No More Learning

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
326
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
327
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
328
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
329
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
330
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'. Modernity, which could never be anything but radical, secularized and collectivized the practising life by breaking the long-standing asceticisms out of their spiritual contexts and dissolving them in the fluid of modern societies of training, education and work. Needless to say, this pulls the ground out from under the venerable vita contem- plativa. The activism of the moderns pushed the monastic way of life to the margins; the Reformation drove the Orient out of Christianity. Leftovers of contemplation survived in the art system, where faith was converted into amazement and prayer into admiration. Here individuals learn to experience the effects of the great masters' works on them, with varying reverence, as artistic enjoyment. In the fifteenth century, the devotio moderna moved from the monasteries to the cities as a popularized mysticism. It expressed the idea that in future, ordinary citizens should also have the right to be crucified alongside the Lord - as a form of the ability to suffer, the imitation of the God-man on the via crucis set up a sublime attractor for the laity. At the start of the artistic age, the will to passion changed camps: now it expressed itself as admiration for artistes whose performances show suffering and ability merging into each other. What is art if not the ability-form of suffering that is simultaneously the suffering-form of ability? The empathetic sharing in the virtuoso's suffering and ability became the foundation of modern applause. The old style of crucifix- ion is given less attention in a world full of artists.
331
EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
not name, or no longer ongms. explains why the ascetic methods of modernity hid behind a triple pseudonym - art, education and finally wotk - only presenting themselves in an almost uncovered state in the field of sport, now modernized as train- ing. Wearing these masks, the disciplinary imperatives of modernity established themselves on all fronts of human self-intensification. The exercises that moulded the artist, the educated person and the working person already met the condition formulated by Nietzsche when he addressed the supposedly revolutionary prospect of making asceticisms natural again. If the wanderer of Sils Maria called for the abandonment of Christian exercises in mortification and de-selfing - leaving open the question of whether he had understood the nature of Christian asceticism correctly - in favour of an asceticism of improve- ment, exercises in self-domination and development training, he was speaking neither as a caller on the mountain who had rushed ahead nor as an eccentric prophet on the periphery, but from the mainstream of the tendency that had grown since the start of the virtuoso era in fifteenth-century Europe. The event of Nietzsche remains epochal not because the author said completely new things about the human condition - after all, the call for an over-elevation of man, whether individual or collective, had been in the air since antiquity and had constituted the fluidum of Christianity for a millennium and a half,34 and it continued to be the first self-evident truth of all enlightened communications about the course of the world, even if the pessimistic conservative motto 'man is always the same' had chronically opposed it since the French Revolution. Nietzsche's intervention remains sig- nificant because it raised the level of articulation in the process of anthropotechnic explication - and this explication, I repeat, is for us the technological and epistemological form of destiny. Because the human being is now understood as the animal technologicum, every further advance in technology for application to itself contains an inescapably binding pro nobis.
Inoculation with the Monstrous: Nietzsche as Immunologist
Nietzsche is connected to the little-understood central logical event of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the transformation of meta- physics into General Immunology- an event that modern philosophy, theology and sociology have all failed to comprehend to this day. 35 By
332
ART WITH HUMANS
revealing immunity as a system and principle, humans are explained anew to themselves. They explicate themselves as beings that must secure themselves in the monstrous - in-the-world, Heidegger says - even at the price of terrible alliances. Clarifications of this type should have had an immediate effect on the status of 'religion' as the most comprehensive immunitary praxis of the symbolic kind (next to the legal system) -and yet it took an entire century for newer forms of cultural theory and theology to make use of the new potentials for reflection.
The course had already been set in German Romanticism, however: if religion, according to Schleiermacher's semi-modern definition, is to be understood as a 'sense and taste for the infinite', what this means against the background of the immunological turn is nothing other than the option of a maximum symbolic immunity, a version of final insurance that stabilizes itself in the greatest possible - so it must accordingly grow with the scale of the injuries. Schleiermacher is close enough to logical modernity to understand that this result can only be achieved through a new operationalization of religious acts: an inoculation with the infinite, as it were. This is precisely what Romanticism had discovered concerning consciousness: according to Novalis, romanticizing is identical to the art of giving infinite meaning to the finite; hence religion was now considered the general applica- tion of the Romantic procedure. Consistently with this, the reciprocal transitions from art to religion and vice versa were a clear fact for Novalis and his colleagues. Now one could also show retroactively what motivated people in their first 'religious' actions: they primarily carried out diplomatic procedures in order to form alliances against harmful powers. Thus it always had to be ensured that more energy flowed into salvation than disaster: God is greater. In particular, the greatest expected damage to life - absolutely certain and probably violent death - had always been opposed through the possibility of a reinsurance in an indestructible life. In order to promise such a thing, it seemed natural to ally oneself with a principle that could overcome death. This forming of alliances has appeared in countless variations in virtually all cultures. It was recoded with the Roman term religio to give the alliance between humans and God, who had refuted death, its definitive form. Hence Christianity'S claim to be the 'true religion': it is the alliance that offers the highest insurance benefits.
Nietzsche, who was one step ahead in the explication of these phenomena, termed the procedure of infinitization 'inoculation with madness'. 36 For him, however, its purpose was not only to insure against life's risks, but also to raise the stakes. Inoculating humans
333
EXERCISES OF THE MODERf\'S
lU,'UU',-",,'" means lH Q ". H . li'.
status quo provoking a of the will to give
enee a non-trivial meaning. Since Nietzsche, it has been possible to know why functional explanations of the 'religious' phenomenon remain incomplete: like the practice system of art, the practice system of 'religion' does not simply react to deficits. It solves no problems, instead manifesting surpluses that cannot be exhausted in any real task. The pious say: 'There are not only uses - there are also bless- ings. >37 Those who are less pious translate it thus: there is not only lack - there is also excess.
