No More Learning

'56 From now on, Catholic faith implied an unconditional subjugation of married persons to the consequences of marital intercourse, regardless of whether they were in a position to ensure a sufficient inheritance, and thus a productive future, for their offspring - without consideration, even, for the question of whether one can expect workers with no property of their own to bring up children at all. The policy of 'capital expansion through population increase' calmly passed over objections of this kind. In truth, the population explosion of the Modern Age was triggered in part by the extensive incorporation of the propertyless workers, the subsequently much-discussed and usually wrongly declared 'proletariat', into the family and procreative praxis of late aristocratic-bourgeois 'society'.
In matters of procreation, the attitude of most Reformation theolo- gians was even more Catholic than that of the papacy. Martin Luther, who produced half a dozen children with Katharina von Bora, taught - intoxicated by the elan of his own faith - that Christian men should rest assured that if they increased the numbers of the faith- ful, God would not withhold the material means to nurture them as long as they were sufficiently diligent. Heinsohn and his colleagues incisively sum up the maxim behind such thinking: 'Generalization of individual irresponsibility in the form of responsibility to God. '57 One should note here that the concept of responsibility is significant neither in theology nor in classical moral philosophy; it only moved to the centre of ethical reflection in the course of the twentieth century, when the explosively grown problem of actions and their unintended consequences gained a large part of the moral attention.
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to -in a resolute blindness to consequences that would like to be mistaken for trust in God. Because of their com- mitment to the protection of unborn and born life, an honourable thing in itself, Modern Age churches of all confessions acted as de facto accessories to the most cynical biopolitical operation of all time.
Human Overproduction and Proletarianization
In its boundless longing for subjects, the new Leviathan decreed the most massive deregulation ever seen in the history of human repro- ductions, excepting the demographic explosions during the twentieth century in the Islamic sphere and various zones of what was once called the 'Third World'. Within a few generations, thanks to con- sistent 'witch policies' from both above and below in the leading European nations (which, moreover, were still looking back fear- fully on the depopulation catastrophe in the thirteenth century and the periodically returning plagues), birth rates first increased stead- ily, then exploded. Within barely more than a quarter of a century, the effects of absolutist biopolitics accumulated (though temporar- ily restricted by the consequences of the Thirty Years War) into a human tsunami whose crest broke in the nineteenth century - one of the conditions not only for the growth of a 'proletariat' damned to frustration, a class of propertyless workers who had to sell their services on markets outside of family businesses, but also for a dis- proportionate human exportation, mistakenly termed 'imperialism' by Marxists, that supplied the personnel to populate three continents with Europeans - South America, North America and Australia - as well as a partial occupation of the remaining continents. 58
The same demographic tidal wave flooded European 'societies' with countless unusable, unruly and unhappy people absorbable neither by the labour market nor by regiments, let alone the navy or overseas destinations. It was they who, from the seventeenth century on, brought about the first precursors of the welfare state, the Etat providence, and provoked intervention. It was their fates that Foucault stumbled upon in his studies on the history of the modern disciplinary system. It is no insult to him if one notes that the explanatory value of his investigations is lessened by their insufficient consideration for the demographic dimension of his topic - a dis- concerting observation on a scholar whose present renown is based almost entirely on his supposed discovery of biopower mechanisms.
its form -
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
policy but It is perhaps time to point out calmly that start of his disciplinological research, fell prey to an enormous optical illusion when he sought to attribute the state's capture of irretriev- able surplus humans, whose existence is often documented by no more than a note in the records of the absolutist administrations,59 to the effects of a fundamentally repressive, state-based disciplinary power. In reality, the measures taken by the early modern state on the poverty·political front can only be grasped if recognized as a more or less mechanical defence against its own excessive successes in the field of human production. What seems like a quintessential manifestation of 'disciplinary power' from the perspective of the genealogy of the prison was, from a state-functional perspective, already a form of the caring power that would constitute the modern welfare state60 - long before the nineteenth century raised any capitalism-specific 'social question'. In fact, the measures to discipline the poor in the classical period already contained the concession to the central principle of anthropological enlightenment: it is not nutrition that makes humans, but rather incorporation into the symbolic order - 'socialization', in the jargon of the twentieth century. What is socialization, however, but one of the masks worn by the practising life in an age bewitched
by work and domination?
The culture-pathological consequences of deregulated human pro-
duction in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were unforeseeably far-reaching. They culminated in a modernization of cruelty that surpassed even the purposeful brutalization training of antiquity. Even here, however, one should not confuse side effects with intentions. Gunnar Heinsohn and his colleagues point out the early Modern Age's 'inability to fine tune itself',61 which guaranteed that it would fall prey to its lack of regulation sooner or later. 62 It is gener- ally doubtful, in any case, whether demographic policy can already be viewed as a concise form of modern anthropotechnics, as it quite obviously lacks the technical aspect, the mastering of the procedure that brings about the desired result in discrete, explicit and controlled steps. There is no doubt that it turns human beings into raw material for further processing, political and otherwise. It is equally evident that it is committed to the experimental style of modern 'great politics' already identified by Nietzsche: the dynamism and futurism of the new civilizatory model are inconceivable without a significant element of chance. From this perspective, the absolutist style of demographic policy was a form of project-making on a grand scale - something halfway between technique and gamble that was typical of its time. 63
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ART WITH HUMANS
The Birth of Sodal Policy from Problem of Human Surplus
In our context, all that matters is that the populationist policies of the early modern state triggered the impetuous development of numer- ous concrete forms of anthropotechnics, whether these manifested themselves on the education-political, pedagogical, military, police or welfare state fronts. The demographic policy based on uncondi- tional growth led to the typical modern vicious circle in which the incessant, soon apparently fateful overproduction of humans caused a massive overtaxing of upbringing potential in families, and hence a higher risk of epidemic child neglect. The response to this disastrous situation was, for understandable reasons, usually to appeal to the modern school system - not only so that it would provide the modern community with the necessary numbers of achievers, but also in the hope that the vast group of hopeless and superfluous people might form something resembling useful, or at least harmless members of society after all - a task at which the educators of the early modern state were doomed to fail. 64 When the toughening disciplines of school and the integrative effects of professional life fail, a second rescue system is required to 'catch' the surplus individuals. It is in this regime of administrative severities that the Foucauldian phenomena - the disciplines of custody, sedation and correction in the classical state - developed.
What we call social policy today is initially nothing but the modern state continually tracing its self-created vicious circle. 'Capitalism' only contributed to it after the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, by beginning the never-ending crusade to lower the cost of the labour factor. This all-tao-successful campaign is still giving the postmodern therapy and redistribution state a chronic headache, as it does not know what to make of the confusing simulta- neity of high unemployment and low birth rates; de (acto, this points to the excessive success of the economic system in its search for ways to reduce labour costs - a success that inevitably leads to the mass dis- missal of workers, yet can only be attained at the expense of the social system. But even the absolutist state, which 'made live' too much from the start by producing substantially more humans through its control over sexual parameters than it - or rather the families, schools and factories - could equip with humanizing qualifications and chances of economic employment, was damned to erect its ever higher-towering pyramids of polytechnical virtuosity over a substrate of impoverished and over-numerous humans. For them, compulsive
345
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODER~S
to
at these is not enough to understand disciplinological adventure of the Modern Age as a whole - neither in its artistic and artisanal dimensions nor in its scholarly, epistemological and engineering aspects, to say nothing of the neo-athletic and anthropo-political departures in the late nine-
teenth and complete twentieth century.
