No More Learning

To morality? My plea is for a continua- tion of the phenomenological path. We ask, Who is interested in what? Which forms of knowledge or sciences arise through these interests? Who wants to know what? Why? What motivates his or her curiosity --and even assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural hunger for experience, desire to experiment, and an excess of curiosity, the question still remains, Why precisely this curiosity, this wanting to know? If, in ideology critique, it is always asked, Who is speaking? (in order to reduce the words to the speaker's social position), then, in the critique of en- lightenment, we ask, Who is seeking? Who is researching? Who is struggling?
Here a rather remarkable field of kinship relations emerges --a rare clan of cu- rious persons, of trackers of knowledge and curiosities. From this perspective, the philosopher and the spy, the policeofficer and the journalist, the detective and the psychologist, the historian and the moralist present themselves as the children of the same, although quarreling, family. All appear like the various lines in the spectrum of enlightenment knowledge. Curiosity seeks the reasons for curiosity --it too seeks! - f o r enlightenment about enlightenment, and must there- fore in turn let itself be interrogated as to the reasons for its own curiosity. Coun- terenlightenment inclinations? Reaction? Discontent within enlightenment? We want to know what the point is of this wanting to know. There is too much "knowl-
329
330 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
edge" about which we could wish, for the most diverse reasons, that we had not discovered it and had not gained "enlightenment" about it. All too many insights are fear inducing. If knowledge is power, then today, what was once eerie, in- scrutable power, confronts us in the form of insights, transparency, obvious con- nections . If at one time enlightenment -- in every sense of the word--lessened fear through the increase of knowledge, then today we have reached a point where en- lightenment turns into what it undertook to hinder: the increase of fear. The un- canny that was supposed to be banned comes to the fore again out of the means used to protect against it.
Enlightenment develops in the form of a collective training in mistrust of ep- ochal proportions. Rationalism and mistrust are related impulses, both bound tightly to the social dynamic of the rising bourgeoisie and the modern state. In the struggle of hostile and competing subjects and states for self-preservation and hegemony, a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered. Everything that "appears" to us could be a deceptive maneuver of an overpowering, evil enemy. In his proof through doubt Descartes goes as far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world of appearance is only the work of a genius malignus, calculated to deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective on reality cannot be comprehended without a thorough cooling down of the ego-world relation, with- out the deep penetration of suspicion and fear about self-preservation to the very roots of the modern will to know. An overpowering concern with certainty and an equally irresistible expectation to be deceived drive modern epistemology on to search at any price for absolute and unshakably secure sources of certainty-as if its primary concern were to overcome a downright world-annihilating doubt. Enlightenment possesses at its core a polemical realism that declares war on ap- pearances: Only the naked truths, the naked facts should be regarded as valid. For the deceptions that the enlightener expects are considered artful but neverthe- less transparent, exposable maneuvers. Verum etfictum convertuntur. The decep-
tions are transparent because they are self-made. What is self-evident in this world is fraud, threats, dangers-not openness, generosity, security. Truth is thus never to be had straight off but only through a second effort, as the product of critique that destroys what seemed before to be the case. Truth is not "discovered" innocently and without struggle, but rather is won in a toilsome victory over its predecessors, which are its concealment and antipode. The world bursts at the seams with problems, dangers, deceptions, and abysses as soon as the gaze of mistrusting investigation penetrates it. In the universe of modern knowledge, the backdrops, trapdoors, panoramas, deceptive images, dissembling gestures, hid- den feelings, concealed motives, enveloped bodies predominate--all of these phenomena make "reality itself more inaccessible precisely because, with in- creasing complexity, it is composed of ambiguous, concocted, and contrived acts and signs. This forces us all the more to separate the obvious from the concealed.
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 331
I am deceived, therefore I am. And: I unmask deceptions, I myself deceive; there- fore, I preserve myself. The Cartesian cogito, ergo sum can also be translated in this way.
We follow roughly the sequence of chapter 8, "The Cardinal Cynicisms," in treating the essential manifestations and dimensions of "enlightenment" as polem- ical empiricism in six steps: war and espionage; police and enlightenment in class struggle; sexuality and hostility toward self; medicine and suspecting the body; death and metaphysics; and natural science and weapon technology. That this po- lemical phenomenology makes a circle from the knowledge of war to the natural science of weaponry is no accident; we are preparing here the "Transcendental Polemic" of chapter 11. It describes how, behind a series of curiosities, compul- sions to struggle are at work that guide "epistemic interests. " In this phenomenol- ogy, we go through the characteristic tapping-in-the-dark movements of a "full modernity" that is still in search of itself and that is learning to doubt the produc- tivity of Cartesian doubt and to mistrust the measurelessness of enlightenment mistrust.
Knowledge of War and Espionage
. . . Instead, in May 1869 he sent his confidant, Theo von Bernardi, to Madrid, a historian and national economist whom, under the mask of the scientist, Bismarck and Moltke had already often used for secret missions . . . .