The religioid act par excellence, which Schleiermacher convention- ally calls 'faith', consistently goes hand in hand - folie oblige - with a suspension of empiricism. Only someone who is able to decide against the authority of appearances, in this case the appearance of finitude and in Fichte even the apparent primacy of the objective, can believe. Whoever cannot go mad - or become childlike, one could say - within certain boundaries has no place among believers. The reason for this is clarified by an understanding of the function of symbolic immune systems: they separate out individuals from the continuum of prosaic data. Their basic operation aims to rehearse the most improb- able as the most certain. We recall Tertullian's words: certum est quia impossibile. 38 There can be no immunity to setbacks without separa- tion from the principle of reality, and without the will to faith there can be no confidence that the mountains standing here today could already appear elsewhere tomorrow. 39
The European Training Camp
In sketching the drama of the explication of human existence through technological and symbolic additions in a few of its central aspects, it is not my intention to tell the whole story of newer forms of anthropotechnics - such a project would occupy a team of researchers for decades or longer. I cannot promise more in this chapter than a provisional attempt to name a few minimal logical and factual pre- conditions for an understanding of the questions discussed.
The complex of phenomena that I would like to expose displays its discouraging complexity at first glance, and its uncanniness at second glance. It encompasses no less than the conversion of Europe into a training camp for human improvements on a multitude of fronts, whether in the school and military context, the world of workshops or the idiosyncratic universes of newer medicine, the arts and the
334
ART HUl\lANS
sciences. sport,
gymnastic systems, joined this group in the mid-nineteenth century, it augmented the familiar spheres of praxis with an autonomous discipline comprising no less than the pure representation of modern heightening behaviour in specific theatricized forms. In sport, the spirit of competitive intensification found an almost universally comprehensible, and hence globally imitated, form of expression. It not only completed the 'rebirth of antiquity', but also provided the most concrete illustration of the performative spirit of modernity, which is inconceivable without the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. De-spiritualized asceticism is known as 'training',40 and corresponds to a form of reality that demands fitness as such, fitness sans phrase,41 of individuals.
Training is Methodism without religious content. Hence the pre- dominance of the West in the evolution of world society in the nine- teenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came not only from widely and rightly criticized 'imperialism'; the deeper reason was that it was the people in this part of the world who, because of their head start in practice, forced all other civilizations on the planet to join in with the training systems they had introduced. The proof: among the outpaced nations, only those that knew how to implant a sufficient degree of didactic stress through a modern school system managed to leap forwards. This succeeded most where, as in Japan and China, an elaborated system of feudal conditionings facilitated the transition to modern disciplines. Meanwhile the tiger states of practice have caught up, and while the modernism of the West haughtily turns up its nose at imitation and mimesis, new competitors all over the world have built their success on the oldest learning principle. Westerners will probably only understand how much an old great power of prac- tice like China owes to this principle when the Confucian institutes of the new global power have penetrated the furthest corners of the earth. 42
The aforementioned groups of disciplines form a constellation that can only be understood within the framework of a general history of systemic intensifications. As noted above, this shares some elements with Foucault's studies on the history of ordering and disciplinary systems, but integrates them into a broader horizon. One can only do justice to the Modern Age as a whole if one relates it to a mental, moral and technological change that has never been adequately por- trayed: the existence of the moderns shows aspects of a global fitness exercise in which what I have termed the 'ethical distinction', the intense call to elevate life - heard by very few in premodern times -
335
and numerous
THE EXERCISES OF THE
Its transmitters were primarily modern state and the corresponding 5chool,43 at first supported ener- getically by the clergy of all confessions. In addition, other agencies,
not least the writers of the Enlightenment, appropriated fragments of the mandate to call for a change in life. 'Culture is a monastic rule' - for the moderns, this meant constantly facing the task of integrat- ing themselves into an order of achievement that imposed its rules on them, with the notable detail that far from entering the order of their own volition, they were born into it. Whether they liked it or not, their existence was embedded in ubiquitous disciplinary milieus from the outset - with no breakaway movements, romanticisms of laziness or great refusals to oppose it. As if to prove that it was serious about its imperative of achievement, the order of achievement that donned the mantle of civil 'society' also has something resembling confirma- tions for the elan of the young: certificates, examinations, doctorates and bonuses.
As soon as the absolute imperative takes broader effect, the age of propaganda begins. It was not only the Christian faith that strove for universal dissemination and penetration (the goal which the infamous Congregatio de propaganda {ide, set up by the Counter-Reformation Pope Gregory XV in 1622, set itself}; it was rather the imperative of human getting-into-shape in general that put training pressure on European populations, guided by their clerical and worldly mentors. And the antagonism between confessions had always included a com- pulsion to heighten the tonicity of faith. Belonging to a religious camp implied - particularly in times of war - an increased level of coercion to religion-polemical being-in-form. Even the Ignatian exercises con- stituted only one of many varieties of early modern fitness imperative in the religious field. The widespread Jesuit schools, famous both for their severity and for their teaching success, were the most tangible document of corresponding advances on the pedagogical front.
As soon as affecting larger populations through morally and artisti- cally demanding vertical tensions is put on the cultural agenda, one must resort to unaccustomed methods in order to popularize asceti- cisms. This entails abandoning the elitist beginnings of asceticism. Thus the exercises of the moderns broke open the monasteries, cathe- dral schools and medieval armouries to create new practice centres. In time, the renovated training units transformed society as a whole into a training association affected by the stress of increase: what had once largely been the province of escapists now shifted to the centre of the system. Hermitages were now elegant places of retreat
336
ART WITH HUMANS
on even
higher varieties of could not escape
dictate of fitness. One could take the great departures to pedagogi- cal utopias in the seventeenth century as indicating the transitional 'saddle period' of the new universalism of achievement - indeed, even the prompters of the current 'information society' who trumpet the motto of 'lifelong learning' are still performing an unconscious con- tinuation of Baroque mobilizations. To understand why the Modern Age transpired as the era of technology and simultaneously anthro- pological self-explanation one must note the fact that the main socio- historical, or rather lifestyle-historical, event of this epoch was the transformation of 'societies' into practising associations, stress-driven mobilization groups and integral training camps - spanning all their differentiated subsystems. Here, constantly renewed technologies are configured with humans who constantly have to learn anew about themselves. These associations are of an 'interdisciplinary' constitu- tion, as the diverse practice systems are intertwined via both close and loose connections -like the different weapons in a military asso- ciation or strategic roles within a team. What we call labour-divided 'society' is de facto the practice-divided competency field of a modern achievement collective entering the stress field of 'history'. Writing history turns into reporting on competing communities of fate under shared stress. One should never overlook, however, how much the national formats of the new European performance culture have been foiled by the internationalism - initially taken for granted - of the arts, literatures, sciences, military drill procedures and, more recently, also sporting athletisms.