Educational Policy Under the Absolute Imperative
Modern pedagogy reacted to the new order situation in its own way: it took advantage of the state's chronic need by making itself indis- pensable to the modern body politic for centuries. It sharp-wittedly rose to become the discipline of all disciplines. It single~mindedly combined the crude education-political imperative - supplying the modern state with usable human beings - with a modern form of the absolute imperative: 'Instead of changing your life later on, you should let us change you from the start. ' At the start of their offensive, educators were committed almost without exception to this rule, as they almost all came from church traditions - or, in our translation, from the institutionalized practice forms of ethical difference. They knew from venerable sources and early-morning introspections that man is the being which needs to be brushed the wrong way. The era in which Rousseau and the anti-authoritarians would spread their confusion had not yet dawned; it had not occurred to anybody that one need only let children follow their own inclinations in all matters for free citizens to emerge. Even the most terrible fouetteur d'enfants - to use the epithet Rabelais coined for Pierre Tempete, master of the Parisian College de Montaigu (where Ignatius of Loyola studied), who became legendary for his brutality towards students - was abso- lutely convinced that he was merely doing what was necessary, as a
Christian and schoolmaster, to turn little monsters into adults with character. In the certainty that idleness is the beginning of all vice, the pious educators of that time did everything in their power to ensure that the devil had no chance of finding a pupil's mind unoccupied.
Emendatio Mundi
Perhaps this was the only way for the absolutely unexpectable to occur. From the modern state's initiation of human production
346
ART WITH HUMANS
the intervention most power- idea nve hundred years: notion world
ment appeared on the scene when the Baroque school accepted the task of warding off the human catastrophe triggered by the early modern state through its policy of unfettered human production. In this situation, improving the world meant improving humans en masse. As this was no longer practicable as the self-improvement of an ascetic minority, it required improvement of the many through educational institutions. Hence the pedagogues of early modernity, for the first time, applied the metanoetic imperative directly to chil- dren. Only then did the meaning of the thesis that all education is conversion truly become clear. The later totalitarian systems would be heir to the invasive schools, reclaiming the prerogative of com- pletely capturing the young.
With the support of the human production state, which was demographically competent (and hence strong) but pedagogically incompetent (and hence in difficulties), educators on the eve of the Enlightenment realized that they could only perform their duty suc- cessfully on one condition: they would have to reach for the whole human being in each student: they already saw the child as the future citizen. They consequently decided to pre-empt metanoia, the ethical revolution in mid-life, by planting the seed of change at the begin- ning. 65 Because of this disposition, the early modern school became the cell of ambition for the world that was to be changed - indeed, the incubator for all later 'revolutions'. It not only wanted to prepare for the better world while still in the worse; it sought to pull the world as a whole onto the better side through the production of graduates who were too good for the world as it was. School had to become the place where the adaptation of humans to deficient reality was thwarted. A second overproduction was to compensate for the damage caused by the first.
Implanting the change of life in the beginnings of each life demanded, to begin with, no less than the transference of monastic discipline to the school setting; this was the minimum price for the project of modernity. From the start, its goal was nothing but the correction of the erroneous world text - the emendatio mundi. It consisted in the replacement of the current depraved wording with a lost original version that could only be rendered legible once more by theologians, philosophers, and now also educators. This idea - which could only have occurred to the typesetters and printers, the correctors and pub- lishers of the Gutenberg era and their accomplices, the schoolmasters and educators of adults, who would call themselves members of the
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
Enlightenment soon afterwards - could be applied most plausibly to the souls of children in the burgeoning age of print. School transpired early on as the moral distillation flask of modern 'society', being the place where the metanoetic appeal to retreat from the world was to be taken up by a secular institution and turned towards profane ends. Here it was always important to maintain the semblance of subor- dination to the state mission - no publicly funded school in the time between Erasmus and Hartmut von Hentig has ever stated openly that its aim was the production of socially unusable characters, let alone modern hermits. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that every educator of quality had thoughts about the true goals of their profession that did not exactly coincide with the expectations of statehood.
This, then, proved to be the highest form of art with humans in the age of Christian humanism and its school projections: the availability of procedures for incorporating imperatives of humanization into edu- cation and imprinting the watermarks of the ideal indelibly upon the souls of the youngest. The premises for this change lie in the dissonant alliance between state and school: the mercantilist state of the early Modern Age identified the movements of monastic flight from the world, which were still massive, as an unwelcome tendency, almost a subversive evasion of potential workers from the spreading dictate of universal usefulness. It believed it was acting circumspectly and in its own interests by giving educators the power to take the young by the hand early on, and thus commit them to a curriculum of general usability from their first steps on. Its miscalculation would become evident in subsequent centuries; whoever relies on pedagogues to produce citizens should be prepared for unexpected side effects.
School Interest Versus National Interest
The trick of pedagogical reason articulated itself in the fact that while the modern school trained its pupils nominally with a view to the state and 'society', it secretly, sometimes even manifestly, bypassed the state and 'society'. This error was crystallized in the resonant German word Bildung. 66 The special status of 'culture' in the modern construction of reality cannot be understood without the organized deviation of education from its external purpose. One could already see a hint of the incipient 'differentiation of subsystems' - the trivial- izing sense behind the talk of differentiation, admittedly, would be clearer here than elsewhere. Just as modern demographic policy fails
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ART H. UlvlANS
at its
its own, modern culture was flooded with an enormous surplus of
dead-end idealisms - personalism, humanism, utopianism and mor- alism being the official varieties. 67 This excess provoked a series of culture-pathological reactions, from escapism and inner retreat to Romanticism, revoltism and immoralism. The character mask of the cynic conquered the late aristocratic and bourgeois stage from the eighteenth century on - the Mozart-da Ponte operas would be quite incomplete without the figure of the hard-boiled philosopher who, wrapped in his foul-smelling donkey hide, always expects the worst of humans. 68 At the same time, the modern novel unfolded a veritable phenomenology of private reason turned bad. Hegel's philosophy, at its didactic core, is nothing other than a machine for processing frustrated idealism; for what he calls 'education' is essentially disap- pointment management. It refers not to the decentred wandering of bourgeois curiosity between this and that thing, as today's equation of 'culture' with leisure implies. Bildung demands the hard later con- ditioning of the flaring-up idealistic subject, which must abandon the illusion that the world owes it any adjustment to its morally exagger- ated expectations. Needless to say, the sensible Protestant Hegel was defeated across the board in his struggle with modern protest culture.
