No More Learning

In modernity, admit- tedly, hubris has changed its approach: it no longer appears as self- elevation, but rather as the presumption of a lowness to which, on closer consideration, no one can lay claim.
Max Scheler arrived at the phrase 'height psychology' in the 1920s to express his dissatisfaction with the psychology of the unconscious propagated by Freud, Jung and others and, for a time, known as 'depth psychology'. In Scheler's view, it explained humans one-sidedly 'downwards', oriented towards the mental mechanism, whether drive-theoretically or neuro-theoretically underpinned. 23 He believed that the psychologies of modernity excessively biologized humans, underestimating or entirely neglecting their involvement in a register of metabiological realities, the sphere of intellectual and spiritual 'values'. The word Geist - denoting both the spirit and the mind - is taken by Scheler as indicating the partial release of humans from the absolutism
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HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY
once
! ion', after simply meant an access to objects while retaining
one's organic shackles. Humans project into this 'other world', the spiritual or metabiological (some authors caU it 'bionegative') zone of values, by attempting to reach the more-than-natural by natural means. Under Nietzsche's influence, Scheler had understood that the body must be taken along in the transition to the higher register; this distinguishes him favourably from spiritualists and dualists.
He also knew this: the task faced by modern height psychology is the opposite of that dictated to its Old European precursors. While the ancients had to bring 'extravagant' back to the meson, the healthy middle, the moderns have to remind their contemporaries of the region of height as such, assuming these are humans of the type who feel most comfortable at the average level and below. Left to their own devices, they chronically excuse themselves downwards, and prefer to follow models which prove that downhill paths are more likely to be successful than steep climbs. The modern human being can therefore only be 'sub'verted from a height, from the overground. The hidden overground, however, lies - and this is new - more in artistedom than in 'religion', in that 'religions', as hinted above, can be co-opted much more easily for artistic purposes (with their branches of asceticism, ritualism, ceremonialism) than vice versa. Artistedom is subversion from above, it superverts the 'existing'. The subversive, or rather superversive, principle lies not in the 'height' of haughtiness, the hyper of hybris or the super of superbia; it is con- cealed in the 'aero' of acrobatics.
The word 'acrobatics' refers to the Greek term for walking on tiptoe (from akros, 'high, uppermost' and bainein, 'to go, walk'). It names the simplest form of natural anti-naturalness. Before the nineteenth century, the term was used almost exclusively for tightrope acrobatics and later expanded to include most other forms of bodily wizardry, such as advanced gymnastics and the corresponding circus routines. The athletisms and extreme sports, on the other hand, for reasons that remain to be established, sought to avoid any association with acro- batics, as obvious as their kinship might seem - to say nothing of their joint campaign to make the mountains of improbability higher.
Jacob's Dream, Or, The Hierarchy
The central document of the subversion, or rather supraversion, of humanity through artistry far predates Sophocles' references to the
125
THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
the vision of Jacob as
book of Genesis, here in chapter 28:
lOJacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. llWhen he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13There above it stood the Lord, and he said: 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. '24
The Old European tradition does not know any image for the inter- pretation of human ties to vertical forces that has a comparably pow- erful effect. Here too we find over-humans, though not of the species coming from humans, but rather those who are created thus by God. The work carried out here by angels is that of acrobats from the start: they climb up and down a ladder - in some translations a staircase - between heaven and earth. This is meant to demonstrate a fact that should be pointed out very plainly: the sphere in which humans lead their lives forms the midpoint between worlds above and below it. Every human operation, even the most skilled and meaningful, whether profane or sacred, is overarched by a higher world of tran- scendental actors whose agents are the angels. Whatever humans are capable of doing can be done better at the over-human level. Thus, since time immemorial, angels have been making their own contribu- tion to an artistic superversion of the human.
There is good reason to claim that the history of Old Europe is, in many respects, the history of translations of Jacob's Ladder from the dream sphere into daily culture. It constitutes the shared history of hierarchy and acrobatics - in so far as one transfers the initial akro bainein, the 'walking high up on tiptoe', onto walking and stand- ing on the steps of a ladder between the earth and the Highest, and onto the many ranks of nobility between the king and the people. Incidentally, ladder acrobatics in the circus constitutes a transitional form to aerial acrobatics - as with angels, whom one imagines not only as rung-climbers, but also as a flying company. 25 It makes good sense, therefore, when Jacob builds the first house of God, Bethel, in the very place where the angels' ladder touched the earth. For the first brick, he takes the stone that he used as a pillow on the critical night. When an old nomadic people territorializes itself, the best place to do so is one from which the route continues vertically.
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HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY
as the one in ten from the
ping seraphim to the executive angels of the basic courier service, the members of the actually existing church should also stand above one another, according to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - and like- wise the functionaries of actual administrations and the all-too-actual corporations of bureaucrats; whether the Old European nine-level secondary school [Gymnasium] also contains a distant ptojection of the Neoplatonic-Christian choir levels is an open question. 26 What
Jacob, the patriarch of the hierarchy thinkers, dreams up is an artistic pyramid of subtle bodies. Unlike in the circus, its sight results not in storms of applause as soon as it persists for a minute; it is meant to last for millennia - at least, that is how Pseudo-Dionysius translated the ladder vision into his system. That the Areopagite thus simul- taneously created a symbol of the acrobatization of both heavenly and ecclesiastical hierarchies, however, can only be noted from the current pole of history, once the dissolution of traditional hierarchical systems provokes a new reflection on the reasons, modes of operation and metamorphoses of verticality.
It testifies to the power of the ladder tradition that even Nietzsche was still under its influence when he lets Zarathustra say to his friend that he wants to show him 'all the stairways to the Obermensch',27 What is notable here is the paradoxical construction whereby the stairway is to continue existing, even if there is no longer anything above it to lean against. The old world's most powerful symbol of verticality mysteriously survives the atheistic crisis. It continues to indicate a tension coming from the heights, even though it is no longer consolidated by any transcendental opposing camp. The prob- lematic motif of the transcendence device that cannot be fastened at the opposite pole also returns in Zarathustra's declaration that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and Obermensch' - whether ladder or rope, one can no longer tell with this imagery where the upward tension is supposed to come from. This difficulty remains irresolvable at the level of traditional imaginations; indeed, it would have ruined the entire structure, had Nietzsche not long since adapted implicitly to the completely different kind of evolutionary enhancement of improbability. With its help, the transformation of angels into artistes succeeds almost unnoticed. In the same way the former served as God's messengers, the latter act as messengers of art. They convey the good and alarming news that people are piling up ranges of ever higher and more sacred mountains.
