No More Learning

"64 A civil war can also provide extreme motivation if the front against the enemies within has been clearly morally demarcated. Because the Bolshevists no longer had a sufficiently external enemy at their disposal after the end of the civil war in 1921, they had to internally refinance their thymotic war bonds and open a new front out of the spirit of pure mobilization.
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With this operation the darkest chapter of the tainted history of revolu- tionary rage transactions began: the intentional redirection of "mass rage" against the affluent farmers of the Soviet Union, in particular those of the Ukraine, who gained notoriety under the name of "kulaks. " They are still the largest collective of genocide victims in the history of humanity—at the same time, they constitute the group of victims that can do the least to struggle against the forgetting of the injustice committed against them.
According to Marxist teaching, the Soviet leadership should have regarded the peasantry of the country as a productive class that was, to a certain extent, analogous to the proletariat. Because it belonged to a prein- dustrial universe, however, it formed a category of producers of the wrong kind, producers condemned to fall. Thus the peasants of Russia and the other Soviet states entered the radar screen of the revolution in a twofold sense—on the one hand, they embodied a shocking backwardness, which could only be eradicated by means of forced modernization; on the other hand, they were the producers of the food that the revolutionary elements claimed for themselves from the first day of the riots. Lenin himself deter- mined the rough tone of the politics concerning the kulaks by consistently situating the independent farmers in the first row of those "classes" to be executed, next to the bourgeoisie, the clergy ("the more representatives of reactionary clergy we can shoot the better"), and the Menshevik reformers. It was only after a return to financing compromises (in the context of the new economic politics after 1921) that most of these groups were allowed to breathe a sigh of relief.
This was finally finished when Stalin around 1930 turned back the wheel to an exclusive command economy. From that point onward, the "destruc- tion of peasantry as a class" became the main priority on the revolutionary agenda. Because there was no arrangement in regular Marxism for using repressive measures against the peasantry as such, Stalin picked up Lenin's directives and had to extend the schema of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat to such an extent that it now included a class struggle that had not been predicted: between the poorer and the less poor, sometimes even affluent strata of the rural population. The latter suddenly enjoyed the questionable honor of being declared a substitute for the exterminated bourgeoisie—even straightaway becoming a representative of "agricultural capitalism. " Consequently, the new mobilization was directed against those farmers who were still able to continue with their business in a relatively successful way in the midst of the general economic disaster (from 1917 until
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1921 the number of deaths from starvation in Lenin's empire climbed to more than 5 million). It is understandable that these "big farmers" were not excited when the functionaries of the revolutionary countries seized their harvests. Their hesitation in having to deliver their means of subsistence was identified as sabotage and was punished accordingly. The ominous col- lectivization of agriculture under Stalin pursued the goal of simplifying the confiscation of yields by starting with the production.
The "de-kulaking" during the early 1930s, which led to up to 8 million starvation deaths during the harsh winter of 1932-33, meant a psycho- political caesura in the business conduct of the rage bank management. From 1930 onward in Stalin's politics with regard to the kulaks, the dark aspects of popular thymos prevailed as the essential driving forces in the rev- olutionary rules of business: resentment, envy, the need to humiliate those who were allegedly or truly better off.
If it is appropriate to describe the history of events in the Soviet Union as a drama of the lost innocence of the revolution, the application of hatred against larger farmers—and after 1934 also against so-called midsized farm- ers (those who owned up to two cows)—marked the transition of the Stalinist U. S. S. R. to an open psychopolitics of dirty energies. In its course, the "class" of those semi-starved was sent into battle against the "class" of those barely able to survive—with the pretense that this would be the most contemporary form of revolutionary struggle in the fatherland of the world proletariat. Stalin himself provided the justification by contributing a new "class analysis" from the vantage point of somebody who was riding on the witch's broom of solitary illumination: according to this justification, it was legitimate to call for a "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in the name of the Marxist classics. A kulak or "great farmer" was identified as somebody who produced enough in order to provide for his own family and a few laborers—with an occasional surplus sold at markets or in the city. This injustice against the working masses was not in the future allowed to remain unpunished. To avenge it, a demonstration was needed to show what "ter-
65
ing of the concept of "class struggle. " Suddenly it was no longer mentioned that the bourgeois epoch had "simplified" class oppositions in terms of a clear opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat, as the Communist Manifesto stated. After Stalin had elevated the kulaks to the rank of a "class," and by calling them "counterrevolutionary," this class was ordered to be liquidated
rorism in one country" was capable of achieving.
The reason behind the events was concealed in the random broaden-
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overnight in substitution for the barely existing and quickly extinguished bourgeoisie. From that point on, it was evident for everybody who wanted to know that every form of "class analysis" entails the demarcation of fronts at which the executioners confront those to be executed. Mao Zedong also came up with a new "class analysis" when inciting the Chinese youth against the "class" of the old during the great Cultural Revolution.
It is important to realize that we are not merely talking about termino- logical finesse here. If one continues to speak about classes after Stalin and Mao, one makes an assertion concerning the perpetrators and the victims in a potential or actual (class) genocide. As smarter Marxists have always known, "class" is a descriptive sociological term only at the surface level. In reality, it is primarily strategic in nature because its content materializes only through the formation of a combat collective (a confessional or ideo-
67
What lends disturbing significance to the processes initiated by Stalin's improvisations is the ease with which the leaders of the Soviet Commu- nist Party were able to induce in countless participants the intoxication of a resentment that unites its bearers to serve as accomplices in extinguishing devalued "classes. " Research has provided vast information on the motives of Hitler's willing executioners; Stalin's armies of helpers remain hidden in the catacombs of history. What genocidal excesses in the name of class in fact reveal is the extent to which what sociologists refer to as "social ties" are also always woven out of a hatred that binds the disadvantaged to the seem- ingly or actually advantaged. When envy dons the gown of social justice, there arises a pleasure in belittling others, a pleasure that is already halfway to destruction.
The Bolshevist system would never have recovered from this defilement—which could hardly have been exceeded even by the Moscow trials—if Stalinism had not been rescued by the war that Hitler carried into the Soviet Union. The fury of idealizing, which its agents and sympathiz- ers shared, would never have sufficed to compensate for these darkenings (Verdunkelungen) of the Soviet experiment as a whole, if there had been an appropriate and timely enlightenment concerning the events in the coun- try. The anti-Hitler imperative of those years was responsible for the fact
66
matively and, eo ipso, performatively, one makes an assertion stating who is
logically formed maximum-stress-cooperation unit).
justified to extinguish whom under which kind of pretense.
ing ranks far above race thinking when it comes to the release of genocidal energies in the twentieth century.
