No More Learning

Apart from revealing aspects of human nature, the Romanian and Albanian tragicomedies presented the mythic essence ofthe capitalist conception ofwealth: the idea that the money used as capital possesses the property of a self-multiplying fiuidum—or that money as capital is a powerful amulet that promises the constant arrival of happiness assets to its wearers.
This phantasm does not lack support, even though the serious interpret- ers of the market economy, or rather the private-property economy, have for a long time warned about short circuits resulting from a purely specula- tive usage of money and referred to detached casino capitalism as a danger for the global economy in general. Indeed, the party that creates real value within the capitalist complex does not tire of emphasizing that the process of creating prosperity rests initially and, for the most part, exclusively on the artfully directed synergy of private property, cash generation, labor, organi- zation, and innovation, while all other transactions, in particular the purely monetized economy, will never be more'than smoke rings in virtual space. The party of easy gains, on the other hand, continues to hold onto the belief that enrichment is nothing other than the natural reward for engaging in speculative risk. For them, it is not labor and effort that result in wealth, although the necessity of labor and effort is not completely denied. Accord- ing to them, the true significance of wealth consists in demonstrating the sovereignty of Fortuna, who chooses those she favors and leaves the others with nothing. In a less mythological way of speaking, this means that who wins is right and who loses should not complain.
The mistake of the Albanians was thus not a complete misunderstand- ing of the facts of speculative capitalism. Rather, the Albanians succumbed to a late-socialist dream image that suggested to them that under the capi- talist system there could be a first prize for everyone. In their willingness to distance themselves from the phantom of socialist pride and, like the other members of the free world, prioritize desire, they committed them- selves to the new circumstances without ulterior motives. Because of their inability and unwillingness to come up with a realistic conception of where the desired gains were supposed to come from, they remained prisoners of their own past. It is beyond doubt that the feeling of being cut off from wealth and its distribution for too long played a role in the storm after the Ponzi schemes. After half a century in a dictatorship that spoon-fed them
195
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
grandiose phrases, the people finally wanted to take part in the satisfying injustices of the affluent world—even if someone else would have to pay the bill for the fantastic increase of their input. Just like everyone who followed the call of the popular Eros, the awakened Albanians were convinced that this time it was their turn to bring home the beautiful bride.
REAL CAPITALISM:
COLLAPSE DEFERRAL IN DYNAMIC SYSTEMS OF GREED
NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN MORE MISPLACED IN LIGHT OF THE Albanian mishap than the sarcasm of some Western observers toward "Shqiptar capitalism. " In reality, only a few party supporters of regular cap- italism are likely to be able to define the difference between the economic system they favor and a simple pyramid scheme. It cannot be denied that the phenomenon of a gain that one did not earn—or, more generally, of income without effort—is highly valued by long-time players of the capi- talist system. For the imaginary of modern national economies, the magic and irrational aspects of an uneven distribution of wealth have a signifi- cance that would have to be called archetypical, if the term did not have misleading depth-psychological connotations. The modern property econ- omy attracted a shining aura of happiness fantasies from the beginning, so that the term "Fortuna capitalism" would have been more appropriate. Non-European users grasped this imaginary dimension of the new eco- nomic processes within a short time. If the modern property and monetary economy—which is often called, with a slip of the tongue, capitalism— exerts, beyond cultural boundaries, a fascination that even overshadows its practical advantages, then the imaginary dimension derives without ques- tion from this source. Furthermore, the belief in the returning Fortuna, who promotes her beneficiaries via banks and stock exchanges, needs to be understood as a post-Christian reinterpretation of Protestant fantasies of being chosen—with the danger of thus disclosing the merciless essence of Calvinism, whose true face is expressed in the mystic obscenity of the feel- ing of closeness to God when time has come to an end.
The preconditions for the objective commensurability of regular capital- ism with a Ponzi scheme can be located in the undeniable fact that both models are credit-based systems of growth that are, for good or evil, depen- dent on extended reproduction. Both share a tendency to collapse, the regu- lation of which becomes constitutive for the system dynamics as a whole.
196
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
In the case of a pure Ponzi scheme, the collapse needs to occur relatively suddenly (or it needs to be brought about consciously) because the num- ber of momentarily recruitable payers necessarily becomes zero after only a few rounds—which is why, even with good camouflage, it is hardly possible to extend a game longer than a few years. Ponzi himself could extend his games for about nine months, his Eastern European successors for two years at most. Regular capitalism, which is based on industry and banks, distin- guishes itself, on the other hand, in that its players respond to fluctuations of interest rates with economic growth, which is primarily caused by the synergy of market expansion, product innovation, and technical rational- ization. Its modus of "fleeing ahead" is thus elastic, long-term, and familiar with crises. Its mode of operation includes creative and civilized behaviors. At times, it does not even shy away from revolutionary culture advances. To the amazement of its agents, the capital process has so far showed that it is capable of controlling tendencies that signal collapse even over larger volatility and stagnation phases. Today it can look back on a more or less coherent developmental process of approximately ten human generations, if one follows Immanuel Wallerstein in assuming that the global capitalist system had already emerged around 1500.
With regard to the achievement of the essentially ahistorical or purely futuristic capitalist system, it needs to be stated that it did bring about a his- torically of a special kind. Its general tendency was made mystical with the singular concept of "progress. " This does not really change the ironic rela- tionship between capitalism and the past. The entrepreneurially run world
9
talism confronts today's players and critics with a high standard of seri- ousness. This can be summarized by the thesis that capitalism provides a growth model for, in principle, an inexhaustible future power. In its name, it is expected that its actors participate in a life of permanent technical change, penetrated in all its domains by commodification and money trans- fer. The truth is that the future of the game does not look as promising as its boosters relentlessly claim. It suffices to read the popular term "sustain- ability" as a neurotic symptom of the self-doubt of the status quo. As the word demonstrates, the more thoughtful among today's economic experts already have a clear idea of what is incompatible within the system.
In fact, even non-Ponzi schemes (i. e. , the regular national economy in particular and the global economy in general) are unbalanced systems that
needs the past basically only to leave it behind.
Especially after the vanishing of the so-called socialist alternative, capi-
197
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
continuously have to cope with a significant degree of internal threat. Con- solidated capitalism can only compensate for its inherent tendency toward collapse (the first manifestation of which was the overproduction crisis that Marx describes) by taking the bull by the horns. What for today's customer is a proof of genuine business principles is rooted in the refinement of steer- ing instruments whose key mechanism needs to be identified as an "art of central banking. "10 This amounts to a process of making the unserious serious—expressed differently, a technology of decelerating breakdown. By raising and lowering the primary interest rates, a central bank pursues the task of minimizing the endemic risks of a crash by adjusting to an acceptable level the stress incurred by the interest rate. By making regulatory decisions, it orients itself according to the actual and expected results of economic achievements, that is, according to the sum total of the effects of market expansion, product innovation, and increased productivity. In this context, the notorious phrase "jumpstart the economy" means nothing other than decreasing the risk of insolvency for the units that are in debt. In the case of professional steering mechanisms, the pressure to settle debt on all levels of economic activity does not need to spell doom for the entire system, even though many businesses and private households might crash. In the big pic- ture, liability stress advances the economic process to new rejuvenations and increases.
