No More Learning

It is only through proximity to panicked experiences that living cultures are possible – it is only the occasional experience of the extreme that exposes the temperate human region where we can cultivate what we are competent to do. One of the attributes of the Greek Pan was to be the god of the midday hour when the shadows are at their shortest and the world is dashed to the ground by light, holding its breath in his presence. The modern term “panic” forgets this connection between presence, revelation, and fright – the only thing it remembers is the kinetic motif of directionless escape. Above all, it no longer knows what is most important: bearable human life is always an island within the unbearable, and the existence of islanders is only ensured through the discretion of a subtly present ocean. The world that we are assured of is thus always placed against an either (Judeo-Christian) apocalyptic or (pagan) panicked background. But modernity wants presence without tears. It sees
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culture only as a state of being where the existence of faucets answers the question about the origin of water, just as the problem of the origin of “truth” is taken care of through the dealings of scholars. A panicked culture would be immediately recognized by its respect for faucets; after all, it is possible that when you turn one on, the ocean comes out. It would be no different with the sciences, especially since they have been generating things for a long time now under which the world has the same right to cower as humans and animals once did under the panicked Greek light of midday.
A few questions are now inevitable. Does alternative culture then need catastrophe? Does it secretly approve of disasters, as people sometimes fear to be the case? Does it have to be addicted to calamity because only this creates a climate where alternative ideas gain popularity? Is catastrophe essential for the introduction of a new movement, like a teacher who eventually convinces even the most stubborn minds of his or her lessons? Do humans need catas- trophe because they must be educated and can only be educated by the school of worst possible scenarios? Consequently, are the real hopes of alternative movements not linked to disaster-didactic calculations – provided it is true that only a visual instruction of the worst can usher in a turn for the better?
It was in the days of the Harrisburg nuclear accident on Three Mile Island in 1979 that I really understood what disaster didactics meant for the first time. As the out-of-control reactor boiled and everyone held their breath to see if this infernal machine would explode, I noticed an uncanny phenomenon in myself and in others. Of course, no one could have any doubt about the devastation that an explosion of the nuclear reactor could cause, nor could anyone guarantee that what seemed to be a safe distance from accidents of this kind was actually safe. And yet at the time of Harrisburg, there was an option in the air in favor of the catastrophe; one could sense a sly sympathy with the explosive substances in the reactor casing. It was as if the deadly radioactive substances not only represented a physical quantity, but also contained a culturally critical message that deserved to be released. The small, immoralist neurosis in the face of the defective nuclear reactor was therefore not just a milieu-specific perversity, not just a sign of pyromania or evidence of an inclination towards the macabre within the human nervous system that is characterized by ever stronger stimuli to gain arousal. In it, a whole way of thinking came to light together with its dubiousness. Within its own logic, the option for the explosion was nothing more than an educational hypothesis about the didactic and mind-changing energies that radiate from actually occurring disasters.
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Only through Chernobyl did the underlying disaster-pedagogical implications of Harrisburg come to light. Indeed, if the worst has to occur before relearning can begin, then, from this perspective, the Harrisburg incident was “not bad enough. ” Because the big explosion failed to materialize, the Harrisburg disaster could not reach the level where disaster didactics develops its grim calcula- tions. It is the level where one believes that compelling connections between misfortune and insight can be formed. According to this dicey logic, such connections arise through an absurdly magnified application of the basic idea that those who do not listen will have to learn the hard way. In fact, disaster-pedagogical thinking promises that even the greatest calamity can be referred to a human scale – that is, into the field of sensible measures for preventing its repetition – through subsequent learning. Consequently, after Harrisburg, the term “warning disaster” made a career for itself in the vocabulary of alternative movements – a term that encapsulates the hope that disasters might penetrate our otherwise unteachable minds like probes and ignite new insights within them. 3
This desperate theory of learning shines a light on the state of the enterprise that has been calling itself Enlightenment since the eight- eenth century. It began as a utopia of an unforced guidance towards better understanding. By using the soft logic of an autonomous thinking that listens to the “voice of reason,” it wanted to eliminate the violence that cuts deep when it comes to learning the hard way. In the meantime, however, even the well-meaning old Enlighteners are not very far from adding disaster to the curriculum of humanity as the last pedagogical tool, if it is really the only way that something can still be learned. Thus, we can see how classical Enlightenment, with its concept of truth based on argumentation, has been pitifully put on the defensive. No one seriously believes that something essential can still be reached on the path of listening. “Let learning the hard way be welcome; for listening has failed. ”4 There are more than a few tireless members of the old Enlightenment troop who are already at the point of being glad if at least one treatment of learning the hard way in the face of disasters that cut deep could contribute a little bit to the establishment of truth in the “civilizing process” at the very last moment (oh, this word that burns the tongue! ). And thus emerges the strange affective pull towards actually occurring doom. The catastrophe will show them! The real present calamity apparently closes the gap between argument and disclosure, bridging the distance between the appeal to the imagi- native consciousness and its overpowering with existing evidence. The catastrophe is thus the apt reversal of a miracle – no wonder, and why is it not one? Because it is a direct consequence of what the
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deluded activists are up to. The real present catastrophe thus attains a formidable truth-theoretical function: it complements the mere argument and brings massively into presence what can otherwise only be imagined. By bridging the evidence gap between listening and learning the hard way, the didactic catastrophe places the epiphanic truth of an event above the discursive truth of the imagi- nation. And thus the problem of learning from disasters leads to the logical center of enlightenment and modernity. Modernity is, after all, the enterprise where human intelligence is not content with just giving voice to right pronouncements about the world; it can only be satisfied if it has actively ensured that the right things happen to the world as a whole. But this active concern for what is right is in the most radical crisis. For if now even human-made catastrophe ought to impose a tax on learning how to do things right, then it is a fatal testament to the way that modernity has strayed from its conception of learnable right action under the guidance of success and truth. 5
The hope for a way to learn from the worst thing at the very last minute is difficult to distinguish from despair about the possibility of learning at all.
