No More Learning

A Renaissance shows its genius in finding the ability to step into something entirely unprecedented under the cover of its enthusiasm for a prominent antiquity. The unprecedented newness can emerge precisely by drawing inspiration from a great precedent – it seems as if enthusiastic repetitions are the great vehicle of innovation. In this way, Renaissances always owe their prolificacy to a passionate misunderstanding of the old by a newness that does yet not speak its name. Only through an intense misrecognition do antiquities get brought back to a new life – one that is not their own, but rather the fluorescence of the still necessarily self-misrecognizing current life.
What the Grecomania of the Italian Renaissance and then again of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant for the
The Modern Age as Mobilization 25
self-forming of modern bourgeois society is by now culturo-histor- ically evident. But what it might have to do with the more recent Asiamania is still an unrevealed secret for most contemporaries – many come to take this (certainly conspicuous) phenomenon to be a fashion trend or an episodic exoticism. Thus, it would seem, they make good use of their fundamental right to live in ignorance of the major events of their time. But this does not change the fact that things are being negotiated in the Asiamanic phenomena of the present time which get to the heart of the world process, insofar as we are able to know something about it. When the West imagines itself to be in a sunken East and channels Asian antiquity as a master model of culture for life in the present, it is searching for possibilities of a future for itself within a foreign past. Nothing other than this was precisely the case back in the great European Renaissance, which rarely suspected the profound differences that separated it from its ancient Greek models. Today’s Asianizing Renaissance similarly delves deep into old Eastern worlds of wisdom to create pathways towards the new, the unprecedented, the inacces- sible for late modernity, whose corruption seems threatening, if not entirely incurable. For many, Asia is the cipher that offers shelter to a concept of the inconceivable.
Initially, we can draw four conclusions from this. The first is that a post-Christian era has begun within the Western hemisphere that could not possibly find the terms it would require to under- stand itself within the scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Following in the footsteps of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, the Young Conservative diagnostician Otto Petras already summarized this situation in 1935 in the form of a still impressive intention “to show that Christianity – the most formidable history-shaping movement of our time – has exhausted its formative power and that we live in a Post-Christianity understood in a deeper sense than the calendar’s AD. ”15
Secondly, modernity, thus left to its own devices – at least according to the conviction of skeptical interpreters – has used up its moral reserves and has no counterforces to deploy that could intercept its own fatal drift. Enlightened secularism, with its dual commitment to self-determination and large-scale technology, is disappearing, it seems, before our very eyes in global neglect – things run as they please and initial intentions are no longer of concern. Thirdly, the attempts of the last Central European generations to invoke livable forms of neopaganism from Germanic, Celtic, Greek, and Latin religious antiquities have proved to be straw fires that sometimes burned off with barbaric fumes and rarely on a level higher than that of spiritual party conversations. Thus, anyone who
26 The Modern Age as Mobilization
is interested likely knows that under present conditions one might perhaps make a rural commune with that homemade raw substance of Old European and pre-Christian elements, but no longer a terri- torial state. Fourth, a turn to the East (for Americans, it is not a turn anyway, but a continuation on their old Western course, only through water) brings into play no less than a world-cultural alter- native to the Greco-Judeo-Christian path that retains its quality as alternative even when the actual contemporary Eastern hemisphere modernizes itself beyond recognition by adopting Western mobili- zation techniques.
What does it indicate that in the crisis of late modern Western world this phenomenon – here referred to as an Asian renaissance – is interlaced with it? If a logic of the Renaissance really exists, then the new Asiamania should be read as a sign that creative members of post-Christian civilization hope to come to an understanding of themselves by grasping at antiquity once again – but this time not so that it can be appropriated as one’s own antiquity, but as antiquity in a foreign form. This time, the illusion of a “memory” of something that once belonged to us is not being sought. Today, an Asian antiquity rising to the rank of exemplarity has to do not with what is foreign or one’s own, but with the very spirit of the ancient as such. In other words, we have become so uncanny to ourselves through our modernization that the old, strange sounds of the Far East suddenly begin to sound like an old, familiar idiom. And although it is obviously not a native language that touches us so suggestively in this respect, it could – after many twists and turns – become a sister language to the mother tongue. To put it differ- ently, once again: the destruction of our own traditions by way of modern analytics has stripped our lives down to the stumps – that is, all the way down to the anonymous awareness of the fact that we find ourselves in a world that is both foreign and our own at the same time. This design-making awareness that is thrown into being can now learn the language of Buddha as well as that of Plato in order to clarify its strange position to itself insofar as it experiences every language as a foreign one. From now on, it only knows itself as that which cannot know itself and cannot name itself – and if it can, then only in the form of a persistent self-misrecognizing, of an essential theatricality. From the anonymousness of this existence, the path to Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu is no longer than the path to Parmenides or Augustine, the ascent to Plotin and Hegel no steeper than the one to Nagarjuna and Shankara, the path through Aristotle no drier than the one through Patanjali, the entry into the way of being of Meister Eckhardt no more mysterious than that of Master Dogen. Whether of Eastern or Western origin, the same
The Modern Age as Mobilization 27
exhausting improbability looms over these old names and doctrines, the same fascinating strangeness. Precisely because modernization has evaporated our Old European traditions and identities by way of progressive mobilization, the most foreign ancient tradition is no longer more foreign than the one that has until recently been our own.