The compulsion to expand and innovate, which is characteristic of the capitalist method of production, thus traces itself back to the artfully con-
11
fined but never fully eliminated Ponzi factor.
complex constitutes a global network of operations to relocate mountains of debt. But even the best-compensated Ponzi scheme cannot achieve more in the long run than postponing the moment of its demystification—at the very least until the moment in which the path of expansion is blocked because all new players who can be recruited have already entered the game. This might still be a distant possibility for our contemporary world, so that a final rush is for the moment not justified. The indeterminacy of the moment of disappointment can still be interpreted by the participants of the game, with a certain degree of justification, as the essential openness of the future. Nevertheless, those buying into the game should know the opinion of a minority of experts who claim that the openness effect—the unlimited ability to perpetuate the game under its present conditions—can hardly be sustained for more than a few decades. Other interpreters believe that the game will continue for a longer period of time, especially those who
198
The capitalist-economic
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
are optimistic enough to predict the exhaustion of fossil energies only for the twenty-second century.
During the almost one hundred years since Charles A. Ponzi's Boston coup of 1919, his psychological assumptions have not in any way been falsi- fied. It can be assumed that in general they characterize the psychomotor skills of the capitalist mode of production with a high degree of accuracy. In fact, a certain level of decision making based on the greed dynamic remains indispensible for the morally inconspicuous and economically solid mani- festations of the system. These basic decisions are motivated by strong ten- dencies of expansion that occur in the psycho-semantic economies of the players in increasingly more intensive ways—usually via a detour through cultural media, such as novels, theater, films, and TV. Mass media syner- gistically create a climate of increasing liberalization, and this wins over the long course against conservative reactions.
Because the quantitative expansion of monetary processes cannot be distinguished from qualitative changes in forms of life, ensembles of capi- talist players have to adapt to a permanently revisionist climate. What has been referred to as the Zeitgeist since 1800 cannot be imagined without the money spirit. However much one attempts to point out the polarity of money and spirit in the conservative milieu, in the big picture those poles are converging. The expectation of adaptation is manifested in the demand for "mobility" and "lifelong learning" with the aim of making professional biographies flexible and, at the same time, allowing for the highest possible degree of consumerism during old age—this is the point of the most recent introduction of propaganda for a California-style retirement capitalism in Germany. As much as serious values seem to be required in this constant movement, the global tendency of the game requires a continually increas- ing level of frivolity in player populations. Even under the most favorable of circumstances—when the welfare-state satisfaction of a population has been largely successful and the containment and stimulation of a capital econ- omy has been running smoothly in a country for a long enough period of time—the system requires the integration of a growing portion of the pop- ulation into more risky greed activities and offensive acts of carelessness— a circumstance only remotely captured by the expression "consumer soci- ety. " "Consumption" here refers to the willingness of clients to participate in credit-based pleasure-acceleration games—with the danger of spending a large portion of one's lifetime stuck with repayment. The secret of the consumerist lifestyle is concealed in the evocation in its participants of a
199
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
neo-aristocratic feeling of the complete appropriateness of luxury and extravagance. Under capitalism, an aristocrat is someone who does not need to reflect in order to know that he or she deserves only the best.
Greed is the affect that refers to the ontological assumption that it is pos- sible to sustain a permanent asymmetry between giving and taking. If taking gets the upper hand in a capitalist player for a long enough period of time, one usually calls it success. The common understanding of success sees it as a phenomenon of overcompensation—often accompanied by a tendency to repeat the unlikely. Stabilized overcompensation creates claims to elite sta- tus. Those who have been chronically overcompensated develop the talent of taking their premiums to be an appropriate toll for their effort—or, in the case of a lack of effort, for their mere eminent existence, or even for their physical appearance. Part of a fully developed greed system is typically also the elevation of being good-looking into a good reason for expecting over- compensation. It is characteristic of the unfolded greed culture that its agents assume that they will be compensated most for what they are responsible for least. It is not accidental that the "lookism," this religion of ingratitude, is on the rise globally. Youth culture has been announcing the good news for a long time that in order to be successful, it is enough to look like someone who is known through the mass media that sustain that very culture.
The capitalist form of eroticism unfolds bit by bit the paradox of an "over- compensation for everyone. " Through it the human right of greed without limits is proclaimed. Consequently, the market of appearance becomes the market of all markets—in it potential objects of desire are transformed into greed subjects by the drug of overcompensation. It is easily understandable why the last "class antagonism" under capitalism will be between those who are overcompensated and those who make a normal amount of money or very little. The reason this divide is nearly synonymous with the antagonism between the beautiful people and those who cannot earn with their appear- ance is somewhat more sophisticated. A definition of the word "people" in advanced capitalism would involve the mass of those excluded from overcompensation. These masses are certain not to get anything for their mere appearance.
THROUGH THEIR BEHAVIOR, THE ELITES OF GREED ADMIT THE potential for permanent lotteries—or at least for sufficiently long phases of success to provide the lucky ones with surpluses for the rest of their lives.
200
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
Generally, acute greed is accompanied by the feeling that one deserves more luck than one has so far received—one of the reasons it is not possible to determine internal limits for activities that are driven by greed. Few aspirants of Fortuna were willing during the capitalist centuries to state with Andrew Carnegie, "I have had far beyond my just share of life's blessings. "12
With regard to the unlucky Albanians and their initiation into the spirit of speculative capitalism, it needs to be noted that overall they could be lucky that things did not turn out worse. Apart from the approximately 2,000 bankruptcies of smaller companies, their nationwide losses turned out to be far less dramatic after the crisis than one would have feared. Those who escaped learned that the restructuring toward private property of a command economy could not be achieved through mere speculation. They learned what is a known fact for veterans of capitalism: everyday creation of value possesses a special kind of inertia that one cannot rush unpunished. If one wants to create wealth, one usually has to work for a while and abstain. However much the dream of making a fast buck is indispensable for the moving dynamic of capitalism, it presupposes a regular entrepreneurial cul- ture and a disciplined work world, which combine to take on a road that is only a little bit steep.
As already stated, regular capitalism, which knows how to content itself with profit rates earned in the real economy, is marked by the tension between the burden of interest and an increase in productivity—including all the psychopolitical factors without which the transformation of a given population into consumers capable of increasing demand does not work. While the pyramid crises in Eastern and Southern Europe could be traced back to an acute greed psychosis—and therefore to a sudden and rough eroticization of affective economies—it was necessary to instill deeper, more discreet, and chronically effective forms of eroticizing "society" dur- ing the subsequent consolidation phase.