Four brief comments will illustrate the risks and limitations of disaster-didactic thinking below. It is only from the failure of this desperate learning theory that the reason why alternative cultures will only be possible as a panicked culture becomes plausible. These observations are commentary on the question that is on the lips of every contemporary: what more needs to happen before something happens? Practically oriented, it could also say: how big would a catastrophe need to get before it radiates the universal flash of insight that we are waiting for? From what point on would disasters be the self-evident grounds for radical mentality-changing insights? How bad does it have to get before it can get any better? Does it have to get bad at all? Does the underlying link between misfortune and insight have validity?
It is clear from the very first remark how problematic an answer to these questions would be, indeed how problematic the questions themselves are already. Clearly, there is no quantitative measure that could be adopted as the “didactically” sufficient size of the disaster. In various ways, the conscious minds of humans have the ability to stay immune to disastrous evidence. Presumably, the silent majority always stays outside the possible radius of damage of great disasters. Additionally, the citizens of the modern epoch have long experienced their era as a fateful event that cannot be mapped onto any reasonable will. The second fatalism that is dawning on all sides belongs to an awareness that realizes the extent to which things already occur differently than one might think. Moreover,
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the most powerful groups of modern societies have politically, ideologically, entrepreneurially, and vitally invested so much in the most dangerous mobilization techniques that even accidents on the largest scale must not cause any doubts on grounds of principle about the course and speed of the civilizing process. In these circles, mentalities exist that are irreversibly, extremely set on mobilization; in the bunker of their automatic responses, they can hold their own against any agitation. Even evidence of actual disaster ricochets off such structures. For them, revelation does not take place. In the end, minds are tougher than facts, and those who did not want to listen when it was still possible will also make themselves immune to learning the hard way, too.
If these considerations are true, then the insinuation that Harrisburg was not yet bad enough to learn anything decisive from becomes doubly transparent in its questionability. Obviously, catastrophe is conceived here as a quantum which, according to allopathic principles, produces stronger effects at higher dosages. With this logic, we immediately get into the most uncomfortable escalation. The victims of Chernobyl will have been lying in terrible agonies for a long time when a zealous didactics announces itself and says: Chernobyl was not terrible enough either, because, after all, the International Organization of Soldiering On is holding it together more determinedly than ever. The relentless consequence of this can only be that more has to happen – but to what extent?
The pedagogization of disaster eventually also fails because of an aesthetic subversion. Since metaphysical or moral meanings for major accidents are no longer available to us in the modern age, images of disaster can no longer be easily provided with a moral key. To the extent that the “readability” of catastrophes ends, their phenomenal and aesthetic visibility is revealed. On the day after the Challenger disaster in 1986, I was giving a lecture on the criteria of post-modern aesthetics at the Academy of Art in Karlsruhe which was followed by a discussion with the audience. There, a not so young student in a black shirt and grey hat spoke up and declared almost triumphantly that he had enjoyed the televised images of the exploding rocket. Hearing that confession, I stood there for a moment, speechless – you are suddenly in the eye of the storm, knowing that this was said from within the core of modern kines- thetics where the world is spun into a series of “images. ” With such memories, you remain skeptical towards the prospect of epiphany through disaster evidence. In the best-case scenario, a demonic Kantianism would emerge, which would transfer the concept of the sublime from The Critique of Judgment to reactor explosions and the view of biologically dead oceans.
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The second remark on disaster didactics connects to the topos of “learning through mistakes,” wherein humanity’s oldest theory of learning is stored. It contains the insight that only a child who has had a burn can understand fire. Because intelligence is not a theoretical quantity but represents a behavioral quality of creatures in an open environment, it must go through the school of fire. Without experiencing burns, you have no idea how to cope with life. The world is not always good and does not tolerate all kinds of behavior. A warning pain must be engraved in the nervous system in order to reliably embody the selectivity predetermined by the world. Human wisdom has been bound to the engrams of suffering from time immemorial. Thereby, disaster-didactic thinking seems initially justified, because it is based on the assumption that humanity make sense of nuclear damage in an epoch-spanning learning process. This sense-making would be identical to the act we are facing in the “drama of the history of species. ” Because humanity enters its path into the unprecedented as a student without a teacher, it would have to teach itself what it cannot learn from anyone else. It must endure being fated to an auto-didactics as a matter of life and death. Its goal of study sounds like a fairytale: it is supposed to transform itself through its own power from a coercive community of deadly stupidity into an ecumenism of intelligences. Evidently, outrageous demands are being made of its auto-didactic genius. In a study of itself that involves many victims, we will see if humanity can teach itself about itself and its planetary situation, or if it still proves to be a learning-impaired subject.