No one who wanted to write a reasoned history of modern peda- gogy could avoid examining the deepest systemic rupture within the semantics of the Modern Age: the divergence of school interest and national interest. The pseudo-symbiosis of school and state holds some of the most baffling dysfunctionalities of modern culture - it causes frictions whose dissonant potential goes beyond the old symbi- otic dualism of church and state. A retelling of this dangerous liaison would not only have to show how, to this day, countless graduates of the modern school systematically dream in directions unrelated to the conditions of the 'working world'; it would also have to explain the state's chronic attempts to defeat the single-mindedness of the 'peda- gogical province' for pragmatic and utilitarian reasons. Such attempts would provide the running thread leading to a history of school as a history of school reforms - always from the ideal school to the real one, of course. University reforms in Germany during the twentieth century, whether those of 1933 or those from the late 1960s - to name only the most symptomatic caesuras - form a coherent picture if one sees in them the undisguised will of the state to reconquer the commanding heights of cognitive human production in the service of the working world and power politics. Had Wilhelm II not already
measures. Because a
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
claimed, in front of German secondary school teachers, that what was needed at German schools were not new Greeks but young German men? Naturally the 'education planners' could only succeed in their neo-realistic plan if they took suitable steps to eliminate the humanism still blooming in the faculties, especially the humanities - assuming the reorganized departments did not initiate the necessary adjustments of their own accord: for decades, pre-emptive dismay has been the zeitgeist itself. 69
All the World's a School
Whoever wants to teach becomes a member of the modern world's most powerful organization: teachers without borders. If world time and school time converge in future, it is due to their actions. No author of the burgeoning era of teachers formulated with more elan, more comprehensively or more radically how pervasive the new pedagogy had become than John Amos Comenius. His works give the impression that he wanted to correct Shakespeare's statement, 'All the world's a stage I and all the men and women merely players,/o replacing it with the counter-thesis that all the world is a school- and all humans merely pupils. We are inhabitants of a creation in which everything revolves around instruction.
2. That it is right to call the world a school is shown first of all by the matter itself [. . . ] for what is a school? It is generally defined as a company ofpersons who teach and learn what is useful. 71 If this is true, then the world is a school, since it is entirely made up of an order of teachers, learners, and disciplines.
3. For everything that exists in the world teaches or learns, or it does both alternately . . .
5. Therefore everything is filled with disciplines, i. e. with various tools for admonishing, advising and driving on: therefore it is not wrong to call the world a house o f discipJine. 72
For human beings, the created world is a 'prelude to eternity': it offers a preparatory course that we must attend before we are admitted to the heavenly academyJ3 Comenius has no doubts about the material that has to be covered during the stay in the house of discipline: the world-pupil must work through three books to acquire the necessary wealth of knowledge:
The first and greatest book of God is the visible world inscribed and illustrated with as many characters as there are creatures of God to be
350
ART
seen in Jt. The second book is man made in likeness of God. [. . . JBut God has into man's hands a third book [. . . J the Scripture. 74
If one takes into account the depraved nature of man, it is hardly sur- prising that mortals have so far, for the most part, made no proper use of the aids given to them. They rejected the universal books granted to them thanks to the free availability of divine teaching tools. They wilfully insisted on imaginary special knowledge, causing them to sink into darkness and eternal quarrelling. As a result, there is no redemp- tion in the world, only a civil war between the pseudo-knowledgeable and the ignorant. At the time he wrote these statements, Comenius was not only looking back on the Thirty Years War, which he had experienced in its entirety; he could also see the beginnings of the never-ending cold war that modern experts in international law whitewash as the 'European state system' established in the Peace of Westphalia and rationalized by the Ius publicum europaeum.
Pre-Enlightenment: The Way of light
For Comenius, the enthusiastic mastermind of the Bohemian Brethren, the way to heal the world's sickness was not to be found at the peace conferences of potentates. It could only be gleaned from the eternal philosophy and from revelation. The path of salvation for the decrepit world could only be the Way of Light - thus the title of Comenius' chiliastic manifesto of 1668, whose most significant parts had been written in London over twenty years earlier. In this epochal treatise, he stirred up conventional Neoplatonic thought figures (such as the doctrine of the threefold action of the primal light, comprising inner stasis, emanation through creation and the satisfying return to the source) in the spirit of a pedagogical apocalypticism. Here the main motifs of the later Enlightenment - in so far as it is based on a barely disguised totalitarianism of the school- are plain to see in their origi- nal Christian-millenarian form.
In our context, it is instructive to observe how for the great school man, the way of light prefigures the way of school, while the way of school points to the perfection of the book. Thus he answers the ques- tion, 'How can the greatest light of understanding be kindled for the world? '75 with the information that one must unify the three sources of light - self-communicating nature, the inborn ideas of the human soul and the Holy Scripture - in a single over-bright flame. Through
351
its rays, step to
can communicate it already
THE EXERCISES
THE MODERNS
in the new books, and will shine even brighter in the futu~e once improved books are available, the 'absolutely necessary books can be translated into the common languages'. 76 Thanks to the timely inventions of the letterpress and deep-sea navigation, the spreading of that strongest and most radiant light which overcomes all resistance from darkness is now only a 'matter of time': the omens of future pan-harmony are shining on the horizon of the present. Among these is the widespread human longing for a better world. Comenius would not have been a metaphysicist in the classical tradition if he had not taken the presence of that longing as a sign that it could be fulfilled - God would not have implanted this yearning for good in us if He had not already ensured its attainability. Analogously, Ernst Bloch, the last great-naive thinker of world improvement, saw hope itself as an agent of realizing the hoped-for.
The top form of Modern Age art with humans is evident in the over-enthusiastic project of turning every student into a pupil of pan- sophy. This term, common among encyclopaedic scholars since the sixteenth century, is probably best translated as 'the art of omnisci- ence'. In our century, though probably since the days of Diderot and his colleagues, it has been forgotten that the world knowledge of the Modern Age had begun its reproduction cycles under the catchword of omniscience - a word whose history of decline indicates the oft- cited 'clarification of Enlightenment' [Abklarung der AufkiarungJ. The syllabus of the student of omniscience (and other students are, for the moment, not worth mentioning) is based on the aforementioned premises: whoever wishes to learn must learn everything, in keeping with the three keys to totality or 'books' which the creator, according to Comenius' doctrine of source, provided for mankind. Hence every single pupil must transform into an artwork of omniscience, printed in the typographic workshops of the new pan-disciplines. Comenius, one of the grand masters of pansophy alongside Athanasius Kircher and Leibniz, never tired of constantly inventing new subdivisions and variations to augment the mother discipline: panpaedeia (universal education), panurgia (universal technique), pangiottia (doctrine of universal language), panorthosia (doctrine of universal reform), pannuthesia (universal warning), panergesia (universal appeal) and panaugia (universal light). The definition of school in Comenius' Orbis sensualium pictus (The Visible World] - the first schoolbook of the Modern Age, published in Nuremberg in 1658 - as a 'work- shop in which young minds are formed in accordance with virtue>77 is
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ART WITH
virtus of the to in their goal was to transform the pupil's soul into a speaking mirror of totality. To graduate, the student had to become a Gesamtkunstwerk of world knowledge and cognizance of godly things.