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If one uses it affir-
Class think-
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that interest in not perceiving overshadowed the horrors of Stalinism, in particular for Western party supporters and sympathizers, who insisted on their high-minded immunity to the facts. For countless members of the New Left in the Western world, the phase of wishful blindness was to last until the Solzhenitsyn shock of 1974. Only with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago and the works of the nouveaux philosophes was it possible for a modified perspective to come about, although some spokesmen of the eternal militancy were still then content with modernizing their protection of ignorance.
After July 22,1941, it was once more proven in the battle of the Russians against the German invaders that it is possible to set free the most powerful cooperative energies in a collective through provoking the national thymos, even if this collective had just suffered the most severe humiliations on the internal front—perhaps precisely then because the war between nations can bring about a certain recovery from ideological infamy. It was thus ini- tially consistent that Stalin's propaganda referred to the war against Hitler's armies as the great patriotic war—in deliberate analogy to the "patriotic war" of the Russians against Napoleon in 1812. The bitter irony of history was only revealed when the heroism and willingness of the Russian people and its allies to suffer entered into the books of "antifascism" after the battle was won.
As Boris Groys has demonstrated, communism constituted itself as a
68
mobilizing power exclusively within the medium of language.
not surprising that its successes consisted mainly in the enforcement of a strategic codification of language (Sprachregelung). For good reasons, these successes went far beyond the sphere of Soviet dictates. In the entire sphere of influence of Stalinism and beyond it in the New Left, the ingenious self- depiction of left fascism as antifascism became the dominant language game of the postwar era. This had long-term effects that can be traced to the present in dissident subcultures of the West, most importantly in France and Italy. It is not an exaggeration to identify the flight of the radical left to "antifascism" as the most successful maneuver of language politics in the twentieth century. That it remained, and remains to this day, the source for highly desired confusions follows from its premises.
The continuation of the game by the Western left after 1945 happened primarily because of the need for an encompassing self-amnesty. The so- called attempts to work through the past to search out the "sources" of fas- cism remained subordinate to this imperative—whereas the tracing back
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It is thus
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to Lenin's initial contribution remained blocked through a prohibition on thinking. It can be easily explained why the left needed this act of amnesty. Considering the devastating results of Stalinism, they needed to cover up, justify, and relativize an excess of mistakes, failed opportunities, and illu- sions. Well-meaning companions knew what they did not want to know— and did not hear anything during the critical times. (Sartre, for example, knew about the 10 million prisoners in Soviet camps and remained silent in order not to break with the front of antifascists. ) Their always problematic cooperation with the manipulators from Moscow, their acting blindly with regard to the first signs and the true extent of red terror, their one-eyed sympathizing with a communist cause that had been deeply compromised in theory and praxis long ago—all of this strongly called for understanding, romanticizing, and forgiveness. The left's absolution necessarily had to be granted by its own people and from its own fundus because independent instances, which could have pardoned them, were not available.
It is not correct to say that the far left in Europe after the Second World War concealed its emotions from itself. By perpetually raising its antifas- cist convictions, it proclaimed for itself that, apart from its basic historical legitimacy, it had intended grandiose plans and possessed the right to con- tinue where the revolutionaries before Stalin had stopped. A higher moral mathematics was invented according to which someone has to be taken to be innocent if he can prove that someone else was even more criminal. It was thanks to such strategic reflections that for many Hitler served as the savior of conscience. In order to distract oneself from the affinities of one's own engagement with the ideological premises of the most extensive acts of murder in the history of humanity, historical mock trials were staged, mock trials in which everything pointed towards the private first class of the war, to the person who completes the history of the West. Thanks to totaliz- ing forms of cultural criticism—for example, the tracing back of Auschwitz to Luther and Plato, or the criminalization of occidental civilization as a whole—it was attempted to cover how closely the West was affiliated with a class-genocidal system.
The smart redistribution of shame did not miss the intended effect. In fact, a point was reached in which almost every form of critique against communism was denounced as "anticommunism," which, in turn, was denounced as a continuation of fascism by liberal means. Although after 1945 there really were no publicly committed fascists anymore, there was an abundance of paleo-Stalinists, former communists, alternative communists,
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and radical innocents from the most extreme wings, who held their heads as high as if the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, and other communist leaders had been committed on planet Pluto. The thy- motic analysis makes it possible to understand these phenomena. The same human beings, who have convincing reasons to be too proud to engage with reality—"on a raison de se revolter"—sometimes, for less convincing rea- sons, are too proud for the truth.
MAOISM: ON THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF PURE FURY
IF ONE BELIEVES THAT THE CONTROL OF THYMOTIC ENERGIES through the Stalinist management of rage reached the ultimate degree of realpolitik cold-bloodedness, one is disabused of this belief in a twofold manner by Maoism. The first lesson consists in the invention of a new kind of guerilla warfare that Mao Zedong advanced as China was confronted with a major challenge during the time of civil wars between 1927 and 1945; this kind of guerilla warfare later served as a source of inspiration for the many "liberation armies" of the Third World. The second lesson can be learned from the notorious cultural revolution of the 1960s. We have to remind ourselves that the struggle between social classes was replaced by the unleashing of the hatred of stoned adolescents against the older generation of tradition bearers. Here as well problems of rage management were at the heart of the matter. Mao's politics was from the outset characterized by a methodical substitution of collective fury for missing revolutionary ener- gies, which was provoked by the military-political leadership.
Mao Zedong's fame is primarily connected to his astounding achieve- ments as the strategic head of the civil war, which lasted twenty-five years. What was at stake in the struggle was the question of who was to have power in postfeudal China. The protagonists of this epic battle, the Kuomintang and the communists, initially cooperated from 1924 until 1927, then again from 1937 until 1945, first against the warlords in the provinces of the coun- try, and later against the Japanese invaders. Between 1927 and 1936, and between 1945 and 1949, they confronted each other, at times seemingly and at other times in reality, as fierce adversaries. Mao's military apprentice- ship began with the resistance of the communist troops against the dicta- torship of the national-revolutionary general Chiang Kai-shek, who seized complete power after his notorious strike in Shanghai against the (until then) allied communists. Andre Malraux chose as the background plot for
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his 1933 novel La condition humaine the attack of the Kuomintang fighters against the communists of Shanghai to depict a scene that was permeated by hatred and active despair. In light of this background, the idea of an absolute engagement gained focus, an idea that was about to cast its shadow over the European intelligentsia in its Sartrean variety after 1945.