By now we are in a position to understand why the psychodynamic mod- ernization of "societies" moved by money bears the face of eroticism: noth- ing less is on the agenda of economic modernity than using contemporary psychopolitics of desire imitation and calculating greed to replace the (only seemingly archaic) thymotic control of affect with (only seemingly irratio- nal) aspects that are incompatible with the market. This transformation cannot be achieved without a far-reaching depolarization of populations— and also without the progressive loss of the meaning of language in favor of the image and the number. In particular, classic leftist parties, insofar
201
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
as they are active as rage and dissidence banks, have to appear in this new climate as dysfunctional relics. They are condemned to struggle with ugly speeches against images of beautiful people and tables of solid numbers— an impossible task. Modernized parties of social democrats a la New Labor, on the other hand, move within the element of capitalist eroticism as sound as a bell—they ceased being pride and rage parties and acknowledged the primacy of appetites. Through the introduction of a Western culture of the standardized image, a depository of illusions is provided to the postcom- munist nations that addresses simultaneously erotic longing and the neces- sity of waiting.
In the course of the transformation there is, from the standpoint of moral history, a singular stimulation of wish rivalries between the partici- pants of the generalized games of desire. In Western populations the struc- tural transformation of desire took many centuries to come about—with a significant acceleration during the nineteenth century. This time has been characterized as the century of the operetta because the eroticization of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, which the Zeitgeist called for, created
13
its most effective medium in this genre.
social orders caused currents of rivalry and severe contests between the participants in court intrigues and leaders of trading concerns. Both were systems of action that were already characterized by emotional "modern- ization," notably by the consolidation of commerce and an intensifica- tion of the liaisons dangereuses, that is, strategic interactions. There was no historical formation, however, in which such a high degree of greed- and envy-driven competition was required as the unfolded "society" of mass consumption, which—after a more than hundred-year prelude—expanded triumphantly according to Euro-American models during the second half of the twentieth century around the globe.
These processes reveal that all modernizations culminate in a more or less dramatic revision of the form of morality authoritative since antiq- uity. Because today's systems no longer presuppose combative collectives but eroticized populations, they refrain from demanding the cancelation of the Old Testament's fifth commandment—one of the most characteristic traits of left fascism, which, as we have seen, returned in National Social- ism. These two formations of thymotic affect modeling called for resolute fighters and child-bearing mothers, not ambitious lovers and luxury con- sumers—in fact, British followers of the Communist International sang this song in the 1930s: "Let's liquidate love / Till the revolution / Until then love
202
The courtly and early-bourgeois
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
is / An un-bolshevik thing. "14 The primacy of combative values was self- evident for the activists, while Eros figured under the disdainful heading of "bourgeois luxury. " As long as killing enjoyed a priority over loving, the
15
spirit of revision was primarily directed against the fifth commandment.
In the advanced sphere of consumption, on the other hand, loving, wish- ing, and enjoying become the most important civic duties. Nowadays, the abstinence provisions and the prohibitions against envy in the Ten Com- mandments are what have to be bracketed and replaced by their reversals. While the tenth commandment states, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant" (Exodus 20:17), the first commandment of the new authorita-
tive law states: "Thou shall desire and enjoy whatever others present to you as a desirable goodr The second commandment reinforces the first: it is an imperative to exhibit oneself, which, in diametrical opposition to the rules of discretion of the tradition, elevates the open display of personal enjoy-
16
Thou shall not make a secret ofyour desires! It
ment to the status of a norm.
would be short-sighted to think that the effects of the exhibition principle are limited to the world of advertising and night clubs—the reality con- struction of subjective capitalism is in fact fully built on competitions for visibility. Visibility designates the possibilities of stimulating envy impulses in the worlds of commodities, money, knowledge, sports, and art. In order to compensate for the dangerous effects of the two disinhibition command- ments, the third and final commandment needs to claim: Thou shalt not make responsible anyone else but thyselffor potential disappointments during the contestfor access to the objects of desire and privileges of enjoyment!
DISPERSED DISSIDENCE:
THE MISANTHROPIC INTERNATIONAL
THE FOREGOING CONSIDERATIONS PRESENT A VARIETY OF CONDITIONS attesting to the impossibility of collecting and organizing contemporary rage and dissidence quanta in the neocapitalist heartland. The most important factor preventing this has already been referred to in passing: in the present, no movements and parties are visible that could once again take on the func- tions of a world bank for the utopian-prophetic use of thymotic impulses. In the absence of a successful collection point of rage with a perspective on what needs to be done, we are thus at the same time missing the theoretical standpoint from which consultations concerning truly global matters could
203
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
be carried out. Even though for years there has been a flood of moralizing remarks about the so-called globalization of the public sphere of the West and the newly industrialized countries, the sum total of the discourses does not suggest in the least the emergence of a new "organon"—unless one is willing to accept the global sociological divisions of the Pentagon and its staff members, concerned with the so-called war on terror as such. The same cir- cumstance is expressed by the thesis that, at this moment, there are no forms of positive apocalypse whose popularization would be capable of translating the potential collapse of currently successful social and economic systems into attractive visions for the time to come. Neither in Davos nor in Porto Allegre during recent years was there a convincing conversation concern- ing postcapitalist models. Put differently, this only proves that capitalism wants to be the entire culture. Thus it erects itself as the intransient horizon of the present. What comes after it has to be, according to its self-conception, only always again its own restless metamorphoses and euphoric exaggera- tions. Only the discourses of the solar movement and related antisystemic approaches contain projections that reveal a level of temporal depth, projec- tions that confront the dominant system with its inevitable end because of its dependence on fossil energies. Some of these projections only identify the reasons for the transition to a non-fossil-energy regime, while others advance
17
affect economy of capitalist democracies has already been, at least indirectly, touched upon: contemporary conditions, at least according to their general direction, defeat most variations of fundamentalist thinking—including the young Hegelian figures who present themselves as the practical real- izations of a thinking that "gets to the roots. " All forms of bearded theory have been excluded from the canon of the present. Typical bearded theories commented on the worldviews of their enemies from the standpoint of ide- ology critique (and operated on a second-order level of observation) but continued to use naive semantics to support their own cause—which puts them near the crudest systems of faith. They create the connection between thymotics and extremism, on the one hand, and extremism and monologic
18
A third reason for the diffusion of rage and protest potentials can be located in the change of its collection media and its organizing myths. While
to a horizon beyond capital economy.
The second main reason for the devaluation of vengeful impulses in the
thinking, on the other.
tions, it is only surprising for those who have themselves invested in the business of naivete.
If rage cannot lead to insight under such condi-
204
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
class-conscious proletarians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies already had the possibility of integrating local suffering and struggle into the epic of the workers' movement, perhaps even into the grand nar- rative about the advent of the revolution, today's rage carriers do not have a convincing narrative that could provide orientation or assign them a vital place in world affairs. In this situation, the return to ethnic or subcultural narratives is not surprising. If the latter are not available, they are replaced by local we-they constructions. Insofar as the dissatisfied of postmodernity cannot abreact their affects in different locations, the only available option is to escape to their own mirror image, which is provided by mass media as soon as scenes of violence attract public interest. The quick mirroring of self-inflicted excesses in the press and TV images may provide a momentary satisfaction for the actors. In some instances it might even symbolize a satis- factory proof of existence. However, it is precisely in such episodes that the medium wins over the content. This shows once again that the instruments of the "bourgeois public sphere" cannot function as collectors or as accu- mulation and cultivation media for thymotic subjects (which means that they are incapable of moderating the transformation of rage into pride and hope). It is beyond doubt that modern mass media possess the potential to initiate affective epidemics—topics that could spread according to the principle of viral infections. At the same time, the media neutralize topics in order to subject all events to the law of standardization. It is their demo- cratic mission to create indifference by eradicating the difference between major and minor matters.
