No More Learning

The ethics of being passes over the sphere of polemical pretense. Only pathological cynics and vengeful negativists admit their mistakes with the intention of committing them again. They even abuse the form of confession in order to struggle and to lie. And not always is seen in this the coquetry with which Zarah Leander, as the notorious Miss Jane, once sang, "I am so and I'll stay so /1 am so in my whole body / Yes sir! "
One will have noticed that the series of cardinal cynicisms represents simul- taneously a list of the elementary satirical themes and most important genres ot jokes. They represent the main battlefields of elevations and humiliations, ideali- zations and realistic disillusionments. Here, vices and insults, ironies and mock-
n eries have their largest playing fields. Here, the most frivolous sideswipes of h "
guistic liberalism still have a morally regulative sense. The military with its
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 305
tensions between hero ethics and cowards' realism, between officers and subor- dinates, front and rear echelons, war and peace, command and obedience, is just as much an inexhaustible generator of soldiers'jokes as politics, with its ideolo- gies, state actions, its great words and small deeds, which provides an infinite source of pranks and parodies. It is no different with sexuality, which, with the juxtaposition of the covered and the naked, the forbidden and the permitted, con- stitutes a vast field for jokes, obscenities, and comedies, regardless of whether it is flirtation, marriage, coitus, or bedroom battles. Likewise, the medical do- main, with all its possibilities for sarcasm about health and sickness, madness and normality, the living and the dead. And all the more so with the entire domain of religion, which is more serviceable for swearing and joke telling than almost any other theme. For, wherever there is so much sacredness, a large profane shadow arises, and the more saints are honored, the more comical saints can be found among them. Finally, there is also the area of knowledge, which is criss- crossed by tensions between intelligence and stupidity, joke and citizens' duty, reason and madness, science and absurdity. All these "cardinal jokes" function in collective consciousness like a drainage system--regulating, balancing, equilibrating --as a universally accepted regulative mini-amoralism that cleverly assumes that it is healthy to poke fun at what exceeds our capacities to become outraged. For this reason, those who still struggle reject coarse jokes about their own cause. Only when the joke goes inward and one's own consciousness, admit- tedly from on high but not too ungraciously, inspects itself, does there arise a serenity that reveals not a kynical laughter, nor a cynical smile, but a humor that has ceased to struggle.
The most astounding profile of our cultural-moral situation is probably the in- satiable craving of modern consciousness for detective stories. They belong like- wise, I think, to the institutions of moral airing and ventilation in a culture that is doomed to live with an excessively high degree of mixing of norms, ambigui- ties, and contrary ethics. The genre as a whole, in relation to collective ethics, appears as an institutionalized medium for confession. Every detective story is a new opportunity for experimental amoralism. Through fiction it makes "happi- ness in crime" (d'Aurevilly) accessible to everybody. In the movements of thought in modern detective stories, from Poe to the present, those movements or thought in an analysis of cynicism are already anticipated in concentrated form, ? jood crime stories, every one of them, work to reduce the gravity of the in-
ividual crime. If the detective were the representative of enlightenment, the
r
'rninal would be the representative of immorality and the victim would be the
re
presentative of morality. However, this constellation regularly becomes shaky
hen the investigation into guilt reaches the point where the victims --from a dra-
at
'c point of view, initally the "innocent" victims --themselves lose their inno- nce, are cast in a twilight, and are separated from the culprit who assaults them y only a microscopically thin juridical line. This line distinguishes between cyni-
e
306 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
cal, nonpunishable immoralisms and truly punishable offenses. In the most ex- treme case, it is the culprit who, almost like a provoked enlightener, merely exe- cutes on the victim the latter's own amorality. "The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. " (Franz Werfel). These are the films at the end of which the inspector walks down the street, deep in thought, and makes a face as if he were sorry to have solved the case.
Already in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville, in his novel Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), relates such an inversion --in a tragic setting, of course. The hero, an upright, naive-sympathetic figure of light, is systemati- cally provoked by a devilish magazine officer until he knocks the latter down in a speechless fit. The officer unfortunately falls on his head and dies with a sneer on his lips because he knows that the boy, who had to hit him because he had no other way of expressing himself, must now in turn, according to maritime law, be sentenced to death by the ship's command. The law appears here as an authority that can be used as an instrument of an absolutely evil will, as a weapon of the victim against the, in reality, "innocent" perpetrator.
The great crime novel constructions remain for a long time in an analogously critical moral schema. They draw their vividness from the moral structure of cap- italist society. In them, individual crimes often appear either as rather naive, rela- tively harmless splinters of a universal social cynicism or as reflective exaggera- tions and magnifications of behaviors that, on a scale of averages, are not yet pursued as crimes. (Hence the two types of perpetrators: here, the relatively harmless perpetrators who have "stumbled into it"; there, the cynical tricksters, grand criminals, and monsters of crime. ) The triumphant success of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera is based on its ability to set a blackguards' cynicism into a transparent but not moralistic relation to the social whole. As in a Punch and Judy show for adults, the figures flaunt their amorality and their evil artful- ness, sing songs about their own wickedness and about the still greater evil of the world, and use cynical sayings and ways of speaking to educate the public to a mode of expression in which it, too, not completely without pleasure, could speak the truth about itself.
Certain symptoms, it seems to me, indicate that enlightenment dramatization of criminality through theater, literature, and film has reached its limit. The creativity of the various criminal schemata gives the impression of exhaustion. The dissolution and thinking through of moral-amoral multivalences become in- creasingly too pretentious, too artificial, and not binding enough for today's men- talities. The trend hints at a more brutal way out of the tension, at an inclination to breaking loose, to massacre, to explosion, to catastrophe. Preambivalent forms of thinking win--everything or nothing, fantastic or shitty, good or bad, bomb or sugar, OK or not OK. In the place of subtle investigations of cases comes, more and more frequently, Fascist artistic release. Tense situations no longer call for mediation and defusion so much as for things to be blown to smithereens.