The question of the learning ability of our species touches on a critical point: humanity is a priori learning impaired because it is not a subject, but an aggregate. When we speak of humanity, we are creating a general term that can only haunt speculative sentences in the form of an allegorical subject – sentences that the Age of Enlightenment made carefree use of. What appears to be a crisis of enlightenment universalism today is in fact a transition from the study of humanistic allegories of the species to that of a hard ecology of local intelligences. This ecology begins only after the completed insight that humanity has no self, no intellectual coherence, no reliable organ of wakefulness, no self-reflection capable of learning, no identity-building common memory. 6
That is why humanity cannot be wiser than a single human being – indeed, even as a whole it cannot become as wise as an individual who has learned the hard way. The aggregate we call humanity has no body of its own with which to learn the hard way – no hand by which to learn first-hand – but rather a foreign body, its place of residence, the earth, which does not become wise, but transforms
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into a desert. The classic model of learning from harm collapses before this fact. All future learning processes at the level of the species will be fraught with an almost intractable problem of trans- mission: the question of how acquired and embodied intelligence can be transferred from one who has become wise to the unwise; more generally speaking, how individual insights can be incorpo- rated into social institutions and technical systems. Only individuals can be wise; institutions are well designed, at best.
The third remark concerns itself not with the subjectlessness of “humanity,” but the subjectlessness of disaster – if I may use this manner of speaking. Our everyday understanding shows an inkling of this when it follows its usual habit of interpreting great disasters in a fatalistic way. We think of fatality under the schema of the anonymous event. In contrast, it is crucial for disaster didactics to view even the most massive disaster under the schema of personal action. Disaster as event does not have the same grammar as disaster as action. Of the first, we say: it happened, it fell upon us. Of the second: someone did it, someone let it get to this point. It is only when the disaster has a subject – you could also say a culprit – that it makes sense to interpret it as a stimulus for self-critical relearning. In order for learning to become possible after disasters, a subject must be assumed that sees the disaster as their own and refers to it as their own deed.
Only disasters that are “committed” by someone can form this arc of reflection which confronts the perpetrator with themselves while bypassing the event. It is only disaster as action that creates this recourse which presents the seemingly impersonal calamity to a particular subject as their previously hidden “true reality. ” Understanding the disaster therefore means setting in motion a kind of oedipal investigation: only insofar as the disaster that happened is an indirect crime does the investigation expect metanoia, rethinking, and repentance from an unconscious or hybrid perpetrator. Thus, here, as in any thinking that judges morally, both the interpre- tation of the event as deed and the identifying of a culprit are indispensable.
It remains questionable, however, if an accident like that of Chernobyl can be attributed to an offender. Aside from the opera- tional aspects and general breakdown risks, isn’t Chernobyl also a result of epistemological and socio-cultural developments in an anonymous and unattributable way, which build upon premises that are thousands of years old and lead to nuclear technology? Is it still possible to seek culprits and assign responsibility in processes of this scale? It would be justified if it could be shown that this entire development is an occurrence where the occidental type of human
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theoretically works out their unmistakably peculiar will, realizes it technocratically, and enforces it in the form of a planetary politics that enslaves nature. The perpetrator could then be identified as the subject of a Western culture of will and understanding, and traced back to every single citizen of modernity, provided that each of us is made up of an objective complicity with this imperialist, nature- consuming ego. All those who participate in modernity would thus be members of its primordial horde that is bound together by the collective crime of matricide.
Let us assume for a moment that it could act the way that this speculation presumes. Don’t we have to break off the investigation and follow the modern culprit-self into the fate of its self-becoming? What has awakened the will to dominate nature in this culprit? Who or what gave the culprit the weapons to do their deed? What history could in the end turn this dominant subject into a master of nuclear fire as well? How was the will for domination positioned within it, and what instances of takeover provided access to exactly this desire and this ability? Is a compulsion to desire perhaps prior to this will to power? Is a certain formation of a self by its very nature as disastrous as a nuclear reactor explosion? Does this self that has attained the power to destroy nature not also happen to “itself” like an anonymous disaster? And is this why the potent agency and ability of modernity relates to itself as suffering and powerlessness?
These questions are being asked to show that even disasters that have been “committed” can ultimately never fit into the context of deed and doer. In them, the boundary that separates the logic of responsible action from the logic of the tragic act is crossed. In the tragic deed, not only is the offense the product of the perpetrator, but the perpetrator themselves is the result of what happened. The dramatic-tragic consciousness crystallizes only at the event itself and no “learning process” follows because the tragic deed makes it clear that the disaster and its perpetrator are made of the same substance. Thus, Chernobyl could belong to the tragedy of ability and desire, where the doers and their disaster emerge from the same happening – from the history of cognitive mobilization of the subject and the planet.
The fourth remark pertains to the relationship between truth and disaster itself. If disaster didactics sheds a light on the agony of the Enlightenment, then an agony of truth is simultaneously at play. In fact, the idea that disaster “reveals something” is only so suggestive to us because we have always associated revelation – in Greek, apocalypse – with truth. Truth – insofar as it “appears” – has ever been presented as a coming-to-light or being evident. In this respect, every kind of enlightenment contains a drama of light
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or illumination – without this photological element, we would not know what knowledge means at all and why it is always the bright side of things that faces in the direction of knowledge. If, for us, the possibility of a realization of “truth” is tied to the coming to light of previously dark things, then the younger Enlightenment as light- emitting process has also made extensive investments in this lighting model of truth.