Finally, a fourth motif for the political regression of the left culture of rage results from the conversion of money-directed civilization to the primacy of eroticism. The new commandment to love prescribes the love of goods that your neighbor enjoys as if they could become your own. Apparently this extensive commandment of enjoyment is hardly easier to live by than the Christian commandment of charity. Erotic pressure on the actors in a greed-dynamic "society" necessarily leads to a situation in which ever more irritated and isolated individuals find themselves surrounded by impos- sible offers for relationships. Because of chronic impositions of love, which have to result in failure because of limited means of access, an impulse to hate everything emerges, a hate that belongs to the siege by pseudo-objects. While collective systems of affect convert revolt into participation within the paradigm of postmodern irony, those dissident, angry, socially isolated, and linguistically impoverished impulses are captured by numbness. In this
205
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
situation the vandalistic relationship to impossible objects imposes itself as the most plausible one. Vandalism could be described as the negativity of the ignorant and thus as a form of rage that has given up once and for all any striving to understand.
THERE WAS NO EVENT IN THE MORE RECENT PAST IN WHICH THIS mechanism expressed itself more explicitly than in the Paris banlieue riots, which flamed up in late October 2005 and spread within a few days accord- ing to the rules of the media-rewarded imitation game to numerous cities or metropolitan areas in France. It was fully obvious that the unexpected explosions of violence by a group of exclusively male adolescents with Islamic Arab and Christian African origins were riots for the purpose of abreaction and provocative vandalism fun—that affective cocktail that the political hermeneutics of the hegemonic French center-left culture does not know how to deal with. Consequently, the Paris feuilleton was content with accessing the available language games, which are happy about every occa- sion in which they can quote themselves. ("They set cars on fire—we apply our favorite theories. ")
One thing was certain during all of this: none of the political parties could, nor wanted, to offer itself as gatherer or transformer of the emergent dirty energies. Yes, vague commitments to the obligations of a republican pedagogy could be heard, but nothing that would have pointed to a new strategy of a political use of rage. The only quick-witted interpreter of the psychopolitical situation was the then minister of the interior, Nicolas Sar- kozy, who bluntly referred to the rioters as "rabble" (racaille) who needed to be washed away with a power hose. Not only did he violate the rules of political beau parley, he also made clear that in line with the attitude of the new moral majority in the country, this time there would be no attempts of political integration, only uncompromising practices of elimination. It is possible that through this verbal outbreak a new paradigm of politi- cal semantics was born. The spokespersons of the center-right would thus have understood the postrepublican imperative according to which politics should not mean anything beyond a system of measures for militant con- sumer protection. On the rhetorical plane, the transition from social therapy to disposal of the abject is unmistakable—it expresses a current agreement between the conservative anxiety of a large stratum of the society and the neoliberal principle of being relentless, which the wealthy elite admits to.
206
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
This alliance is confronted by a left that is not capable, in either its postcom- munist or its social-democratic form, of developing appropriate measures
19
of rage collection and its investment in thymotically lucrative projects.
The weakness of the circulating ad hoc explanations for the unexpected eruptions of violence in France is revealed primarily by the fact that most of them attempted to identify the riots as mere momentous symbolic actions, though the interpretations of the symbolized affects varied significantly: depending on the inclination of the interpreter, they ranged from help- less anger through a subsequent need to revenge chronic humiliation up to manifestations of pure "pleasure in evil. " No less misleading is the allegation of some rightwing politicians that the burning of vehicles and buildings as
well as other acts of vandalism were planned, if not also controlled actions. In reality, the escalation of the violence goes back to occasional creations of rage objects, which were rewarded through feedback in the French mass media and with high attention and incentives for imitation. Assuming that this reconstruction of the events on the crucial night are fitting, the trigger- ing event consisted in the sudden dissemination of a rumor that the police had driven two suburban adolescents to their deaths on October 27, 2005. This suggestion (which turned out to be only half-true because there was no direct connection between the deaths of the young men and the persecution by the police) was sufficient to evoke a primitive us-them scenario among the numerous adolescents who were present. It quickly spread to other locations. The national police were naturally on the "they" side, as was, for understandable reasons, the eloquent minister of the interior. A confused complex arose that comprised people, symbols, and institutions in which
the strangeness and hostility of the French environment crystallized.
The formation of a negative object was, in spite of its vagueness, suffi- ciently articulated to evoke, in numerous adolescents and for several weeks, the belief that there was a real battle scene on which one could play. During the course of the riots in the streets of Clichy-sous-Bois, Le Blanc Mesnil, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and so on, one could witness a form of theatrical col- lection with a high power of attraction, even though there was no political management giving orders. An appropriate interpretation of this phenome- non transcends standard sociologies; it rather appears as if only the swarm- logical, medialogical, and mimetological descriptions would be capable of casting light on the rhythm of the events. At any rate, what was decisive for the rapid escalation of the riot was that the typical action on the fight- ing scene, the random burning of parked cars, presented a long-rehearsed
207
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
pattern, not to speak of the initiation qualities of a ritual. Through a strong influx of new players, the pattern of a communion suddenly entered the spotlight through destruction.
20
In a sharp commentary for the newspaper Liberation,
captured the essence of what was so scandalous about the scandal: it was only through the November riots that the French public became aware that in a series of cities in their country, an average of ninety cars were set on fire every night—during the course of 2005 alone there are said to have been more than 9,000 car burnings, of which approximately 2,800 took place during the banlieue riots and their provincial imitations. The peak of these pyromania games was reached during the night of November 7, when more than 1,400 cars burned across the entire country. Furthermore, the statis- tics for 2005 mention that until November, there were 17,500 arsons in gar- bage containers and almost 6,000 vandalistic acts against public telephone booths and bus stops. Although the sociology of the perpetrators presents a somewhat more complex depiction of the chronic attacks, there is a high measure of similarity between the actors of the acute riot and those of the chronic kindlings. In every case, we are dealing with the same angry young men into whose double misery of unemployment and excess adrenaline the explosive insight into their social superfluity was added. It would be careless not to want to understand that they are the potential recruits for any war, which provides them with a perspective for breaking out of the prison of their involuntary apathy.
Considering the daily arsons, which remained beneath the attention threshold of the media for years, Baudrillard sarcastically speaks of an eter- nal flame that burns in honor of the unknown immigrant, comparable to the flame at the Arc de Triomphe. The wild flames bear witness to the psy- chopolitical disasters of French "society," which cannot manage to com- municate to large portions of its Arabic and African immigrants and their children a consciousness of belonging to the political culture of the country. However, this is a mischaracterization of the situation; what is at stake here is not the French "political culture," whose splendors remain unseen by the angry adolescents. Rather, at stake are attractive social positions, which are impossible to get for the offspring of immigrants. When he asks, "Belonging to what? " Baudrillard already presupposes, with a provincial consciousness of detachment, that the republican ethos has vanished as a political force in French civil "society. " Regis Debray articulated a related diagnosis with a mediological-cultural-theoretical accent by diagnosing, not without a sense
208
Jean Baudrillard
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
of melancholy, the lack of an effective civil religion in France.