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS D 307
The School of Arbitrariness: Information Cynicism, the Press
Whoever tells the truth will be caught doing it, sooner or later.
Oscar Wilde
For the consciousness that informs itself in all directions, everything becomes problematic and inconsequential: a man and a woman; two illustrious scoundrels; three men in a boat; four fists for one hallelujah: five principal problems of the world economy; sex in the workplace; seven threats to peace; eight deadly sins of civilized humanity; nine symphonies with Karajan; ten black pawns in the North-South dialogue-it could just as well be the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, but here we don't have to worry about details.
I do not want to quote cliches about the notorious cynicism of journalists and press people, and not merely because it is still only a few individual reporters who go so far as to orchestrate with African mercenaries the most photogenic arrange- ment for an execution so as to be able to send home interesting film material, or who experience a conflict of conscience about whether, at a car race, to warn a driver about an accident up ahead or shoot photos when he crashes into the wrecked car. It would also be pointless to reflect on whether journalism is a better climate for cynicism than public-relations institutes, advertising agencies, com- mercial studios, film production circles, political propaganda offices, TV sta- tions, or the studios of the pornographic press. The point is to find out why cyni- cism, almost as if it were a natural necessity, belongs to the professional risks and deformations of those whose job it is to produce pictures and information about "reality. "
We have to speak of a twofold disinhibition that concerns the production of pictures and information in modern mass media-of the disinhibition of the por- trayal vis-a-vis what is portrayed, as well as of the disinhibition of the currents
1
of information in relation to the consciousnesses that absorb them.
The first disinhibition is based on the systematic journalistic exploitation of others' catastrophes, in which there seems to be an unspoken contract of interests between public demand for sensations and journalistic provision of them. A con- siderable part of our press serves nothing other than the hunger for misadventure, which is the moral vitamin of our society. The use value of news is measured in large part by its stimulation value, which obviously can be raised considerably through its packaging. A journalism can hardly flourish completely without makeup. Insofar as it could be understood as simply the art of comprehensible portrayal, we could value it positively as the descendant of a rhetorical tradition for which the way something was brought to market was never a matter of in- difference. However, the packaging of the usual cynical type rests on a twofold disingenuousness: With literary-aesthetic means, it dramatizes the innumerable world events, both large and small, and transfers them-without making the tran-
308 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
sition recognizable and with a more or less clear consciousness of deceiving --into fiction, in their form as well as their content. Second, the packaging lies with its sensationalizing style by continually restoring a long since superseded, morally primitive frame of reference in order to be able to present the sensations as some- thing that fall outside these coordinates. Only a highly paid, corrupt mentality lets itself be used over a long period of time for such games. Modern primitive con- servatism owes a great deal to a correspondingly primitive journalism that prac- tices daily cynical restoration by acting as if every day could have its sensation and as if a form of consciousness had not long since arisen in our heads, precisely through its reporting, that has learned to accept scandal as a way of life and catas- trophe as background noise: With a trumped-up, sentimental moralism, a world picture is continually concocted in which just such a sensationalism can exercise its seductive and stupefying effects.
The second disinhibition of the information industry is even more problematic. This industry floods the capacities of our consciousness in a downright anthropo- logically threatening way. One has to have been completely away from media civilization once for a long time --for months or years --in order to be so centered and concentrated when one returns that one can consciously observe in oneself the renewed distraction and deconcentration that occurs when one takes part in the modern information media. Seen psychohistorically, the urbanization and in- formatization of our consciousnesses in the media complex probably represent the aspect of modernity that cuts deepest into life. And only in such a world can the modern cynical syndrome -- diffuse, omnipresent cynicism -- unfold in the way we experience it today. We now regard it as normal that in magazines we find, almost like in an Old World theater, all regions close to one another: reports on mass starvation in the Third World next to advertisements for champagne, arti- cles on environmental catastrophes beside a discussion of the most recent automo- bile production. Our minds are trained to scan and comprehend an encyclopedi- cally broad scale of irrelevancies --in which the irrelevance of the single item comes not so much from itself but from its being arranged in the flood of informa- tion from the media. Without years blunting and training in elasticity, no human consciousness can cope with what is demanded of it in flicking through a single thick magazine. And without intensive practice, people, if they do not want to risk some form of mental disintegration, cannot bear this continual flickering of important and unimportant items, the waxing and waning of reports that in one moment demand the highest attentiveness and in the next are totally passe.
If we want to speak positively about the superfluity of information streams through our heads, we would have to praise them for the principle of boundless empiricism and the free "market. " Indeed, we could go so far as to grant to the modern mass media one function in which they are intimately linked with philoso- phy: The limitless empiricism of the media imitates philosophy to a certain extent in that they adopt the latter's perspective on the totality of being --of course, not
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 309
of a totality in concepts but a totality in episodes. An enormous simultaneity stretches itself out in our informed consciousness: Here, some are eating; there, some are dying. Here, some are being tortured: there, famous lovers separate. Here, the "second car" is being discussed; there, a nationwide, catastrophic drought. Here, there are tips on tax write-offs according to section 7b; there, the economic theory of the Chicago boys. Here, thousands go wild at a rock concert; there, a dead woman lies undiscovered for years in her flat. Here, the Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, and peace are awarded; there, only every second person knows the name of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Here, Siamese twins are successfully separated; there, a train with 2,000 pas- sengers derails into a river. Here, a daughter is born to an actor couple, there, the cost estimates of a political experiment rise from half a million to two million (people). Such is life. As news, everything is at our disposal. What is foreground, what background; what important, what unimportant; what trend, what episode? Everything is ordered into a uniform line in which uniformity {Gleichformigkeit) also produces equivalence {Gleichwertigkeii) and indifference (Gleichgiiltigkeit).