Speaking of the Modern Age, then, means addressing the cultural production of an all-pervading bracing climate of performance increase and ability development - a climate that had established itself in the absolutist states long before the social Darwinist proc- lamation of competition as the supposed law of natural history. It is characterized by a constant externalization of practice goals and the transformation of self-collection into fitness.
The current key term for these externalized increases in outward application is 'enhancement',44 a word that expresses the shift of emphasis from the previous practising-ascetic self-intensification (and its bourgeois translation into 'education') to the chemical, biotechnical and surgical heightening of individual performance profiles. The enhancement fever of today articulates the dream - or the illusion - of a modernization that does not stop at formerly internal zones in human self-relationships. From Arnold Gehlen's
337
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
perspective, the diagnosis of this trend would be that the principle of relief has penetrated to the core areas of ethical behaviour. By reliev- ing oneself of the ego, one supports the suggestion that it is possible and desirable for individuals to access their own lives like an external datum, without having to bother shaping their existence themselves through practice. A glance at the most recent effects of the enhance- ment industry operating worldwide - with its departments of plastic surgery, fitness management, wellness service and systemic doping - retroactively suggests that the exercises of the moderns had pos- sibly only ever aimed for the perfect externalization of 'concern for oneself' and the avoidance of the subject in the definition of its fitness status. Where the enhancement idea is dominant, the raising of the performance level is used like a service where the effort made by the individual is restricted to purchasing the most up-to-date procedures. The classical practice subject, which sought to adapt to the law of the cosmos in protracted asceticisms or made space for God within itself through de-selfing (an 'aesthetic of existence' like the one Foucault believed he had discovered never existed in antiquity, however, and the Middle Ages could never have invented such a thing), is replaced by the lifestyle subject, which does not want to forgo the conventional attributes for representing existential autonomy. 45
Second History of Art: The Executioner as Virtuoso
In the following, I shall present elements of a second history of art that tells of applied art. It deals with the art that takes humans themselves as its material - in Trotsky's words, by seizing on the human being 'as a physical and psychic semi-finished product'. I shall leave aside the most obvious phenomena of 'art with humans' - especially the well-known practices of tattooing and the manifold varieties of body painting, cosmetics and decorative deformation. Nor will I discuss the fantastic world of status-indicating headwear such as crowns, hats and helmets, although these would be fruitful for the observation of 'put-on' art with humans. 46 As far as the reservoir of clothing fash- ions, jewellery and accessories is concerned, I shall merely refer to the corresponding literature. 47 This literature, on a passing note, shows that the history of vestimentary modernization can only be told as a history ofpeople and their wardrobes.
Instead, I shall begin at the macabre extreme of a craft exercised on human beings: the profession of executioner. It should be beyond doubt that Michel Foucault had the gruesome penal rituals of the
338
ART WITH Hm\1ANS
biopolitics newer
biopower classical times expressed itself in the approach 'let live and make die', while modernity supposedly prefers to 'make live and let die'. It is no coincidence that the author of Discipline and
Punish: The Birth o f the Prison opens his discipline-historical investi- gation with a fascinated and fascinating account of the most opulent execution spectacle ever presented to an eighteenth-century audience - the torture, quartering and burning of the would-be royal assassin Robert Fran~ois Damiens in 1757 before the royal household on the Place de Greve in Paris. Foucault's description brings back memories of the era of the chatiment spectacle, which ended with the ancien regime, when punishment was staged as the triumph of the law over wrongdoing and the exclusion of delinquents from moral society - a further reason to date the 'society of the spectacle' back to classical, or perhaps medieval, even archaic statehood. 48
Among the French Restoration authors, none perceived more clearly that the art de punir later uncovered again by Foucault indeed had an artistic character in its own right than Joseph de Maistre, author of those notorious pages in Soirees de St. Petersbourg (1821) devoted to that shunned pillar of social order, the executioner. Here he reminds the reader - targeting the spirit of the bourgeois age with Catholic-royalist defiance - of the forgotten and frowned-upon puni- tive art of pre-revolutionary times:
A dismal signal is given. An abject minister of justice knocks on his door to warn him that he is needed. He sets out. He arrives at a public square packed with a pressing and panting crowd. He is thrown a poisoner, a parricide, a blasphemer. He seizes him, stretches him out, ties him to a horizontal cross, and raises his arms. Then there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but the crack of bones breaking under the crossbar and the howls of the victim. He unties him and carries him to a wheel. The broken limbs are bound to the spokes, the head hangs down, the hair stands on end, and the mouth, gaping like a furnace, occasionally emits a few bloody words begging for death. He has finished; his heart is pounding, but it is with joy. He congratulates himself. He says in his heart, No one can break men on the wheel better than 1. 49
De Maistre's executioner appears as a master of his craft who antici- pates the Romantic artist: like the latter, he must forgo daily con- viviality, as his art alienates him from human relationships; like the artist, he develops a specific detachment (Flaubert's impassibilite) that enables him to carry out his profession matter-of-factly, and as with the artist, his self-approval precedes the judgement of the masses -
339
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to savoir as it is not even
by conversation. He does not receive any guests who could give him advice on how to perfect his craft; there is no chance of a visit from an 'earnest traveller' with greater knowledge - one who 'humbly leaves with us another craftsman's trick',50 The executioner is a virtuoso of an art applied to humans whose focus is the exhibition of a body twisted in agony. Anthropotechnics is involved, in so far as the delinquent appears as starting material for artful manipulations - a semi-finished product that is transformed into a fatal end product within a few hours.
The Beginning of Biopolitics: Even the Classical State Had Already Made Humans Live
At first glance, it might appear that there is no more convincing con- firmation of Foucault's first version of the biopower formula - 'let live and make die' - than the performances of the 'theatre of terror' in the penal rituals of the early Modern Age. 51 In reality, the early modern state was precisely not content to 'let' its subjects 'live', On the contrary, it is clear from even the most fleeting glance at the demographic policy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that in its incipient absolutist phase, the state was equally determined to 'make' its subjects 'live' - to a degree that makes the 'biopolitics' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which supposedly 'makes live and lets die', seem like a helpless postlude, helpless especially in the face of the main demographic trend in twentieth-century Europe: the abrupt decrease in reproduction, stemming from the return of con- traceptive art in combination with the new rise of private procreative considerations.