In the light of such monumental aims, one would suppose that their author himself had the greatest doubts as to their feasibility. But the undaunted pedagogue of totality insisted on proving by all means that it was indeed time to hope and strive for the 'greater'. Hence the six learning steps of mankind summarized by the author in chapter 13 of Via Lucis - one of the first outlines of a stage theory of the human race, from Adam and Eve to Gutenberg and Magellan - had to be augmented by a seventh: the step into the global society of light. It is not hard to recognize the euphoric original state of the disen- chanted 'society of knowledge' in this vision. For Comenius, this final manoeuvre contains the mission and adventure of the now. Whoever completes it supports the operative light in its current work: they further the breakthrough to total didactics, which promises without false modesty to convey everything to all in a universal fashion. Here sounds the battle cry of pedagogical millenarism: omnes omnia omnino, which runs through Comenius' work - unwaveringly main- taining the balance between enthusiasm and method for forty years.
With the call to universal education, Comenius announced that the apocalyptic call was the order of the day in this 'evening of the world': because not much time was left, it was high time to gather up what had been scattered, and collect all summations in summa- tions of summations. 78 The agenda of the age called for a new book of books, a hyper-Bible that would meet the needs of the Gutenberg era. A book of this kind, a form of Newer Testament that would test our ability to count to three with the Holy Scriptures too, would by its nature have to be the definitive, or even final, book. It would have to contain everything a prudent person should know - heavenly and earthly, natural and artificial things alike. 79 It is meant to hold the evangelic potential of profane knowledge.
What is peculiar here is that world knowledge, whose scope is wide, and salvific knowledge, which demands a restriction to the one essential thing, suddenly find themselves in a state of unim- paired harmony. One can, in fact, view the balanced coexistence of encyclopaedism and apocalypticism as the intellectual miracle of the seventeenth century. Something of this kind would not reappear until the spiritual lightning flash prior to the Russian Revolution, namely in the work of Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the creative mind of
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
the Russian cosmists, who not only postulated an all-encompassing world museum and a universal cemetery for all the dead of mankind, but also predicted the resurrection of the dead of all eras with the help of the life sciences, which would be founded specifically for this purpose. For him, true universalism consisted in the rejection of death, the final cause of asynchronicity, finitude and disconnection. 8o
Something distantly comparable also applied in the apocalyptic thought of the Baroque: Christians were able and expected to be encyclopaedists once the conflict between the theomorphism of the soul and the cosmomorphism of the whole human being had ceased to exist. One universe, one book, one psyche: the book-shapedness of the world permits the literate soul to embrace its world-shapedness fully. This is the ultimate reason why the great practisers of modernity no longer retreated to the desert. In future, it would suffice for them to live by the rule nulla dies sine pagina. Many pages form a chapter, and many chapters create the world. The immersion of scholars in the total book created a polyvalent movement in which withdrawal and exodus coincided: modern being-in-the-world realized a third way
between flight into the world and flight from the world.
This movement, which always points forwards and upwards, con- tains the original gesture of world improvement. 81 Improving the world means comparing the corrupted text to the intact one and cor- recting it to restore it to its original state. If there is no access to an original world text, improvers must rely on the dialectical assumption that the negation of the wrong will automatically produce the right. Against this background, it is clear why the Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School, especially after its reduction to a negative dia- lectics, was not only a camouflaged Marxism without a revolutionary
perspective; at the same time, it constituted a late daughter product of Baroque world-improving idealism - or, more precisely, its regression to a 'sad science'. Need we still add that during its best years, Baroque idealism carried out the transference of the Reformation from matters of faith to matters of knowledge? According to this idealism, we should be saved not only by faith, but also through knowledge. Enlightenment begins as pedagogical gnosis.
For those producing art with humans in the seventeenth century, the mission of emendatio mundi entailed a wealth of further conclu- sions: they quickly had to produce universal books (the plural is used here merely as a formality), universal schools, a universal college and a universal language. 'In this, no corner of the earth, no people, no language and no class of society will be neglected. '82 The books of light, schools of light, colleges of light and languages of light are
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ART WITH HUMANS
m every corner
win out everywhere, in
Comenian motto: Omnia sponte tluant, absit violentia rebus. g3 The primal light and the technical light campaign for the same cause: books are the lamps of world-illumination, schools the lamp-bearers, scholars the lamp-lighters, and languages the fuel for the flame of universal illumination. 84
Words and things are still so close together here that one can easily cross over from one side to the other. The world is the orderly tableau of essences, and as such it is easily understandable as a whole; that is why the encyclopaedias of the early Modern Age were still a form of atlas reproducing all the continents and countries of being 'topically' in clear maps. God and humans share the same 'conception of the world'. The lexica of the late eighteenth century, on the other hand, abandoned the aim of metaphysical overview, mirroring the disinte- gration of the whole in unrelated or weakly connected keywords. 85 Hence the newer 'reference works' since Zedler's Universallexikon and the French Encyclopedie have opted to string articles together alphabetically. One should not underestimate the formative effect of alphabetically 'ordered' lexica of the eighteenth century; for later ones, they provided exercises in incoherentism. Their mere structure reinforced the implicit conviction of the moderns that the world was an aggregate of isolated details; to this day, no form of holism has been able to overcome this influence - be it the ecological or the philo- sophical variety.
Comenius' manifesto of the pedagogical international uncovered substantial premises for world-improving action: for those who choose the way of light, haste is as necessary as the conviction that they can pass on universal knowledge. A hundred years later, one of the editors of the Encyclopedie took up the impulse provided by Comenius. Diderot's vigorous call Hatons-nous de rendre fa philoso- phie populaire can therefore also be reversed: to make philosophy popular and effective requires an acceleration. Only by its haste can one recognize that progress is apocaiypticism under a bourgeois guise. For the philosophical apocalypticist, the way to the light is the way of light itself: it is the absolute in history. It has accepted performing the work of world-pervasion since the beginning of all creation, and in our time the enterprise has entered its final phase. If there has ever been a version of the 'project of modernity' in plain terms, it can be found in the work of Comenius.
The postulate of omniscience recalls a time from which we have long since been alienated, when knowledge was viewed as something
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
nature 1t """"""'UU knowledge to penetrating insight into the structure the rounded cosmos of essences. It referred to an effectively complete, but phenomenally disordered world in need of repair, and thus seemingly incomplete - but nonetheless reparable. At that time, the world-improvers were any who wanted to give the world back its original perfection - whereas today, one must assume that every repair causes new imbalances, new imperfections. For the pansophists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was nothing presumptuous in the call for omniscience; it merely drew the inescapable conclusions from the basic assumptions of classical metaphysics, which rested on an ontology of the perfect and compre- hensible world. This could at most be augmented by a therapeutics
that enabled humans to heal into the whole.