Where does this unleashed drive for information come from? This addiction and this compulsion to live daily in the whirr of information and to tolerate the constant bombardment of our minds with unbelievable masses of indifferent- important, sensational-unimportant news?
It seems that since the beginning of the modern era our civilization has become entangled in a peculiarly contradictory relation to novelty, to the "novella," to the case study, to the "interesting event"--in a certain way as if it had lost control over its "hunger for experience" and its thirst for news [Neu-gier, literally, craving for the new; -- Trans. ]. Enlightenment wants to turn the universe increasingly into the epitome of news and information, and it achieves this with the aid of two com- plementary media, the encyclopedia and the newspaper. With the former, our civilization undertakes the attempt to span and organize the "circle of the world" and the entire cycle of knowledge. With the newspaper, it produces a daily shift- ing frame of the movement and transformation of reality in its eventfulness. The encyclopedia comprises the constants, the newspaper the variables, and both are similar in their capacity to convey a maximum of "information" with a minimum of structuring. Bourgeois culture has had to live with this problem from the start, and it is worth a quick look to see how to date it has come through unscathed. The person in a relatively closed culture, with an organic information horizon and a limited curiosity about the outside, remains largely unaffected by this problem. Not so, however, with European culture, particularly in its bourgeois period, which is characterized by its laboring, researching, traveling, empirically dis- posed, experience-hungry, and reality-thirsty individuals. Through centuries of the accumulation of knowledge, they bring their civilization onto a curiosity course that, especially in the nineteenth century and even more completely in the twentieth, has been transformed with the triumph of the radio and electronic me-
310 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
dia into an overpowering, strong current that washes us forward rather than being steered by us.
All this began seemingly quite innocently, namely, with the emergence of novelists, narrators of curiosities, and entertainment artists who, in the late Mid- dle Ages, began to build up a novella-like "narrative news network" in which the accent increasingly shifted from morally exemplary, didactic stories to the anec- dotal, remarkable, special, extraordinary, piquant, and picaresque, the strange and singular, the eventful and amusing, the terrifying and that which causes one to ponder. Perhaps this is the most fascinating process of all in our culture: how, in the course of the centuries, such "singular stories of events" gain increasing acceptance over the standard stories, the fixed motifs, and the commonplace- how the new sets itself off from the old and how the news from outside works on the still narrow, traditional consciousness. Through the history of our litera- ture and discourse, therefore, even more than through the history of law, we can study the unfolding of "modern complexity. " For it is not at all self-evident that our consciousness has to be able to absorb and order information about explosions in the outer layers of the sun, about failed harvests in Tierra del Fuego, about the way of life of the Hopi Indians, about the gynecological problems of a Scan- dinavian queen, about the Peking Opera Company, about the sociological struc- ture of a village in Provence . . .
Since the age of the Renaissance (which Jakob Burckhardt poignantly de-
scribed with the formula: "the discovery of the world and of people"), the heads
of those who are "plugged into" the (learned, diplomatic, news) information net-
work have been inflated with immense masses of news. An unleashed empiricism
piles up mountains of assertions, reports, theories, descriptions, interpretations,
symbolisms, and speculations on one another until, in the end, in the most
elevated intellects of the age (one thinks of figures like Paracelsus, Rabelais,
Cardano, "Faust"), "knowledge" grows profusely and boils over in chaotic am-
biguity. We no longer remember this early period of a "baroque age of informa-
tion" because the age of enlightenment, rationalism, and the "sciences" has cut
2
us off from it. What we today call enlightenment, by which we inevitably mean
Cartesian rationalism, also refers, from the perspective of the history of informa- tion, to a necessary sanitary measure. It was the insertion of a filter against the flooding of the individual consciousness, which already had begun in the learned circles of the late Renaissance, with an infinity of equally important, equivalent, and indifferent pieces of "news" from the most diverse sources. Here, too, a situa- tion regarding information had arisen in which individual consciousness was hopelessly exposed to news, pictures, texts. Rationalism is not only a scientific predisposition but, even more, a hygienic procedure for consciousness, namely, a method of no longer having to give everything its due. Now we separate the examined from the unexamined, the true from the false, the hearsay from the evi- dence of one's own eyes, the adopted from what one has thought out for oneself,
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 311
the statements that rest on the authority of tradition from those that rest on the authority of logic and observation, etc. The disburdening effect is initially enor- mous. The memory is devaluated; in its place, criticism and a defensive, select- ing, testing kind of thinking are intensified. Now, one does not have to let every- thing pass through. Indeed, on the contrary, what is valid and has "scientific substance" is from now on only a tiny island of "truth" in the middle of an ocean of vague and false assertions --soon, they will be called idols, prejudices, and ideologies. Truth becomes like a solid, rather small fortress in which the critical thinker resides, and outside the fortress stupidity and the infinite, falsely formed and falsely informed consciousness rage.
But it took only one or two centuries before this new rationalism, which was initially so successful in its mental-hygienic procedures, ran into the same difficulties it wanted to overcome. For enlightenment research too --indeed, it all the more so --does not elude the problem of producing a world that is "much too large," of bringing forth a boundless empiricism, and of unleashing still more streams of reports consisting of truths and novelties. Rationalism copes with its own products just as ineffectively as the Renaissance literati did with the measure- less confusion of traditions. From then on, moreover, a certain intellectual shrinking process can be observed within the strictly rationalist camp, so that the impression is given that the sanitary and defensive function of rationalism has won the upper hand over the productive, researching, clarifying function. In fact, with some so-called Critical Rationalists and so-called Analytical Philosophers, the suspicion is justified that they emphasize their rational methods so much be- cause there is a lot they simply do not understand and so, with clever resentment, they cover up their lack of comprehension with methodological rigor. Here, how- ever, a merely negative, filtering, defensive function, inherent in rationalism from the beginning, is revealed,
We today are not the first to notice this. Since the eighteenth century, when- ever people with more sensitive understanding and with psychological, poetic, and emotional aptitudes spoke out, they expressed their concerns that the rational- ism was too narow and the learned pedantry too narrow-minded. For them, too, the full breadth of human experience and culture in their time could not be grasped with the rationalist, hygienic instrumentarium alone.