But we are witnessing the death throes of truth. The old alliance between light and truth – the photological pact of occidental ration- ality – has been torn ever since we have been able to use what gives light to bring death. Nuclear weapons also make philosophical history. From a photological point of view, truth takes place as an event of exposure on a three-step scale: it increases from a natural or artificial lighting of dense bodies that become visible through their self-sufficient reflection to an active and invasive fluoroscopy of the bodies until the bodies are finally transformed entirely into light. The photological Enlightenment encompasses all and any objects from the point of view of their luminosity, transparency, trans- formability into light. If Enlightenment has a dramatic finality in itself, it is located in the eradication of the initial difference between light and matter as it appears in ordinary lighting via a terminal transformation of all matter into light. As long as Enlightenment operated in the middle (analytical) stage of an X-Ray logic, it could not foresee the end of its movement towards light – the light-kinetic dimension of the process only became transparent in the moment that modern nuclear physics actually reached the level of a radical thinning of matter. The cutting-edge technologies under the rule of light are a consequence of the photological process in that they turn matter directly into “light” – brighter than a thousand suns. But what can we still see in this light? Is the light of a nuclear explosion one in which the world would learn something about its situation? Or does not this light itself turn into the last reality, into the disap- pearance of everything in a lightstorm? Instead of shedding light on the state of things, the thinning light eliminates them, together with those who wanted to understand them.
Something of these paradoxes takes effect in the speculations of disaster didactics as well. Those who count on learning from disaster expect the explosion to illuminate dark minds. The warning disaster is itself supposed to be the disaster warning. The actually occurring transformation into light is supposed to critically examine our civilizational process. Those who follow this logic to its conclusion will arrive at a fatal conclusion: only an apocalypse could act as a convincing warning against an apocalypse. Only an actual disaster could provide evidence for a truth that must occur both
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apocalyptically and in the present in order to become completely true. Thus, the only disaster that makes sense to all is a disaster no one survives.
When all of the possibilities to transform disaster into pedagogy are played out and have been understood in the context of their necessary failure, then all the pathways for the history-making reflex of fleeing forward will be blocked. The powers that produce the catastrophe and at the same time want to be saved from it suddenly pile up on top of themselves. It is not “Save yourself if you can! ” but “Recognize the situation! ” that becomes the slogan of the age. And thus the situation emerges where panicked consciousness could develop into culture. Everything before that point remains the bourgeoisie with rocket ships. It is only through the experience of panic that one is freed from didactic illusions – it is the bridge to a consciousness that no longer hopes to gain something from disaster, certainly no civilization-critical revelations. Panicked culture begins where mobilization in the form of a permanent flight forward ends. For this reason, the “history” of a panicked culture would play the role of the chronic end of history itself – the kinetic motives that have heretofore made history would be tamed in it by way of an explicit culture whose efforts would be to prevent the invasion of new history-making impulses from precisely the post-historic knowledge of the catastrophe of historical mobilization. This, a previously esoteric form of consciousness (referred to as enlight- enment within spiritual jargon), would become a public matter. In a panicked-ecstatic culture, entire populations would perform an act that was previously only done by a scattered few: the leap of consciousness through time to the end-times and the subject’s exit from the causality of flight and hope. Thereby, the post-historical culture of panic would be the only alternative to the culture of historical mobilization, which already has no more history left ahead of it – just a countdown.
The First Alternative: Metaphysics
Alternative cultures come into existence when humans find themselves in an irrevocable disagreement with the world. For this reason, today’s individuals with an alternative view cannot be seen as the inventors of the alternative. They are not the first ones to have their discontent with the world become confident and fundamental. In order to understand the meaning of alternative culture in a more radical sense, we must dig around in the submerged layers of our tradition of ideas. If we go back a few millennia, the archeological
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dig for traces of an old protest against the world will make a find. There, we encounter sediments containing the beginnings of high forms of religion and metaphysical interpretations of the world. What metaphysics presents as a philosophical phenomenon is not up for discussion; so too, its basic conceptual structures and the variants of its architectonics are of no concern to us at this moment. Metaphysical statements made by humans are only of interest to us insofar as a crucial chapter in the prehistory of discontent with the world connects to their emergence. We interpret the appearance of metaphysical forms of thought as an indication of the increased need for harmony and abstraction in the face of increasing social and existential dissonance. In this respect, metaphysics could not be separated from its pathogeneses out of the malaise in the high cultures. To convince ourselves, it suffices to see how the most painful fundamental experiences of human existence are hidden beneath the fabric of fundamental metaphysical words: the One, substance, reason, God, logos, cosmos, soul, immortality, idea, order. Admittedly, they are experiences that always appear within the pure text of metaphysics as something that has already been overcome. The purpose of the pure text is to report the success of metaphysical harmonization efforts. In it, we can already hear the logical triumphs of consciousness over the dark, hurtful world.
As people of today, we can no longer easily understand the texts of such victory reports, because we have come to use different weapons from the old metaphysicians in our battles against world- weariness. But if we go back to the fundamental experiences through which metaphysics was first crystallized, we can see how metaphysics emerged as the very core of the first alternative cultures. These experiences are probably inaccessible to today’s everyday consciousness at first, but they are available to contemporary conscious life at the very least when it comes to situations where treatments from modernity’s pharmacy are no longer helpful. Ironically, the modern-day crisis includes involuntary access to the metaphysical attempt at world management – after all, we are watching (with a perplexity that befits primal peoples rather than late cultures) an age of a second helplessness emerge on the passive side of modernity’s status as a jack of all trades. As a result, the present time, which is philosophically based on its fundamentally post-metaphysical position, has created a piquant community of experience with the old metaphysics-kindling world conditions. The threats that loomed over the world at the end of the metaphysical era reveal its beginnings as well, so much so that restorations seem inevitable. One glance at the New Age scene in North America and Central Europe gives the impression that we are dealing with a
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gigantic remake.
