No More Learning

It would also be wrong to deny that, here and there, a Jewish cantor’s world lament can be heard, for whom every man-made wall becomes a Wailing one. The dedication to Jacob Taubes – one of the last great repre- sentatives of the Jewish spirit in the German language – who died in March 1987, holds a commitment to the memory of apocalypticism as a Jewish alternative to the optimism of the moderns and the tragicism of neo-heroics. It is in Taubes’ work that I experienced an unforgettable enlightenment about that which Manés Sperber calls the religion of good memory.
A nuance will surely elude a reader who is unfamiliar with the landscape where these texts largely came into being. In them, at least to my perception, some of that ahistorical calm of a Provençal summer has been stored. They assume a refutation of city neuroses through heat and light; you may sense the spirit of that place in the way that thoughts at the end of a given paragraph do not always continue on logically – there are frequent imperceptible interrup- tions between one sentence and the next. The warmth of the land seeps into these gaps – a land that rests upon itself in a burning euphoria. In such a climate, one’s very physiological functions change. Thinking automatically becomes a measure against the heat even though it cannot entirely help but become a symptom of it as well – cruelly rested, it glints at the reader mischievously, as if offering an invitation to a long siesta; it seems to be joviality itself at play. Sitting at Northern desks, one might not be able to immedi- ately pick up on these conditions because different requirements apply to them. Nevertheless, to understand the matters at hand, one must go to the countryside from time to time. The task of discov- ering a slower pace applies to philosophy as well.
The more horses you hitch up, the faster it goes – I mean, not tearing the block out of the foundations, which is impossible, but tearing the reins and so travelling empty and joyful.
Franz Kafka4
1
THE MODERN AGE AS MOBILIZATION
May your fate be to live in interesting times.
Ancient Chinese curse
Can humans still comprehend the general development of the modern world that they have set in motion? A growing list of contemporaries denies that it is possible – their answers are based on arguments and not just instinctual reactions. For this reason, there is much talk of a post-modern condition at the end of this interesting century. 1 But the inscrutable aspects of our times are so uniquely new that we must not equate our current confusions of the mind with pre-modern surrenders of human reason when confronted with the mysteries of the world.
One idea has rooted itself in pre-modern ways of thinking more deeply than any other: nothing turns out the way it was planned. For even though man may propose, it is still the gods who dispose, whatever the case may be. The a priori of any Old World practical life experience is: if it happens as it should, it happens differently than it was planned. This experience cannot rid itself of the constant awareness that human plans and actions always move in the recesses of an insurmountable passivity. But with the advent of modernity, things happen in a new way – just as humans have planned. They do so because people in the West, monks, merchants, physicians, architects, painters, and cannon-makers – in summa geniuses and engineers – have begun to organize their way of thinking in an entirely new way; and (one would like to say, suddenly) a new kind of “praxis” joins this reorganization of thought as the technological
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counterpart of thinking and intervenes in the events of the world with a revolutionary impact. Modernity as a techno-political composite has unhinged the old familiar equilibrium between human power and powerlessness. Spurred on by a history-making amalgam of aggression and optimism, modernity promises us a world in which things turn out as planned because people are able to accomplish what they want – and if not, they are able and willing to learn. In modern times, it is the will to power of the can-do spirit that makes the world go around.
It is for one reason only that we call our epoch modern: people of the West have been so captivated and impressed by their own great deeds that they found the courage to proclaim that they had created the world on their own. This and nothing else constitutes the very core of what we (often defensively) refer to as the project of modernity. This project nature of the modern era stems from the grand assumption that we will soon be able to control the world to such an extent that nothing continues to develop unless we wisely choose to maintain it with our own actions. The modern project is thus established on the basis of a kinetic utopia – something that has never been explicitly articulated: the total movement of the world is to be the implementation of our plans for it. The movements of our day-to-day lives become progressively identical with the movement of the world itself; the process of the world as a whole increasingly resembles an expression of our lives – things occur as planned because that which occurs is increasingly an event of our making. It would not suffice to say that modernity set out to make history from this point forward. At its innermost core, modernity wants to create nature in addition to history. As this evil century draws to a close, it dawns on us that making history was just a pretext. The crucial issue of the modern era is the nature that is to be made.
As soon as modernity’s kinetic utopia is revealed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems come to light – what we have learned in the good old modern age no longer applies to anything. The paradoxes displayed by the very developments of the modern era constitute the thus newly formed and unusual problem world: a post-history superimposes itself onto history, an epinature onto nature, and a post-modernity onto modernity. Meanwhile, the inevitable transformation of modernity into post-modernity becomes obvious to any onlooker. It results from the observation that even modern events occur differently than planned – but not because man proposes and god disposes; rather, this notion that “it must occur differently” is both inherent in and not quite understood by our thoughts and actions, and it pushes right through our venture with an unstoppable irony. Things do not happen according to plan
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because we have left movement out of the calculation. Things unfail- ingly do not happen according to plan because as we think through and bring forth what is supposed to occur, we automatically set in motion something else as a by-product – something we did not think about, did not want, and failed to consider. Once set in motion, it propels itself forward with a dangerous tenacity. It seems that we have surrounded ourselves with an epinature of consequences that slip away from the grasp of our “history-making” praxis like a secondary physis. With mounting unease, we watch as the self- perpetuating side-effects of modern progress spill over into the controlled projects; a fatally foreign movement breaks off from this very core of the modern enterprise, from within the consciousness of a spontaneous independence that is guided by reason – and it slips away from us in every direction. What looked like a controlled uprising towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrol- lable and catastrophic hetero-mobility. Precisely because so much comes about through our actions, just as we have planned, develop- ments as a whole turn out explosively and affect us quite differently.
This is the post-modern status quo, and it is actually a lapsus – a regressive step. A philosophical post-modernism made up of insights and not merely nostalgic posturing or bad moods can only be possible today because, given the actual course of events, powerful arguments make it clear that the bubble of modernity’s kinetic utopia has burst. Unforeseen processes have gained momentum, and it is doubtful whether humans can ever rein them back in and divert them to a trajectory that will not prove fatal.
If we were to give a philosophical name to the drift of the current “civilizing process” (a dreadful term that burns the tongue), we would have to say that it resembles a thinking avalanche. What is a thinking avalanche? We do not know, but it is certainly what we are. We were hardly predictable as such, but this astounding avalanche is nevertheless plunging towards the valley as we speak. The “civilizing process” (the tongue begins to ache) turns out to be a pressing ontological oddity. What becomes a given in this process is nothing other than a self-reflexive natural catastrophe. And like all that is calamitous, this, too, is philosophically very interesting. The thinking avalanche is the industrial post-Christian counterpart to Pascal’s thinking reed, which once upon a time trembled in the icy breath of the early modern era. Meanwhile, the most fragile of all creatures, the human, avalanche qui pense, is no longer endangered by the storm of life alone – he is himself setting off the landslides that can bury him alive.
