No More Learning

Recognizing oneself means not determining an identity, but becoming aware of a disproportionality.
If someone was to believe that the path inward attests to a secret image of the self, they would be proven wrong through self-knowledge.
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What remains of the pathos of reason that should have told us what we are? The imperative of wisdom “Know thyself! ” transforms into the existential motto “Be yourself! ” This is a cavalier ontological motto that allows every relative to be whatever they wish if they just think that being means being from the best family. In the small village of being, this is the local rightness that gives human behavior a benchmark. But aside from its uplifting effect, the phrase “Be yourself! ” is a bit too weak for practical guidance in this area. The cavalier concept of reasonableness does not yet help one get through the adventurous daily routine. Then the advice goes on to say that to be yourself, you must also help yourself and let others help you. From here, we are not too far away from a paramedic concept of reason as first aid, where what is right is that which counters the urgent first. This corresponds most closely to the accidental nature of historical life. But existence consists not only of its accidents but also of its successes. Be yourself thus means “Invent yourself! ” This is answered by the poetic concept of reason where what is right is what agrees to the unique opportunity of life. As René Char says: “Only one perk is given to us together with death: to create art before it comes” (“Nous n’avons qu’une ressource avec la mort: faire de l’art avant elle”). 5
6
AFTER MODERNITY
HAMM [anguished]: What’s happening, what’s happening? CLOV: Something is taking its course.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame1 The Age of the Epilogue
In recent times, the prefix “after” has made a noteworthy career for itself. Hardly any article or feature supplement would be considered up to date without it. In the form of the Latin “post,” more recent cultural criticism is speckled with it; it emits a flair of elegant reflex- ivity; it suggests that something is happening because something else is over; its property includes a consciousness that has seen many worlds come and go, including those that wanted to become a beautiful new one. Used correctly, the prefix pushes the past away as if it were a position that has become untenable. In one sentence, it jumps into a present that can always claim to come after the past. We do not know much of this past, and yet it is a unique feeling to have it be behind us. A small “after” and world ages become outdated. Post-modernity – it has a strange ring to it. Never before did someone give such a cold goodbye to yesterday. With just one prefix, you are ahead of your epoch. What does this tell us?
The career of the prefix “after” suggests that although shocking things happen, we no longer have a conception of history at our disposal that would allow the present to date itself. Since the general impression that history has no road map is spreading, we feel our way forward through a processual no man’s land. The unleashed realities seem to be neither communicable nor predictable – never
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mind the idea of subsuming them under a historico-philosophical schema. And no specific epoch name seems to fit the present either; we can’t even clearly distinguish epochs and trends. You might get the impression that the matter of reality is itself changing and evaporating into something unimaginable.
For this reason, post-modernity cannot be the term for an epoch with any kind of claim to historico-philosophical materiality, but only an index for increases in reflection. But what increases with this reflection is only the sobering effect of contemplation and nothing more. Post-modern reflexivity does not lead to peaks where a self-made and self-satisfied consciousness can look down onto its age, having made the climb. Expansive views, cross-sections, panoramas – who wouldn’t like them, and with them the ecstasy of the broad context, the summit experience that can capture its age in thought? But when thinking goes about its task today, it is not in the mood for summit expeditions – it remains completely post-conceptual and post-culminating, it abstains from the old ascension fantasies that would have us characterize the processes in social and logical reality with progressive-alpine metaphors. Process and progress only have a deceptive rhyme in common, and post-modernity does not set much in store for it. Sure, we continue to advance, but not upward – that is the quintessence of post- progressive reflections on the relationship between mind and time – and this confirms that pre-modern spirits are also to be found in the post-modern hustle and bustle for whom the wheel of fortune makes far more sense as a symbol for historic time than a ladder of progress. Those who live later do not know better – this fact marks the end of the historical experiment that wanted to force the truth to increasingly “stand out” over time. What has really emerged in the course of the experiment is precisely that it is by no means certain that a later knowledge is the better one.
Post-modern feelings of process are not those of people that believe that they are going uphill historically. They are more likely to be the sensations of passers-by on an escalator where you make automatic progress, whether you abide by the rule to stand to the right or to walk to the left. As long as you are on the escalator, it constantly proceeds forward in one direction – but comparing an escalator with the idea of progress would be an overinterpretation, to say the least. The spatial and kinetic metaphors of the Old Enlightenment no longer belong here, and the concept of ascension is also unsuitable for marking location differences on escalators. If one rolls down, the other rolls further up; the distance between the two has no evolutionary purpose and cannot translate into a leading edge for the top-rolling one, even if it seems to be the one that has
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gotten “further” – further to the “height of the age,” whose high position amounts to being here and now, and nothing else.
Ever since progress has become automatic, optimism about the future has transformed into process melancholy. We are no longer driving out of Genoa into modernity; we are rolling on a conveyor belt into the unpredictable. Our own movement hardly counts compared to the total bulk of movement, and the steps that the individual can take on their section of the escalator disappear almost without trace in the rolling whole. Furthermore, although no one knows where the escalator leads, it’s hard to suppress the thought that even the longest conveyor belt must eventually end and throw its passengers off.
Since all this has become entrenched into a modern “order of things,” briefings on the escalator have become a mass necessity. One has to fear that today’s cultural enterprise is no longer much more than the sum of the intellectual hobbies of escalator riders. Even these hobbies are now so imbued with their own automatism that it makes little difference whether someone moves affirmatively or criti- cally on this escalator – indeed, one can even move revolutionarily. There has been no effective difference between the movement of the escalator and the cultural manifestations on it for a long time now, because the field of culture as a market of differences is itself entirely organized like an escalator. Through its motor activity, the things of yesterday are constantly de-actualized; from the gesture of de-actualization itself, a new actuality is launched and already overthrown in its design stage, one volatility chasing the other.
