No More Learning

It is not for nothing that his impressive collection of autobiographical utterances is entitled Cafard [Snitch/Cockroach/Moral Hangover] in the German edition. 73 As a practising parasite, Cioran followed on from the Greek meaning of the word: parasitoi, 'people who sit at a spread table', was what Athenians called guests who were invited to contribute to the company's entertainment. The Romanian emigre in Paris did not find it difficult to fulfil such expectations. In a letter to his parents he wrote: 'Had I been taciturn by nature, I would have starved to death long ago. '74 Elsewhere he states: 'All our humili- ations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. '75
Cioran's aphorisms read like a practically applicable commen- tary on Heidegger's theory of moods, that is to say the atmospheric impregnations of the individual and collective 'thymos' that 'lend' existence an a priori pre-logical tinge. Neither Heidegger nor Cioran went to the trouble of discussing the lending and the lender of moods as extensively as the significance of the phenomenon would demand - presumably because both tended to break off psychological analysis and move on quickly to the sphere of existential statements. In truth, Cioran accepts his aggressive-depressive disposition as the primal atmospheric fact of his existence. He accepts that he is fated to expe- rience the world primarily in dystonic timbres: weariness, boredom,
76
PARISIAN BUDDHISM
thing is the case. He frankly diagnosis
the ideals of metaphysics should be viewed as the intellectual prod- ucts of physical and psychophysical illness. By taking the approach of speaking 'an honest word about himself' further than any author before him, he openly admits that his concern is to offset the 'failed creation'. Thinking does not mean thanking, as Heidegger suggests; it means taking revenge.
It was only with Cioran that the thing Nietzsche had sought to expose was fulfilled as if the phenomenon had existed from time immemorial: a philosophy of pure ressentiment. But what if such a philosophy had only become possible through Nietzsche's influence? Here the German-born existentialism of defiance changes - bypassing the French existentialism of resistance, which Cioran despised as a shallow trend - into an existentialism of incurability with crypto- Romanian and Dacian-Bogomilian shades. This shift only came to a halt at the threshold of Asian inexistentialism. Though Cioran, marked by European vanitas, played throughout his life with a feeling of all-encompassing unreality, he could never quite bring himself to follow Buddhism in its abandonment of the postulation of reality, and with it that of God. The latter, as is well known, serves to guarantee the reality we know through a 'last reality' that is hidden from US. ? 6 Though he felt drawn to Buddhism, Cioran did not want to subscribe to its ontology. He not only loathed the reality of the world, but also intended to take advantage of it; he therefore had to accept the reality of reality, even if it was only sophistically. He neither wanted to save himself nor to let anyone else save him. His entire thought is a com- plaint about the imposition of requiring salvation.
One could pass over all this as a bizarre breeding phenomenon in the biotopes of Parisianism after 1945, were it not for the fact that it brings to light a generally significant tendency that forces a radical change of conditions on the planet of the practising. Cioran, as noted above, is a key witness to the ascetologically far-reaching shift that we are thematizing as the emergence of anthropotechnics. This shift draws our attention to the informalization of spirituality that I said we should grasp as a complementary counter-tendency to the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. Cioran is a new type of practising person whose originality and representative nature are evident in the fact that he practises rejecting every goal-directed way of practising. Methodical exercises, as is well known, are only possible if there is a fixed practice goal in sight. It is precisely the authority of this goal that Cioran contests. Accepting a practice goal would mean believing
77
THE PLANET THE PRACTISING to act
This running forwards to the goal is the fourth module of the 'reli- gious' behavioural complex. 77 The anticipation generally takes place as follows: one looks at someone perfect, from whom one receives, incredulous and credulous at once, the message that one could be the same one day. We will see in later chapters how the use of this inner operation set armies of practising humans in motion over millennia. 78 Without the module of running forwards to the goal there can be no vita contemplativa, no monastic life, no swarm of departures to other shores, no wanting to be the way someone greater once was. One can therefore not emphasize enough that the most effective forms of anthropotechnics in the world come from yesterday's world - and the genetic engineering praised or rejected loudly today, even if it becomes feasible and acceptable for humans on a larger scale, will long remain a mere anecdote compared to the magnitude of these phenomena.
The believer's running-ahead into perfection is not Cioran's concern. He certainly has a passionate 'interest' in the religious texts that speak of perfection and salvation, but he will not carry out the believing operation as such, the anticipation of one's own being-ready-later. His non-belief thus has two sides: that of not being able, because his own prevailing mood corrodes the naivete required for the supposition of perfection,79 and that of not being willing, because he has adopted the stance of the sceptic and does not want to abandon this definitive provisional state in favour of a position. His only option, then, is to experiment with the leftovers. He is forced to play on an instrument for which any purposeful training would be futile - the detuned instrument of his own existence. Yet it is precisely his performance on the unplayable instrument that shows the unsup- pressible universality of the practising dimension: for, by practising in the absence of a suitable instrument, the 'anti-prophet' develops an informal version of mastery.
He becomes the first master of not-getting-anywhere. Like Kafka's hunger artist, he turns his aversion into a virtuoso performance and develops the corresponding form of skill for his carard. Even in this form one hears the appeal that returns in all artistedam: 'I always wanted you to admire it . . . ' While Kafka's fasting master waits until the end before uttering the contrary injunction 'you shouldn't admire it', Cioran provides the material for demystifying his art from the outset by revealing it on almost every page as the act of letting
78
P ARISIAN BUDDHISM
~ h~
mood speaking when Cioran '1 am of not suffer- ing. '80 'My books express an attitude to life, not a vision. '81 He felt a contemptuous suspicion towards the possibility of therapeutically modifying attitudes towards life; he lived off the products of his disposition, after all, and could hardly have afforded an attempt to change it.
In contributing to the discovery that even letting oneself go can be art, and that, if it is accompanied by the will to skill, it also requires training, Ciaran helped the Order of Holy Foolhardiness to find a set of rules. It is preserved in his Precis de decomposition, this book of peculiar exercises that, as I intend to show, formulates the true charter of modern 'culture' as an aggregate of undeclared asceticisms - a book that exceeds any binding. The extent of Cioran's own awareness of his role in translating spiritual habitus into profane dis- content and its literary cultivation is demonstrated in A Short History ofDecay (whose title could equally have been rendered as 'A Guide to Decay'), the work that established his reputation. Originally this col- lection was to be entitled Exercices negatifs - which could refer both to exercises in negation and anti-exercises. What Cioran presented was no less than a set of rules intended to lead its adepts onto the path of uselessness. If this path had a goal, it would be: 'To be more unserviceable than a saint . . . '. 82
The tendency of the new set of rules is anti-stoic. While the stoic manner does everything in its power to get into shape for the universe - Roman Stoicism, after all, was primarily a philosophy for civil servants, attractive for those who wanted to believe that it was hon- ourable to hold out in the place assigned by providence as a 'soldier of the cosmos' - the Cioranian ascetic must reject the cosmic thesis as such. He refuses to accept his own existence as a component of a well-ordered whole; it should rather serve to prove that the uni- verse is a failure. Cioran only accepts the Christian reinterpretation of the cosmos as creation to the extent that God comes into playas the impeachable cause of a complete fiasco. For a moment, Cioran comes close to Kant's moral proof of God's existence, albeit with the opposite result: the existence of God must necessarily be postulated because God has to apologize for the world.