Mao Zedong's strategic intuitions started with the assumption that the diffuse antifeudal rage of the Chinese "masses" of peasants constituted an insufficient basis for the mobilization of the ascetic-heroic troops he required. Because for Mao the organization of an industrial-proletarian movement was never an option—China was in this respect even more underdeveloped than Russia in 1917—he was faced early on with the prob- lem of how to create an efficient machinery of war from only agrarian ener- gies. The solution consisted in the conception of a guerilla doctrine designed for the war of small mobile troops against the massive units of the govern- ment. It rested on the easy, albeit effective principle that uses the superiority of the adversary as leverage to increase one's own forces. Mao observed that the brutality of the official military apparatus, which was led by Chiang Kai- shek, created enough despair in the agitated mass of the rural population that with appropriate guidance they could be prompted to defend them- selves against armed invaders on their own ground.
By drawing the ultimate consequences from this, Mao understood that for the weak, total mobilization was the key to success. He preached that this could not, of course, come about through a "revolutionary agrarian war" alone. A national war, he taught, was much more capable of bring- ing about the desired great mobilization—for which the Japanese invasion of 1937 was supposed to provide the desired conditions. Sebastian Haffher has explained that in the history of the war, the significant turn was the invention of the "total guerilla," which was a clear reference to Goebbels's hysteric proclamation of a "total war. " Mao proved nothing short of the fact that guerilla warfare can be taken to its specific extreme.
In a lucid commentary on Mao Zedong's writings about the theory of war, Sebastian Haffher exposes the exploitation of national war for the pur- poses of strengthening the revolutionary guerilla as Mao's epochal innova- tion. Its basic principle is the integral mobilization of radicalized fighters who confront a superior power of only moderately motivated troops. What makes the difference is the resolution of the leaders to cut off every possibil- ity of escape for their own troops in battle in order to expose them to a situ- ation of absolute stress. In this way, the war was supposed to be projected
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onto the molecular level. Even the smallest village that had been involved in the war had to transform itself according to the will of the commander into a reactor of despair, willing to sacrifice itself. Mao's apposite slogan is "China's strength lies in her very poverty. "69 The revolutionary war of the people wanted to be a daily plebiscite for excess.
While war, according to Clausewitz, is "an act of violence" in order to "force an enemy to fulfill what we wish for," Mao starts with the axiom that war is nothing but the procedure "to preserve oneself and to destroy the enemy. " This is the definition of war of the biopolitical age, which sees the world stage as inhabited solely with competing life complexes. In this connection competition is not understood as an appeal to the judgment of the market about what is the most suitable product but as the contest of destruction on the battle ground of vitalities. Thanks to this intensifica- tion, a way was discovered to overcome the amateurish traits of the terror transactions of Bakunin's revolutionaries and replace them with a resolute exterminism—as one otherwise only knows from Hitler's conception of race struggle and its realization through the fascist state (or else from Len- in's and Zinoviev's hardly concealed imperatives, for the sake of the global decimation of populations).
A conception of "growth" is connected to Mao's total guerilla warfare,
which enables initially weak fighting cells to corrupt the body of the enemy
only bit by bit and secretly, steadily multiplying themselves at his cost. One
could call it a model of war constructed according to the paradigm of can-
cer. Mao's strategy thus possesses great similarity to political oncology.
To use Sebastian Haffher's words, "The essence of Maos's warfare" "is to
overgrow the enemy, to overgrow him to death. "70 Mao's bizarre prefer-
ence for an unpopular "protracted war" was rooted in the insight that revo-
lutionary cells required substantial time for their destructive growth in a
71
in his career been a Marxist, however much he attempted to keep up the
appearance of revolutionary correctness by drawing on Leninist rhetoric.
With his belief in the possibility of the great leap of China out of feudal-
ism to communism, he rather resembled a conceptual artist who wanted to
fill the empty space of his country with a grandiose installation. Hereby he
added an East Asian counterpart to the "Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin" of whom
large country.
These few pieces of evidence make it clear: Mao Zedong had at no point
72 Mao emerged as a mystic voluntarist whose convictions were rooted more
Boris Groys has spoken in his recontextualization of Soviet avant-gardism.
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in a primitive ontology of continuing struggle than in a developmental the- ory of a Western sort. The basic assumptions of the Chinese revolutionary leader could best be described as a frugal form of natural philosophy in which the theme of bipolarity sets the tone. The peasant Mao was, typo- logically speaking, a neo-pre-Socratic of the Eastern school. He translated conventional Taoist intuitions into the jargon of political economy with which, it has to be noted, he engaged only on a superficial level. He knew almost nothing about property, industry, the banking system, or city cul- ture. About peasants he taught that there were large, middle-sized, and small ones and that the latter constituted the large majority, which was why one needed to seize control of this group. One can understand partially why this mixture of Marx and Lao-tzu left a deep impression on many observers and visitors. Some Western enthusiasts such as the young Phillippe Sollers, who never felt ashamed of his misjudgment, thought that Mao was the Chi- nese embodiment of Hegel. With a little bit of distance one sees, however, that he was a crossbreed of two kinds of platitude that could only be united in a man of greatness.
The Moscow branch of the world bank of rage needed to become aware of the activist Mao Zedong rather early. At a time when the world revolu- tion in the industrialized countries did not advance a single step forward, news of other battlefronts was followed meticulously, including those in feudal and agrarian China, which had been ravaged by chaos and promised to become more of a burden than a pillar of support for the Comintern. It was more because of speculative reasons than sympathy that Mao's initia- tives were strongly supported by the Comintern, which also supported the activities of Chiang Kai-shek because Moscow's society enjoyed seeing itself pulling the strings of competing puppets. Nevertheless, Mao remained for Moscow an embarrassing partner because his successes exposed the secret of combatant voluntarism, which had also been the driving force behind Lenin's initiatives. If one took Mao seriously, one understood sooner or later that the October Revolution was only a coup d'etat that wanted to retrospectively prove itself to be a revolution. Mao, on the other hand, was the dramatic advisor of an unprecedented peasant war that cumulated in the acquisition of power by a peasant general.
After the victory of the Chinese Red Army, Mao's mobilizing psycho- technology had reached its limits because the creation of a state and a mod- ern economy, whether hierarchical and state-directed or property-based and entrepreneurial, follows completely different laws than those with
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which it is possible to drive thymotically distinguished combatant commu- nities into a state of fury that promises victory. The story of the statesman Mao Zedong, it follows, needs to be recorded in the form of a report of the failures of an excessive mobilizer. The strategist Mao remained con- vinced even after 1949 that the principles of total guerilla warfare could be applied more or less unchanged to the swift creation of a Chinese industry. This fallacy led to the sequence of events from the ominous "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1961) to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969, and de facto until Mao's death in 1976), and finally to the polite marginalization of the Great Steersman.