The gesture that corresponds to continuous operations is that of the obituary. It is the dominant form of expression of a culture that lives entirely on the game of current de-actualization; for this reason, the “post” of post-modernism primarily means the “after” of obituary. No form of speech is as adequate to the principle of escalator culture as the obituary, which, in the midst of permanent movement and chronic ambiguity, recalls the last sure fact: the past is not the present. In a time and place where no one can know what will happen tomorrow, it seems almost like a gift that at least the past is over. It thereby provides a criterion that weathers storms. Contemporary culture is a large machine that emits epilogues and creates a hint of orientation in the present by suspending the past. Contemporary brains are at the moment still warm from the iteration of the last epilogic surges – this entire post-Freudian, post- Marxist, post-structuralist, post-metaphysical rhetoric, with which the respective speakers appeared to be at the highest level of possi- bility for fifteen minutes. The more violent the defamation of the past, the sooner a space for new settlements opens up in the present,
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even if it is only an illusion of space. For the citizens of escalators, only the epilogic overtaking of the latest trend can achieve the coveted contemporary ecstasy, without which no modern generation can stand itself. As if under duress, the glance falls backwards – by no means forwards, where the journey of the conveyor belt would show that it leads into hopelessness. We prefer to have modernity behind us rather than the eternity of the escalator in front; to cavort in the post-modern rather than in the purgatory of a unitary civili- zation; to stand at the open grave of the age of progress than before that turn into the future that economic advisors want to talk us into. For contemporary consciousness, death no longer means the “impossibility of having a project,” as Levinas once put it, but the impossibility of giving an excuse. It may be that we do not take it far with such speeches, but with its epilogic genius, the much-maligned post-modernism reaches an optimum of the presently possible mental states in spite of everything. For this is just the way it is – every incoherent dreamer creates programs, but epilogues require a modicum of awareness and a sense of context.
Additionally, the “after” comes from the after of after-school detention,2 where we only too often have to stay to make up the missed lessons of modernity. There are reasons to believe that for a large majority of contemporaries, a substantial modernity has not yet occurred, and that it could only arrive in the form of making up and reviewing. Moreover, a lot of suspect figures can be seen spooking around at the moment, wanting to skip a grade directly into post-modernism from the bushes or the Biedermeier, without getting to know even a little bit of modernity in-between. They will show whether post-modern times might have enough class and forming power to make the new bushmen sit down for detention.
The “after” of after modernism has yet another meaning that extends past that of the epilogue and the obituary. The obituary and the declaration of the death of yesterday are not enough. At least within a dark corner of their consciousness, everyone knows that the automatism of the world process conceals perspectives other than just the “and so on” of the obedient escalator. There is also something catastrophic and unparalleled with which the escalator only has automatism in common, but otherwise propels us forward with a completely different type of movement. We are subjective elements, plugged into a historico-planetary chain reaction that we called “history” in its relatively slow phase and which now seems to be running right to the point of explosion. What we would have to say in view of such threatening things does not seem to be an epilogue, but a prognosis, because we are talking about a catastrophe that has been going on for a long time whose biggest blows are yet
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to come. In truth, this prognosis is the most radical form of eulogy – namely, a prophetic epilogic that obits to us from a location after annihilation, letting us know what will be said about us then. Thus, the current epilogic apocalyptic breaks through the wall of time and, as if from the other side of fate, talks about the events on this side of the wall. This results not only in an anticipatory epilogue on humanity, but also in the very strange sense that the speakers must think of themselves as dead in order to take the point of view from which they will tell the truth. The “after” of post-modernism reveals itself here as the “after” of self-indulgence with which a civilization convinced of its untenability gives itself an account of its prospects. The Enlightenment is completed in the coincidence of prognosis and obituary, culminating in an absolute necrology that overtakes every possible future and now already pronounces doom as the last word of knowledge. That is why the present, which examines its future perspective, is forced to speak of itself in a tragic future tense and deliver its own eulogies ahead of time because there will be no other speakers to do it in due course. Aren’t most animal films today already obituaries to animals, eulogies for entire species? Does anthropology thus turn into a zoology of the necrological animal?
This is where an unforeseen “after” comes into play. It belongs to an awareness that has the aforementioned self-eulogies behind it – at least in the sense that it has heard and understood them and yet cannot stop there. Obviously, even the most routine pessimism is limited to the fact that bad predictions travel faster than bad events. Before they arrive, the observation that we still exist, in spite of everything, remains true. Even premature obituaries do not change the fact that new days are dawning until further notice, as fragile and temporary as all previous ones. The waking spirit sometimes survives the red-hot despair at its own finiteness. Set against a background of downfalls, our stay in the temporary act of the real starts to become strangely cheerful – the worries translucent, the uncertainties self-confident. Perhaps adulthood was never anything other than an encrypted word for what comes after despair. We are still breathing, the sun is still rising, we still learn the most important thing from the day in the main news. The last days are still hidden, the Apocalypse is being put on the shelf for now to join the other unsightly literature, the black tailcoat for humanity’s funeral stays in the closet, the Eschaton shows patience. This post-desperate life resembles carelessness to a tee and differs from blindness only in barely noticeable details. We say post-modernism with a misunder- stood smile, as if we knew that it should be called still-modernism.
If we were to characterize the specific time structure of contem- porary life, we would come up with the concept of an interim that
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is after the prognosis of the worst and before the verification of the predictions by the actual. There is no more appropriate term for such a situation than that of the interim. 3 However, our interim does not have a precise deadline, but leaves the day, hour, and cause of the disaster open. Because of this, life, too, can set itself up and spread out within the extended interim as if it were safe. It is only in the ambiguity of the interim that hope finds its playing field. That is why hope is not a principle, but a secondary product of uncertainty about the bad outcome of history. While hope has become effective as a history-making force, its effects are borrowed from eschatology and the inaccuracy of our knowledge about the limits of the interim. This explains why the word “hope” must not be writ large either now or in the future. Its real place is behind the scenes and its appropriate key is pianissimo. Only Bloch was allowed to raise his voice on the subject of hope because, unbeknownst to him, he wrote its obituary – the only legitimate occasion to transfigure an effect into a principle. Moreover, loud talk about hope is nowadays just cynical fabrication. Those who want to wage aggressive hope campaigns belong in the neighborhood of the leading German columnist who is supposed to have said after Chernobyl: “Life is distasteful. It just keeps going. ” The same can be said of the hope that is rightly claimed to belong to life. The only thing that helps hope in its macabre alliance with this obstinately continuing life is unyielding discretion. In the future, we must place private hopes under confessional secrecy and threaten prison sentences for public hope. Those who actually have hopes should bury them as deep as they can – for they can only be helpful as silent forces. Only as such do they not get mixed up with those series of causes that lead to catastrophe. This is the only way in which they do not contribute to the mobilization of enterprises against one’s better judgment. Only thus will they become forces of life, doing their work behind individuals’ backs and carrying them over the abysses above which the worlds of daylight have been erected.