It is in this context that the punchline of the Asian Renaissance in the modern West becomes clear: it makes us so pointedly aware of the question of the ancient preconditions of the modern enter- prise that while we can underestimate, misunderstand, combat, and disregard it, we can in the end no longer shake it off. As long as these times remain modern, they will be haunted by the question of the compatibility of human life processes and modernity itself. Since human culture is demonstrably very old and modernity very new and unsubstantiated, it is not a secondary task to find out if modernity is an outdoing of the ancient by the means of the modern or if its modernity puts a final end to antiquity. This question has become so urgent that the difference between the familiar and the foreign no longer plays any major role in these matters. Since the most foreign traditions are no longer more foreign to us than our own, it becomes clear how much our path towards the unparalleled has put all of the Old World nature and culture reserves up for negotiation. Because it is by now undeniable that a universalizing modernity exists in the form of “mobilization as such,” the question of “antiquity as such” pushes itself to the forefront almost violently. Then what is it that we take with us from antiquity on our trip into the unprecedented? Which dowries from the ancient world still create a link between past and future? What provisions will future generations live on during their continued exodus? How do the vessels in modern outer space stay in contact with the ancient ground controls?
These very questions indicate that the Asianizing Renaissance goes far beyond the events of the Grecizing Renaissance in the early bourgeois mobilization time; it is both more than and different from a mere cultural quote that will unleash something unprecedented in allusion to an authentic antiquity. Because it already emerges after this unleashing and already has an impression of what modernity can be, it poses the question more radically than the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and seeks the ancient as something that is not just as a pretext for the modern. Since the world belongs to the moderns anyway, the moment has come to inquire about the possibility of the ancient as ancient. Modern Asiamania is a Renaissance to the extent that it sides with those antiquities – whether ancient culture or nature – that create conditions for New World adventures. Thus,
28 The Modern Age as Mobilization
the new Asiamanically encrypted “Renaissance as such” asserts the authority of the ancient in two ways: on the one hand, it stresses that modernity would not exist if it could not – as user and consumer of pre-modern resources – depend on that which it (in an ultimately self-destructive way) exploits without regener- ating; on the other hand, it proves that the New World enterprise fundamentally overwhelms the ancient precepts since modernity follows the drive to carry out an infinite project on a finite basis. It obeys this drive if it has constituted itself metaphysically as being-towards-movement. This is actualized through us in the production of expanded productivity, in the will to a further reaching will, in the imagining of heightened imagination, in the creation of more comprehensive creativity, in short, in the movement towards movement ad inifinitum. As being-towards- movement, modernity is defined as “mobilization as such,” in other words as being-towards-self-annihilation.
The “Renaissance as such” that we see at work in the Asianizing activity of the more sensible West equals nothing less than an ontological sign change.
For if there is a common denominator for the currents of ancient Asian thought, it is that they grasp the meaning of being as a being-towards-stillness-within-movement. Even where, as in yoga, one works with the highest mobilizations of forces in the sense of a mystical physiology, the focus of consciousness is always on the advancement towards stillness within strength. The Asianizing tendencies in the West are perhaps only awkward tentative attempts in this direction – they express the intuition that nothing less than an ontological sign change will suffice to take the fatal thrust out of the “processes of modernization. ” Nowadays, whoever looks for a language of demobilization will most likely find it in the ancient Eastern realm, where different dramaturgies have been developed for the kinetics of the will to live than in the Western mobilization civilization. And it is only by borrowing from such languages, which irritate us with their frustrating wisdom, that it is possible to point, however awkwardly, to what needs to be said in the midst of the worldwide movement towards movement. The unthinkable impertinence that is heard by modern ears in old Asian “quietist” keys is aimed at the kinetic demission of mobilizing systems and subjects. But can we seriously imagine our de-automobilization? Can we conceive of a way of being where the system-subjects would no longer be driven forward by their self-advancement propellers? Does a prospect even exist for us where the powers of the subject generate something other than otherworldly acceleration, enrichment, research, and empowerment?
