No More Learning

The wrath of God was to become human rage--and waiting for transcendent retribu- tion was to become an immanent praxis, which was to be sufficiently cold- blooded in order to prudently reach its goal but also heated enough in order not to let go even a little bit of the call for retributive gratification. Here rage was explicitly described in terms of its thymotic nature--the elimination of the unbearable lack of suffering, which rules in a world full of injustice without atonement.
Seen from this perspective, Edmond Dantes embodies the world soul of the bourgeois era. He knows in a clear and self-evident way what the politi- cal transformers of his day still had to search for. He is the human being who has found his struggle. He is infused by a motivation that eradicates every ambiguity. If one lives for rage, one possesses that simple, apodictic "in-order-to," which Kierkegaard took to be the difference between an apos- tle and a genius. 79 While the genius always has to wait for new ideas--ideas being unpredictable enough to change direction at every opportunity-- the apostle knows every time exactly what needs to be done. What the left Hegelians postulated on the other side of the Rhine in philosophical termi- nology was realized with all its consequences by Alexandre Dumas in the world of the novel. The Count ofMonte Cristo provided the French pendant to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. It unfolded a grant narrative apparatus with the proposition: "So far the abject and the offended only showed lenience based on various pretenses with regard to the villains of this world; the point is to take revenge on them. "
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The transition to practiced revenge presupposes that the revenger knows from the beginning where he needs to search for the evildoers. Dumas completely lives up to this law from the great history of revenge. From the first day of the plot his villains are clearly identifiable--all of them bear the faces of the ruling class in the era of the reign of the bourgeois king. In a sense they are consistently "character masks of capital"--in no case is their guilt reducible to their class position. They are led by the small scoundrel Caderousse, who plays the part of the tale teller in the betrayal of Dantes-- he embodies the eternal henchman who senses his own advantage in every regime, no matter if it comes in francs, rubles, or dollars. He is followed by the corrupt judge, Villefort, who knows the innocence of the accused and yet sentences him to life on the prison rock in order not to jeopardize his own career. He is also an embodiment of the timeless opportunist. It is not surprising that he was successful in advancing to the position of attor- ney general. And finally there are the two directly responsible authors of the conspiracy against the young captain, Fernand and Danglars. The one planned the conspiracy out of jealousy and the other out of envy for his career. The first advanced under Louis Philippe to the position of general and the second became a successful banker, embellished with a purchased aristocratic title. The spectrum of these careers is instructive: in contrast to the Bourbon reaction, the arrivistes of the July monarchy are not bound any longer by the fatal alternative of rouge and noir. The quantity of good posi- tions has increased dramatically. The city of Paris vibrates with new chances. The possibilities of advancing have multiplied so that, for the first time in the history of old Europe, a majority of the people who advanced to the top were new to the position. With the depictions of these figures, Dumas expresses the conviction that evil in the relationships among people does not ultimately originate from social structures but from the hearts of cor- rupt individuals. No political transformation can do anything against time- less infamy--only rage, calmly followed through to the end, allows one to reestablish the unsettled balance of the world. This is why popular literature
has the task of depoliticizing the rage of the disadvantaged and redirecting it to its "natural" objects, the unambiguously identified villains. True satisfac- tion, ifwe can trust the gospel according to Monte Cristo, does not lie in the victory of a collective of humiliated individuals, nor of those offended over their former masters. It comes about only as a result of the rage of a chosen victim against those who have messed with his life.
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Only one time, at the height of the rage action--which Dumas reserves for the end--does an appearance of tensions connected to class struggle break into the count's revenge against his enemies. In the end of his mis- sionary work, Dantes does not rest content with ruining the banker Dan- glars by manipulating option trading. He has to advance his campaign^ the point of destroying the capitalist personality as such. Thus Monte Cristo seeks symbolic revenge against the entire spirit of the bourgeois era. Dan- glars is arrested on behalf of the count by a gang of Italian robbers under the command of a certain Luigi Vampi--a picturesque bandit who reads Plutarch's Life ofAlexander during his free time, which probably means that he is a university dropout. The banker, who has difficulty understanding the significance of his abduction, is held in a remote cave. He only under- stands his situation bit by bit: in his cell the prisoner is forced to select his meals from "Luigi Vampi's menu. " For each meal from the alternative restaurant the prisoner has to pay a certain price, "as it is appropriate for every true Christian. " The prices, however, are exorbitantly high, so that the penny-pincher sees himself forced to spend his entire fortune, with the exception of a symbolic remainder, for his daily livelihood. He spends five million francs in twelve days, which amount, it is told, the count immedi- ately passes on to hospitals and poorhouses.
The reader who follows the downfall of Danglars understands how wrong Marx was in claiming that the proletariat did not have to realize any ideals. 80 There is a proletarian idealism that, in a sense, argues for successful rage. In such cases one experiences the completed cruelty as the realization of a sublime mission--just as with the popular call for the death penalty.
The demand for rage crosses a threshold in these scenes, which have been painted with pleasure. Beyond this threshold there is no hope for further increase. After hardly two weeks, when Danglers, now white- haired form his ordeal, tumbles out of his prison, everything that could be achieved under the auspices of secular law has been realized. The highest satisfaction is granted from the destruction of the bourgeois character. The principle of the corrupt career is unveiled by this destruction; the careerist suffers the penalty that he deserves. If one attentively studies the menu of the robber, it becomes clear that it is nothing more than a popular com- mentary on the concept of exploitation. The novelist transforms the mil- lionaire into a wretch through the reversal of the relationship of exploita- tion; the devil experiences with his own body what it means to sell one's
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life day by day for the simple purpose of self-preservation. He has never needed to sell his labor power in order to survive, but now he must sacri- fice his buying power to prevent starvation. The moral lesson of the scene is obvious: every vampire lives with the risk of encountering a superior vampire sooner or later.