Leaving these rather lyrical intimations behind, we will now turn to the analytical and feel our way forward through the no-man’s-land
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between old concepts and new circumstances. Now more than ever, a critique of the current times must begin with the admission that we do not know how things happen to us. We will begin by seeking that which is incomprehensible, unwritten, and overlooked in the current “civilizing process. ” At this point, it might only be possible to establish a few bridgeheads of articulation in the blind and murky vortex of events. I do not go so far as to claim that an alternative “critical theory” of the modern age could already take shape in these pages. What I do claim is merely this: first, that both of the well-known versions of critical theory (the Marxist and Frankfurt Schools primarily come to mind) have up to now remained irrelevant because either they do not grasp their object – the kinetic reality of modernity as mobilization – or they are unable to point out a critical difference to it because they are mobilizers themselves based on the effect they have; second, that diagnoses of present times must be brought into a kinetic and kinesthetic dimension because if they are not, all talk of modernity bypasses what is most real. The following diagnostic exercises are post-modern only insofar as they stem from a readiness to formulate the modern active voice into the passive voice. To think from a post-modern position is to explicitly own up to the congestion, vortices, vacuities, and depressions that come with the kind of spontaneity that the modern era has triggered. With respect to philosophy, the post-modern can perhaps best be recognized by its reformulation of modernity’s strong and proud sentences in the active voice into those in either passive or imper- sonal phrases. What is thereby revealed is not only a grammatical engagement but also an ontological one – what is at stake is nothing less than the possibility to include suffering, incidents, and processes in our contemporary idea of “being” alongside deeds, dates, and productions. Modernity has overfed us with theories of action – what it knew of suffering is only that it could be “used” as an engine for actions. But what if the necessity to develop a passionate consciousness of human mortality arose from today’s numerous cultural approaches to post-modernism; a consciousness of a second passivity that can only develop on the flipside of the project that is modernity? Seen from the point of view of a second passivity, what does the historically moved world mean? What meaning does the made and to-be-made history retain for us, of which leading modern philosophers have expected so much? If the modern era really was a revolt of the subject against its first passivity – some say it was a campaign to disrupt fate – what is to be made, then, of the second passivity that weighs on history as suffering, on our ability to make history as anxiety, and on this dubious enterprise called modern life as a compulsion to participate in it?
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At the margins of modernity, history and fate engage yet again in unforeseen duels. It is as if a quasi-karmic debit interrupts the deeds and doers in history to undermine their very projects and intentions. We will investigate this “karmic” irony in kinetic terms. For it is clear that neither the philosophy of history proper nor classical Eastern concepts of karma (i. e. moral causality of actions) can adequately interpret the fact that things occur differently than planned in modern times. Thus, it is neither the fault of the antag- onist in the most recent battle2 nor due to an unpaid karmic debt of the actors that a history planned with the best intentions does not succeed. The historical movement gets out of hand because of the inherent aspects of making history. Whoever moves always moves more than just themselves. Whoever makes history always makes more than just history. This “more” is the typo that distorts the neatly drawn-up text – it is the kinetic surplus which shoots beyond borders and past targets into a region not aimed for. The fatal “more” joins the momentum of the dead masses who have forgotten all about moral purposes once in motion. This kinetic capital blows up old worlds – it has nothing against them; it simply cannot be stopped on principle. It cannot help but make affairs dance to accelerated melodies. It makes the flow of goods flow, fleets cruise, escalators glide, climates suddenly change, and faunas disappear. The naïve times in which humans could think that their movement was necessary for the world to move forward are over. Meanwhile, the movement goes on – the pure movement. While the gracious defenders of modern accomplishments bow down to theories of human actions and talk about the norms of the (latest) reasons for acting (they will certainly be promoted to directors of the future national parks of modernity), an ugly suspicion makes its rounds in the rest of the world: could kinetics and fate be one and the same?
The Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification
The following interpretation of the present is based on philo- sophical kinetics, which assumes three axioms: first, that we move in a world that is itself in motion; second, that the self-movement of the world both includes and surpasses our self-movement; third, that in modernity, the self-movements of the world emerge out of our self-movements, which are cumulatively added to world- movement. From these axioms, we can more or less completely develop the relationship between the Old World, the modern world, and the post-modern world.
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To show the modern world as one engaged in a catastrophe- bearing movement, we would have to assume that today’s world process received its dynamism from centuries of accumulated human initiatives. Thus, perceiving the modern age with an awareness of real events means accepting something that our intellectual conscience has resisted so far: a physics of freedom, a kinetics of moral initia- tives. Let us say it openly: this is the end of aestheticism in cultural theory. What seems emptiest, most external, most mechanical – movement (ungrudgingly left to the physicists and doctors of sports medicine to research) – intrudes into the humanities and immedi- ately proves to be the cardinal category of the moral and social spheres as well.
Marked by movement, the ethical-political adventures of the human mind become a branch of physics. While everywhere in the West ethics commissions hold meetings, while people of good will sacrifice their weekends in order to discuss the principles of a New Morality in idyllically located evangelical academies and political “study centers,” modernity’s best-kept secret seeps out of the studios of hermetic and philosophical fundamental research into the open. What nobody really wanted to know becomes increasingly evident. What nobody welcomed as an insight forces itself into our thoughts with a logical rigor that is altogether infuriating. Once spoken aloud, the revealed secret makes us wonder why something so obvious has not been brought to our attention long ago. Some urbanists and a few military people who liked to speculate knew it first; dodgy philosophers who mistrusted modernity adopted the matter; the wild eccentrics in the theory scenes of big cities jumped on the bandwagon; a few mundane feature articles in the culture and arts pages of newspapers and magazines took up the issue; soon many will claim that they have always known it. Known what, then? Well, the trivial fact that kinetics is the ethics of modernity.
The worrisome and even obscene nature of this emerging fact is only partially alleviated by relating it to well-known doctrines of progress. There, the liaison between kinetics and morality still seemed to be controlled morally. Indeed, modernity has also been defined in kinetic terms since the beginning, having had its manner of execution and realization determined to be progressive and forward-thinking. Progress is the concept of movement in which the ethical-kinetic self-awareness of modernity is both expressed and concealed to the highest degree. If we are talking about progress, what we really mean is the kinetic and kinesthetic ground motive of a modernity that only aims to remove the limits of human self-movement. Initially we assumed (both rightly and wrongly) that progress is a “moral” initiative which would not rest until
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it actualized its goals of improvement. The experience of a true progress entails that a worthwhile human initiative stems “from within itself,” burst the bounds of its previous mobility, widen its circle of influence, and bring itself to the fore in good conscience vis-à-vis both its inner inhibitions and outside resistance.