In truth, the state of the pre-classical and classical age was prima- rily a life-making state, for the equally simple and fatal reason that, as a mercantile state, a tax state, an infrastructure state and a state of standing armies, it strove for a form of sovereignty that presumed the discovery of the demographic mass law: that power, in its more recent inflection, primarily means dominion over the greatest possible number of subjects - with the subject already conceived consistently within the expanding property economy as a non-enslaved worker, an epicentre of value creation and a taxable seH-interest headquar- ters. As the modern state knows, it shares a fateful alliance with this centre - macro-egotism cannot thrive without blossoming micro-
340
WITH
power involves state - supported its accomplice,
church as guardian of family values - gaining control over the source of populousness. It intervenes in the generative behaviour of its sub- jects via suitable measures, specifically by terrorizing the bearers of contraceptive knowledge, namely midwives, to ensure the highest possible number of reproductively able people.
The measure of all measures in this field is the state- and church- sanctioned maximization of 'human production' - even Adam Smith, in his main work of 1776, speaks calmly of the 'production of men', which is governed by the 'demand for men'. 52 It was set in motion by the systematic destruction of the informal balance between the manifest patriarchy and the latent matriarchy, and thus by the annul- ment of the historic compromise between the sexes that, under the mantle of the church's life-protection ethics, had become established in Europe since late antiquity and remained in force until the late Middle Ages. Hence the unprecedented offensive to enslave women to the imperative of reproduction and the systematic destruction of knowledge about birth control, which went down in history under the misleading name of 'witch hunts'. As Gunnar Heinsohn showed decades ago in co-operation with Otto Steiger and Rolf Knieper,53 the misogynistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, with their numerous live burnings of women, should not be understood as a regression of modern 'society' into medieval 'barbarism', nor as an epidemic sexual neurosis, as psychoanalytical commentaries usually claim. They were rather the hallmark of early modernity itself, which followed its main impulse in accordance with the new demographic imperative: to ensure an unlimited availability of subject materia1. 54
With its terror against midwife-witches, the early nation-state handed its business card to 'society' as the latter modernized itself. The question of whether one can genuinely ascribe a 'highly devel- oped expertise' to the 'wise women' of that time in matters of con- traception will perhaps remain open; supposedly, however, over a hundred procedures for the prevention of unwanted offspring were known before the repression began - procedures whose effectiveness may, in some cases, be open to doubt. But apart from this, the conse- quences of 'witch oppression' were soon plain to see - and represent statistically. During a long period of rigid demographic policies, the modern state in alliance with the Christian clergy refused to toler- ate the conventional controlling function of wives over the 'source
341
THE EXERCISE'> OF THE MODERNS
it.
exemplary crime against UUAU(~AH
and a direct attack on the national interest; here one finds a rare case of total congruence between family and state morality.
It is anything but coincidental, then, that the greatest modern state theorist after Machiavelli, the jurist Jean Bodin (1530-96), a former Carmelite monk, distinguished himself as one of the most rabid witch hunters of all time. The writer of the epochal Six livres de la repuhlique (1576) was at once the author of the most brutal witch- hunting tracts of all time, published in Paris in 1580 under the title De fa demonomanie des sorciers. 55 What he wanted to achieve in his dual function as the founder of the modern theory of sovereignty and master thinker of the inquisition against reproductively able but self- willed women is plain to see. The crux of the matter had already been revealed a century earlier by the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, alias The Hammer of the Witches: 'No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives. '56 From now on, Catholic faith implied an unconditional subjugation of married persons to the consequences of marital intercourse, regardless of whether they were in a position to ensure a sufficient inheritance, and thus a productive future, for their offspring - without consideration, even, for the question of whether one can expect workers with no property of their own to bring up children at all. The policy of 'capital expansion through population increase' calmly passed over objections of this kind.
In truth, the population explosion of the Modern Age was triggered in part by the extensive incorporation of the propertyless workers, the subsequently much-discussed and usually wrongly declared 'proletariat', into the family and procreative praxis of late aristocratic-bourgeois 'society'.
In matters of procreation, the attitude of most Reformation theolo- gians was even more Catholic than that of the papacy. Martin Luther, who produced half a dozen children with Katharina von Bora, taught - intoxicated by the elan of his own faith - that Christian men should rest assured that if they increased the numbers of the faith- ful, God would not withhold the material means to nurture them as long as they were sufficiently diligent. Heinsohn and his colleagues incisively sum up the maxim behind such thinking: 'Generalization of individual irresponsibility in the form of responsibility to God. '57 One should note here that the concept of responsibility is significant neither in theology nor in classical moral philosophy; it only moved to the centre of ethical reflection in the course of the twentieth century, when the explosively grown problem of actions and their unintended consequences gained a large part of the moral attention.
342
ART WITH HUMANS
to -in a resolute blindness to consequences that would like to be mistaken for trust in God. Because of their com- mitment to the protection of unborn and born life, an honourable thing in itself, Modern Age churches of all confessions acted as de facto accessories to the most cynical biopolitical operation of all time.
Human Overproduction and Proletarianization
In its boundless longing for subjects, the new Leviathan decreed the most massive deregulation ever seen in the history of human repro- ductions, excepting the demographic explosions during the twentieth century in the Islamic sphere and various zones of what was once called the 'Third World'. Within a few generations, thanks to con- sistent 'witch policies' from both above and below in the leading European nations (which, moreover, were still looking back fear- fully on the depopulation catastrophe in the thirteenth century and the periodically returning plagues), birth rates first increased stead- ily, then exploded. Within barely more than a quarter of a century, the effects of absolutist biopolitics accumulated (though temporar- ily restricted by the consequences of the Thirty Years War) into a human tsunami whose crest broke in the nineteenth century - one of the conditions not only for the growth of a 'proletariat' damned to frustration, a class of propertyless workers who had to sell their services on markets outside of family businesses, but also for a dis- proportionate human exportation, mistakenly termed 'imperialism' by Marxists, that supplied the personnel to populate three continents with Europeans - South America, North America and Australia - as well as a partial occupation of the remaining continents. 58
The same demographic tidal wave flooded European 'societies' with countless unusable, unruly and unhappy people absorbable neither by the labour market nor by regiments, let alone the navy or overseas destinations. It was they who, from the seventeenth century on, brought about the first precursors of the welfare state, the Etat providence, and provoked intervention. It was their fates that Foucault stumbled upon in his studies on the history of the modern disciplinary system. It is no insult to him if one notes that the explanatory value of his investigations is lessened by their insufficient consideration for the demographic dimension of his topic - a dis- concerting observation on a scholar whose present renown is based almost entirely on his supposed discovery of biopower mechanisms.