If his diag- nosis was correct, it would suggest nothing less than that the country has irrevocably entered a situation that bears not only post-Gaullist but also postrepublican characteristics. Baudrillard, on the other hand, reaches the provocative conclusion that the majority of the French already behave like insecure immigrants in their own country, immigrants who are plagued by resentment. They can only assert themselves as indigenous by discriminat- ing against other immigrants.
The excessive thesis according to which "society" has become a phantom collective to itself points to the psychopolitical consequences of capitalist
21
eroticization.
republican reserves of political culture in France would prove that its regen- erative capacities are in a better state than the witty pessimist commenta- tors would have it. This is confirmed by the protest strikes throughout the country that forced the government of Prime Minister Villepin in March 2006 to withdraw a law that loosened the job market for entering workers (Contrat premier embauche), a law that had already been passed by the national assembly. Then again, the protests prove that the French adoles- cents are at home in an illusory bubble in which they protect privileges as if they were basic rights. The current level of subversive mass eroticization also illustrates, to be sure, how strongly the traditional thymotic ensemble of people, nation, party, and confession has been weakened, partially even destroyed, through the politics of desire in popular capitalism. Through this politics, every individual is turned into a consumption citizen who—unless uplifted by family, cultural, and cooperative counter-forces—is increasingly fixed to poisoned loneliness within a doomed irritation of desire. When the French voted no in the referendum in May 2005 to the European Constitu- tion, they engaged, following Baudrillard, in an act that, according to its political and gestural content, constituted the exact equivalent of the riots of the nonintegrated in the suburbs. In a large majority, they behaved like ballot-arsons. They responded to the praised object, Europe, hardly less scornfully than the banlieue adolescents responded to the attractions of the French Republic.
It is quite likely that a more patient view of the democratic-
These observations, which are the basis of Baudrillard's and Debray's diagnoses, converge in a dark zone. They reveal an amorphous negativism whose phenomenology has been investigated sporadically for a long time while its therapy, as well as its politics, stagnates. In his 1993 essay Ausichten aufden Burgerkrieg (Expectations of civil war), Hans Magnus Enzensberger
209
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
cited a social worker from the banlieue in Paris who vividly described the vandalistic dynamic:
They have already destroyed everything, the mailboxes, the doors, the stair- cases. They have demolished and looted the polyclinic where their smaller brothers and sisters are treated forfree. They do not recognize any rules. They smash medical and dental clinics to bits and pieces arid destroy their schools.
22
ENZENSBERGER INCLUDES THESE OBSERVATIONS IN A PANORAMA OF scenes of shabby violence, which he sums up under the title "molecular civil war. " The typical gesture of this "war" and its "warriors" is the aimless dev- astation of the terrain, which only seemingly resembles "their own. " Such behaviors constitute, according to the author, an answer to the dark insight that speaks from all the images from the crowded camps and dismal sub- urbs: "we are too many. '" This dubbing has to upset its bearers. If these fig- ures, until then often inconspicuous and marginal, finally want to take the "abolishment of the superfluous" into their own hands while lashing out blindly, they do it because "they secretly count themselves among them. "23
The signs of a "molecular civil war" initially increase almost unnoticed: more garbage on the streets, smashed beer bottles on the avenues and side- walks, discarded needles in parks, monotonous graffiti everywhere "whose sole message is autism. " In time, the symptoms of destruction reach a critical threshold: smashed school furniture, cut wires, public telephones that have been made useless with pliers, cars set on fire—now it becomes clear that a basic language of disgust has put up a sign for itself. However, these are not traces of a "civil war. " To speak of a civil war, formed parties of fighters would have to face each other as confrontable realities. Instead, waves of pre-objective negativity enter the picture as vandalistic impro- visations, which attest to the inability of their bearers to act as citizens, even as fighting citizens. As Enzensberger lucidly remarks, in all of these features is an element of "anger about what is in fact," a form of "hatred against everything that functions," a grudge against the circumstance "that forms an insoluble amalgam with self-hatred. "24 At this time he had already attested on television to a complicity among all forms of practiced vandalism, which function "like one single huge graffiti" scribbled on the wall by vengeful semilunatics who know how to get on the evening news
If they are provided with a soccer field, they saw off the goal posts.
210
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
with the help of a few beer bottles filled with gasoline, a lighter, and will- ing cameramen.
What I have referred to as the language of disgust with how things are describes an epidemic of negativity in which the spread of what in former times was called "cultural malaise" advances to a riot in a failed civiliza- tion. This form of negativity has little in common with the forms of mor- ally articulable and politically collectable rage that I have addressed so far. Retrospectively, this spreading disgust makes clear the extent to which the traditional left—especially its Bolshevist wing but also its more liberal forms—can be blamed for anthropological and political negligence since it had always assumed that its members as well as the so-called masses indis- criminately affirmed a natural and ambivalence-free human community in large social associations.
The least that would need to be said about these primarily sociophobic assumptions is that they rest on a one-sided perspective. Realistically speak- ing, no social politics would ever possess the slightest prospect for success if it did not understand that the goal of social organization has to be to restrain the molestation of human beings by human beings. The collectivist remains of the twentieth century have violated this precept by inventing an unprecedented sadism of constipation: the most extreme maliciousness of the camp universes, as they have been created by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, does not so much consist in the fact that human beings were reduced to the status of "bare life," as Giorgio Agamben attempted to show in an exaggerated interpretation. Rather, the camp rests on the intuition that hell is always other people as soon as they are mutually forced into unwelcome proximity. In Huis clos, Sartre merely replaces macro-hell with micro-hell. If one shoves one's enemies together into a state of total coexistence, one is responsible for each individual being burned in the small flame of induced hostility against his kin. Only saints survive camp situations without being dehumanized. "Camp" is only a conventional name for the modern forges of misanthropy. Without considering the occult misanthropist substrate— which is only minimally concealed in the conviction that there is no need for human beings to be concerned for other human beings (Celine: "One asshole less")—the exterminist excesses of the more recent past would remain even more obscure, defying all previously attempted historical and psychological explanations. The proposition homo homini lupus loses its plausibility when considering these aspects. He who speaks of the twentieth century as the century of wolves still thinks too innocently.
211 *
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
The xenophobia of the right is only one of the signs of the misanthropic element, which cannot become visible as long as it persists in concretely identifiable forms, which are, eo ipso, its pseudonyms, its ideological gar- ments. Taking offense only at the political and ideological costumes of social disgust misses the essential misanthropic message. The more obscure aspects of the misanthropic mood are systematically ignored. In reality, the sociophobic-misanthropic tendency is endemic to the left as well as the right. In all opportune idioms it rages against the imposition of coexisting with whomever and whatever. It is only with the epidemically amorphous vandalism that the negative primordial soup surfaces. With it a primary, unblended, and unmitigated misanthropy, the abysmal aversion to the social world and society, and even to the existence of the world in general, becomes identifiable as radical behavior. Hereby it becomes apparent how misanthropy itself is the special form of an amorphous negativity that could be determined with concepts such as misocosmics or misontics: animosities against the world and what exists in the world as a whole. It brings out the aversion to the imposition of existence and coexistence as such.