The current epoch has expressed its kinetic self-conception in doctrines of progress in the fields of politics, technology, and the philosophy of history. But it never revealed its secret tendency to take moral motives seriously only in their capacity as motors for external movement. Part of the essence of progressive processes is that they begin with ethical initiatives so that they can continue in their kinetic momentum alone. One of the great secrets of “progress” still remains: how could it at its onset fuse mores and physics, motives and movement into an effective unit? This secret leads us to the active center of what modern philosophy calls subjectivity. The essence of subjectivity is inseparable from the mysterious force that expresses itself as the ability to initiate new chains of movement which we label “actions. ” If something like progress really exists, then it does so because movements that originate in subjectivity undeniably occur. Kinetically, these are the very material from which modernity is built. Whenever the thought of “progress” goes through the mind of a subject, the self-igniting mechanism within that thought already initiates progress-like self- movements. The person who truly knows what progress is already moves within what has been conceptualized – they know it, because they have already progressed and continue to progress further. The person who grasps modernity can only grasp it on the basis of this self-igniting self-movement, without which modernity would not exist. Already in their self-creation, they must have taken a good step forward – the very step that continues to be the very kinetic element of further progress. Progress is initiated by this step into a second step, one that performs its own self-introduction in order to then surpass itself. This is why the notion of progress does not signify a mere change of location where an agent moves from point A to point B. A “step” is essentially only progressive if it leads to an increase in the “ability to take steps. ” This provides us with the formula of the modernizing process: progress is movement towards movement, movement towards greater movement, and movement towards an increased ability to move.
In modernity, ethics can directly emerge from kinetics only due to the validity of this formula. Ethical imperatives of the modern kind no longer exist, unless they are also simultaneously kinetic impulses. The categorical impulse of modernity is: in order to continu- ously exert ourselves as progressive beings, we should overcome
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all situations in which humans are constricted in their movements, stuck within themselves, without freedom and pitiful. 3
To the extent that we as modern subjects understand freedom to be a priori the freedom of movement, we can only conceive of progress as a movement that leads to increased mobility. In their physical sense, free movements are always steps towards freedom of movement; even when we speak of self-determination, we really always mean self-movement. Prior to any difference between “is” and “ought,” “being” is determined in modernity as an “ought to be” and an “I want to be” of increased mobility. Ontologically, modernity is a pure being-towards-movement. This interpretation of “being” is valid for us because it becomes irresistibly real through us. It is irresistibly valid because it is immune to backlash and morally ruinous for any negation of it. It becomes real because it is carried out by us in the mode of a spontaneous and uncriticizable will. The motives that pulsate in the being-towards-movement seem to come from the inner core of what we want and have to want. If the fundamental process of modernity indeed advertises itself as the “self-freeing movement of humankind,” then it is a process that we do not utterly wish to reject and a movement that we absolutely cannot make. A moral-kinetic automatism seems to be at work here – one that makes us not only “condemned to be free”4 but also to be in constant free movement.
If we visualize the great revolutions of the modern world as occurring on the scale of our own lives, we notice a profound contradiction in our steps towards a higher degree of movement. To be sure, the thrusts towards movement of modern generations have provided us with enormous leeway in numerous fields – what members of the modern bourgeoisie have been able to attain within the span of hardly two centuries with respect to mobility in the field of politics, economy, language, information, traffic, expression, and sexuality borders on the miraculous; herein a kinetic “modern tradition” becomes evident, regardless of how questionable the possibility of its continuation may be. But instead of guiding the agents of modernity to spirited5 mobility, most of the steps of progress have immediately led to new kinds of forced movements which compete with the most stifling endings of pre-modern times in their depth of alienation and misery.
Modern “dynamism” helped preserve the spiritless rigor of super-mobile forms. Whoever wishes to know what this specifi- cally means must answer the following question correctly: what do machines, industrial companies, and management staff in politics and economics have in common? All three hold the exemplary kinetic lesson for citizens of modernity by efficiently demonstrating
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to them what self-movement wants and does: to switch itself on in order to stay on; to activate itself in order to stay running at any cost. This is the higher school of automation which sees no funda- mental difference between intelligent machines and human agents. If the kinetic self activates and takes the initiative, it turns into the central agency of the self-operating process via its “own” impetus.
The self-initiating subject is the miller of modernity’s “mill grinding itself” – this is what the poet Novalis in his 1799 essay “Christendom or Europe” called the principle of movement of the then activated human-nature factory that gained momentum through prosaic self-motivating entrepreneurial types: Protestants, Brits, Prussians, and professors. Novalis was also the first to concep- tualize the kinetic utopia of modernity by thinking the subject and the machine together in the same image: the “mill of itself” is the “true perpetuum mobile” that is “driven by the stream of chance and floating on it,”6 uniting two kinds of movement (endogenous self- movement and exogenous foreign movement) into a consolidated motion – a motion whose dynamism is admittedly also its bleakness – an ego-driven drift into vacuity, catastrophe, lack of inhibition, and deadliness.
The diagnostic power of Novalis’ formulations is only today becoming apparent to us in its full scope. Meanwhile, we now know (without the help of even a hint of romantic irony) what the self manages to do in “its” machine, even if this machine is not exactly a self-grinding mill. Modern society has realized at least one of its utopian plans, namely that of total automobilization – the state in which every self that is of age moves on its own at the wheel of its self-moving machine. It is because the modern self cannot be thought of at all without the notion of its movement that the I and the automobile belong together in a metaphysical way, like the body and soul of one and the same unit of motion. The automobile is the technological double of the principally active transcendental subject.
That is why the automobile is the sanctum of modernity; it is the cultish center of a kinetic world religion; it is the sacrament on wheels that lets us take part in something that moves faster than we do. A person who drives a car gets closer to the numinous and feels how their small self expands to a higher self that makes the total world of highways into a home for us and makes us aware that we are called to something more than a half-animal pedestrian life.
From an auto-motorist view, we lived in Messianic time for a little while, in the fulfilled time where two-cycle engine vehicles parked peacefully next to twelve-cylinder vehicles – the messiah ruled with low emissions in his kingdom; with electronic fuel injection and an
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anti-locking system, with a controlled catalyst and turbo charger, he brought his subjects into heavenly motion. But not all contem- poraries were convinced that this last kingdom of automobiles was also a paradise on earth. The devil had a part to play and made sure to occasionally turn general self-movement into general immobility. In such moments it becomes clear – even if no one wants to admit it to themselves – that we have long been exiled from the paradise of modernity and will have to learn the post-modern Stop-and-Go by the sweat of our brow from now on. The large-scale traffic jams on the summer highways of Central Europe (and the legendary power outages in New York that can make us feel nostalgic) are thus phenomena of historico-philosophical importance and even have a religio-historical significance. It is through them that a piece of false modernity fails and in them that we encounter the end of an illusion – they are the kinetic Good Friday when all hope for redemption through acceleration becomes lost. On those scorching afternoons in the funnel of Lyon, in the Rhine valley hell near Cologne, or wedged in at Irschenberg, Europe’s longest parking lot, where 1. 5 miles of unmoving hot steel stretches out in either direction, dark historico-philosophical insights rise up like exhaust fumes and people begin to speak in tongues, uttering something critical about contemporary culture; obituaries of modernity waft from the side windows and, regardless of their educational level, those trapped in their vehicles begin to suspect that it cannot go on like this for much longer. Another “era” looms on the horizon. Even those who have never heard the term “post-modernity” are already familiar with what it entails on those afternoons spent in traffic. And in fact, this can be reformulated in terms of cultural theory: wherever unleashed self-movements form congestions or vortices, they generate the beginnings of an experience where the modern active turns into the post-modern passive.