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THE OF THE
Over-Words
Finally, it should noted that Nietzsche, though the most radical analyst of the newly broached problematics of verticality, was not alone in his time. One could say that the most contemporary thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were those who added at least one term to modernity's vocabulary of verticality: Marx speaks of superstructure and overproduction, his brother-in-law Lafargue of overconsumption, Darwin of survival, Nietzsche of the Obermensch,28 Freud of the superego, Adler of overcompensation, and Aurobindo of the supermind and the supramenta1. 29 We owe the word 'overkill' to an astute nuclear strategist, 'hypertonia' to an obscure doctor, 'over- population' to an obscure demographer, 'supermarket' to an obscure wholesaler, and 'superstar' to an obscure journalist. One must go as far back as the fifth century to find an analogous wave of new verti- cality words; they were introduced almost exclusively by the master thinker of hierarchism, the aforementioned Pseudo-Dionysius, who stirred up the vocabulary of Christian-Platonic theologians for the next thousand years with his numerous neologisms using the prefix 'hyper-'. 30
If there is a word missing from the dictionary of the twentieth century, even though the matter itself was ubiquitous, it is the word Obermorder [super-murderer) - it would apply to the group of dic- tators who capitalized on the vertically blind and anti-hierarchical affects of mass culture to make great politics, usually under socialist pretences. As far as Nietzsche's ominous Obermensch is concerned, I cannot refrain from ending my reflections on this concept with an ironic note. One thing is clear: in the dating of the era of the Obermensch, its inventor fell prey to the greatest of all possible optical illusions - which is astoundin! ? , for nothing seems more obvious than the fact that the age of the Ubermensch lies not in the future, but in the past. It is identical to the epoch in which humans sought to elevate themselves above their physical and mental status by the most extreme methods for the sake of a transcendent cause. Christianity undeniably has a share of the copyright on the word Obermensch, incurring royalties even when it is used for anti-Christian purposes. 31
No Slave Revolt in Morality: Christian Athletism
I part ways most importantly with Nietzsche in his interpretation of the difference between master morality [Herrenmoral] and slave
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HEIGHT
event as the
Nietzsche ever occurred. I tend more towards view that this sup- posed revaluation of all values, this most far-reaching distortion of all that was naturally right in the history of the spirit, was a fiction in which the author elevated a number of very significant and correct observations to an untenable construct. His motive lies in the fact that Nietzsche, though not intending to found his own religion, did intend to de-found traditional Christianity with holy fury.
It is precisely the ascetological perspective reopened by Nietzsche that highlights the continuity in the transition from 'heathen' antiq- uity to the Christian world, especially in the area most relevant here: the transference of athletic and philosophical asceticism to the monastic and ecclesiastical modus vivendi. Had this not been the case, the early monks of Egypt and Syria would not - citing Pauline images of the apostles' agon - have called themselves the 'athletes of Christ'. And were monastic asceticism not an internalization of the regimen of physical warriors as well as an adoption of philosophical doctrines of the art of living from a Christian perspective, monastic culture - especially in its West Roman and Northwest European manifestations - could not possibly have led to the unfolding of powers on all cultural fronts - charitable, architectural, administra- tive, economic, intellectual and missionary powers - that took place between the fifth and eighteenth centuries. What actually happened, then, was a displacement of athletism from the arenas to the mon- asteries; or, more generally speaking, a transference of proficiency from declining antiquity to the burgeoning Middle Ages - to mention only the periods, and not name each of the old and new carriers of competence, the aretological collectives of that time and later times. 32
Hugo Ball put his finger on the essence of these shifts when he emphasized, in his book Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), that the intellectual heroism of the monks constituted a superior counter- project to the 'nature heroism' of warriors. 33 It is obvious that this great transfer led to distortions under the influence of ressentiment. But even as tendentious a statement as 'But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first' (Matthew 19:30), which Nietzsche mercilessly exposed, could also be read from the perspec- tive of the great shift of arete. It could be saying that the hierarchy resulting from the conditions of power and ownership should not remain the only permissible view - in fact, not even the central one - of intellectual rankings.
in
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
Aristocracy or Meritocracy
I repeat: a slave revolt of morality did not, in my view, take place at any time in the Old Europe. In reality, a revaluation of values occurred in the separation of power and virtue (arete, virtu) that would have been inconceivable for the ancient Greeks - a separa- tion whose effects continued into the woolly endgames of European aristocracy in the nineteenth century. The Old European social order committed its true sin against the spirit of positive asceticism not through its Christianization, but rather through the Faustian pact with a class system that saw a nobility without virtu reaching the top in many places. This enabled the consolidation of a non-meritocratic exploitative aristocracy whose only achievement lay in the identical transference of its inflated self-image to equally useless descend- ants, often over several centuries. One gains a clearer picture of this chronic European disgrace, the hereditary nobility, by comparing conditions in the ancient scholarly culture of China, which pushed back the hereditary nobility with an educated nobility for over two thousand years. The indicated revaluation of values did not bring to power the ressentiments of sick little people, as Nietzsche sug- gests; rather, the mixture of laziness, ignorance and cruelty among the heirs to local power was expanded into a psychopolitical factor of the highest order; the court of Versailles was only the peak of an archipelago of noble inutility that spread over Europe. It was only the neo-meritocratic renaissance between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, borne by the middle class and the virtuosos, that gradually put an end to the grotesque of hereditary aristocracy in Europe - leaving aside the still-virulent phantoms in the yellow press.
Only since then have we been able to say once more that politics as a European form of life means the struggle and the concern for the framework of institutions in which the most important of all emancipations can take place - the emancipation of the differences that arise from achievements and are controlled from the differences created and passed on through subjugation, power and privilege. Needless to say, the aforementioned group of Obermorder were not politicians, but rather exponents of an oriental power concept that does not acknowledge any discipline except the art of domination. They had no interest in the European definition of the political, for all they got to see of the range of differences was the portion that could be explained by theories of class and race. Such theories have always been blind as soon as the birth of difference from levels of proficiency came into focus.
130
ICULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
Twilight of the Life Formsl Disciplinics
Non-Dominatory Gradations
After the first excursions into the preliminaries of an analysis of verti- cal tensions, it should be appreciable why any theory of culture must be viewed as half-blind if it does not pay attention to the tendencies in cultural life to form internal multi-storey structures - and not only ones dependent on political hierarchies. This thesis is not intended to rekindle the tiresome debate on so-called 'high culture', which, for various reasons, has become conspicuously quiet in recent decades. My concern is rather to develop a more ethically competent and empirically adequate alternative to the heavy-handed attribution of all hierarchy effects or gradation phenomena to the matrix of power and subjugation.
The necessity of such an undertaking has become apparent since modern 'society', after two hundred years of experimenting with egalitarian and neo-elitist motifs, entered a phase in which it is pos- sible to draw conclusions from these attempts as a whole and assess their results. A paradigmatic phenomenon for the new situation is the emergence of the sport system in the twentieth century - what I termed the 'athletic renaissance' above - which enables a wealth of conclu- sions about a non-dominatory dynamic of gradations. An equally significant stimulus came from the formation of a non-aristocratic economy of prominence, whose investigation is indispensable for an understanding of the driving forces behind the vertical differentiation of modern large-scale groups in the public sphere. The gradation phe- nomena within the worlds of science, administration, school, health and political parties, to name only these few areas, lie far outside what can be grasped with the crude claw arms of a theoretical set-up
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THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
a more
the step-forming forces as figures in the field of a political psychology
of thym6s (pride, ambition, will to self-assertion), in my book Rage and Time. 34 Neo-thymotic analysis, which incorporates Platonic, Hegelian and individual-psychological motifs, describes the social field as a system driven in equal measure by pride and greed. Pride (thym6s) and greed (eros) can form alliances despite their antitheti- cal natures, but the rewards of pride - prestige and self-respect - and greed - appropriation and enjoyment - belong to clearly separated areas.
