No More Learning

Professors, Teachers, Writers
I shall conclude this overview with a summary description of the three remaining types of pragmatic teaching licence: the university profes- sors, the teachers at the primary and secondary schools of modern nations, and finally Enlightenment writers and politico-culturally committed journalists. From a historical perspective, these authorized teachers and speakers are largely involved in a drama that could be described as the progressive self-abolition of the privilege of educa- tion, or the democratization of the elites. In a process drawn out over several centuries, many of them - never without opposing tendencies complicating and deflecting the course of the development - devoted themselves increasingly explicitly to the aim of rendering the trainer obsolete through the training. They reinforce the depersonalizing tendency of toughening exercises by shifting the emphasis from the person of the teacher to the learning field (the faculty, the school, the
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
most
easier to identify retrospectively as early as Gutenberg's time, even in the age of manuscripts.
If one looks back at the figure of the Old European professor, one immediately notices that he was never meant to be, nor ever wanted to be, more than a character mask of his subject, and how little he was initially expected to make any original contribution to the advancement of his science. Until recently, an original professor was a contradiction in terms - and still is today, essentially, except that the contradictions now have slightly better living conditions, especially in the humanities, where teachers are allowed to speak not only professorially, but also (within limits) enthusiastically and expressively. The name 'professor' already indicates the vocation to reproduce and pass on whatever the state of the art required, and if the bearer of such a title received an honorarium from the state, it was in acknowledgement of the energetic unoriginality with which he was able to teach his subject as a whole. Professors belong to an economy of ordinated secular knowledge in which the professorial chair is strictly superior to its holder, just as, at the next highest level, the priority of the faculty over the chair is never in doubt. The faculty is the impersonal self of a discipline, whereas the individual professors act de facto and de jure as mere personifications of a teaching and learning process that has long been supra-personally institutionalized. If the chairholders can look back on qualification processes of twenty to thirty years, they constitute the average in their discipline. In their totality they form a collective subject that, at the start of the Modern Age, was given - not without reason - the title res publica litteraria, the scholars' republic. 123 To explain the nature of its task, one would first have to point to the expanded reproduction of cognitive capitals with which academic life concerns itself. One would perhaps have to emphasize even more that this res publica ultimately constituted a crypto-Platonic political body: the replacement of the simple pyramid of the 'philosophers' kingdom' with the complex polyhedron of the 'philosophers' republic'. The former sought to guide a city that would have been governable via a completed science of principles against the background of a static nature; the latter is based on the self- administration of a polity exposed, both in terms of principles and nature, to an unforeseeable dynamization.
If one is prepared to understand the faculty, the university and the scholars' republic as collectivizations, anonymizations and perfections of the master function - and this means judging the 'Enlightenment'
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phenomenon
MASTER GAMES
one can trainer
namely writers and journalists. They carry toughening process on which the res publica of the knowing is based to the respective wider levels - first into the classrooms, from which tomortow's literate indi- viduals capable of judgement and action will emerge, and then into the public media that serve the communication among today's society of the knowing. From this perspective, the teachers are character masks of the school system, just as journalists are personifications of the press - so they too, if they wanted to see themselves in that way, would serve a positive dynamic of collectivization that sought to expand a particular quality to the level of 'society' as a whole, a quality long believed to be afforded only to the few: that of mastery, be it the solving of a factual problem or the art of living as such. But as long as the collectivization of mastery - in philosophical terms, the self-determination of 'society' (as if 'society' could possess a self) - does not take place, individuals would do well to continue practising as if they were the first who will reach the goal.
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND
REVOLUTION
On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns
The Science of Reversal
To conclude this investigation into the structure of orthodox retreats to the practising and artistically heightened life, I shall cast a brief glance at a phenomenon without which the ascetic radicalisms discussed here would remain a mystery: I mean those moments of existential concentration, self-collection and reversal that, from a religion-historical perspective, one calls conversions. It should be clear by now that these certainly cannot be considered merely 'reli- gious' events. Rather, they belong to the overall inventory of ascetic behaviour from the recessive position - that is to say from the stance that develops in response to the absolute imperative. They take on a 'religious' semblance through the combination of practising or radical-ethical behaviour with the language games of the sacrifice, regardless of whether one performs these outwardly or inwardly. Sacrifices of the first kind have always been made with blood and fire, and those of the second kind as the renunciation of the will and transformation of desires. 124 While sacrificial thinking supplies the symbolic code for operations of violent exchange, the practising life as such provides the foundation for all civilizations, especially those based on internalized forms of sacrifice.
In the following, I shall cast a second glance at the processes that I have described in terms of secession and recession, detachment from the social environment and withdrawal into oneself. Dealing more closely with the phenomena, it now transpires that these categories are not adequate for identifying the first ethical movement. The spokesmen of the great ascetic caesura were never content to label their behaviour
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TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
as mere as a retreat
or an evasion of real, even though own statements intent do not lack such turns of phrase - recall such widespread distancing metaphors as flight from the world (fuga mundi), flight from the times (fuga saeculi), passionlessness (apdtheia), detachment (vairagya) or refuge in the Dharma path. The last great symbol of distance of this type is the 'Angel of History' in Walter Benjamin's interpretation, which backs away step by step from the flood of disasters, its eyes fixed in disbelief on the world scene. The concern of the most resolute secessionaries is not simply a fascinated retreat from a reality that no longer invites participation, but rather a complete reversal - a turn away from the superficially manifest, which means a turn towards something that is better, true and real on a higher level.
What I would like to sketch here cannot be more than a small prelimi- nary study towards the general science of reversal that was insepara- bly bound to the older radicalisms of the practising life. Only through this doctrine of philosophical and ascetic conversion do secessionary and recessive operations gain an object and a direction, and it is no secret that even modern revolutionary teachings still constitute the more distant derivatives of the oldest statements on beneficial turns and salvatory changes of direction. This means that there is a move- ment of all movements without which the concept of truth, according to this tradition of thought, cannot be adequately conceived. 125
This movement, which is not only retreat but also turning, was first accounted for in the ancient occidental tradition by Plato. In his account, the critical movement initially appears as a purely cognitive act meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out, a change of sight from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place 'without turning the whole body' (holo to somati). 126 This marks the first explicit reference to the motif of the integral turn. Analogously, the same faculty must 'be wheeled round, in company with the entire soul' (hole te psyche), from seeing to becoming, until one has learned to pay attention only to the eternally existent, and to prefer and endure the brightest part (phanotaton) thereof: the sun of good. Needless to say, the 'turned' soul takes the whole human being with it in its subtle movement. This redirection of sight and existence must not occur by chance and merely once, however, but be developed into a veritable 'art of turning around' (techne periagoges), or an asceticism of complete existential reversal. This is based on the assumption that those to be turned have their full cognitive apparatus, but that this is
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
mostly III a
posture. philosopher this from own experi-
ence, for has discovered the cave's exit. He understands what it means to have turned himself around and ventured outside. What he has achieved should not, he feels, be impossible for his fellow humans. Never is he, the first orthopaedist of the spirit, more gener- ous and more of a stranger to the world than when, as here, he pro- jects his own character onto others.