The procedure Cioran develops for his anti-exercises is based on the elevation of leisure to a practice form for existential revolt. What he calls 'leisure' is actually a conscious drift through the emotional states of the manic-depressive spectrum unencumbered by any form of structured work - a method that anticipates the later glorification
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
life in a state amounts to a practising reinforcement of sense of discontinuity that belonged to Cioran's disposition because of his moodiness. The reinforcing effect is further heightened dogmatically by the bellicose thesis that continuity is a 'delusional idea'83 - it would have sufficed to call it a construct. Hence existence means feeling ill at ease at constantly new
now-points.
The literary form that corresponds to the punctualism of Cioran's
self-observation, which alternates between moments of contraction and diffusion, is the aphorism, and its publicistic genre the aphorism collection. The author establishes a relatively simple and stable grid of six or eight themes early on, using it to comb his states in the drift and move from an experiential point to a corresponding thematic node. With time, the themes - like partial personalities or edito- rial offices working alongside one another - develop a life of their own that enables them to continue growing self-sufficiently without having to wait for an experiential occasion. The 'author' Cioran is merely the chief editor who adds the finishing touches to the products of his typing rooms. He produces books by compiling the texts pro- vided by his inner employees. They present their material in irregular sessions - aphorisms from the blasphemy department, observations from the misanthropy studio, gibes from the disillusionment section, proclamations from the press office of the circus of the lonely, theses from the agency for swindling on the edge, and poisons from the edi- torial office for the despisal of contemporary literature. Formulating the thought of suicide is the only job that remains in the chief edi- tor's hands; this involves the practice on which all further sequences of repetition depend. This thought alone permits, from one crisis to the next, the restoration of the feeling that one is still sovereign even in misery - a feeling that provides discontented life with a minimum of stability. In addition, those responsible for the different themes know what the neighbouring offices are producing, meaning that they increasingly quote and align themselves with one another. The 'author' Cioran simply invents the book titles that hint at the genre - syllogisms, curses, epitaphs, confessions, lives of the saints or guide- lines for failure. He also provides the section headings, which follow a similar logic. In everyday life he is much less of a writer than a reader, and if there was one activity in his life that, from a distance, resem- bled a regular employment or a formal exercise, it was the reading and rereading of books that served as sources of comfort and argu- ments to be rebutted. He read the life of St Teresa of Avila five times
80
P ARISIAN
BUDDHISM
m
process the and,
words, form a bundle of interactions to the nth degree.
The 'negative exercises' of the Romanian 'trumpery Buddha' - as he terms himself in All Gall Is Divided - are landmarks in the recent history of spiritual behaviour. All they require now is explication as valid discoveries, beyond the chummy comments about the prevail- ing mood that have dominated the reception of his work thus far. The scepticism attributed to the author in accordance with some of his own language games is anything but 'radical' - it is virtuosic and elegant. Cioran's approach may seem monotonous, but it almost never leads to the dullness that characterizes radicalisms. What he says and does serves to raise his suffering to the level of skill that corresponds to his abilities. Cioran's work appears far less self-contradictory as soon as one notes the emergence of the practice phenomenon - so once again we have 'one of the broadest and longest facts that exist' in an unusual declination. Even if his prevailing mood was that of a 'passive-aggressive bastard' - as group therapists occasionally put it in the 1970s - his ethos was that of a man of exercises, an artiste who even made a stunt out of sluggishness, who turned despair into an Apollonian discipline and letting oneself go into an etude almost classical in manner.
The effective history of Cioran's books shows that he was immedi- ately recognized as a paradoxical master of exercises. Naturally they only spoke to a small number of readers, but resonated very strongly with them. The small band of intensive recipients even discovered in the writings of this infamous author something whose existence he would probably have denied - a brotherly vibration, a hidden tendency to give the 'Trappist Order without faith', of which he play- fully and irresponsibly considered himself a member, a slightly denser consistency. There was a secret readiness in him to give advice to the despairing who were even more helpless than himself - and a far less concealed inclination to become famous for his exercises in escape from the world. While he may have resisted the tentation d'exister more or less resolutely - even in brothels, even in chic society - he was willing, with all due discretion, to succumb to the temptation of becoming a role model. It is thus not unreasonable to see in Cioran not merely the apprentice of an informalized asceticism, but also an informal trainer who affects others from a distance with his modus vivendi. While the ordinary trainer - as defined above - is the one 'who wants me to want',84 the spiritual trainer acts as the one who does not want me not to want. When I want to give up, it is he who
81
are into memories of own
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
it.
provided an form of suicide for numerous
readers - something that is also said of personal conversations with him. Those seeking advice may have sensed how he had discovered the healthiest way of being incurable.
I read Cioran's output of 'negative exercises' as a further indica- tion that the production of 'high culture', whatever that may mean in specific terms, has an indispensable ascetic factor. Nietzsche made it visible by reminding his readers of the immense system of rigid conditioning on which the superstructure of morality, art and all 'dis- ciplines' is based. This asceticism-based thought only becomes clearly visible when the most conspicuous standard exercises in culture, known as 'traditions', find themselves in the difficult situation of Kafka's hunger artist - as soon as one can say that interest in them 'has markedly diminished during these last decades', the conditions of possibility of their survival will themselves become conspicuous. When interest in a form of life dwindles, the ground on which the visible parts of the constructions erected themselves is revealed here and there.
82
TRANSITION RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST:
From Pierre de Coubertin to L Ron Hubbard
It is time to draw our conclusions from the indications we have discussed about an anthropotechnic re-description of the religious, ethical and ascetic-artistic phenomena. I will therefore return to the two main practice- and mentality-historical tendencies of the last century: the rise of the neo-athletic syndrome around 1900 and the explosion of informal mysticism, regardless of whether it manifests itself privatissime or in the network operations of psychotechnic sects. It is with reference to both of these that the hypothesis of the spectral 'return of religion' can be rendered more precise. I will begin by using the example of the neo-Olympic movement founded by Pierre de Coubertin to show how an undertaking initiated as a cult religion outgrew its religious design to become the most comprehen- sive organizational form for human behaviour of effort and practice that could always be observed outside the worlds of work and war - compared to the dimensions of the neo-Olympic sport cult, even the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages and the excesses of Spanish monastic culture in the seventeenth century (when a substantial part of the populace flooded the prison cells to rid themselves of their selves by all available means) are of a merely episodic character. Then, using the example of the Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction author Lafayette Ron Hubbard, I will investigate what we can learn when a company for distributing well-known methods of auto- suggestion manages to expand into a worldwide psychagogic firm that claims to be a religion.