In the following, I will show in broad terms how the shift from a theory of class society (with vertical differentiation through domi- nance, repression and privilege) to a theory of discipline society (with vertical differentiation through asceticism, virtuosity and achieve- ment) can take place. For the first round of this operation I shall take Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault as philosophical and idea-historical mentors - the former because his attentiveness to the integration of language into behavioural figures ('language games') provided modern sociology with an effective instrument for revealing manifest and latent ritual structures, and the latter because his inves- tigations into the interlocking structures of discourses and disciplines led him to a breakthrough in reaching an understanding of power beyond simple denunciation - and thus an exit from a long history of ideological misunderstandings that ultimately refer back to patho- genic legacies of the French Revolution. This double stimulus at once clarifies the direction in which the next steps have to be taken: beyond Wittgenstein, by moving on from the language game theory to a universal theory of practice and asceticism, and beyond Foucault, by developing his analysis of discursive forms further into a de-restricted disciplinics.
Wittgenstein's Monastic Rule
Our starting point is a brief, at first glance somewhat mysterious note that Wittgenstein entrusted to one of his notebooks in January 1949, two years before his death: 'Culture is a monastic rule. Or it at least presupposes a monastic rule. '35 The appearance of a term such as 'monastic rule' in the philosopher's vocabulary might initially take the reader aback. His way of life in Cambridge contained little that
132
IS A
monastic one's """Hr. ",. ,
a'-'HA""lHJl~ rituals. striking phrase appears somewhat
less astounding in the light of recent biographical studies, which show to what extent Wittgenstein's life was infused with religious motifs, and how profound his efforts were to achieve ethical perfection. 'Of course I want to be perfect! ' he supposedly said as a young man in reply to a critical question from a female friend. 36 In a New Year's letter to Paul Engelmann, his friend during his Vienna years, he wrote in 1921: 'I should have changed my life for the better and become a star. But I stayed put on the earth, and now 1 am slowly wasting away. '37 According to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein was toying with the idea of entering a monastery around 1919; he had completed the Tractatus a year earlier, and realized that he could scarcely expect much of an echo. In 1926 - after his humiliating failure as a primary school teacher in rural Austria - he did indeed work as a gardener at the monastery of the 'Barmherzige Bruder' [Compassionate Brothers] in Hutteldorf, near Vienna. Wittgenstein's most revealing statement on religious matters is contained in a note from 1948:
The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. 38
I shall now combine these isolated observations to form the thesis that Wittgenstein is a rare example of an inverse acrobat, one who found the easy more difficult than the impossible. Naturally his art was also located on a vertical axis; if one were to place him somewhere on Jacob's Ladder, however, this thinker would undoubtedly belong to the group of descending angels (we shall omit the fallen ones). When the thirty-two-year-old author writes in a letter to Engelmann that he should have become a star, one could perhaps read 'become' as 'remain'. Who would want to become a star without some prior con- viction that they had once been one? This strong observer comes from very far above - with time, he realizes that it is a mistake to remember overly lofty origins if one is fated to exist on the ground.
One statement in a letter to Engelmann from 1926 reveals what existence on the ground can mean: '1 am not happy, and not because my swinishness troubles me, but within my swinishness. '39 Wittgenstein's oft-cited 'mysticism' is the trace of a disconcertion upon arrival that never entirely ended - in the inelegant terminology of psychiatry one would presumably speak of a schizoid structure. Such an immigrant would not simply find one or two aspects of what is the case here astounding, but rather the totality of what he
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THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
for a being brought to earth - without an overly great loss of the lucidity he brought along with him. Grasping things as they are and performing the unavoidable acts of life as they happen to be dictated by. the local grammar, without getting even deeper into 'swinishness' - that may have been the goal of Wittgenstein's exercises. Hence the obstinately resigned note from 1930: '1 might say, if the place 1want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.
Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. '40 An entry from 1937 shows how strongly Wittgenstein wanted to persuade himself to adopt a floor-gymnastic interpretation of exist- ence: 'You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet. '41 On the other hand, the author can imagine what it would be like to be saved (from sin, from reality or from gravity): then you would no longer stand on the earth but hang from the sky - though an outside observer would not easily distinguish between the two, as hanging from the sky and standing on the earth look practically the same from the outside. 42 Wittgenstein remains convinced to the end that the goal is to become as happy after the descent into existence as one destined for despair can be: 'Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness. '43 Such premises no longer permit a philosophical project in the usual sense of the word, in so far as philosophers had, until then, always wanted to keep the ascending angels on the ladder company. For Wittgenstein, this was obvious; it would have been helpful if those who plundered his ideas in the
strongholds of Analytic Philosophy had seen it with the same clarity. If, under these conditions, one asks as to the meaning of the state- ment 'Culture is a monastic rule. Or it at least presupposes a monastic rule' - penned by a sixty-year-old - one notices first of all how casu- aily, almost carelessly, the author uses the word 'culture' - he of all people, who always displayed a seventh sense for seeking out hidden ambiguities beneath identical surface formulations. Everything sug- gests that he was, at that moment, less concerned with the word 'culture', under which he would immediately have sensed the lacunas if he had been interested in looking more closely, than with the phrase 'monastic rule' [Ordensregel]. This, despite its unusual sound, is unmistakably where the greater analytical emphasis lies. Its meaning was clearer to Wittgenstein: such a rule expresses one of the most suggestive attempts to approach what a grammar meant for him - it
134
set
sum produces a
no
monastic way life, 1f1
'CULTURE
A MONASTIC RULE'
Pachomian, Augustinian, Cassianic, Benedictine, Franciscan or any other style. To understand what it means to follow a rule - and this is the chronically recurring question in later Wittgenstein - it is suf- ficient to imagine how one would live if one entered a religious order. What gives it its specific character, and how the rule affects those who follow it, is only revealed to those who make it their own by choos- ing the monastic way of life themselves. The Wittgensteinian monk, however, would be condemned to playing the role of ethnologist in his order, as he would remain incapable of absorption into the col- lective form of life for psychological reasons. He would, furthermore, be an ethnologist who is tricked by the natives - for he would be joining a tribe that contained no natives, only joined members like himself.
The particularity of a monastic rule - and this is where Wittgenstein's statement becomes problematic - is that whatever the individual pre- scriptions, it requires the monks (the author would scarcely have been thinking of nuns) to carry out every step, every action in meditative contemplation and choose every word carefully. Whether it is the form of the tonsures, the dress code, the regulations for setting up the sleeping quarters and the behaviour of the older and younger monks in them, the allocation of sleeping times, the holy readings, the gath- erings to prayer, the work in the scriptoria, the arrangement of the storerooms and dining rooms, and so on - all the concrete rules are embedded in the rule of all rules, which states that the monk must not carry out the slightest action out of mere dull habit, but rather be prepared for interruption by orders from his superior at any moment - as if constantly expecting the Saviour to enter the premises. St John Cassian insisted that a scribe called to the door by his superior should not even finish the letter he had begun: he should rather leap up to be fully ready for the new assignment. 44
Monastic life thus differs from ordinary life in three ways: firstly, entering an order implies compliance with the artificial system of carefully written rules that animate the monastic life of whatever observance. In the case of ordinary culture, by contrast, one grows into it without ever being asked if one wishes to accept its rules - indeed, most never reflect on whether there is any regula for the local forms of life at all. Secondly, living behind monastery walls creates a special climate of vigilance and readiness for any given tasks that is not found in any form of life in the non-monastic sphere - 'obedience' and 'piety' are metaphors for total availability. The basic rhythm of
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
in way, the to monastic-communist maxim that work is good, but prayer is better. In monastic culture, after all, the strongest characteristic of profane culture disappears - the division of labour between the sexes, and the concern for the transference of existing forms of life to the little bar-
barians who emerge from the intercourse between the sexes.