What can we gain from these flickering observations that could lead to a serious theory of the present? They accomplish enough for what is to follow if they help build up suggestions that generate the next step forward. That step is to openly appoint the term “mobili- zation” as the core expression to explain and describe the basic process of modernity. Without hasty consideration of the inevitable horror at such a choice of concept and its inherent consequences, it is first a matter of strengthening the evidence that modernizations always show the character of mobilizations in a kinetic way. Of course, one could proceed inductively and discreetly with so-called “infantry” methods, collecting countless peripheral descriptions of the current status-lapsus-quo of the processes in the bio- and noosphere in a slow accumulation of evidence: the number of
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revenue billionaires is multiplying; the butterflies of our childhoods are no longer there; the trajectories of long-distance tourism and arms budgets are showing a significant upward trend; the popula- tions in modernizing countries are exploding while those in already modernized countries are stagnant; the holes in the ozone layer above the poles are aggressively widening; sneaker sales are flour- ishing while those of surf gear are sinking; trees in low mountain ranges are becoming discolored and forming brush-like crowns; South African fruit can presently be found at Bavarian Sunday markets; the air time of Soviet nuclear bullets is 120 seconds from the Urals to Bad Godesberg, and so on. But the endless number of such statements only makes sense if they find a common denomi- nator in the term “mobilization,” which makes an essential assertion about several separate processes: the essence of what is happening today are proceedings of mobilization. The very diversity of varied interpretations of modernity is what forms it according to a kinetic model since that model can be identified as that of a mobilization.
It is very right to take offense at the military connotations of the term at first. Mobilization is a category belonging to a world of wars – it encompasses the critical processes by which dormant combat potentials are brought to readiness for action. The aversion towards the concept referred to by the term, and even more so the disgust towards the actual procedure, must not make us blind to the fact that the kinetic foundational model of this process – as self-actualization for deployment – is by no means specific only to the military but rather expresses the foundational principle of modern self-moving enterprises as a whole. The aesthetic shudder as a response to the word could easily seduce us to abandon the only term that makes the dynamic model of modernization nameable. We are unable to avoid thinking of certain notorious works by Ernst Jünger in this context, who famously already in the early 1930s dislodged the phenomenon of mobilization from its military-specific meaning in order to apply it to the process of modern society as a whole. For half a century now these state- ments have been lying on the trash heap of intellectual history – unused, scandal-ridden, unacceptable, but above all untested, hated rather than refuted, unchosen rather than outdated. There is a reason for the general reservations against Jünger’s reflec- tions, which have been suspected of being fascist. Whoever would adopt his cold, evil optic for an analysis of late modern processes even on a trial basis risks experiencing a historico-philosophical Damascus. Far beyond Jünger’s intentions, the category of mobili- zation can liberate insights that are not compatible with the sleep of the just in the project of modernity. The ominous formula of
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“total mobilization” prepares the still scandalous and, yes, even almost unbearable realization that a political-kinetic fundamental process exists in the modern world whose tendency is to de facto neutralize the morally important difference between work and war and increasingly override the once existing distinction between rest position and deployment. This is precisely the uncanny process of mobilization – to bring everything considered a power reserve to the “front” and drive any potential forward towards realization. Jünger is that evil man whom we will always quote from a great distance – though of course never without respect for his perceptual capacity;7 but his exercises generated a previously unobtained definition of modern technology as the “mobilization of the planet via the figure of the worker. ” Of course, the latter does not describe the Marxist subject of history, the proletariat, but rather the planetary subject of mobilization, trembling from over-fitness, the pain-hardened, matter-of-fact high-performance type in his dedicated effort to the self-exalting, readying, forward- and perhaps future-looking action system (whether we call it a company, class, people, nation, bloc, or country is already irrelevant on this level of action).
If we now want to undertake a new attempt under very different constellations to make the term “mobilization” productive for a new theory of modernity (of course, very differently from Jünger, the order of merit wearer), it will only be promising insofar as we accept the discomfort with the term and place it in the service of a critical perspective. This term will keep alive the memory of the violent core of the major scientific, military, and industrial processes, especially at a time when they are entering a smart phase where violence is becoming informational, cool, procedural, and analgesic. (What is the key phrase of the new phase again? Transfer from heavy industry to fast information? Transition from working society to learning society? The first would probably give off a little soot, the second will be as clean as the toilets in a Swiss motorway rest stop. ) Precisely because the term “mobilization” (owing to the uncanny, even disastrous elements in its meaning) bristles against a total positivism (Jünger’s nerves-of-steel attempt in this direction cannot be repeated), it is more appropriate than any other to describe a “civilizing” mechanism that exploits all modern growth of skill, knowledge, mobility, precision, and effectiveness for processes of crowding out and killing off, for upgrades, expan- sions, self-authorization, and breaches of context. Mobilization as an autogenous fundamental process of modernity leads to the provision of ever-increasing movement potentials for position holding, which precisely by way of the conditions and effects of this deployment make themselves impossible as positions and drift into
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the untenable. It is here that the broad field of kinetic paradoxes opens up for an alternate critique of modernity. Thus, social critique becomes a critique of false mobility.
If, after the debacle of Marxism and the ambiguous fading away of the Frankfurt Schools, there can still be a third version of critical theory of a sophisticated kind, then it is probably only in the form of a critical theory of movement. If it is to be accurate, its therapeutic criteria would consist of the difference between correct movement and false mobilization. Its claim to truth would rest on the recognition that a kinetic spectrum exists that reaches from physiology all the way to politics. A critical theory of mobilization would bridge the gap between the thought process and the actual event on the level of basic terms – there would no longer be any “outside” thinking; the theorist would have to ask herself at every sentence whether what she is doing increases the offering to the idol of mobilization or distinctly subtracts from it. A critical theory can after all only be such, regardless of what its critical semantics convey, if it abandons its kinetic complicity with the movement of the world process into the worst of all possible directions. Thus it has to remain open if such a “third” critical theory can still exist not merely in name but in its full sense. If possible, it would put itself into effect at its outset as a pre-school of demobilization. Only as a still theory of movement, as a quiet theory of a loud mobilization, can a critique of modernity still differ from that which it critiques – all else is a rational cosmetics of participation, a conscious or unconscious nudging forward of already moving trains, a mimesis of the basic process within the process of reflection.
But it is impossible for such a “quiet” critique to generate its own beginning, its own jump out of the urge to act differently. The fact that it cannot do so is one of the riddles that are concealed in the ubiquitous post-modernist babble. Because whatever wishes to come after modernity would have to have gone through such a critique and have brought it to an end – no human being can claim that this is indeed the case with him in any significant way. All that can be said is that we have long begun to gain experience with the so-called “post-modern” passive voice and that it is not a very large step to admitting that we have, above all prospectively, landed on the suffering side of modernity. In this respect, the formula rings true: the more modern, the more post-modern. This is of great importance for the style of a “third” or post-modern critical theory, because in order to understand its own subject, it must have entered the modern scuffle without reservations – otherwise it would never arrive on the flip-side of things. But how this theory will find its way to something truly other from out of the modern Tempo-drome,
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that is something it will first have to explain – no, demonstrate – to us. The question of the possibility of an actually different “third” critical theory thus boils down to the classic riddle of how a quiet in the eye of the storm is possible for beings so thoroughly condemned to action.