These assumptions echo in the admonition of Comenian pedagogy
to build the new school on the summation of all summations, so that future tuition would be based on a universal book.
Even omniscience can be given a child-friendly form. The pan-pedagogical intention is unmistakably based on other premises than the ancient way of prac- tising towards omniscience. For the Sophists, it did not come from an overall insight into the circle of knowledge joining the world, but rather the decree that the artiste in the eternal rhetorical training camp should be able to speak spontaneously and triumphantly on any given subject. 86
Eccentric Positionality: The Human Automaton as a Provocation of Anthropology
The modernity of Comenius' school projects is clear not so much from its limitless optimism, which seems decidedly antiquated today; it comes from the radically technical definition o'f school as an integral learning machine. It is not without reason that Comenius emphasized that the reformed school, this workshop (officina) of humaneness, must function in the manner of an automaton. To understand this term, one must take into account that the seventeenth century began to honour God Himself as the first builder of automata. The later equation of automatism and soullessness - undoubtedly the great- est success of anti-modern semantics after 1750 - was still a remote notion for the engineers of the time. For his own part, Comenius aimed to construct a perpetuum mobile. As his notes reveal, he was determined to make such an object public - assuming he succeeded
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\'<lITH HUMANS
In
he to it norin his own interests, the completion of the perfect machineP Here the adventure of cognitive modernization hinges on the identification of nature as the epitome of the God-built automaton. It formed the basis of the prediction that man, viewed by Comenius as the co-operator Dei, could soon embark in earnest on the reconstruction of natural machines.
Barely a century later, the anthropomorphic automata from the workshops of Baron von Kempelen (who had been appearing with his purportedly mechanical Chess Turk since 1769), Pierre Jacquet-Droz (who presented his immortal androids the Writer, the Draughtsman and the Musician in 1774) and Friedrich Kaufmann (who displayed his automatic trumpeter to the public) were on everyone's lips. From that point on, Romantic literature, including opera, raved about the possibility of confusing humans with statues, dolls or machines - with nothing to suggest that this motif could ever be abandoned again in technological civilization. 88
As early as the seventeenth century, then, or the eighteenth at the latest, anthropotechnics opened up a second front by projecting the impulse of artificial human moulding onto android machines. For Comenius there was no doubt: school had to become a machine. Its task was to send perfect reproductions of humans into the world - as genuine, well-formed humans. Anyone curious as to the things of which pedagogy once dared to dream can obtain the necessary information here. Here we also witness the reactivation of a disposi- tion that was already familiar to the Stoic teachers: when they gave the students who chose the philosophical way the task of working on their 'inner statue', this contained the suggestion that the empirical human should step aside for the ideal figure.
The popularity of anthropology from the eighteenth century on was triggered not least by the doubling of humans as androids and their human observers. If one takes this into account, it becomes clear why Plessner's 'eccentric positionality', correctly understood, is not merely a trivial self-transposition to the place and view of others, or the familiar human phenomenon of stepping out of oneself in front of the mirror. It not only reflects the increased demands of multi-situative 'societies' on the art of role playing; in addition, it is irreducible to the disadvantage of being seen, as illuminated by Blumenberg, let alone to an attempt to tum the disadvantage of visibility into an advantage. As much as this observation might offer a plausible explanation for
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THE EXERCISES 010 THE MODERNS 1S
as the flight into visibility,H9
The awareness of eccentricity among the moderns primarily ration-
alizes the shock of the ability to produce human automata; at the same time, it mirrors the amusement that can be derived from playing with mechanical doppelgangers. The statue is alive, it may harbour unpredictable intentions, it is moving towards humans - the modern theory of the human being is unimaginable without these suggestions. If the moderns still erected statues, it was no longer simply to set up moral and cultural models; they also did so to learn new things from within the statues. Were not the anatomical maps of Vesalius, in fact, macabre statues that revealed what the 'factory of the human body' looks like from the inside - though the viewer of the Vesalian plates would be reminded less of a workshop than of a ballroom acting as a venue for modernized danses macabres, performed by men composed of blood vessels and organs in all possible cuts and projections? Was not the message of the human skeletons appearing in the scientific collections of the nobility, and later also as demonstration objects in publicly funded schools, primarily an anthropological one, as they were presenting the basic framework of the android? And did not the plastinates of the Beuys imitator Gunther von Hagens, which have caused a worldwide furore since 1996 under the name 'Body Worlds', merely clarify the idea of the modern statue - the statue that exposes
the inner android?
The plausibility of the anthropological mode of reflection from
the eighteenth century onwards stemmed from the fact that every individual was now confronted with the stimulus of understanding themselves as a composite of android and real human. 9o Thus the venerable body-soul distinction presented itself in a new state of matter. The heyday of body discourses in Europe for the last two hundred years makes this constellation clear to this day. Following the publication of La Mettrie's L'Homme machine in 1748, the recipients of the physiological Enlightenment could see what happens when automata learn to speak and machines become nervous. It is not without reason that somnambulism - alongside the fear of being buried alive91 - was the central psychopathological symptom of the nineteenth century. The sleepwalker presents the inner android acting independently after the subtraction of the ego's consciousness, while live burial evokes the complementary phenomenon: the pure ego as it appears to itself after the interment of its body. The psychoanalysis of the early twentieth century (a contemporary mask of practising life in a world where even mourning is described as a form of work) still
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leU"UPC,,",", to map onto relationship ego and
The constant back and forth between the poles of the android id and the human ego gave rise to the soul drama of the mid-Modern Age, which was simultaneously a technical drama. Its topic is best summarized in a theory of convergence, where the android moves towards its animation while increasing parts of real human existence are demystified as higher forms of mechanics. The uncanny (which Freud knew something about) and the disappointing (on which he chose to remain silent) move towards each other. The ensoulment of the machine is strictly proportional to the desoulment of humans. As explained in the first and so far only philosophically elaborated theory of technology, that of Gotthard Gunther, the draining away of transcendently misunderstood subjectivity into the outer world was the key metaphysical event of the Modern Age. 93 The most commonplace observations already show how humans come under pressure on two fronts at once: not only have humans constituted a tiny minority compared to images for some time - for every Western person in the twentieth century there are countless visual documents and reproductions - they are also becoming a minority in relation to anthropomimetic cognition-mimetic machines, namely computers.
The Interdisciplinary Continent
It was one of the terminologico-historical mishaps of the Modern Age that it reserved the word 'scholasticism' for the higher education of the Middle Ages and its philosophical-theological treatises. By now it is unmistakably clear how far modernity itself gave rise to a scholastic world form determined by didactic-disciplinary impulses, far beyond what medieval school culture, which was de facto only a marginal element in its time, could hope to achieve. Modernity is hyper-scholasticism. It is based on the universal invasiveness of the school, as well as the reciprocal transfer of disciplines between the subsystems of 'society'. We have already hinted at the transfer of monastic discipline to school life. Its consequence was a transforma- tion of humans into pupils, one that continued through all temporally conditioned forms of pedagogy - including the school-hating move- ments in the twentieth century.