Culture Arises from Secession
Wittgenstein's point was clearly a different one. When he notes 'Culture is a monastic rule', the meaning of 'culture' here has shrunk to a finely sieved residue. By no means should every form of life that appears in 'societies' be considered culture, only those comparable to existence under a monastic rule in terms of explicitness, strictness, vigilance and reduction to the essential - and which permit a modus vivendi whose first and last criterion is relief from the consequences of sexuality. It is insignificant here that the monastic rules, in their sacral transparency and elitist unambiguity, are ultimately no less arbitrary than the fixed regulations of any grammar among natural languages. All that matters is the separatist dynamic of life under the rule. Wittgenstein's use of the term 'culture' leaves no doubts: for him, culture in the substantial sense of the word only comes about through the isolation of the truly cultivated from the rest of so-called 'culture', this muddled aggregate of better and worse habits whose sum is barely more than the usual 'swinishness'.
From this perspective it is easier to explain why Wittgenstein is one of the few authors of modernity - perhaps the only one of real distinction in the period between Nietzsche and Foucault, except for Heidegger - whose work displays the transformation of philosophy from a school subject back to an engaging discipline. His example shows what happens when study becomes exercise. The reason for this change can be found in his secessionist understanding of culture. It is easy to show that this was part of Wittgenstein's Austrian legacy, which he never abandoned.
Wittgenstein knew from childhood what a secession is, as the breaking away of the group of artists around Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann from the historicistically inclined con- servative Vienna Kunstlerhaus in 1897 had been one of the main events in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), the philosopher's father, a steel industrialist and music patron, was one
136
'CULTURE IS
most - not con- the building on the also personal support for individual artists. The young Wittgenstein was sixteen when Klimt staged his next act of self-removal by leaving the seces- sion, and nineteen at the publication of Adolf Loos's epoch-making essay Ornament and Crime. One can assume that from that moment on at the latest, the concept of culture had merged irreversibly with the secession phenomenon - for the young man and the young Viennese culture scene in equal measure. This included the experi- ence that a secession is not sufficient in order to remain faithful to the impulse to break away from the usual. Only a constant progression in distancing oneself from the misery of conventions can preserve the purity of the modernizing project - hence the never-ending rhythm of secession in the art of the twentieth century, which remains in motion until there is nothing left from which to secede. In fact, Loos was one of the strongest critics of the first aesthetics of secession. He saw it as no more than the replacement of one form of kitsch with another - of
the vulgar ornament with a select one.
As Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have shown, Viennese moder-
nity as a whole was characterized by secessionist motifs in the broad- est sense. For its protagonists, the culture-founding gesture consisted in exiting from the system of conventions in which the aristocratic- bourgeois audience in the imperial capital revelled. Regardless of whether it was architecture, painting, musk or language, the group of modems constituted itself through a secessionist operation in every field - through the separation of the purists from the ornamentalists, the constructivists from the indulgent, the logicians from the journal- ists and the grammarians from the chatterers. What united the new artists was an aversion to every form of excess. In their view, culture and art could only progress through a radical opposition to what Karl Kraus called the 'debasement of practical life by ornament, demon- strated by Adolf Loos'. 45 The equation of ornament and crime pre- sented by Loos in his essay perfectly expresses the new ethos of formal clarity determined by the true use of things - it also reminds us that functionalism was initially a form of moralism, or more precisely an ascetic practice that sought to come closer to the good by dispensing with what could not be justified. It would not be difficult to pinpoint the Loos factor in detail in Wittgenstein's logical habitus, for example when the philosopher notes: 'I assert that use is the form of culture, the form which makes objects. '46 The polemical atmosphere in which the search for the 'form of culture' took place is demonstrated in an aphorism by Karl Kraus:
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
Adolf Loos I, he have done no
[han to show that there is a between an urn and a chamber pot, and that culture only has room to move within this difference. The others, however, the positives, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn. 47
Wittgenstein's late note 'Culture is a monastic rule' still presupposes the aggressive ethic of reduction and the future-postulating tenor of the formal purism characterizing early Viennese modernity. The bizarre overtones accompanying his remark make sense when one grasps the paradox underlying the basic secessionist stance: that a credible ascent within culture can only be achieved through a descent to elementary forms. For these form zealots, the simple stood above the complicated. For the participants in the great exodus from the 'debased' sphere, the calls to return 'to the things', 'to the elemen- tary life forms' or 'to real use' were synonymous. Through these campaigns, the phenomenological as well as the functionalistic, the reductionistic as well as the postivistic, entire worlds of 'ornaments' - or whatever one wishes to call the superfluous elements - fell by the wayside. What would count in future was the study of primary forms, grammars and their constructive principles. The participants in the course of study that enabled and justified 'culture' in the new sense were a group of artist-ascetics living under an explicit rule. For them, ethics, aesthetics and logic pointed in the same direction. The Viennese monastic rule was only decisive for the growth of a new 'culture' because it took an opposing stance to the predominance of debased conditions in every single one of its tenets. The style was neo- Cistercian and depourvu, founded on the trinity of clarity, simplicity and functionality.
Form and Life
I would not have to remind readers of these connections if the figure of secession, independently of its Viennese history, were not to become significant for everything that will be said in the following about the organizational forms of the practising life, in its earlier and earliest manifestations too. The secession gesture as such already expresses the imperative without which there could never have been any monastic 'order', any reform or any revolution: 'You must change your life! ' This presupposes that life has something about it which the individual has - or can acquire - the competence to change. In 1937, Wittgenstein noted: 'The fact that life is problematic shows
138
'CUL TURE IS A MONASTIC
RULE'
your
not once your life
The belief in the possibility of a better 'fit' between form and life is based on a concept of form that can be traced back to the founding phase of philosophy in the work of Socrates and Plato, and to the early period of Brahmanic asceticisms. It expresses the conviction that there is a 'good form' of life, regardless of whether it comes from the Viennese workshops, the Athenian school or the monasteries of Benares - a form whose adoption would necessarily lead to the elimination of disturbances in existence. Finding the good form is a design task that includes a moral-logical exercise. It is only because philosophy itself implies such a task from the outset that it can catch on as a 'school'; the school as such is itself a secession phenomenon - as much in the case of Plato, the founder of the Academy, as among the Viennese moderns. Where there is secession, the reformers have run out of patience with the pre-existing facts. They no longer want to see either the conventional conditions or their reproductions; the hour of a return to the original models has struck. The model does not represent life; it precedes it. One can virtually speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of secession to models. It is not quite by chance that Platon's Athenian Academy, founded in 387 BC - and consistently in use until its destruction by Sulla in 86 BC - was located out of the way, almost a mile to the northwest of the city centre, though very appropriately next to a larger sports venue, the gymna- sium, which was soon incorporated into the educational system.
The founding of a school implies a rejection of fate kitsch - be it late Athenian or late Habsburg. It requires the conversion of ques- tions of fate into tasks of discipline. Plato had already rejected tragedy because he sensed a moral 'debasement' in it: instead of watching comfortably and sentimentally as other people perish in their entan- glements, he considered it more commendable to tend to one's own mistakes and, once aware, to correct them to the best of one's ability.