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These questions do not comprise disclaimers for modernity after-the-fact owing to bad experiences with it. They are as old as modernity itself; indeed they are inseparable from the superb upswing of early Romanticism, in which an offensive modernism, sustained by the élan of self-outdoing, inquired beyond itself in its best philosophical moments. Novalis’ phrase – “One is greatly in error if one believes that antiquities exist. Antiquity is only now coming into being”16 – already holds the key to the post-modern Renaissances. What emerges out of the new antiquities are shadows that belong to the light of modernity. The more modern, the more post-modern – there is no way around this formula. Aside from an imperceptible boundary, nothing can survive the impulse of modern self-mobilization ad infinitum unchanged unless it be through the boundless generosity of post-modern patronage for the benefit of “Renaissances” as such.
2
THE OTHER CHANGE: ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL SITUATION OF ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENTS
. . . one man is a fool – two are a new humanity!
Robert Musil, The Enthusiasts1
Every age has its own style of being dissatisfied with the world. And every dissatisfaction that becomes self-conscious contains within itself the seeds of a culture.
Today’s dissatisfaction with the world shows unmistakable traits of panic. Those who do not sense the panic are not up to speed – presumably they live off-site, in an asynchronous cave, having been spared, sparing themselves any exertion, living on a private income, perhaps happy as well, transported into a province out of reach from the news. To avoid panic, one would have to trust one’s small good fortune. One would have to have the old psycho- logical immune system that uses immediate worries to protect itself from big questions. But immunity to panic is rare nowadays, as is any believable unworldliness. Whoever reads the newspaper and eats mushrooms is already contaminated. Even those who are constructive-minded can get no further than a little bit of positivity against a panicked background. Goodwill no longer has a common denominator with the course of the world.
All of this says that panic is not a symptom of mass hysteria, nor does it present a personal case of the nerves. Speaking in classical terms, it is a constitution of the objective spirit, articulating an adequate relationship of the intellect to the matters at hand, and should the spirit lose its composure at what it discovers, it is right
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in this matter. It is the same with the panicked spirit as it is with Lessing’s Father Galotti: if you don’t lose your mind over some things, you have no mind to lose. Panic proves to be the obligatory way of being of a consciousness that delves into its time – into our time. And that is why panic cannot be adopted or discarded like an external code, the possibility of inciting or appeasing it being illusory; its very nature is to be beyond manipulation because it is older than all calculation – ultimately, panic is not born of scare- mongering but the other way around.
In panic, we discover a fundamental feature of the truth about the present historical moment, and even more so an aspect of the truth about the brittle historicity of contemporary existence. If we are gripped by panic, then it has become clear to us that historical time dies with us – in such a way that at its end, barely anything will have happened. Our history – all that we are and have – will one not too distant day not have anyone for whom it is something that has happened. That is why panic arises – and insofar as it arises, it is the intelligent tinge of the moment in which we realize how time trickles away for us into the realm of might-as-well-never-have- been. Something would only have happened to us if a future exists that retains its past – our present – as its origin. Such retention has been the great work of the civilizational imagination which ensured that what has been “remain as happened. ” To remain as having happened means to enter into memories. But since we cannot rule out the absence of a future that remembers us, panic seeps into the signature of the present time as an inevitable feature of it. Before the panicked world-view, the entire historical context disintegrates and the usual impermanence of things suddenly turns into a panicked impermanence. It is as if a black hole appeared in time into which all that has happened within time disappears. Vertigo in the background, a tear in the film of representations, a flavor of unreality and emptiness – and panic is the form in which the end-times are “there” for the insightful zeitgeist from now on. Put simply, panic is the post-Christian, neo-pagan version of the apoca- lypse; it arrives at the same time as the re-actualization of Greek motifs from the ancient fund and occupies the space left open by the receding Judeo-Christian interpretations of the last things. Ever since time has run out for historical messianism, the bell of panicked worldly experience has tolled once more.