I will present the conclusions in advance: the fate of Olympism and the business of the Scientological 'churches' show that 'religion', as understood by those who exploit the notion, does not exist - and never has. Both de Coubertin and Hubbard fell for a modern mirage
83
PLANET THE PRACTISING
into
rion in Both wanted to or to
something that cannot be, and which therefore, once 'founded', inevi- tably transpires as something other than what its founder thought it should be or should seek to become. Both founders made the same mistake in opposite ways: actual Olympism refused to become the religion planned by de Coubertin, while the Scientology movement resists being viewed merely as the psychotechnic firm that it in fact is. In the first step of analysing these two refusals, I will clarify the meaning of my claim that religion does not exist. What we are actu- ally dealing with - on a scale whose measurement has scarcely begun - are variously misinterpreted anthropotechnic practice systems and sets of rules for moulding one's inward and outward behaviour. Under the shelter of such forms, the practising work on improving their global immune status85 - which, both on European soil and in Asia, highlights the paradox of how destroying physical immunity has not infrequently been praised as the royal road to boosting meta- physical immunity (immortality): recall St Francis of Assisi's exercises of deliberate attrition for 'brother donkey' - as he was wont to call his body - and certain parasuicidal practices that brought notoriety to Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism and Lamaism.
Cioran's All Gall Is Divided contains the following remarks under the heading 'religion':
Without the vigilance of irony, how easy it would be to found a religion! Merely allow the gawkers to collect around our loquacious trances. 86
This note is instructive, for despite its modern sarcasm, it testifies to a premodern understanding of the phenomenon known as 'religion'. With his micro-theory of the genesis of religion from the commotion around ecstasy, Cioran, the son of an Orthodox priest, continues the line of Old European theories of supply. s7 The two components or 'raw materials' whose combination produces religion are thus an ecstatic performance by an individual and a corresponding curiosity among the masses. The first naturally takes priority, as it contains the more precious element. If one further interprets Cioran's observation, religion only comes about when the rare - the ecstatic offering - approaches the common - profane curiosity - and allows it to gather around it. It is plain that Cioran here reproduces, albeit on a cruder level, the conviction of the classical monotheisms that it is ultimately God, and God alone, who provokes and permits the assemblages whose congealed form we call churches. He organizes the assemblage by, as they say, revealing Himself to humans.
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
In typological terms, the supply-theoretical interpretation of the religious phenomenon corresponds to the Catholic position, in so far as the latter is based on a strictly hierarchical line of offer-conveyance running from God to humans, from the priests to the laypersons. The primacy of the giver and the priority of the gift remain unassailable in this universe. The believers here appear exclusively on the taking side, like the hungry at a soup kitchen. 88 In clericocratic times, the 'word of God' was not simply a sublime gift; it was simultaneously the model of an offer one cannot refuse. That is why the most Catholic of the Catholics still insist on the Latin mass today: it presents the diamond core of the religion of supply. It asks not what humans can under- stand, but rather what God wants to show. For the religion'S fol- lowers, the Most High is most present when the priest carries out his Latin mystery play with his back to the congregation - church Latin is the petrified form of the 'loquacious trances'. Cioran indicates quite openly that he often found himself in states that would have induced more naive natures to take church-founding steps.
Demand-theoretical interpretations of the religious phenomenon take us onto the soil of modernity. Here, to take up our image again, the crowd now takes precedence, and one asks oneself how best to meet the needs of the masses. Now there can no longer be any talk of permitting, from above, the common to be present at the appear- ances of the rare. Rather, it is a matter of giving the many what they want - or what they will want once they have been shown what they are entitled to expect. Those who wish to can see a democratic shift in this. Its consequence is the task of interpreting the assemblage as a demand and responding to it by offering an appropriate supply. To take up this position one must read faith as the updated version of a disposition that is inherent in human existence. Aside from that, it is plain enough why the priority of the demand means that the supply- ing side must be flexible and refrain from adopting any threatening tone.
This brings us into the field of Protestant practices, where, summa summarum, the meeting of demands - for a just God, an address for metaphysical needs, or a helper for a successful life - is the central concern. 89 This applies less in empirical than in typological terms, however; early Protestantism, especially in its Puritan variety, loved the apocalyptic communications characteristic of heartily fist-waving religions of supply. In truth, the Reformation had got under way as a restoration of the offer-theological motif against Catholic inefficiency. It only showed its demand-theoretical quality when the congregations changed into a religiously interested audience. Furthermore, modern
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Protestant theology - the work of Karl Barth, for example - is responsible for the most radical formulation of the supply principle, combined with the harshest rejection of the humanely and undogmat- ically dissolving religiosity of demand that had defined the situation since the eighteenth century. Barth had recognized Schleiermacher, the wooer of the educated among those who despised religion, as the master theologian of the religion of demand - or worse still, the religion of talent - and devoted himself to opposing him as firmly as possible. 90
It was the same Karl Barth who arrived at the thesis - unheard-of in its time - that Christianity is not a religion, because 'religion is unbelief'. He had the right idea, but made the wrong point and pre- sented the most unsuitable of all possible justifications: that the 'word of God' strikes through the fabric of cultural machinations vertically from above, while mere religion is never more than a part of the system of humanities and all-too-humanities set up from below. The argument may seem impressive as a catastrophe-theological intensifi- cation of the situation after 1918, but as a description of the overall situation it would be misleading - for modernity is simply not known for being a time in which God shows Himself vertically to humans. This century the earth was struck by meteorites, plummeting down from the outermost and highest places; but there were no gods among them. Had Barth's claim been true, he would have been right in his resolute enmity towards all natural theologies. He would have had good reason to discard any derivation of religion from the structures of consciousness - and likewise any dissolution of Christianity into enlightened ethics. The reason why his thesis was wrong becomes evident upon closer inspection of the 'vertically from above' motif. We know from the phenomena described above that the entire complex of verticality in modernity is revised into a new version that permits a deeper understanding of the emergence of embodied improbability - Barth, however, did not participate sufficiently in its developments. He fell prey to the error that theologians are ex officio constrained to make: simply co-opting the dimension of vertical ten- sions for the 'call from above' in its Christian decoding.
