fuel culture releases each of us from any rela- tion, debt, guilt, anxiety or fear and trembling. It is the freedom of a godless spirituality, a version of Hegel's spiritual animal kingdom - but not an indi- viduality free from substance by withdrawing from the world, rather, an individuality whose freedom in the world is freedom from substance.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Fossil Fuel Culture 81
As such, this freedom, or this experience of unfreedom, is actual as the (non) culture of the driver who fills her car up or the consumer who turns on the air conditioning or the central heating. These are the freedoms of fossil fuel culture; freedom to travel without the recognition of nature as other; freedom to shop without the recognition of labour and poverty; free- dom as the master who needs no slaves and who knows no slaves; freedom to burn fossil fuels without having to recognize either inner anxiety or outer chaos. Free, because released from implication. Free as voyeur of a nega- tion which is not mine. Hence, traffic jams are caused by everyone except me; I can watch the destruction of the earth's resources knowing that my life is not to blame; I can watch the struggles for freedom knowing they will never be my struggle. This is the modern phenomenology of modernity, where universality vanishes into image, and freedom is freedom from other- ness per se. It is the logic of civil society par excellence. It is not the fetishism of the particular. It is the particular become image and reality, released from the object. The phenomenology of modernity we can say here is absolute freedom from the concept. As such, fossil fuel culture represents and repro- duces itself in my freedom as a voyeur of destruction (which is, of course, also my own destruction). Never is the aesthetic of destruction sufficiently related to an object for it to become a critique of this fascism of representa- tion. Never, as I switch on the light or turn on my car engine is the truth of this freedom - the aesthetic of destruction - rendered visible or account- able in relation to itself of therefore to the universal.
Thus my identity as a person, my mastery, consists in my having fossil fuel culture relieve me from all social and political relations. It relieves me from my determination as self and other, because it aestheticizes the life and death struggle. Death is reduced to an image, something unreal, some- thing represented in such a way as to have no actual relation to life. Death, and the slave, and the other - the carriers of the meaning of our political education - in fossil fuel culture are entertainment. It means that I am never other because the other is not real. As such I am relieved of any expe- rience in which I learn of myself as the master of fossil fuel culture, or as the destroyer.
This freedom from death will - is - destroying itself. The wars, current and future, for control of oil are destined to be the aesthetic of destruction that Benjamin identified. Indeed, riots and wars for oil in the name of free- dom point towards an almost certain future. The totality of fossil fuel culture, unmediated by the totality of the negative, as suggested above, is its own categorical imperative. It is an imperative which reproduces itself in an aesthetic of destruction. In fossil fuel culture, destruction is freedom.
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The immediacy of this imperative, feeding itself on the need which it cre- ates, resembles Adorno's critique of culture as pre-digested 'baby-food' (1991: 58). Both offer a dialectic of nihilism emancipated from all needs save those which it reproduces for itself. But fossil fuel culture adds an important dimension to this totality of ideology. It enjoys the fetishism of the object as the fetishism of fetishism itself. Freedom is freedom not only from the object, but also from alienation from the object. As such, fossil fuel culture echoes Adorno's observation that objects pass 'impotently by' (1991: 62). 'Nothing happens any more' (1991: 62-63). 6 The decay of aura has already removed experience from its objects. Image and reality parade as the aestheticization of the political, and freedom from culture is the new culture, fossil fuel culture.