This explains why today’s style of dissatisfaction with the world can be nothing other than a panicked one. What is not explained, however, is whether a panicked consciousness that pushed through to self-affirmation could be the stylistic principle of a post-Christian culture. Even less is said about the question of whether the
32 The Other Change
movements that present themselves as alternatives contain enough mental substance and lifestyle to bring about an alternative culture from their new attitude to the world in which the attitudes to life and interpretations of being human would take shape for the coming millennium. Only one thing is certain: the macabre undertone in the phrase “panicked culture” is not without reason. 2
This undertone not only insinuates the shift from religious apoca- lypse to post-religious panic, but it also foreshadows with an uncomfortable realism the coming era as a kind of earthly purgatory where sinners who can still be rescued must undergo dire courses of treatment. For one can only describe the due learning processes of the kind found at the level of great social and political systems in terms of a diabolical autodidacticism. In this view, the histori- cally moved planet appears to be something between hell and adult education, where the poor souls have to memorize the conditions for their own survival through a disastrous self-study.
In connection with these scandalous reflections, we engage those employed at the alternative front in a historical conversation. Why? Because it must be shown how the most militant dissatisfactions with the actual have a share in a very old history of dissatisfaction with the state of earthly affairs. The current alternatives are to some extent the partners and to some extent the heirs of epochal alternative movements whose beginnings date back to the “rise” of advanced civilizations. Consequently, today we are dealing not only with trivial efforts to reform bad global conditions such as fill the history books, but also with a completely newly constructed and organized alternative to a previous alternative movement. Ecologists, autonomists, fundamentalists, the neo-religious, Green pacifists – all of them get caught up in a very distant history of revolts and revolutions, where an older dissatisfaction with the world has already created its classical expression of it. To positively define the philosophical locus of today’s alternatives, we must distin- guish between two kinds of alternativity: the first (or metaphysical) type of disagreement with the world, which aims for transcendent beyond-worlds or utopian counter-worlds; and the second (or poetic) type of disagreement with the world, which sees the track that shows the way out in reality itself.
Panicked Culture – or: How Much Catastrophe Does a Person Need?
Let us begin with a succinct thesis: today’s alternatives are already the children of catastrophe. What differentiates them from earlier
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generations and makes them the most likely candidates for a panicked culture is their expert-like approach to the potential disasters that surround them. From a historical perspective, the alternatives are likely the first humans to cultivate a non-hysterical relationship to a possible apocalypse. For the first time ever, we do not have to imagine doomsday scenarios to see the writing on the wall. The current situation takes care of that sufficiently. Nowadays, the apocalypse calls attention to itself as if its name were in lights on Broadway. With dry professionalism, it writes its own letter of announcement. Apocalyptic alarm no longer presupposes religious uproar; warnings of the end-times do not imply that prophetic individuals have declared themselves to be the mouthpiece of transcendent revelations. The current alternative consciousness is characterized by what we might call a pragmatic attitude towards catastrophe. The catastrophic is now a category that no longer belongs to visions but to perception. Nowadays, anyone can be a prophet if they dare to say anything at all. In any case, catastrophe needs less an announcement than a transcript – linguistically, its place is not among apocalyptic promises but among the daily news and committee reports. The writing on the wall appears in ordinary language and the only thing that belongs to modern doomsday prophesies (aside from a spray can) is empirical data, such as that pertaining to the events of the year 1986, which has already attained symbolic features with its series of fatal accidents.
What can the expression “panicked culture” mean? Does panicked experience even allow for culture? To the extent that culture must be built upon expectations, repetitions, certainties, and institu- tions, does it not presume the lack, indeed the exclusion, of the element of panic? We vote for the opposite to be the case. It is only through proximity to panicked experiences that living cultures are possible – it is only the occasional experience of the extreme that exposes the temperate human region where we can cultivate what we are competent to do. One of the attributes of the Greek Pan was to be the god of the midday hour when the shadows are at their shortest and the world is dashed to the ground by light, holding its breath in his presence. The modern term “panic” forgets this connection between presence, revelation, and fright – the only thing it remembers is the kinetic motif of directionless escape. Above all, it no longer knows what is most important: bearable human life is always an island within the unbearable, and the existence of islanders is only ensured through the discretion of a subtly present ocean. The world that we are assured of is thus always placed against an either (Judeo-Christian) apocalyptic or (pagan) panicked background. But modernity wants presence without tears. It sees
34 The Other Change
culture only as a state of being where the existence of faucets answers the question about the origin of water, just as the problem of the origin of “truth” is taken care of through the dealings of scholars. A panicked culture would be immediately recognized by its respect for faucets; after all, it is possible that when you turn one on, the ocean comes out. It would be no different with the sciences, especially since they have been generating things for a long time now under which the world has the same right to cower as humans and animals once did under the panicked Greek light of midday.