However, such [emissaries] required the greatest capacities in observation, knowledge of people, combination, dissimula- tion; indeed, a general cunning and artfulness . . .
Wilhelm J. C. E. Stieber Spion des Kanzlers (Munich, 1981)
For every warlord, the questions are, What is the enemy doing? What is he plan- ning? What condition is he in? How can it be found out? Direct communication is not possible. To ask the enemy himself is ultimately impossible or at least point- less, since he will always simply give deceptive answers.
For this reason, an outstanding intelligence service is required whose chief is an extraordinarily intelligent man but not necessarily a fighter. He should be able to think clearly in order to separate what is essential from the mass of the accidental that is always present where the prob-
1
In the case of enmity, the probability, indeed, the certainty, of being deceived is a priori a given. The enemy will pretend to be stronger or weaker than he really is so as to provoke or deter. He will take up illusory positions and suddenly attack
lems of the opponent are concerned.
332 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
from an unexpected side. It is thus part of the logic of survival of each side in a dyad of opponents to see through and circumvent the deceptive maneuvers of the opponent through enlightenment in the sense of espionage and to outdo him with one's own exposures, counterdeceptions, and operative measures. Espi- onage in its most immediate form is set up as a science of survival. What the po- lemical realism of "enlightenment" wants can be seen most clearly through its ex- ample. Enlightenment as espionage is research on the enemy --the accumulation of knowledge about an object to which I am bound not through well-wishing, or through disinterested neutrality, but through a direct, hostile tension with a threatening effect. It nourishes a special kind of wanting-to-know and necessitates a series of peculiarly "indirect" methods of research: dissimulation, secrecy, in- filtration of positions of trust, misuse of friendships. Espionage exercises the art of getting the other to talk, works through surveillance and searches, spies on others' intimate and private domains, seeks levers for extortion, looks for vulner- able points and the weak link in the opponent's chain. It banks on the readiness of individuals on the other side to betray it. All this belongs to the methodology of espionage. The spy, the "subject of knowledge," comes forth in a mask vis-a- vis a hostile reality, that is, the reality of the enemy.
We see at once how the approach of enlightenment as espionage to "truth" is distinct from that of science and even more so from that of philosophy. For the truths that the spy brings together are, from the start, subject to a passionate and special "interest. " War of powers, war of consciousnesses. The migration of knowledge from subject A to subject B is already part of a struggle or an arming. Accordingly this amoral direction of research appeals openly to martial law and situation ethics, which says that whatever serves self-preservation is allowed. For this knowledge, the grand gesture of disinterestedness and contemplative objec- tivity, which science is particularly fond of, does not come into question. The spy seems to stand closer to the man of war than to the philosopher or the researcher. When he wants to know something, the disinterestedness he presents to the world is in every case only an illusion; the cases in which it is otherwise with researchers and philosophers remain to be examined.
But what attitude do the warrior and the philosopher assume toward the spy? Most of the time they have contemptfully chastised him; and with good reason as the spy's research work violates the ethical norms of the metier on both sides. On the one side, it is the generals who, in going about their "heroic, upright, manly, brave" business, never like having to deal with people who, because of their profession, do not really care about all that stuff. For the spy, another moral- ity always holds, although he fights the same fight. The hero does not want the corrupt spy as a fellow fighter; that would make him feel soiled. Strategy and tac- tics, which are certainly also familiar with deceptions and ruses, belong ambiva- lently to the heroic-masculine side. The spy, by contrast, appears merely as cun- ning and sly in the low sense of these words. He seduces; he does not carry out
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 333
frontal breakthroughs. Napoleon was at least honest enough to confess that be-
hind some of his great victories stood not only military genius but also the diplo-
matic art of deception of his master-spy, Karl Schulmeister (he contributed decid-
edly to the hoodwinking of the Austrians, which led to their defeats at Ulm and
Austerlitz). It is said that General von Moltke, Bismarck's veteran fighter, did not
like spies in general, and particularly not that Wilhelm Stieber, who from 1863
on was Bismarck's chief spy (his nickname was "Most Superior Security Su-
perior"; Oberster Sicherheits-Oberer and who, under the cover of a news service,
that is, a kind of press agency, built up the international network of the Prussian
secret police. If one reads Stieber's recently published memoirs, one can estimate
the significance of modern intelligence networks for "Realpolitik. " Not only did
Stieber repeatedly save Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I from assassination, but
in organizing the intelligence work on the Austrian army according to new princi-
ples, he laid the groundwork for the Prussian campaign against Austria in the
"fraternal war" of 1866. It was also his duty to organize the intelligence prerequi-
sites and the reconnaissance of the terrain on which the German campaign against
France in 1870-71 was to take place. Nevertheless, the more distinctions he
reaped through his extraordinarily successful activity, the more he was snubbed
by the Prussian officer caste. The heroes could not bear that their naive (? ) sol-
diers' ethos should have anything to do with the systematic amoralism of the chief
2
spy. Thehighertheoffice,thegreaterthecompulsionstolie. Oneactedasifone
were blind to Machiavelli's realism: "In war, fraud is laudable" {Discorsi, Book III, p. 40).