All Education Is Conversion
The implications of these seemingly harmless reflections are literally monstrous: they constitute no less than the first sketch for a doc- trine of subversion which holds that pedagogy more platonico must virtually be defined as an integral science of revolution. The licence to teach in this field is acquired thus: an individual pioneer of the new way of seeing escapes from the collective cave into the open, and subsequently - initially with inevitable reluctance, overcoming himself - feels ready to descend once more to the wrongly directed in the shadow cinema and explain to them how to access these lib- erations. In this sense, Platonic pedagogy is a pure art of conversion - revolutionary orthopaedics. Purely because the philosopher is already a 'convert', one who has been turned around and the first of his kind, can he make it his task to pass on the turn to others. If he simply remained enlightened on his own behalf, he could bask in his private happiness; if he is seized by concern for the state, however, he must abandon privatism and seek to share his illumination with the many.
Pierre Hadot calmly encapsulates the surplus flowing from radical reversal: 'All education is conversion. '127 One must add: all conver- sion is subversion. In the instruction to this movement lies an inex- haustible 'revolutionary' potential, at least as long as it does not content itself with individual reversal. At the start, after all- because of the strict parallelism between the psyche and the polis - it always had to be concerned with the universalization of turning, and sought to include virtually all members of the commune it meant to reform in the other way of living. It was only the later philosophical schools - the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists - that made private tuition a central concern. For them it became a sign of wisdom to content oneself with the conversion of individuals and give up on the incorrigible many - hence their belief that there is no wisdom
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OF TRAINER AND
no certain consent 'cruelty life'. abandoned plan to reform souls and the state at once - not only because they no longer wanted to believe in the parallelism between the two factors, but also because they began to recognize in the state that cold monster which, they were
convinced, could not possibly be the valid analogue of the soul. There were good reasons for the timing of the individualistic retreat from Plato's over-enthusiasm, from this excess of missionary zeal that denizens of the Modern Age would term 'utopian'. The doctrine of periagoge, the turning around of the soul (which was later often combined with the term epistrophe), was in fact the first explicit version of the absolute imperative 'You must change your life! ', framed in the exhortation to turn one's entire being towards the spir- itual side. This imperative was first formulated in a holistic variation that led to numerous severe misunderstandings. In its deep structure, the Platonic doctrine of learning by the sun of truth had remained an occulted sacrificial theory - related in this respect to the ascetic systems appearing in Asia at the same time - as the turning around of the soul could ultimately only be defined as a relinquishment of the particular in favour of the general. 128 The consequence was that this version of the absolute imperative was affected by two profoundly misconstruable factors. The first was the verb, in that 'change' here meant something along the lines of 'sacrifice oneself to the general', and the second lay in the possessive pronoun, in that the adepts were secretly dispossessed of 'their' lives, which were instead handed over to the true whole that was yet to he created. You are in the world for the sake of the whole, not vice versa - this is the correspond- ing admonition in Plato's Nomoi. 'We do not belong to ourselves', we are still told today in traditions of this type. This is the origin of anthropotechnic tendencies that pervert the absolute imperative by reading 'life' instead of 'your life' - though here, on the terrain of antiquity, the word 'life' admittedly has more political than bioscien- tific implications. Compared to this, the apolitical spiritual systems of late antiquity were absolutely right to insist that individuals should be taken seriously as individuals. Only for that reason had they been concerned to initiate them into the craft of life, concern for oneself, lege artis. Like an ancient anticipation of the modern restriction of the right to arrest (the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act of 1679), they undo the individual's helplessness before the whole and assert its inalienable claim to a self-determined life, even if, as prisoners of reality, they are forced to accept certain curtailments of their right to
freedom.
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EXAGGER. <\TION PROCEDURES
followers put the idea of universal conversion back on the agenda of modernity, with the known consequences - predominantly bloody consequences that, taken as a whole, go back to the amalgamation of the Graeco-Germanic philosophy of liberation and the ideas of the French Revolution. I will show in chapter 11 how his amalgam led to an anthropotechnics that was intended to help produce the New Human Being, this time as the product of a political conversion that did not rule out the rebuilding of the body - and still, questionably enough, in line with holistic concepts of 'society', where it is only ever a small step from the over-elevation of the whole to the sacrifice of the part.
The Catastrophe Before Damascus
In the meantime, the motif of reversal - which had initially been primarily the domain of political theory and the philosophical art of living - had been monopolized by religious interpretations. Their paradigm was the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, com- mented upon countless times. There are two accounts of this defining moment in the Acts of the Apostles: once in autobiographical form as part of Paul's defence speech before the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 22), and once in the third person (Acts 9). Both versions emphasize that Paul was 'turned around' through the event on the road to Damascus, transformed from a persecutor of Christians to an envoy of Christianity. In the personalized version, the story is as follows:
'About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, "Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me? "
'''Who are you, Lord? " I asked.
"'1 am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting," he replied. My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me.
'''What shall I do, Lord? " I asked.
'''Get up," the Lord said, "and go into Damascus. There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do. '" (Acts 22:6-10)
The third-person account of the same events, which is located near the beginning of the acta apostolorum, contains only one substantial variation: it emphasizes that the companions stood by speechless because they heard the voice, but saw no one (Acts 9:7).
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TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
IS even we are light years away Platonic reflections on the
of the soul and its guidance from the cave of collective sensory illu- sions. There is no reference to the concerns of Greek rationalism or the turn towards the sun of truth. The light that dazzles the zealot on the road to Damascus is a mixture of midday demon and hallucina- tion. The story is already set firmly on the terrain of a magical concep- tion of the world (Spengler even assigned it to the atmospheric space of the 'Arabian' cultural soul) whose mood is defined by apocalyptic expectation, salvation panic and a miracle-hungry supra-naturalistic hermeneutics. Most of all, it displays the spirit of a zealotry that is ready to leave for any destination, and which barely seems to care whether it heats up in one direction or another. Placed against the background of the philosophical concept of conversio or epistrophe, Paul's experience is by no means a conversion, which would have completely changed his personal habitus. Nor was it for a moment a realization, but rather the encounter with a divine voice that has no qualms about manifesting itself in this world. Taken as a whole, what happened to Paul is no more than the 'reprogramming' of a zealot in the precise sense of the world. The term is justified because the 'oper- ating system' of Paul's personality could continue to be used more or less unchanged after the reversal, but now freed up for an extraordi- nary theological creativity.
The conversion of Paul therefore belongs in an entirely different category of 'turnings' that display an apostolic-zealotic character, not an ethical-'revolutionary' one. The theological tradition provides the term metdnoia for this, whose general tendency is best formulated as 'change of heart', with 'penitence' as the heightened Christian form. 129 From a psychodynamic perspective, the term belongs in the force field of the inner collection that seems appropriate before or after great events - whether after a personal or political defeat that forces a re-evaluation of one's decorum, one's guiding maxims in life,13° or in anticipation of an imminent event that is apocalyptically foreshadowed. Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon, in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end. It is no coincidence that the era of the European Reformation, which was swarming with people who wanted to get serious, was another heyday of the dark belief in astral influence and the fear of end times. The modus oper- at1di of metanoia is not the turning around of the personality, but rather the collection and heeding of the long-known, which, for lack of an immediate occasion, one had previously avoided examining in
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EXAGGERA TION
PROCEDURES
full depth.
Jewish dissidents
ample opportunity to understand that they essentially had the more coherent interpretation of the tradition already, and that they were the ones who had given the messianic element of Jewish doctrine the most exciting of all possible readings.