Monte Cristo aims to completely suspend the domination of capital over the desires of citizens. This change is not supposed to come about through the expropriation of the means of production as the Marxist vulgate wanted, but rather through the discovery of a treasure that surpasses even the great- est wealth from industry or banking transactions. Thus the treasure hunt of work, profit, and redistribution turns out to be the deeper phenomenon. With this demonstration, I leave the political and economic scene and dive back into the world of fairy tales. However, is it not the case that the deeper layers of every criticism of political economy are only touched by the criti- cism of the fairy tale of enrichment? Is it not the case that all monetary fan- tasies rest on one theme, namely, that the hero is supposed to find a way to spend his means without losing his liquidity? The person who has been truly blessed by Fortuna is not supposed to lack the miraculous manna, even if he has charitably given it to the people. It is precisely this effect, which the mysterious count has embodied since he began to haunt the discussions of Paris society like a phantom.
It is not really surprising that such a story ends with a pious lie. After the count settles all outstanding accounts and, according to his strategic plan, disposes one by one of all the people responsible for his suffering, he declares himself free of the will to revenge in a sentimental farewell let- ter and acknowledges that he, just as Satan before him, succumbed to the temptation of wanting to be just like God. Now, however, having overcome the desire to preside over Judgment Day himself, he will return to human standards. In the future he wishes to be a normal man among men or, even better, a rich man among rich people. He takes leave of his friends by reminding them that "all of human wisdom is entailed by the words: wait and hope! "
The audience had good reasons for not wanting to hear about the man any longer. It is fully justified to let go without remorse the privateer who has become dull. One more member of the satisfied class does not change the condition of the world. Of what concern is the destiny of a deserter who abandons the sublime cause of disaster as soon as he has satisfied himself?
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He who violates the pledge of allegiance to the spirit of revenge has lost his entitlement to our attention as readers. The reader continues to stick, with good judgment, to the one who has not been converted, who after his resur- rection from the dungeon insists on the execution of his rage as one insists on a sacred legal title.
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Conservatives start with frustration, progressives end with frustration; everybody suffers from the age and can agree on that point. The crisis becomes universal.
NIKLAS LUHMANN, PROTEST
IF ONE WANTED TO EXPRESS THE STRONG CHARACTER OF THE contemporary psychopolitical international situation in one sentence, it would have to be: We have entered an era without rage collection points of global perspective. Neither in heaven nor on earth does anyone know what work could be done with the "just anger of the people. " The sacred fureur, from which Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most vicious and greatest agitators of 1789, expected the creation of a new society, leads today to nothing. It creates only dissatisfied noise and brings about hardly more than isolated symbolic actions. However large one realistically needs to conceive of the contradictory potentials of the present, be it in the countries of the center or those at the peripheries, they no longer unite in the historically known forms of radical parties or in international oppositional movements, which put pressure on the bourgeois center or on an authoritarian, that is, quasi- liberal state. Vagabond dissidence quantities do not seem to know anymore whether they still have a task to fulfill. Here and there, there are protest marches under banners,1 burning cars expressing the rage of declassified immigrants, and opportunist waves of indignation transforming traditional
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nations of culture into debating clubs in which one scandalizes for weeks about illegal Hitler comparisons and dubious free flights for ministers. At times isolated and more sophisticated political projects or networks of regional significance (which enjoy talking themselves into having global sig- nificance) emerge. However, nowhere do we find an articulation of a vision that would provide perspectives for an accumulation capable of action--I will comment on the special case of radical political Islamism later.
The dispersion of forces is in stark contrast to the ubiquitous rumor that the world is increasingly interconnected by new media. Might it be the case that networking itself designates only a state of organized weakness? In large parts of the Third World, if one wants to continue to use that term, just as in some countries of the former Second World, the outrageous circumstances appear to be in no way less dramatic than the situation of the English work- ing class in the nineteenth century according to Friedrich Engels's daunting depiction. One is led to believe that the sum total of suffering, misery, and injustice on earth, which could potentially spark rage, would be enough for ten eruptions when compared to the situation in October 1917--especially if one considers the significantly improved conditions of information--and yet attention to these energies remains modest. There is hardly any construc- tive use of psychopolitically relevant affects. Thymos fields do not manage to stabilize themselves. It seems that rage does not want to continue to learn. It does not reach the level of knowledge, and knowledge does not reach it. Indignation cannot provide for a global idea anymore. Apparently the tra- ditional left parties are one dimension too stupid for their own ambitions, if they are not too sluggish to express their ambitions at all. Intellectuals enjoy citing one another. If the ambitious do in fact lead the conversation, they have more important things to do than take care of the debased and insulted. In the East and in the West all that remains of the hopes of those who used to be revolutionaries, reformers, transformers of the world, and redeemers of classes are mere "petrifactions"--to call up a bizarre phrase of Heiner Miiller, bizarre because hopes usually wither, not petrify.
AFTER THEORY
THUS THE "AGE OF EXTREMES" SEEMS TO BE OVER PASSED LIKE A spook that, in retrospect, no one any longer understands what made it powerful. Radicalism is only important in the Western Hemisphere as an aesthetic attitude, perhaps also as a philosophical habitus, but no longer
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as a political style. The center, the most formless of monsters, consistently understood the law of the hour. It made itself into the protagonist, even solo entertainer on the posthistorical stage. Whatever it touches becomes, just like itself, docile, characterless, and despotic. Yesterday's agents of extremist impatience have become unemployed and are no longer offered any parts to play in the Zeitgeist. What is called for now are resilient bores. What is expected of them is to sit around big tables to come up with the world formula of compromise. The relentlessly soft center creates hybrids out of everything.