its form -
343
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
policy but It is perhaps time to point out calmly that start of his disciplinological research, fell prey to an enormous optical illusion when he sought to attribute the state's capture of irretriev- able surplus humans, whose existence is often documented by no more than a note in the records of the absolutist administrations,59 to the effects of a fundamentally repressive, state-based disciplinary power. In reality, the measures taken by the early modern state on the poverty·political front can only be grasped if recognized as a more or less mechanical defence against its own excessive successes in the field of human production. What seems like a quintessential manifestation of 'disciplinary power' from the perspective of the genealogy of the prison was, from a state-functional perspective, already a form of the caring power that would constitute the modern welfare state60 - long before the nineteenth century raised any capitalism-specific 'social question'. In fact, the measures to discipline the poor in the classical period already contained the concession to the central principle of anthropological enlightenment: it is not nutrition that makes humans, but rather incorporation into the symbolic order - 'socialization', in the jargon of the twentieth century. What is socialization, however, but one of the masks worn by the practising life in an age bewitched
by work and domination?
The culture-pathological consequences of deregulated human pro-
duction in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were unforeseeably far-reaching. They culminated in a modernization of cruelty that surpassed even the purposeful brutalization training of antiquity. Even here, however, one should not confuse side effects with intentions. Gunnar Heinsohn and his colleagues point out the early Modern Age's 'inability to fine tune itself',61 which guaranteed that it would fall prey to its lack of regulation sooner or later. 62 It is gener- ally doubtful, in any case, whether demographic policy can already be viewed as a concise form of modern anthropotechnics, as it quite obviously lacks the technical aspect, the mastering of the procedure that brings about the desired result in discrete, explicit and controlled steps. There is no doubt that it turns human beings into raw material for further processing, political and otherwise. It is equally evident that it is committed to the experimental style of modern 'great politics' already identified by Nietzsche: the dynamism and futurism of the new civilizatory model are inconceivable without a significant element of chance. From this perspective, the absolutist style of demographic policy was a form of project-making on a grand scale - something halfway between technique and gamble that was typical of its time. 63
344
ART WITH HUMANS
The Birth of Sodal Policy from Problem of Human Surplus
In our context, all that matters is that the populationist policies of the early modern state triggered the impetuous development of numer- ous concrete forms of anthropotechnics, whether these manifested themselves on the education-political, pedagogical, military, police or welfare state fronts. The demographic policy based on uncondi- tional growth led to the typical modern vicious circle in which the incessant, soon apparently fateful overproduction of humans caused a massive overtaxing of upbringing potential in families, and hence a higher risk of epidemic child neglect. The response to this disastrous situation was, for understandable reasons, usually to appeal to the modern school system - not only so that it would provide the modern community with the necessary numbers of achievers, but also in the hope that the vast group of hopeless and superfluous people might form something resembling useful, or at least harmless members of society after all - a task at which the educators of the early modern state were doomed to fail. 64 When the toughening disciplines of school and the integrative effects of professional life fail, a second rescue system is required to 'catch' the surplus individuals. It is in this regime of administrative severities that the Foucauldian phenomena - the disciplines of custody, sedation and correction in the classical state - developed.
What we call social policy today is initially nothing but the modern state continually tracing its self-created vicious circle. 'Capitalism' only contributed to it after the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, by beginning the never-ending crusade to lower the cost of the labour factor. This all-tao-successful campaign is still giving the postmodern therapy and redistribution state a chronic headache, as it does not know what to make of the confusing simulta- neity of high unemployment and low birth rates; de (acto, this points to the excessive success of the economic system in its search for ways to reduce labour costs - a success that inevitably leads to the mass dis- missal of workers, yet can only be attained at the expense of the social system. But even the absolutist state, which 'made live' too much from the start by producing substantially more humans through its control over sexual parameters than it - or rather the families, schools and factories - could equip with humanizing qualifications and chances of economic employment, was damned to erect its ever higher-towering pyramids of polytechnical virtuosity over a substrate of impoverished and over-numerous humans. For them, compulsive
345
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODER~S
to
at these is not enough to understand disciplinological adventure of the Modern Age as a whole - neither in its artistic and artisanal dimensions nor in its scholarly, epistemological and engineering aspects, to say nothing of the neo-athletic and anthropo-political departures in the late nine-
teenth and complete twentieth century.
Educational Policy Under the Absolute Imperative
Modern pedagogy reacted to the new order situation in its own way: it took advantage of the state's chronic need by making itself indis- pensable to the modern body politic for centuries. It sharp-wittedly rose to become the discipline of all disciplines. It single~mindedly combined the crude education-political imperative - supplying the modern state with usable human beings - with a modern form of the absolute imperative: 'Instead of changing your life later on, you should let us change you from the start. ' At the start of their offensive, educators were committed almost without exception to this rule, as they almost all came from church traditions - or, in our translation, from the institutionalized practice forms of ethical difference. They knew from venerable sources and early-morning introspections that man is the being which needs to be brushed the wrong way. The era in which Rousseau and the anti-authoritarians would spread their confusion had not yet dawned; it had not occurred to anybody that one need only let children follow their own inclinations in all matters for free citizens to emerge. Even the most terrible fouetteur d'enfants - to use the epithet Rabelais coined for Pierre Tempete, master of the Parisian College de Montaigu (where Ignatius of Loyola studied), who became legendary for his brutality towards students - was abso- lutely convinced that he was merely doing what was necessary, as a
Christian and schoolmaster, to turn little monsters into adults with character. In the certainty that idleness is the beginning of all vice, the pious educators of that time did everything in their power to ensure that the devil had no chance of finding a pupil's mind unoccupied.
Emendatio Mundi
Perhaps this was the only way for the absolutely unexpectable to occur. From the modern state's initiation of human production
346
ART WITH HUMANS
the intervention most power- idea nve hundred years: notion world
ment appeared on the scene when the Baroque school accepted the task of warding off the human catastrophe triggered by the early modern state through its policy of unfettered human production. In this situation, improving the world meant improving humans en masse. As this was no longer practicable as the self-improvement of an ascetic minority, it required improvement of the many through educational institutions. Hence the pedagogues of early modernity, for the first time, applied the metanoetic imperative directly to chil- dren. Only then did the meaning of the thesis that all education is conversion truly become clear. The later totalitarian systems would be heir to the invasive schools, reclaiming the prerogative of com- pletely capturing the young.