What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, then, was a meta- noetic episode that led to a reorganization of consciousness from the perspective of a newly formed centre of the highest conviction. This constitutes a process that William James, in the chapters devoted to 'conversions' in his classic Gifford Lectures of 1901 ('The Varieties of Religious Experience'), sought to interpret using a suggestive general schema: in the subliminal consciousness of the subject, a new epicen- tric personality core prepares itself and merges with the hot spot of operative self-awareness at an opportune moment, bringing about an intense transformative experience. 131 The application of this model to the case of Paul immediately yields a consistent picture; in practice- theoretical terms, he had already 'trained with the opponent' for some time. His exercises in hostility towards the Jesuans had put him in suf- ficient form to cross over to the position of his previous adversary at the right moment. He had long formed a clear, albeit still unwelcome idea of this adversary's strengths on the pre-conscious level. In this context, it seems significant that in the 'autobiographical' version of the scene on the road to Damascus, he already addresses the speaker who calls him from above as 'Lord' (kyrie), even before he has identi- fied himself as the Jesus he had been persecuting. Everything would suggest that his second person was waiting for this interjection.
From this point of view, Paul was not a convert, let alone a 'revo- lutionary', as is claimed in recent neo-Jacobin interpretations of the Pauline phenomenon,132 but rather an opportunist - in the sense of Machiavelli's theory of opportunity - who, in spite of himself, had long since recognized the high spiritual chances of the new doctrine he had initially fought. He had understood, at first intuitively and later explicitly, that only a messiah who genuinely came could help the politically hopeless and intellectually stagnating Judaism of his time to escape from its rut. Naturally he had never remotely intended to found or set in motion 'universalism', or even a subjective varia- tion thereof; he simply applied himself to reformatting an elect group (much like the professional revolutionary of the Leninist cast, who were always more elitist exterminists than inclusion-friendly univer- salists, and like the no-longer-numerous successors of Robespierre in France). It is characteristic of 'conversions' of this type that they
304
pursumg Jesuan sect, would have had
OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
occur more t o an pre-consciously recognized a completely new doctrine - James quotes extensively from the accounts of heavy drinkers who, through a form of religious self-collection (usually in a Protestant environment with strong conversion stereotypes), had managed to ally themselves with their existing, but previously powerless better judgement and thus distance themselves from their addiction.
There Is No Conversion: The Augustinian Paradigm
In this context we have an opportunity to re-evaluate Oswald Spengler's strong thesis that essentially, conversions do not exist - only re-occupations of vacant positions in the fixed structures of a culture's field of options. 133 The basal soul atmosphere of an advanced-civilized complex remains identical through all superficial changes of confession, he argues, and what seems like a U-turn from the outside can, in reality, never be more than an ultimately arbitrary variation (albeit occasionally a far-reaching one for present and future generations) within a clearly demarcated space of possibility. Hence in spiritual matters too, the saying applies: plus (4 change, plus c'est la meme chose.
The suggestiveness of this claim can best be explained using the example of the second conversion hero in Christian tradition, Aurelius Augustinus, who, in his Confessions, famously stylized the entire story of his youth as a protracted hesitation before his 'con- version' in 386. In his case, Spengler's theorem seems supremely plausible. One can easily use his life story - like those of countless analogous confession-changers and serious-getters - to show that no trace of a 'conversion' ever took place in the deep structure of his personality. Rather, within an age-old orientation towards the world above, he simply changed addresses, or the Great Other, the transcendent trainer, several times - from Manichaeism to Platonism, from Platonism to philosophical Christianity, from philosophical Christianity to a theocentrically darkened cult of submission. He was no anomaly in this; as early as the second century AD, 'conversions' to philosophy had taken place among the educated members of the Roman ecumenical community, and these were organically continued in adoptions of Christianity - in the case of Justin the Martyr, for example, the Catholic patron saint of philosophers.
At no point in these multiple rebuildings of his edifice of convic- tions did Augustine go through a complete epistrophe; he simply
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
m beginnings bit by he attained a personally con- densed and completely embodiable form of ascetic rejection of 'this world'. Nor did the famous 'take up and read' [toile lege] contain any new discovery, merely a reminder of familiar motifs that had ripened within his 'epicentric personality' for the inner takeover. Thus, in ideal-typical purity, he embodied the qualities of the 'sick soul' or the depressively 'divided self', of which William James showed how, not infrequently, it also achieves the collection of its powers in a gradual
or sudden unification without any religious turn. 134 In psychological terms, what converts have often described as the effect of grace mani- fests itself above all as a personal energy gain as a result of increased integration. Such integration takes place when the entire system of mental drives is subordinated to a unified perspective of purpose. It is due to this effect that all partial forces now work together under the direction of a previously latent new centre of conviction. Such a 'united' subject experiences itself as simultaneously called-upon and moved: the movebo effect135 manifests itself in it with twice the strength. In the case of Augustine, the 'unification' seemed to have been reached at the moment when he achieved the concentra- tion of all partial energies in the gesture of Christian-Platonic self- abandonment. The candidate's long hesitation, furthermore, proves that during his time, a complete conversion to Christianity had to be undertaken as an entrance into a training camp surrounded by ascetic horrors, the Byzantine asketeria or the Western monasterium. It was thus never purely a matter of the 'faith' so often invoked by Paul, but rather the total subordination of the person to the harsh practice law of the imitatio with fatal results - or the monastic metaphorization thereof. It seems only consistent, then, if the initial eutonic balance
between philosophy and religion in Augustine's early writings gave way in time to his bleaker late theology.
The originality of Augustine's 'conversion' is only evident in the determination with which the convert managed to elevate his trans- formation to the exemplary level. His Confessions are the first model of Christian performance literature - the transformation of a life story into a lesson in grace. What helped Augustine most to carry out this performative turn was his Christian radicalization of the Platonic doctrine of the psyche's original malposition. In Augustine's vision, what Plato had described merely as the factual fixation of those trapped in the cave on the shadow play on the cave walls - in neutral terms: the priority of empirically oriented perception over reflective insight among worldlings - is immediately declared a consequence of
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND
sm: a creature turned away creator, to origin. From that point on, sinful egotism governs all actions, as life in perversion always means idolizing the things one should be using (sensual and worldly things) and using the things one should honour (spiritual and godly things). 136 The perverted creature, according to Augustine, cannot perform the complementary reversal to undo the resulting metaphysical damage by its own strength - it would remain incur- ably fixed in its fallen position, its abandonment of origin, if God Himself did not accommodate it in the person of Christ and enable its re-converSlOn.
Spengler was certainly exaggerating when he rejected the possibil- ity of conversion within a given culture out of hand, but there were good reasons for his objection, as the vast majority of actual conver- sions take place not in the mode of an epistrophic total reversal, but of a transition to a more or less natural alternative; ultimately, a truly radical change only occurs upon taking the advanced-civilized path as such, which trains mortals for the high forms of vertical tension by injecting them with the madness of longing for the impossible.
Seneca defines the individual-revolutionary character of this turn late on, but clearly, when he declares: Desinamus quo voluimus velie! 'Let us cease wanting what we previously wanted! '137 The will to want differently sets in motion the permanently tense concern for the new, unaccustomed and improbable stance. One could say something similar about the doctrine of Epicurus, which, in its way, meant practising the break with the vulgar modus vivendi. Because wisdom implies emancipation from the mistaken faith in the predominance of Tyche or Fortuna, it aims for a radical departure from ordinary concerns: where there was fear of the gods, there shall now be fear- lessness. This already heralds the Enlightenment - the conversion of the spirit to a use of one's own life without religious intimidation. Religiously encoded conversions, on the other hand, usually only display the character of a switch to an alternative cult system with rearranged compulsions. This process can generally be imagined as a shallow operation - even the striking inversion figure 'Burn what you worshipped and worship what you burned' in no way makes the pro- cedure more inward; it merely formulates the directive to give Christ the ritual attentions previously reserved for Wotan, or whatever forest, wind and mountain gods one used to follow. With numerous other religiously coded conversions too, one observes most of all the metanoetic shifts of emphasis within a heavily prestructured field.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
one can conversio. From a distance,
Freudian maxim 'Where there was id, there shall be ego' reveals its membership in the group of metanoetic practices where the change of living habits is accompanied by a change of subject, that is to say a reallocation of the guiding figure to the place of the Great Other. Here the id corresponds typologically to the murky category of demonic possession, and the ego to monotheistic brightening.