As the leader of the national bank of revolutionary affect, Mao was con- vinced after the creation of the People's Republic that he would be able to regulate infinite credit if he could succeed in amalgamating rage, despair, and revolutionary pride, the mixture that had supported him in the most surprising ways during the civil-war era. In order to advance the industri- alization of China, he announced the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958. Every independent observer could interpret it as nothing less than the deliberate psychotization of the entire country. However, what characterized China already back then was the liquidation of every form of internal independent observation, so that Mao's attitudes and statements meant law and eternal truth to 600 million people.
Under these circumstances, the biggest prank of human economic his- tory could be presented as the outflow of an elevated politics of genius: a huge propaganda apparatus advertised for years the idea that China's wel- fare and the glorious revolution would succeed if—together with the forced collectivization of agriculture—the production of iron was relocated from the cities into the villages. Hundreds of millions of clueless, astonished, and reluctant farmers were forced together in unfamiliar cooperatives. As a result, their motivation and ability to work weakened abruptly. At the same time, they saw themselves confronted with the task of constructing primi- tive furnaces in order to increase steel production in the country overnight using only local methods. At the time, this was one of the most important indicators of economic ability. The officially proclaimed goal was to surpass the per capita production of England within fifteen years. The results of these frenetic activities, which quickly turned out to be useless, were put into remote dumps and piled in steel mountains. Should there ever be a de-Maoicization in China, one would have to declare these hidden surre- alist mountains of rust world cultural heritage sites. (A de-Maoicization
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of China is, of course, an implausible hypothesis: politically, because Mao Zedong's icon is an indispensable means of integration for the current and future leadership of the country; culturally, because the persisting Sino- centrism almost categorically denies an enlightenment of the Chinese about
73
In spite of the complete senselessness of this form of production, a senselessness soon recognized by the leaders, the mobilization of the work- ers continued incessantly. Movie images of that time show countless rural Chinese workers in front of a limitless horizon, chasing here and there in a hectic ballet between the smoking chimneys. The neglect of agriculture was accepted by Mao and his followers as an inevitable side effect of this new adjustment of priorities. The burlesque of the Great Leap cost, according to current estimates, between 35 and 43 million lives (or, according to more conservative estimates, approximately 30 million); in some provinces, 40 percent of the population died from starvation and exhaustion. This is the only mass destruction of human beings through work that did not require camps. The fact that the Chinese leadership also insisted on the creation of its own gulag confirms the rule that no fascism, once it has seized power, passes up the chance to be gratified by cracking down its enemies through the dehumanizing act of crowding them together.
Several years were needed before the party leadership was ready to con- cede that its campaign had failed—until the end it was impossible to find anyone willing to risk telling Mao about his mistakes. The only exceptions were Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had personally attacked Mao at the con- ference of Lushun in the summer of 1959 because of the obvious debacle (and disappeared immediately after that), and some journalists, who suf- fered harsh repressions as an immediate consequence. The other members of the cadre were silent or withdrew into diplomatic illnesses in order to keep out of Mao's way at the crucial conferences. Mao himself, when being discreetly reminded about the high toll of his directives, is said to have stated that the corpses could also be useful because they would fertilize Chinese soil.
The culmination of Mao Zedong's mobilizing technology was reached between 1966 and 1969 when the leader, in the meantime marginalized, wanted to seize power again by discovering a new, easily activated rage
their own history by better-informed foreign Chinese or non-Chinese. Then again, a formal de-Maoicization is no longer on the agenda because China, with its new economic politics, has for a long time turned its back on the dreams and nightmares of Mao's epoch. )
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capital. Similar to Stalin, who staged a false class struggle between the poor- est and the less poor among the peasant population of the Soviet Union by tapping into vast resentment reserves, Mao discovered in his empire a new "class position"— between the young and the old, or between the living elements of the movement and those that were in a state of bureaucratic torpidity. The deliberate intensification of this "opposition" was supposed to help Mao draw once again on his conception of total guerrilla warfare. Apparently his quasi-natural-philosophical doctrine of an eternal war of oppositions was suited to transform any structurally caused social differ- ence into a starting point for a civil war that could be declared as a class struggle. Hereby the great director proved himself to be, until the bitter end of the Cultural Revolution, what he had been from the beginning—a nationalistically minded warlord with left-fascist principles and imperial ambitions. He stayed the man who constantly required new combative pre- tenses in order to remain in power. He also stayed the man who dismissed all such pretenses without hesitation as soon as the circumstances required, or allowed for, such measures.
For Mao it was sufficient to identify a random new resentment collective in order to set it on its designated enemy—this was enough to present the conflict as the contemporary form of "class struggle. " The apposite "class" comes into being only in the context of the fight Mao sought in order to destroy the apparatus of the party around Liu Shaotsi, who had dared to push him to the side after the debacle of the Great Leap. In the Chinese teaching of prudential strategies, the method Mao chose is called "killing the enemy with a foreign knife. "74 Mao discovered his instrument in a flood of infuriated adolescents who, following the call of their leader, left their schools and universities in order to spread physical and psychological ter- ror across the entire country. The catchphrase for this deployment of rebel- lious youth into villages was once again referred to as the unity of theory and praxis.
In Mao's famous Beijing encounters with more than a million euphoric students and Red Guards from all provinces, he explained the assaults that he expected from them. Is it not always the point of such gatherings that the people are given the opportunity to read the mind of the ruler? The public humiliations of scholars, who were chased around market squares wearing hoods of shame, who were beaten and forced to accuse themselves and, in countless cases, even murdered, belong to the memorable scenes of the Cul- tural Revolution. Even today one discovers ceramic sculptures in Beijing
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flea markets that reveal the social-realist style of that age. They depict a pro- fessor who kneels beneath the boot of a red guardsman with a sign around his neck saying, "I am a stinking number nine," an intellectual.