Scientists and philosophers who do not deign to look on the spy and the phenomenon of espionage, however, proceed in a way that is scarcely any differ- ent. For dirt sticks to the spy's hands, namely, an all-to-clear, all-too-special "small" interest. The high seekers of truth, by contrast, do everything to avoid resembling the spy; they would rather admit to no self-"interest" at all and not put themselves as tools at the disposal of any "aim. " If the true philosopher had con- tempt even for the paid academic (see Schiller's lecture on the study of universal history), then the spy was really beneath all criticism. But how would it be if the spy proved to be in reality the shadow and obscure double of the enlightenment philosopher?
On the surface, of course, one can hardly think of an opposition greater than that between the spy, who, being quite "interest" oriented, commits himself to a particular party, nation, a mere fraction of humanity, and the investigator of truth, who looks only at the whole and claims to serve only the universal well- being of humanity, or even "pure truth" itself. Not until this century did science and philosophy of enlightenment become conscious of their own limited biases and narrower polemical and pragmatic commitments. In the age of class struggles at the end of the nineteenth century, the keepers of the seal of high knowledge had to feel the ground shake under their feet for the first time: A nasty suspicion
334 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
arose that they, the bourgeois scientists, might be agents of bourgeois class domination --deluded helpers of a political system who naively, idealistically un- covered "universal" truths that, when applied, however, served only, or for the main, the particular interests of the ruling classes. When in August 1914 the First World War "broke out," many professional "seekers of truth" dropped their masks. The wave of "ideas of 1914" tore them along and found them more than willing to consciously take over the role of "ideologue," of spiritual weaponsmith in the slaughter of the peoples. What was committed to paper as theory in the years 1914-18 remains unimaginable --the extent to which culturally chauvinistic
3
nationalization of "pure truths" suddenly became possible.
In subsequent decades, the sciences as a whole have largely lost their passion
for truth. Moreover, they have to live under constant suspicion of being agents, a suspicion that was and is determined to unmask them as helpers of the powerful. Since then, associations that place the spy and the philosopher, the secret agent and the researcher side by side no longer seem so misguided. At the same time the military became detheorized, the consciousness of researchers began to be- come more pragmatic. Knowledge and interest were allowed to, indeed should, have something to do with each other, with the proviso that the interests take it on themselves to prove their legitimacy. Nietzsche had begun to undermine every will to know through the suspicion of the will to power. Students of the First World War cannot fail to notice the acknowledged role espionage and martial "en- lightenment" played --cognitive warfare, psychological warfare, treason, propaganda. General Moshe Dayan finally declared both openheartedly and secretively after the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War that intelligence services had played just as important a role as the air force and tank divisions. The taboo seems to be broken. It is no different with countless scientists all over the world who, obviously without professional ethical scruples, work on weapon research and projects with the potential for annihilation. If science too has to earn its daily
4
bread, then at least a part of it discovers the coming war as employer. Military enlightenment as provocation to philosophical enlightenment? What is the situation with the subjection of knowledge to interests and how universal, how particular, do these interests have to be? Is every gathering of "truths," knowledges, and insights bound to polemical, defensive-aggressive subjects (here states)? Certainly, espionage is the furthest from the illusion of "universal" interest. It therefore emphatically puts its knowledge under lock and key. Scien- tists, by contrast, are categorically publication crazy, and some metatheories even construct a fundamental connection between universality, truth, and the publicness of assertions. Whereas science boasts of universality, the secret ser- vices know that "knowledge" has value only as long as others do not know that
they know it.