Conversion as Change of Trainer: St Francis and Ignatius
From a practice-theoretical perspective, conversions of the meta- noetic type amount to a change of trainer, as the converts generally submit not only to an altered moral regime - and eo ipso a new Great Other - but also a new practice plan. The personality structure as such, however, is usually kept throughout the change. Thus the long- habitualized zealotry of Paul 'after Damascus' was reassigned from Pharisaic to Jesuan principles - and subsequently expanded with Christological supplements of his own making. Certainly it makes a difference whether one trains with Gamaliel, the rabbinical teacher, or with Jesus, the resurrected. One would be doing an injustice to the people's apostle if one reduced the opus Christi he set in motion exclusively to its zealotic element. In submitting to Christian doc- trine in the matter of love (agape or caritas), Paul had experienced a notable expansion of his personality. And the success story of Christianity would simply be unthinkable without Paul's stretching of the horizon of chosenness (which, as noted above, must not be confused with universalism).
The metanoetic forms of reversal would consistently prove the most far-reaching for the further development of Christianity as the most important practice field and habitus generator in the transitional space between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Alongside these, the real initiatic sacrament - baptism - remained a momentary and external matter. An effective remoulding of human beings does not depend on a singular gesture; it can only succeed as a result of lasting self-curatorial efforts. The interpretation of baptism as rebirth lends the act a symbolic depth that does not have any adequate correlate in terms of internalization.
The extent to which Christian metanoia amounts to a change of practice system and trainer figure is shown not least by the two
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
most popular conversion legends of the high Middle Ages and early Modern Age: those of St Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola. If one examines the turn of the young Francis, it was anything but a sudden leap into the Christian camp. In a certain sense, the youth had long been prepared for the later turn, whose immediate cause was the well-known conflict of authority with his father, since internalizing a robust form of knightly idealism and an elegant, quasi-Proven~al rhetoric of courtly love - commentators often refer in this context to his mother's French descent. It was when Francis seemingly turned 'against his own origins' in his spectacular renunciation of paternal authority that he began to consolidate them all the more. In the symbolic area, it was only a small step from the noble dames of trou- badour poetry to the 'Lady Poverty' whom he now served, and simi- larly, the elegant upper-class Platonism underlying the courtly cult of ladies and honour (which had visibly affected the middle classes of Assisi) was not far from the people's Platonism offered by late ancient and medieval Christianity.
Once again, the novelty lies purely in the decision - in the focus on the one thing that collects individual power where 'there is need'. The young Francis was unmistakably seized by the zeitgeist: the Christianity of the early urban period was looking for a superstar. With the role of poverty's troubadour, he had found a position that allowed him to transpose the imitatio Christi into an allegory of courtly love. By learning to draw sweetness from bitterness, he gained leeway for the release of mental energy to compensate for the constant depression of the coming centuries: the growing scandal of involuntary poverty in an era that was increasingly devoting itself to wealth. By practising self-denial for the sake of Lady Poverty, he created surplus powers from the weakest point - albeit at a price that already made his contemporaries shudder. He paid this price in the form of a triumphant self-chastisement that would not rest until total imitation, the emulation of the crucified through the duplication of his wounds, had been achieved. Thomas of Celano put his finger on the critical point: 'Nothing else could spring up in that soil, since from the first that wonderful cross claimed it for its own. '138 For the imitator Christi, this inevitably meant that he must live no longer than his model: without the imperative of following the Lord even in the duration of his life, his deliberate self-attrition would have been inconceivable. The pantomime of his death shows how much he was still thinking in the traditional terms of the ascetic agon and Christian athletism:
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
his serious illness that was to an end with he had himself naked upon naked ground, so in that final hour when the enemy could still rage against him, he might wrestle naked with a naked enemy. He waited without fear for his triumph, and with his hands clasped he was grasp-
ing a crown ofjustice. 139
For Francis and his followers, the thought form of imitatio went so deep that the small congregation surrounding the dying man even cel- ebrated the Last Supper - coming dangerously dose to blasphemous parody. In this imaginative field, the reappearance of the deceased to some friars in a transfigured state was naturally a must: it was recog- nized that his person and that of Christ had merged into one and the same person - an indication that intense supra-naturalisms appear in the form of fields and develop in spaces of synchronously practised suggestibility.
The case of Ignatius of Loyola also shows all the hallmarks of a classic change of trainer under the sign of metanoia. Although these are already distant from the sacred expressionism of the perform- ance artist Francis, the conversion mechanism manifests itself here in strictly analogous forms. In keeping with the code of honour during that period, the structure of the young noble's personality was fully developed, and his horizon of ambition saturated with the popular concepts of knightly life and the lady cult. After the catastrophe of the battle of Pamplona in 1521, which left the thirty-year-old officer crip- pled and removed him from the ranks of the pretenders to worldly fame, he too was seized by the spirit of the age, which this time sug- gested an imitatio Christi in militant forms. Ignatius changed trainers, switching from Amadis of Gaul, the hero of the chivalric novel, to Christ - who now appears in the form of a divine general who can only be imitated by earthly elite troops.
I have discussed the unforeseeable consequences of the Ignatian turn for the further history of Catholic and more general forms of subjectification at greater length elsewhere. 140 They are inseparable from the modernization of practice - in this case, from the transfer- ence of the military training principle to the new roles of religion- political achievement, which were formed on the battlefields of the Counter-Reformation. What makes Loyola'S place in the history of subject techniques so exceptionally significant is that all earlier layers of autoplastic practice had successively been sedimented within it in complete clarity: what began with the drill of the Greek and Roman soldiers, and was continued by athletes and gladiators before
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secrets in the existence
leading to the strongest surge in newer psychotechnic exercises. This time, however - corresponding to the humanistic milieu with its neo-rhetorical rupture - it was in the form of a theatre of the imagination in which the practising person, following strict instructions, convinces themselves of their own worthlessness and immeasurable guilt before the saviour. In their time, the Jesuit exer- cises, this autogenic training in contrition over thirty hard days and nights of utmost concentration, obviously formed the newest layer in the stratigram of Old European practice cultures, whose older and most ancient layers lead back to the beginnings of heroism and ath- leticism. Recent neuro-rhetorical research, incidentally, shows that the 'artificial' affects produced in exercises are physiologically indis- tinguishable from natural ones.
The almost instrumental grab of the Jesuit technique for the trust- ing psyche, which itself turned meditation into a training camp, explicitly heralded the beginning of what would later be called the 'Modern Age'. Its inhabitants developed into 'modern people' to the extent that they convinced themselves they had discovered the secret of self-determination in exchanging absolute dependence on God for human self-assertion. We will see that nothing could be further from the truth.
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The Exercises of the Moderns
For indeed this is the time above all ages that are past both to hope, and to attempt, greater things.