Nonetheless, Barth must be considered the most important recent 'observer' of verticality after Nietzsche. He succeeded in producing a new presentation of Christian doctrine that presupposes the absolute precedence of God's self-representation. This means that the situation of humans can only be understood in the steepest vertical terms: the true God is the one who uncompromisingly overtaxes humans, while the devil meets them at their own level. Even Barth, however, did
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO EXIST
not existence
the non-religion Christianity. He the fact former were no more 'religions' than his favoured Christian brand. Whether Christian or non-Christian, all of them are both materially and for- mally nothing other than complexes of inner and outer actions, sym- bolic practice systems and protocols for regulating traffic with higher stressors and 'transcendental' powers - in short, forms of anthropo- technics in the implicit mode. They are constructs which, for purely pragmatic reasons - initially out of Roman-Christian opportuneness, then later due to Protestant confessional polemics and enlightened systematics - were given the name reiigio, a term dragged along from the millennium of Latinity, referring back both compulsively and arbitrarily to the language games and cultic pursuits of Roman state bigotry. 91 What reiigio (literally 'reverence') meant for the Romans, before St Augustine took the word out of their mouths and spoke of vera reiigio, can best be learned from a detail: that some of the most important Roman legions were allowed to bear the honorific pia fidelis, on the model of the Legio tertia Augusta, stationed in North Africa, which existed from the middle of the first century Be to the fourth century AD, as well as the Legio prima adiutrix, based first in Mainz and later in Pannonia, which existed from Nero's day until the middle of the fifth century. Owing to Christian alterations of meaning, Caesar's piously faithful followers became the legionaries of Christ, known in French as fideles to this day.
Recalling Pierre de Coubertin's neo-Olympism and Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology raises several questions: what is religion anyway, if the people next door can simply found one? What does religion mean if a Hellenophile educator with a taste for men's bodies in battle and a beaming smart aleck, known until then mainly as the author of cunning space crime novels, believed in all seriousness and unseriousness that they had called one into existence before our eyes? Would that not mean that the safest method of exposing all 'religions' is to found one's own? What do we learn about 'religion' in general by studying the blueprints of newly founded cuIts and observing their modus operandi in their long-term activities? Naturally these questions do not only arise with the two examples highlighted here. They could equally validly be directed at everyone of the many recent religious experiments that have drawn attention to themselves since the French Revolution - from the cult of the Supreme Being founded in 179392 via Saint-Simonism, Auguste Comte's sociological religion, Mormonism, theosophy and anthroposophy to the makeshift neo- Hindu cults and manifold networks of psychotechnic sects spanning
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THE PLANET O f THE PRACTISING
in vivo and in vitro if there been corresponding interest in doing so with the
suitable optics and methods.
As far as de Coubertin's neo-Olympism is concerned, its history has been recounted sufficiently often - most recently on the occasion of the centenary celebrations for the modern Olympic Games in 1996 - for there to be no need for me to reproduce more than some rudi- mentary aspects here. Three sources and elements of de Coubertin's sport-religious system have also been amply acknowledged: they can be found in John Ruskin's gymno-philosophical ideas on eurhyth- mics,93 in Dr Brooke's neo-Hellenistic Olympic Games in Shropshire (held from the mid-nineteenth century on) and in Wagner's Bayreuth Festival, where the archetype of a modern elitist-communitary edifi- cation cult was taken up in its full articulation - six thousand foot away from everyday industrial life and class divisions. Some have also referred to the inspiring effect of the Parisian Exposition universelle of 1889 in order to explain the transfer of the totalizing impulse. Viewed in this light, Olympism appears as a timely globalization of sport in action. 94
The famous Sorbonne congress of 1894 for the 'Reinstatement of the Olympic Games' had already gathered these ingredients together - augmented by de Coubertin's own socio-therapeutic and pedagogi- cal motifs - to form an effective mixture. De Coubertin recounts in his memoirs that at the opening session at the Sorbonne on 16 June, Gabriel Faure's Hymn to Apollo op. 63 for voice, harp, flute and two clarinets, specially composed for the occasion and based on an inscription found shortly beforehand at the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, was premiered before two thousand 'enchanted listeners':
A subtle feeling of emotion spread through the auditorium as if the antique eurhythmy were coming to us from the distant past. In this way, Hellenism infiltrated into the whole vast hal1. 95
At the same time, the Paris congress laid down the fundamental aspects of the games and the organization carrying them: the four- year rhythm, which would create a temporal structure for all future times like a new religious calendar; the enlightened dictatorship of the IOC presidency, later consolidated by the election of de Coubertin as president for life; modernism in the definition of sport; equality of dif- ferent sports; exclusion of children; the principle of circulating games; amateurism (which remained controversial, however, and was sus-
88
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
pended in 1976); internationalism and the principle of pax olympica. Furthermore, Athens was chosen as the location of the first games and Paris as that of the second in order to draw sufficient attention to their place of birth and their place of rebirth. Little did those in charge know that the Paris Olympics of 1900 would be the low point in the history of Olympism: they were barely noticed alongside the simultaneous Exposition universelle. The lesson from this was that two world festivals at the same time are not feasible.
The first Olympic Games of the Modern Age were held in Athens a mere two years later, with great ceremony, under the patronage of the king of Greece - as a purely andrological festival, for the enthusiastic baron had a famously low opinion of women's sports; he wanted the female role in the games to be restricted to handing the winner the olive branch or placing the wreath on his head. De Coubertin's failure to establish his taceat mulier in arena was only the first of many in the practical realization of his 'muscle religion'. One of the most far-reaching consequences of the first games was that thanks to the donation of a major patron, the Panathenaic Stadium of Athens, from the time when Greece was a Roman province, could be restored and used again. This initiated the stadium and arena renaissance of the twentieth century, which is still producing ever new event architectures based on ancient primary forms to this day. 96 Even the monks of Mount Athos supposedly contributed money to the Olympic subscription, as if following the revelation that in distant Athens, the modern replicas of their own blurred archetypes were entering the stage again - had the first monks of Eastern Christianity not called themselves the 'athletes of Christ', and joined forces in training camps called asketerfa?
The notable and unforeseen climax of the Athenian games was the first marathon. The idea for this came from the French classical scholar and Hellenophile Michel Breart, who, at the closing banquet of the Sorbonne conference, had praised the establishment of a mara- thon trophy for the first winner in the new discipline. When the victor of the race, a twenty-three-year-old Greek shepherd by the name of Spiridion Louys, entered the shining white marble stadium on 10 Apri11896 wearing the fustanella, the traditional dress (the winning time was given as 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds), a state came about that it would scarcely be adequate to call 'exceptional'. It was as if a new form of energy had been discovered, a form of emotional electricity without which the way of life in the subsequent era would no longer be imaginable. What happened that scorching afternoon in the Panathenaic Stadium at around five o'clock must be classed as
89
new
the moment,
A previously itself to the
THE
OF THE PRACTISING
require no proof because they only exist for the duration of their manifestation and are not believed in, but experienced. In that hour a new chapter in the history of enthusiasm was opened - and whoever is unwilling to speak of this history must remain silent about the twentieth century. 97 The Greek crown princes ran the last metres of the race alongside the athlete amid the ecstatic cheering of almost 70,000 people; after he had crossed the finishing line, they carried him aloft before the king, who had stood up from his stadium throne. Had one wanted to prove that a new age of inverted hierarchies had begun, this would have provided the most spectacular evidence. For a moment, an athletic shepherd became king over the king - for the first time, one could witness the majesty, indeed the power of the monarch being transferred to the runner; in later decades, there was even a growing feeling that shepherds and their ilk were striving to rule the country alone. A sustained wave of rapture swept over the whole country; an enthusiastic barber promised to shave the victor for free for the rest of his life. An olive branch and a silver medal were the official marks of honour, and these were followed by a flood of gifts.