From this vantage point, a connection between the theory of knowledge and
the intelligence service can be seen: Both devise postures of "objectivity" toward
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 335
the object of knowledge, postures that would remain incomprehensible without the influence of the hostile stance toward the object. Both are set on separating the obvious from the concealed. Both worry that error and delusion can lie in wait everywhere. In both, deception is a rival of suspicion. To have an enemy thus means to define an object of research (the converse of the sentence holds only with qualifications). War channels curiosity into a polemical course and equates what is unknown about the enemy with his dangerousness. To know him is half the job of holding him in check. Out of enmity, specialized domains of curiosity, areas of research and epistemic interests are built up: through the keyhole to the naked facts. Without making enemies and a corresponding concealment, there is no un- masking; without darkening, there is no naked truth. The striving of "enlighten- ment" to reveal the truth obeys a dialectical principle: Only through a specific, polemically forced concealment does a space "behind" arise--the "naked facts. " What is naked is what was previously secret: the enemy, eavesdropped on in his privacy; the hidden power here, the conspiracy there; the naked women, the geni- tals made visible; the confessions of the amoral; the true intentions, the real mo- tives, the hard statistics, the relentless standards. Those who enlighten do not rely on what "people say"; the naked facts will probably always be different from what "people say. " The enemy is everywhere: powers of nature that are too powerful, too dangerous for us to rely on; rivals who, when it comes to the crunch, will show no mercy and who already envision us as corpses over whom they, deter- mined to "survive," will walk if necessary; traditions that fog up our minds and cause us to "believe," but forbid us to know what "the case really is. "
If secretiveness is a striking characteristic in the theory of knowledge of the intelligence services, then here a bifurcation of enlightenment into naive and reflected, gullible and artful directions becomes clear. The naive assume that they are a priori nobody's enemy and would let nothing force them to become some- one's enemy. When enlighteners of this type "know something," they automati- cally think that everyone else should also be allowed to know it. More reflective forms of enlightenment (e. g. , the earlier Freemasons) from the start understood themselves in this regard differently: They accepted the facts of the (even though always only relative) enmity and consciously reckoned with the compulsion to be secretive; they accepted the need to think in the logic of struggle during unavoida- ble conflicts. They knew that knowledge was to be treated as a weapon, prefer- ably as a secret weapon. The other side does not have to know what we know. With the spy this becomes most striking: to gain knowledge without letting it be known that one knows. Hence also the often fascinating, Romanesque masquer- ades in espionage. Agents are trained to see without being seen, to recognize without being recognized. Stieber was not only a sly organizer but also an actor with talent-- who even visited Karl Marx in his London exile and played, success- fully, it seems--the comic role of a doctor who, due to his revolutionary convic-
336 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
tions, had had to flee Germany. Stieber noted smugly in his memoirs that Herr
Marx did not waste a word inquiring about his revolutionary vicissitudes and the
situation in Germany, but only asked Doctor Schmidt about a prescription for
5
hemorrhoids. Stieber also occasionally appeared at scenes of unrest as a land-
scape painter. He is even supposed to have turned up as a street vendor who car- ried devotional knickknacks and pornographic postcards on his cart--one of the two could always be used to lure soldiers into confidential conversations. We have also heard how Stieber's descendants do it today in the socialist Prussian se- cret police: In psychological Casanova courses, East German agents are said to study the art of curing the weekend neuroses of top Bonn secretaries so tenderly that even the East Berlin State Security Service profits from it.
Are we preaching to the converted? The German public must long since be
well aware of the connections between science and espionage, at least since a
model concept of the secret services has permeated into general consciousness.
Those pieces of information collected by legal and illegal means, which are "at
hand" "against" a person or a group, are called "intimations" (Erkenntnis). Suspi-
cion guides the storing up of "intimations"; it constitutes the prosecution proce-
dure. What mistrust ferrets out lies at hand as "intimations" when the time comes
to take "measures. " This is no semantic lapse, no conceptual contingency. In a
broader sense, this way of speaking about "intimations" is only one of several ex-
posures of the primary connection between knowledge and (polemical) interest.
The English language uses at this point the compact word "intelligence. " "One un-
derstands by it particularly the gathering, assessment, and handing on of (publicly
accessible or secret) pieces of information in special bureaus (agencies or ser-
vices) for the purposes of the military and political leadership (general staff and
6
government). " The "naked facts" ferreted out by intelligence build the first solid
layer of a cynical empiricism (Empirie). They must be naked because they are supposed to help keep the object in its dangerous enmity in its sights. The subjects must thus dissemble in order to eavesdrop on the ("naked") objects. Dissimulation of the subject is the common denominator of espionage and modern philosophy.
Police and the Optics of Class Struggle
Certainly, my fair miss,
the police want to know everything, especially secrets.
Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm
This observation can easily be carried over to inner-political enmities, fears, and struggles. Enlightenment is written in good part "psychohistorically," as a history of political fear and its emotional and practical-strategic offspring: suspicion and
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 337
? Olaf Gulbransson, Russian Secret Police, 1909.
mistrust, control and subversion, surveillance and secret, criminalization and outrage. Those who nurse suspicion can become collectors in a black (in the mul- tiple senses: secret, polemical, anarchist, directed at the bad) empiricism. On the side of the wielders of power: rulers, administrators, police, stooges, denoun- cers; on the side of the critics of power: revolutionaries, rebels, deviants, "dissi- dents. " Each of the two sides (properly speaking they are not mere "sides," as in a symmetrical relation, but classes superior and inferior, master and servant, ruler and oppressed; this asymmetry would play a significant role in a moral evaluation, but that is not our concern here) views the opponent through specta- cles of suspicion. Organs of state and representatives of hegemonic powers watch out for subversive, oppositional, deviant forces in the domain of their subjects, fueled by the worry that a "conspiracy" could be formed that gives expression to a will to change. The oppositional powers, by contrast, keep a transcript of the immoralism of the ruling power, of its capricious acts, infringements of justice, its corruptness and decadence. In times of open polemical tension, a mutual curi- osity to investigate can be spurred on by the element of enmity that inevitably (but more or less manifestly) clings to every domination. Both, although asymmetri- cally, are moved by a specific will to know that seeks to expose the political oppo- nent in his nakedness.