A sufficiently complex civilization history of the Modern Age would, furthermore, have to show how all systems of social action interlock in a constant play of discipline transfer:94 thus it is not only
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERN"
"">l\H<""L"~ one, discipline discipline - the most example being the amalgam of monastic groom- ing and sublimated combat training in the companies of the Societas Jesu. All three areas of disciplines - the monastic, the scholastic and the military - not only act as matrices for the ordering projects of the 'police' and the professional shaping of the civil service,95 but also radiate into the sphere of craftsmen's studios, factories and trading companies. Those who had known the strict alliance of discipline and compulsion in these areas could experience the harmonious coexist- ence of discipline and freedom in the arts. In this sense, Europe was the interdisciplinary continent from the virtuosity boom in the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, and has remained it to this day. As such, it forms a network of total schooling. The constant stimulation of the skilled by competitors was one of the effects of the network's increasing density. Educators have often overlooked the
fact that one's rival is the most important teacher of all.
The new media of the Gutenberg era contributed to the expansions of practice zones. Thanks to increasing literacy, all nation-states saw the growth of reading populations who were exposed to insistent media fitness training: they embodied the equation of humans and readers. They were joined in the twentieth century by the telephone and radio peoples, who were subsequently sublated into the world people or the Internet. Media fitness is the element in which modern populations elaborate both their global and specific fitness. Why passive media consumption leads almost inevitably to unfitness (in technical terms: how the stimulating connection described by Comenius between seeing for oneself, autopsia, and doing for oneself, autopragmasia) would have to be explained via an analysis of nega-
tive training.
Art History as Asceticism History
Without the ubiquitous modern fluidum of disciplinary increase, it would have been impossible for the art industry of the Renaissance and subsequent centuries to function. It is time that the frequently told history of the visual and musical arts in the Modern Age was presented as the history of artistic asceticisms. This would not only show the phenomenon of art in a different light; it would also cast a new spotlight on the art of mid-modernity, which can be understood in significant aspects as the production of an increasing suspension of
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art' concerns art in the art of pushing them towards higher achievements, one of its most important chap- ters deals with the production of artists in the early modern 'house of discipline'. Suffice it to recall Richard Sennett's remarks on the ethos of the crafts, specifically his excursus on the goldsmiths of the Renaissance. 96
Only in the area of art singing and instrumental music does one find an unbroken and self-evident tradition of practice awareness that has survived all changes of style, taste, compositional technique and performance tradition from the Renaissance to postmodernity. Ironically, it is the great instrumentalists who stand in the limelight almost daily, trained in 'decent impudence' before the audience, who wallow in applause and thus feed the welcome illusion of that high artistic freedom which one likes to imagine first at the mention of repressive discipline. Because of their overwhelming practice work- load, these virtuosos seem more open to Foucauldian analogies than almost any other disciplined group. Many of them see the parallels when one compares their practice rooms to prison cells, and the torment of etudes to solitary confinement at the instrument. 97 One cannot, however, deny the relatively voluntary nature of their suffer- ing through discipline.
Though it may, at first glance, seem plausible to present the history of newer instrumental music as a classic case of 'disciplinary power', it actually forms a chapter in the metamorphosis of passions. If one looks from Czerny's notorious didactic piano works, such as The School of Velocity op. 299, Forty Daily Exercises op. 337 or Nouveau Gradus ad Parnassum op. 822, to the didactic devotional texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Thomas aKempis' De imitatio Christi (written anonymously around 1418) or the Exercitationes spirituales by Ignatius of Loyola (published in Spanish in 1533, in Latin in 1541), they give an idea of the wide-ranging changes in the willingness among modern humans to accept passion in the course of barely more than four centuries. They extend from the instrument-less passion of the spiritually co-crucified, co-dead and co-resurrected, who follow mystical instructions, to the instrumental virtuoso culture of the early nineteenth century that embodies the Romantic compromises between the artiste's bravura and a de-selfing in the face of the instrument's demands - to say nothing of the inter- pretative requirements of the works themselves. Whoever scans this stretch will immediately realize why the art history of the Modern Age cannot be understood solely as a history of works. In addition, it
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
always constitutes the history of passion exercises and their transfor- mation into artistic passions.
What I call the second history of art, then, is primarily responsible for the training procedures of artists in their disciplines. It thus also deals with the process of de-disciplining in more recent art history. With this dual focus, it shifts the focus from the work to the artist by defining the production of art producers as an independent dimension of art history - which, incidentally, is the opposite of conventional biographism. This re-focused art history thus becomes a branch of the general history of practice and training. Firstly, it gives techni- cally precise answers to the question of high art's creation, in so far as this is possible through the analysis of practice forms. Secondly, it can offer new ways to interpret the paradoxes of mass culture, for example the phenomenon that some international stars in the pop music scene still cannot sing after decades on the stage - which is only mildly surprising if one knows that a mere fraction of their practice time is invested in singing, whereas they automatically assume that less than three hours of working out at the gym are insufficient for their stage show.
If one transposes the history of art into the framework of a history of asceticisms, one gains not least a new perspective on the complex of phenomena which Hans Belting presents as a 'history of the image before the era of art' in his study Likeness and Presence. 98 This knowledgeable synopsis of iconic painting from late antiquity to the Renaissance is not so much concerned with venturing into a zone 'before art' - this would mean delegitimizing the secular artist and subordinating him to the artist-priest. In his book on icons, Belting rather discovers the possibility of rethinking art history as the medium for a history of art-bearing asceticisms. The author stops halfway, admittedly, subsuming art history Ii contre ca! ur under a general 'image history' - for him, one of the few resolute art essential- ists today, this was certainly only a provisional solution, in which the sense of different qualities had not yet been sufficiently explored.
In reality, it is not the liquidation of art history in favour of a general image history that is the order of the day - otherwise, the mass photographing of everything and everyone would be the culmi- nation of the history of image productions. What needs to be made explicit is rather the historical alliance of art and asceticism, which has thus far only been discussed indirectly. If one accepts this themati- zation, iconic painting can offer the most plausible starting point for a grand narrative of the procession of image-creating energies through
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ages - not one
because the icon embodies work
here art is applied asceticism, and high asceticism sometimes high art. The sacred image is not only an object of selfless prayer and meditation; the very act of painting from which it ensues is one of the most concentrated forms of prayer, meditation and de-selfing. The reason why generations of icon painters have devoted themselves to a single motif for their entire lives is that, in the spirit of Hellenistic- Eastern Christianity, they were obliged to keep submitting anew to a transcendent image that would then materialize through their work. This monothematicism shows that the image is only permissible in the service of salvation; hence there is no question of a free choice of motif. Through its restriction to a few archetypes, spiritual painting is capable of furthering flight from the world or ethical secession. Icon painters could never entertain the belief that they had created the perfect image; it was a sign of Satanic temptation to think that the divine archetype had chosen them in order to take on a worldly mani- festation through their work. Only the transcendent archetype could exhibit the fullness of perfection, not its inner-worldly projection -let alone the painter, a subordinate iconopoiete, however dissolved his ego.
