No More Learning

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
315
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
316
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
317
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
318
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
319
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-
320
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
321
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
322
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
323
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-
324
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
325
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
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.