John Amos Comenius, A Reformation ofSchooles, 1642
PROSPECT
The Re-Secu/arization of the Withdrawn Subject
On the Power of the Slogan
'To hope, and to attempt, greater things':1 one of the strengths of the modern world is that it was never at a loss when it came to proclaiming slogans through the mouths of its protagonists by which participants in excessive crusades could identify one another. Now, two hundred years later, what the Florentine goldsmith and humanist Lorenzo Ghiberti said to his co-conspirators in the early fifteenth century, at the start of their argonautical journey to the shores of universal art - 'Men can do all things if they Will'2 - has almost become self-evident to the artistic and technical virtuosos, the modern people of skill, the entrepreneurs of their own lives, as well as the increasingly numerous prefects for the life of the others. Despite all periodically recurring cycles of historical discouragement and calls for self-reduction, the proud motto of the Modern Age would never be entirely forgotten; even the Soviet educators from the time of change around 1920 still repeated this revolutionary-optimistic thesis in every register, though perhaps adding the qualification that aside from the resolute will to act, the social conditions must also be given.
The great Comenius (1592-1670), founder of Baroque pedagogy and idea provider for the construction of modern large-scale learning machines, knew what it meant to undertake greater things after so many wasted centuries: grace is great, but technology applied to man is even greater; and election takes us a certain distance, but the new art of education takes us further. Where there had been the exception, there would now be the rule. Now was the time to apply the letter- press to young souls and print annual volumes of students who would emerge like prize specimens from the erratum-free human publishing
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THE EXERCISES THE
no
,. ,r""'f'r as a typographaeum
a appara- tus that would populate the world with masterpieces of human print. He thus presented an idea that could be newly acknowledged by the media theorists of the late twentieth century - although these would speak less of the subject being printed in a press than of its mental for- matting. The early twentieth century revealed its concerns when Leon
Trotsky lectured in the style of the enthusing hardware ideologue:
Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society, man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product. 3
According to the revolutionary cult of science, completion could only take place in the mints of the New Human Being which the Soviet state was planning to create. The periods after Trotsky showed that work on the human being continued in quite different treatment centres. The semi-finished product man has its dangers that resist reprocessing, whether into educated man, the 'overman' or the New Human Being. But at least, since the end of the Second World War, the news has been all over town: 'Man has reached the point of treat- ing the human race as material. ,4
The New Zeitgeist: Experiment with Humans
The path to the age of production, which culminated in the pro- duction of the producer, began long before the twentieth century. Whenever there was progress along this route, it was announced with great pomp that humans were becoming 'accessible' to themselves. It seems that the effective centre of modern currentnesses consists in continuous reports on the growth of the radius of human availability to oneself and one's kind. Such novelties have always - below the level of general rejection stemming from their potentially disturb- ing nature - evoked affirmative and negative passions. Indeed, the appearance of anything truly new on this front was followed by apocalyptic declarations, most recently around the year 2000, when the decoding of the human genome was imminent. Tempus est, Comenius wrote on the wall in fiery letters in 1639: 'It is time' - this formula continues to determine agendas for the futurized world to this day. The most pressing item on these agendas is the systematic production of human beings who meet the highest standards of
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PROSPECT
- we are Europe, when the zeitgeists
the word Zeitgeist only entered modern German vocabulary around 1800). 'Anthropomorphism' - at the time, this still meant an unimpaired image of God. For the passionate reformatory theo- logian, it encompassed universal knowledge of the three great books of being: nature, the human soul and the Holy Scripture. s Humanity was now to go into serial production in order to populate every area of this continent - and later the planet - with individuals at the level of the humanly possible. Patience with the old inadequacies had come to an end: it was time for humans to cease being an outgrowth of moral coincidence. We, the meanwhile impatient self-sculptors and man-sculptors of the technological centuries, could no longer wait until some individual deigned to break with their conventional existence and create a heightened, exemplary life through metanoia, asceticism and study. In future, the young creatures in the human gardens of the Baroque state would be cultivated on high trellises to become well-formed specimens of their kind. 6
The new educators believed that they knew how to overhaul each individual's coincidental weariness of their previous life: the whole system of moulding humans was arranged metanoetically - indeed, the basic order of the 'pedagogical province' itself bespeaks the impulse to pre-empt the late remorse of individuals through the early training of all. This 'anthropogogics' reveals a naive perfectionism whose elan still fed the later Enlightenment. Here discipline is aligned with the quest for perfection, duty with voluntary agreement, and study with inner surplus. It is only a secondary concern to reflect on the necessity of facing the wilder outgrowths of humanity with the means of guarding and punishing?
It is high time to clear up a misunderstanding to which Foucault contributed: it is not in the prisons and places of oppressive super- vision but in the frequently strict schools and academies of the Modern Age, along with the craftsmen's workshops8 and artists' studios, that the main human orthopaedics of modernity is carried out - that is to say, the moulding of the young by the standards of Christian-humanist discipline. The real aim of the departure to the age of arts and technologies was to train ever new generations of virtuosos. Certainly, the disciplinary imperative shows its second face in the 'heterotopic' background inhabited by the droves of 'infamous humans' (in the age of absolutist population politics, they inevitably constitute a massive group) - and this face must be mentioned by anyone seeking to reconstruct the 'birth of the prison' from the spirit
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THE EXERCISES OF THE
to concept in to penitentiary, repressive and surveillance-state meanings on which Foucault placed such deliberately exaggerated emphasis in the writings of his middle period. 9
Anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with all phases of the production of the New Human Being, at any rate, must probe as far back as the seventeenth century, even to the turbulences of the Reformation - and further still, to their preludes in late medieval mysticism. Whoever wanted, like the young Gorky - clearly under Nietzsche's influence - to 'write "man" in capital letters' almost unknowingly joined a tradition that had begun with the recruits of Christ in the Egyptian desert monasteries and the Pauline communi- ties in Greece and Asia Minor, those pneumatic aggregations through which the Holy Spirit, supported by the exercises in crucifixion of the flesh, was meant to bring about a 'new creation'. 10
The early Christians began to transform their whole lives into an experiment in order to resemble the God-man: nos autem in experi- mentis volvimur, Augustine writes in his Confessions - only God always remains identical to himself, whereas we are tossed from trial to trial. l1 Modern humans augmented the ascetic experimental- ism of the ancients with technical and artistic, then finally political experimentalism. The task they set themselves, in all seriousness, was to rewrite the text of the human condition - partly with updated Christian-humanist procedures, partly following the guidelines of post-Christian and post-humanist schemes of existence. The essay and the experiment are not merely literary and scientific procedures; they shaped modernity's style of existence as a whole - and, after 1789, also that of major politics and the national and global economy. An experimenter is someone who takes a chance every time, convinced that the new is always right. Needless to say, the American president Theodore Roosevelt placed himself in the same tradition when he invoked the 'great work of uplifting mankind' in 1899, exchanging the Christian world mission for civilizatory messianism. 12
Modern Unrest
The beginnings of the turn towards greater things were already several centuries in the past when Comenius launched the campaign of universal education (panpaedia) in response to the apocalyptically interpreted confusion of the Thirty Years War. In the human zoo of
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PROSPECT
lowed an unrest that would never much speculation as to the origins of the new zeitgeist and Weltgeist. Some sought to locate them in the mysticism of Northwest European towns or in the early capitalist economy; connections have been posited with the development of the clockwork mechanism, or with the double- entry bookkeeping of the Venetians, propagated by the Franciscan priest Luca Pacioli in his 1494 book on arithmetic, which was read throughout Europe. The Faustian soul was taken as the metaphysical source of modern restlessness, while Doctor Faustus, that man of infi- nite skills and 'far-famed Sorcerer and Master of the Black Art' who pawned his soul for the sake of heightened self-enjoyment, was con- versely declared the personification of credit, that fifth essence which grips honest debtors to the marrow and drives them over land and sea in ever-expanding trajectories. Modern unrest was also attributed to the shock of spatial expansion resulting from Atlantic seafaring and the discovery of the New World, as if the global mobility of the floating capital on the oceans had reproduced itself in the attitude towards life in the most obscure mainland towns. 'The primary fact of the Modern Age is not that the earth revolves around the sun, but that money flows around the earth. '13
In the following, I will show that the specifically modern unrest in the field of shaping humans - which, in its most recent offshoots, is still and more than ever ours - stems most of all from endogenous, that is to say practice-historically or ascetologically relevant sources. Looking back on the programmes and workshops of the practis- ing life in the premodern world, it becomes clear: the realization among Marx and the Young Hegelians that 'man produces man' can only be understood in all its ramifications if one looks behind the word 'produce', which was borrowed one-sidedly from the modern working world and its industrial procedures, and also perceives the universe of practising behaviour, training and routines of conscious and unconscious keeping-in-shape, among which, ironically enough, one must also include the phenomenon of getting-out-of-shape through the wrong training and exercises in neglect. This conces- sion seems more acceptable in the case of athletes and monks than farmers, factory workers or handymen. Nonetheless, even the most intense activities of a working type constitute one of the many masks of the practising life. Whoever lifts it sees through the mystifications of the productivistic era and sees the omnipresence of the practice aspect amidst work phenomena. Then it becomes demonstrable, down to the smallest detail, how the active mould themselves through
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
regularly repeated activities. It is necessary to understand why and through what repercussions on his own existence man can effectively be considered the producer of man.