One could almost say that the school is based on the invention of the 'mistake' - the mistake is a secularized, revisable misfortune, and a pupil is someone who learns from mistakes and attempts to elimi- nate them. What is conspicuous here is the convergence of the basic Socratic position, as developed by Nietzsche in his early writings, and Wittgenstein's approach to continuous self-clarification. For the latter too, the language analyst, there is nothing tragic, 'and conflict [does] not become something splendid but a mistake'. 49
Let us be open about the point of these reflections: in showing 139
change your
problematic will disappear. '48
So you must into the mould, is
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a secessionist on one's personai mistakes the mistakes of collective sensibility, one removes every possibility of co-opting him for the egalitarian and relativist ideology that accompanies the numerous varieties of Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. In reality, Wittgenstein's 'work' is probably the harshest manifestation of ethical elitism in the twentieth century - perhaps excepting Simone Weil, as the only reform elitist of equal stature. His secessionist-elitist approach extends so deep that the author even wished he could have withdrawn from himself and his various forms of 'swinishness',
had this been possible. Once Wittgenstein's unbending elitism - which, incidentally, is as radical as it is apolitical and ahistorical - is revealed, this not only affects our understanding of his most success- ful theorem, that of 'language games'; it also casts a very different light on Wittgenstein's role as a teacher.
language Games Are Exercises: The Deception of 'Ordinary language'
Now it becomes directly apparent that the 'language games' cited ad nauseam in reality constitute asceticisms, or rather micro-ascetic modules: verbally articulated practical exercises whose performance is usually acquired via imitation - without anyone to tell us whether it is worthwhile or desirable to carry out these games. Evidently the cultures themselves do not enlighten us here - they are condemned to affirmation in these matters. What is less acceptable is that the lan- guage game theory also answers these questions evasively. It thus con- ceals the fact that an imitation of ordinary'swinishnesses' is inherent in most language games, while the most important thing, namely participation in secession, usually remains unspoken or uncompre- hended. In the conventional language game, one practises something that is not actually worth practising. One practises it nolens volens by doing what everyone does without considering whether it is worth doing. A conventional language game is the everyday, not explicitly declared training of the 'swine', and hence of those who do not care whether their form of life stands up to examination.
Only in the rarest of cases is the ability to participate in language games acquired through a voluntary adoption of a clarified seces- sionary form of life. This, as Wittgenstein emphasizes in the second half of his statement, would presuppose an explicit 'monastic rule' - although the word 'explicit' refers to a form knowledge or asceti-
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'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
cism knowledge that was either distilled in the course of long experi- ments with the practising life (as in the era of the regula authors from Pachomius to Isidore of Seville, or in the Brahmanic and Yogic tra- ditions) or had to be newly developed amidst a cultural crisis (as in fin-de-siecle Vienna) through a radicalized design. Then, however, and only then, practising means assimilating the practice-worthy via declared asceticisms. Exercises of this level lead to language games and forms of life for non-swine. As elementary as they might seem, they constitute the perfect impregnation of everyday life through artistry. The perfect depiction of normality thus becomes an acro- batic exercise. For Wittgenstein, the ethical miracle takes place at the
, summit of Mount Improbable: the miracle that forms of life can be clarified through logical analysis and technical reconstruction.
For all his efforts at humility, one cannot help but note a certain hypocrisy in late Wittgenstein, because he usually pretended not to know that his language game theory contained a murky concession to existence in the trivial and 'swinish' dimension, even though he had always striven to keep away from it. For himself, he kept an eye out for clarified monastic rules under which exceptional humans of his cast and secessionists of equal stature would want to live - and would, perhaps, also be able to live according to their standards. These forms are also known as 'language games', but one can tell that the robes are of the finest cloth. When the once-fashionable movement of ordinary language philosophy invoked Wittgenstein as an influence, it fell prey to a deception of which the master himself was far from innocent. He was never interested in the ordinariness of 'ordinary lan- guage'; the art would have been to sense something of the perfection- ism of the Viennese workshops coming through the word 'ordinary'. People forgot to remind the English patients that they should not be too hasty in their eagerness to praise the everyday. It was in the spirit of great reform to say 'ordinary' while meaning 'extraordinary'. One would have had to explain to the interested what the search for the quintessential form of use actually meant, at the risk of spoiling the party for the ordinarists. Anyone who has hung their coat on a hook designed by Adolf Loos has a standard that will remain unforgotten. If one then sees where one's British and American colleagues hang their things, one can never take them seriously again.
The subtle mendacity of language game theory is undoubtedly the secret of its success. It also reveals something that otherwise only 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's habitus as a 'teacher'. He knows that teaching means demonstrating, but what he is able to demonstrate as a virtuoso - the logical analysis of language - is worlds apart
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from what he actually wanted to demonstrate: the saint's form of life. What 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's teaching is that he does not show what he is concerned with - and that he cannot do what he wants, and never stops wanting to do what he cannot. The estab- lished Wittgenstein hagiography has long since admitted that its hero more or less failed miserably in his role as primary school teacher in Austria between 1920 and 1926. But no one dares utter the fact that he failed equally - and even worse, as there were consequences to this failure - as a university lecturer, presumably because, in secret, people exculpate the author psychologically, as well as believing that by becoming a global celebrity, he achieved more than a Homo aca- demicus could dream of anyway. When Wittgenstein wrote in 1946, shortly before leaving the teaching profession, 'I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know',50 he was implicitly admitting to keeping his audience in the dark as to his real preferences. He could have done more to illuminate those parts of the landscape that concerned him, but he preferred to offer noble disorientation - as if his Christian perfectionism were as much of an undisclosable private matter in Cambridge as his homo- sexuality, something that was not appreciated at that time.
What Shows Itself
In my view, the absence of any explicit criticism of Wittgenstein's role as a university lecturer indicates that his students turned a blind eye to their teacher's ambiguity and contented themselves with half the lesson. What one could achieve with half the lesson is demonstrated by the trends that have dominated university philosophy for over fifty years on both sides of the Atlantic. The paradigm of the mental athlete and arrogant epistemologist, bursting with acumen, to which Wittgenstein himself had contributed through his academic persona, became dominant everywhere, while the things that truly mattered to the thinker all but disappeared from the curricula of analytic semi- nars. Wittgenstein must have noticed that on the path of 'it shows itself', something quite different from what he desired was coming to light. The idea of having any direct effect as a role model had long since collapsed when he noted in 1947: 'Most likely I could still achieve an effect in that, above all, a whole lot of garbage is written in response to my stimulus and that perhaps provides the stimulus for something goOd. '51
It would be impossible to find another example in the history of 142
'CULTURE IS RULE'
philosophy own so At the same statement also sums up intellectual catastro- phe of the second half of the twentieth century. The 'garbage' that Wittgenstein knows he will provoke soon or posthumously is no dif- ferent from the 'swinishness' into whose hands he would play with his official later theory, the pseudo-neutral language game principle. Wittgenstein's late ambiguity does not, admittedly, express merely a private complex; it testifies to an objective difficulty that he was unable to overcome. For him, the survivor of the late Habsburg world, the clocks had stopped in November 1918 - and would remain immobile for the rest of his life. Until then, like the other pro- tagonists of Viennese modernity, he had been ahead of his time - part of the ascetic-formalist problem community of those who embarked on the great reform. After the collapse of the Austrian world he lost all connection to the topics of the present, navigating in a space of undated and unaddressed problems - in this perhaps comparable only to Emile Cioran, who, after breaking with the hysterical exag- gerations of his early 'committed' phase, had also moved towards a form of exiled and decontextualized resistance to the conventionali- ties of existence. It would be a worthwhile undertaking to examine Wittgenstein and Cioran alongside each other with reference to their anachronistic exercises - both invented something aptly summarized by the younger in his discarded book title Exercices negatifs. 52 The sum of Wittgenstein's achievements during his British years (1929- 51) is a tragic testimony to the immobilization of the Kakanian refor- matio mundi caused by the war.