It is still unclear how Spiridion Louys acquired the necessary stamina; the shepherd boy had supposedly worked for an officer as a messenger or water-carrier and become accustomed to long distances as a result. In a test run two weeks before the games, he had come fifth. He would hardly ever have encountered the word 'training' until then - I take that as supporting my hypothesis that most varieties of practice behaviour take the form of undeclared asceticisms. 98 For the brothers on Mount Athos, it may have seemed like a confirmation of their intuitions when, not long afterwards, the rumour began to cir- culate that the runner had spent the night prior to the race in prayer before icons - even de Coubertin took this information seriously enough to begin reflecting on the mental and spiritual components of the greatest sporting achievements. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Hermann Unthan and Hans Wurtz, the founder of the games was also convinced that the will ultimately leads to success and victory. De Coubertin therefore made no secret of his aversion to the positiv- ism of sports physicians, who were too 'philistine' in their thinking to grasp the higher dimensions of sport in general and the new move- ment in particular.
99
Pierre de Coubertin believed that what he was invoking under the name of Olympism would amount to no less than a fully valid new
90
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
"Hi~HJ,U. He this view religious of ancient games. During
year existence they had always been held coram deis; in fact, they not only took place before the gods, but also with their approval, perhaps even their participation - in so far as one can interpret the victories of athletes in the stadium and the palaestra as events that never took place without the consent of the divine, and why not their interven- tion too? De Coubertin's yet-to-be-created 'religion of the athlete' did not follow on directly from Greek mythology, however - the founder of the games was too educated not to know that the gods of Hellenism are dead. Its point of departure was the modern art religion of the Wagnerian variety, which had been conceived as a sacred act to reconcile the torn 'society' of the day. As every complete religion has an ordained clergy alongside its dogma and rituals, its embodiment became the function of the athletes. It was they who would adminis- ter the muscular sacraments to the ecstatic masses. This is my body, my struggle, my victory. Thus de Coubertin's Olympic dream unified Romantic Graecophilia, as well as the pedagogical pathos of the nineteenth century, with the aesthetic heathendom of the body cult to form an amalgam that would meet modern standards.
What de Coubertin expected from an effective new 'religion' can be seen in a memoir note on a visit to the Bayreuth Festival. Here he draws parallels between the two seemingly disparate spheres:
Music and sport have always been the most perfect 'isolators', the most fruitful aids to reflection and vision, as well as powerful stimuli, like 'massage of the will', encouraging me to persevere. In fact, after a period of difficulties and perils, all immediate worries were suddenly removed. loo
With the notable word 'isolator', de Coubertin points to the ability of 'religion' to divide reality into ordinary and extraordinary situa- tions. Wherever one finds sport and music, therefore, one also finds religion, in so far as their key characteristic - the effect of transcend- ing everyday life and eliminating worries - is present. If one develops the term 'isolator' further, one arrives at the following statement: that which brings about an exceptional state is religious. For de Coubertin, religion is the attainment of the 'other condition' by sport- ing means - here begins one of the paths leading to event culture. As is customary for threshold states, these means must simultaneously be released and kept under control; the fully developed athletes' religion would have to carry out both tasks. The athletic exercises prepare the exceptional state in the competitions, and the stadium cult steers
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m In Bayreuth, de Coubertin realized once for all why nothing
of a newly founded religion could do justice to his intentions. Like Richard Wagner, he wanted to propel people out of their ordinary lives for a few incommensurable moments before releasing them back into the world transformed, elevated and purified. De Coubertin found an affirmation of his basic position in the esoteric climate of the Wagner festivaL Just as the boldest form of art-religious offer was at home in Bayreuth, the analogous manifestation of sport religion would find its base in Olympism. Comparable to a nineteenth-century Malraux, de Coubertin declared that the twentieth century would be Olympic or would not be at all.
Against this background, one can understand in what sense the success story of the Olympic idea was simultaneously the failure story of de Coubertin's original aims. However one chooses to interpret Olympism, it is clear that it resulted in anything but the triad of sport, religion and art that de Coubertin wanted to transpose from antiquity to the Modern Age. His failure as the founder of a religion can be summed up quite simply: he had called into being a system of exer- cises and disciplines that was perfect for refuting the existence of 'reli- gion' as a separate category of human action and experience. What in fact came about and became ever more solid in its consistency was an organization for the stimulation, guidance, care and management of primarily thymotic (pride- and ambition-based) and secondarily erotic (greed- and libido-based) energies. The former were by no means restricted to the athletes, but were equally present among the newly created functionaries without whom the new cult could not be put into action. For them, the indispensable parasites of sport, this was the start of a golden age, because the Olympic movement spontaneously followed the most important of all organizational secrets: to create as many functions and honorary offices as possible, in order to guarantee the thymotic mobilization of the members and their pragmatic binding to the sublime cause. De Coubertin, who liked to move in old aristocratic circles, had nonetheless realized that modernity is the era of the nouveau riche and the nouveau impor- tant. For the latter in particular, his movement was an ideal field of activity. As well as the ambition-political incentives, greed-related rewards were not neglected; Olympism produced many new fortunes, some resulting from the direct flow of donations from applying cities into the bank accounts of IOC members. The pragmatic foundation for both forms of incentive was provided by the clubs, the natural matrices of sporting exercises and the alliances between trainers and
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the practising; they experienced their most impressive presentation in the competitive games themselves. The time was clearly right for this order of disciplines. If the age belongs to the competitive economy, then competitive sport is the zeitgeist itself.
The overall outcome of de Coubertin's efforts, then, could not have been more ironic: he failed as a religious founder because he exceeded every foreseeable level of success as the initiator of a prac- tice and competition movement. The initiator of the games missed what became the alpha and omega for the next generation function- aries in their further undertakings: the glaringly obvious fact that the Olympic idea would only survive as a secular cult without a serious ideological superstructure. The small elements of fairness-pathos, youth ceremony and internationalism that had to be kept as a matter of form could also be summoned up without a great lifting of souls. Often enough, a mere wink was all that remained of de Coubertin's noble pacifism among his pragmatic heirs. The games had to integrate themselves amid the excesses of mass culture, changing into a profane event machine more resolutely at every repetition. On no account should they present themselves too loftily - least of all with the 'Catholic' or offer-theological trait that characterized de Coubertin's approach. Where higher things could not entirely be avoided, as in the obligatory opening celebration, they would go no further than the ceremonious entrance of the athletes, the hymn, the flame and the appeal to the youth of the world. The post-war games in Antwerp in 1920 featured, for the first time, a separate High Mass in the cathe- dral, with a chilling moment when the names of Olympic icons killed in the war were read out. The Olympic idea never had a chance as a 'heathen' form of a religion of offer from above. Disenchanted into an athletes' summit, it became an irresistible magnet for the masses.