At the moment it is still difficult to understand the significance of the cae- sura. For at least a century, the sense of reality has done what was necessary to situate itself at the extremes--probably because it always retained proxim- ity to wars, because it saw war everywhere and wanted to see it everywhere. If one lived during the age of extremes, one witnessed a condition in which, as Hobbes noted, "the Will to contend by battell [sic] is sufficiently known. "2 What appeared to be peace was inevitably unmasked as the false face of war. Every act of mediation, every reconciliatory gesture appeared as treason against the harsh reality of the extreme. Now, however, everything that is one-sided and exaggerated is smiled at as if it would reveal a lack of ability to understand the conditioned and meditated character of every position. "Being-there" (Dasein) and "to be in the midst of things" (In-der-Mitte-Sein) mean the same thing today. Heidegger would probably say: to exist means to be put into mediocracy (Hineingehaltensein in die Mittel-Mafiigkeit). 3
These remarks are roughly synonymous with what modern historians, columnists, and unemployed specialists of the Soviet Union mean when they speak of the postcommunist situation. It may legitimately be pro- claimed: pretty much everything that rushed by the audience during the last decades under the heading of "post-" ultimately culminates in the concep- tion of a postcommunist situation (which has existed in reality since the last years of the Brezhnev era). Because the Soviet experiment was undeniably the defining political event of the twentieth century, its formal end around 1991 signified the decisive caesura from which the objectively important later datings take their departure. The inflation of the prefix "post-," which has lasted for about two decades now, symbolically expresses that future energies of the culture of rage and dissidence inexorably fade away.
The thesis that we are living "after theory"--to cite the elegant title of an essay from Terry Eagleton's pen, an essay that does not do full justice to the topic--is only sensible if one also applies it to the postcommunist situation.
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Because "theory," as it is evoked by some of its disappointed lovers, is mean- ingless without being related to the communist Utopia. If one engaged with social theory during the heyday ofMarxist influences, it was necessary for sub- stantive reasons to focus on the large picture--not in the mode of academic contemplation, to be sure, but as a participant of a military briefing and, when it became serious, even as a member of the war council. "Theory" could turn into a discursive praxis of authoritative radicalism because it signified, either explicitly or discreetly, the consultation of the world revolution. That was the reason it could be recognized by its messianic vibrato even in the driest lec- ture. The interest in it resulted from the mostly concealed but never repu- diated suggestion that there could be something like a logical Comintern-- a philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical supervision of the great act of revenge in the name of world history. Once this specter is discontinued, the drama and the theory are also at once finished. He who says "after theory" truly intends "after politics. " One lives "after politics," if one can no longer believe that what can still be done contributes to "the revolution. " The pre- sentist adventism, which had instilled its form into the prerevolutionary and revolutionary forms of life, thus disperses. While activists were permeated by the certainty that the present would be filled with the traces of the coming, todays disenchanted live out of the conviction that the future has already been there--and nobody can bear to think of a second visit.
While exercised at a certain level, "theory" was a radically romantic affair because, like a cultural secret service, it spied on the unconscious of the class "societies" in order to find out what became of the impeded desire of human beings for the Other. The dossiers of these services thus always mentioned alterity. This amalgam, prominent during the Indian summer of the critical-theory version of neo-Marxism or as a theory without epithet in German and Anglo-American universities (while France added its resources of Jacobinism and formalism) was nothing but an apocalyptic semiology that contributed to a science of the crisis of the "establishment. " It provided the accessories necessary to observe a great politics--one always ready to interpret the emerging signs of the end of the world and the revolution of the world or the sad failure to materialize either. 4
After the world bank of rage closed down its business operations, count- less ideological agencies have been drawn into the maelstrom of competi- tion. Only a few, such as Noam Chomsky and some recent monotonous thinkers, have been almost as successful in their reconstructions as earlier generations--even if only in outsider markets. This does not mean that other
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contemporaries have sunk into states of peevish inexpressiveness. It is not at all the case that we have to become silent when we want to address the mat d'etre of our days just because the East is no longer red. To the contrary, it is astounding how quickly the contemporary intelligentsia wanted to adapt to the situation, a situation in which there is no universally functioning depot capable of collecting rage, indignation, dissidence, subversion, and protest. And certainly there is no emission center for future projects that could con- vincingly transcend the actual world system. And still: wherever one evokes among intellectuals of the old school the rediscovery of the political, there is a form of homesickness or nostalgia for the old days in which one wanted to believe that the day of rage would soon come.
Although the Soviet Union appeared since Stalin's death in 1953 as a mor- ally extinct colossus, and although it had lost every attraction for dissident fantasy, its factual existence served as a guarantee that the principle of the left possessed a sort of secular manifestation. Although Jean-Paul Sartre was never a formal member of the Communist Party, he could commit himself "to the leading role of the Soviet Union" still in 1952. Just like the Roman Catholic Church itself during the periods of the grossest perversions bore wit- ness through its mere existence to a transcendental mission, the disenchanted "Eastern bloc" provided a foundation for the moral and ontological postulate that there have to be domains of possibility pointing beyond the capitalist world system. The spirit of Utopia possessed more credibility than today in demanding a field "left to the establishment" in which potential worlds could flourish. Back then, no one would have fallen for the simplistic slogan, "A dif- ferent world is possible. " The other world was in the midst of us, and it was horrible. What was called for was another otherness--in this situation the word "alternative" started its career. Of course, the complete absurdity and rottenness of "realized" socialism was apparent, but as long as the rotten and absurd complex continued to exist, the simple "that" of its existence provided a reason to believe that a nonperverse realization of its justified motivations would be possible. Not all dissident potentials were already condemned to the art world's late-night programs and pantomimes; the horizon was not yet narrowly constricted to amusement parks for erotically excited last men.