Since the amputation of its world, Austria has been a country without reality, and Wittgenstein's re-imported philosophy its great lie. Before 1918, Wittgenstein's defection from late Habsburg Austrianhood to a designer Christianity ala Tolstoy may have sym- bolized part of the inevitability of radical reform sensed by the best; after 1918, however, such an option only formed part of the almost universal failure in formulating the rules for life in a post-dynastic world. Had Wittgenstein already believed then that culture was a monastic rule, the emergency of the time would have led him either to write one or to participate in its production - even if it were only in the inelegant form of a party programme or an educational plan for post-feudal generations. Instead, he fled to the obsolete world of rural Austrian primary schools - a Narodnik who had chosen the wrong century. Later on, his philosophical analyses contributed to popular- izing the Austrian modus of flight from reality by way of England. The lie of language games began its triumphal march through the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
W estern
of the deception. It was as if American stores
to stock only products of aristocratic formalism ala Loos - ignoring the fact that hardware stores inevitably restrict themselves to a stand- ard inventory. Through the manner in which he stood still in 1918, Wittgenstein was one of the ideological contributors to the intellec- tual standstill in the Anglophone world after 1945: on the outside a seeming equality of all forms of life, analytic fitness and a liberal 'anything goes' mentality, but on the inside a homesick longing for the green valleys of silliness and feelings of hierarchy belonging to an elite from times past.
Declared Exercises
I do not want these diagnoses to be misunderstood as destruc- tive criticism; on the contrary, correcting the distortions caused by Wittgenstein is no insoluble task. A reminder of the secessionist dynamic of searching for the good form is sufficient to understand that the language game theory is really a training theory based on the - itself undeclared - difference between declared and undeclared asceticisms. The individual language games are micro-ascetic modules normally carried out by the players without knowing, let alone reflecting upon what they are doing. If they act as they have been taught, they are possessed by the grammar, as it were, even if it is only a mild possession by habits of sentence structure. Nonetheless, possession by an unconsciously or semi-consciously followed rule cannot be the right way for humans to act in relation to the right and the true. True as it might be that the meaning of a word is determined by its real usage, the decisive factor is the refinement of that usage. Did Adolf Loos not study the independent life of everyday things in minute detail, then replacing the most trivial objects with utensils of the most ingenious simplification and the greatest material purity? And Wittgenstein himself - did he not, in the house in Vienna that he designed for his sister, even abandon the seemingly definitive shapes of door-handles and supplant them with his own, handles whose shape indicated whether the door opened inwards or outwards?
The conclusions to be drawn from these analogies are far-reaching: many undeclared exercises can and should, in fact, be concerted into declared ones and clarified in the process. The asymmetry between the undeclared and the declared exercise is itself one of the first ethical facts. This difference justifies Wittgenstein's assertion - directed
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'CULTURE IS l\
RULE'
against
the of
perspicuity are valuable in themselves. '53 This supposed end in itself is, in truth, the medium in which the conversion of possessed rule- applications to free exercises takes place.
For the primal ethical imperative 'You must change your life! ' to be followed, therefore, it is initially necessary for the practising to become aware of their exercises as exercises, that is to say as forms of life that engage the practising person. The reason for this is self- evident: if the players are themselves inescapably affected by what they play and how they play it (and how it has been drilled into them to play it), they will only have access to the bridge of their self-change by recognizing the games in which they are entangled for what they are. Consequently, the language game theory is not an expression of 'therapeutic positivism', as the American philosopher Brian Farell claimed in 1946 with the insensitivity of the hardware store customer - one can understand why Wittgenstein was extremely displeased by this. It is the working form of transformative ascetism, and hence aes- thetic secessionism in action. It is carried out with the aim of choosing between the muddle of life forms dictated, absorbed under situative compulsion and inevitably close to 'swinishness' to find those that can be taken up into the clarified 'monastic rule'. Every thing is a 'language game', living crystal and swinishness alike - what matters is the nuance.
Whereof One Should Not Be Silent
This takes care of the chatter, rampant among Wittgensteinians, of the silence that must allegedly be maintained about everything that truly matters in life. One does not keep silent when it is a matter of preferences. Here too, looking for the source of the confusion leads us to Wittgenstein himself. On this sensitive point he fell for his own ideology by amalgamating the Jesuan and monastic habitus of silence, which had already been attractive for him early on, with his logically weak denial of the possibility of metalanguage - had his entire output not been one great breaking of the rule of silence, a speaking, scat- tered over the decades, about the what and the why of speaking?
All that remains of the talk about silence is as much as is required to show a practising person that the main thing is to carry out the exercise, not to reason over it. One can only carry out a throw of the
145
clarity 'For me on the contrary clarity,
THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
no amount of
righr way to throw them can replace throw and the
biographies of throwers nor the bibliography of throwing literature will lead a single step further. This by no means changes the fact that 'discology' could become a discipline carried out in keeping with the standards of the art, assuming it existed. Its performance would consist in carrying out the language games belonging to this -ology lege artis - why not in a special department for throwing research and human projectile studies? Whether it would be better to be a discus-thrower or a discologist is another matter. It forces one to choose between two disciplines, each of which requires its own form of expertise - or it results in a combination of subjects and leads to the emergence of the athleta doctus.
Taken on its own, Wittgenstein's silence-posturing has no deeper meaning than Erich Kistner's verse 'Nothing good happens unless you do it. ' One could, if one liked, also associate it with the Regula Benedicti, which states in the section 'What Kind of Man the Abbot Ought to Be'; 'Therefore, when anyone receives the name of Abbot, he ought to govern his disciples with a twofold teaching. That is to say, he should show them all that is good and holy by his deeds even more than by his words. '54 Wittgenstein's habitus becomes 'religiously' charged because the primal scene of 'silently embodying the truth', like Jesus standing before Pilate, shines through him. The philosopher's behaviour perhaps becomes easier to understand if one imagines him standing constantly before Pilate. This provides a picto- rial commentary on the statement 'But Wittgenstein was silent. ' In reality, he was not silent; on the contrary, he gave lectures through a behaviour befitting a man who is convinced that the world is the ideal place to show something. But he was never entirely sure about the content of what had to be shown; he was neither able to take the step of adopting a formal teaching and training role nor that of choosing a manifest guru or messiah role. He remained indecisive in the most important question, partly for mental reasons and partly because, within his doctrine of silent showing, he did not separate two tasks: providing examples as a technical master and setting an example as a life teacher.