THE NIGHTMARISH RIOTS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION WHICH were trivialized by Western observers as upheavals—happened almost simultaneously with the student movements in Berkeley, Paris, and Berlin. In these cities, there were engaged groups that took the little information that they had about the events in China and its causes as a sufficient reason to present themselves as Maoists. Some coquettish admirers of Mao from back then, who have since forgiven themselves as if nothing happened, have continued to be active political moralists. Having reached the age to write memoirs, they depict, not without justification, Western Maoism and their
75
of the treacherous Deng) and allowed "restoration" determine the future. In 1968 Paris seemed to be firmly in the grip of the radical arts and cul- ture sections of newspapers (feuilletons). President Pompidou, a man of the center-right, was depicted as embodying the empowerment of right-wing radicalism. The culture sections did not conceal their sympathies with the events in China, the country of wall newspapers, the Mao bible, and the slaughter of scholars. Once again, the mal francais sparked the division of the world into revolution and restoration, a global epidemic, even though it was primarily limited to academic circles. When, after the political thaw of 1972, an American president visited the People's Republic of China for the first time, many members of the New Left in Europe and America were hor- rified to think that a being of light such as Mao Zedong could shake hands with a villain like Richard Nixon. In the same year, Andre Glucksmann expressed his conviction that France would become a fascist dictatorship in Les temps modemes.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a master in the sublime art of not being willing to learn. For a long time he transformed his previous sympathy for revo- lutionary violence into a self-tormenting exercise. And yet he was also an eminent representative of a generation of fakers, tormenting themselves on bed of nails, downplaying themselves in order to pay for belonging to the
participation in its performances as a sad late form of surrealism.
think that it is beneath them to forgive themselves and continue to announce that they are convinced that they were and are right—only the course of events, they claim, has taken a wrong turn (especially after the "Thermidor"
76
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bourgeoisie. Even today, it hurts Europeans with a remainder of historical tact to see again images from 1970 of one of the greatest intellectuals of the century, the author of Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialec- tical Reason, serving as a street vendor for a radically confused tabloid of the Maoist gauche proletarienne in order to step in for, as it was called, the threatened freedom of the dissidents of France.
Such snapshots belong to the final phase of a learning cycle that spanned two centuries. In its course, the European left, fatigued and indefatigable, searched for procedures to lend a voice to the rage of the disadvantaged, a language that was supposed to lead to appropriate political action. The more grotesque the images, the better they helped to illustrate how deep is the abyss that separates rage from the incompatible principle of appro- priateness. Looking at these principles reveals the paradox of revolutionary politics in general. Revolutionary politics has always devoted itself to the task of determining the right measure for something that, by itself, strives for what is "without measure.
"
THE MESSAGE OF MONTE CRISTO
THREE YEARS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1848, the French public was infected by a novel that occupied its atten- tion for almost a year and a half. From August 1844 until January 1846, The Count ofMonte Cristo, the greatest rage fable of world literature, was unrav- eled in front of the eyes of an enchanted and insatiable audience. Alexan- dre Dumas's continuing narrative appeared in episodes in the Journal des Debuts, and the book version of 1846 was more than 1,500 pages long. Hegel had declared that the appearance of a hero whose travels in the world are recorded by an epic is no longer possible in the modern "world condi- tion. " But here that very situation was presented, even if in the less artisti- cally respectable genre of the light novel. Mass culture made possible what high culture had not been allowed to do for a long time—a modern Iliad, the hero of which, the young sailor from Marseille Edmond Dantes, was denounced by enviers and careerists and innocently imprisoned in the dun- geons of the ocean-pounded rock Chateau dTf in order to spend the time after his escape fulfilling his pledge of revenge. His martyrdom had started during Napoleon's exile to Elba in 1814—after a decade of regenerative retreats, voyages, and preparations for revenge, the path of the resurrected led to Paris in 1838, at the height of the July monarchy, when the financial
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world of the upper-middle class had once and for all taken over the power from the old aristocracy.
The title and the plot of the novel did not leave any doubt that Dumas wanted to tell the story of a messiah who returned to practice revenge. It is not accidental that the work of Edmond Dantes's spiritual mentor and prison companion, Abbe Faria, which the hero discovers at the end of his campaign in his former prison cell, is prefaced with the motto "You will pull the dragon's teeth and trample the lions underfoot, said the Lord. "77 In line with this oath, the mysterious count wants to demonstrate "how much, nowadays, with a fortune of thirteen or fourteen millions, a man could do in the way of harm to his enemies. "78
As a master of mass entertainment, Dumas understood that nothing has such an intense effect on the public as a profane story of salvation. Perhaps Dumas was the first to see the mission of mass culture in displacing the myth of the eternal recurrence from heaven back to earth. The wrath of God was to become human rage—and waiting for transcendent retribu- tion was to become an immanent praxis, which was to be sufficiently cold- blooded in order to prudently reach its goal but also heated enough in order not to let go even a little bit of the call for retributive gratification. Here rage was explicitly described in terms of its thymotic nature—the elimination of the unbearable lack of suffering, which rules in a world full of injustice without atonement.
Seen from this perspective, Edmond Dantes embodies the world soul of
the bourgeois era. He knows in a clear and self-evident way what the politi-
cal transformers of his day still had to search for. He is the human being
who has found his struggle. He is infused by a motivation that eradicates
every ambiguity. If one lives for rage, one possesses that simple, apodictic
"in-order-to," which Kierkegaard took to be the difference between an apos-
79
tle and a genius.
being unpredictable enough to change direction at every opportunity— the apostle knows every time exactly what needs to be done. What the left Hegelians postulated on the other side of the Rhine in philosophical termi- nology was realized with all its consequences by Alexandre Dumas in the world of the novel. The Count ofMonte Cristo provided the French pendant to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. It unfolded a grant narrative apparatus with the proposition: "So far the abject and the offended only showed lenience based on various pretenses with regard to the villains of this world; the point is to take revenge on them. "
While the genius always has to wait for new ideas—ideas
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The transition to practiced revenge presupposes that the revenger knows from the beginning where he needs to search for the evildoers. Dumas completely lives up to this law from the great history of revenge. From the first day of the plot his villains are clearly identifiable—all of them bear the faces of the ruling class in the era of the reign of the bourgeois king. In a sense they are consistently "character masks of capital"—in no case is their guilt reducible to their class position. They are led by the small scoundrel Caderousse, who plays the part of the tale teller in the betrayal of Dantes— he embodies the eternal henchman who senses his own advantage in every regime, no matter if it comes in francs, rubles, or dollars. He is followed by the corrupt judge, Villefort, who knows the innocence of the accused and yet sentences him to life on the prison rock in order not to jeopardize his own career. He is also an embodiment of the timeless opportunist. It is not surprising that he was successful in advancing to the position of attor- ney general. And finally there are the two directly responsible authors of the conspiracy against the young captain, Fernand and Danglars. The one planned the conspiracy out of jealousy and the other out of envy for his career. The first advanced under Louis Philippe to the position of general and the second became a successful banker, embellished with a purchased aristocratic title. The spectrum of these careers is instructive: in contrast to the Bourbon reaction, the arrivistes of the July monarchy are not bound any longer by the fatal alternative of rouge and noir. The quantity of good posi- tions has increased dramatically. The city of Paris vibrates with new chances. The possibilities of advancing have multiplied so that, for the first time in the history of old Europe, a majority of the people who advanced to the top were new to the position. With the depictions of these figures, Dumas expresses the conviction that evil in the relationships among people does not ultimately originate from social structures but from the hearts of cor- rupt individuals. No political transformation can do anything against time- less infamy—only rage, calmly followed through to the end, allows one to reestablish the unsettled balance of the world. This is why popular literature
has the task of depoliticizing the rage of the disadvantaged and redirecting it to its "natural" objects, the unambiguously identified villains. True satisfac- tion, ifwe can trust the gospel according to Monte Cristo, does not lie in the victory of a collective of humiliated individuals, nor of those offended over their former masters. It comes about only as a result of the rage of a chosen victim against those who have messed with his life.