338 ?
BLACK EMPIRICISM
We know that Louis XIV maintained a complicated network of palace espi- onage, that spies had to inform him of his courtiers' every move, every secret word, and every possible ulterior motive --especially about the activities of peers, the great men of the realm, that is, potential rivals and aspirants to the throne. Since then, the incumbents of power have infinitely extended and refined the sys- tem of surveillance of the other candidates and participants in power. Modern so- cieties are permeated with organs of self-reconnaissance. In the time of Napoleon I, the police had stocked the Fouches Archive with files on all persons of actual or virtual political significance. The networks of the Russian secret police in the late nineteenth century traversed not only Russia itself but all countries in which Russian emigrants lived. The cross-examinations to which members of the public services are subjected have today become unquestioned routine. All power ap-
7
paratuses derive the right to fight against subversion from the principle of self-
preservation. "Understandably enough, I am thinking of "internal security," of the
protection of our state from subversion, by which I understand the undermining
8
by enemies of the constitution. " Of course, the secret style of this inner-political
reconnaissance contains a certain risk of paranoia that is fundamentally related to a disturbance in the reciprocal relation of seeing and being seen. Being seen without being able to see belongs to the standard motifs of delusion (persecution),
9
Political self-reconnaissance in modern societies is not precisely covered by today's concept of the police and its circle of duties, but is approximately covered by that of the police in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (when the concept was conceived more broadly). This also has something to do with the change in the structure of social opposition. After the disappearance of feudal absolutism and the emergence of political parties, political opposition became partially decriminalized; from then on, not every opponent or rival had to be suspected of being a threat. With the emergence of the party system in the nineteenth century, a situation arose in which "constitutions" and parliaments offered competing power groups a stage for self-representation. With the public institutionalization of the "opposition" as counterpart to the government, a dimension of inner-social reconnaissance was more or less abolished. In this system, the opponent takes over a part of the work that otherwise would have to be done by informers (with- out the latter becoming unemployed, but the domain of secrecy is displaced). Now the opponent himself must say what he thinks, what he plans, what his means are, and how strong his following is. Parliamentary systems do, in fact, have the advantage of lessening political paranoia through daily contact with the
opponent: integration through collaboration, trust through division of powers and
10
transparency.
position, the problem of subversion is displaced: Political fear now hovers around the possibility that "changes in the system" could take place gradually under the
just as conversely, seeing, without being seen, can slip into "seeing ghosts. "
Of course, the lessening is only partial because, with a legal op-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 339
protection of legality or, worse still, in the underground, in the extraparliamen- tary sphere, outside the transparent official oppositions. For this reason, mul- tiparty states also suffer, and not infrequently, from political paranoia (e. g. , McCarthy ism).
Black empiricism also knows the converse perspective. It keeps its eye on the bloody or crooked finger of the powerful. With a frequently justified suspicion, it inverts the principle of legitimation. It asks not only which principles, which right, is power based on, but also which rights the powerful infringe in their exer-
11
cise of power. What is hidden behind the veil of legality?
lemical curiosity is a political trauma: to have been exposed without protection to the "legitimate" but brutal, painful, oppressive force and violence of others-- the power of parents, disciplinary force, political (military, police, executive) force and violence, sexual violence and coercion. The trauma gives birth to a crit- ical attitude. Its a priori: Never again be struck; never again swallow offenses without resisting; never again, if possible, allow a hegemonic power to do vio- lence to us. This critical stance is allied at its origins with Jewish kynicism against the arrogance of the more powerful: They may boast, they may present them- selves as the legitimate power, but at the core of their exercise of power is always "naked force," partly arrogant, partly hypocritical. This critique tends toward wanting to wring from the ruling powerful confessions of their violence and im- morality. It comes down to an inversion of the police and espionage: antipolice, social espionage, reconnoitering the lion's den, exposure of the wolves in sheeps' clothing by the "humbled and insulted. " Since the eighteenth century, there has been in Europe a strong current of such critical empiricism of power, especially in the form of a literary shadowing of the powerful. Early on, enlightenment be- gan to denounce the excessive sexual proclivities of the despots, to attack the un- scrupulousness of the courtiers and ministers who secure their careers by taking advantage of the wild pleasure principle of the rulers. Recall the cynical courtier, Marinelli, in Lessing's Emilia Galotti, the graphic masterpiece of German politi- cal psychology in the eighteenth century. Such a critique really provides "naked truth. " It shows the powerful in their despicableness, artfulness, egocentricity, lust, addiction to extravagance, lack of conscience, unreasonableness, greed for profit, misanthropy, duplicity . . . Earlier, the religious, ascetic kynic cast this gaze on the excessively worldly life-style of their time; then the bourgeois intel- ligentsia on the morbid aristocracy; later, the morally aggressive part of the wor- kers' movement on the "overstuffed imperialist bourgeoisie," and, most recently, anarchism and the antiauthoritarian movements on the state and the wielding of power per se. The dynamic of such research impulses can still be demonstrated in the modern social sciences. In them, the rulers and the ruled, the wielders of power and oppositional powers, observe each other in order to "rationally" objec- tify their political mistrust.