The Interim – or: The Birth of History from the Spirit of Postponement
The term “interim” not only describes the playing field shared by illusion and hope; it is also reminiscent of the basic shape of Western historical thinking. For what history means in the eminent occidental sense of the word can only be understood from its nature as time limit and interim. An interim can only exist where an event in time strives for a final goal or a final date from which it can be understood as a deadline. These are precisely the basic features
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of the late Jewish and Christian perception of history, which is constitutive of Europe as a phenomenon. Few historians have fully conveyed how a large swath of history has been shaped by the tradition and variation of messianic and eschatological motifs – not only early Western history, but also modern times, including the recent present. But as for the program of a critique of historical reason, which has been open since Mar and Dilthey, there should be no doubt that messianology, as it emerged from the Jewish tradition and made history in its Christian variant, must form its core.
The messianic perception of history is based on the idea that the long march of peoples through the deserts of time must one day come to an end – when the Messiah completes the alienation era and establishes a final kingdom that does not resemble the current world in any way whatsoever. The Christian version of this model became effective at the moment when Jesus accepted the insinuation of his disciples that he was the Messiah and began to preach the presence of the kingdom of God within him. (The two most revealing variants of such a process are provided by Sabbatai Zwi in the seventeenth and Jiddu Krishnamurti in the twentieth century. ) After the disaster of Golgotha, it became clear what explosive power lay in this process. The possibility of Christian messianism was laid out in the unbearable paradox that the Messiah did not prevail as a world king of end-times, but left the scene as a miserable executed criminal. For the first believers, this scandal could only be surmounted with the proclamation of an imminent return of the Lord in all his glory – visible to all, liberating for the faithful, appalling to adversaries. Thus, at the beginning of the Christian concept of history, world time is transformed into a waiting period, which shrinks the horizon to the small span between the crucifixion and the reappearance of the Messiah. It is from this minimum that the later expansions of the horizon had to emanate, and they were due once the waiting for a return became existentially impossible. The first generation of Christians died with a question to which European history would be the answer: How is the absence of the Messiah to be understood? The very next generation had to learn to expect greater time spans and move the Parousia to the time of their grandchildren or great- grandchildren. For them, the question of a Christian’s involvement in the business of this world became pressing – and if not with body and soul, nevertheless with great obligation as it would be commanded if tomorrow the last judgment came and the final kingdom began. It was in the musings of the early Christians that Western history was put on its very strange trajectory. Back then, patience and hope first entered into a historicizing tension with each other. Never before had hope been so elevated to virtue and
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aggrandized into religious psycho-politics. It may be said that the Christian revolution set in motion by Paul intervened more deeply in the experience of time in the Old World than any reform of the imperial calendar could ever have. For Paul, too, the time ahead is a terse interim. But its significance is not that of an inconsequential passage; it is a time with its own dignity insofar as it already stands in the light of salvation by virtue of its message. Consequently, all cosmic and mythical calendars are invalidated.
Even with the caveat of the short interim, existence post Christum stands out as an epoch in its own right and is as differentiated from the pre-messianic life of the Jews as it is from the world of the Greeks and Romans. Paul is presumably the first person to live in a hurry as a matter of principle, because it was important to him to fulfill his universally understood mission in the supposedly short period of time given. For him, the content of the mission lies in the revolutionary newness of every life after Christ. The extent to which the epoch-making power of this turning point extends is demonstrated not least by the fact that the present rumors of a post- modernity would be groundless without the Pauline post-antiquity. Without Paul’s great success, there would be no Christianity as world religion, and without that, no periodization of history whose dissolution moves contemporary minds. Christianity as a historical religion, however, stands and falls with the awareness that the time between the crucifixion and the return of the Messiah participates in an epochal newness and thus possesses an objective redemptive- historical content. If this consciousness had not been effective, the Christian impulse would have been lost in the syncretism of late antiquity after a few generations. The non-return of Christ would have drained the expectation of salvation and deprived the Christian message of any future history-making character. A mystical and symbolist psychotherapeutic would probably have absorbed the Christ legend and dissolved it into a self-redemption theory of an Eastern type. The early history of the church, which represents a single struggle against the gnostic temptation of the individual exit from the real history of salvation, shows how powerful the tendencies to such developments were. Only after centuries of wrangling could the real existing church, as a Catholic one, prevail against the private salvation cults and constitute itself as a political organon of salvation and hope for a new world time. The new era is already developed in the fantastic apostolate of the thirteenth Apostle, who felt expressly called to bring the news of Christ to the peoples of the entire non-Jewish world. In Paul’s person, that which will become the historical content of the new world age is crystallized for the first time: the self-transcendence of Judaism.
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Since then, Christian world time has been substantially an apostolic time – time for the spread of an exuberant and counter-worldly message; time for the (however contradictory) installation of justice and fraternity in a desert world; time for the instilling of hope into decaying souls which the war of life had set on a greedy and desperate trajectory. A considerable need for time becomes apparent for this unprecedented mission, as the Christianization of peoples cannot happen overnight. In the light of the missionary idea, the delayed Parousia can be understood not only as a disappointment, but also as a salvation-bringing postponement of the end. If the story really eats from the apostolic substance, then the end of days must not come before the universalization of the message.