We have seen, at the beginning of this century, that fossil fuel culture claims and will continue to claim the state of emergency and 'restoration' as its own unquestionable imperative. This freedom, this imperative, is absolute godless spirituality, and is evil. It has overcome nature yet it is also in a constant state of emergency in anticipating, knowing, that nature will only yield finite amounts of freedom. Running out of oil, whether as a disruption in supplies or as the end of oil reserves, will play itself out as the allegory of the fallen creature. Fascism will carry the crisis. It will offer the 'sanctuary' (Adorno, 1991: 87) of a dialectic of nihilism, inwardly experi- enced as the yearning for a restoration of itself with the freedom that is deserting it, and outwardly carrying out its imperative for restoration in ruthless fashion such that the dialectic of nihilism becomes the praxis of intrigue. At stake is how fossil fuel culture learns to represent itself as other to itself. Those who refuse this negation, this real loss of abstract freedom, will find in a state of emergency the authority to destroy others by protect- ing themselves. Those who can learn of culture as the representation of representation will learn of their collaboration in the illusions of fossil fuel freedoms and will recognize a relation to the universal. But do not be sur- prised then, when, 'at home', freedom demands armed guards at petrol stations, and 'abroad', it offers destruction to feed the aesthetic. In what may prove to be the coup de gra^ce of fascist culture, through the reproduc- tion of destruction on television and the Web, the categorical imperative of bourgeois freedom will itself be aestheticized. As such, even absolute destruction will not be recognized as a universal event. Ruin in fossil fuel culture is the absence of a notion of culture as representation at all. We are continually learning to enjoy (watching) the recognition that there is nothing we can do. That, above all else, is the triumph of culture as the
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of philosophy.
End of culture
There is a second way in which the spirit of Fascism represents itself; this is as the culture - or, really the lack of culture - of specific forms of philoso- phy. The term 'post-modern' refers to the state of emergency brought about in and through the dialectic of enlightenment. The totality of the latter is the experience of desertion by the universal and objectivity, and marks phi- losophy as the site of the ruin. In turn, this absence even of the possibility of resistance produces in consciousness a capitulation to the culture that represents this resignation. The ideology of the ideology of this culture is that it is representation without a notion of itself as culture. 7 Thought is denied its own expression as thinking, the dialectic of enlightenment ceases to 'examine itself' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: xv) and thought is reduced to predatory voyeurism. Thus the culture of philosophy is the representa- tion of Fascism and the fascism of representation. Or, the same, the culture of philosophy is become representation without dialectic, without negation and without its difficult or aporetic relation to the universal.
As Adorno and Rose both note, representation is essential to philosophy for it is the dialectical relation between thought and being representing itself as thinking, as knowledge, and as philosophy. 8 The 'transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of individual words' (Adorno, 1973: 11), says Adorno, is the work of representation within philosophy. The 'more' is itself a mediation of that which expresses it. It is the relation, the difference, the dialectical experience of the more and 'the in-itself of this more' (1973: 12). But both Rose and Adorno draw attention to the ways in which phi- losophy 'would abolish representation' (Rose 1996: 55). Rose states, 'the translation of modern metaphysics into ontology involves, first and last, the overcoming of representation as the imperium of the modern philosophical subject, and as the false promise of universal politics' (1996: 55). This, she says, converges with 'the inner tendency of Fascism itself' (1996: 41). Ontology cannot discern between evil and positivity because ontology 'can only read experience as identitarian' (1996: 56). Thus, ontology reads 'the insistence on ground . . . [as] the process involved in the Nazi myth of racial superiority' (1996: 56) and refuses the experience of the modern subject its lack of iden- tity, its dialectic of enlightenment. Resignation before the desertion of truth and its consequent evil of posited identity characterizes 'the new
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ontology' (1996: 56). It cannot distinguish between self-identity as fixed and as fluid because it denies the experience of the relation. Without the experience, evil 'makes itself at home with itself' (Adorno, 1973: 26).
Adorno makes a similar case to Rose. In philosophies of the 'authentic', 'the authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority' (1973: 5). This form of absolute godless spirituality, complicit with the language that it strips of representational significance, offers itself as a refuge from the false promise of universal politics. However, it is, says Adorno, a refuge where 'a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation' (1973: 5). Rose notes that the new ontology gives 'Being to beings, who live and die' (Rose, 1996: 55). Adorno, more directly, observes that in relation to a phi- losophy where 'simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing' (1973: 21), beings could 'hardly do anything other than exist' (1973: 13). The jargon of authenticity marks the state of emergency for philosophy now, not because of the desertion of the universal from the creaturely, but from its absolution from desertion in Being. The year 1933 marks the state of emer- gency that responds to the ruin of universal politics and the philosophical subject by denying their formative significance.