Icon painting thus embodies art at its ascetic maximum - and the minimum connection to the world. Once this point has been fixed, post-iconic European art history can be presented as a multi-stage process entailing a shifting, expansion, loosening and dissolution of art-enabling asceticisms. In the disappearance of the monopoly held by religious themes, it was the visual art of the Renaissance that liter- ally opened new windows. The liberation of polythematicism was the true mission of the 'art of perspective'. Seeing perspectivally, after all, means affording the world the third dimension, depth, and with it the dignity of contemplability. Now the icon was everywhere: any image could be a sacred one, and every window opened on a true manifes- tation. Salvation no longer meant liberation from the temptations of the world, but rather liberation to experience the wealth of earthly wonders. The world became everything worthy of being shown.
The encounter between the most elaborated discipline and the most comprehensive attention to the world created the conditions for extreme culminations of artistic success. The possibility of such heights is not limited to the classical centuries, of course, being essen- tially present in all later periods too - including the present. As is well known, however, this creates a less favourable environment for new peak productions, as the all-infiltrating phenomenon of mass culture,
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to mixture
erance, is averse any normative notion to which it is supposed to compare.
It is unnecessary to trace the problematic role of twentieth-century visual art in the dissolution of 'standards', even - and especially - in its advanced-civilized wing. One of its passions, after all, was the propagation of an art without disciplinary premises: the topic 'Duchamp and the consequences' will continue to occupy art critics for a long time, and it is by no means certain whether the reputation held by the church father of art after art will survive such examina- tion intact. 99
On Military Drill
A significant side branch of newer art with humans, one that only receives scant interest and even scanter sympathy among contempo- rary audiences, is evident in the military world of the early Modern Age. We know that soldierly practice extends back to the early periods of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean state forms - the famous Greek phalanx and the Roman legions were already considered marvels of combat training and the overcoming of psychological probability (that is, the human inclination to flee in the face of mortal danger) in their own time. Nor was Cicero's connection of the Roman word for the army, exercitus, to its main function of daily weapons prac- tice, exercitatio, ever completely forgotten in Europe. In addition, ancient accounts describe how in battle, group fitness - demonstrated in impressive formations and coherent collective movements - far outweighed individual fitness in man-to-man combat. Although the medieval military system could not ignore this information, knight- hood established an entirely different notion of battle and victory, and it was only in the early Modern Age that a new type of warfare on the basis of resolute formation training emerged once more. Without this, it would be impossible to understand the controlled 'evolutions' of troops, both on the battlefield and on the drill ground, between the seventeenth century and the innovations of Napoleonic mobile warfare.
In the common descriptions of early modern reconnections to Greek and Roman cultural patterns in the fields of architecture, visual art and literature, it has often been overlooked that this was almost contem- poraneous - displaced by a few generations - with a military 'return
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of antiquity'. It is associated in particular with the work of the army commander Maurice of Nassau (with contributions from William of Orange and his brother, John VI of Nassau-Dillenburg), which, next to contemporary military-theoretical impulses, was based most of all on the renewed interest in ancient military writers. Thanks to his sound knowledge of classical languages, Maurice was able to study the original texts of authors such as Xenophon, Polybius and Onasander, as well as Caesar, Livy and Suetonius, but most of all the tactical writ- ings of Aelianus and the Byzantine emperor Leo VI. From these works he took precise instructions for the development of modern training rules. In the military reform he carried out for the Dutch troops in the anti-Spanish war of liberation after 1589, he drew particularly on the instructions - already tested by the Greeks - to set up soldiers in rank and file, a division whose effects could still be observed on the barrack squares of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a sort of involuntary Platonism, Greek and Roman warriors alike had adopted the central principle of the Republic, namely that the 'state' is nothing but a great man (makranthropos) - unabashedly equating the 'state' (polis) with a disciplined military troop. Such ideas suited the intui- tions of Renaissance strategists, because they permitted the projection of geometric figures and homogeneous movements (evolutions) onto larger masses of 'political organisms'.
Consistently with this, Maurice took the descriptions - some of them extremely precise - of the 'elementary movements' of army groups from the ancient tactical manuals, including such figures as about-turns, wheeling, countermarches and others. Here the soldier is shaped into the lateralized human being, who must not confuse left and right under any circumstances. Furthermore, the ancients had already discovered the significance of a simple and effective language in which commands could be conveyed unambiguously to the troops. Under this influence, all armies of the burgeoning European nation- states followed the Orange-Nassau model and developed their own native military codes, consisting of short one-word commands that would be internalized on the barrack squares and subsequently fol- lowed on the battlefield. The sections of the new rule books devoted to the use of arms, in particular the still-unwieldy firearms - a subject on which the pioneers of the Orange reform could not learn much from the ancients - even contain first descriptions of complex move- ment sequences whose ergonomic precision would only return in the positivistic investigations of early sport science in the nineteenth century, as well as the instructions for production-line workers in the era of Taylorism. lOo These studies were not surpassed until the last
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THE EXERCISES OF THE lYlODERNS
trammg studies procedures, grams showing the metabolic rates of top athletes, and individualized training instructions for sporting disciplines of all kinds and levels the order of the day.
Human-Fitters in General
We have seen how the privilege of conveying the absolute imperative gradually left the hands of religious speakers and passed to a number of secular agencies at the start of the Modern Age. Notable examples of these were the early modern prince as a patron of human produc- tion, the Baroque educator as an expert on the pansophic moulding of humans, and the Renaissance commander as a classically schooled virtuoso of massed human arrangements in the war of formations. In time, these were joined by throngs of advisers and prompters who no longer addressed their fellow humans as messengers of the metanoetic imperative, but as bringers of practical innovations that concerned technical advantages more than moral improvements. I call these the human-fitters of the Modern Age. They were highly significant in the moulding of the 'human material' of their time, for, unlike some phi- losophers, they never succumbed to the ideology of the unequipped, absolute human being. 101 The new fitters chose the pragmatic way to access humans: they saw them primarily as clients, that is to say as participants in the world of goods and things who were surrounded by obtainable objects, were stimulated by objects and practised with objects. They never spoke of the single necessity as long as they could promote useful innovations. They suggested to their contemporaries that they should change their life through participation in current artificialities and raise their existential tonicity, and not least their competing power, through new means of information, comfort and distinction. This new market undermined the archaic either/or of ethical difference: now fundamentalists could transform themselves into customers, believers could become readers, and escapists could turn into manifest media users. Whoever wanted to change their life found themselves amidst an ever-widening horizon of life-augmenting and life-increasing accessories - these are the strongest attractors in the modern deluge of commodities, which is often unjustly described only in terms of consumerism. Their acquisition is tied to a share in elevated fitness chances and expanded gratifications. This extends from the first editions of humanist authors to flat rates for the net-
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from
von Berlichingen's day to the hi-tech implants of
the present, from the coaches of Emperor Maximilian's time to the luxury jeeps for the mobility elite of the last petroleum years.