Almost from the very beginning, Christian thinking about time and history thus contains the contrast between an eschatological (short) and an apostolic (long) determination of the interim within itself. 4 While the eschatological motif constantly reminds us of the closeness of Judgment Day, the apostolic motif keeps the story open as a time of spreading salvation over the inhabited earth. In the struggle between these two poles, the tense time structure of the Christian world age attains its profile. This is the sign of revolutionary impatience as well as conservative continuity; the élan of messianic unrest as well as the inertia of the sacramental estab- lishment; the eschatological readiness for the end of days as well as the anti-eschatological engagement with the temporary. Where the motif of the long story rules in mature comprehensiveness, there the apostolic goal-orientedness of time emerges most clearly – for it is only from the point of the successful outcome of the mission that the connection to world history as total salvation event can be made visible. With his apostolic program for the post-ancient world, Paul became not only the founder of the Christian religion, but also the initiator of a “sacred mobilization” that has deployed a large part of the psychological and political energy of Europe over the span of millennia. 5
For the modern phase of the “Christian West,” however, it is characteristic that the eschatological element is increasingly pushed into the background. The idea of history as a time between creation and redemption, or between death and Parousia of the Messiah, loses its plausibility in the demarcated horizon of “modern troubled history. ” “Christian woe” – which no longer even senses its contra- diction in terms – begins to arrange itself in a forwardly open continuum. The burdensome thought of a final end is obscured by the philosophy of infinitely perfectible progress. Thus, from the eighteenth century onwards, Christian ideas against traditional Christianity become paradoxically effective by creating decidedly
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post-Christian or anti-Christian philosophies of history. It is precisely in the decidedly worldly and atheistic wings of the Enlightenment that the messianic impulse, chastened for a millennium, reawakens to radical offensiveness. It becomes world-political violence in Marxism above all and gives a messianic perspective to modern progressive thought – a perspective back onto a beginning from the point of view of an end; the end of the path through the desert of an alienated interim and to the beginning of an era of post-historical fulfillment. It seems that the Christian impulse in modernity reaches a worldly maximum of influence under an atheist, socialist, and humanist incognito. At the same time, it witnesses its irreligious liquidation as well. 6
The present is indeed a time of historical ambiguity. It is typical for it not to be able to decide between religion and irreligion in the same way it can’t decide between the proclamation and revocation of progress. Even though Western civilization has undoubtedly entered a post-Christian age, the departure from the Christian era does not entail a departure from its conception of history and its eschatology. On the contrary, one cannot avoid the impression that the eschato- logical motif of the Judeo-Christian tradition begins to dominate more forcefully in post-Christian times than ever before. The Judeo- Christian apocalyptic lives on in the neo-pagan panic. The end of the Christian world-epoch does not mean that the apocalyptic stress is followed by a new-cosmological sigh of relief. Only in our grand- fathers’ generation could we buy into the vision of becoming the new Greeks; up until the eve of National Socialism, it was seductive to think together with Nietzsche that one could emigrate from Christian decadence to pagan health and sacrifice history for the cosmos. Even if, for most contemporaries, Christianity may only be an unreal citable magnitude, no generation has ever been as distant as today’s from the cosmic cycle of the times. Never has the return from linear history to a cyclical order of things been as unlikely as it is now. Of course, anyone who is reeling on the sloping trajectory of natural devastation would like to find safety in a cosmological post-history where a sovereign timeless existence prevails. Without a doubt, it would be appealing to settle in a post-Paulinian way and without illusory hope as “tremendous” mortals on the maternal earth. But it is clear that this resettlement is not going to happen, because the world process initiated by Christian hope as well as by the Greek epistemes has gotten disastrously out of control. There is no real pleasure in living. There seems to be no room left in our countdown for the desirable large cosmic cycles.
Chatter about post-modernism bursts into this situation. It drives the dilemma that has been latent for over a hundred years, to the
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point where it gets out of hand in an open scandal. As soon as a consciousness comes forward that claims to speak of a post-modern location, modernity is lured out of the reserve by this presumption and forced into the confession that it sees itself as the epoch that no other can follow. Post-modern talk, which at first was only meant to provide a bit of variety, forces modernity to profess to be the end of times, that is, an era that no longer wants to have an interim character, but has crossed over into the enduring presence of an infinitely perfect post-history. For modernity, the mere thought of post-modernism is illegitimate and shocking, because according to its self-image, the successors of modernity must never be anything other than modernity, once again.
The dull escalator feeling now proves to be a symptom of historico-philosophical significance: according to its basic historical feature, the present is already a small-scale end of times, which only has itself in front of it. A “post-modern” epoch can no longer be created, except in the bad sense that shocking regressions or catastrophes could destroy the entire construct of the modern age. Because modernity is already a secret millennium burdened with complexes, seen from within it, only the worst can still lead beyond it.
This is where we touch on the most anxious point of the contemporary crisis: as long as modernity does not confess that it has established itself discreetly but relentlessly as an end-times kingdom, it remains stuck in its claim that after modernity no other age is permitted to create new epochs. It insists on this claim with an unconscious violence and is plunged into an irresolvable dilemma: on the one hand, modernity can only see the worst as coming after itself; on the other hand, the worst is precisely placed on moder- nity’s own trajectory, which it forbids us to leave because it cannot conceive of a possible alternative to it. It can therefore neither reach nor really even imagine a future for itself. If it continues as before, it produces the worst; if it were to cease producing the worst, it would no longer be itself, but something epochally different. But since it literally sees “nothing” else coming after modernity, it remains condemned to itself. Through its unspoken and uncorrectable belief in itself as the very last era, modernity is fixated on the murky linear processualism that it inhabits, and the only thing it can see ahead is the postponement of the end, but no longer the possibility of something new.
The escalator babble about post-modernism is now becoming expensive. The gallery owners, architects, zeitgeist designers, and cultural editors are losing control of it and it is rising to become a question of epochs in the exact sense of the word – it puts the epochal quality of the present to the test. Thus, the question
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becomes explicit and undeniable as to whether modernity indeed already has the character of being an end-times or if it is an interim that can be surpassed. In other words, does it still form a section of an open history or rather already the final formation of the occidental-planetary civilizing process? For the busy zeitgeist critics in the media, the problem can also be raised as to whether fashion has already replaced history.