The pragmatic turn did not even demand of its protagonists a betrayal of de Coubertin's vision; it was entirely sufficient not to com- prehend the old man's lofty intentions. Soon no one knew any more what his dream of a religious synthesis of Hellenism and modernity had once meant. It is no exaggeration to say that the Olympic idea tri- umphed because its followers at all levels, from the board members of the IOC to the local dubs, had soon lost any inkling of it - even when tears were flowing at the presentation ceremony. The valiant Willi Daume, who, as long-standing chairman of the German National Olympic Committee, had access to the sources, could only shake his head about the ideational motives of the Olympic cause. Referring to the 'religion of the athlete', he notes in flawless functionaries' prose: 'Here things become slightly confused. 'lOl
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movement
how a can spontaneously regress to the format of its true substance - the anthropotechnic basis, as embodied by a graduated system of exercises and diversified disci- plines, integrated into a superstructure of hierarchized adminstra- tive acts, routinized club relationships and professionalized media representations. None of the structural characteristics of an elabo- rated 'religion' remain except for the hierarchy of functionaries and a system of exercises that, in keeping with their secular nature, are referred to as 'training units'. The only function of the IOC Vatican in
Lausanne is to administer the fact that God is olympically dead too. In this respect, one can say that the 'religion of the athlete' is the only phenomenon in the history of faith that disenchanted itself by its own means - only a few intellectual strains of Protestantism in Europe and the USA have achieved anything comparable. As the non-religion longed for by countless people, the athletic renaissance was able to spread over large parts of the world. Its development shows the change from a zeal into an industry. Small wonder that the young science of sport showed no interest in becoming the theol- ogy of this cult movement, which had barely been founded before its spirit was driven out. But the response among anthropologists was also reserved; to this day, they are interested neither in the artificial tribes of professional athletes nor in the fact that the emergence of the sport functionaries marked the appearance of a new sub-species no
less deserving of attention than Aurignacian man.
There is no stronger example in the twentieth century of the tendency towards a phenomenon I have mentioned several times, namely the de-spiritualization of asceticisms, than the Olympic movement. As far as the opposing tendency is concerned, the worldly appropriation of the spiritual, the Church of Scientology founded by the novelist and DIY psychologist L. Ron Hubbard is just one example among many - but an outstandingly informative one. In the following, I would like to honour the inventor of Dianetics as one of the greatest enlighten- ers of the twentieth century, as he decisively increased our knowledge about the nature of religion, even if largely involuntarily. He earned himself a place in the pantheon of science and technology, as he suc- cessfully performed a psychotechnic experiment whose results were significant for culture as a whole. After Hubbard, it is clear once and for all that the most effective way of showing that religion does not exist is to establish one's own.
Whoever wishes to found a religion can essentially operate on one 94
Its twen1tlet:h century
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO EXIST
of two is many already true one is not among them; now new insights have finally
it possible and necessary to call it into existence. Christianity fol- lowed this schema to set itself apart from Judaism, just as Augustine later did the same in relation to Manichaeism and the Roman cult, and, even later, Mohammed drew the line between Islam and its two monotheistic predecessors. An analogous approach was taken by the Enlightenment thinkers, who wanted to found the 'religion of reason' from the seventeenth century onwards by breaking away from the historical reiigions. 102 Such initiatives seek to draw authority from the progressive disclosure of the truth, which dictates the content for which the suitable form then has to be found. The new content lies in a message that, so the founders believe, holds more salvific power than previously known cults; one can therefore call this type of religion-founding content-religious. Its protagonists are usually naive, in a value-free sense of the word. They think they believe that they believe what they believe. If they are not naive they would like to be, and regret their weakness of faith. The wiser among the weak of faith elevate doubt itself to an organ of faith for an ascetologically plau- sible reason: chronic doubt is the most effective exercise for keeping alive that which is doubted.
The second assumption under which a new religion can be started is that the previous religions are inadequate because they cling too much to their content, whereas in future the concern will rather be to foreground the form or 'mood' of religion. This turn towards the formal side involves a dramatic bifurcation: the first option is for the new religion to be born as a free-floating meta-religion that no longer knows any dogmatic precepts, yet wants to preserve the dimension of the religious 'in itself' bona fide in a content-neutral form - this is roughly what is done by most modern confessionless people, who believe that there might be something after all in the thing they do not believe in. The advantage of this position is that it defuses the tensions between salvific knowledge and secular knowledge, between theology and ethics. Romantic Protestantism had already approached the self- dissolution of positive religion in polyvalent emotional culture, as is evident when Schleiermacher states in his second speech On Religion: 'It is not the person who believes in a Holy Scripture who has reli- gion, but rather he who requires none and could probably make one himself. ' Or the new religion could exclusively take the formal side of religion to convey foreign content. This was the case with Pierre de Coubertin, among others, who wanted to tie the content of sport to the form of religion - with the results discussed above.
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Ifone astep it he>,-,,"c>",C' apparent religion can be employed as a mere vehicle to
alien content mala fide. The 'political theologies', whereby religion is used as a psychosocial support system for state success and which are once more enjoying considerable attention, are the inescapable example of this. To clarify this attitude through examples, one need only think of popes who enlarged the church state while leading their troops, or French cardinals who formed alliances with the Muslim Turks to harm the Christian rulers of Austria. In both distant and recent times, entire peoples and nations have also appeared in the guise of religious communities. The empirical political reality of the twentieth century illustrates to the point of overkill how revolution- ary movements can garnish themselves with messianic trappings, as if the activists had wanted to give the lie to Friedrich Engels's careless claim from 1844 that 'all the possibilities of religion are exhausted'. 103 As soon as the form-religious view becomes radicalized, the abstrac- tion progresses to the point where any content can potentially take on a religioid design if the content provider so desires. Religion then appears as a rhetorical-ritual mode and an immersion procedure that can serve any project - be it political, artistic, industrial, sporting or therapeutic - as a medium of self-distribution. It can very easily be transferred back to old content-based religions. 104
In the following, I will show how Lafayette Ron Hubbard's entre- preneurial and literary-rabulistic genius drew profit from the form- religious principle in its most abstract manifestation during the promotional campaign for a product called 'Dianetics' in 1950, only to convert it soon afterwards into the Scientological 'church' through a religioid upgrading. The starting point for Hubbard's campaign lies in the cultural crisis of the late 1940s, which also marked a period of personal setbacks for the author. At the time, he could presume a market for life counselling and self-help literature with considerable growth potential and a tangle of psychoanalytical, life-philosophical, pastoral, business consulting, psychagogic, religioid, dietary and fitness-psychological motifs. Hubbard's ingenious approach consisted in bringing all these forms of demand together into a single point. He placed himself in the tradition of modern charlatans, taking this word too in a value-free sense, who seek to combat all illnesses with a single medicine - or all problems with one solution. One can observe this habitus in countless concrete forms between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries - from the zero-point thought of modern philoso- phy to the political idea of total revolution. According to the great
96
TRANSITION: RELIGlONS EXIST art arts to
the panacea, universal agent,
out in physical or moral Hasks. As a rule, the distillation produces a simple substance, a final element, or a simple action and a final operation. Whoever has it or is capable of it has and is capable of everything.