With the support of the human production state, which was demographically competent (and hence strong) but pedagogically incompetent (and hence in difficulties), educators on the eve of the Enlightenment realized that they could only perform their duty suc- cessfully on one condition: they would have to reach for the whole human being in each student: they already saw the child as the future citizen. They consequently decided to pre-empt metanoia, the ethical revolution in mid-life, by planting the seed of change at the begin- ning. 65 Because of this disposition, the early modern school became the cell of ambition for the world that was to be changed - indeed, the incubator for all later 'revolutions'. It not only wanted to prepare for the better world while still in the worse; it sought to pull the world as a whole onto the better side through the production of graduates who were too good for the world as it was. School had to become the place where the adaptation of humans to deficient reality was thwarted. A second overproduction was to compensate for the damage caused by the first.
Implanting the change of life in the beginnings of each life demanded, to begin with, no less than the transference of monastic discipline to the school setting; this was the minimum price for the project of modernity. From the start, its goal was nothing but the correction of the erroneous world text - the emendatio mundi. It consisted in the replacement of the current depraved wording with a lost original version that could only be rendered legible once more by theologians, philosophers, and now also educators. This idea - which could only have occurred to the typesetters and printers, the correctors and pub- lishers of the Gutenberg era and their accomplices, the schoolmasters and educators of adults, who would call themselves members of the
347
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
Enlightenment soon afterwards - could be applied most plausibly to the souls of children in the burgeoning age of print. School transpired early on as the moral distillation flask of modern 'society', being the place where the metanoetic appeal to retreat from the world was to be taken up by a secular institution and turned towards profane ends. Here it was always important to maintain the semblance of subor- dination to the state mission - no publicly funded school in the time between Erasmus and Hartmut von Hentig has ever stated openly that its aim was the production of socially unusable characters, let alone modern hermits. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that every educator of quality had thoughts about the true goals of their profession that did not exactly coincide with the expectations of statehood.
This, then, proved to be the highest form of art with humans in the age of Christian humanism and its school projections: the availability of procedures for incorporating imperatives of humanization into edu- cation and imprinting the watermarks of the ideal indelibly upon the souls of the youngest. The premises for this change lie in the dissonant alliance between state and school: the mercantilist state of the early Modern Age identified the movements of monastic flight from the world, which were still massive, as an unwelcome tendency, almost a subversive evasion of potential workers from the spreading dictate of universal usefulness. It believed it was acting circumspectly and in its own interests by giving educators the power to take the young by the hand early on, and thus commit them to a curriculum of general usability from their first steps on. Its miscalculation would become evident in subsequent centuries; whoever relies on pedagogues to produce citizens should be prepared for unexpected side effects.
School Interest Versus National Interest
The trick of pedagogical reason articulated itself in the fact that while the modern school trained its pupils nominally with a view to the state and 'society', it secretly, sometimes even manifestly, bypassed the state and 'society'. This error was crystallized in the resonant German word Bildung. 66 The special status of 'culture' in the modern construction of reality cannot be understood without the organized deviation of education from its external purpose. One could already see a hint of the incipient 'differentiation of subsystems' - the trivial- izing sense behind the talk of differentiation, admittedly, would be clearer here than elsewhere. Just as modern demographic policy fails
348
ART H. UlvlANS
at its
its own, modern culture was flooded with an enormous surplus of
dead-end idealisms - personalism, humanism, utopianism and mor- alism being the official varieties. 67 This excess provoked a series of culture-pathological reactions, from escapism and inner retreat to Romanticism, revoltism and immoralism. The character mask of the cynic conquered the late aristocratic and bourgeois stage from the eighteenth century on - the Mozart-da Ponte operas would be quite incomplete without the figure of the hard-boiled philosopher who, wrapped in his foul-smelling donkey hide, always expects the worst of humans. 68 At the same time, the modern novel unfolded a veritable phenomenology of private reason turned bad. Hegel's philosophy, at its didactic core, is nothing other than a machine for processing frustrated idealism; for what he calls 'education' is essentially disap- pointment management. It refers not to the decentred wandering of bourgeois curiosity between this and that thing, as today's equation of 'culture' with leisure implies. Bildung demands the hard later con- ditioning of the flaring-up idealistic subject, which must abandon the illusion that the world owes it any adjustment to its morally exagger- ated expectations. Needless to say, the sensible Protestant Hegel was defeated across the board in his struggle with modern protest culture.
No one who wanted to write a reasoned history of modern peda- gogy could avoid examining the deepest systemic rupture within the semantics of the Modern Age: the divergence of school interest and national interest. The pseudo-symbiosis of school and state holds some of the most baffling dysfunctionalities of modern culture - it causes frictions whose dissonant potential goes beyond the old symbi- otic dualism of church and state. A retelling of this dangerous liaison would not only have to show how, to this day, countless graduates of the modern school systematically dream in directions unrelated to the conditions of the 'working world'; it would also have to explain the state's chronic attempts to defeat the single-mindedness of the 'peda- gogical province' for pragmatic and utilitarian reasons. Such attempts would provide the running thread leading to a history of school as a history of school reforms - always from the ideal school to the real one, of course. University reforms in Germany during the twentieth century, whether those of 1933 or those from the late 1960s - to name only the most symptomatic caesuras - form a coherent picture if one sees in them the undisguised will of the state to reconquer the commanding heights of cognitive human production in the service of the working world and power politics. Had Wilhelm II not already
measures. Because a
349
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
claimed, in front of German secondary school teachers, that what was needed at German schools were not new Greeks but young German men? Naturally the 'education planners' could only succeed in their neo-realistic plan if they took suitable steps to eliminate the humanism still blooming in the faculties, especially the humanities - assuming the reorganized departments did not initiate the necessary adjustments of their own accord: for decades, pre-emptive dismay has been the zeitgeist itself. 69
All the World's a School
Whoever wants to teach becomes a member of the modern world's most powerful organization: teachers without borders. If world time and school time converge in future, it is due to their actions. No author of the burgeoning era of teachers formulated with more elan, more comprehensively or more radically how pervasive the new pedagogy had become than John Amos Comenius. His works give the impression that he wanted to correct Shakespeare's statement, 'All the world's a stage I and all the men and women merely players,/o replacing it with the counter-thesis that all the world is a school- and all humans merely pupils. We are inhabitants of a creation in which everything revolves around instruction.