A few questions are now inevitable. Does alternative culture then need catastrophe? Does it secretly approve of disasters, as people sometimes fear to be the case? Does it have to be addicted to calamity because only this creates a climate where alternative ideas gain popularity? Is catastrophe essential for the introduction of a new movement, like a teacher who eventually convinces even the most stubborn minds of his or her lessons? Do humans need catas- trophe because they must be educated and can only be educated by the school of worst possible scenarios? Consequently, are the real hopes of alternative movements not linked to disaster-didactic calculations – provided it is true that only a visual instruction of the worst can usher in a turn for the better?
It was in the days of the Harrisburg nuclear accident on Three Mile Island in 1979 that I really understood what disaster didactics meant for the first time. As the out-of-control reactor boiled and everyone held their breath to see if this infernal machine would explode, I noticed an uncanny phenomenon in myself and in others. Of course, no one could have any doubt about the devastation that an explosion of the nuclear reactor could cause, nor could anyone guarantee that what seemed to be a safe distance from accidents of this kind was actually safe. And yet at the time of Harrisburg, there was an option in the air in favor of the catastrophe; one could sense a sly sympathy with the explosive substances in the reactor casing. It was as if the deadly radioactive substances not only represented a physical quantity, but also contained a culturally critical message that deserved to be released. The small, immoralist neurosis in the face of the defective nuclear reactor was therefore not just a milieu-specific perversity, not just a sign of pyromania or evidence of an inclination towards the macabre within the human nervous system that is characterized by ever stronger stimuli to gain arousal. In it, a whole way of thinking came to light together with its dubiousness. Within its own logic, the option for the explosion was nothing more than an educational hypothesis about the didactic and mind-changing energies that radiate from actually occurring disasters.
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Only through Chernobyl did the underlying disaster-pedagogical implications of Harrisburg come to light. Indeed, if the worst has to occur before relearning can begin, then, from this perspective, the Harrisburg incident was “not bad enough. ” Because the big explosion failed to materialize, the Harrisburg disaster could not reach the level where disaster didactics develops its grim calcula- tions. It is the level where one believes that compelling connections between misfortune and insight can be formed. According to this dicey logic, such connections arise through an absurdly magnified application of the basic idea that those who do not listen will have to learn the hard way. In fact, disaster-pedagogical thinking promises that even the greatest calamity can be referred to a human scale – that is, into the field of sensible measures for preventing its repetition – through subsequent learning. Consequently, after Harrisburg, the term “warning disaster” made a career for itself in the vocabulary of alternative movements – a term that encapsulates the hope that disasters might penetrate our otherwise unteachable minds like probes and ignite new insights within them. 3
This desperate theory of learning shines a light on the state of the enterprise that has been calling itself Enlightenment since the eight- eenth century. It began as a utopia of an unforced guidance towards better understanding. By using the soft logic of an autonomous thinking that listens to the “voice of reason,” it wanted to eliminate the violence that cuts deep when it comes to learning the hard way. In the meantime, however, even the well-meaning old Enlighteners are not very far from adding disaster to the curriculum of humanity as the last pedagogical tool, if it is really the only way that something can still be learned. Thus, we can see how classical Enlightenment, with its concept of truth based on argumentation, has been pitifully put on the defensive. No one seriously believes that something essential can still be reached on the path of listening. “Let learning the hard way be welcome; for listening has failed. ”4 There are more than a few tireless members of the old Enlightenment troop who are already at the point of being glad if at least one treatment of learning the hard way in the face of disasters that cut deep could contribute a little bit to the establishment of truth in the “civilizing process” at the very last moment (oh, this word that burns the tongue! ). And thus emerges the strange affective pull towards actually occurring doom. The catastrophe will show them! The real present calamity apparently closes the gap between argument and disclosure, bridging the distance between the appeal to the imagi- native consciousness and its overpowering with existing evidence. The catastrophe is thus the apt reversal of a miracle – no wonder, and why is it not one? Because it is a direct consequence of what the
36 The Other Change
deluded activists are up to. The real present catastrophe thus attains a formidable truth-theoretical function: it complements the mere argument and brings massively into presence what can otherwise only be imagined. By bridging the evidence gap between listening and learning the hard way, the didactic catastrophe places the epiphanic truth of an event above the discursive truth of the imagi- nation. And thus the problem of learning from disasters leads to the logical center of enlightenment and modernity. Modernity is, after all, the enterprise where human intelligence is not content with just giving voice to right pronouncements about the world; it can only be satisfied if it has actively ensured that the right things happen to the world as a whole. But this active concern for what is right is in the most radical crisis. For if now even human-made catastrophe ought to impose a tax on learning how to do things right, then it is a fatal testament to the way that modernity has strayed from its conception of learnable right action under the guidance of success and truth. 5
The hope for a way to learn from the worst thing at the very last minute is difficult to distinguish from despair about the possibility of learning at all.