A holistic consciousness industry has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic and it lives on metaphysical plagiarism. To put it a bit more amicably: countless contemporaries spontaneously quote from early metaphysical sources to articulate aspects of their current feelings about the world. They deem it necessary to skip over several millennia to find answers for their own questions. A portion of modernity must fall back on archaic speeches to say things for which no usable modern words exist.
What questions are we referring to? I will only discuss two here, which were essential in motivating the upsurge of thinking towards metaphysics: the inequality between different fates in life and the fear of all-devouring time. As for the first of these experiences, it was brought into language through the classical verses of the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal (one could add, with the mild somnam- bulist cynicism that is sometimes the privilege of poets):
Many will of course have to die down there
Where the heavy oars of the ships sweep
Others reside above near the helm
Aware of the migration of the birds and the lands of the stars. 7
This poetic meditation aims at balancing the inequality of destinies by way of a metaphysical world-housekeeping. On that higher level which constitutes the scene of metaphysical movement, everything is both closely linked and haphazardly connected to everything else; thus, the misfortune of the one comes together with the fortune of another in a sublime harmony.
But a shadow falls from those lives Across and into the others’ lives, And the light are bound to the heavy As the air is bound to the earth.
Through an awareness of connection, an evident scream to the heavens becomes music to the metaphysician’s ears. This desperate need for music is driven by the evidence that human destinies are unstoppably unequal and that there is no compensation for this inequality on a human level. Without a doubt, this experience points to the emergence of hierarchized large-scale societies and the separating of the fate of those at the top and those at the bottom. From there on out, the social world appears like an enchanted galley where rowing slaves perish below deck while a comprehensive view develops above in which the misery of others is redeposited into the harmony of the whole.
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Many fates weave alongside my own,
All are interconnected by a common existence And my part is more than simply this life’s Slender flame or narrow lyre.
The metaphysical impulse demands that thinking make this climb out of the inequality and confusion of life into an order-creating contemplation, and insofar as efforts towards order of this kind simply belong to the very nature of thinking, we can never entirely eliminate the metaphysical or “cosmic” holdings on the activity of the mind – unless this activity were willing to become as incom- prehensible and confused as the reality it works on, but then we would lose the difference between mind and reality and confused de facto existence would no longer relinquish any work to the mind. Some mystics have indeed taken this path of indifference. But for metaphysical thinking its task is entirely unambiguous: to show messy life the pathways that lead to order. For us, the claim to validity of the old metaphysical cosmic ideas of order fails because of a simple logical distinction: an ordering contemplation is not the contemplation of order per se. Music and metaphysics rise up against the noisy physics of life as an unstoppable first alternative because the will to order is at the very root of the entire impetus. Metaphysical study turns away from the desolate “surface” of things and looks down into depths or up into heights, from where intel- ligible order shines towards us, if we are willing to look away from the all too visible and not see through the intrusive glow. In order to advance to such order, the not yet refined eye and the not yet spiritualized ear must shift to more abstract forms of hearing and seeing – to seeing with the third eye, hearing with the third ear. This alternative – metaphysical seeing and hearing – is always already an overseeing and overhearing as well; a hearing all the way to the end and a seeing through, a not listening and a looking away, a right hearing and seeing, an inner listening and a seeing inward. The metaphysical break with the “superficial” world of appearance grips the organs of perception first: to ensure the effect of order, they have to spiritualize themselves and withdraw from the gross turbulence of what is present and existing. With that, the first step into an “enlight- enment” is made – it leads to a culture of transparence where all existing things shift from the state of being naturally lit or shaded to that of a logical transillumination. Thus, the analytical mythos moves into its invasive phase. The analytical mythos no longer sees the world as a sovereign play of light and dark onto illuminated non-luminous things; instead, it becomes the object of constant transillumination where a permanent intellectual light pierces
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through fleeting phenomena to reach eternal structures and bring them to definitive determinations. There are grounds for suspecting that the history of nihilism begins with the advent of such transillu- mination ontologies. If so, this history would be identical to the fate of analytical rationality which sees right through the facts to grasp their cause, through appearances to see their essence, and through structures to understand their function. This suspicion contradicts the vulgar idea of nihilism that sees the phenomenon as a modern affair and derives it from the collapse of the metaphysical “sphere. ” In reality, what has gone by the name of nihilism for a hundred years could only be the latest explication of the basic nihilism that has inhered in the transilluminating, backwards-leading, and, from presently tangible appearances, refraining rationalizations of the world since their emergence.
Next to the irremediable affronts on thinking by the mysteries of inequality and dissonance, the experience of death and tempo- rality by all individual life plays a decisive role in the emergence of metaphysics. Essentially, they form one complex, and time and death are not two different experiences, but a single experience that consists of temporality. The eventual death of all individual life is already implied in the fact that everything real seems to exist “within time” and that nothing living can escape the decay that comes with the passing of time. Whatever exists in the passing of time must suffer from the illness of becoming and the injury of passing away. Whoever is born in the passage of time owes a death to nature. The Greek myth of Kronos who devours his children captures this idea in its pervasive morbidity. It speaks of life bound to time as fateful self-consumption. This idea of time has defined the Western “civilizing process” (ow! ) and modernity has advanced this “fall into time” (first registered by the old metaphysics) to a consummate “chrono-latry,” to quote Massimo Cacciari’s baroque term for the modern cult of time. 8 But what is obscured by the contemporary dictates of clocks was glaringly obvious in the early metaphysical experience of time: Chronos,9 the passing of time, is fundamentally a period of suffering, lack, failure – a deadline for the inevitable undoing of life.