APART FROM THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BREAK WITH THE OLD EUROPEAN monological conception of truth, responsibility for the currently domi- nant unlimited pluralism mainly belongs to the end of the dogma of
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homogeneous evolution, which had still characterized the European Enlightenment--in that regard it is an heir to medieval logic. The illusion ended that one could control one's age from a single metropolis, whether called Moscow, Paris, Berkeley, Frankfurt, or Heidelberg. In the meantime, the "multiplicities," the differentiations, the singularities are so prominent that their media could forget that they belong to one common "humanity. " In 1951, Albert Camus wrote with regard to the passed horrors, "Disaster is today our common fatherland. " Contemporaries do not want to hear about com- mon fatherlands beyond their own spheres of interest. Even the negative Uto- pia, the anticipation of a global natural catastrophe, is incapable of creating a transcending horizon of binding departures. The spirit of de-solidarization, whether private, local, national, multinational, or imperial, reaches so deep that every unity wants to be certain that it will be spared, even if the others are swallowed up by the maelstrom. The next years will show how dangerous this multi-egoistic situation is. If it belongs to the lessons of the twentieth century that universalism from above fails, the stigma of the twenty-first century could become the failure to cultivate a sense for common situations from below.
These changes ruin the moral, rhetorical, and doctrinal basis of the tra- ditional left. Previously successful language games have become implausible as what could be commonly taken for granted has changed. The prudish gynecological images with which Marxism got intoxicated have totally lost their footing in reality. Who could seriously repeat the phrase that the means for the realization of the classless "society" would grow "from the bottom" of the bourgeois "society"--in order to one day break free, and why not with the help of a bloody C-section by the name of "revolution"? It would now be just as ridiculous to continue using the outdated metaphor of a "primal ground," as if truth and the future could hide down there, ready for the big leap to the top. The conception of a hidden "society" beneath "society," of a secret world of cellars and tunnels where the subversion of the bourgeois edifices was planned for the future, is a totally empty con- ception. Only abstruse "sleepers" wait under the cover of normality for the day of being activated. The deep bunkers built today--for example, for the secret nuclear-weapons programs of expansive middle-tier powers--could be all kinds of things, but not incubation cells for happy futures.
Today the decline of a mythology of cellars and the underground extends so far that even steadfast partisans of the communist idea such as Antonio Negri have had to give up the old totem of the left: the groundhog. In a universe made up of surfaces, Negri claims, this being, which digs in hidden
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places, has lost its political significance. It is to be replaced by the snake, a creature with a rich gnostic past life that adapts perfectly well in the hori- zontal dimension to the flat, transparent shape and color changing world. 5
Let us return to the irony of the situation: after 1991 there was nothing left to understand of what had already been hidden for alert observers of the Soviet experiment after 1918 and Lenin's decrees concerning the red terror, for the sympathizers with the left opposition after 1921, for those stuck with Utopian defiance after 1956, and for the special-needs students of history after 1968.
The art of reading for "deconstruction," the representative of radical cri- tique, could only remain on the stage by clearly distinguishing itself from the myths of the underground. It is not concerned with digging down into the impossible depth of texts and institutions in order to attach dynamite to the "foundations. " It carefully points to the instability and ambiguities of seemingly solid constructions; it reveals the indeterminacy of allegedly clear binary oppositions; it makes manifest the hidden self-contradictions of coherent discourses. As a new version of the dream analysis of texts of any kind, in particular those of the old European metaphysics, it is, although its defenders often claim the opposite, an upgraded version of hermeneutics, which dedicates itself with a critical apparatus and heightened pathos to the task of provisionally letting everything be what it is. 6 Starting with this result, it is also possible to understand the complicity between deconstruc- tion and American mass culture: the latter is also committed to the mission of not touching "what exists. " Its means is the incessant evocation of the dream of a worse world next to which the existing world looks like a real- ized Utopia, worthy of being defended by all means.
It would be possible to gather many observations following a similar tendency in order to always repeat the same fact: after the resignation of the Eastern opponents from the world civil war in between 1917 and 1945, and since the end of the Cold War between the two primary nuclear pow- ers, the ideological pendulum, which used to swing to the extremes, has almost reached a standstill. Where everything is pulled to the center, grav- ity wins. Graffiti artists from Berlin understood: Being puts consciousness out of tune (Das Sein verstimmt das Bewufitsein). "Being" now refers to the gravitational forces of the unified center. Only what possesses the power to draw down is real. What could be more obvious in this situation than that the new unhappy consciousness diverts itself from Being just like in the old days? Precisely this is the signature of an age that wants to be everything but
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critical. The intelligentsia has, for the most part, turned away from criti- cism to opt once again for the primacy of religion. Desecularization gains ground every day. The need for the life-serving illusion has wrestled down "truth"--what this transition means for the process of civilization in the long run cannot be predicted today. Criticism was, it is important to real- ize, the consequence of the ontological assumption that fictions can fail because of facts. Now it is the facts that fail because of fictions--because in the future, facts themselves are supposed to be only successful fictions.
Future historians will confirm that the last third of the twentieth cen- tury was dominated by the motif of a return to the center--a center that could never fully decide on its motivations and philosophical implications.
These historians will identify the unwillingness of the intellectual to identify positive values in the center or middle positions as one of the symptoms of the crises of that epoch--the ongoing romanticism of radicals blocked the learning processes that could have prepared for the problems of the twenty-first century. They will have to reconstruct how the decay of West- ern democracies came about after they more and more committed them- selves to a neo-authoritarian, partially even neo-belligerent turn after 1990, and even more strongly after 2001.
Returning to today's perspectives, the horizon seems still relatively open, although nobody would believe that it provides for positive medium-term outlooks. What characterizes the situation is not the real decrease of avail- able quantities of rage among the excluded, ambitious, unsuccessful, and vengeful. Their quantity necessarily has to be higher under free circum- stances than in the past authoritarian systems of the East in which a climate of discouragement characterized the atmosphere. The mark of the situation is rather the loss of the function of symbolic institutions responsible for the political accumulation and transformation of dissident energies during two centuries of conflict. This raises the question of how our time will interpret the formula ira quaerens intellectum--indeed, whether is it at all possible today to revitalize the liaison between indignation and adaptability that constituted (or at least co-constituted) politics for two hundred years?