Autoplastic Action: Circulus Virtuosus
The basic information about the production of humans through humans is made explicit via study of the vita activa; the pragmatists of the nineteenth century realized this. By studying the active life, they uncovered the basic anthropotechnic law: the repercussions of all actions and movements on the actor. Working places the worker in the world and marks them with the stamp of their own acts by the short route of a practising self-shaping. No activity evacies the principle of retroactive influence on the operator - and whatever reacts to earlier events also affects later ones. The act produces the actor, the reflection the reflected, the emotion the feeler, and the test of conscience the conscience itself. Habits shape the virtues and vices, and complexes of habits form 'cultures'. The European seafarers who circumnavigate the world are still discovering peoples with their own ways of life, some of them bizarre, on the most distant islands; the anthropologists on board recognize the power of practice systems in the local customs and describe these autoplastic rules of human shaping, in analogy to corresponding European phenomena and, for want of a better term, as 'religious' rituals.
The practising life is not limited to a simple reproduction of actors by their actions, however. All expansions of ability circles, all increases extending to the furthest caves of artistry, take place on the basis of self-shaping through practice.
The mystery of why achievements tend towards growth under certain circumstances has not been fully solved to this day; for some forms of ascending spirals, however, more precise descriptions are available. In the field of physical strength increase, for example, the explicit description of the supercompensation mechanism in modern sport physiology has brought about a far-reaching expansion of understanding. The newer sciences of training have been able to show in detail how, after heavy strains, the muscular apparatus can restore its strength to a level higher than its original fitness status - assuming it is granted the necessary recovery time. The rhythms of regeneration hold the secret of the overexertion that leads to higher performance levels. This phenomenon has been intuitively comprehensible since time immemorial, and had already been exploited for intensive train-
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PROSPECT
ancients were appear if regen-
eration rhythms are disregarded. 14 With increases in mental and fine motor performance, supercompensation is augmented by a form of superadaptation. This ensures that nervous and kinetic systems accommodate certain regular stimulations through a form of pre- emptive willingness to execute - thus even highly improbable move- ments such as prestissimo runs on the piano or a conjurer's tricks ('prestidigitator' literally means 'fast-fingerer') can be imprinted on the bodily memory and stabilized as a virtuosic habitus. Here it is the anticipatory intelligence in particular that is stimulated. Recent research in the fields of learning theory, neuro-motorics, neuro- rhetoric and neuro-aesthetics consolidate and vary didactic intui- tions that originate in early asceticisms and artistries. All somewhat advanced civilizations make use of the observation that every active person is dyed in the lye of their activities until the miracle of 'second nature' takes place and they perform the near-impossible almost effortlessly. 15
The highest theorem of explicit training theories, then, is that ability subjected to persistent furthering tension produces, almost 'of its own accord', heightened ability. Through exact descriptions of the circulus virtuosos, it becomes explicable how accomplishment leads to higher accomplishment and success to expanded success. The Jesuan axiom 'everyone who has will be given more'16 is not evidence of an early Galilean capitalism, but rather one of the oldest formulations of the circle of success, also known in sociology as the 'Matthew effect'. Whoever is able will be granted more ability. It is not without reason that successful people from the most diverse fields believe they can learn from one another at a distance; they intuit that virtuosos from all kinds of disciplines emerge from comparable circles of increase. They see humans standing at the crossroads which all forms of positive feedback must pass. Together, they thus become carriers of able virtue, which is often only a short distance away from giving virtue - this observation creates the possibility of affirming the medieval doctrine of the connexio virtutum on a modern foun- dation. I7 Everyday intuitions already tell us that non-leisure is the beginning of virtue. Conversely, Christian monks recognized lethargy as the mother of despair - accompanied by its other unattractive daughters: digression, verboseness, aimless curiosity, lack of restraint and inconstancy. 18 It is the daily line of writing that forms the artist, the daily self-denial that forms the ascetic, the daily encounter with the power needs of other humans that forms the diplomat, and the
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
daily joy at the willingness of children to be stimulated that forms the teacher.
Anyone who subjects themselves to rituals and regularities develops nolens volens into their representative. What is a carrier of culture if not a guardian of repetition? Just as practice makes perfect, train- ing makes the subject - provided that we understand subjectivity in the light of the general theory of practice as the carrier of its activity sequences, the apprentice of trainable modules and the holder of its habitual acquisitions, without having to deny the relative validity of the usual interpretation of subjectivity as the epicentre of expression, reflexivity and innovation. As soon as one realizes how every gesture carried out shapes its performer and determines their future state from the second occurrence on, one also knows why there is no such thing as a meaningless movement.
Repetition lost its innocence in the anthropological Enlightenment: as people now explicitly understood, the continuance of the world depends on it - which does not say anything against the unique, except that we abuse it by dancing around the Golden Calf of the 'event'. It is in the nature of natures to be systems of repetition for the established, and this applies almost equally to cultures. God Himself has to carry out most things via the routines of nature, and can only occasionally make use of His ontological secret weapon, the miracle. Kierkegaard was already speaking from the perspective of modern reflexive knowledge when he stated:
If God Himself had not willed repetition, there would never have been a world. [. . . JThis is the reason there is a world. The world consists of repetition. Repetition is actuality and the earnestness of existence. 19
Nietzsche adds to this what he learned through long experiments on himself: style is indeed man himself, provided one is aware that style is a cultural manifestation of repetition. Anyone with style will even see happiness as the good habit of being happy. 2o Even genius is simply a group of good habits whose collision makes sparks fly.