I believe that the significance of bourgeois art and literature in the history of spirit can be best surveyed from this perspective. The work of art--the closed just as much as the open --placed its aesthetic order emphatically against the lex- icographical chaos of the Encyclopedists and the journalistic chaos of the newspapers' empiricism. Here, something durable was erected against the in- creasingly broad flood of simultaneous inconsequences: formulated in a language that penetrated the ears and took hold of the heart; with constructions to which one could return (cultivation, identity, quotations - that is one complex); often presented in ritualized forms that maintain a highly significant durability in the
312 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
stream of inconsequential changes; built up around characters who seem pithy, coherent, and vitally interesting; in plots that unfold life before us, dramatized and intensified. With all this, bourgeois art possessed an enormous significance for the forming and strengthening of consciousness threatened by the waxing chaos of experience in developed bourgeois-capitalist society. Only art could still in any measure provide what neither theology nor rationalist philosophy were in a position to give: a view of the world as universe and the totality as cosmos.
With the end of the bourgeois age, however, this bourgeois, quasi- philosophical exercise of the arts is also extinguished. Already in the nineteenth century, art gets caught in a narcissistic circling of itself and in the ruts of the
3
Artistic --whereby its illusion of representation increasingly fades. Soon art no
longer appears as the medium in which the rest of the world could be "conceptual- ized" and presented with a unique transparency, but itself becomes one more puz- zle among others. More and more, it gives up its representational, ersatz theologi- cal, ersatz cosmological function and, in the end, stands before consciousness as a phenomenon that distinguishes itself from other "information" above all because in it, one does not know "what the whole is supposed to mean," that it is no longer something transparent, no longer functions as a clarifying medium and that it re- mains darker than the all-too-explicable rest of the world.
Only after the decline of the great function of representation in the arts was the time ripe for the ascent of the mass media to their hegemonic position with regard to information about the world as event and actuality. (Here, we do not want to get into a discussion about the interlude provided by the "life philosophies" and "grand theories" of the nineteenth century, halfway between art as religion and mass media consciousness; I refer the reader to the section on the Grand Inquisitor in "The Cabinet of Cynics," chapter 7. )
The mass media were the first to develop a capacity that no rationalist ency- clopedia, no work of art, and no life philosophy could do to that extent. With im- measurable power of compilation, they steer toward that which grand philosophy could only dream about: the total synthesis--of course, at the absolute rock bot- tom of intelligence, in the form of total summation. They really do admit of a universal, chaotic empiricism; they can report on everything, touch on every-
4
thing, record and place everything side by side. In this they are even more than
philosophy; they are the descendants of both the encyclopedia and the circus. The inexhaustible "ordering" capacity of the mass media is rooted in their addi- tive "style. " Only because they have placed themselves at the very bottom of men- tal penetration can they give and say everything, and this, moreover, all at once. They have only a single intelligible element: the "And. " With this "And," literally all things can be turned into neighbors. In this way, chains and neighborhoods arise that no rationalist and no aesthete would have allowed themselves to dream about: expenditure cuts-and-premieres-and-motorbike-world-championships- and-street-walkers' tax-and-coups d'etats . . . The media can provide every-
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 313
thing because they have given up without a trace the ambition of philosophy to also understand the given. They comprise everything because they comprehend nothing. They talk about everything and say nothing about anything. The media kitchen serves us daily a reality stew with innumerable ingredients, but it still tastes the same every day. At least there must have once been a time when, be- cause the stew was still new, people were not yet fed up with it and stared fasci- nated at the flood of unleashed facticity. Thus, in 1929, Frank Thiess could declare with a half-justified pathos; "Journalism is the church of our time" (Das Gesicht unserer Zeit. Briefe an Zeitgenossen, 4th ed. [Stuttgart, 1929], p. 62).
The "And" is the morality of journalists. They have to swear, so to speak, a professional oath that when they report on something, they will not object to the placement of this thing and this report among other things and other reports with the use of an "And. " One thing is one thing, and the medium permits no more. To produce connections between "things"--that, after all, would be the same as to disseminate ideology. Therefore, whoever produces connections gets chucked out. Whoever thinks has to get out. Whoever counts to three is a fantasizer. The media's empiricism tolerates only isolated reports, and this isolation is more effective than any censorship because it guarantees that what belongs together does not get together and can be found only with difficulty in people's minds. A journalist is someone who is forced by occupation to forget what the number is called that comes after one and two. Whoever still knows it is probably not a democrat--or is a cynic.
To look at this "And" critically should be worth the effort. Viewed in isolation, is it already "cynical" in some way? How can a logical particle be cynical? A man and a woman; knife and fork; pepper and salt. What could be objectionable about that? Let us try other combinations: Lady and whore; love thy neighbor and shoot him dead; starvation and caviar for breakfast. Here, the "And" seems to have been caught up between antagonisms that it renders by way of a sort of shortcut as neighbors so that the contrasts scream out at one another.