Four brief comments will illustrate the risks and limitations of disaster-didactic thinking below. It is only from the failure of this desperate learning theory that the reason why alternative cultures will only be possible as a panicked culture becomes plausible. These observations are commentary on the question that is on the lips of every contemporary: what more needs to happen before something happens? Practically oriented, it could also say: how big would a catastrophe need to get before it radiates the universal flash of insight that we are waiting for? From what point on would disasters be the self-evident grounds for radical mentality-changing insights? How bad does it have to get before it can get any better? Does it have to get bad at all? Does the underlying link between misfortune and insight have validity?
It is clear from the very first remark how problematic an answer to these questions would be, indeed how problematic the questions themselves are already. Clearly, there is no quantitative measure that could be adopted as the “didactically” sufficient size of the disaster. In various ways, the conscious minds of humans have the ability to stay immune to disastrous evidence. Presumably, the silent majority always stays outside the possible radius of damage of great disasters. Additionally, the citizens of the modern epoch have long experienced their era as a fateful event that cannot be mapped onto any reasonable will. The second fatalism that is dawning on all sides belongs to an awareness that realizes the extent to which things already occur differently than one might think. Moreover,
The Other Change 37
the most powerful groups of modern societies have politically, ideologically, entrepreneurially, and vitally invested so much in the most dangerous mobilization techniques that even accidents on the largest scale must not cause any doubts on grounds of principle about the course and speed of the civilizing process. In these circles, mentalities exist that are irreversibly, extremely set on mobilization; in the bunker of their automatic responses, they can hold their own against any agitation. Even evidence of actual disaster ricochets off such structures.
For them, revelation does not take place. In the end, minds are tougher than facts, and those who did not want to listen when it was still possible will also make themselves immune to learning the hard way, too.
If these considerations are true, then the insinuation that Harrisburg was not yet bad enough to learn anything decisive from becomes doubly transparent in its questionability. Obviously, catastrophe is conceived here as a quantum which, according to allopathic principles, produces stronger effects at higher dosages. With this logic, we immediately get into the most uncomfortable escalation. The victims of Chernobyl will have been lying in terrible agonies for a long time when a zealous didactics announces itself and says: Chernobyl was not terrible enough either, because, after all, the International Organization of Soldiering On is holding it together more determinedly than ever. The relentless consequence of this can only be that more has to happen – but to what extent?
The pedagogization of disaster eventually also fails because of an aesthetic subversion. Since metaphysical or moral meanings for major accidents are no longer available to us in the modern age, images of disaster can no longer be easily provided with a moral key. To the extent that the “readability” of catastrophes ends, their phenomenal and aesthetic visibility is revealed. On the day after the Challenger disaster in 1986, I was giving a lecture on the criteria of post-modern aesthetics at the Academy of Art in Karlsruhe which was followed by a discussion with the audience. There, a not so young student in a black shirt and grey hat spoke up and declared almost triumphantly that he had enjoyed the televised images of the exploding rocket. Hearing that confession, I stood there for a moment, speechless – you are suddenly in the eye of the storm, knowing that this was said from within the core of modern kines- thetics where the world is spun into a series of “images. ” With such memories, you remain skeptical towards the prospect of epiphany through disaster evidence. In the best-case scenario, a demonic Kantianism would emerge, which would transfer the concept of the sublime from The Critique of Judgment to reactor explosions and the view of biologically dead oceans.
38 The Other Change
The second remark on disaster didactics connects to the topos of “learning through mistakes,” wherein humanity’s oldest theory of learning is stored. It contains the insight that only a child who has had a burn can understand fire. Because intelligence is not a theoretical quantity but represents a behavioral quality of creatures in an open environment, it must go through the school of fire. Without experiencing burns, you have no idea how to cope with life. The world is not always good and does not tolerate all kinds of behavior. A warning pain must be engraved in the nervous system in order to reliably embody the selectivity predetermined by the world. Human wisdom has been bound to the engrams of suffering from time immemorial. Thereby, disaster-didactic thinking seems initially justified, because it is based on the assumption that humanity make sense of nuclear damage in an epoch-spanning learning process. This sense-making would be identical to the act we are facing in the “drama of the history of species. ” Because humanity enters its path into the unprecedented as a student without a teacher, it would have to teach itself what it cannot learn from anyone else. It must endure being fated to an auto-didactics as a matter of life and death. Its goal of study sounds like a fairytale: it is supposed to transform itself through its own power from a coercive community of deadly stupidity into an ecumenism of intelligences. Evidently, outrageous demands are being made of its auto-didactic genius. In a study of itself that involves many victims, we will see if humanity can teach itself about itself and its planetary situation, or if it still proves to be a learning-impaired subject.