THE EROTICIZATION OF ALBANIA;
OR, THE ADVENTURES OF THE POSTCOMMUNIST SOUL
IT SEEMS AS IF IT IS NOT ONLY RAGE, DISSATISFACTION, AND GENERAL being-against-it that cannot be addressed anymore. Psychic economies
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have for some time found themselves altogether condemned to privatize their illusions. 7 The age of the serial reproduction of self-deception has also begun. Consequently, it could have been predicted that those liberated from communism during a critical period show a significantly higher susceptibil- ity for designer illusions.
Seen from a functional perspective, the postcommunist situation implies, as I have already stated, a return of the command economy to the property economy, that is, the replacement of the medium of language with that of money. 8 In psychopolitical terms the conversion corresponds to the tran- sition from a dynamic system of rage and pride to a dynamic system of greed--or, in terms of this psychopolitical analysis: a turn away from the primacy of thymotics for an eroticization without limitations.
The essence of eroticism cannot be understood from the perspective of the special case of the sexual libido and its aesthetic triggers, as recent social psychology assumes. Rather, eroticism is based on the stimulation of the idea of lack and all types of feelings of insufficiency. It articulates itself in corresponding actions of wanting to have and wanting to achieve: no phenomenon of recent psychohistory serves better as an illustration than the reception of the ur-capitalist idea of money that creates money in the countries of the former "Eastern bloc. " Marx, who often quotes Hegel inap- propriately, could have claimed that all comedies of history happen twice: the first time they are bloody, and the second time ridiculous. It would be interesting to read how the author of The Eighteenth Brumaire would have commented on the great investment of fraud with which the proletarian populations and peasants of Eastern Europe were deceived for seventy years about their assembled rage and their aspirations for respect and pride. One would like to know just as much how Marx would have glossed over the waves of corporate criminality which went over the former "Eastern bloc" countries after the breakdown of the communist regimes.
The wave began shortly after the memorable day of December 25, 1991, when the red flag over the Kremlin flew for the last time. The earli- est manifestations appeared in postcommunist Romania, which after the execution of the dictator Ceausescu in 1989--also on December 25--took its first steps on the unfamiliar stage of democracy and market economy. Starting in 1992, a hitherto unknown gold fever infected the country, caused by an invasion of allegedly new investment systems, the most successful of which was called Caritas, a name that inspires confidence. The agents of these systems--in Romania alone there are said to have been roughly 600
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such conspiracies against probability--promised to finally communicate to their customers a sense of the pleasures of capitalism. The investment games fascinated large parts of the population by promising fantastic profit margins--during the initial phase of the wave it was a common occurrence that the "invested" money increased its value by factor of eight within a few weeks and months. Within a year, Ion Stoica, a fifty-year-old business- man and the initiator of Caritas, became the hero of the nation. Factory worker, unemployed, or employee--those who could invest the remainder of their money could enjoy the benefits of enormous premiums. Many put a mortgage on or sold their houses to acquire the necessary liquidity. For two years, Stoica deluded exhilarated investors about the true nature of the enterprise by providing high yields on a regular basis. The "earnings" were, of course, not returns from regular corporations but rather, as is typical for pyramid schemes, came form shifting the assets of later investors to the accounts of those who had entered the scheme at an earlier point. Up to 20 percent of the Romanian population are said to have bought into this popu- lar and widespread investment game. In the spring of 1994, the yields slowed down and, shortly afterward, the system collapsed. Countless people faced immense debt. It took a concerted effort on the part of the government to prevent a national uprising. For those who were deceived, it could have only been a cold comfort that Stoica was sentenced to six years in prison.
In spite of this deterring episode, the spirit of the blessed Charles A. Ponzi (1882-1949) was soon to go around countless other postcommunist countries. In 1919, in Boston, Ponzi, an Italian adventurer who came to the United States in 1903, launched the first investment scheme. He went on to become a multimillionaire in less than a year, though afterward he spent most of his time in various prisons and died in Rio de Janeiro after a long, poverty-stricken odyssey. During his better days he was celebrated by his enthusiastic supporters as the first get-rich-quick financier of the twenti- eth century. His system, which was based on the trade of postal reply cou- pons (which pretended to use differences in value between American and Italian stamps), was seen by its sympathizers as the most elegant money- creation machine of all time. Since then, there have been countless attempts all over the world to make a quick fortune with the help of the so-called Ponzi scheme. In the footsteps of Ponzi, the Russian Sergey Mavrodi became the sixth-richest man in Russia with his pyramid scheme MMM, which collapsed in 1994 after at least 5 million of his compatriots invested enormous sums of money in it. Being the sixth-richest person in Russia
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meant something in the empire of new billionaires. In order to evade legal prosecution, Mavrodi let himself be voted into the Duma by his followers, who worshiped him like a savior. After his immunity as a congressman was abolished, he disappeared somewhere abroad, without a doubt because he was convinced that the days of such a talented man would be too valuable to be spent in the prisons of the new Russia.
During the same year, the spark went over to Poland, the Czech Repub- lic, Bulgaria, and Serbia. From Poland it is said to have passed to Albania. It is part of the instructive moments of de-Sovietization that it was precisely the poorest country of Europe that became the most extensive laboratory for postmodern rip-off capitalism. A young businessman from Hamburg with a questionable reputation was partially responsible for the destruc- tion of the illusion in Eastern Europe. His system, which was propagated with sectarian psycho-techniques, went by the name of Jump before being renamed Titan because of an acute danger of being exposed. This Ponzi scheme was once again refurbished and, thanks to the Polish manager of Titan, brought to Albania. However, it is said that it was practiced there as only one among at least a dozen Ponzi schemes. There the managers of the intensely propagated game trend were successful in plunging most of the country into greed psychosis from 1994 to 1996. The idea that money would multiply itself if merely lent to an "investment society" permeated the entire population, which had for decades lived under the dictator Enver Hoxha in severe poverty and confinement from information. One of the indirect consequences was the ignorance of the public with regard to the Romanian affair, which had been carried out only recently. Until the end of 1996 more than half of the 3. 3 million Albanians had made "investments" in the pyramid schemes, which were carried out all over the country--many of them pledged their houses and farms to real banks. Here as well profits of up to 100 percent were promised and, for some time at least, also paid. During the final nervous phase of the game, 40 to 50 percent per month was paid out--enough of an incentive to downplay the signs of a reasonable hesitation. The Albanian pyramids also became so attractive because they were advertised on national TV--a fact that was misinterpreted by count- less investors as a proof of seriousness.