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Only one time, at the height of the rage action—which Dumas reserves for the end—does an appearance of tensions connected to class struggle break into the count's revenge against his enemies. In the end of his mis- sionary work, Dantes does not rest content with ruining the banker Dan- glars by manipulating option trading. He has to advance his campaign^ the point of destroying the capitalist personality as such. Thus Monte Cristo seeks symbolic revenge against the entire spirit of the bourgeois era. Dan- glars is arrested on behalf of the count by a gang of Italian robbers under the command of a certain Luigi Vampi—a picturesque bandit who reads Plutarch's Life ofAlexander during his free time, which probably means that he is a university dropout. The banker, who has difficulty understanding the significance of his abduction, is held in a remote cave. He only under- stands his situation bit by bit: in his cell the prisoner is forced to select his meals from "Luigi Vampi's menu. " For each meal from the alternative restaurant the prisoner has to pay a certain price, "as it is appropriate for every true Christian. " The prices, however, are exorbitantly high, so that the penny-pincher sees himself forced to spend his entire fortune, with the exception of a symbolic remainder, for his daily livelihood. He spends five million francs in twelve days, which amount, it is told, the count immedi- ately passes on to hospitals and poorhouses.
The reader who follows the downfall of Danglars understands how wrong
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The demand for rage crosses a threshold in these scenes, which have been painted with pleasure. Beyond this threshold there is no hope for further increase. After hardly two weeks, when Danglers, now white- haired form his ordeal, tumbles out of his prison, everything that could be achieved under the auspices of secular law has been realized. The highest satisfaction is granted from the destruction of the bourgeois character. The principle of the corrupt career is unveiled by this destruction; the careerist suffers the penalty that he deserves. If one attentively studies the menu of the robber, it becomes clear that it is nothing more than a popular com- mentary on the concept of exploitation. The novelist transforms the mil- lionaire into a wretch through the reversal of the relationship of exploita- tion; the devil experiences with his own body what it means to sell one's
Marx was in claiming that the proletariat did not have to realize any ideals. There is a proletarian idealism that, in a sense, argues for successful rage. In such cases one experiences the completed cruelty as the realization of a sublime mission—just as with the popular call for the death penalty.
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life day by day for the simple purpose of self-preservation. He has never needed to sell his labor power in order to survive, but now he must sacri- fice his buying power to prevent starvation. The moral lesson of the scene is obvious: every vampire lives with the risk of encountering a superior vampire sooner or later.
Monte Cristo aims to completely suspend the domination of capital over the desires of citizens. This change is not supposed to come about through the expropriation of the means of production as the Marxist vulgate wanted, but rather through the discovery of a treasure that surpasses even the great- est wealth from industry or banking transactions. Thus the treasure hunt of work, profit, and redistribution turns out to be the deeper phenomenon. With this demonstration, I leave the political and economic scene and dive back into the world of fairy tales. However, is it not the case that the deeper layers of every criticism of political economy are only touched by the criti- cism of the fairy tale of enrichment? Is it not the case that all monetary fan- tasies rest on one theme, namely, that the hero is supposed to find a way to spend his means without losing his liquidity? The person who has been truly blessed by Fortuna is not supposed to lack the miraculous manna, even if he has charitably given it to the people. It is precisely this effect, which the mysterious count has embodied since he began to haunt the discussions of Paris society like a phantom.
It is not really surprising that such a story ends with a pious lie. After the count settles all outstanding accounts and, according to his strategic plan, disposes one by one of all the people responsible for his suffering, he declares himself free of the will to revenge in a sentimental farewell let- ter and acknowledges that he, just as Satan before him, succumbed to the temptation of wanting to be just like God. Now, however, having overcome the desire to preside over Judgment Day himself, he will return to human standards. In the future he wishes to be a normal man among men or, even better, a rich man among rich people. He takes leave of his friends by reminding them that "all of human wisdom is entailed by the words: wait and hope! "
The audience had good reasons for not wanting to hear about the man any longer. It is fully justified to let go without remorse the privateer who has become dull. One more member of the satisfied class does not change the condition of the world. Of what concern is the destiny of a deserter who abandons the sublime cause of disaster as soon as he has satisfied himself?
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He who violates the pledge of allegiance to the spirit of revenge has lost his entitlement to our attention as readers. The reader continues to stick, with good judgment, to the one who has not been converted, who after his resur- rection from the dungeon insists on the execution of his rage as one insists on a sacred legal title.
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THE DISPERSION OF RAGE IN THE ERA OF THE CENTER
Conservatives start with frustration, progressives end with frustration; everybody suffers from the age and can agree on that point. The crisis becomes universal.
NIKLAS LUHMANN, PROTEST
IF ONE WANTED TO EXPRESS THE STRONG CHARACTER OF THE contemporary psychopolitical international situation in one sentence, it would have to be: We have entered an era without rage collection points of global perspective. Neither in heaven nor on earth does anyone know what work could be done with the "just anger of the people. " The sacred fureur, from which Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most vicious and greatest agitators of 1789, expected the creation of a new society, leads today to nothing. It creates only dissatisfied noise and brings about hardly more than isolated symbolic actions. However large one realistically needs to conceive of the contradictory potentials of the present, be it in the countries of the center or those at the peripheries, they no longer unite in the historically known forms of radical parties or in international oppositional movements, which put pressure on the bourgeois center or on an authoritarian, that is, quasi- liberal state. Vagabond dissidence quantities do not seem to know anymore whether they still have a task to fulfill. Here and there, there are protest
1
marches under banners, burning cars expressing the rage of declassified
immigrants, and opportunist waves of indignation transforming traditional 183
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nations of culture into debating clubs in which one scandalizes for weeks about illegal Hitler comparisons and dubious free flights for ministers. At times isolated and more sophisticated political projects or networks of regional significance (which enjoy talking themselves into having global sig- nificance) emerge. However, nowhere do we find an articulation of a vision that would provide perspectives for an accumulation capable of action—I will comment on the special case of radical political Islamism later.