The Ascetological Twilight and the Gay Science
Wittgenstein's inability to explicate the difference between asceti- cism and aesthetics - and the resulting confusion between the
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'CUL TURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
an exercIse a - may caused a
in the camp of analytic opportunism, but it is not in itself an incur- able ailment. To put it in the terms of the attempt developed here, Wittgenstein's work, like that of all the authors treated so far, belongs to the movement that began in the late nineteenth century and which I call the ascetological twilight. We must draw the necessary conclu- sions from it - and I repeat my claim that they will culminate in a general anthropotechnics. What the author left behind is a wealth of coherently incoherent studies on the clarification of the purpose of a practising behaviour. Strangely enough, his active vocabulary shows a gap in the decisive place - at least, I do not know of any passage in his writings where the word 'practise' is used in more than a passing fashion. Nor do I find any indication that Wittgenstein was aware of the etymological equivalence of askesis and 'exercise'. One can, there- fore, perhaps say that Wittgenstein's 'work' was arranged around a blind spot, the missing central concept of askesis. His explicit sense of the grammatical cannot be separated from his implicit understanding of the ascetic.
Wittgenstein's investigations into the diversity of language games should therefore be read as contributions to General Ascetology - as collected references to the ubiquity of the practical-practising motif in all fields of human behaviour. Micro-asceticism is always current. It remains involved in all that humans do - indeed, it even extends to the pre-personal zone, into the idiolects of all body parts, each of which has its own history. There is no escape from the games and language games because the law of practice misses nothing, whether it happens deliberately or in ego-remote and non-intentional chains of repetitions. That everyday life and practice are identical is one of the strongest intuitions of language game thinking. It needs to be made clear, however - against the mainstream of evened-out language game chatter - that not all everyday things are acceptable per se, and that not every repetition of a well-worn language game helps the practis- ing person to progress, or is even of use to them at all. What is more, it is untrue that philosophy is a sickness of language that can be cured by regressing to everyday usage. If anything, listening closely to ordi- nary language teaches us the opposite: it is often far sicker than the philosophy it claims to cure.
In my view, everything Wittgenstein put down on paper as a lan- guage ethicist and logical reformer only makes sense if understood as the most serious resumption at that time of Nietzsche's programme of the Gay Science. This science is gay to the extent that it advances
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~ ro tendency fundamentalist moroseness that is usually con- nected to reformist polemidsm. I shall therefore take the liberty of regarding Wittgenstein as an occult Nietzschean - not only on the tac- tical or formal level (for, like the author of Human, All Too Human, he recorded the best part of his insights in small attacks) but also strategically, in that he, like Nietzsche, gave philosophy a guerrilla form and developed an existentially binding transformative analysis with the aim of bringing about a clarifying change in the form of life,
and thus changing life itself from the ground up.
Foucault: A Wittgensteinian
If Wittgenstein was an occult and involuntary Nietzschean, Michel Foucault emerged from the outset as his manifest and voluntary counterpart. Nonetheless, one can say that Foucault started from where Wittgenstein left off: showing that entire branches of science or epistemic disciplines are nothing other than complexly structured language games, also known as discourses or discursive practices. Just as Wittgenstein had broken with the cognitivist prejudice in language theory to show how much speaking is an act rather than knowledge, Foucault broke with the epistemist prejudice in the theory of science in order to explain how much the disciplines he examined are per- formative systems rather than 'reflections' of reality. His choice in the book The Order of Things to refer to the group of disciplines whose performativity of scientific knowledge or of knowledge effects he demonstrates as the 'episteme', of all things, is a case of exquisite irony - comparable in this only to the psychoanalytical use of the word 'rationalization' to describe the 'logical' explanations of neu- rotics dictated by wishful thinking. Analogously, the disciplines of the 'episteme' constitute the discursive pseudo-explanations of those who dominate theory, be they psychiatrists, doctors, biologists, economists, prison directors or jurists by profession. Owing ro their performative status, the 'discourses' at any time in the history of practical power are an amalgam of knowledge effects and executive competencies.
One could therefore describe Foucault's work as it developed between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s as a Wittgensteinianism intensified via Heidegger - and hoisted up further with surrealisms - that grew, curiously enough, without any closer knowledge of German or British sources, just as French culture after 1945 in
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'CUL TURE ,'v10NASTlC RULE'
nHprp·rl no
tion. Naturally, attempts
of Parisian structuralism - aside from certain parallels in the stance against the dictates of 'hyper-Marxism'. 55
Tragic Verticality
His work, however, is too varied and too flamboyant to be summed up from a single perspective. I shall focus on two aspects with an obvious connection to our inquiries: firstly, Foucault's laconic and prescient early contributions to a redefinition of the vertical dimen- sion in human existence, and secondly, his richly varied late studies on the autoplastic or self-sculptural life techniques of antiquity. I would consider the first relevant document to be Foucault's lengthy introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's book Dream and Existence (1954), in which he addresses the 'tragic verticality' of existence; the other sources are from the group of studies he pursued during his hiatus from writing between 1976 and 1984, which organize the posthumously edited body of work around such figures as 'self- concern', 'self-culture' and 'struggle with oneself'.
The 'acrobatic' dimension - as a stance taken by existence upon the appearance of its inherent vertical tension - is unmistakably visible at both poles. I shall pass over Foucault's reflections on the horizon- tal phenomenon, the oft-cited historical formations of 'discourses', as they are not productive for our line of questioning, and because they exhibit the same seductive ambiguity as Wittgenstein's language game theorem; they have the effect of traps into which intellectuals like to walk in order to confirm their critical reflexes - when Foucault himself especially emphasized that he had never met an 'intellectual' in his life, only people who write novels, people who work with the sick, people who teach, people who paint and people 'of whom I have never really understood what they do '" But intellectuals? Never. '56
One thing that has scarcely ever been noted among the turbulences of Foucault's reception after the breakthrough of The Order of Things in 1966 is that the author's emergence twelve years earlier had begun with a grand anti-psychoanalytical gesture: with amazing self- confidence, he pushed aside the mechanics of deformation described in Freud's dream analysis, the 'dream work' [Traumarbeit], defin- ing the dream as the decisive manifestation of the tragic truth about human beings:
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If the dream is the bearer of the deepest human meanings, this is not insofar as it betrays their hidden mechanisms or shows their inhuman cogs and wheels, but on the contrary, insofar as it brings to light the freedom of man in its most original form. 57
While sleep denies death by simulating it, dreams - especially the dream of death - speak the truth. It thus achieves a form of 'self- fulfilment' by causing the 'emergence of what is most individual in the individual'. 58 'But in every case death is the absolute meaning of the dream'. 59
If this is true, the structure of existence can only be elucidated through the analysis of dreams. It is in dreams that humans enter the true Dionysian theatre - but not to become a new Oedipus. When we dream, we move within a directed spatiality more originary than geometry and the clear disposition of things in bright spaces. The character of the vertical axis in the existential spatiality of dreams is completely different from those in mathematics or architecture. It provides enthusiasm with the direction of its ascent - up until the calm at the summit, close to the divine. At the same time,
The vertical axis can also be the vector of an existence that has lost its place on earth and, like Solness the Builder, is going to resume, up above, its dialogue with God. Then it indicates flight into excess, and from the start is marked by the vertigo of a fall. 60
Binswanger had already asserted the anthropological priority of the vertical dimension because for him, the essential temporality of existence revealed itself in the dramas of ascent and fall. Foucault adopts Heidegger's definition of 'transcending' on the vertical axis as 'breaking away from the foundations of existence'; the complemen- tary movement reveals itself as a tragic 'transdescendence', the fall from a pinnacle whose only purpose seems to be that of supplying the extravagant with the necessary altitude for fatal plunges.