One can now understand what it is exactly that the reminder of movement brings us – we get closer to an epistemological abyss where a theory without wisdom is no longer useful even as a theory. Should kinetics of all things become a school of serenity? We can hardly imagine what physicists and metaphysicists would have to say to that. Whatever their objections may be, this is where our entry into the investigation on the passive side of strong self-mobilizations ought to begin – an investigation into the process and progress of that which we have set in motion to speed over and past us. We ask, taking into account what happened, what it was that occurred so differently from what we planned. It turned out so very differently than expected, but what else could we have expected?
Sketches towards an Outline of a Critique of Political Kinetics
Why another critical theory of modernity? And why precisely now, at a time when most people have taken their lives beyond the reach of theories? And if there has to be a bare minimum of intellectual distance to the so-called “status quo,” why not go with Marxism as usual? Why no recourse to the ethical potential of humanity? Why not poetry steeped in ruin at the Wailing Wall of facts? Or at least a fashionable skepticism towards the neoliberal swing of things? No, for the reason that Marxism, appeals to ethics, poetry, and skepticism of this kind are not in line with what is necessary and possible for critique because they themselves function at best as agents of impotent mobilizations and yet do not contribute enough to a fundamental understanding of mobilization events.
The fate of the Marxist social critique exemplifies this more than any other. In their time, Marx and his successors were of the partially justified opinion that they made the causes of modern radical changes in the world transparent with their analysis of capital flow. Additionally, they formulated a revolutionary ethics that saw the strategic core of its “praxis” in the political control over capital; from there, humanity’s emancipation was rigorously to be steered towards a life in general wealth and limitless productivity. Thus, the fathers of socialism openly placed their bets on an ethics of productive mobilization with a humanistic intent. Admittedly, they did not suspect that only one aspect of their construction
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would be rather inadvertently realized, namely that regulatory instances must indeed be incorporated within or placed counter to capitalist processes if one is to prevent the worst for all of humanity. In more modern terms: without a certain, shall we say, “political” cybernetics of capital, the “host organism” that is earth, along with all its historic guests, is at the mercy of devastation. This cyber- netics, should it ever come into play, stems in the long term less from socializations (since these alone lead to the effect of “more of the same, only worse”) than from a consequent ecological curbing of production motives and the demilitarization of profits for the benefit of festive overspending in a general, mutual patronage. 8
In its more assertive days, the old socialist Left tried to morally push its demand for political control over the processes of capital with the formula “socialism or barbarism” to the decision point. This is the point where its revolutionary politics fails when countered with actual historical findings, and the concept of world processes as mere effects of capital flows becomes consequently doubtful. Considering the results so far, very little can be found between barbarism and actual existing socialism to suggest mutual exclusion – however, there is a broad field of instances where they are synon- ymous. Now, it is a legitimate supposition that real socialisms not only had historic bad luck but also were unable to achieve anything better in a world full of enemies. Their mishap, however, is also caused by their fateful commitment to an inadequate concept of the modern kinetics of world change via Marxist analysis. Of course, it is not without reason that Marx saw his reconstruction of modern labor relations in capitalism as already having uncovered the general law of movement of modern class societies. Whatever it is that moves in these societies on a political, cultural, psychological, and ideological level, it can be, according to him, nothing more than a secondary movement that is determined in the last instance by the economic primary movement. This primary movement has exhibited a special legality since the eighteenth century, the age of the industrial revolution: since people’s actions have been largely understood as “material reproductions of their lives” in the capital process, a categorically new phenomenon has emerged that no other age has had to contend with – the phenomenon of “work as such,” the category of “work sans phrase. ” Marx sees this as the capture of human activities in the material life-process through the value creation of capital. The industrial proletariat gives the category of work sans phrase its social shape. But human activity only becomes “work as such” if it belongs to a form of production which in its very essence continually produces further possibilities of production. Marx explains this extraordinary phenomenon by
16 The Modern Age as Mobilization
linking the anthropological motive of self-production both to the economic motive of profit (i. e. investment return) and to the agonal motive of competition. An explosive mixture of motives emerges from the alliance between self-preserving self-sufficiency, pursuit of profit, and competition that lends the modernizing movement its impetus. The decisive mechanism in this new arrangement is indeed the suspected “self-exploitation of value” – that work of alchemy which organizes an activity in such a way that its result consists of the increase in ability to carry out the activity. Wherever the modern “work sans phrase” sets the rhythm, not only is a given form of life reproduced “economically” (in other words, in terms of home or palace economics), but also an increase in productivity becomes part of the primary product of production. This is precisely in accordance with the kinetic formula of mobilization. The self- exploitation of value as production of productivity is one of the many ways in which the modern mobilization loop begins to turn into movement that leads to more movement. Marx was right to describe capital which circulates around its own self-propagation as a demiurgic processing magnitude that forces the concrete lifelines of workers to march to its abstract rhythm for the sake of its self- sustaining self-propagation. But he gives far too little attention to the kinetic foundational process of modernity as the general movement towards more movement. Marx attributes the fact that “in modern times” everything moves further, faster, and more inten- sively to the dynamics of capitalist modes of production and uses confusing schemas of primary and secondary movement (i. e. base and superstructure) to interpret it as a problem that is sui generis. In reality, the capital process would never have begun if it had not been sustained by independent, parallel, and preceding structures of self-actualization and self-intensification. It is no coincidence that Marxist interpreters of early modern emerging movements continue to be perplexed by the riddle of “primitive accumulation. ” This perplexity necessarily remains as long as we insist on under- standing the accumulation process in economic terms. In actual fact, the problem of accumulation leads to the core of modern kinetics, which is in turn – we’ve already said it – inseparable from the secret of subjectivity. We find more promising clues if we reject the question of primitive accumulation of capital and turn our attention to that of primitive accumulation of subjectivity – always provided that we are right to see it as not just a “metaphysical” phenomenon (which it also is in a certain sense) and not address it merely as the seat of intelligible and creative capacity, but above all to recognize the agency of self-movement towards movement in it, which is as puzzling as it is world-shaking. We would then be
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dealing with the primitive accumulation of a “kinetic energy” which – always mediated by subjective initiatives – repels itself from the world as first nature, turning it into pure raw material, energy source and substrate, which is then used by the kinetic energy to construct a New World from mobile artifacts on top of it. (In chapter 3, we will identify the nature of this kinetic subjectivity and connect it to the tension between a birth through a mother and a self-birth through one’s own efforts. )
Wherever the modern kinetic model of success (movement towards increased mobility) begins to operate within a sector of activity, wayward contributions to the great dawn of the New World are created; a dawn where Europe is split off from its archaic, antiquated, and pre-modern way of being, followed by vast parts of the rest of the world. It is likely that classical Greece acted as a prelude to it: in sophistry, we can see the first signs of the devel- opment of intelligence into sport and in the Olympic games, a cult-like intensification of physical exercise. After that, the kinetic genie in a bottle seems to have been corked for a millennium and a half; it is only underground that the energies continued to rumble, having been exhausted in tribal feuds, migrations of peoples, Hunnish wars, Saxon slaughters, Germanic missions, politics of the first Reich, agriculture, livestock farming, monastic immersion, hermitage, simple reproduction. Then: the great initial spark. It seems to begin in the monasteries of the high Middle Ages, where the true factories of primitive accumulation of subjectivity are to be found. What is deployed here in the religious exercises of ascetic self-intensification – autogenic movement to increase movement, concentrating on concentration, immersing oneself in immersion, praying for work, working at being able to pray – has its analog in the various sectoral movements towards increasing self-powering mobility; in the accumulation of scientific knowledge which can only retain its status as valid knowledge if it is organized as research, that is, cognitive mobilization; in the self-exaltation of modern territorial states which soon reveal themselves to be transport states and arm themselves as nation states; in the dynamic of military mobilization, which has always been an arms race, that is, a battle for ballistic and kinetic advantages; in the self-dramatization of fit bodies that surrender to the ecstasy of increased movement almost as if entering a cult; in the self-erotization of sexual subjects who practice arousing their ability to be aroused; in the self-deification of the individual as artist, who revolves around the creation of their own creativity in a constant, expressive mobilization. In all of these fields and sectors of human mobility, self-mobilizations are being played out that span over several centuries, and the economic process
18 The Modern Age as Mobilization
is certainly their most willing medium, most unilateral driving force, and most versatile accomplice; in it, movement towards more movement pushes through industrial and monetary processes as well with an irresistibility that is sui generis. But the Marxian “value” that generates additional value per capitalization is in reality more a kinetic than an economic phenomenon; its parameter is the power to move, and its content, in turn, tantamount to being able to move.