When the schemes collapsed in January 1997, a frustrated panic broke out. Upset investors accused the state and the government of failing to undertake the necessary measures to protect the investors--which was cor- rect, because those with positions of responsibility had ignored warnings
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from the World Bank. Groups of those negatively affected spontaneously set police stations on fire, while gangs of angry workers and employees stormed the weapons caches of the police and the army and took approximately 600,000 small arms. In subsequent years, the rate of murder and homicide skyrocketed in Albania, five times as high as before--the majority of the weapons could not be recuperated. It seemed as if state structures deterio- rated overnight: several provincial cities fell into the hands of insurgents, who were recruited primarily from members of the oppositional socialist party. The capital, Tirana, became an arena of civil-war scenes. For a couple of weeks there was no regulatory authority in sight, probably because a large portion of the civil servants had joined the protests. Many policemen who had deserted could only be convinced to return by being promised a tri- pling of their salaries. The Albanian president, Sali Berisha, whose Demo- cratic Party was obviously affiliated with the managers of the pyramids, felt impelled to resign from office.
At the height of the upheaval, the masses, who were driven by a mix- ture of defiance and vengeance, stormed schools and universities as well as countless factories and public offices. They took everything they could and destroyed the remainder in blind anger. Western observers who visited Albania shortly afterward reported that they had never seen such a degree of destruction, even in countries devastated by war. Public buildings were looted to the last doorknobs; families sat in cold apartments beneath a rug and stared for the whole day at images from Italian TV commercials. Many Albanians attempted to leave the country out of fear in overloaded ships and scruffy fishing cutters and even on rafts. Within a few days the har- bors of Brindisi and other Italian Adriatic cities were flooded with refugees. European foreign ministers were, as usual, incapable of coming up with a realistic agreement on the quotas for the admission of this "invasion of the despairing" to the countries of the European Union. The fact that, within a relatively short amount of time, the situation normalized was mainly attrib- utable to the newly formed government's admission that the government had been partially responsible for the debacle. Moreover, the Albanian central bank could rescue significant sums for the investors by freezing the pyramid accounts; another portion of the losses was supposed to be made up by the national budget.
The processes of these schemes and their effects are symptomatically important because a message about capitalism as such is concealed in the infectious energy with which the wave spread through poor countries such
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as Romania and Albania? at least a message about the exterior view of the system as it presents itself in the daydreams of people excluded from free markets and the private-property economy. Apart from revealing aspects of human nature, the Romanian and Albanian tragicomedies presented the mythic essence ofthe capitalist conception ofwealth: the idea that the money used as capital possesses the property of a self-multiplying fiuidum--or that money as capital is a powerful amulet that promises the constant arrival of happiness assets to its wearers.
This phantasm does not lack support, even though the serious interpret- ers of the market economy, or rather the private-property economy, have for a long time warned about short circuits resulting from a purely specula- tive usage of money and referred to detached casino capitalism as a danger for the global economy in general. Indeed, the party that creates real value within the capitalist complex does not tire of emphasizing that the process of creating prosperity rests initially and, for the most part, exclusively on the artfully directed synergy of private property, cash generation, labor, organi- zation, and innovation, while all other transactions, in particular the purely monetized economy, will never be more'than smoke rings in virtual space. The party of easy gains, on the other hand, continues to hold onto the belief that enrichment is nothing other than the natural reward for engaging in speculative risk. For them, it is not labor and effort that result in wealth, although the necessity of labor and effort is not completely denied. Accord- ing to them, the true significance of wealth consists in demonstrating the sovereignty of Fortuna, who chooses those she favors and leaves the others with nothing. In a less mythological way of speaking, this means that who wins is right and who loses should not complain.
The mistake of the Albanians was thus not a complete misunderstand- ing of the facts of speculative capitalism. Rather, the Albanians succumbed to a late-socialist dream image that suggested to them that under the capi- talist system there could be a first prize for everyone. In their willingness to distance themselves from the phantom of socialist pride and, like the other members of the free world, prioritize desire, they committed them- selves to the new circumstances without ulterior motives. Because of their inability and unwillingness to come up with a realistic conception of where the desired gains were supposed to come from, they remained prisoners of their own past. It is beyond doubt that the feeling of being cut off from wealth and its distribution for too long played a role in the storm after the Ponzi schemes. After half a century in a dictatorship that spoon-fed them
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grandiose phrases, the people finally wanted to take part in the satisfying injustices of the affluent world--even if someone else would have to pay the bill for the fantastic increase of their input. Just like everyone who followed the call of the popular Eros, the awakened Albanians were convinced that this time it was their turn to bring home the beautiful bride.
REAL CAPITALISM:
COLLAPSE DEFERRAL IN DYNAMIC SYSTEMS OF GREED
NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN MORE MISPLACED IN LIGHT OF THE Albanian mishap than the sarcasm of some Western observers toward "Shqiptar capitalism. " In reality, only a few party supporters of regular cap- italism are likely to be able to define the difference between the economic system they favor and a simple pyramid scheme. It cannot be denied that the phenomenon of a gain that one did not earn--or, more generally, of income without effort--is highly valued by long-time players of the capi- talist system. For the imaginary of modern national economies, the magic and irrational aspects of an uneven distribution of wealth have a signifi- cance that would have to be called archetypical, if the term did not have misleading depth-psychological connotations. The modern property econ- omy attracted a shining aura of happiness fantasies from the beginning, so that the term "Fortuna capitalism" would have been more appropriate. Non-European users grasped this imaginary dimension of the new eco- nomic processes within a short time. If the modern property and monetary economy--which is often called, with a slip of the tongue, capitalism-- exerts, beyond cultural boundaries, a fascination that even overshadows its practical advantages, then the imaginary dimension derives without ques- tion from this source. Furthermore, the belief in the returning Fortuna, who promotes her beneficiaries via banks and stock exchanges, needs to be understood as a post-Christian reinterpretation of Protestant fantasies of being chosen--with the danger of thus disclosing the merciless essence of Calvinism, whose true face is expressed in the mystic obscenity of the feel- ing of closeness to God when time has come to an end.