Hubbard's product was conceived as a mental panacea and brought onto the agitated life-counselling market. At first glance, his 'Dianetics' of 1950 seemed to be no more than a new method, praised with much ado, to clean the misted windowpanes of our conscious- ness - a product, to be sure, whose already conspicuously high sales in the first year proved that five years after the first atomic bombs fell, a large number of Americans were prepared to follow spiritual and intellectual suggestions for the simplest solution to the world's prob- lems. There was no time left for complicated esoteric systems, the author announced; one had to change the world from the ground up - rapidly enough to make sure that the bomb did not beat everyone to it. 'Survival' had become the watchword of life counselling. It forms the American counterpart to early Christian metanoia in the face of time running out. Against the background of the incipient nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, 'Dianetics' initi- ated an alternative course of the world - between itself and the world system of war, mental illness and crime. Confronted with such a sce- nario, who would have refused to join the camp of those who claimed self-assuredly that they had the solution to the world's problems?
The solution lies in the name of the method: the word 'Dianetics' supposedly comes from the two Greek components dia (through) and nous (mind) and denotes the science of what happens 'through the mind' - occasionally a word such as dianoua is also named as a source, though unfortunately this does not exist in Greek. One can intuit the point, namely that everything happens through the mind - though the precise sense of 'through' remains unclear. One cannot yet tell how the system reworks the old contrast between mind and matter - 'scientifically' on the surface and gnostically in its deep struc- ture. Dispensing with false modesty, Hubbard's new hyper-method presents itself as the 'modern science of mental health' and promises to offer the simplest solution to all problems that had hitherto seemed insoluble. Like a Californian avatar of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hubbard praises his science of knowledge as ending the era of mere preliminary attempts. While traditional solutions in turn became part of the problems, whether they presented themselves as religions, philosophies, therapies or politics, Dianetics proclaims the solution
97
one essence, of whether this is
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
to in a clarity. we are
will not up drifting to the problem side again - which is why none but malicious and mentally disturbed people could have any interest in the prevention of Dianetics. This provides, from now on, a new criterion for the rapid diagnosis of psychopathic dispositions: indifference or hostility to the offers of Dianetics. A disproportionate polemic against what Hubbard called 'conventional psychiatry' is a running thread through his entire work - and that of his students. He undoubtedly knew what experts would say about him and his activi- ties. He made them pay dearly for his intuitions. lOS
As far as its actual content goes, Dianetics initially offers no more than a simplified and technified variation on the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis: it merrily replaces Freud's distinction between the systems or field states of conscious/unconscious with Hubbard's distinction between the analytical mind (with its clear memory bank) and the reactive mind (with its pathological memory bank). The latter holds the sum of all problems, while the former offers the solution to all problems. With this starting situation, it seems like the natural task of the analytical mind to clear up the reactive mind until only clear ideas are left. Whoever managed to empty their pathological store would bring about the sale dominion of the analytical mind and could henceforth call themselves 'clear'. All 'processing' follows the maxim that wherever there was a reactive mind, there will now be an analytical one. The task of Dianetic procedures is no less than the production of the clear. They lead clients, regardless of their specific ailments, along inner 'time tracks' and back to the 'engrams' in their pathological memory - often with 'locks' on the pathogenic stores that must first be opened. This takes place on the more or less fantastic assumption that the old engrams can be 'erased' through recall and the 'aberrations' they have caused eliminated - an assump- tion that had already been popularized by psychoanalysis and Alfred Hitchcock in Hubbard's early days, although it never managed to achieve more than pseudo-plausibility.
If this were all there is to say about Hubbard's approach, one could content oneself with the conclusion that Dianetics is a more or less amusing chapter in the epic of the Americanization of psychoa- nalysis. This epic relates how the partisans of ego psychology took advantage of the psychology of the unconscious - or how the healthy soul of the esoteric West Coast triumphed over the morbid psyche of the East Coast. In truth, however, the Dianetics/Scientology episode belongs to a broader intellectual-historical movement that I would like to term the techno-gnostic turn in Western psychology. This is
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a new,
store of mental and spiritual distortive energy comes
from a technology-historical event that must be viewed as the great- est caesura since the implementation of vowel-alphabetical scripts around 700 BC: the advent of computer culture. Its unfolding around the middle of the twentieth century forced a revision of the time- honoured mind-body dichotomy by showing, through the construc- tion of computers or 'mind machines', that many of the phenomena one had previously attributed to the mind-and-soul side of the totality of being in fact belonged on the mechanical-material side. Reflection is a property of matter, not a privilege of human intelligence. Since then, the redistribution of the world under the pressure of the new cybernetic centre has defined the drama of contemporary thought. In this process it becomes clear why idols fall. The philosophy of cyber- netics renders it possible to formulate a general theory of twilights of the gods. 106
The Hubbard phenomenon unmistakably belongs to the turbulences set off by the irruption of cybernetics into the domains of metaphysi- cal classicism. As a contemporary of the first generation of cybernetics and an author of science fiction novels (viewed not entirely unfavour- ably by connoisseurs of the genre), he had the advantage of privileged early access to the new world of inner technologies. One should take care to avoid the fallacy that Hubbard's 'former life' in science fiction was something negative. Gotthard Gunther, still the most significant philosophical commentator on the event of the computer, has argued convincingly that the science fiction novel should be viewed as the laboratory for the philosophy of the technical age - a claim that seems entirely legitimate if one considers the work of authors like Stanislaw Lem and Isaac Asimov, to name only the greatest.
There is every indication that the novelist Hubbard never aban- doned his original genre - he merely expanded it. Showing great consistency, his first step beyond the confines of science fiction led him to Dianetics, which, in its cognitive status, is nothing other than psychology fiction. This is in keeping with the accounts of those close to him that Hubbard wrote his SOO-page book Dianetics in Bayhead, New Jersey, in a mere month - and completely 'off the top of his head', without drawing on any scientific research. The experimental foundation he invokes - 'hundreds of case studies' - is itself part of the invention. This observation casts a retroactive light on the systems of Freud and C. G. Jung; once one has grasped the schema of psychol- ogy fiction in its outlines, one also recognizes its characteristics in the alternative versions.
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step lS movement psychology
into the religion fiction of Scientology. Observing this transition, one witnesses the debut of the religion of the technical age. 107 When the success of Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health sent him the message from the real world that applied fiction 'works', he took this as the go-ahead for his ambitions. With the same elan that had carried him towards his first expansion of science fiction's boundaries, he performed the second and opened, after the psychotherapeutic front, the religious one. The response from the real world showed that this time too, it had 'worked' - the religion fiction materialized in a very short time and took the form of an actually existing 'church'. There was an unmistakable element of taking the bull by the horns at work, as Hubbard had reason to fear the reac- tion of the organized medical profession after the disproportionate success of his self-help therapy book. To the extent that the establish- ment denied that his 'magical' methods were in any way effective, and accused him of dealing irresponsibly with the hopes of the suffering, many of them incurable, it seemed natural to flee to the immunity of the religious sphere. Incidentally, it was never a secret in the inner organizational circle of the time that the ecclesiastical camouflage of the new anti-professional healing method was simply a way of mis- leading the tax authorities.