The dispersion of forces is in stark contrast to the ubiquitous rumor that the world is increasingly interconnected by new media. Might it be the case that networking itself designates only a state of organized weakness? In large parts of the Third World, if one wants to continue to use that term, just as in some countries of the former Second World, the outrageous circumstances appear to be in no way less dramatic than the situation of the English work- ing class in the nineteenth century according to Friedrich Engels's daunting depiction. One is led to believe that the sum total of suffering, misery, and injustice on earth, which could potentially spark rage, would be enough for ten eruptions when compared to the situation in October 1917—especially if one considers the significantly improved conditions of information—and yet attention to these energies remains modest. There is hardly any construc- tive use of psychopolitically relevant affects. Thymos fields do not manage to stabilize themselves. It seems that rage does not want to continue to learn. It does not reach the level of knowledge, and knowledge does not reach it. Indignation cannot provide for a global idea anymore. Apparently the tra- ditional left parties are one dimension too stupid for their own ambitions, if they are not too sluggish to express their ambitions at all. Intellectuals enjoy citing one another. If the ambitious do in fact lead the conversation, they have more important things to do than take care of the debased and insulted. In the East and in the West all that remains of the hopes of those who used to be revolutionaries, reformers, transformers of the world, and redeemers of classes are mere "petrifactions"—to call up a bizarre phrase of Heiner Miiller, bizarre because hopes usually wither, not petrify.
AFTER THEORY
THUS THE "AGE OF EXTREMES" SEEMS TO BE OVER PASSED LIKE A spook that, in retrospect, no one any longer understands what made it powerful. Radicalism is only important in the Western Hemisphere as an aesthetic attitude, perhaps also as a philosophical habitus, but no longer
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as a political style. The center, the most formless of monsters, consistently understood the law of the hour. It made itself into the protagonist, even solo entertainer on the posthistorical stage. Whatever it touches becomes, just like itself, docile, characterless, and despotic. Yesterday's agents of extremist impatience have become unemployed and are no longer offered any parts to play in the Zeitgeist. What is called for now are resilient bores. What is expected of them is to sit around big tables to come up with the world formula of compromise. The relentlessly soft center creates hybrids out of everything.
At the moment it is still difficult to understand the significance of the cae-
sura. For at least a century, the sense of reality has done what was necessary
to situate itself at the extremes—probably because it always retained proxim-
ity to wars, because it saw war everywhere and wanted to see it everywhere.
If one lived during the age of extremes, one witnessed a condition in which,
as Hobbes noted, "the Will to contend by battell [sic] is sufficiently known. "2
What appeared to be peace was inevitably unmasked as the false face of war.
Every act of mediation, every reconciliatory gesture appeared as treason
against the harsh reality of the extreme. Now, however, everything that is
one-sided and exaggerated is smiled at as if it would reveal a lack of ability
to understand the conditioned and meditated character of every position.
"Being-there" (Dasein) and "to be in the midst of things" (In-der-Mitte-Sein)
mean the same thing today. Heidegger would probably say: to exist means to
3
be put into mediocracy (Hineingehaltensein in die Mittel-Mafiigkeit).
These remarks are roughly synonymous with what modern historians, columnists, and unemployed specialists of the Soviet Union mean when they speak of the postcommunist situation. It may legitimately be pro- claimed: pretty much everything that rushed by the audience during the last decades under the heading of "post-" ultimately culminates in the concep- tion of a postcommunist situation (which has existed in reality since the last years of the Brezhnev era). Because the Soviet experiment was undeniably the defining political event of the twentieth century, its formal end around 1991 signified the decisive caesura from which the objectively important later datings take their departure. The inflation of the prefix "post-," which has lasted for about two decades now, symbolically expresses that future
energies of the culture of rage and dissidence inexorably fade away.
The thesis that we are living "after theory"—to cite the elegant title of an essay from Terry Eagleton's pen, an essay that does not do full justice to the topic—is only sensible if one also applies it to the postcommunist situation.
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Because "theory," as it is evoked by some of its disappointed lovers, is mean- ingless without being related to the communist Utopia. If one engaged with social theory during the heyday ofMarxist influences, it was necessary for sub- stantive reasons to focus on the large picture—not in the mode of academic contemplation, to be sure, but as a participant of a military briefing and, when it became serious, even as a member of the war council. "Theory" could turn into a discursive praxis of authoritative radicalism because it signified, either explicitly or discreetly, the consultation of the world revolution. That was the reason it could be recognized by its messianic vibrato even in the driest lec- ture. The interest in it resulted from the mostly concealed but never repu- diated suggestion that there could be something like a logical Comintern— a philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical supervision of the great act of revenge in the name of world history. Once this specter is discontinued, the drama and the theory are also at once finished. He who says "after theory" truly intends "after politics. " One lives "after politics," if one can no longer believe that what can still be done contributes to "the revolution. " The pre- sentist adventism, which had instilled its form into the prerevolutionary and revolutionary forms of life, thus disperses. While activists were permeated by the certainty that the present would be filled with the traces of the coming, todays disenchanted live out of the conviction that the future has already been there—and nobody can bear to think of a second visit.
While exercised at a certain level, "theory" was a radically romantic affair because, like a cultural secret service, it spied on the unconscious of the class "societies" in order to find out what became of the impeded desire of human beings for the Other. The dossiers of these services thus always mentioned alterity. This amalgam, prominent during the Indian summer of the critical-theory version of neo-Marxism or as a theory without epithet in German and Anglo-American universities (while France added its resources of Jacobinism and formalism) was nothing but an apocalyptic semiology that contributed to a science of the crisis of the "establishment. " It provided the accessories necessary to observe a great politics—one always ready to interpret the emerging signs of the end of the world and the revolution of
4
less ideological agencies have been drawn into the maelstrom of competi- tion. Only a few, such as Noam Chomsky and some recent monotonous thinkers, have been almost as successful in their reconstructions as earlier generations—even if only in outsider markets. This does not mean that other
the world or the sad failure to materialize either.
After the world bank of rage closed down its business operations, count-
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contemporaries have sunk into states of peevish inexpressiveness. It is not at all the case that we have to become silent when we want to address the mat d'etre of our days just because the East is no longer red. To the contrary, it is astounding how quickly the contemporary intelligentsia wanted to adapt to the situation, a situation in which there is no universally functioning depot capable of collecting rage, indignation, dissidence, subversion, and protest. And certainly there is no emission center for future projects that could con- vincingly transcend the actual world system. And still: wherever one evokes among intellectuals of the old school the rediscovery of the political, there is a form of homesickness or nostalgia for the old days in which one wanted to believe that the day of rage would soon come.