The preconditions for the objective commensurability of regular capital- ism with a Ponzi scheme can be located in the undeniable fact that both models are credit-based systems of growth that are, for good or evil, depen- dent on extended reproduction. Both share a tendency to collapse, the regu- lation of which becomes constitutive for the system dynamics as a whole.
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In the case of a pure Ponzi scheme, the collapse needs to occur relatively suddenly (or it needs to be brought about consciously) because the num- ber of momentarily recruitable payers necessarily becomes zero after only a few rounds--which is why, even with good camouflage, it is hardly possible to extend a game longer than a few years. Ponzi himself could extend his games for about nine months, his Eastern European successors for two years at most. Regular capitalism, which is based on industry and banks, distin- guishes itself, on the other hand, in that its players respond to fluctuations of interest rates with economic growth, which is primarily caused by the synergy of market expansion, product innovation, and technical rational- ization. Its modus of "fleeing ahead" is thus elastic, long-term, and familiar with crises. Its mode of operation includes creative and civilized behaviors. At times, it does not even shy away from revolutionary culture advances. To the amazement of its agents, the capital process has so far showed that it is capable of controlling tendencies that signal collapse even over larger volatility and stagnation phases. Today it can look back on a more or less coherent developmental process of approximately ten human generations, if one follows Immanuel Wallerstein in assuming that the global capitalist system had already emerged around 1500.
With regard to the achievement of the essentially ahistorical or purely futuristic capitalist system, it needs to be stated that it did bring about a his- torically of a special kind. Its general tendency was made mystical with the singular concept of "progress. " This does not really change the ironic rela- tionship between capitalism and the past. The entrepreneurially run world needs the past basically only to leave it behind. 9
Especially after the vanishing of the so-called socialist alternative, capi- talism confronts today's players and critics with a high standard of seri- ousness. This can be summarized by the thesis that capitalism provides a growth model for, in principle, an inexhaustible future power. In its name, it is expected that its actors participate in a life of permanent technical change, penetrated in all its domains by commodification and money trans- fer. The truth is that the future of the game does not look as promising as its boosters relentlessly claim. It suffices to read the popular term "sustain- ability" as a neurotic symptom of the self-doubt of the status quo. As the word demonstrates, the more thoughtful among today's economic experts already have a clear idea of what is incompatible within the system.
In fact, even non-Ponzi schemes (i. e. , the regular national economy in particular and the global economy in general) are unbalanced systems that
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continuously have to cope with a significant degree of internal threat. Con- solidated capitalism can only compensate for its inherent tendency toward collapse (the first manifestation of which was the overproduction crisis that Marx describes) by taking the bull by the horns. What for today's customer is a proof of genuine business principles is rooted in the refinement of steer- ing instruments whose key mechanism needs to be identified as an "art of central banking. "10 This amounts to a process of making the unserious serious--expressed differently, a technology of decelerating breakdown. By raising and lowering the primary interest rates, a central bank pursues the task of minimizing the endemic risks of a crash by adjusting to an acceptable level the stress incurred by the interest rate. By making regulatory decisions, it orients itself according to the actual and expected results of economic achievements, that is, according to the sum total of the effects of market expansion, product innovation, and increased productivity. In this context, the notorious phrase "jumpstart the economy" means nothing other than decreasing the risk of insolvency for the units that are in debt. In the case of professional steering mechanisms, the pressure to settle debt on all levels of economic activity does not need to spell doom for the entire system, even though many businesses and private households might crash. In the big pic- ture, liability stress advances the economic process to new rejuvenations and increases.
The compulsion to expand and innovate, which is characteristic of the capitalist method of production, thus traces itself back to the artfully con- fined but never fully eliminated Ponzi factor. 11 The capitalist-economic complex constitutes a global network of operations to relocate mountains of debt. But even the best-compensated Ponzi scheme cannot achieve more in the long run than postponing the moment of its demystification--at the very least until the moment in which the path of expansion is blocked because all new players who can be recruited have already entered the game. This might still be a distant possibility for our contemporary world, so that a final rush is for the moment not justified. The indeterminacy of the moment of disappointment can still be interpreted by the participants of the game, with a certain degree of justification, as the essential openness of the future. Nevertheless, those buying into the game should know the opinion of a minority of experts who claim that the openness effect--the unlimited ability to perpetuate the game under its present conditions--can hardly be sustained for more than a few decades. Other interpreters believe that the game will continue for a longer period of time, especially those who
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are optimistic enough to predict the exhaustion of fossil energies only for the twenty-second century.
During the almost one hundred years since Charles A. Ponzi's Boston coup of 1919, his psychological assumptions have not in any way been falsi- fied. It can be assumed that in general they characterize the psychomotor skills of the capitalist mode of production with a high degree of accuracy. In fact, a certain level of decision making based on the greed dynamic remains indispensible for the morally inconspicuous and economically solid mani- festations of the system. These basic decisions are motivated by strong ten- dencies of expansion that occur in the psycho-semantic economies of the players in increasingly more intensive ways--usually via a detour through cultural media, such as novels, theater, films, and TV. Mass media syner- gistically create a climate of increasing liberalization, and this wins over the long course against conservative reactions.