Thus the “after” of after modernity emerges from its cocoon in the last instance as the “after” of a Western age that is still looking for itself. It is an “after” that shakes at the prison-window bars of the present and gives expression to a doomsday claustrophobia. There, the small talk of post-modernity is done with and the delicious prefix is just a symptom of panic; it is a powerless postulate that maybe, after the immanent end-times which we know ourselves to be caught in, new spans of time could open themselves for a post-historical human existence. Whoever says the word “post-modernism” just wants to take their neck out of the noose of history. The future prospects of a civilization now hinge on the sense or nonsense of a prefix, and although it was not meant so seriously at first, the involuntary seriousness of the matter has rendered its own reckless origins entirely forgotten. What is at stake here is in fact nothing less than the possibility of a post-modern historicity, in other words, the chance for a post-historical temporality. And yes, such questions do sound like a “betrayal of history. ” The ominous prefix leads its users into historico-philosophical illegitimacy. It seduces us to play with the unimaginable and makes us willing to travel into a future that no longer constitutes modernity. A small “after” or a tiny “post” and the misty outline of a time beyond the end of history emerges from the realm of what has never been before.
Truth and Symbiosis: On the Geological Sublation of World History
Aristotle said that drama is more philosophical than history; but physics (understood as dialectically transparent) is more philosophical than history and drama combined.
Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi7
Certainly, it is appropriate to use terms such as “national spirit” and “national character” only with reservations for all time to come. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that there is a “typically German” sensibility for the apocalyptic dimension of history. This sensi- bility has a theoretical drive and a moral foundation. Whether it
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is about thousand-year-old empires or the twilight of the gods, messianic tendencies or fears of the end of times, the foundation of invisible churches or utopian communication communities – the German vote on such questions always reveals itself through an unmistakably singular accent that is entirely its own. The strongest conceptual models of historical interpretation through which modernity wanted to come to an understanding of itself are signed by Hegel, Marx, Weber, Bloch, and Habermas, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Taubes, and Löwith, on the other. They can all be distinguished by a logical instinct to characterize the way of the world as a drama of generalization or realization in historical time. As for the moral-political side of the current German end-times sensibility, it gets its seriousness from the memory of the unforgivable twelve years in which the Germans staged themselves as a providential people. German fascism was more than just an impudent grasp for “world domination”; its mythological engine was driven by a racist chiliasm – to use Jacob Taubes’s terms, it was driven by a theo-zoology that employed the means of a religious biopolitics to stir up the masses to an unprec- edented destructiveness. With its essential gesture, it performed the rebellion against the Judeo-Christian-liberal tradition of Europe; as a war against Judaism, it was an attempt to outbid the status of Jewry as a chosen people through German self-proclamation.
Against such a background, historico-philosophical aspirations are from the outset to be understated. Based on German premises, it would be suspect to have no difficulties with the philosophy of history. This does not just mean that the notorious “German spirit” was ripe for an analytical cooling. More important is the fact that a historico-philosophical warning has imprinted itself in the national memory; more precisely, a warning against manically lived historicism and a dread of the violence that can stem from taking historico-religious interpretive models of the world literally. Thinking after 1945 means carrying a millennium on one’s back; in this position, no de-Germanization can make a difference. A certain post-millenarian nervousness has been part of the regional character here since the end of the Third Reich. Through all justified and necessary efforts to be a “normal democracy,” the German resignation from historico-religious presumption shines through – imperceptibly, but significantly. It is a specialty of post-fascist Germans to consciously not be a chosen people any longer. In this way, they present themselves anew as a negative unicum. From their manic historicism, they have retreated into a post-historical modesty; they now practice the powerful melancholy of the day after. They have developed a relationship to the missions of history
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that resembles that of a sober alcoholic to their former drug. It may be assumed that, until further notice, they will adhere to an experience that lies ahead of those people that are still undertaking missions, still manic, still making history. Through an unprecedented defeat, they have been brought to the unwanted but valid insight that national identities and ethnic missions are in principle nothing more than violent and violence-producing collective autohypnosis. Under its effect, the historical actors rush to the stage, guided by self-insinuations, to conquer their place in the world-historical sun. If we soberly take stock of the infernal adventure of the Germans, we create an ability to see through the dealings of history-making nations that make us shudder: “history” could now be understood as that which results from competing social manias, driven by the real-theatrical competition between autohypnotic imperial collec- tives, each of whom want to play out their world delirium to the end and lead it to supremacy. Even if we do not dare say it out loud, it is one of the psycho-historical peculiarities of post-fascist German intelligence to possess a sensorium for those tendencies that conjure up new life-threatening equations between real-theater and real- politics (to whom it may concern . . . ). 8
Meanwhile, no one can accuse the Germans of not wanting to learn the Western lesson. As special students of modernism, they have understood that life in the twentieth century can mean nothing more than self-assertion in a “risky and ultimately meaningless world” (Gehlen). In two generations, we have rebuilt ourselves to profanation for all intents and purposes. No doubt about it, in hollow offensiveness we have caught up with the top of the world; when it comes to translating a lack of perspective into mobilization, we follow closely behind the major powers; in our self-doubt we have even become an exporting nation and German melancholy enjoys international prestige; all over the world, “Made in Germany” stands for a state of mind, thanks to which feelings of meaninglessness are translated into a willingness to perform. Thus we have found our connection to kinetic modernity, to the mediocre and-so-on that dreams of catastrophic interruption, to the acceler- ating escalators, which automatically keep moving without a need for vision and approval.