When Hubbard developed the Church of Scientology in 1954, he applied the form-religious strategies: he surrounded the profane content of Dianetics®, and later of Hubbard books, Hubbard speeches, Hubbard counselling techniques etc. , with the apparatus of sacred techniques typically found in religion. Its basis is a founder cult without boundaries: the celebration of the master as the awakener of humanity runs through the entire media sphere of Scientology. It constitutes one of the most airtight systems of self-praise in recent intellectual history - like a space station, it recycles its own system- inherent operating data. This was augmented by a sharp propaganda of urgency, the strategic version of the apocalyptic: it explained to clients that the only choice was between Scientology and suicide. This ensured total immersion in Hubbard's theme park. In addition, the sect created countless internal functional roles such as 'auditors', 'registrars', 'ethics officers', and a wealth of new importances in the form of supervisory and regulatory tasks - the imaginative replicas of a church hierarchy - as well as institutes, business centres, clinics, and even colleges where one could acquire heterodox academic titles, including Doctor of Theology. One can hardly say that no provi-
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
sion was made in this far-sighted enterprise for the newly important and those who wanted to join them. Internal communications were refined through the introduction of an insider language whose use gave the divide between members and non-members the desired depth. A system of mutual regulations stabilized the business; the discreet observation of members for an early diagnosis of scepticism rounded off the package of church-imitating measures. The design of the Scientological community was also original: the intention was that each new believer would also be a new customer. One has to go back to the Catholic trading of indulgences in the sixteenth century to find a similarly close and elegant connection between salvific and monetary transactions. lOS
Hubbard already deserves the greatest acknowledgement for these achievements in the recreative reconstruction of the church phenom- enon alone, as his form-religious imitation procedure provided valu- able insight into the general conditions of religion-founding, whether historically grown or currently synthesized. The loss of aura in his artefact of religion clearly did not worry him. What the new church lacked in venerability it balanced out through the carefreeness with which it presented itself as the summit of humanity's quest for truth that had been conquered late, but still in time. Scientological theology candidly allows the religious founders of the past to look up to him, the finisher - Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, but also authors such as Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Bergson and whoever else is entitled to candidacy in the colourful list of precursors. All of them can rejoice that Hubbard has completed what they could only strive for with inadequate means. A certain Dharma is also said to have been very close to the truth in days gone by, supposedly an Asian monk of antiquity. Evil to him who evil thinks - after all, does the New Testament not also contain details that do not stand up to historical criticism? I am not sure one can claim that Hubbard was attempting, with his less successful claims, to show that a complete church should also include signs of its own fallibility.
The question of whether Hubbard wanted to go beyond psychol- ogy fiction and religion fiction and create a form of politics fiction will remain unanswered here. 109 Depending on one's attitude and mood, one can take the corresponding statements by the master - especially the notorious equation of democrats and apes - either as Dadaistic or as pre-fascistic. There is a parodistic quality that runs through the entire spectrum of Scientological themes and leaves nothing that Hubbard ever touched unchanged or untwisted. Whatever sym- bolic traditions he appropriated reappeared as technically repeatable
101
images
the production of special effects.
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Hubbard's achievements as a parodist of religion were outstanding, not least as a parodist of the hierarchical principle - recall his amusing 'Operating Thetan', levels one to eight - but also as a parodist of the mystical idea that the soul (now 'Thetan') recognizes God within its innermost self. The insight that fragile psyches can be replaced by high-class Thetan implants would itself have earned Hubbard a Nobel Prize. Scientology's way of dealing with its apostates is also of great parodistic value - here the classic condemnation of infidels is travestied in the systematic molestation of ex-Thetans. This would be even more comical, were it not for the fact that it meant subjecting their targets to vicious psychological terror. The old missionary cults followed the principle that one wins over the people by converting the king; translated into modern terms, this means that one must first of all court celebrities. 11o
With the help of these techniques, Hubbard managed to establish an intellectual-historical Las Vegas based on quotations without boundaries in a few decades. He led the 'church' into the age of its technical producibility. Unease in the face of this complex of com- promising imitations may be one of the reasons why followers of the 'original religions' prefer to avoid it. The attention of the organs of German intelligence to the ambiguous organization is all the greater, however - in the USA, the FBI had it in their sights for a time. Its suspicious appearance is a consequence of its design, as it almost openly displays its principle of production. This has to be the case, as Scientology offers the model for the form-religious staging of foreign content.
In April 2007, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed the right of Scientology - despite its sometimes dubious, at times even manifestly criminal economic activities111 - to present itself as a religious community. This verdict merits the closest attention, because it is a disturbing indication of the increasing illiteracy of our legal system in 'religious' matters. Despite all appearances, it does not contain any statement about the religious quality of the enterprise; it merely points out the inalienable right of every person to avow a functioning fiction. The judges took the Scientological organization's claim of pursuing spiritual, 'religious' and humanistic goals at face value. On closer inspection, the Strasbourg verdict was no more than a statement by the court about itself, in that it declared questions of parody outside its jurisdiction. A similar logic applies to airport secu-
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to
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
are
to a in hand luggage zone - one cannot, after all, expect them to take such statements anything but literally.
It is thus decreed by the supreme court: in our time, all that is required to be a religion is for a business to claim that it is one. A person with religion in their hand luggage can proceed to the gate. It did not occur to the judges that Jesus himself would not have been able to sue for recognition as a religious founder at the European Court of Human Rights because he did not know the word 'religion'. Nor was the concept of human rights available to Jesus, least of all the inviolable right of modern people to the free cultivation of illu- sions. The Strasbourg judges did not realize how close they were to Hubbard: if he could found a religion, they could allow one. At least the judges - assuming there were no undercover Scientologists among their ranks - attempted to pass judgement in good faith, while Hubbard knowingly built his 'church' on an abyss of ironies. In addition, the Scientology lawyers have been working for decades on transforming the legal systems of their host countries into locations for jurisprudence fiction - with impressive success. Without the taste for lawsuits among American lawyers, whose effects also reach across to Europe, it is clear that Scientology would long have disappeared from the market.
My conclusion from the dispute over the religious status of this psychotechnic group is that it proved once and for all that religion does not exist. If one looks to the heart of the fetish of religion, one exclusively finds anthropotechnic procedures (this applies analo- gously to the second large-scale fetish of the present, 'culture'). The word 'religion', both here and elsewhere, represents two things: inwardly, it is a password to unlock the more yielding zones of the psyche, those in danger of exploitation, and outwardly it is a badge that one shows in order to be admitted to the world of the respectable semblance. In the context of a genetic theory of culture one would call this effect pseudo-transcendence.