Good and evil, positive and negative, are therein released from their bondage to the autonomous moral subject and retrieved in their authenticity for states of Being. Thus, says Adorno,
positive and negative are reified prior to living experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation. (1973: 21)
In terms of education in Hegel, this is to say that the jargon of the authen- ticity of Being posits the meaning of life and death as a voyeur of their struggle and not as the result of that struggle and the illusions it carries.
Dominant within philosophy then is the effacing of its formation within the baroque spirit of desertion, an effacing which is mourning in denial of itself. The dialectic of enlightenment has been traduced into the ideology of the ideology of philosophy and has resigned itself to the notion of totality that it gives to itself when it is no longer attached to itself as its own object. This fetishism of philosophy is again the inner tendency of Fascism. It destroys opposition, defines totality as equivalence, liquidates experience and the individual, posits illusory being as essence, separates thought from experience, aestheticizes the political, and, through the equivalence of
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unmediated singularity, reinforces the particularity of bourgeois freedom. In short, it suppresses 'the risk of the universal interest' (Rose, 1996: 62). 9
So, if the spirit of Fascism dominates not only the political reality of free- dom but also its image in and as philosophy, then might we conclude that culture itself, the representation of the relation of state and religion, is fas- cist through and through? Has modern bourgeois subjectivity become its own ideology, its own duplication? Has the dialectic irretrievably lost its substance, its political significance, to the un-dialectic of the immediacy of image and reality? Are we without an object of experience altogether? If autonomous thinking is resigned, if the dialectic is eschewed in favour of authenticity, and if fossil fuel culture becomes its own ideology of ideology, then the familiar question raises itself - can anything be done? This is the kind of question Adorno felt the need to defend himself against. In 'Resig- nation', he notes that critical theory was criticized for not producing a programme of action. His response was that resignation lies not in the rec- ognition that individuals are formed and deformed by culture and cannot change this 'merely through an act of their own will' (Adorno, 1991: 171). Rather, resignation is reserved for those who find relief from the cognition of impotence by action. As such, 'the feeling of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking' (1991: 174). The question of theory and practice, however, is borne of the same ideology of ideology, the same fascism of representation and representation of Fascism that it would overcome. This is both its strength and its weakness. The fact that we are implicated in political and philosophical cultures is our formation, our deformation and our re-formation. This notion of totality is qualitatively different from a fascist notion of totality as conformity and equivalence, for here culture retrieves itself as its own object.
Any return of the object of thought to itself as thinking, or as our philo- sophical education, is not the overcoming of fascist culture, but it is the philosophical re-education regarding a notion of totality that fascist culture attributes to itself. To know fascist totality is to know complicity, even in going to the pictures. And to know complicity is to know how to think the dangers, the violence, of guarding our 'particular interests' (Rose, 1996: 62). In the cinema as in the traffic queue, the aestheticization of the political is politicized by the negation of the particular for whom traffic or the audi- ence is everyone except himself. These are strange places to experience the universal, but then, they are cultural experiences. 'We are always staking ourselves in the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representa- tion throughout the range of quotidian practices and cultural rituals' (Rose, 1996: 61). It is an educational matter, then, to learn to comprehend them
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differently, not in the kind of cultural studies which only deals in 'close ups of the things around us by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects' (Benjamin, 1992: 229) but by the form and content of philosophical think- ing that can retain the relation of such experiences to the object as to itself. Such philosophy is representation and as such is both the fascism of repre- sentation and the representation of Fascism.
Illusion
Another way of stating the education described in the previous paragraph is as education in Hegel. If this education was seen above as able to survive the end of culture in the quotidian experiences of the traffic queue and the cinema, and even in turning on a light bulb, it also persists in an equally unlikely way in Hegelian philosophy. Education in Hegel is present for itself in the shapes that insist on its disappearance.