A view of mobilization as a fundamental process of modernity has only recently been coming to light, not because anyone claims to be more insightful than the great social theorists of previous centuries but because the “thing itself ” has appeared on the stage of recognizability for the naked eye to behold. It is only for us, in view of the late modern effects of acceleration, that the phenomenon of pure mobility has become real and conceivable. In analogy to Marx’s vision of the Fundamentals, a categorically novel phenomenon seems to appear for the diagnosis of the late twentieth century: “mobility as such,” “self-movement sans phrase. ” This postulates not only a third industrial revolution, with all that has been done to the reality of modern life by electronics, nuclear technology, and computer science, but also modern politics with its arms races, mass movements, and initiatives from above and below; it also assumes modern tourism and its conception of the world as service counter and landing strip; the cable-equipped screens, too, and the new disarray of love with its urban theater of separation, night clubs, computer games, and consoles in children’s rooms; jogging in the park and athletic cults in the stadiums, disposable bottles, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Captured Music. . . It is only once the self-movement sans phrase has directly forced its way into everyone’s reality of life as a real category that the dynamic motif of a society made up of self-mobilizing subjects can be designated as such in the tone of calm critique without the diagnostician having to rise to the status of a prophet. And it is only recently that we have been forced to perceive in philosophical hindsight as well that Marx and Nietzsche said the same thing – the will to self-appropriating self-production and the will to power (as an initiative to enforce an interpretation of the world) are two alternate formulations of the same creative large-scale attack of the acting spirit on “matter,” of the same kinetic nihilism that apprehends what exists as source of energy and construction site, nothing else.
We can differentiate three basic tendencies or categories of the modern fundamental process of mobilization, which has in the meantime absorbed the entire way of the world. The great self- movement towards more movement takes place first as a tendency towards motorization, installation of autonomous process units,
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and continuous acceleration of them (“tachocracy”); second, as a tendency to relieve, numb, and disable the functions of a subject that are too sensitive, slow, and oriented towards truth (automation through desensitization or elimination of context); third, through progressive eradication of distances and imponderables in coinci- dence with strategic appropriation of the other (logistics). In these three executing aggregates, the world as a hitherto inert resource for automobile system-subjects becomes processed, codified, made ready-to-use, and de-realized. De-realization is the psycho-social result of a systemic “self-realization” where the outdated term “reality” logically shrinks to the residual function of the not-yet- mobilized. For a few years now, American “deconstructionists” have been whispering the new message to each other: there is nothing outside the text;9 only the naïve still cling to the antiquated fiction of the “external referent. ” Even epistemology shows glimpses of the impending short-circuit between kinetics and semiotics – the world is logically ripe for evaporation.
Only on the horizon of an omnipresent mobilization do we see that there can only be one kind of appropriate critique for such a reality that works towards a pervasive awareness of movement. Yet this is again formulated to be misunderstood, because this work towards awareness must not move forward but take a step back in order to gain distance and disconnect from the process of acceleration. Only hesitantly do we call the critical aspect of this mobilization theory after a classical model: the critique of political kinetics.
This critique claims the ugly and seemingly merely physical and subhuman concept of movement for the humanities, social sciences, and history in basic conceptual terms. We can only imagine what kind of reception the critique of political kinetics will receive when we recall what kinds of arguments and faces were made by the beautiful souls of the nineteenth century in response to the Marxist impertinence of accepting the term “work” as a funda- mental category of historical anthropology. All we know is that this time the Marxists have joined the beautiful souls and bourgeois pragmatists as part of the great coalition of mobilizers: the Marxists because they are the first to understand that the critique of kinetics is only possible from a post-Marxist position that views “dialectical materialism” as just a particularly faded form of modern mobili- zation folklore; the beautiful souls because they are at least not inspired by such an ugly theory while they engage in their favorite occupation, the dawn of a New Age and the Human Potential Movement; the pragmatists because they in any case suppress any thought that could even remotely question their axiom of economic growth at a rate of 3% per annum.
20 The Modern Age as Mobilization
Now, no one can be under the illusion that anything more can be called into question through a critique of political kinetics than just the growth rate of an industrial civilization that is racing – with the force of a train that’s been accelerating for centuries – into the unknown. Whoever raises the question of kinetics does no less than to call into play the problem of whether and how this train can be brought to a halt, or at least diverted somehow. And it is a matter not of whether individuals can get off the train (of course they can, provided they are the right kind of individuals), but of whether modernity as a whole can free itself from a way of being that is ontologically determined by the formula “being-towards-movement. ”
These questions are too fundamental to be left to fundamen- talists. Therefore, the critique of political kinetics exposes a working framework that can potentially be joined by every thinking and praxis that contributes in some way to the study of movement and to the exercise of the right kind of mobility. The critique of political kinetics will be a working title for the studies of a trans-disciplinary post-university “college. ” It can begin its exercises wherever the correctness of human and systemic movements needs to be examined. Like all other university-like entities, the trans-discipline for the awareness of movement requires power-neutral terrains to which the executives and stakeholders of the mobilizers have no access – it is the best tradition for the protection of theory since the European high Middle Ages. But since the operation of almost all currently active universities in this world has evolved into pre-schools of mobilization and cognitive subcontracting companies for the “attack of the present on the rest of all time,” the critique of political kinetics has to look for other spaces in order to hold its studies. Whether this will take place in the New Social Movements, the centers for alternative culture, para-academic start-ups – that is not a pressing matter for the time being, and besides, these are also not the only possible alternatives. It is pressing, however, that the trans-discipline of the critique of movement cultivate polyvalent new brains of the societies in which the knowledge of demobilization from a variety of fields is instantiated. For all of us who come from the mobilization process, this knowledge will seem difficult to handle, implausible, and frustrating because the critique of political kinetics can under no circumstance be the theoretical conscience of a “praxis. ” Some will say that its bizarre and absurd result is to describe real processes in such a way that initially there is “nothing to do” – inasmuch as all those who are eager for action will make fools of themselves before doing what is to be done first, before hesitating, before stepping back to perceive more precisely, before ceasing with what has always been
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done, before imperceptibly becoming open to the correct movement. We can guarantee that anything else will once again yield blind mobilization, however magnificent the slogans of action may sound.