The human-fitters are no mere sellers or market criers peddling accessories for an up-to-date life. If one takes their function as seri- ously as is absolutely necessary in the face of their significance for the material equipping of modern existence, one observes that what they offer is frequently no less than world improvement in discreet amounts - such as the late medieval invention of eyeglasses, without which reading and living in the Gutenberg era would have been inconceivable. 102 Even Petrarch, it is written, already made use of such a reading aid from the age of sixty. Modern paper also falls into the category of world improvements from the production line; this is the source of the pandemonium of commodities that are brought to the modern audience via printers, publishers, newspaper makers, cartographers, writers, scholars and journalists. Members of the paper-based professions here act as discreet drill instructors for modern humans. They change the life of every individual without reaching for their whole existence.
The anthropotechnic effects of these services and products - the competence-elevating dynamic and the expansion of the operational horizon - are generally only granted full approval in their early days. At the beginning of an innovation it is the difference between users and non-users that is most apparent, while in the phase of market sat- uration, its entropic and abusive effects attract attention. That is why Comenius and Karl Kraus could not hold the same opinion about the blessings of the Black Art. As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.
This background enables us to understand a fact that is sympto- matic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the bur- geoning modern world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvement was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the
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OF THE MODERNS
early
general training for contemporary performance ' v H . . . . ' - H
thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de {acto usually lead to weakenings.
Finally, we should speak of modern bankers, who, because of their role as lenders for people who seek to improve their situation, and, as business actors, often actually do so, prove the most effective motiva- tors for an intensifying change. Their work shows how a substantial part of the improvement imperatives under which the moderns live stem from the arcanum magnum of the modern property economy. If one formulates it explicitly, one stumbles on the categorical impera- tive of debt service: economize in such a way that, through an efficient use of resources, you can always be sure of being able to repay credit on time. The credit stress that forces growing populations of debtors into shape is a source of willingness to innovate that no theory of creativity has yet adequately acknowledged. As soon as one under- stands that modern disciplinings are based neither on the relationship of 'master and slave' nor on the opposition of 'capital and labour', but rather on the symbiotic antagonism of creditors and debtors, the entire history of money-driven 'societies' must be rewritten from scratch.
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11
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics
In Praise of the Horizontal
In modernity, the metanoetic imperative increasingly changed into a prescription of 'outward application'. Its dissemination from the phil- osophical and monastic sphere into late aristocratic and bourgeois circles, and later also into proletarian and lower middle-class groups, reinforced the tendency towards de-spiritualization, pragmatization and finally the politicization of the dictate of change. Thus countless individuals in the centuries of modernization could follow the call to change their lives by opening the door to the typical products of their time. The magical paper products of the Gutenberg era - Bibles and non-Bibles alike - reached many, if not all, households over the years, decades and centuries. Whoever dealt with them seemed eo ipso on the better path. Printed texts accustomed their users to the dynamic of their time, which was still entirely opaque to them: that new media spread old content until different circumstances provide new content. This is in turn kept in circulation by the ageing media until the appearance of newer ones, which recycle the old media along with their old and new content.
What is decisive in all that followed is the observation that the demand for self-change and reversal no longer affected the change- disposed consciousness only from above: it need not always be the light from the vertical that casts the zealot to the ground before Damascus. The bright streak on the horizon towards which we wander on the ground now takes on a new spiritual and moral value. If the east is red, it cannot be a mistake to walk in that direction. The Reformation abolished the spiritual privileges of monastic life, as every point in the world is equidistant from grace. This changed the
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
preconditions for a radical rejection of the world in their most sensi- tive point. If the ascetics in their strict orders were no closer to the light than the laymen in public offices and workshops, the latter could also find opportunities to advance spiritually by worldly means. The Enlightenment was able to follow on directly from this. And more than this: since the beginnings of the lighting policies that gave rise to the lumieres, one could imagine the path to the illumination of all things as a gentle upward slope on which anyone with a vaguely good will who understood the signs of the times could move forwards. An inarticulate urge from within was now to be sufficient in order to find the right path; where there is an urge, there is a way forwards. From the eighteenth century on, a constant striding along moderately rising paths was rationalized as the authentic mode of progress. Cultura non facit saltus. 103 World improvement is the good thing that needs time. 104
It is impossible to overstate the consequences of the shift towards a moderation of ethical standards; the tempering of aims restored an awareness of the moral chromaticism of the real. The ethical distinc- tion moved to the level of nuances. It not only gave tepid Christians back their clear conscience; it even granted the worldlings precedence in the quest for the good life - in fact, it made it possible after mil- lennia of spiritual discrimination to rehabilitate the worldly life as a positive movement in the horizontal, provided it showed a certain upward tendency. Whoever denied or dismissed this tendency was immediately reactionary; whoever was not content with it would dream sooner or later of a vertical exit from anything that seemed horizontal, continuous or foreseeable: of revolution.
Progress as Half-Price Metanoia
Thus the idea of progress and development in modernity transpires as the worst enemy of old-style radical metanoia. It deprives the steep old-ascetic vertical of its plausibility, relegating it to the domain of 'fanaticism'. This change lies behind the thousandfold repeated misreading of modernity as the era of secularization. Certainly Christianity lost its predominance in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, but only a few Enlightenment zealots established a form of 'humans alone' movement that slammed shut all doors to the beyond and sought to transfer everything unconditionally to the realm of immanence. The general populace had always retained a vague awareness of transcendence, even in the supposedly secular
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THE AVTO-Ol'ERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
simultaneously SUpposlt! on a
reality 'piecemeal supranaturalism', applying it also to himself. This disposition was perfectly suited to the pragmatic immanentism of the Modern Age, as well as the good logical manners of academia and the educated audience, and it is this familiar attitude that is attracting attention once more in the rumours currently circulating of a 'post- secular society'.
The central moral-historical event of this epoch was therefore not secularization, but rather the de-radicalization of the ethical distinction - or, if one prefers, the de-verticalization of existence. This is precisely what is meant by the once-great word 'progress'. The discreet spiritual sensation of the Modern Age was that the middle paths were now the ones leading to salvation. The moderation of demands for a radical disavowal of ancient Adam and his corrupt milieu gave worldliness a new dignity. They contributed to bringing about the cultural climate change in favour of a fundamental neophilia. It is unnecessary to demonstrate here how the inclination to welcome the new gave the Modern Age its futurist orientation. Since Hans Blumenberg'S central work, its debt to the rehabilitation of curiosity has been known. lOS
In its quieter periods, especially 1648-1789 and 1815-1914, and once more from 1945 to the present day, the newer era was, all in all, an age of half-price metanoia.