Rage is encountered in mollusk-like upsurges of this kind at the zero point of articulation. After its relapse to the level of diffuse universal aver- sion, it relinquishes any kind of collectability, transformability, and culti- vatability. It simply no longer remembers anything concerning the close connections among sensitivity for values, legal sensitivity, and a capabil- ity for indignation—the matrix of democratic cultures of irritation. It now seems sunken to a sub-thymotic level from which point there is no initia-
25
tory power to redeem one's own value and claims.
of the darkest form of rage, there lies, diffuse and inarticulable, the desire for an end of humiliation through the real. We are dealing with an extrem- ism of fatigue—a radical apathy that refrains from any attempt at form or cultivation. Its agents would in reality prefer not to lift a finger, as if playing dead could be the means of escaping the prison of failures. When they try to smash whatever happens to get close to them, it happens as if in a foreign tongue of gestures, the meaning of which not even they believe. To these extremists of tedium, their own massive quantity means nothing. They do not want to know that they could perhaps be the strongest of parties—if they could unify and take action for something in their own interests.
This International of human tedium exists in continuous self-dissolu- tion. Every night it decays in millions of isolated anestheticizations; every morning it formlessly erases itself and all its concerns from the day's menu.
212
At the "foundation"
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
No constitutive assembly would be able to provide form and content to this excessive protest against the actual state of affairs. Wherever fragmentary gatherings occur, one recognizes the theses of the actors in broken glass, wreckage, and burned metal the day after. It is not surprising that the mem- bers of this impossible International do not feel addressed by the thought of an organized gathering at all. Every form of purposive cooperation with them would mean a step toward transcendence, not being weary, not being vanquished. Not taking this step is their most intimate revenge against the status quo.
THE GLOBAL THEATER OF THREATS
TO END, ALLOW ME TO ENGAGE IN A PANORAMIC VIEW IN THE STYLE of a world-historical investigation to look back at the fate of the thymotic during the last two hundred years and situate it against the background of the two monotheistic millennia. What will become clear is that the two most powerful organs of metaphysical and political rage collection in West- ern civilization, the Catholic teachings concerning the wrath of God and the communist organization of antibourgeois and anticapitalist rage masses, have not mastered the challenges of the time and the change in mentality.
Catholicism only survived the advance of modernity for the price of a reluctant accommodation to the present day, an accommodation that lasted for more than two centuries. During this long period it indulged in gestures of denial that in some aspects closely resemble the theocentric antimodern- ism of an Islamist type, which we know from contemporary sources. During its period of defiance it ravaged the hubris of the moderns longing to make religion into a private affair. It rebelled zealously against the tendencies to create a deliberately lay state culture or one that was distanced and neutral with regard to religion. However, the change in the basic attitude of Cathol- icism could not be avoided, even though it was not brought about before the second half of the twentieth century. It brought with it a profound theo- logical conversion: in order to be able to make peace with modernity, Rome needed to distance itself from what before seemed to be nonnegotiable anti- humanist and antiliberal traditions, which were rooted in the absolutism of God's law. The transformation reached a point at which Catholic theology defined itself as an "organon" for a more profound justification of human rights. Naturally this brought with it the surrender or degrading intimi- dation of the believers through apocalyptic threats and dreadful Dies irae
213
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
pronouncements. Subsequently, the time-honored teachings of the wrath of God and images of a revenging Judgment Day at the end of time were withdrawn from within the Church—they have been degraded to the status of curiosities that one inspects as one would a metaphysical horror genre, assuming that one can still find an interest in them.
When it comes to communism's attempt to create a global collection point for thymotic energies with globally convincing human dividends, the disappointed and exasperated elderly witnesses of that spooky epoch are still too close to it to explain why any thought of an "improved" taking-up of similar experiments means for them pure stupidity. In the eyes of those who were born later, the communist adventure already appears like a dark curiosity. It seems to be as gothic as the forgotten Catholic eschatology.
I have addressed the themes, procedures, and promises of the two big rage collectives in the second and third chapters of this book. The effects of its dissolution were addressed in the first chapter, in which the free-floating rage in the early post-Christian situation was sketched out, and this fourth chapter focuses on the political homelessness of rage in the postcommunist situation. I did not pursue the possible and actual relationships between Catholicism and communism—in fact it would have been plausible to por- tray communism as the secularized form of Christian rage theology, even as a materialistic translation of the idea of the kingdom of God. Let us thus rest content here with the remark that communism did indeed share many characteristics of a second Catholicism. If in 1848 it was claimed with a tone of triumphant satisfaction that a specter was haunting Europe, which ter- rorized and frightened all governments between Paris and St. Petersburg, this phrase signaled that one was in a situation "after the death of God," a situation in which the function of the world's court of judgment—apart from numerous other professions of God—had to be passed on to secu- lar agencies. Under the circumstances, early communism was best suited to claim this heritage. The "spectral" character of this movement, which Jacques Derrida highlights in Specters of Marx, to which I have repeatedly referred, was, to be sure, not so much attributable to the fact that commu- nism presented a rationalist Utopia, as Derrida suggests, that is, a thought that could never emerge as a manifestation of flesh and blood. What made ascending communism spooky and what lent it the power to attract the paranoid reflexes of its adversaries was its ability, which could be detected early, to convincingly threaten the status quo with its downfall. When it had lost its capacity to threaten, it was finished as a ghost as well—and no
214
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
animation of philosophical congresses will provide the hollow pumpkin with new haunting power.
After the collapse of communism the business of world-directed revenge and, generally speaking, the business of a universal balance of suffering had to slip out of the hands of human agencies. Consequently there were good reasons the Catholic Church could present itself as authentic after the fall of communism, even as the soul of an authentic and spiritual communism. To see and seize this opportunity was Karol Wojtyla's theatrical message. The Catholic message, of course, includes the return to the classical mor- ally conservative attitude according to which the man of the present would need to free himself from rage and revolt in order to rediscover what he had lost as a consequence of the events of 1789: patience and humility. What is most of the time overlooked concerning these recommendations is that highly praised virtues stand on shaky grounds if they are not supported by the threatening force of a convincingly delivered theology of the Day of Judgment.
These remarks suggest that Hegel's figure of a cunningness of reason still has a certain pragmatic appeal, however ascetic the expectations of a hid- den reason in history might be today. If one had to step back to sum up the achievements of communism, one would most importantly mention its external effects, which many times surpassed its internal effects in terms of productivity. These external effects were, to be sure, so paradoxical that they were hardly ever addressed. It is not necessary here to once again call to mind the much-appreciated efforts of the Soviet Union in the war on the armies of the National Socialist invader. The most important external effect of communism unfolded only after 1945, when an unprecedented chance opened up to expand the European welfare-state system against the back- ground of the saber-rattling regime of Stalin and its Middle and West Euro- pean outposts.