But what can the "And" do about it? It does not create the antagonisms; it sim- ply couples the unequal pairs. In fact, in the media, the "And" does nothing other than place things next to one another, founding neighborhoods, coupling, contrasting -- no more and no less. The "And" has the capacity of building a linear series or chain whose individual links touch solely through the logical coupler. The latter, in turn, says nothing about the essence of the elements it brings into a row. In this indifference of the "And" vis-a-vis the things it places beside one another lies the germ of a cynical development. For through the mere placing in a row and the external syntactic relation between everything, it produces a unifor- mity that does not do justice to the things that have been set in a row. The "And," therefore, does not remain a "pure" "And" but rather develops the tendency of eliding into an Is-equal-to. From this moment on, a cynical tendency can propa- gate itself. For when the "And" that can stand between everything also means an
314 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
Is-equal-to, everything becomes the same as everything else, and each is just as valid as the other. Out of the sameness of form of the "And" series comes, imper- ceptibly, a factual sameness of value and a subjective sameness of validity. Thus, when I go down the street in the morning and the newspapers scream at me from the mute vendor, I have to choose, for all practical purposes, only the favored indifference of the day. Is my choice for this murder or that rape, this earthquake or that kidnapping? Every day we must make renewed use of the natural right not to learn of millions of things. That I must exercise this right is guaranteed by the media, which, at the same time, guarantee that those millions of things are already on their way to me and that I only have to look at a headline for a split second and already another inconsequentiality has managed to leap into my conscious- ness. Once it has made that leap, it also induces me to make a protocol of a cynical indifference toward whatever has reached me as "news. " I register, as a hyperin- formed person, that I live in a newsworld that is a thousandfold too big and that I can only shrug my shoulders at most of it because my capacities for empathy, outrage, and thinking-through are tiny in comparison to that which offers itself and makes an appeal for my attention.
Without noticing it, we have worked our way up to a point at which it becomes possible to take up the best of the Marxist tradition and rethink it. Those who speak of uniformity, equivalence, and indifference have secretly already arrived on the soil of Marx's classical achievements in thinking and stand in the middle of its reflection on the puzzle of equivalence relations between goods and things. Should there be connections and transitions here?
Has not Marx, in his com- modity analysis, provided a fulminating and logically very subtle description of how a same-valuedness produces a sameness in validity (indifference) that precipitates in the relation of commodity and price? The best prep school for Capital-- would it not consist in watching television several hours a day, looking through several newspapers and magazines the remaining hours, and continu- ously listening to the radio? For basically, we can read Capital as often as we like and we will never understand the decisive point if we do not learn it from our own experience and if we have not sucked it into our own structure of thinking and way of feeling: We live in a world that brings things into false equations, produces false samenesses of form and false samenesses of values (pseudoequiva- lences) between everything and everyone, and thereby also achieves an intellec- tual disintegration and indifference in which people lose the ability to distinguish correct from false, important from unimportant, productive from destructive -- because they are used to taking the one for the other.
To live with pseudoequivalences, to think in pseudoequivalences: When you can do that, you are a full citizen in this cynical civilization, and when you are conscious of it, you have found the Archimedean point from which this civiliza- tion can be critically unhinged. Marx circled around this point in his powerful movements of thought on the critique of economy, in order to unfold the central
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS D 315
inequality of our form of economy --that between wage and labor value--from ever new angles. However, the simplest path to an understanding of Capital leads not via a reading of Capital. We do not have to say, along with the unhappy Althusser, Lire le Capital, but rather Lire le Stern, Lire la Bild newspaper, Lire le Spiegel, Lire Brigitte. There we can study the logic of pseudoequivalences much more clearly and much more openly. In the last instance, cynicism leads back to the amoral equating of different things. Those who do not see the cynicism evident when press reports on torture in South America are placed between per- fume ads will also not perceive it in the theory of surplus-value, even if they have read it a hundred times.
Exchange Cynicism, or: The Hardships of Life
Who ever said life was fair?
Money is abstraction in action. To hell with value, business is business. For money, nothing matters. It is the medium in which the equating of what is differ- ent is realized in practical terms. Like nothing else, it has the power to bring different things to a common denominator. Just as newspaper print and television screens are indifferent to the contents they transmit, money preserves its unshaka- ble indifference with respect to all goods for which it can be exchanged, no matter how different. The Roman emperor Vespasian sniffed a coin as if he suspected that it must stink and remarked ironically: non olet. Modern bourgeois economic sciences are basically nothing other than a higher-level non olet. In the song of praise to the free-market economy, modernized money, as capital, has found an appropriately modern form to declare its physical and moral odorlessness. For as long as nothing other than purely economic acts of exchange stood to debate, scarcely a single philosopher, still less an economist, thought of checking out the phenomenon of money with regard to its cynical valences. In its theory, the capi- talist commodity economy unrelentingly confirms its good reputation. Is it not based on the best possible of all morals --the just price and the free contract? Wherever private wealth emerges, there is always someone around who assures us that he has "earned" it in the most moral way, by "his own sweat. " Only out of resentment could anyone want to find fault with good businessmen.
Of course, the non olet party, in its intelligent representatives, has accepted responsibility for certain moral complications of the commodity and money econ- omy. With regard to spending money, some dubious manifestations must be obvi- ous even to the defender of the existing relations. Georg Simmel was probably the first to investigate explicitly the problem of cynicism that arises with money. For if money, as we say, has "buying power," how far can this buying power ex- tend itself? If money confronts a commodity that has been produced for the mar- ket, it is naturally the price that determines whether the commodity changes hands
316 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
to the money possessor. This remains a purely economic calculation of value.