The education in Hegel that forms the substance of each chapter in this book has its ground in one of Hegel's most difficult ideas, that of the groundlessness of illusory being. As we will now see, illusory being is death in life, dependence in independence, and the other in the self. In each of these relations the illusion is that there is no relation. Education in Hegel retrieves this relation while recognizing that even such retrieval is grounded in the groundlessness of illusion. The significance of illusion here is that it can retrieve for philosophical thought an object where it appears that no such object exists. In the concrete case of fossil fuel culture - where the object has been assimilated into the aesthetic of fossil fuel freedom, and where the paradox of complicity has nothing to set itself against, and where paradox and complicity thus melt away without substance - this means that philosophy can find an otherness to the totality of its freedom.
The political significance of illusory being is that the illusory mastery of the bourgeois is still a substantive self-re-formation, because illusion here is itself determinative, or educational. The logic of essence in Hegel's Science of Logic is really the logic of the illusions of essence. Being is saved for itself when essence makes it its own. As such, essence holds itself to be the inde- pendence of being. But essence, like all mastery, avoids the dependence of its mastery upon an other. It avoids its own vulnerability by exporting other- ness beyond itself, failing here to recollect otherness within itself. This illusion is concrete as the subjective reflective thinker, for whom reflection is autonomy. As such, the mastery of this essence is a positing of life as without death, or of essence as without nothingness. It is, as we saw in Chapter One above, life understood from the point of view of the victor in the life and
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death struggle. It is really only a non-essence, a merely illusory essence, an illusory mastery. As the truth of the master is the slave so, here, the truth of illusory being is really the nothingness of being that it rejects as other than itself and to itself. In one manifestation the awareness of the illusory foun- dation of essence here is scepticism. This is because reflection, aware of itself as illusion, believes itself unable to think the truth of anything, for each thought that it holds to be true will be undermined by the groundless- ness of all thought. Thus it appears that scepticism is as far as thought can go. The mastery of such scepticism is really a violence against itself, where thought attacks thought. When this is believed to have no educational import for thought, scepticism becomes the aesthetic of destruction. This, as we saw above, characterizes the illusion of fossil fuel freedoms, that totality is null and that actions therefore have no other.
But scepticism is at best only one third of a triadic philosophical educa- tion. The harder education, now, is that regarding how illusion can be substantive, and can be educative as self-determinative. This determinate substance is already content10 within scepticism but not yet recognized or disturbed as such. This content(ment) is carried in the illusion of life as something without nothing, of life without death, of ground without also groundlessness. Reflective subjective essence enjoys this as the idea of itself as completely separate from nothingness. Here, mastery and scepticism are the one reflective freedom. Politically, in fossil fuel culture, this freedom is total in the exclusion of otherness from all sovereign masters. It defines what a 'free' man is, masking the groundlessness of this definition in and by the illusion that fear, death, or other have no part to play here. As such, essence as illusion has no object that can compromise it, for it is related to all externality as freedom from it, and internally, it is related to itself by the absence of such objects. What fossil fuel culture adds to this illusion, as we have seen already, is that externality is in fact no object and that fossil fuel freedom has no responsibilities except to itself. Its actions have no object but themselves, and these are aesthetic.
How, then, can the inherent instability of such political illusion become an object to itself in such a way as to know its freedom re-formed against itself? The philosophical education here is of illusory being learning that, as reflection, it is the reflection of nothing. This contains a crucial ambigu- ity. As the reflection of nothing it is nothing. As the reflection of nothing it is something. It is what it is: the reflection of nothing, grounded in groundless- ness. This education is open to two misrecognitions of current interest. The first is that this self-mediation, in undermining essence, lends itself to the hope for some form of intersubjective middle between reflective subjects,
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often conceived as mutual recognition. The second is that this self- mediation is seen to impose itself as an infinitely reproduced difference from itself that eschews all identity thinking, including that grounded in intersubjectivity and the logos. Both of these responses are less than and more than the philosophical education that illusion contains. They both posit something other to illusion, rather than see their own complicity within the totality of the other also as illusion. Both responses, the positive over- coming of illusion and the unknowable (excessive) condition of its possibility, essentially posit that of which they are already the return. Suppressing this education leaves only what Hegel calls external reflection.