Older metaphysical thinking was aware that the time of Chronos moves directly towards death. Metaphysics (Christian metaphysics above all) understood that, being mortals, we are zombies: the living dead, walking around in their own corpses with the ghastly pretense of being alive. Indeed, this perspective forces itself to be accepted by a thinking that has conceived of all individual life as falling prey to all-consuming time. Those who conceive of life as occurring within time and understand time as an indomitable process do not only see
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themselves as continuously dying but must also imagine themselves already as those who will have died. Together with their physical and moral being, they fall victim to Chronos – not just in retrospect, but at the outset. Life must cope with this outrage if it has understood the predicament of time in its universality. From that point on, one of the fundamental questions of conscious life is how it can cope with its irreversibility. Full of horror, the one who can imagine the passage of time with respect to their own existence will see their own flesh fall from their bones – flesh and bones that are already no longer really one’s own, but that we have been dispossessed of from the outset by all-devouring Chronos. There is a reminder of this kind of shock brought on by the sight of the ephemeral in the Buddhist legend that tells of the first time that Gautama ventures outside of his father’s protective palace and sees with his own eyes the suffering nature of life falling prey to time in the form of the sick person, the beggar, and the deceased. The shock penetrated so deeply that thereafter the young man no longer wished to have his “own” eyes so they could captivate him with the deadly play; he wanted to detach himself from the sense of sight and what it perceived both at the same time.
Emil Cioran is a witness to this kind of feeling in our time. In a text called Paleontology, he recorded the shudders of an unredeemed metaphysician when confronted with the flesh:
An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology. . . . Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed on its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves . . . the solidity, the seriousness of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life. 10
Flesh and bones stand in ontological opposition to each other. While the flesh obscenely passes away, a promise of eternity belongs
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to the essence of bones. With cynical self-sufficiency, the bones perform metaphysics’ rejection of this temporary life; grinning, they bode beyond flesh and transience. A gaze that looks upon the disease of life and remains unshaken can only emerge from empty eye sockets. Thus metaphysics and cynicism come into being from the same impulse; the first as an overcoming of the temporal through an ascent into timelessness and the second as a sarcastic lingering of consciousness in what is fleeting, what is null and void. Together, cynicism and metaphysics speak about this ridiculous life with the humor of destruction.
The symbol of bones shows how metaphysics’ alternative to the ephemeral took shape. This alternative looks through the ominous fiction of the flesh all the way to the bony substance, to the very skeleton of life which continues to exist as a time-superior residuum. But bones only function as parables for last principles. Since they, too, are mere “apparitions,” they can be reduced and converted to their nothingness. In the past, it was fire that took on the work of metaphysical alchemy, distilling the imperishable from perishable life. Whatever has gone through fire has overcome this final breakdown. What remains is imperishable essence. In the end, nothing remains from living bodies that lasts – only ash and spirit, dust and weightlessness, mineral and light. This is the substance that eternity is made of. In its last distillates, the ravenousness of time breaks down. By means of an extreme reaction, the imperishable is filtered out from the murky and volatile elements.
Thus we can see how the old metaphysics sought to cope with the irreversibly oriented-toward-death: it answered the question about an antidote to transience with eternity; its answer to the question of overcoming death was immortality. These answers were enforced as the irreversibility of life processes could no longer be compensated by older, cyclical concepts that had sufficed for a mythical interpre- tation of the world. Cyclical thinking only has a chance in the life forms where world-changes in linear time can be pronounced by myths of nature as never having happened. It is only in the mythic circle of nature that life is annually reborn as if nothing irrevocable, irreversible, inseparable had ever happened. However, in historical mobilized cultures, time’s arrow flies irrevocably forward. In them, the irreconcilability of the fates and the transience of living condi- tions become overwhelmingly evident. They can only be processed with metaphysical strategies.
The metaphysical alternative (with which most of the continu- ances of modernity are still impregnated) contains the primordial history of human dissatisfaction with a lapsed world fallen prey to time. Radical metaphysics knew that only a radical overcoming
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of this reality can be its remedy. Only that which transcends life can make it bearable. And thus, metaphysics responded to the sickness of life with a witty self-cremation. Passionately, it sought the reduction of reality to its time-superior residues in matter or in spirit. It countered sickly flesh with serene bones, the burning wound with cooling stone. The metaphysical alternative has above all expressed itself consummately in the erection of stone monuments. Towering works of rock – menhirs, pyramids, temples, gates, obelisks, columns, towers – physically represent the ideals of law, permanence, and divine finality. Some of this Egypticism can still be found in the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong. In its architectures, metaphysics illustrates the thesis that the wound of time is healed only by eternal stone. In stone, the physical itself gains metaphysical content. The metaphysical exercise works ceaselessly towards a mineralization of the soul. Only those who discover within themselves the inert wisdom of the stones have found the Philosopher’s Stone.