Though critique of political kinetics has its basic starting point in post-Marxism, we may not extrapolate that it relates to the insights of the socialist tradition in a destructive way. What carries weight compared to that tradition is the expansion of the conceptual field from production to mobilization, on the one hand, and the amendment of the prognostic symptoms of kinetics, on the other. One has to make the effort to once again study The Communist Manifesto in the way the text has for a long time now deserved to be studied: as the Magna Carta of aggressive kinetic nihilism, in which modernity declared for the first time what it is and what it wants. But a critique of kinetics will no longer be able to participate in Marx’s euphoria in the face of the observation that in a world through which capital pulsates “all that is solid melts into air. ”10 In this phrase, we can completely hear Marx as a thinker of mobili- zation – it is not for nothing that he has provided half the world with rationalizations for making history. But he is also a thinker of mobilization because his great terminology machine – especially the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production – is only built for the purpose of demonstrating the blastability of the inert conditions that still offer oppositions to the unleashing of effective production and the ultimate evaporation of assets. Marx’s work- messianic vision is directed at a state of society where the activity of productive selves only has its own issues to deal with – removal of real resistance, total appropriation of the other, self-appropriating self-creation twenty-four hours a day. In its own way, a critique of political kinetics will indeed also know a “dialectic,” namely that of the forces and conditions of movement; only it will not lament the fact that the conditions “still” inhibit the full use of the forces but rather dryly note, if need be, that the forces of movement are in any case not too far from “evaporating” all conditions in which conven- tional movements on our part have been possible. The critique of kinetics, too, will point out – in accordance with its derivation of post-modernism from the effects of a second passivity – that there is a growing organic compound of the masses of self-movement and therefore also a tendentious decline of the advantages of movement, but it would never occur to it to prognose a “revolutionary situation” from these observations; similarly, catastrophe-loving speculations about the connection between total system collapse and the rising up of the masses are foreign to it. What this critique does emphasize is nothing more or less than a crisis-induced opportunity for an evolutionary recall of the false mobilization forays. 11
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Just as the percentage of fixed capital permanently proportionally increases in the capital process, so too the dead automated centrifugal masses continuously swell in the world-wide mobilization of systems and increase their dominance over the gestures of living mobility to the point of oppression. Moreover, the same is true of the independent scientific research companies where the self-movement of theoretical apparatuses ensures that the act of thinking plays as good as no role in relation to what is thought. These extraordinarily uncanny operations are expressed by the concept of automation as inadequately as by the term “alienation” – our classical vocabulary is of no help to us whatsoever in the face of such new process-related realities. Movement is the great unthinkable in our languages.
Considering all of this, we can anticipate the contours of what a critique of political kinetics might entail. It does the groundwork for a critical theory of modernity that could use expressions of movement to describe how mobilization problematically sublates all Old World stock through mobilization and to criticize it through exercises in demobilization. There is no indication that something of this sort will be successful – except the success itself, for which it is impossible to decree any indubitable criteria. In any case, the point of departure for this critique is the observation that the departure of modernity towards an independent conscious life for all has largely lost itself in a rather blind kinetic passing on of the sometime initiated process congeries. The cost of the impressive yields of modern possibilities for self-movement and self-actualization in many fields is an incalculable and increasingly unbearable self-surrender to the subsequent automatic, self-lapsing processes. If we are right to imagine the immediate future as a time when the growing risks of disaster rapidly actualize, it is because we can already formulate the basic kinetic scheme of every possible accidental disaster: they will be the hetero-mobile result of countless self-mobilizations. A singular and dark inevitability emerges from the interaction between countless automatizations. And as concerns our much-vaunted future from a systemic point of view, its secret lies entirely in the variations of this great inevitability. Among these variations, we can determine two kinds of extremes: one leads to a relative cessation of mobilization as a whole via the mutual deceler- ation of partial processes (a great commendation to the obstacles? ); the other drifts into the exponentiation of mobilizations through interactions to become an eco-kinetic inferno. And our process- consciousness? What role does it play in this world theater: that of the hero, the fool, or just a powerless audience member? If every- thing is really heading towards a fatal end, then our conscious self can take heart in the fact that it plays all the roles of the endgame
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at the same time so that it can be the audience of its own dramatic morphing from mobilization hero to process fool until the curtain falls. In the relatively benign version, on the other hand, subjects would be faced with a remarkable experience of themselves. In a time when modernity could save itself from itself, subjects, too, would stop moving as ontological agents of movement towards more movement. They would then know from their changed way of being that they are not the agents of mobilization but the “guardians” of real movement.
The Prospect of an Asian Renaissance: Towards a Theory of the Ancient
Wherever [the European] Mind prevails, there we witness the maximum of needs, the maximum of labor, capital and production, the maximum of ambition and power, the maximum transformation of external Nature, the maximum of relations and exchanges.
All these taken together are Europe, or the image of Europe.
Moreover, the source of this development, this astonishing superiority, is obviously the quality of the individual man, the average quality of Homo europeus. It is remarkable that the European is defined not by race, or language, or customs, but by his aims and the amplitude of his will.
Paul Valéry, “The European”12
It is an open secret among experts that for more than a hundred years now a large part of Western intelligence has been “Asianizing,” as they say. Therein, one could perceive an ironic game that an object of cognition plays with its subject. In the world of intelligences, the discoverer is always exposed to a counter-discovery by those who have been discovered. For the bourgeois world between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the interest in the East began under the sign of colonialism, which soon brought about an intel- lectual world trade. It was through the generation of early romantics that Asian imports were first brought to a theoretical level and incorporated into a generous synopsis of world cultures. A world conversation about world literature is what the cheerful mission statement of a romantic ecumenism proclaimed, in which Persian poetry and translations of the Upanishads were passed around as evidence of the actually metaphysical activity of the world soul.
But it did not end with philological flirtation. For the actual East, being discovered by another spirit turned out to be a date
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with destiny. What first began as discovery and then turned into conquest, mission, and instruction of the East soon pulled the old East into the mobilization of the planet along with it. Japan has given the world a model of self-liquidation in its final form, committing a seppuku for the sake of industry and history that will remain forever astonishing. Old Asia probably disappeared from the earth one day in the course of an epochal self-colonization, only surviving in the libraries of Western-inspired Indology, Sinology, Japanology, not unlike the way Old Europe has only survived in classical philology, medieval seminars, and period dramas.