Simmel then came to speak of exchange procedures in which money exchanges
against "values" not known to count as commodities. The Philosophy of Money
reveals the phenomenon of cynicism in the fact that it seems to be an inherent
power of money to entangle in exchange deals goods that are not commodities
as if they were such. It is the obvious venality of everything and everybody that,
in capitalist society, instigates a gradual but continually deepening process of
cynical corruption. "Here the more money becomes the sole center of interests,
the more we see honor and conviction, talent and virtue, beauty and the health
of the soul mobilized on its behalf, all the more will a mocking and frivolous
mood arise regarding these higher goods of life, which are offered for sale for
5
the same kind of value (Wertquale) as goods on the weekly market. The concept
of market price for values, which in their essence refuse every valuation except
that in their own categories and ideals, is the completed objectification of what
cynicism represents as subjective reflex" (Philosophie des Geldes, 4th ed.
6
The cynical function of money reveals itself in its power to entangle higher values in dirty deals. One rightly hesitates to treat this under the concept of buying power. Wherever economic money value shows itself to be in a position to draw extra economic values --honor, virtue, beauty --says Simmel, into "business," there, in addition to the power of buying, a second power of money comes to the fore that is only analogous, not identical, with the first. It is the power of seduc- tion. It exercises its power on those whose wishes, needs, and life plans have as- sumed the form of venalities -- and, in capitalist culture, that is more or less every- one. Only in a situation of universal seduction (in which, moreover, those who were seduced have long regarded the word "corruption" as morally overstrained) can Simmel's "frivolous mood" regarding the higher goods of life (from now on, so-called higher goods of life) become a cultural climate. This climate is nothing other than what we described at the beginning as "universal diffuse cynicism. "
Caricatures: "Everything has its price, particularly that which is priceless. " The speech balloon rises out of the mouth of a big financier of the fin de siecle who dines in his private compartment, his coat unbuttoned, cigar in his hand, on his knees two naked ladies from good society. Counterpart: American billionaire on a tour of Europe as intimidated Europeans may have imagined him during the twenties: "Well, boys, I'll be blowed if, for a couple of dollars, we couldn't pack up the Old Continent into our suitcases. An extra check for what these deep Ger- man ecstatic thinkers call 'cooltoor. ' And to top if off, we'll sign up the Pope as well. " Such buy-up phrases caricature the breaking through of the material sphere of values into the "ideal" sphere of values. Capital irresistibly corrupts all values bound to the older forms of living --whether by buying them up as decorations and means of enjoyment, or by causing them to disappear as obstacles. (This con- stitutes the dialectic of "antiquities": Old stuff survives if it can be capitalized, and
[Munich, 1912], p. 264).
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 317
it can be capitalized only by virtue of the dynamics of modernization and aging specific to capitalism. ) Here capitalist society inevitably comes up against its fun- damental cynical dynamic regarding values. It is in its nature to continually ex- pand the zone of venalities. In this way, it produces not only an abundance of cynicisms but also, as moral encore to these, its own outrage against them. In ac- cordance with its ideological optics, it can only conceive of money cynicism as a market phenomenon. Without effort, neomoralistic and neoconservative phraseologies find here their accusing examples. The capitalist form of economy is compatible with nothing quite so much as the humanistic lamentations about the corrupting effect of "almighty" money on ethics and customs. Money makes the world go round. Isn't that terrible?
The non olet party must, therefore, also concede a certain odor of disreputabil- ity. However, it does everything it can to trace cynicism in the use of money back to the seducibility of individuals. The flesh is weak where money is willing. Things can always be presented as if the disreputable actors were responsible for shady acts of exchange. Once their principal accountability is assured, it is not hard to concede certain "marginal moral problems"; these are, unfortunately, in- herent to the market. Seduction in the sense of the "channeling of needs," indeed, belongs to its fundamental principles. Insofar as a cynical function of money is noticed, it remains strictly limited to the domain of exchange and consumption in which, as they say, secondary disreputabilities "cannot always be avoided. " However, who would want to deny the advantages of the system? In order not to have to speak of cynicism, sociologists like to tinker with theories of moderni- zation that jovially enter the "change of values" in the progress account.
If we listen closely, we cannot avoid noticing that Simmel has a particular form of venality of higher values in mind. Naturally, here we are talking about the honor, virtue, beauty, and spiritual welfare of "woman. " Such things can also be "bought. " Prostitution --in the narrower and broader sense --is the core of ex- change cynicisms in which money, in its brutal indifference, also drags "higher- order" goods down to its level. In no other area does the cynical potency of money come so glaringly to the fore as there, where it bursts sheltered regions -- feelings, love, self-esteem--and induces people to sell "themselves" to an alien interest. Wherever "hussies" carry their genitals to market, there capital is confronted from the outside with something about which deep inside it does not want to know anything.
In a certain respect it is a shame that Marx, in his famous commodity analysis, did not proceed from prostitution and its particular form of exchange. Such an approach would certainly have offered theoretical advantages. As head of the olet Party, he would have to be interested in every opportunity to demonstrate the cynicism of money. The woman as commodity would have been a truly irrefuta- ble argument. But a book that intends to become the Bible of the worker's move- ment cannot begin with a theory of prostitution. Marx thus initially tries to explain
318 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
the secret of equivalent exchange with completely irreproachable products such as wheat and iron, coats and linen, silk and shoe polish. We follow his subtle anal- ysis in its decisive steps: commodity and commodity; commodity and money; money and commodity; transition from money as money to money as capital. Here, in the middle of these idyllic, formal considerations of equivalence, those dull tensions reveal themselves for the first time that hint at a source of "contradic- tion" at the core of the entire system of exchange: All at once, money, by way of the detour through commodity and back to the money form, now becomes more money. Where does it come from? According to the assumptions, equal value is exchanged for equal value, and it augments itself this way! Is the economy a magi- cal variety show? Marx, however, and this much is certain, has described nothing other than the basic form (Grundform) of all circuits of capital that, without ex- ception, rest on the expectations of augmentation. The common people too know
8
that money only begets money.
that "money works. " In observing this wondrous augmentation of capital on the commodity market, Marx behaves like a total spoilsport. He does not rest until he has explained the augmentation mechanism from first principles. To the pres- ent day, capitalist society has not forgiven him for this. But it does not do the moral, and even more, the intellectual integrity of a society any good when it has to live chronically against the truths that have long since been formulated about it without being allowed to accept them.