2. That it is right to call the world a school is shown first of all by the matter itself [. . . ] for what is a school? It is generally defined as a company ofpersons who teach and learn what is useful. 71 If this is true, then the world is a school, since it is entirely made up of an order of teachers, learners, and disciplines.
3. For everything that exists in the world teaches or learns, or it does both alternately . . .
5. Therefore everything is filled with disciplines, i. e. with various tools for admonishing, advising and driving on: therefore it is not wrong to call the world a house o f discipJine. 72
For human beings, the created world is a 'prelude to eternity': it offers a preparatory course that we must attend before we are admitted to the heavenly academyJ3 Comenius has no doubts about the material that has to be covered during the stay in the house of discipline: the world-pupil must work through three books to acquire the necessary wealth of knowledge:
The first and greatest book of God is the visible world inscribed and illustrated with as many characters as there are creatures of God to be
350
ART
seen in Jt. The second book is man made in likeness of God. [. . . JBut God has into man's hands a third book [. . . J the Scripture. 74
If one takes into account the depraved nature of man, it is hardly sur- prising that mortals have so far, for the most part, made no proper use of the aids given to them. They rejected the universal books granted to them thanks to the free availability of divine teaching tools. They wilfully insisted on imaginary special knowledge, causing them to sink into darkness and eternal quarrelling. As a result, there is no redemp- tion in the world, only a civil war between the pseudo-knowledgeable and the ignorant. At the time he wrote these statements, Comenius was not only looking back on the Thirty Years War, which he had experienced in its entirety; he could also see the beginnings of the never-ending cold war that modern experts in international law whitewash as the 'European state system' established in the Peace of Westphalia and rationalized by the Ius publicum europaeum.
Pre-Enlightenment: The Way of light
For Comenius, the enthusiastic mastermind of the Bohemian Brethren, the way to heal the world's sickness was not to be found at the peace conferences of potentates. It could only be gleaned from the eternal philosophy and from revelation. The path of salvation for the decrepit world could only be the Way of Light - thus the title of Comenius' chiliastic manifesto of 1668, whose most significant parts had been written in London over twenty years earlier. In this epochal treatise, he stirred up conventional Neoplatonic thought figures (such as the doctrine of the threefold action of the primal light, comprising inner stasis, emanation through creation and the satisfying return to the source) in the spirit of a pedagogical apocalypticism. Here the main motifs of the later Enlightenment - in so far as it is based on a barely disguised totalitarianism of the school- are plain to see in their origi- nal Christian-millenarian form.
In our context, it is instructive to observe how for the great school man, the way of light prefigures the way of school, while the way of school points to the perfection of the book. Thus he answers the ques- tion, 'How can the greatest light of understanding be kindled for the world? '75 with the information that one must unify the three sources of light - self-communicating nature, the inborn ideas of the human soul and the Holy Scripture - in a single over-bright flame. Through
351
its rays, step to
can communicate it already
THE EXERCISES
THE MODERNS
in the new books, and will shine even brighter in the futu~e once improved books are available, the 'absolutely necessary books can be translated into the common languages'. 76 Thanks to the timely inventions of the letterpress and deep-sea navigation, the spreading of that strongest and most radiant light which overcomes all resistance from darkness is now only a 'matter of time': the omens of future pan-harmony are shining on the horizon of the present. Among these is the widespread human longing for a better world. Comenius would not have been a metaphysicist in the classical tradition if he had not taken the presence of that longing as a sign that it could be fulfilled - God would not have implanted this yearning for good in us if He had not already ensured its attainability. Analogously, Ernst Bloch, the last great-naive thinker of world improvement, saw hope itself as an agent of realizing the hoped-for.
The top form of Modern Age art with humans is evident in the over-enthusiastic project of turning every student into a pupil of pan- sophy. This term, common among encyclopaedic scholars since the sixteenth century, is probably best translated as 'the art of omnisci- ence'. In our century, though probably since the days of Diderot and his colleagues, it has been forgotten that the world knowledge of the Modern Age had begun its reproduction cycles under the catchword of omniscience - a word whose history of decline indicates the oft- cited 'clarification of Enlightenment' [Abklarung der AufkiarungJ. The syllabus of the student of omniscience (and other students are, for the moment, not worth mentioning) is based on the aforementioned premises: whoever wishes to learn must learn everything, in keeping with the three keys to totality or 'books' which the creator, according to Comenius' doctrine of source, provided for mankind. Hence every single pupil must transform into an artwork of omniscience, printed in the typographic workshops of the new pan-disciplines. Comenius, one of the grand masters of pansophy alongside Athanasius Kircher and Leibniz, never tired of constantly inventing new subdivisions and variations to augment the mother discipline: panpaedeia (universal education), panurgia (universal technique), pangiottia (doctrine of universal language), panorthosia (doctrine of universal reform), pannuthesia (universal warning), panergesia (universal appeal) and panaugia (universal light). The definition of school in Comenius' Orbis sensualium pictus (The Visible World] - the first schoolbook of the Modern Age, published in Nuremberg in 1658 - as a 'work- shop in which young minds are formed in accordance with virtue>77 is
352
ART WITH
virtus of the to in their goal was to transform the pupil's soul into a speaking mirror of totality. To graduate, the student had to become a Gesamtkunstwerk of world knowledge and cognizance of godly things.
In the light of such monumental aims, one would suppose that their author himself had the greatest doubts as to their feasibility. But the undaunted pedagogue of totality insisted on proving by all means that it was indeed time to hope and strive for the 'greater'. Hence the six learning steps of mankind summarized by the author in chapter 13 of Via Lucis - one of the first outlines of a stage theory of the human race, from Adam and Eve to Gutenberg and Magellan - had to be augmented by a seventh: the step into the global society of light. It is not hard to recognize the euphoric original state of the disen- chanted 'society of knowledge' in this vision. For Comenius, this final manoeuvre contains the mission and adventure of the now. Whoever completes it supports the operative light in its current work: they further the breakthrough to total didactics, which promises without false modesty to convey everything to all in a universal fashion. Here sounds the battle cry of pedagogical millenarism: omnes omnia omnino, which runs through Comenius' work - unwaveringly main- taining the balance between enthusiasm and method for forty years.