But if post-modern modernity currently suffers from doomsday nightmares, it is because it can tell that the ability to withstand the extreme is beginning to disappear. For years now, anthologies and special booklets on the apocalypse have been published all over the world. In other words, contemporaries are noting with interest that the removal of a deadline on the world process is failing. This gives us pause for thought, because it threatens the temporal-logical
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core of the enterprise called the modern age. The energies that once dared to carry out the infinite project of modernity on the finite base of the earth feel suddenly dramatically scarce. An awareness of being pressed for time threatens everything far more than the mid-term. The modern-day program for deadline extension once again transforms into doomsday thinking, where the impossibility to escape the logic of time makes itself deeply felt. There is even much to suggest that the sharpest edges of the last-days problematic have yet to appear before us. We are not, as it turns out, done with the fact that the wartime allies removed the hysterical millennium of Central European fascism from the world in 1945. The long postwar peace gave the victors time to settle into the irony of their victory. After the fall of the monster, it had to slowly become apparent that great powers in the modern age represent crypto-millenarian structures per se. This can also be seen both in the alcoholic-athletic millennium of the socialist republics of workers, peasants, and functionaries and in the melancholy baroque lifestyle millennium of North-Western European welfare states. For the hysterical Protestantism of the philanthropic World Mission of “America,” this is true in a special way. Each of these entities discreetly claims a last-days status in the sense that none of them can imagine a future that would be different from their respective self-extension into infinity. Thus, as citizens of Eastern or Western great power complexes, we have reached the limits of the “classical” realm of history, and therefore cannot imagine any other morning than that of escalators, that is, the dynamic perpetuation of the conditions of movement and eternal life that the relevant mobilizers have meanwhile reached at the national or multinational level. What is the point of these reflections? It becomes apparent in the assumption that these kinds of observations reveal the temporal-logical reason for our present crisis: the conceivability of world time under the Old European historical drama patterns is approaching utter depletion. For this reason, European intelligence – where it does not evade with decisions and confessions – has been living for some time now with the awareness that it no longer has any positive terms for “what is really happening. ” We feel it in our nerve endings that as modernity began, so did the final act of classically conceived world time – this act is a phase that no longer wants to be a phase, but an indefinite continuum that perpetuates itself through the status quo in an irrevocable permanent self-affirmation.
Whoever has this perception of time in themselves – be it concept- ualized or not – cannot be perturbed by the fact that advanced modernity simultaneously displays both claustrophobic and agora- phobic reactions. To a world that can neither date or narrate itself,
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every now is too cramped and too vast, while a need for space immediately merges into a fear of limitlessness. The idea that every- thing ends in a big bang is no more frightening than the thought that everything goes on forever.
At this point, does it make sense to ask if we can “find a way out” from the interior of the late-modern last days state of mind? Isn’t it nonsense to think that we may find an “exit” into the post- historical open? Is there not an inadmissible combination of spatial images with concepts of time in such phrases? What kind of sense can speculation have of whether there is an outer realm in relation to world history up to now? Is a form of time conceivable that would be open as a dimension of depth of an essentially post-historical species life? And how should the actors of the current history finale depart from the stage of the Judeo-Christian-Western world period, when it is clear that their whole way of being and justification for existence is based on such moral-historico-dramatic concepts?
In these questions, the uncanny comes together with what is difficult to imagine. They condense three hypotheses, and each carries a dizzying historico-philosophical risk: first, that so-called “world history” in itself is the psycho-political and geopolitical result of a history-making script that was first designed in Persian- Jewish court metaphysics and then acted out by the monotheistic nations; secondly, that a more long-term future is only open to a historically highly mobilized humanity if it revises its previously valid historical script and post-historically breaks character; thirdly, that the Old European salvation-, reason-, integration-, and exoner- ation-historical conception of the world can actually be overridden and neutralized by a new, explicitly non-history-making world time schema. These theses are difficult to conceive of if their logic of time goes against the grain of a reason that represents worlds in a modern way; they are uncanny to the extent that within them everything is focused on defending the historic time bomb that ticks towards the end of the world.
The critique of historical reason – so far almost exclusively a domain of peaceful Dilthey researchers – suddenly proves to be the core of the question regarding “fate” in an age where it has been replaced by history. A critique of historical reason must therefore ultimately mean a critique of eschatological reason: that is, at the same time a critique of time-conceiving thinking, aim-thinking, anticipatory reason which imagines the end states, dramaturgical reason which stages the world process in a final act as it is written – in short, critique of the history-making reason that leads to the mobilization of the planet. All these critiques strive towards a post- historical process thinking that seeks to model the movement of the
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world within time minus apocalypses, final acts, consummations, arrival fantasies, final judgments, and last kingdom thoughts.
What concept of history is being used here? The world history set in motion as a drama striving to the end is linked to the fates of a super-subject that grasps all events with a continued historical effect as its own “inner context” and carries them on. For the seat of this historico-dramatic subject, only outstanding figures of salvation history or reason history are eligible: a chosen people, a world spirit, a proceeding species reason, a learning world-state central system. The content of a story belonging to such figures consists solely in the self-creation and self-realization of the subject on the world stage. Because history, understood as such, can simply be nothing more than a self-realization drama at the highest level, the whole striving, recognition, and action of the subject of history must remain curved into the interior of its self-accomplishment. Let’s assume for a moment that this super-subject acted through the brains of the current mobilization carriers and said “I” and “we” through their mouths. For this subject, who of course says “for me” and “for us,” the only possible reality is consequently that which belongs to its own realization. Thus, to count as “real,” something must be attributable to the occurrences in which our salvation, reason, wealth, and life alleviation, to cite Bloch, are brought forth. Dramatic world time is pure self-realization time for the super- subject. For it/me/us, the world is nothing but stage and resource, fuel and building material for the progressive mobilization of the self that is realized in the movement towards further movement. Because the super-subject can in principle have nothing outside itself, it practically acts in a cosmopolitan sense. It realizes itself by tirelessly maintaining its cosmopolitan stride.