This process must be formulated in an exaggerated way in order to correctly assess the Western Asian cult in all its strangeness. As the real East throws itself into industrial, scientific, political, and military mobilization in order to leave its old ways of thinking and being behind, the West is experiencing a cultural Asianizing for which there is no historical precedent – unless one wanted to accept the pervasion of the Roman Empire by Greco-Hellenic curricula as an analog. In this case, one would have to cite the cynical motif of conquering the conqueror; Horace’s Graecia capta ferocem victorem vincit is still on the tip of the last humanists’ tongues – after all, the verse (“Conquered Greece took prisoner her rough conquerer”13) proves how conspicuous it was even in a Roman setting to have a victor bow to the superiority of the vanquished.
Nevertheless, the topos of conquering the conqueror is not suitable for deciphering the inflation of Asianizing motifs in the current Western cultural scene. If we look through the historical arsenal for a prototype for current events, the only phenomenon that lives up to the occidental enthusiasm for Asia is that of a cultural renaissance. 14 We will argue in a moment that the phenomenon of “our” great Renaissance which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages can probably only be understood in light of today’s Asia cult.
Renaissances are visualizations of old culture in a new context. A Renaissance shows its genius in finding the ability to step into something entirely unprecedented under the cover of its enthusiasm for a prominent antiquity. The unprecedented newness can emerge precisely by drawing inspiration from a great precedent – it seems as if enthusiastic repetitions are the great vehicle of innovation. In this way, Renaissances always owe their prolificacy to a passionate misunderstanding of the old by a newness that does yet not speak its name. Only through an intense misrecognition do antiquities get brought back to a new life – one that is not their own, but rather the fluorescence of the still necessarily self-misrecognizing current life.
What the Grecomania of the Italian Renaissance and then again of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant for the
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self-forming of modern bourgeois society is by now culturo-histor- ically evident. But what it might have to do with the more recent Asiamania is still an unrevealed secret for most contemporaries – many come to take this (certainly conspicuous) phenomenon to be a fashion trend or an episodic exoticism. Thus, it would seem, they make good use of their fundamental right to live in ignorance of the major events of their time. But this does not change the fact that things are being negotiated in the Asiamanic phenomena of the present time which get to the heart of the world process, insofar as we are able to know something about it. When the West imagines itself to be in a sunken East and channels Asian antiquity as a master model of culture for life in the present, it is searching for possibilities of a future for itself within a foreign past. Nothing other than this was precisely the case back in the great European Renaissance, which rarely suspected the profound differences that separated it from its ancient Greek models. Today’s Asianizing Renaissance similarly delves deep into old Eastern worlds of wisdom to create pathways towards the new, the unprecedented, the inacces- sible for late modernity, whose corruption seems threatening, if not entirely incurable. For many, Asia is the cipher that offers shelter to a concept of the inconceivable.
Initially, we can draw four conclusions from this. The first is that a post-Christian era has begun within the Western hemisphere that could not possibly find the terms it would require to under- stand itself within the scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Following in the footsteps of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, the Young Conservative diagnostician Otto Petras already summarized this situation in 1935 in the form of a still impressive intention “to show that Christianity – the most formidable history-shaping movement of our time – has exhausted its formative power and that we live in a Post-Christianity understood in a deeper sense than the calendar’s AD. ”15
Secondly, modernity, thus left to its own devices – at least according to the conviction of skeptical interpreters – has used up its moral reserves and has no counterforces to deploy that could intercept its own fatal drift. Enlightened secularism, with its dual commitment to self-determination and large-scale technology, is disappearing, it seems, before our very eyes in global neglect – things run as they please and initial intentions are no longer of concern. Thirdly, the attempts of the last Central European generations to invoke livable forms of neopaganism from Germanic, Celtic, Greek, and Latin religious antiquities have proved to be straw fires that sometimes burned off with barbaric fumes and rarely on a level higher than that of spiritual party conversations. Thus, anyone who
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is interested likely knows that under present conditions one might perhaps make a rural commune with that homemade raw substance of Old European and pre-Christian elements, but no longer a terri- torial state. Fourth, a turn to the East (for Americans, it is not a turn anyway, but a continuation on their old Western course, only through water) brings into play no less than a world-cultural alter- native to the Greco-Judeo-Christian path that retains its quality as alternative even when the actual contemporary Eastern hemisphere modernizes itself beyond recognition by adopting Western mobili- zation techniques.
What does it indicate that in the crisis of late modern Western world this phenomenon – here referred to as an Asian renaissance – is interlaced with it? If a logic of the Renaissance really exists, then the new Asiamania should be read as a sign that creative members of post-Christian civilization hope to come to an understanding of themselves by grasping at antiquity once again – but this time not so that it can be appropriated as one’s own antiquity, but as antiquity in a foreign form. This time, the illusion of a “memory” of something that once belonged to us is not being sought. Today, an Asian antiquity rising to the rank of exemplarity has to do not with what is foreign or one’s own, but with the very spirit of the ancient as such. In other words, we have become so uncanny to ourselves through our modernization that the old, strange sounds of the Far East suddenly begin to sound like an old, familiar idiom. And although it is obviously not a native language that touches us so suggestively in this respect, it could – after many twists and turns – become a sister language to the mother tongue. To put it differ- ently, once again: the destruction of our own traditions by way of modern analytics has stripped our lives down to the stumps – that is, all the way down to the anonymous awareness of the fact that we find ourselves in a world that is both foreign and our own at the same time. This design-making awareness that is thrown into being can now learn the language of Buddha as well as that of Plato in order to clarify its strange position to itself insofar as it experiences every language as a foreign one. From now on, it only knows itself as that which cannot know itself and cannot name itself – and if it can, then only in the form of a persistent self-misrecognizing, of an essential theatricality. From the anonymousness of this existence, the path to Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu is no longer than the path to Parmenides or Augustine, the ascent to Plotin and Hegel no steeper than the one to Nagarjuna and Shankara, the path through Aristotle no drier than the one through Patanjali, the entry into the way of being of Meister Eckhardt no more mysterious than that of Master Dogen. Whether of Eastern or Western origin, the same
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exhausting improbability looms over these old names and doctrines, the same fascinating strangeness. Precisely because modernization has evaporated our Old European traditions and identities by way of progressive mobilization, the most foreign ancient tradition is no longer more foreign than the one that has until recently been our own.
It is in this context that the punchline of the Asian Renaissance in the modern West becomes clear: it makes us so pointedly aware of the question of the ancient preconditions of the modern enter- prise that while we can underestimate, misunderstand, combat, and disregard it, we can in the end no longer shake it off. As long as these times remain modern, they will be haunted by the question of the compatibility of human life processes and modernity itself. Since human culture is demonstrably very old and modernity very new and unsubstantiated, it is not a secondary task to find out if modernity is an outdoing of the ancient by the means of the modern or if its modernity puts a final end to antiquity. This question has become so urgent that the difference between the familiar and the foreign no longer plays any major role in these matters. Since the most foreign traditions are no longer more foreign to us than our own, it becomes clear how much our path towards the unparalleled has put all of the Old World nature and culture reserves up for negotiation. Because it is by now undeniable that a universalizing modernity exists in the form of “mobilization as such,” the question of “antiquity as such” pushes itself to the forefront almost violently. Then what is it that we take with us from antiquity on our trip into the unprecedented? Which dowries from the ancient world still create a link between past and future?