Although the Soviet Union appeared since Stalin's death in 1953 as a mor- ally extinct colossus, and although it had lost every attraction for dissident fantasy, its factual existence served as a guarantee that the principle of the left possessed a sort of secular manifestation. Although Jean-Paul Sartre was never a formal member of the Communist Party, he could commit himself "to the leading role of the Soviet Union" still in 1952. Just like the Roman Catholic Church itself during the periods of the grossest perversions bore wit- ness through its mere existence to a transcendental mission, the disenchanted "Eastern bloc" provided a foundation for the moral and ontological postulate that there have to be domains of possibility pointing beyond the capitalist world system. The spirit of Utopia possessed more credibility than today in demanding a field "left to the establishment" in which potential worlds could flourish. Back then, no one would have fallen for the simplistic slogan, "A dif- ferent world is possible. " The other world was in the midst of us, and it was horrible. What was called for was another otherness—in this situation the word "alternative" started its career. Of course, the complete absurdity and rottenness of "realized" socialism was apparent, but as long as the rotten and absurd complex continued to exist, the simple "that" of its existence provided a reason to believe that a nonperverse realization of its justified motivations would be possible. Not all dissident potentials were already condemned to the art world's late-night programs and pantomimes; the horizon was not yet narrowly constricted to amusement parks for erotically excited last men.
APART FROM THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BREAK WITH THE OLD EUROPEAN monological conception of truth, responsibility for the currently domi- nant unlimited pluralism mainly belongs to the end of the dogma of
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homogeneous evolution, which had still characterized the European Enlightenment—in that regard it is an heir to medieval logic. The illusion ended that one could control one's age from a single metropolis, whether called Moscow, Paris, Berkeley, Frankfurt, or Heidelberg. In the meantime, the "multiplicities," the differentiations, the singularities are so prominent that their media could forget that they belong to one common "humanity. " In 1951, Albert Camus wrote with regard to the passed horrors, "Disaster is today our common fatherland. " Contemporaries do not want to hear about com- mon fatherlands beyond their own spheres of interest. Even the negative Uto- pia, the anticipation of a global natural catastrophe, is incapable of creating a transcending horizon of binding departures. The spirit of de-solidarization, whether private, local, national, multinational, or imperial, reaches so deep that every unity wants to be certain that it will be spared, even if the others are swallowed up by the maelstrom. The next years will show how dangerous this multi-egoistic situation is. If it belongs to the lessons of the twentieth century that universalism from above fails, the stigma of the twenty-first century could become the failure to cultivate a sense for common situations from below.
These changes ruin the moral, rhetorical, and doctrinal basis of the tra- ditional left. Previously successful language games have become implausible as what could be commonly taken for granted has changed. The prudish gynecological images with which Marxism got intoxicated have totally lost their footing in reality. Who could seriously repeat the phrase that the means for the realization of the classless "society" would grow "from the bottom" of the bourgeois "society"—in order to one day break free, and why not with the help of a bloody C-section by the name of "revolution"? It would now be just as ridiculous to continue using the outdated metaphor of a "primal ground," as if truth and the future could hide down there, ready for the big leap to the top. The conception of a hidden "society" beneath "society," of a secret world of cellars and tunnels where the subversion of the bourgeois edifices was planned for the future, is a totally empty con- ception. Only abstruse "sleepers" wait under the cover of normality for the day of being activated. The deep bunkers built today—for example, for the secret nuclear-weapons programs of expansive middle-tier powers—could be all kinds of things, but not incubation cells for happy futures.
Today the decline of a mythology of cellars and the underground extends so far that even steadfast partisans of the communist idea such as Antonio Negri have had to give up the old totem of the left: the groundhog. In a universe made up of surfaces, Negri claims, this being, which digs in hidden
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places, has lost its political significance. It is to be replaced by the snake, a creature with a rich gnostic past life that adapts perfectly well in the hori-
5
left to understand of what had already been hidden for alert observers of the Soviet experiment after 1918 and Lenin's decrees concerning the red terror, for the sympathizers with the left opposition after 1921, for those stuck with Utopian defiance after 1956, and for the special-needs students of history after 1968.
The art of reading for "deconstruction," the representative of radical cri- tique, could only remain on the stage by clearly distinguishing itself from the myths of the underground. It is not concerned with digging down into the impossible depth of texts and institutions in order to attach dynamite to the "foundations. " It carefully points to the instability and ambiguities of seemingly solid constructions; it reveals the indeterminacy of allegedly clear binary oppositions; it makes manifest the hidden self-contradictions of coherent discourses. As a new version of the dream analysis of texts of any kind, in particular those of the old European metaphysics, it is, although its defenders often claim the opposite, an upgraded version of hermeneutics, which dedicates itself with a critical apparatus and heightened pathos to
6
the task of provisionally letting everything be what it is. Starting with this
result, it is also possible to understand the complicity between deconstruc- tion and American mass culture: the latter is also committed to the mission of not touching "what exists. " Its means is the incessant evocation of the dream of a worse world next to which the existing world looks like a real- ized Utopia, worthy of being defended by all means.
It would be possible to gather many observations following a similar tendency in order to always repeat the same fact: after the resignation of the Eastern opponents from the world civil war in between 1917 and 1945, and since the end of the Cold War between the two primary nuclear pow- ers, the ideological pendulum, which used to swing to the extremes, has almost reached a standstill. Where everything is pulled to the center, grav- ity wins. Graffiti artists from Berlin understood: Being puts consciousness out of tune (Das Sein verstimmt das Bewufitsein). "Being" now refers to the gravitational forces of the unified center. Only what possesses the power to draw down is real. What could be more obvious in this situation than that the new unhappy consciousness diverts itself from Being just like in the old days? Precisely this is the signature of an age that wants to be everything but
zontal dimension to the flat, transparent shape and color changing world. Let us return to the irony of the situation: after 1991 there was nothing
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critical. The intelligentsia has, for the most part, turned away from criti- cism to opt once again for the primacy of religion. Desecularization gains ground every day. The need for the life-serving illusion has wrestled down "truth"—what this transition means for the process of civilization in the long run cannot be predicted today. Criticism was, it is important to real- ize, the consequence of the ontological assumption that fictions can fail because of facts. Now it is the facts that fail because of fictions—because in the future, facts themselves are supposed to be only successful fictions.
Future historians will confirm that the last third of the twentieth cen- tury was dominated by the motif of a return to the center—a center that could never fully decide on its motivations and philosophical implications. These historians will identify the unwillingness of the intellectual to identify positive values in the center or middle positions as one of the symptoms of the crises of that epoch—the ongoing romanticism of radicals blocked the learning processes that could have prepared for the problems of the twenty-first century.