Thus, the yearning to turn to stone lends an Eleatic trait to the metaphysical need for validity. For those unable to make peace with impermanence under any circumstances, there is no greater promise of salvation than the one that lies in the discovery of the immobile. This is why God is philosophically called the unmoved mover. To become similar to him – or to restore a lost resemblance to him – the radicals of the first alternative were happy to use impossible means. Whether they went into the desert to become a grain of sand of eternity in an ecstasy of loneliness, let themselves be walled in alive to force a stand-still of the absolute with the ultimate rejection of movement or prove with crushing logic that the flying arrow stands still in the air – each time, the Eleatic effect is at play, the desire to see through false movement in order to enter into true immobility. The authentic old metaphysics abhors what moves, teems, mixes, circu- lates, but, above all, the revolting food cycle that requires movement and violence of the highest degree. Eat and be eaten – it is this bestial macrobiotics in particular for which metaphysical movement phobia seeks a remedy. Only a static alternative can free human existence from its movement in the direction of death. Therefore, the misery of life can be simultaneously overcome by overcoming its movement. Hardly any metaphysicians of the old kind would shy away from the thesis that only the immobile could be good whereas everything else – all greed, lack of freedom, fear, violence, misery, and exploitation – moves, whether on legs, wheels, through automation, or with motor engines.
For a few centuries now, the immobilizing affect has been exhausting itself in Europe. As a result, metaphysics of the older
50 The Other Change
kind has become impossible. Since being is thought of as a verb and the subject is thought of as an activity, ontology in its classical form is no longer “tenable. ” Even modern science has devoted itself to a concept of movement according to its mode of operation, namely that of research; when it comes to Hegel, the suspect movement has conquered metaphysics itself and made eternity get a move on. Meanwhile, Chronos devours not only his children but also the timeless magnitudes which we once thought to have evaded his appetite. We reside in such a penetrating de-eternalization and mobilization that we are not even able to speculatively conceive of an opposite concept to the dominant concepts of movement and event. Two centuries were all it took to use up the immobilistic reserves of a world age. A cult of movement without historical precedence has enveloped modern thought and agency. It sees all that stands still, holds on, relies on itself, and rattles unused as ridiculous. As if it had to recover from a long illness, modernity has broken away from its rigidity-enamored former times and now enjoys its new power to evaporate “all that is solid. ” Nowadays, only real estate brokers believe in immovable property.
However, disestablished eternity casts a long shadow over the great dynamization epochs. Modernization visibly attacks the Old World basis of existence and does as much violence to the primary courses of life through increasing mobilization as the most raging immobilization. Thus, a discontent grows out of the “civilizing process” and calls forth new alternatives. Does metaphysics thereby return? Do the Egyptian and Eleatic motifs once again have a chance? Are the apostates of modernity once more seeking the exit from earthly confusion in cosmological order? Was the collapse of the old metaphysics through the attack of modern concepts of activity not definitive? Or was that first static metaphysical alter- native perhaps not the only way to disagree with the world? Is there another alternative that does not have to end up in stone, purity, and self-mortification in order to cope with the transience of life?
The Second Alternative: Poeisis
It is still not broadly understood that a philosophical discourse of modernity is only possible as a critical theory of mobilization. To put this more pointedly: there is no Frankfurt school of critical theory, only a Freiburg one. Because if mobilization is indeed the basic process of modern times against which a critical theory must define itself in the form of diagnostics and therapeutics, then the Frankfurt theory has no critical principle, whether as an aesthetic
The Other Change 51
theory or a theory of communicative action. As a negative aesthetic, it fails the critical moment with its latent argumentation that is without a world; as a theory of action, it becomes indistinguishable from its object insofar as communicative action manifestly operates as a principle of mobilization. 11 In contrast, the Freiburg theory has found a critical “principle” in the concept of releasement, which expresses an acute if not unmistakable difference to mobilization. The acuity of this difference consists in the fact that it describes the kinetics of modern processes as an active plunge into autom- atization without any illusions and then serenely recommends accepting the modern ability to act as an illness to be endured. Its ambiguousness stems from the fact that this acceptance is easily distorted into an assent to the fatal course of the world – it is but one step from intellectus fati to amor fati; one small false movement between the positivity of an understanding of the history of Being and the affirmation of calamity inherent in destiny. Nevertheless, only releasement, correctly understood, contains the difference that is able to render a theory of the world process critical – it acts not as a driving force of an alternative mobilization but as an alternative to mobilization; it does not place any other movements onto the path of the illusion that there is a path.