It is to education in Hegel that we now turn in order to understand better the philosophical education that illusion commends. It contains within it immediacy, mediation, and the Aufhebung. As immediacy it is the posited sovereignty of the reflective subject. As mediated it is brought into relation with death, with that which is other to itself, and in this case it is where something is brought into relation with nothing. How it understands itself in this relation is the actuality of social and political relations. In fossil fuel culture the relation to death is the relation of freedom without a real object, and where the universal aspect of any action is represented to the voyeur as being without relation to it and thus liberated from responsibility for it. As such, fossil fuel culture is denuded of any educational significance regard- ing the relation of the universal to personal freedom and hides also the way in which culture achieves this. The truth of fossil fuel culture is that nothing happens. It will require education in Hegel to retrieve what happens when nothing happens.
What happens when nothing happens is that education happens, and this education is both the theory and the practice of the relation of life with death, of self with other, and of freedom with its object. Illusion is just such an education. Essence has an independence that is merely posited: it is illu- sory being. When illusion learns of itself as illusory being this is not an overcoming of illusion. It is the truth of illusion known as illusion in illu- sion. This is the nature of the Aufhebung here. It knows to know the ground of illusion and the negation of the ground of illusion to be the same ground- lessness. This does not resolve the two groundless elements of illusion and its negation. Rather, it is their being learned. What is the 'same' here is that neither of them, neither illusion nor its negation, are the same as them- selves. It is in illusion that essence is both already other to itself and that what is other to it is not essence. Illusion is this truth for itself and it is in our philosophical education that illusion is both the theory and practice of this truth - its formation, its negation, and its re-formation in this recollection.
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The truth of illusion is the truth of the negation of the negation, the truth that is groundless. It is this notion of truth that can retrieve the missing uni- versal from within the end of culture and within fossil fuel freedom.
Education in Hegel teaches that it is in the illusions of the master in fossil fuel culture that the latent fascism of this objectless political form becomes unstable and collapses. But without the philosophical education that illu- sion does have substance, that in the recollection of illusion something does happen, there will remain only the end of culture, an empty repetition of illusion without meaning. And this latter captures completely the stand- point of fossil fuel culture. Education in Hegel is a re-formed relation to the paradox of contingency and to the other that is hidden within fossil fuel mastery. It asks of us that we learn to do justice to aporia and not to aban- don it as a dead end. Doing justice to fossil fuel culture means complicity as education and not, as in the academic workshop, complicity without educa- tion. It is the retrieval of such a concept of implication which provides for rather than effaces the relation to the universal.
Nevertheless, the ideology of fossil fuel culture provides the current and most likely the future form and content of representation, of thinking. As the oil runs out, so representation of the universal in fossil fuel freedoms will become increasingly difficult. Each time I drive my car the universal is ideologically represented. Each time I cannot drive my car the universal will assert itself. But without learning how this assertion is another representa- tion of freedom, another politics, and another understanding of thinking, the universal will remain unthinkable within fossil fuel freedom. It is not just a question of new and renewable sources of energy. It is also a question of renewing political and philosophical education regarding the nature of fos- sil fuel freedom. To renew energy sources in order only to repeat fossil fuel freedom will repeat eternally the crisis that feeds our fascistic desires. There may not be long to wait before the fascism of the representation of fossil fuel culture meets the universal that it eschews in a war for its own survival. Even that, however, may not be enough to retrieve its universal significance from the spectacle of war.
Notes
1 Though I note that at the time of writing some are arguing that OPEC has exag- gerated the levels of oil reserves.