It is ironic that the communist world bank of rage achieved its most important success in the form of an unintended side effect. By accumulat- ing a truly intimidating political and ideological threat potential, it helped its former main adversaries, the Western, moderate socialists and social democrats, to reach the high point of their historical ability. It made it easy for the parliamentarily integrated socialist parties in Europe to extort an unprecedented amount of concessions from the liberal and conservative managers of capital in redistributing wealth and extending social networks. Within this constellation, it seemed plausible to the social partners of the
215
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
Western world to transform large parts of their national industries, in par- ticular in France and Great Britain, to government control.
If it is correct to say that sovereignty refers to the capacity to convincingly threaten someone, then it is also true that the Western workers' parties and unions achieved their highest effects of sovereignty because of an indirect threat of class struggle, which they were able to include in the negotiations of the bargaining parties without having to clench the fist themselves. It suf- ficed for them to consider the realities ofthe Second World to make it clear to the employers that social peace has its price. It can be asserted without exag- geration that the social achievements of postwar Europe, in particular the often-cited Rhenish form of capitalism with its extensively extended welfare state and the excessive culture of therapy, were presents from Stalinism— grapes of wrath that, it needs to be said, could only ripen and taste sweet after being exported to a freer climate.
The expenditures for social peace in the West needed to be recalculated from scratch when the threat potential of the left irresistibly continued to decline—not least because the Soviet Union was increasingly difficult to take seriously as a threat to the West. The ultimate phase of the Brezhnev era was the latest that the preconditions for some kind of successful missionary and expansionist activity from Moscow existed. Maoism outside of China never meant more than a straw fire of peasant romanticism in the Third World (think of Che Guevara's confused excursions to Africa and Bolivia) and the waywardness of wealth in Western universities. It was already evi- dent that the East—because of its dogmatic ignorance of the question of property—could not possibly win the confrontation between competing systems. Furthermore, the Russian army provided the proof during its futile ten-year campaign against the Afghan franc-tireurs, who were supported by the United States (1979-1989), how little it was able to live up to its former reputation.
Under these circumstances, the organs of the workers of the West lost their privilege of profiting from the fear of communism from the perspec- tive of capital without any effort. The liberal-conservative camp was able to understand: during the wage-negotiation talks it sat next to a debilitated, if not degenerated, counterpart. On the one hand, the latter was out of shape because of its relative level of saturation; on the other hand, it succumbed to a creeping paralysis that resulted from the ideological deflation of the left.
Since the early 1980s, this sense of exhaustion has determined the psy- chopolitical atmosphere of the West—its results multiply with the climate-
216
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
changing fallout of September 11. It appears that a neo-authoritarian turn of capitalism with a liberal-bellicist background is more and more likely. The year 1979 needs to be seen from today's perspective as the key time of the twentieth century. The entry into the postcommunist situation begins then in a threefold sense: the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union after the invasion of its armies into Afghanistan, the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher, and the consolidation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini.
What is called neoliberalism was in fact nothing but a recalculation of the costs of inner peace in the countries of European capitalist and social- democratic "mixed economy" or of American-style "regulatory capital- ism. "26 This necessarily led to the result that Western entrepreneurialism had paid too high a price to attain social peace under passing political and ideological pressure from the East. The time for cost-reducing measures had come, measures that aimed to switch priorities from the primacy of full employment to that of corporate dynamics. In fact, a downright reversal of the Zeitgeist was brought about: it moved ever quicker away from the revolting and control-centered ethics of comfort during the decades after the war (which survived only in France) in order to give preference to a neo-entrepreneurial risk ethic.
The "market revolution" in Great Britain, which was designed by Joseph Keith and, starting in 1979, realized by Margaret Thatcher (a revolution that would soon spread to the Continent and large parts of the Western world, especially Reagan's and Clinton's America), makes clear how precisely the above diagnosis captures the situation and how radical were the conse^ quences that are to be drawn from it. This shows itself most strikingly in the permanent trend of neoliberalism—the long march to mass unemployment that has set the tone from a social-political perspective. The new circum- stances brought with it what could have hardly been imagined until then: unemployment rates of 10 percent and more are accepted more or less with- out a fight by the populations of European nations—even the increasingly visible decrease of welfare benefits has so far not provokes a flaring-up of the fire of class struggle. The relationships of sovereignty have been reversed overnight: organizations of employees have little power to threaten, because the privilege to threaten has, rather one-sidedly, passed onto the business side. The latter can now plausibly claim that everything will become much worse if the other side refuses to understand and abide by the new rules of the game.
217
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
THE THIRD COLLECTION: CAN POLITICAL ISLAM SET UP A NEW WORLD BANK OF DISSIDENCE?
IT IS NECESSARY TO KEEP THIS SCENARIO IN MIND IN ORDER TO understand the conditions under which Islamic terrorism could celebrate its rise to become a power with the capacity to exert threats. Initially, the Islamists did not seem to be more than parasites of the postcommunist constellation. No one would have thought at the time of Islamism's first appearance that one was witnessing something like a third Catholicism or an Eastern alternative to communism. Nevertheless, day by day the Islamist activists successfully imposed themselves as the new enemy of the West, ini- tially the United States, and then helpless Europe. In this role they have been interpreted ambivalently from the beginning. For tragic-minded polit- ical scientists, who are convinced of the need to always have an enemy, the anger of Islamism seemed like a present from heaven. Although Islamism was initially not especially dangerous in a material sense (as long as its agents did not gain access to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons and the control of migration remained sufficiently strict), it keeps the psycho- political tone of irritated collectives in the West at the desired level. For the adherents of the liberal idyll, on the other hand, Islamist terror remains an unwelcome guest—a crazy graffiti sprayer who disfigures the facades of enemy-free societies with obscene messages.
However one may evaluate the ambivalent reception of the new terror by its Western addressees, it would never have advanced beyond the level of an irritating marginal phenomenon if it had not become an interesting asset in the recalculation of the costs for social peace in Western societ- ies. While the communist threat led to a significant increase in the social costs of peace, the threat of Islamist terror brings with it, at the bottom line, effects that help lower the costs. By exerting imaginary stressful pressure on the attacked collective, it contributes to a feeling of belonging to a real com- munity, a belonging based on solidarity, a survival unit wrestling for its own future in spite of recently severely deepened social differences. Addition- ally, the new terror creates, because of its undifferentiated hostility against Western forms of life, a climate of diffuse intimidation in which questions of political and existential security enjoy high priority over those of social justice—quod erat operandum.
With the exaggeration of the securitarian imperative to the level of being the omnipotent theme of contemporary media democracies, the Zeitgeist
218
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
readjusted itself after September 11, 2001, to a new ecosystem of threats and
defense mechanisms—while, this time, as frivolously as it might sound, the
threat tendencies of Islamist terror in general point "in the right direction"
when seen from the perspective of radicalized capitalism. To feel threatened
by the Middle Eastern sources now means to see reasons why one could
perhaps be ready to make peace with the drifting away of Western politi-
cal culture into postdemocratic conditions. The "war on terror" possesses
the ideal quality of not being able to be won—and thus never having to be
ended. These prospects suggest that the postdemocratic trends will enjoy a
long life. They create the preconditions with which democratically elected
leaders can get away with presenting themselves as commanders in chief. If
political thinking limits itself to advising the commander in chief, concepts
such as democracy and independent judiciary cultures are only chips in a
27
tration illustrates these relations with an abundance of unmistakable exam- ples. Within a few years the world became witness to how a democracy that is proud of its culture of dissent experienced a sudden extinction of political diversity of opinion because it was exposed to the knowingly and willingly induced fiction of a struggle for survival, which needed to be waged by the entire nation. The political field of the nation was influenced by homog- enizing forces. Reminiscent of real wars, in this drole de guerre there was a paralyzing of inner opposition through the patriotic imperative. This devel- opment to a large extent results from the work of the neoconservatives in the United States, who do not hesitate to proudly conjure up the specter of "World War IV,"28 to suffocate, wherever possible, every sign of a new opposition in light of growing social inequalities.