What drives this po-
340 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
Sexuality: The Enemy is Within--Below
When the word "enlightenment" is encountered for the first time, it is as a rule an indecent word. At some time or other, someone gets the idea that we are now old enough to know about "it": Life comes from fucking. There you have it. One can approach the topic innocuously, starting with the bee and the flower, then with cat and tomcat, cow and bull, finally with daddy and mommy, who, in doing it, love each other quite tenderly. No one says a word about it before, no one says a word about it afterwards; in between a gap: enlightenment.
Wherever things are so intensely hidden, there, under the covers, it becomes burningly naked. "Naked" is one of those words that are still sexually unsettled; we think of the atmosphere in a brothel, of skin and secrets. A "naked fact" in some way always resembles an undressed woman. What is naked is rare, desired, and magnetic. It remains an exception, a Utopia. The old sexual economy rested on the game of concealing-revealing, refusing-enticing. It created a deficiency and in doing so produced something valuable. The history of sexual relations therefore probably consists for the lesser part in the history of "eroticism"; the larger part consists in the history of the war between the sexes. For this reason, too, only the smaller part of concealment arises from the erotic game; the greater part comes from coercion, struggle, and oppression. We cannot speak realisti- cally of sexuality without treating animosities and polemics. In a society like ours, the attraction between the sexes seems to be linked from the start with power
12
struggles between "one's own and the alien,"
with exchanges of lust for security, with compromises between fear and sur- render. In the meantime, the word "relationship" has become almost synonymous with conflict.
The black empiricism of sexuality observes its objects through the keyhole, lustful, fearful, apprehensive. Because erotic facts were totally screened off be- fore thevso-called sexual revolution, like dangers and secrets, every access to them, whether one liked it or not, had a conflictual character. Anyone seeking sexual experience found it to be almost like a military adventure. It is no accident that our erotic tradition uses an abundance of martial metaphors -- attack, defense, siege, storm, victory, subjugation, giving over the key to the fortress, etc. The sexual body was thus in no way a simple, straightforward matter. Because it was made so difficult for the sexual body to conceive of itself as an opportunity and as happiness, it became instead a curse and a calamity. The sexual drive, dammed up in its own skin, became an agonizing "thorn in the side. " This is how the older sexual economy handed it down right up to the time of our puberty. In fact, pu- berty was actually the time when acquaintance with the misfortune of having this drive began. Here it helped little to become "enlightened," especially not accord- ing to the formula: the bad news in brief. To be enlightened meant to have become cognizant of the essentials of a new, inner enemy. To learn how to cope with its
with duels over top and bottom,
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 341
? ? ? ? "Guardian Angel," by Roland Topor. Made for laterna-magica sequence in Fel- lini's Casanova. Ink and colored pencils. Copyright (C) 1975 by Roland Topor. Reprinted by permission of Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich.
"Gefahrliche Vaginen" (Dangerous Vaginas), by Roland Topor. Copyright (C) 1975 by Roland Topor. Reprinted by permission of Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich.
urges was the strategically pressing task. Sexuality appeared from this perspec- tive as a vast danger zone. It was on the sexual level that you could be overtaken by every possible misfortune: the catastrophe of unwanted pregnancies; the dis- grace of inopportune seduction; the misery of repugnant infections that consumed you for the rest of your life; the humiliation through a premature, lonely drive without prospect; the risk of discovering a monster within oneself that harbored homosexual or perverse tendencies in its bowels; to say nothing of the degrada- tion of prostitution, and so on and so on. These risks became threateningly present with the beginning of sexual maturity. It is understandable that the thought of con- traception initially referred not to conception but to sexual contact, erotic ex-
? 342 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
? Salvador Dalf, The Puzzle of Desire, Ma mere, ma mere, ma mere, 1928. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
perience per se. Apart from a few liberal clever tricks that has been the Catholic position to the present day: contraception through abstinence. The inexperienced, it was thought, can scarcely ever be mature enough to deal with the sexual danger. Only marriage offers the necessary protection by directing sexuality, together with all its risks, into a secure channel. In it, the forbidden becomes allowed, dis- grace becomes duty, sin necessity, the danger of conception the joy of parent- hood, etc.