The question of the learning ability of our species touches on a critical point: humanity is a priori learning impaired because it is not a subject, but an aggregate. When we speak of humanity, we are creating a general term that can only haunt speculative sentences in the form of an allegorical subject – sentences that the Age of Enlightenment made carefree use of. What appears to be a crisis of enlightenment universalism today is in fact a transition from the study of humanistic allegories of the species to that of a hard ecology of local intelligences. This ecology begins only after the completed insight that humanity has no self, no intellectual coherence, no reliable organ of wakefulness, no self-reflection capable of learning, no identity-building common memory. 6
That is why humanity cannot be wiser than a single human being – indeed, even as a whole it cannot become as wise as an individual who has learned the hard way. The aggregate we call humanity has no body of its own with which to learn the hard way – no hand by which to learn first-hand – but rather a foreign body, its place of residence, the earth, which does not become wise, but transforms
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into a desert. The classic model of learning from harm collapses before this fact. All future learning processes at the level of the species will be fraught with an almost intractable problem of trans- mission: the question of how acquired and embodied intelligence can be transferred from one who has become wise to the unwise; more generally speaking, how individual insights can be incorpo- rated into social institutions and technical systems. Only individuals can be wise; institutions are well designed, at best.
The third remark concerns itself not with the subjectlessness of “humanity,” but the subjectlessness of disaster – if I may use this manner of speaking. Our everyday understanding shows an inkling of this when it follows its usual habit of interpreting great disasters in a fatalistic way. We think of fatality under the schema of the anonymous event. In contrast, it is crucial for disaster didactics to view even the most massive disaster under the schema of personal action. Disaster as event does not have the same grammar as disaster as action. Of the first, we say: it happened, it fell upon us. Of the second: someone did it, someone let it get to this point. It is only when the disaster has a subject – you could also say a culprit – that it makes sense to interpret it as a stimulus for self-critical relearning. In order for learning to become possible after disasters, a subject must be assumed that sees the disaster as their own and refers to it as their own deed.
Only disasters that are “committed” by someone can form this arc of reflection which confronts the perpetrator with themselves while bypassing the event. It is only disaster as action that creates this recourse which presents the seemingly impersonal calamity to a particular subject as their previously hidden “true reality. ” Understanding the disaster therefore means setting in motion a kind of oedipal investigation: only insofar as the disaster that happened is an indirect crime does the investigation expect metanoia, rethinking, and repentance from an unconscious or hybrid perpetrator. Thus, here, as in any thinking that judges morally, both the interpre- tation of the event as deed and the identifying of a culprit are indispensable.
It remains questionable, however, if an accident like that of Chernobyl can be attributed to an offender. Aside from the opera- tional aspects and general breakdown risks, isn’t Chernobyl also a result of epistemological and socio-cultural developments in an anonymous and unattributable way, which build upon premises that are thousands of years old and lead to nuclear technology? Is it still possible to seek culprits and assign responsibility in processes of this scale? It would be justified if it could be shown that this entire development is an occurrence where the occidental type of human
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theoretically works out their unmistakably peculiar will, realizes it technocratically, and enforces it in the form of a planetary politics that enslaves nature. The perpetrator could then be identified as the subject of a Western culture of will and understanding, and traced back to every single citizen of modernity, provided that each of us is made up of an objective complicity with this imperialist, nature- consuming ego. All those who participate in modernity would thus be members of its primordial horde that is bound together by the collective crime of matricide.
Let us assume for a moment that it could act the way that this speculation presumes. Don’t we have to break off the investigation and follow the modern culprit-self into the fate of its self-becoming? What has awakened the will to dominate nature in this culprit? Who or what gave the culprit the weapons to do their deed? What history could in the end turn this dominant subject into a master of nuclear fire as well? How was the will for domination positioned within it, and what instances of takeover provided access to exactly this desire and this ability? Is a compulsion to desire perhaps prior to this will to power? Is a certain formation of a self by its very nature as disastrous as a nuclear reactor explosion? Does this self that has attained the power to destroy nature not also happen to “itself” like an anonymous disaster? And is this why the potent agency and ability of modernity relates to itself as suffering and powerlessness?