I think that Marx's reticence regarding the phenomenon of prostitution has a deeper ground. As a genuine theoretical fundamentalist, he is interested not so much in the easily detectable olet on the market as in the ideologically concealed olet in the sphere of labor. His power of thinking is stimulated not by the cynical stench of circulation but by the mode of production itself. The latter stimulates the theoretical organ in a way quite different from the former, which directs itself more to the senses. (For this reason, the socially critical modern arts have turned toward the colorfully corrupt manifestations of circulation cynicism. ) Marx, by contrast, breaks into the innermost positions of the non olet party and smells on capital itself the unmistakable odor of surplus-value robbery. The contested the- ory of surplus value never would have been able to achieve the key strategic posi- tion it has won in the Marxist attack on the capitalist social order if it were merely one arbitrary economic formula among others. In fact, it constitutes not only an analytic description of the mechanism of capital augmentation but, at the same time--in a politically explosive way-- a diagnosis of the moral relationship of the laboring class to the profiteering class.
In the exchange of labor power for wages, the harmony of the equivalence principle appears to be destroyed once and for all. At the innermost core of the capitalist paradise of equivalence, Marx finds the snake wrapped around the tree of knowledge, hissing: When you comprehend how one can systematically take more than one gives, you will become like capital and forget what good and evil
In expressions of non olet rhetoric it is even said
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 319
are. Since labor creates much more value than is given "back" to the laborers in the form of wages (the wage level always moves along the line of the historically relative existence minima), significant surpluses accumulate in the hands of the possessor of capital. The term "exploitation" poignantly designates the scandal of unfair advantage included in surplus-value production. It contains an epistemo- logical peculiarity; namely, it is simultaneously an analytic and a moral- agitational expression. As such, it has played a significant role in the historical workers' movements. That the side of capital rejected this battle concept from the start because of its "subversive" undertones is self-evident. The ideological strug- gles in the conversations between "labor" and "capital" have, in fact, concentrated on the question of how the phenomena of entrepreneurial profit and exploitation (or rather, so-called exploitation) should be interpreted: oletistically or nonoletistically. Whereas the oletists talk of "problems" such as poverty, proletar- ian misery, oppression, and immiseration, nonoletists draw attention to economic "aggregate interests," reinvestments, social achievements of the economy, secur- ing of jobs, and the like. Thus, modern nonoletism is a single great ideological
9
effort at "decriminalizing surplus-value robbery. "
The Marxian thrust into the moral-economic complications of surplus value
thus shifts the point of attack to the mode of production itself. In this way, it out- does every possible verdict on cynical "outgrowths" of the use of money on the market. The real problem is not that, as one says, "women of honor" and "men of their word" can be made weak with money. Rather, the scandal begins where money as capital systematically presupposes for its functioning the weakness of men and women who have to carry themselves to market. This is the functional- immoral basis of the industrial exchange economy. It always reckons with the needy position of the weaker in its calculations. It erects its continual profit circuit on the existence of large groups that have scarcely any other choice than to like it or lump it. The capitalist economic order rests on the extortability of those who always live in actual or virtual exceptional circumstances, that is, of people who will go hungry tomorrow if they do not work today and who will get no work tomorrow if they do not accept what is exacted of them today.
Marx does not seek the cynicism of unequal exchange where it can be trivial- ized as an "outgrowth," but rather where, as principle, it bears the entire structure of production. After Marx, therefore, money in capitalism can never stop stink- ing of the laborers' misery. In comparison to this, turning the cultural superstruc- ture into a brothel is only a secondary process. The "decadence" theories of the Left describe this pointedly. The great discovery of Marxian political economy, however, consists in the fact that it deciphers the moral-political element in the economic element; domination establishes itself through the wage exchange. Marx exposes how the "free labor contract" between the laborer and the en- trepreneur includes elements of coercion, extortion, and exploitation. (It is funny that since the labor force has become syndicated, entrepreneurs complain that
320 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
they are really the ones being extorted. ) In the interest of self-preservation, those who have nothing to offer but labor power subject themselves to the profit interest of the "other side. " With this archrealistic expansion of the field of view, Marx's analysis raises itself from a merely positive theory of the economic domain of ob-
jects to a critical theory of society.
Whereas with regard to the circulation and consumption sphere, the cynicism
of capital presents itself as a form of seduction, in the production sphere, it ap- 10
pears as a form of rape. Just as money as a means of payment lures the higher values into prostitution, money as capital rapes labor power in the production of goods. In all these transactions, the demand for a real equivalence of the goods exchanged proves itself to be illusory. Acts of exchange that come about under the pressure of seduction and rape make futile every attempt to construct equal values between the goods. The capitalist system of exchange remains more a sys- tem of pressure than a value system. Extortion and rape --even in the noncoercive form of coercion in which contracts are accepted for lack of alternatives -- write the real history of the economy.
With a realism unpardonable from a bourgeois perspective, Marx describes capitalism in a way that takes the ground from under the feet of all mere economic theories. One cannot speak seriously about labor if one is not prepared to speak about extortion, domination, polemic, and war. In investigating surplus-value
11
productions, we find ourselves already in the domain of the Universal Polemic. In order to take the polemical realism of his analysis to the limit, Marx could have even spoken of the struggle value of a commodity instead of its exchange value. This is revealed in particular, of course, with the commodity-producing commodities --the means of production in the narrower sense, which always also represent means of struggle and pressure for their possessor. Moreover, it is also shown with the strategic main goods of economies such as wheat, iron, etc. (one only has to think of the apparently harmless examples in the commodity analysis in volume 1 of Capital), to say nothing of the military weapon commodities and commodity weapons. Due to their functional relatedness, weapons and commodi- ties are frequently interchangeable.