Whether this regime is fully past is not the question. Then as now, in our civili- zation sexuality is seen through a primarily pornographic visor--as if there were still something to spy out, to uncover, and to bring over to one's own side. Naked- ness becomes the symbol for the highest good. Our image world crawls with na- ked bodies that build up flourishing worlds of stimuli for voyeurism and the brain sensuality of the capitalist wish society. The remote, but already visible, naked body remains in the world where we have "contact" without touching each other, the epitome of the really desirable. Because the commodity society can only func- tion on the basis of disembodiment, its members are consumed by a hunger for images of the body, including one's own body image. Often one has the impres- sion that the images are already among themselves, in search of a complementing counterimage. Only in marginal groups and in parts of the intelligentsia does a type of people still live who know that the images are different from themselves --a knowledge not infrequently paid for with disorders, depressions, and who-am-I neuroses.
Would the addiction to images and the black sexual empiricism not cease at one stroke as soon as the concealments were removed and the prevention of sex-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 343
ual experience were stopped once and for all? Prohibition and concealment are really the driving forces of mechanisms of wishing that continually strive from the given to the other. Nudism and promiscuity therefore both have a subversive component that is worthy of investigation. They destroy the backdrops among which the wishes move when they make their appearance. Where everybody dis- arms from the start, unclothes, and becomes accessible, the wish-producing fan- tasies of prohibition, darkness, and remote goals vanish. Those who have ex- perienced such evaporations sense, if not freedom, then nonetheless an increase in possibilities among which freedom can choose. By tracking down their wish functions they can recognize themselves in the role of the producer of their wishes. It is not the objects that are responsible for the desire directed at them but rather: Wishing paints the objects with its longings, as if the objects were not themselves but simultaneously the remote other that inflames the wishes.
Medicine and Suspecting the Body
Even the doctor --at least the doctor who is markedly influenced by modern natu-
ral scientific medicine-exercises an activity of a polemical type. What in positive
terms is practiced as "healing therapy" appears from a pragmatic perspective as
the fight against disease. Healing (making whole) and fighting are two aspects of
13
the same thing.
today's doctor proceeds from the naked body in order to uncover the sources of danger in its interior. The analogies between modern medical diagnostics and the machinations of the secret services (to the point of linguistic details) are glaringly obvious. The doctor undertakes, so to speak, somatic espionage. The body is the bearer of secrets and is to be shadowed until so much is known about its inner states that "measures" can be decided on. As in secret diplomacy and espionage, in medicine, too, things are "probed" a lot, listened in on, and observed. Medical apparatuses are "infiltrated" into bodies like agents --probes, cameras, connecting pieces, catheters, lamps, and tubes. With auscultations, the medico eavesdrops on the body like the listener on the wall. Reflexes are noted, secret(ion)s drawn off, tensions measured, organ data counted. Quantitative statements, whether they be about production figures, troop strengths, urine data, or diabetes points are particularly appreciated because of their "matter-of-factness," here as there. For the doctor as well as the secret agent, there is often no other way than to rum-
14
mage around in excrements and refuse because the investigations, as a rule,
must take place indirectly, without disturbing the normal running of the body or the overheard corporate entity. Only artful and often disreputable methods lead to important information about the inaccessible secret area. To be sure, more re- cent methods of spying on the interior of the body shrink back less and less from direct and aggressive advances. In places, the distinction between diagnostics and intervention becomes blurred: Foreign substances are infiltrated into the body.
Whereas for the voyeur the naked body is the image sought,
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? Michael von Zichy (1827-1906).
For these reconnaissances and illuminations of the body, not only the natural in- lets and outlets are used as canals; often the body is even directly cut open, the safe broken into. And like spies, the medicos put great efforts into encoding their information so that the "object" does not know what is known about it. Learned bluff and intentional concealment for "therapeutic reasons" separate the doctor's knowledge and the patient's consciousness. Coding and secrecy characterize the medical secret service style. Both exercise formally analogous intelligence practices.
If, for diagnostic medicine, comparisons between medical and secret service optics suggest themselves, then, with operative medicine, still more clearly, po- lemical analogies are in place. Surgery shares the concept of "operation" with the military; conversely, concepts such as foreign body, plague boil, festering sore, poisoning, and decay connect the ideas of medicine and those of the police. The fight against crime has long used medical jargon. Evil, against which medicine, the police, and the army all fight, appears not only in the various manifestations of sickness, criminality, and opposition to war; these manifestations can also eas-
ily change from one form to the other. That also brings the "theoretical" polemical
disciplines --military sciences, intelligence services, police, medicine
15
--into a
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 345
partly thematic proximity, but even more so into a methodological proximity. They all follow the logic of suspicion, which promotes the development of strate- gies for theoretical and practical knowledge of the enemy. Modern medicine, too, even more than all its predecessors, is black empiricism. It is based on the a priori principle that between the subject and its sickness, only enmity can exist. To "help" the subject means, accordingly, to help it to a victory over the aggressor sickness. From this optics of hostility, sickness necessarily appears as an inva- sion, and it is self-evident that the only way to deal with it is polemically, defen- sively, aggressively --not integratedly or comprehensively. The idea that sickness --like any hostility --could also be an original and, in a certain sense, "true" self-expression of the "subject" is already excluded by modern medicine's approach. In practice, the idea is ridiculed that sickness, at a given time, can be a necessary and authentic relation of an individual to itself and an expression of its existence. Sickness must be thought of as the other and the alien, and this po- lemically split-off element is treated by medicine in an isolating and objectifying way, no differently from the way the organs of Internal Security treat suspects, no differently from the way the moral prohibitive authority treats sex drives.