In order to uncover the matrix of Old and New European tech- niques for shaping humans, one must first examine the training centres scattered across the whole continent in which those who prac- tise with Christ prepare for their highest agones, brought into shape by their abbots, pastors, saints and learned mentors. And those who have been called 'professors' since the sixteenth century were initially no more than trainers at schools of transfiguration, and those later termed 'students' were first of all seekers in whom the eros of impos- sibility was at work more academico. They yielded willingly to the
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IS
inimitable is
the utmost ambition had taken root within them, they came under the spell of the paradox without whose constant re-enactment no culture can securely fix its upper pole. For them, therefore, 'You must change your life! ' meant nothing other than the call to follow the godly or god-manly models under whose influence the boundaries between the possible and the impossible are blurred. 21 With the advent of modern times, the absolute imperative changed the direction of its impact. In future, it would be: 'You must act at all times in such a way that within your person, you anticipate the better world in the worse. ' It will not be long before the meaning of this directive is twisted into an instruction for 'external application': 'You must change the world so that, if it is reshaped in the correct sense, you can adapt to it with a clear conscience. ' Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves - or with both at once. 22
The Discovery of the World in Humans
The forms of unrest that began to manifest themselves in the four- teenth century stem primarily from the surpluses of subject energy that were bred in the thousand-year empire of withdrawals from 'this world' more philosophico and more christiano. One could almost speak of an original accumulation of capital comprising concentra- tions, intensities and readinesses to act that one day had to look for suitable forms of investment. The centuries following the Black Death in Europe in fact belonged to an unprecedentedly novel economy in which new means of practice - machines, tools, media and funds - brought about new circumstances of practice: first of all schools and more schools, then artists' studios, theatres, concert halls, bar- racks, factories, clinics, prisons, speakers' pulpits, markets, places of assembly, stadiums and sport studios. What began in the Modern Age was no less than a new form of large-scale anthropotechnic regime, a fundamentally changed battle formation of disciplines. Need we repeat that it was Foucault whose studies on the history of modern disciplinary procedures, which had no models to speak of, sensitized us to this previously almost unnoticed field?
The decisive changes primarily concern the traditional division in the world of the practising life, which I call the 'ontological local gov- ernment reorganization'. In the course of this process, the practising
the incomparable soon as
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
pentitential warriors athletes
drawn from worldly matters in order to devote themselves exclusively to what each viewed as 'their own', Their whole existence revolved around the concern for their own ability to remain intact in the midst of the ominous century. Their aim was no less than the final immuni- zation of their own lives in the face of the constant threat of injuries and ubiquitous distractions. Suum tantum curare had been the salvific formula for the era of self-discovery in retreat from the world, apply- ing to both philosophical and religioid life plans.
One cannot remotely claim that the Modern Age disabled the world- averse and radically metanoetic forms of religiously or philosophically coded cum sui overnight. Nothing would be more deluded than to believe that in early modernity, the escapists of yesterday suddenly turned into new worldlings who regretted their gloomy absences. The legend of the 'modern individual's' suddenly recovered affirmation of the world and life should be approached with suspicion. More than a few sound thinkers of the Modern Age placed their lives program- matically under the sign of Saturn - the planet of distance from the world. The homines novi who entered the stage in the fourteenth century, the early virtuoso era, were not runaway monks who had abruptly embraced the joys of the extroverted life, as if they wanted to erase the memory of their thousand-year recession like some regret- table episode. They normally clung doggedly to their ontological exile, indeed claimed more than ever a noble exterritoriality in relation to impoverished ordinariness. Even an exemplary new human like Petrarch - one of the first moderns to wear a poet's crown, the emblem of a new type of aristocracy - had very strong personal reasons to hide in his refuge in the Vaucluse for so many years, searching for a non- monastic form of vita solitaria. Where else could he shelter his noble sickness, the world-hatred of the man of black-galled constitution, the evil discovered and fought by the abbots in the Egyptian desert under the name akedia, if not in his study cell, far from vulgar concerns?
For the early moderns, devotion to the spiritual sphere still assumed a refusal to participate in profane affairs. And yet they, the proto-virtuosos, vacillating between the older monks' cells and the newer studios of the humanists,23 found themselves drawn into a heightened learning dynamic. They were pulled along by a drift towards self-intensification that only formed a contradictory unity with conventional monastic de-selfing courses. This intensification resulted in tendencies towards a restricted new participation of spir-
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PROSl'ECT
persons term vu. ,u",-,
enologist Hermann Schmitz, in a modified this return a 're-embedding' of the excluded subject. 24 The first embed- ding enables individuals to participate directly in their situations; through re-embedding, they find their way back to these after phases of estrangement. Whoever affirms an immersion in the situation is on the way to becoming what Goethe, referring to himself, occasionally called 'the worldling in the middle' [das Weltkind in der Mitte]. 25
Nonetheless: even at the start of the Modern Age, the exiles of the practising were chosen just as resolutely as in antiquity, when the ethical distinction began to take effect. How else can one explain the popularity of the icon of St Jerome, which inspired countless vari- ations on the joys of retreat in the early Modern Age? The scholar with the lion at his feet still testifies to the attraction of the contempla- tive life on the outskirts of a convivially transformed, in fact a bour- geoisified desert - and in a turbulent time that, one might think, was knowledgeable about everything but deserts and refuges. But note: the escapism of the moderns was as urgently motivated as it was in the days of the earliest disgust at circumstances. It still gave hope to those without worldly hope, still offered those with no social pros- pects the prospect of an alternative existence. Nonetheless, the newer retreats often accumulated worldly meanings with a value and scope of their own, to the point where recessively excluded subjectivity, within its enclave of self-concern, emerged as a figure of the world in its own right. Now, from the starting point of a methodically sought unworldliness, a virtuoso industry blossomed. Its masters took them- selves up as workpieces of the art of living, moulding themselves into humane valuables. What Nietzsche's confession in Ecce Homo - 'I took myself in hand' - renders audible, as well as the auto-therapeutic impulse of a chronically ill man, are overtones that recall the turn of the early moderns towards a transformation of themselves into living artifices. Perhaps the habit26 maketh not the monk, but study gets the scholar in shape, writing exercises make the humanist skilled at his subject, and virtu allows the virtuoso to shine. In the midst of a subjectivity excluded through regression into itself, the practising dis- cover a distant coast within themselves - the promise of an unknown world. More than a hundred years before the actual continent, a sym- bolic America appeared on the horizon: its coast is the place where the practising of modernity set foot in the small world of themselves.
Hence what Jacob Burckhardt, following the trail of Michelet, had presented as the formula for the Renaissance - 'the discovery of the world and man' - was initially, seemingly paradoxically, an
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to or human as a model of world, a microcosmic abbreviation of the universe. Friedrich Hebbel still had a notion of this phrase when he noted in his journal: 'Great men are humanity's tables of contents. ' The secret of the humane ability to be whole would no longer be founded on the biblically certified image of God: it pointed equally to the image of the world, which makes suf- fering, active and contemplative humans view themselves as universal mirrors and cosmic oracles. This launched the train that would not
stop until it arrived at the Baroque equation of God and nature - with the human being as a copula and living sign of equality. For the subject of the Modern Age, this meant that it had to understand itself as a reality-hungry potential. From that point on, being human meant running oneself as a workshop of self-realization.
Homo Mirabile
The re-interpretation of the human potency for totality transformed escapism, flight from the world, into the most world-filled mode of being thus far encountered by the individuals of our cultural area. The enrichment of withdrawal into a life form that displays no less wealth or diversity than extroverted existence produces the unlimit- edly cultivatable self-structure addressed with the anthropological catchword of the Modern Age: 'personality'. Modern personalities: these are the microcosmic works of the art of living that result from the time-honoured position of recessive self-formation - except no longer in the spirit of monastic humilitas or the mystical art of dying, but rather driven by an encyclopaedic artistic dynamic that leads to interminable virtuosities and virtualities, jaw-dropping results of an inward extroversion. The imperative 'You must change your life! ' now implies taking oneself in hand and moulding one's own existence into an object of admiration.