So, seduction and rape are supposed to be the two modi of capitalist cynicism? Circulation cynicism here, production cynicism there? Here the selling out of values; there the arbitrary pulping of the living time and labor power of the masses for the sake of blind accumulations? A moral overstraining is noticeable in these formulations, no matter how deftly aimed they may be. Whoever stresses the importance of encountering reality with as few illusions as possible may not cite it before an idealistic court even when it is amoral. The moral paradox of capitalism is, in addition, the peculiar tolerability of the "intolerable," comfort in devastation, and high life in permanent catastrophe. Capitalism has long since swallowed up its critics, especially since it can be certain of the failure of all alter- natives initiated by revolutions. "Whenever it has to be pointed out to capitalism
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 321
that it cannot help the world, it in turn can point out that communism cannot even help itself. " (Martin Walser, Biichner Prize speech, 1981).
Does what has been described here as capital cynicism in the last analysis mean nothing other than the final historical pupation of the experience that, since time immemorial, human life has been exposed to a lot of hardship and cruelties? Is the existence of human beings on a bloody globe at all subject to moral criteria? Does not this cynicism possibly present to us the most recent form of what the friendly pessimist, Sigmund Freud, called the reality principle ? And accordingly, would an explicitly cynical consciousness not be simply the form of "adulthood" complying with a modern world torn more than ever by power struggles, which undisheartedly hardens itself enough to cope with the given relations?
Those who speak of the hardships of life land almost automatically in a realm beyond moral and economic reason. What in the physical world is the law of gravity appears in the moral world as the law that the survival of societies always demands its sacrifices. Every survival demands to be paid for, and it exacts a price that no merely moral consciousness can approve of and no merely economic cal- culation can compute. The laboring and struggling groups in human society must experience the price of survival as such a bitter tribute to the reality principle be- cause they pay it with their own blood, sweat, and tears. They scrape it together in the form of subjugations to "higher" forces and facticities; they bear it in the form of pains, accommodations, privations, and hardening self-limitations. They continually pay this price in living currency that cuts into the flesh. In the struggle for survival, calluses, wounds, and losses are well-known phenomena. Indeed, where a struggle is waged, the strugglers cannot help but make themselves, with their own existence, into a means and weapon of survival. The price of survival is always paid with life itself. Life sacrifices itself everywhere to the conditions of its preservation. Everywhere we look, it bends to the coercion to toil; in class societies, it subjugates itself to the given relations of domination and exploitation; in militarized societies, it hardens under the compulsion of armament and war. What common sense calls the hardships of life is deciphered by philosophical analysis as self-reification. In obedience to the reality principle, the living being internalizes the external harshness. Thus, it itself becomes the tool of tools and the weapon of weapons.
Those who are lucky enough, in a generally hard world, to live in a niche in which even self-dehardenings are possible must of necessity look with horror out- side at the worlds of reification and objective cruelty. The perception of these de- velops most sensitively in those who stand between social worlds of varying degrees of hardness and who want to work their way out of the more strongly reified and alienated world into the milder zone. These people come ineluctably into conflict with a reality principle that requires greater self-hardenings from them than would be necessary in the mild zone. They get caught in a front against the versions of the reality principle that demand nothing but sacrifice and harden-
322 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
ing from individuals. That is the dialectic of privilege. The privileged person who does not become cynical must wish for a world in which the advantages of soften- ing can be enjoyed by the greatest possible number of people. To bring the reality principle itself into movement is the deepest characteristic of progressivity. Those who know the douceur de vivre become witnesses against the necessity of the hardships in life that always reproduce the hardened ones anew. Thus, real conservatives can be recognized, above all, by the fact that they have a horror of the dehardening of people and their conditions of life. The neo conservatives of today fear that we could become too delicate for a nuclear war. They seek a "dialogue with the young," whom they suspect of being possibly already too flabby for the distribution brawls of tomorrow.
In the descent to the deepest layers of the reality principle, we discover com- pulsions to subjugate oneself, to labor, to exchange, and to arm that have imposed themselves on societies in various historical forms. Even exchange, which bour- geois thinking imagines as one of its models of freedom, is rooted more deeply in coercion than in freedom, and this since ages past. Long before we can properly speak of cynicism, we encounter in archaic, exogamous groups the "use" of women of childbearing age as a living "means of circulation. " The principle of equivalence inserts itself in human cultural history in a way that shocks us: as childbearing means of production, women are traded "like cattle" for goods and cattle. However, this exchange does not so much serve the acquisition of herds and riches by the group that exchanges the women. Mostly, the establishment of kinship relations among the dispersed tribes retains its functional priority. Al- ready in the first "economy," a "politics" of survival and pacification manifests itself. The transformation of women into exchange objects contains an embryonic
political "economy" --if you like, a tribal foreign politics. Well before any value calculation, archaic groups in this way pay the price for the conditions of survival.
Modernity distinguishes itself from a macrohistorical perspective, among other things, by the way in which it becomes increasingly unclear how societies can sensibly scrape together the price of survival. The "hardships" they subject themselves to today in the interest of self-preservation in the meantime possess such a fatal inner dynamic that they work toward self-annihilation rather than to- ward security. How can that be? A degradation of the reality principle in the mod- ern world has to be diagnosed. As yet, no new modus has been worked out for societies under today's conditions to sensibly secure an economy of survival.