The medicine of a latently paranoid society thinks of the body basically as a subversion risk. In it, the danger of sickness ticks like a time bomb; the body is suspected as the future murderer of the person living in it. My body is my assas- sin. If in the age of the first asepsis, bacteria and viruses were blown up into sym- bols for everything that stimulated evil-up to the point where politicians iden- tified their opponents as bacteria (for which Fascist rhetoric no less than Communist rhetoric provides examples: swarms of Jewish, foreign, revisionist, anarchist, decomposing bacteria)--then today, in the age of the second asepsis, not only the "foreign body" (germ) but even the body itself is conceived of as a suspected enemy. Because it could become sick, it is the problem child of Internal Security. This suspicion creates the "medicinal" body, that is, the body as bat- tlefield of preventive and operative medicine. According to some statistics, most surgical interventions consist in preventive and "security measure" operations, measures born of mistrust, whose superfluity is veiled by the relief that the worst fears have not been confirmed. One can call this procedure methodical pessi- mism. The secret of its procedere lies in painting a bogeyman on the wall with one hand while operating with the other hand. As with all security systems, such preventive measures exist because of the growth of the readiness to be afraid. If it can be said that societies manifest their feelings toward life in their medicine, then our society reveals that life is too dangerous to live but still also too precious to throw away. Between preciousness and danger, one seeks the safe middle ground. The more life secures itself, the more it becomes virtualized, pushed away, and abandoned. It becomes a mere potential that does not want to engage or realize itself because engagement cannot happen without risk. Preventive, operative, prosthetic, and sedative medicine hold up a mirror to our society: In
346 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
it, in a modernized form but archaically motivated, the existential fears of a civili- zation appear in which, openly or secretly, everyone has to fear a violent death.
16
With the fading of Christian European metaphysics,
these fears have or-
ganized themselves anew. Existence becomes plastered with ideologies of secu-
rity and sanitation. How police thinking and hygiene gracefully elide into one an-
other is expressed by Doctor Herold, the chief of the Federal Criminal Bureau,
in a disturbing way when he sees the police of the future confronted with "social
17
sanitary" tasks
prophylaxis. Behind the enlightened will to know, we thus still discover, to be sure in artfully unfettered forms, archaic fears of contact and wishes to eliminate. They give the polemical disciplines the energy, knowledge, and practices to ac- cumulate for the goal striven for. Scientific prognosis and polemical prevention are essentially related. Obstruction, avoidance, defusing, and suppression are the pragmatic a priori principles of the polemical preventive sciences. In them, en- lightenment has organized itself completely as combative knowledge.
To articulate this implies simultaneously the task of describing an integrating philosophy, namely, to go behind the polemical approach of these disciplines and "sciences" and to uncover the logic of hostility. In this return, the fears and efforts of the will, which precede hostility and prevention, emerge: They are the blind motives of self-preservation.
Nothingness and the Metaphysics of Naked Self-preservation
All primary hostilities can be derived from the splitting off of death from life. The
inability of any modern, postmetaphysical, scientized thinking to conceive of any
death as one's own leads to two obviously ubiquitous attitudes: Death does not
belong to life but confronts it irreconcilably, or even more, disconnectedly, as
an absolute annihilation; and because there is no death of which I can say it is
"mine," thinking clings to the only death that remains thinkable as an objective
death: that of the other. "Live and let die," as the title of a James Bond story says.
The a priori principle of self-preservation --agents' cynicism enjoys the freedom
of being able to say it openly --functions according to this rule of thumb. Because
the modern subject, for psychological, ideological, and metaphysical reasons,
cannot think its "own death" (against this, Heidegger's philosophy seems (scheini)
only an impotent corrective), it becomes subsumed under the law to avoid it with
literally every means available. In a certain respect, all means are means for not
18
dying. As a logical consequence a total instrumentalism
that is not the ego, which wants to survive. It provides the technical-logical basis for the modern rulers' cynicism of "instrumental reason" (Horkheimer). If the subject is a priori that which cannot die, it transforms the world rigorously into the domain of its struggles for survival. What hinders me is my enemy; whoever is my enemy must be hindered from hindering me.