Because the quantitative expansion of monetary processes cannot be distinguished from qualitative changes in forms of life, ensembles of capi- talist players have to adapt to a permanently revisionist climate. What has been referred to as the Zeitgeist since 1800 cannot be imagined without the money spirit. However much one attempts to point out the polarity of money and spirit in the conservative milieu, in the big picture those poles are converging. The expectation of adaptation is manifested in the demand for "mobility" and "lifelong learning" with the aim of making professional biographies flexible and, at the same time, allowing for the highest possible degree of consumerism during old age--this is the point of the most recent introduction of propaganda for a California-style retirement capitalism in Germany. As much as serious values seem to be required in this constant movement, the global tendency of the game requires a continually increas- ing level of frivolity in player populations. Even under the most favorable of circumstances--when the welfare-state satisfaction of a population has been largely successful and the containment and stimulation of a capital econ- omy has been running smoothly in a country for a long enough period of time--the system requires the integration of a growing portion of the pop- ulation into more risky greed activities and offensive acts of carelessness-- a circumstance only remotely captured by the expression "consumer soci- ety. " "Consumption" here refers to the willingness of clients to participate in credit-based pleasure-acceleration games--with the danger of spending a large portion of one's lifetime stuck with repayment. The secret of the consumerist lifestyle is concealed in the evocation in its participants of a
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neo-aristocratic feeling of the complete appropriateness of luxury and extravagance. Under capitalism, an aristocrat is someone who does not need to reflect in order to know that he or she deserves only the best.
Greed is the affect that refers to the ontological assumption that it is pos- sible to sustain a permanent asymmetry between giving and taking. If taking gets the upper hand in a capitalist player for a long enough period of time, one usually calls it success. The common understanding of success sees it as a phenomenon of overcompensation--often accompanied by a tendency to repeat the unlikely. Stabilized overcompensation creates claims to elite sta- tus. Those who have been chronically overcompensated develop the talent of taking their premiums to be an appropriate toll for their effort--or, in the case of a lack of effort, for their mere eminent existence, or even for their physical appearance. Part of a fully developed greed system is typically also the elevation of being good-looking into a good reason for expecting over- compensation. It is characteristic of the unfolded greed culture that its agents assume that they will be compensated most for what they are responsible for least. It is not accidental that the "lookism," this religion of ingratitude, is on the rise globally. Youth culture has been announcing the good news for a long time that in order to be successful, it is enough to look like someone who is known through the mass media that sustain that very culture.
The capitalist form of eroticism unfolds bit by bit the paradox of an "over- compensation for everyone. " Through it the human right of greed without limits is proclaimed. Consequently, the market of appearance becomes the market of all markets--in it potential objects of desire are transformed into greed subjects by the drug of overcompensation. It is easily understandable why the last "class antagonism" under capitalism will be between those who are overcompensated and those who make a normal amount of money or very little. The reason this divide is nearly synonymous with the antagonism between the beautiful people and those who cannot earn with their appear- ance is somewhat more sophisticated. A definition of the word "people" in advanced capitalism would involve the mass of those excluded from overcompensation. These masses are certain not to get anything for their mere appearance.
THROUGH THEIR BEHAVIOR, THE ELITES OF GREED ADMIT THE potential for permanent lotteries--or at least for sufficiently long phases of success to provide the lucky ones with surpluses for the rest of their lives.
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Generally, acute greed is accompanied by the feeling that one deserves more luck than one has so far received--one of the reasons it is not possible to determine internal limits for activities that are driven by greed. Few aspirants of Fortuna were willing during the capitalist centuries to state with Andrew Carnegie, "I have had far beyond my just share of life's blessings. "12
With regard to the unlucky Albanians and their initiation into the spirit of speculative capitalism, it needs to be noted that overall they could be lucky that things did not turn out worse. Apart from the approximately 2,000 bankruptcies of smaller companies, their nationwide losses turned out to be far less dramatic after the crisis than one would have feared. Those who escaped learned that the restructuring toward private property of a command economy could not be achieved through mere speculation. They learned what is a known fact for veterans of capitalism: everyday creation of value possesses a special kind of inertia that one cannot rush unpunished. If one wants to create wealth, one usually has to work for a while and abstain. However much the dream of making a fast buck is indispensable for the moving dynamic of capitalism, it presupposes a regular entrepreneurial cul- ture and a disciplined work world, which combine to take on a road that is only a little bit steep.
As already stated, regular capitalism, which knows how to content itself with profit rates earned in the real economy, is marked by the tension between the burden of interest and an increase in productivity--including all the psychopolitical factors without which the transformation of a given population into consumers capable of increasing demand does not work. While the pyramid crises in Eastern and Southern Europe could be traced back to an acute greed psychosis--and therefore to a sudden and rough eroticization of affective economies--it was necessary to instill deeper, more discreet, and chronically effective forms of eroticizing "society" dur- ing the subsequent consolidation phase.
By now we are in a position to understand why the psychodynamic mod- ernization of "societies" moved by money bears the face of eroticism: noth- ing less is on the agenda of economic modernity than using contemporary psychopolitics of desire imitation and calculating greed to replace the (only seemingly archaic) thymotic control of affect with (only seemingly irratio- nal) aspects that are incompatible with the market. This transformation cannot be achieved without a far-reaching depolarization of populations-- and also without the progressive loss of the meaning of language in favor of the image and the number. In particular, classic leftist parties, insofar
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as they are active as rage and dissidence banks, have to appear in this new climate as dysfunctional relics. They are condemned to struggle with ugly speeches against images of beautiful people and tables of solid numbers-- an impossible task. Modernized parties of social democrats a la New Labor, on the other hand, move within the element of capitalist eroticism as sound as a bell--they ceased being pride and rage parties and acknowledged the primacy of appetites. Through the introduction of a Western culture of the standardized image, a depository of illusions is provided to the postcom- munist nations that addresses simultaneously erotic longing and the neces- sity of waiting.
In the course of the transformation there is, from the standpoint of moral history, a singular stimulation of wish rivalries between the partici- pants of the generalized games of desire.