But as long as this historical drama that strives for generalization in a cosmopolitan way is in motion, the earth must stay reduced to a mere setting. Because the enterprise that is history implies from the outset the self-bending of the history-making agent nations, it is established in the script of this theatrical piece that the setting called earth must turn out to be a mere background for a histori- cally demanding process-progress. History is a priori the play that makes its bill without the stage. It stems from the anti-symbiotic catastrophe that leads humans to “step out” of society. It is only through the anti-symbiotic revolution that leads to history that the human being turns into an ontological animal – something that says what is and what will become different. Because history executes its dramatic content after the exodus from symbioses of a mobilizing humanity, it is nothing other than metaphysics in action, detachment of nature through technology, staging of the
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epistemic-messianic process against the background of a serving and see-through earth. The drama’s indifference to its setting is codified in the logic of mobilization. It is only at the moment when the play threatens to ruin the stage that the players are forced into a new self-perception. Historically moved humanity had to wait for the imperialisms of modern times, the industrial age, and planetary media civilization before seeing the truth about its own enterprise through the crisis of its fundamental position. It has had to produce the informational pantheism of news culture and the mercantile pantheism of monetized total circulation9 in order to see that it always bumps into itself when it crosses a limit – all transcendence leads to an accelerated autism.
A post-historical era would reveal its beginning through an extro- version of the players towards their stage. After the history-making staging of one’s own, the discovery of the forgotten real other is once again possible and overdue. But if we are talking about extro- version, we do not mean another willful turn towards an additional attack space, but rather care towards what has previously been taken for granted as that which merely underlies. This extroversion becomes unavoidable nowadays to the extent that what merely seems to underlie is beginning to slip away from us. Astronautics and ecology – the two ways of seeing that stand out in the current “self-thematization” of humanity – provide us with disturbing images with respect to the (fall of) earth. Since we have been able to see our planet with satellite eyes from the outside, the previously basic has become a quintessential problem case.
Our extroversion is first initiated by the catastrophe of the under- lying: very obviously, the earth cannot provide for much longer what it seemed to up until now. It is overwhelmed by the role expected of it; that of theatrum cosmopoliticum. Its historical assignments: to serve as base camps for the historic exodus; to be available as a source of construction and fuel; to being the scene and object of geopolitical exploitation – these are no longer compatible with the earth’s existence for the foreseeable future. A veritable post-story therefore begins with the growth of the earth out of its histori- cally acquired annihilation definitions. It is hardly necessary to say that these conceptions of the earth are those of the so-called “high cultures,” the height of which is consistently measured by the vastness of their repulsion from the earth-symbiotic state. It is no coincidence that cosmopolitanism is the criterion of victorious high culture; even less coincidental is the fact that the word “world- citizen,” “cosmopolite,” was initially a prophetic Cynical joke that was to assume a world-historical seriousness. Meanwhile, the most pronounced citizens of the world hardly still live on this earth – they
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have become inhabitants of the country of “complexity,” members of the Grande Vitesse class, hasty through-travelers in this “Hotel Earth. ”
By contrast, the behavior of an earth-citizen would be one that sees the planet as more than an indifferent stage for the production of “our” play, in which we act as subjects of great promises and justifications: redemption, self-realization, time saved. It is with good reason that German parlance reserved the term “citizens of the earth” (Erdenbürger) for newborns, as if to mark the only moment in the life of the individual in which they are granted a hint of superiority over the historical world. Perhaps it is not entirely meaningless that it was an astronaut, Edgar Mitchell (“the sixth man on the moon”), who gave the term new content when he described the sentiments of those returned from outer space: “Each man comes back with a feeling he is no longer only an American citizen; he is a planetary citizen. ” Should there really be an era “after history,” its opening would be inseparable from the advent of the earth out of its historical way of being as curtain and raw material and with its illumination as the content of human devotion and care. The earth as a global object, previously lifted and hidden in the darkness of our closeness to it, has since been brought before itself through a series of technically historical “levers” and “spins”; it now sees itself with artificial and natural eyes on. This changes all the premises of the historical game. What was once the scene becomes the theme of the plot. What served as a background comes to the forefront. What was present as a raw material emerges as product. What was previously stage becomes the play itself. Such are the axioms of a post-historical dramaturgy in which the rules of the game are formulated according to a corresponding post- politics. Whatever may be played “on” the old earth stage, it itself is increasingly providing the subject matter of the plays. But it can already be said that “world history” as a time project for the acting out of spiritual and moral missions in front of natural and physical backgrounds is an exhausted idea. If philosophy of history is still to be good for something, then surely it is to comment on the meaning of the exhaustion of the history-making idea. This critical theory of history sabotages world-historical dramaturgy, just as history previously stepped into the world as an initiative for the sabotaging of fate. After the force of fate, a world-historical compulsion is now to be subverted – the play does not have to be played to the end. This insight comes too soon from the perspective of a history that wants to culminate; only through its seduction, however, is it able to postpone the annihilating culmination. By coming too soon, it stands with respect to temporal logic in the right place to disrupt the
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automatisms at whose entrance it would be too late. That is why it remains superfluous to wait for the dawn of apocalyptic anger, nor will anyone experience the Victory Day of a last kingdom. What emerges before us in the logic of procedural time can only be an era without the metaphysical difference between timeless earth stage and historical human drama. For us, the old “nature” no longer exists as a massive pedestal of cosmic pre-performance that would be preset for all human time. For us, the earth is no longer the endlessly patient “building and carrying” that it appeared to be to almost all previous generations. It is precisely through the historical process and its two main events, large-scale technology and the human rights mission, that the earth has been destabilized in its carrying. What once meant nature and was placed in opposition to cultural institutions as a pre-human totality has since been included within the maelstrom of human constructions. If what was once called “nature” had managed to stay alive, its existence would no longer be due to its self-sufficiency – it lost that a few centuries ago via its apprehension by a technically powerful scientific spirit. It can only survive thanks to a new world-building gesture, carried out by people for whom it has become evident that looking after the stage is the play itself.