With the call to universal education, Comenius announced that the apocalyptic call was the order of the day in this 'evening of the world': because not much time was left, it was high time to gather up what had been scattered, and collect all summations in summa- tions of summations. 78 The agenda of the age called for a new book of books, a hyper-Bible that would meet the needs of the Gutenberg era. A book of this kind, a form of Newer Testament that would test our ability to count to three with the Holy Scriptures too, would by its nature have to be the definitive, or even final, book. It would have to contain everything a prudent person should know - heavenly and earthly, natural and artificial things alike. 79 It is meant to hold the evangelic potential of profane knowledge.
What is peculiar here is that world knowledge, whose scope is wide, and salvific knowledge, which demands a restriction to the one essential thing, suddenly find themselves in a state of unim- paired harmony. One can, in fact, view the balanced coexistence of encyclopaedism and apocalypticism as the intellectual miracle of the seventeenth century. Something of this kind would not reappear until the spiritual lightning flash prior to the Russian Revolution, namely in the work of Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the creative mind of
353
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
the Russian cosmists, who not only postulated an all-encompassing world museum and a universal cemetery for all the dead of mankind, but also predicted the resurrection of the dead of all eras with the help of the life sciences, which would be founded specifically for this purpose. For him, true universalism consisted in the rejection of death, the final cause of asynchronicity, finitude and disconnection. 8o
Something distantly comparable also applied in the apocalyptic thought of the Baroque: Christians were able and expected to be encyclopaedists once the conflict between the theomorphism of the soul and the cosmomorphism of the whole human being had ceased to exist. One universe, one book, one psyche: the book-shapedness of the world permits the literate soul to embrace its world-shapedness fully. This is the ultimate reason why the great practisers of modernity no longer retreated to the desert. In future, it would suffice for them to live by the rule nulla dies sine pagina. Many pages form a chapter, and many chapters create the world. The immersion of scholars in the total book created a polyvalent movement in which withdrawal and exodus coincided: modern being-in-the-world realized a third way
between flight into the world and flight from the world.
This movement, which always points forwards and upwards, con- tains the original gesture of world improvement. 81 Improving the world means comparing the corrupted text to the intact one and cor- recting it to restore it to its original state. If there is no access to an original world text, improvers must rely on the dialectical assumption that the negation of the wrong will automatically produce the right. Against this background, it is clear why the Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School, especially after its reduction to a negative dia- lectics, was not only a camouflaged Marxism without a revolutionary
perspective; at the same time, it constituted a late daughter product of Baroque world-improving idealism - or, more precisely, its regression to a 'sad science'. Need we still add that during its best years, Baroque idealism carried out the transference of the Reformation from matters of faith to matters of knowledge? According to this idealism, we should be saved not only by faith, but also through knowledge. Enlightenment begins as pedagogical gnosis.
For those producing art with humans in the seventeenth century, the mission of emendatio mundi entailed a wealth of further conclu- sions: they quickly had to produce universal books (the plural is used here merely as a formality), universal schools, a universal college and a universal language. 'In this, no corner of the earth, no people, no language and no class of society will be neglected. '82 The books of light, schools of light, colleges of light and languages of light are
354
ART WITH HUMANS
m every corner
win out everywhere, in
Comenian motto: Omnia sponte tluant, absit violentia rebus. g3 The primal light and the technical light campaign for the same cause: books are the lamps of world-illumination, schools the lamp-bearers, scholars the lamp-lighters, and languages the fuel for the flame of universal illumination. 84
Words and things are still so close together here that one can easily cross over from one side to the other. The world is the orderly tableau of essences, and as such it is easily understandable as a whole; that is why the encyclopaedias of the early Modern Age were still a form of atlas reproducing all the continents and countries of being 'topically' in clear maps. God and humans share the same 'conception of the world'. The lexica of the late eighteenth century, on the other hand, abandoned the aim of metaphysical overview, mirroring the disinte- gration of the whole in unrelated or weakly connected keywords. 85 Hence the newer 'reference works' since Zedler's Universallexikon and the French Encyclopedie have opted to string articles together alphabetically. One should not underestimate the formative effect of alphabetically 'ordered' lexica of the eighteenth century; for later ones, they provided exercises in incoherentism. Their mere structure reinforced the implicit conviction of the moderns that the world was an aggregate of isolated details; to this day, no form of holism has been able to overcome this influence - be it the ecological or the philo- sophical variety.
Comenius' manifesto of the pedagogical international uncovered substantial premises for world-improving action: for those who choose the way of light, haste is as necessary as the conviction that they can pass on universal knowledge. A hundred years later, one of the editors of the Encyclopedie took up the impulse provided by Comenius. Diderot's vigorous call Hatons-nous de rendre fa philoso- phie populaire can therefore also be reversed: to make philosophy popular and effective requires an acceleration. Only by its haste can one recognize that progress is apocaiypticism under a bourgeois guise. For the philosophical apocalypticist, the way to the light is the way of light itself: it is the absolute in history. It has accepted performing the work of world-pervasion since the beginning of all creation, and in our time the enterprise has entered its final phase. If there has ever been a version of the 'project of modernity' in plain terms, it can be found in the work of Comenius.
The postulate of omniscience recalls a time from which we have long since been alienated, when knowledge was viewed as something
355
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
nature 1t """"""'UU knowledge to penetrating insight into the structure the rounded cosmos of essences. It referred to an effectively complete, but phenomenally disordered world in need of repair, and thus seemingly incomplete - but nonetheless reparable. At that time, the world-improvers were any who wanted to give the world back its original perfection - whereas today, one must assume that every repair causes new imbalances, new imperfections. For the pansophists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was nothing presumptuous in the call for omniscience; it merely drew the inescapable conclusions from the basic assumptions of classical metaphysics, which rested on an ontology of the perfect and compre- hensible world. This could at most be augmented by a therapeutics
that enabled humans to heal into the whole.
These assumptions echo in the admonition of Comenian pedagogy
to build the new school on the summation of all summations, so that future tuition would be based on a universal book. Even omniscience can be given a child-friendly form. The pan-pedagogical intention is unmistakably based on other premises than the ancient way of prac- tising towards omniscience. For the Sophists, it did not come from an overall insight into the circle of knowledge joining the world, but rather the decree that the artiste in the eternal rhetorical training camp should be able to speak spontaneously and triumphantly on any given subject.