Where humans themselves are meant to become the mirabile, the living artificia admired by those around them (and that means far more than respect, love or sympathy), they cannot remain in their escapist retreat forever; one day they must go on the stage and turn their inward performance into an outward one. Petrarch was forced to leave his refuge when he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome - on 6 April 1341, a key date in the history of 'modern fame'. Much of what conventional Renaissance schol- ars have produced to document the 'modern individual' depended
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PROSPECT
- it is not reason that
emphasized the correlation of fame and the culture of individuality as a characteristic of the era. What has more recently been termed 'the archive' was initially no more than a collecting point for fame and the famous in the cultural memory, a functidn that, for reasons yet to be established, had to be come under the control of the modern state - or, more precisely, the semantic state banks, museums and major libraries whose duty it is to look after the balance of meanings and 'cultural values'. 27 What seems like a Vanity Fair is, in truth, the state treasury of prestige and excellence, the nucleus of a new economy based on the creation of cultural value. The fact that these secular col- lections challenge the status of the church's salvific treasury testifies to the attractiveness of this new system of value.
We recall: in the sphere of monastic anthropotechnic forms, the monks worked on transforming themselves into the status of the monk, the exemplary sculpture of servient obedience whose legend was incurvatus et humiliatus sum, evidence of the effects of the Holy Spirit on human material,28 Under divine observation (the angels, after all, pass on all information upwards) and monastic supervision (the abbot acknowledges all his flock's movements), the spiritu- ally practising sought to become like the archetype of their modus vivendi, the suffering God-man. The complete transformation into the saint, admittedly, required the intervention of the world above - which is why it is only permissible to admire the miracle, which breaks through earthly regularities. Only the beyond was empowered to grant the transfigured human a certification from above.
The rules are entirely different in the sphere of courtly, humanistic and artistic anthropotechnics - to say nothing of the mass-media, neo-athletic and biotechnical age. They stand under the sign of the man-made wonderful (mirabile), which no longer addresses faith, but rather educated artistic taste. They appeal to a second-degree faith that expresses itself as an expertise in mastered unbelievabilities.
Modern 'culture' came about when the appreciation of miracles gave way to an appreciation of the miraculous. As one can easily see, this culture could no longer be a matter for saints and the silent, who interpret all higher things as signs from the world above. The turn towards the wonderful marked the debut of the society of the spec- tacle, which Guy Debord mistakenly dated to the twentieth century. It extends back into the late Middle Ages, when virtuosos stepped out of the shadow of the saints. The golden age of admiration for art continued for as long as the willingness to be astonished applied
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to
is the
Every festival summer proves that there is still a disposition towards honouring singing goddesses and listening to the acuti of tenors as if they were sonorous proofs of God. The modern type of virtuosity came from the invitation to encounter the man-made mirabile - it was the appeal to the welcome confounding of art and life, and the equally welcome mingling of heroes, saints and artistes.
Now, knowledge of human nature was only possible as insight into the complexities of the strategically folded and artistically heightened life. Humans are 'structurally' superior to themselves, and carry within them an asymmetry in which they mould and are moulded - these two insights, consolidated in the course of the modern centu- ries, revealed an eccentric potential in humans that could no longer be attributed to the coarse facts of the political 'domination of man by man', to recall the tired formula of the Saint-Simonists. In the course of anthropological enlightenment, it became clear just how far every individual was caught up in vertical tensions and hierar- chical effects of an apolitical type. If existence means the personal realization of chances at ability, then everyone is always already on a ladder of more or less, where they position themselves through the results of their own efforts and cannot dismiss those ahead of them as oppressors. Now the individual seems more like a trainer who oversees the selection of talents and drives the team of his habits. Whether one calls this 'micropolitics' the 'art of living', 'self-design' or 'empowerment' is purely a matter of taste.
Homo Anthropologicus
The unstoppable growth of the knowledge of human nature into the theory of the artiste can be taken to explain the tendency towards anthropology that has formed the manifest centre of modern philo- sophical activity since the eighteenth century. The phenomenon of anthropology indicates and declares: technical explication has brought about a situation in which humans must be explained to humans again from scratch. It is no longer enough to be a human as one was supposedly spawned by nature; the dream of simple self- foundation via the origin is over. The first edition of humanity is now only of ethnological interest - Rousseau's idyllic excursions were powerless to change this. An even weightier factor is that the methods known since antiquity for ascetic revolt against the old Adam in US,29
art in which confusion
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PROSPECT
who is ruled by habits, passions and mental inertias, and the boosts in being-human through religious, philosophical and athletic exer- cises are no longer adequate. The spiritually interested of our time should acknowledge that the great teachers of mankind from Lao Tzu to Gautama Buddha, from Plato to Jesus and - why not? - also Mohammed, are, strictly speaking, no longer our contemporaries. 3o
In anthropological explication, humans come into a morally and epistemologically ecstatic - Plessner calls it 'eccentric' - position towards themselves. A more precise description of this position yields the picture of an ontological hybrid: it shows a theatre director who has been condemned to a practising self-reference from early on, and now faces the task of realizing the script of their own existence on stage and observing how others observe them. One can now say it explicitly: in Homo artista, the agent and the observer merge to form a single dynamic duaL The early ascetics had already eluci- dated these conditions; modernity sought to make the corresponding insights binding in its discursive style, and with technical accessories. Henceforth, it was resolved, no one could be human without simul- taneously being an anthropologist, indeed an anthropotechnician. This title is bestowed on those who take responsibility for their form and appearance. In the late twentieth century, the translation of the anthropological axiom that humans do not simply live, but 'must lead' their lives, was the medially ubiquitous call to turn one's own self into a project and the project into a business, including self- bankruptcy management. 31
At the first climax of the great subjective armament cycle, in Baltasar Gracian's 'pocket oracle' The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the most astute training manual for men of the world, published under a pseu- donym in 1647, the author was still able to put forward a comprehen- sive maxim for life in the book's final paragraph:
In one word, be a saint. Virtue is the link of all perfections, the centre of all the felicities. She makes a person prudent, discreet, sagacious, cautious, wise, courageous, thoughtful, trustworthy, happy, honored, truthful, and a universal hero. 32
One would be hard pressed to find a passage in the literature of modernity where the phrase 'be a saint' is used in as artfully mislead- ing a fashion as here. What is called a 'saint' here is the mask worn by the returned sage of Stoic provenance, who is himself a cover for the yet uncomprehended modern human, the virtuoso, the success artist, the entrepreneur, in fact the epitome of the man - and woman - with
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THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
"ct'~lHlll', intentions motives. In age interesting to remind
that what we think of today as could be recommended as saint- liness in early modernity. The first sentence of The Art of Worldly Wisdom gives a dearer sense of the true quality of the new personal- ity structure than the last:
Everything is at its peak of perfection. This is especially true of the art of making one's way in the world. There is more required nowadays to make a single wise person than formerly to make the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times. 33
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1
ART WITH HUMANS
In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics
Passion Plays
In the light of all this, the moral-historical caesura of the Modern Age gains emphasis: this era saw the change from individual meta- noia to the mass rebuilding of the human condition 'from the root'.