A critical theory of mobilization circles around the point where the kinetics of metaphysics turns into the kinetics of modernity. The old metaphysics as a passion for immobility and self-absorption is the original accumulation of subjectivity, which plunges itself forward within modernity as a passionate mobilization. Modernization takes place as the work of those powers that have catapulted out of the age of the first alternative: as the action of big science, big capital, big technology, big media. These are the essential carriers of the modern processes – and we deny ourselves an insight into their kind as long as we speak of them as “productive powers. ” In truth, productive powers are powers of mobilization. Mobilization is the modern response to the transience of life and the inequality of destinies. Through it, the lawsuit of dissatisfaction with the world moves to the next level of authority. The great mobilizers of modernity carry the promise of defeating the finitude and transience of the human condition by delimiting the mobilization of the finite and transitory conditions themselves. 12 The rapid planetary enforcement of this impulse illustrates the coercion with which life in post-metaphysical times seeks to cope with its irreversibility in the death-oriented process. Instead of implausible striving towards eternity, it thus brings modern dynamization strategies into play. We no longer look through smoke and mirrors at ancient images and primal sounds but have learned to banish images with images and
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sounds with sounds. Through the combined effect of the mobilizers, modernity forms the image of an inverted metaphysical culture. We now react to the horror of irreversible movement not with a flight into non-movement but with a flight into the fleeting. Strangely enough, modern immanentism, with its rejection of a hidden world and an after-life, has brought about no solid sense of the here and now, but has rather transformed it into a phantom and mobilized it to the point of evaporation. Heinrich Heine would revoke his most generous verses: ever since heaven has really been left to the angels and sparrows, the earth is becoming more and more unreal. A Dionysian-kinetic nihilism has superseded the metaphysical one. In it, the world is not overcome by way of the eternal, but actually revolutionized and made to disappear through the acceleration of changes. Thus, Old World metaphysics and New World technology seem to agree not to take the transient existences they encounter too seriously but to place them at the disposal of campaigns for conquest and change. In this new functional dynamism, the old Eleatic immobilism possesses its closest ally. The nihilism of transcendence is perpetuated and outbid by that of immanence. One could probably demonstrate that the newly nihilistic mobili- zation prevailed first and with special ferocity in those parts of the world where ancient nihilistic metaphysics and religions had tilled the ground within people’s subjectivities. Seen through this optic, a nihilistic meridian becomes visible which emerged from Old Europe, from Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, and passed through Russia, Japan, and North America. Without a training to overcome the world that lasted thousands of years, there would be no modern evaporation of it. Wherever this training did not take place, modernity implants itself with great difficulty because it has no connectors to latch on to within people’s mentalities. One must experience things in the world as having seen through them to their very “grounds” before developing a taste for making them dance in a kinetic revolution of modernity.
Only now does it become clear what we mean when we ask about the possibility of a second alternative. This question searches for the possibility of a non-nihilistic position of conscious life towards its irreversibility, an attitude that does not counter the death-bound passing of time with either the old nihilism of eternity and substance or the new nihilism of mobilization and change.
What we understood alternative cultures to be were remedies against the inevitable and unbearable grounds for discontent with the world – particularly against the unacceptable transience that adheres to all life which has come under the rule of an idea of time. A non-nihilistic alternative to that which is unacceptable can only
The Other Change 53
stem from a different concept of time. Since the nihilistic image of the world is one that is dominated by Chronos as the passing of time, a non-nihilistic alternative must above all be one that owes nothing to Chronos. This is only possible if a present, lived time reabsorbs an imagined time. Imagined time, I argue, is the ruinous time of mortality. It stretches out between the lead up to the end and the walk backwards to the beginning – these two gestures that open up the imagined space of time’s passing within a subject. But there is no reason why these gestures should compulsively and irreversibly dominate our conscious lives. The present existence is not doomed to rush forward into its imagined end, nor must it cling to the ideas of an origin, a “nature,” or an initial essence. As long as it remains freely movable, it can always bring its occasional fast-forwarded imagining of the end and its momentary recourse to ideas of origin back to the balancing point in the present. Life in the moment thus stays on this side of the compulsion towards metaphysics and outside the curse of history; for neither does it have to encompass the entirety of transitory processes within historical overviews, nor does it feel it necessary to circumvent such ideas towards a concept of a non-moving eternity. The living moment is also not seduced by the suggestive idea of an infinite becoming and passing, where it would be classified as a fleeting point in time. For then, even points in temporal lines and circles would lose their character as moments in time, no longer considered to be the present.
What follows from this? Nothing less than a mildly radical critique of historical existence. If the second alternative culture actually arises from the present as its source, it will reject all of the world’s structures that have been placed in the imagined space of time’s passing: the mythical world of origin, the utopia of the future, the world as historical enterprise, the world as mission and mobilization.
But doesn’t such presentism push aside all that counts as inter- esting about human existence? Does the retraction of imagined time back into the present not dissolve all the excitement that convinced life that it was worth living and carried it out into the adventure of history? Isn’t this alternative presentism a dull, nirvana-like fundamentalism that has to ultimately fade away in an uncreative indifference?
Under the assumptions of representational thinking, these are good questions. However, if these questions do not remain inquiries but become entrenched in theses, their only use will be to illustrate the lack of understanding that this type of thinking has of the essence of presence. Whoever believes that the permanent present amounts to boredom is stubbornly imagining the present as a point
54 The Other Change
in time. In truth, the present does not belong to the concepts of time. Correctly understood, it is a category of movement or drama. The present refers to the kinetic structure through which things that exist become apparent to us as that which enters the space where we encounter it. Presence is movement in the sense of the drama of arrival, emergence, and entrance. The experience of presence is one of the distinctions of human existence, because the very essence of humans is that of arrival and entry par excellence – we are predis- posed to wake up, come out, bring forth, and begin. Presence exists only where humans do, and humans only exist where they are born. Presence is the sting of the unfinished birth.
If people live in ruinous times, they know that they are mortal – creatures for whom it befits to be drifting towards their own ruin at every moment. They have explicitly named themselves as such with melancholy correctness as long as the metaphysical era lasts. But if humans participate in presence, they are the born ones – creatures in whom the movement of birth continues. Presence as a dramatic term thus encompasses a twofold movement: the opening up of the world as arriving-from-without and the subject’s holding-out of itself into the world as the space of arriving. Presence is therefore always accompanied by the awareness of a twofold happiness and a twofold horror.