An investigation of the redistribution of threat potentials on the geo- political maps of the present raises the question of how the much-discussed Islamic danger is to be understood. By which media does it affect the psy- chopolitical system of the West and the Islamic countries? Does it really have the potential to "replace communism as the world dogma," as one can hear it in radical Islamic circles between Khartoum and Karachi for the last decade, and not only from behind closed doors? 29 The new specter, which is haunting Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world—from where does it take its power to threaten the leaders of the established pow- ers? Can political Islam—whether appearing with a terroristic component or without—unfold itself to become an alternative world bank of rage? Will it
strategic game.
The psychopolitical fate of the United States during the Bush adminis-
219
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
become a globally attractive collection point of antisystemic or postcapital- ist energies? Can Islamism be used for the continuation of the weary West- ern grand narratives concerning the uprising of the debased and humili- ated against their masters, old and new? Does it suffice to meditate on the concept of jihad as long as it turns into a pseudonym for class struggle? Or do the fronts, which emerge from the eruptions of the Islamic world, not possess a sense of obstinacy that can only be reconciled with Western forms of the narrative of continuing revolution, universalizing emancipation, and progressive realization of human rights at the price of misunderstandings and distortions.
What qualifies political Islam as a potential successor to communism are three advantages, which can be analogously identified with historical com- munism. The first is the fact that an inspiring mission dynamic is inherent to Islamism, a dynamic that predisposes it to become a quickly swelling col- lective of new converts, that is, a "movement" in the narrow sense of the term. It is not only the case that it quasi-universally addresses "all" without discriminating on the basis of nations and social classes. It attracts especially the disadvantaged, undecided, and outraged (insofar as they are not female, and sometimes even those). It does so by presenting itself as the advocate of the spiritually and materially neglected poor and by gaining sympathies as the heart in a heartless world. The low preconditions of admission play an impor- tant part here. As soon as a person has been admitted to the ranks of believ- ers, he is immediately usable for the purpose of the fighting community— in some cases to be immediately used as a martyr. By plunging into a vibrant community, newcomers are often given for the first time the feeling of hav- ing found a home and of not playing an equal and detached spectator but a particular role in the dramas of the world.
The second attraction of political Islam emanates from the fact that it— in a way only preceded by communism—is capable of offering its followers a clear, aggressive, and grandiosely theatrical "worldview" that rests on a clear differentiation of friend and enemy, an unmistakable mission to win, and an exhilaratingly Utopian final vision: the reconstitution of the global emirate, which is supposed to provide a shelter for the Islamic millennium, stretched out from Andalusia to the far East. With it the figure of the class enemy is replaced with that of the enemy of the faith, and class struggle is replaced by holy war—while keeping the dualistic schema of a war of prin- ciples, it demands a necessarily long war rich in casualties. As usual, in its last battle the party of the good is destined to win.
220
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
It can easily be seen that when it is used for political purposes, so-called fundamentalism is less of a matter of faith than an appeal to act or, more specifically, a matter of providing roles through which great numbers of potential actors are put into a position in which they can move from the- ory to praxis—or rather from frustration to praxis. In general it is true what demographic research has brought to light: "religion provides . . . additional oil for a fire whose original fuel does not come from it. "30 As a matrix of radical activations, Islam is on a par with historical communism; perhaps it is even superior because it can present itself with regard to its culture of origin not as a movement of radical rupture but as one of a revo- lutionary reestablishment.
The third and politically most important reason for the inevitably grow- ing dramatics of political Islam (even if at this hour, after a series of defeats, it seems to have lost quite a bit of its initial attraction) results from the demographic dynamic of its field of recruitment. Just like the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, it is essentially a youth movement or, more specifically, a movement of young men. Its verve to a large degree results from the excess of vitality of an unstoppable giant wave of unem- ployed and, socially speaking, hopeless male adolescents between the ages of fifteen and thirty—in their majority second, third, and fourth sons, who can enact their futile rage only by participating in the next best aggression programs. By creating in their base countries counter-worlds to the existing one, Islamic organizations create a grid of alternative positions in which angry, ambitious young men can feel important—including the impulse to attack both close and faraway enemies today rather than tomorrow.
These numerically enormous groups constitute the natural allegiance of agitators from the elder generation, whose sermons derive their content almost automatically from the willingness among the members of their congregation to be outraged—whereas the Islamic tradition only provides the semantic forms to add captions to real anger and violence tensions. As in a laboratory experiment, it was possible to observe these conditions dur- ing a scheme to create "spontaneous riots" because of the Danish carica- tures of Mohammed in February 2006. While politically correct Europeans agonized over how to apologize to allegedly or actually offended Muslims, anonymous activists in Iraq continued to turn the wheel of provocation or, even better, the wheel of combative self-stimulation a bit further by way of destroying the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the most important Shiite sacred buildings in the north of Baghdad. They destroyed it with a
221
THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
bomb attack, which led to dozens of Sunni houses of worship being dev- astated during counterattacks. These events speak a clear language. They reveal more about the hunger for a triggering event among the groups who are ready to attack than about an allegedly inevitable clash of civilizations. The agitators would feel sorry if they had to realize that the external cata- lysts were in fact sorry.
From this perspective it is legitimate to claim that Islam, in its Islamist variation, could transform itself to become a religious readymade excel-
31
Its suitability comes from characteristics of
lent for mobilizing purposes.
Muslim dogmatic theology that from the start were publicly committed to the war against "infidels. " The unprepared reader of the Koran has to be amazed about how it is possible that a sacred book is not afraid to repudiate itself when almost on every page it threatens the enemies of the prophet and of the faith with suffering in the eternal flames. The explanations of schol- ars hardly help to get over this estrangement, even if they try to trace the polemical passages of the Koran back to their historical context: the prophet engages in these passages in a form of early-socialist criticism against the wealthy of his time, the arrogant and ruthless merchants from Mecca who did not want to hear anything anymore about the egalitarian and gener- ous values of the old Arab tribal culture. Mohammed's teachings, scholars argue, ties in with these values as it commits his followers to caring for the weak. The initially plausible reference to the monotheistic privilege of zeal- ousness both for God and against the infidels fails to provide a sufficient explanation. It is just as evident to claim that no human being would want to concern himself with the opaque passages in the Koran if it were not for the fact that millions of aggressive gangs of searchers for God choose their words so to fit their coming deeds (while the comparably heated passages of the psalms of rage in the Old Testament have left the small audience of churches and synagogues cold for a long time).