It would take some twenty-five years for the paths of Foucault's thought to return to the place he had touched on in his Binswanger commentary. From that point on, he knew that work on verticality is not simply a matter of the originary imagination discussed in the early reflections. Now it meant a power of self-shaping in which the ethical competence of the individual is concentrated. Just as the young Foucault - who survived two suicide attempts in his early twenties - interprets suicide as the regained original gesture 'in which I make myself world',61 the older Foucault discovers practising self-shaping as the movement arising from one's ownmost possibility of existence: beyond oneself with oneself.
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it
as a man of the vertical, without arousing any suspicions that he secretly wanted to return to the well-trodden paths of a run-of-the- mill transcendence in the Christian-Platonic style. 62 In the same act, he clarified his relationship with Nietzsche by correcting the tempta- tion to excess emanating from the latter's work through Nietzsche's own late asceticism - or, more precisely, through its pre-Christian patterns, of which Nietzsche had dreamed when he declared his aim to 'make asceticism natural again'. Foucault had understood that the Dionysian fails if one does not implant a Stoic inside him. The latter admits entertaining the misconception that getting beside oneself already means going beyond oneself. The 'beyond' in the practising going-beyond-oneself63 is now only seemingly the same as the one discussed upon the early discovery of tragic or karian verticality. 64 It is, in truth, the 'beyond' of superior maturity, acquired on the rungs of the practice ladder. 65
The transgressive kitsch that Foucault had picked up from Bataille many years beforehand, and to which his mimetic talent enabled him to contribute a few precarious specimens of his own, stepped into the background. In retrospect it would prove no more than an episode on the way to a more general understanding of the self-forming consti- tutions of practising life. Needless to say, the last connections to the ressentiment-driven leftist milieu in France were now also severed. Foucault had distanced himself from its fabrications long ago, and when he stated in a 1978 interview that 'nothing is more foreign to me than the idea of a "Master" who imposes his own law. I accept neither the notion of domination nor the universality of the law',66 he voiced a conviction that had estranged him from the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist wings of the French intellectual scene for over two decades - to retain only a few connections to anarcho-liberal and left-Dionysian tendencies.
More importantly, he had now also liberated himself from the paranoid leftovers of his own studies in power. It was only the atti- tude of methodical calmness, acquired late on, that enabled him to formulate a concept of regimen, disciplines and power games devoid of all compulsively anti-authoritarian reflexes. When he states sen- tentiously in the same interview, recalling his beginnings in abstract revolt, 'One not only wanted a different world and a different society, one also wanted to go deeper, to transform oneself and to revolution- ize relationships to be completely "other''',67 he is already speak- ing as someone genuinely changed who, light years away from his
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longing complete this turn phrase is beyond , even beyond
In his way, Foucault repeated the discovery that one cannot subvert the 'existing' - only supervert it. He had stepped out into the open and become ready to perceive something strictly invisible for an intel- ligence conditioned in French schematicisms: the fact that human claims to freedom and self-determination are not suppressed by the disciplines, regimes and power games, but rather enabled. Power is not an obstructive supplement to an originally free ability; it is consti- tutive for ability in all its manifestations. It always forms the ground floor above which a free subject moves in. Hence one can describe liberalism as a system of disciplinary checks and balances without glorifying it in the slightest - but without denouncing it either. With the calm severity of a civilization trainer, Foucault states: 'Individuals could certainly not be "liberated" without educating them in a certain way. '68
Language Games, Discourse Games, General Disciplinics
This cleared the way for a General Disciplinics. Foucault had gone a certain distance along this path by newly covering the universe of ancient philosophical asceticisms in a series of meticulous rereadings of mostly Stoic authors - unimpeded by the ubiquitous barriers of critical kitsch, which sees domination in every form of 'self-control', and immediately suspects any discipline in one's way of life of being a self-repression that doubles an external repression. We recall, to name one of the best-known examples, the discrepancies read into the Sirens chapter of the Odyssey by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, where the Greek seafarer becomes a bourgeois with suppressed drives who instantly advances to the pro- totype of the European 'subject'. One thinks back with trepidation to the times in which a younger generation of intellectuals viewed such gaucheries as the non plus ultra of critical thought.
The attraction of Foucault's late writing lies in the undisguised expression of wonder at the regions into which his study of ancient authors led him. He claims the status of a 'philosophical exercise' for his expedition into the history of asceticisms or 'self-techniques':
There is irony in those efforts one makes to alter one's way of looking at things. [. . . JDid mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was
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'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having travelled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. 69
The proximity between Wittgenstein's clarification of form and Foucault's philosophical exercise is remarkable. The analogies between the 'language games' and 'truth games' are also unmistak- able. The essential differences between the two thinkers of the prac- tising life, on the other hand, become clear when one compares their interpretations of the stay at the summit of Mount Improbable. While Wittgenstein finds it amazing enough if forms of life can be clarified to the point where existence on a plateau is identical to a stay at a Tibetan mountain monastery, Foucault hurls himself into the role of the mining engineer who, through deep drilling at different points, reveals the height of the mountains and the number of concealed folds within them. For him, the mountain of improbability is an archive, and the most plausible way to inhabit it is by penetrating the old corridors in order to study the physics of the archive. His intuition, admittedly, tells him that the mountain culminates in each individual that inhabits it, which is why the ethics of these studies seeks to make it clear that what looks like a rock mass is in truth an accumulation of respectively singular culminations - even if these do not, for the most part, sense themselves as such. Here the imperative 'You must change your life! ' means: 'You yourself are the mountain of improbability, and as you fold yourself, thus will you tower up. '
The objective parallels between Wittgenstein and Foucault are impressive, even if we leave aside the psychodynamic aspect of the bioi paralleloi of two precocious homosexuals who, after a phase of advanced self-destruction attempts, managed to arrive at a form of self-therapy. To my knowledge, Wittgenstein's note from 1948 - 'I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything important. The industry of the great is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth'70 - has not yet been examined in the light of Foucault's studies on confessional practices. One could easily imagine those lines being written after an encounter between Wittgenstein and Foucault - though Wittgenstein would have felt more disgust than admiration for Foucault's work up to 1975, as he would have found his early and middle style unbearable. But he would probably have read the posthumous writings as the marvels of mannerism-free clarity that they are.
It is in the effective histories of the two thinkers, however, that their kinship is strongest. For both, it was the point of highest imitability
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
success, in cases it
the most suggestive misunderstandability. We have seen how Wittgenstein's language game theory turned into the misdirec- tion of 'ordinary language'; in Foucault's case, it is easy to understand why his discourse theory seemed an easy target for critical conform- ism. People took all those analyses of asylums, clinics, police insti- tutions and prisons for a slightly outlandish form of social critique and lavished praise on its lyrically drugged fastidiousness. None of his readers understood that they were always also ascetic exercises in self-shaping in place of a third suicide attempt, and possibly even the author himself was not always aware of it. His insistence on the anonymity of authorship aimed in the same direction: if no one is there, no one can kill themselves. The bafflement was therefore great when the older Foucault sidestepped with the irony of one who had detached himself, shaking off his critical and subversive followers. Whoever still wanted to remain on his trail after that comforted themselves with the oft-repeated assurance that philosophy is not a discipline, but an activity that 'crosses' disciplines.