To what extent do the outlines of a post-historical principle of reality surface in these considerations? By principle of reality we mean the obligations of thought and behavior that develop in human cultures under the afflux of chronic stress and danger. By bowing to the principium realitatis, consciousness adjusted to the burdensome and risky nature of existence. Because there are funda- mentally different attitudes to difficulty and risk, there are more than superficial differences between human cultures. It is even more clear than in their deeply different languages that different cultures manifest their mode of being in the world through the very different ways they bear its weight. Each culture develops its special gesture to master the heavy and precarious, its own style of dealing with the inevitable, its own cunning in the repeal of the unbreakable, its own rules of play for making the unbearable bearable. That is why it is true for all cultures what Herbert Marcuse tries to demonstrate for the modern world: the principle of reality is not only and not for all times identical to the indomitable law of need that restricts and burdens lives in cruel indifference. The approaches to what we now call history in the singular lie in the universally instigated struggles of civilizations against the burdening character of world conditions, and if the compass of all truly history-making traveling beings points to the pole of freedom, it is because freedom is inextricably
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associated with relief in the imaginations of “developed” civiliza- tions. Europe became “the mother of revolutions” because it is the original theatrical continent, the primary scene of an ontological revolt against the weight of the world, the stage of an inner-worldly liberation project that advertises with the promise to break the foreign rule of a dejected need of life through self-determined work.
In the principle of reality of the Christian age, the hopes of the individual were primarily directed to their personal redemption and with a psycho-politics of patience, converted into a willingness to endure the given. But a salvational-dramatic time arc was also extended, which virtually forced all of humanity into a political- theological community of destiny. In this way, an imperial, expansive history-making motif was formed into the Christian modeling of the principle of reality. From the sixteenth century, the explosive power of this is reflected in the Catholically legitimized imperialisms through which the planetary stride of Christianity begins. At the same time, ascetic Protestantism began a new salvation-economic offensive in which economic success impulses were linked to religious election motifs. Both arrangements, Catholicizing geopolitics and Protestant Profit Yoga, pair earthly traffic forces with sacred commands. From then on, the path is open for modern kinetic pantheism, which uses capitals, texts, vehicles, and radio waves to strive for the total lique- faction of all that is solid and standing.
It is only in the success story of this kinetic pantheism that the ominous “project of modernity” becomes possible. If modernity is indeed a project, and not just drift and growth, it has a great ambition to claim reality as its own design. Where essential modernity reigns, reality only rhymes with self-realization. That is why reality in the old-ontological sense is an unacceptable, reactionary word to modern ears. Those who live inside the Western modernization cyclone, spoiled by success, are already taking part in a revolution of relief that has long since overtaken all traditional standards for what is unavoidable and to be withstood. The classical components of the old principle of reality: unbendingness of the law, unpredictability of fate, intransigence of suffering – within modernity, all are, if not rendered ineffective, then certainly reduced to a residual size. The ontological revolt of modernity sets a threefold upheaval in motion against these “constants”: a mobilization revolution; a safeguarding revolution; a revolution of motion generation and unburdening. Revolutionary modernity can dream of the establishment of a “world” in which all independent resistance to the sovereign outlet of the mobilized self would have been lifted because it rejects reality – the unstoppable resistance per se – as a reactionary principle. In the kinetic pantheism of such an accomplished modernity, as
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the young Schelling suspected, infinite self-activity would coincide with absolute calmness, neo-worldly prometheanism would descend into epicurean detachment, principled activism would have to melt into an ultimate quietism. Only under the pull of such pantheisti- cally paradisiacal alluring images could the modern philosophy of progress break the old principle of reality and replace the ages-old politics of guilt with an unprecedented impatient politics of disin- hibition and unburdening. These, too, are reasons to characterize modernity as a stealthy eschaton: its principle of reality can be about nothing more than the last effort at a happiness-political removal of what still requires effort.
What the Christian-medieval version of the principle of reality has in common with modern times is that both perceive nature as an ahistorical background of human drama – even if modernity no longer sees it as a history of salvation, but a program for self-preser- vation, progress, and self-enhancement. Even where these specifically history-making versions of the reality principle are in force, human actors remain introverted in their worries of redemption and relief. Their drama takes place against a natural backdrop and on a planetary stage, drawing from a natural fund and disassembling uncovered physical riches for the benefit of human assembling. Pushed by archaic fear and inspired by modern design power, the subjects of the modern project draw basic raw materials and energy sources into their pragmatic dramas as props, that is, as mobile acces- sories. Their “work” transforms “matter” into consumables for their great scenarios, which revolve around world domination, humani- zation, growth, self-realization, redemption, and relief. Wherever history is made in this sense, there can be no question of an appre- ciation of the earth as a “reality” in its own right. It is always used like a self-evident, non-dramatic basis for unlikely, dramatic super- structures and expeditions. But this attitude of laying claim is now on the verge of disaster. What currently creates epochs is the revenge of the former background on the depicted figures and frameworks: the background has emerged from its inconspicuousness and quit its assigned position as supplier of self-evident things. The old ecology of stage and play is out of joint. It is now no longer possible to place ruthlessly risky cultural figures on endlessly resilient natural slides. The slide itself demands that its previously overlooked improb- ability enter into the figures it carries and be considered in them. It might even seem that nature took revenge on history by having its own fragility suddenly surpass the riskiness of the historical structure. Thus, the due de-dramatization of history gives prelude to the rediscovery of a dramatic nature. If humanity were to awaken from its historical narcissism, it would discover that it no longer has
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a mission other than to make the concern of an overly finite nature its own. By way of historical mobilization successes, nature and civilization have grown together into a common improbability. To perceive reality under such conditions is to profess solidarity in the improbable. Where this perception is clarified, an earth-bourgeois ethos spontaneously arises. The maxim of human action must now always be able to lead to the avoidance of further blind impositions on the carrying capacity of the earth. The old base, contrary to its name, cannot easily be claimed as a basis that bears any structure. Meanwhile, it depends for its part on the “adherence” of construc- tions to the fundamental nature of their basic situation and on being let to be more than a self-evident underlying of things. Just as everything that is built up has always been in need of a basis, so too has the basis become construction-dependent. Since then, an abyssal caveat has been mixed into the horizontal position of the basic: even what is lying down can still fall. Cultural theory crosses an epochal threshold as soon as it understands the new fact from which to begin, namely that base and construction irrevocably form a community of fragility from now on.