These questions are being asked to show that even disasters that have been “committed” can ultimately never fit into the context of deed and doer. In them, the boundary that separates the logic of responsible action from the logic of the tragic act is crossed. In the tragic deed, not only is the offense the product of the perpetrator, but the perpetrator themselves is the result of what happened. The dramatic-tragic consciousness crystallizes only at the event itself and no “learning process” follows because the tragic deed makes it clear that the disaster and its perpetrator are made of the same substance. Thus, Chernobyl could belong to the tragedy of ability and desire, where the doers and their disaster emerge from the same happening – from the history of cognitive mobilization of the subject and the planet.
The fourth remark pertains to the relationship between truth and disaster itself. If disaster didactics sheds a light on the agony of the Enlightenment, then an agony of truth is simultaneously at play. In fact, the idea that disaster “reveals something” is only so suggestive to us because we have always associated revelation – in Greek, apocalypse – with truth. Truth – insofar as it “appears” – has ever been presented as a coming-to-light or being evident. In this respect, every kind of enlightenment contains a drama of light
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or illumination – without this photological element, we would not know what knowledge means at all and why it is always the bright side of things that faces in the direction of knowledge. If, for us, the possibility of a realization of “truth” is tied to the coming to light of previously dark things, then the younger Enlightenment as light- emitting process has also made extensive investments in this lighting model of truth.
But we are witnessing the death throes of truth. The old alliance between light and truth – the photological pact of occidental ration- ality – has been torn ever since we have been able to use what gives light to bring death. Nuclear weapons also make philosophical history. From a photological point of view, truth takes place as an event of exposure on a three-step scale: it increases from a natural or artificial lighting of dense bodies that become visible through their self-sufficient reflection to an active and invasive fluoroscopy of the bodies until the bodies are finally transformed entirely into light. The photological Enlightenment encompasses all and any objects from the point of view of their luminosity, transparency, trans- formability into light. If Enlightenment has a dramatic finality in itself, it is located in the eradication of the initial difference between light and matter as it appears in ordinary lighting via a terminal transformation of all matter into light. As long as Enlightenment operated in the middle (analytical) stage of an X-Ray logic, it could not foresee the end of its movement towards light – the light-kinetic dimension of the process only became transparent in the moment that modern nuclear physics actually reached the level of a radical thinning of matter. The cutting-edge technologies under the rule of light are a consequence of the photological process in that they turn matter directly into “light” – brighter than a thousand suns. But what can we still see in this light? Is the light of a nuclear explosion one in which the world would learn something about its situation? Or does not this light itself turn into the last reality, into the disap- pearance of everything in a lightstorm? Instead of shedding light on the state of things, the thinning light eliminates them, together with those who wanted to understand them.
Something of these paradoxes takes effect in the speculations of disaster didactics as well. Those who count on learning from disaster expect the explosion to illuminate dark minds. The warning disaster is itself supposed to be the disaster warning. The actually occurring transformation into light is supposed to critically examine our civilizational process. Those who follow this logic to its conclusion will arrive at a fatal conclusion: only an apocalypse could act as a convincing warning against an apocalypse. Only an actual disaster could provide evidence for a truth that must occur both
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apocalyptically and in the present in order to become completely true. Thus, the only disaster that makes sense to all is a disaster no one survives.
When all of the possibilities to transform disaster into pedagogy are played out and have been understood in the context of their necessary failure, then all the pathways for the history-making reflex of fleeing forward will be blocked. The powers that produce the catastrophe and at the same time want to be saved from it suddenly pile up on top of themselves. It is not “Save yourself if you can! ” but “Recognize the situation! ” that becomes the slogan of the age. And thus the situation emerges where panicked consciousness could develop into culture. Everything before that point remains the bourgeoisie with rocket ships. It is only through the experience of panic that one is freed from didactic illusions – it is the bridge to a consciousness that no longer hopes to gain something from disaster, certainly no civilization-critical revelations. Panicked culture begins where mobilization in the form of a permanent flight forward ends. For this reason, the “history” of a panicked culture would play the role of the chronic end of history itself – the kinetic motives that have heretofore made history would be tamed in it by way of an explicit culture whose efforts would be to prevent the invasion of new history-making impulses from precisely the post-historic knowledge of the catastrophe of historical mobilization. This, a previously esoteric form of consciousness (referred to as enlight- enment within spiritual jargon), would become a public matter. In a panicked-ecstatic culture, entire populations would perform an act that was previously only done by a scattered few: the leap of consciousness through time to the end-times and the subject’s exit from the causality of flight and hope. Thereby, the post-historical culture of panic would be the only alternative to the culture of historical mobilization, which already has no more history left ahead of it – just a countdown.
The First Alternative: Metaphysics
Alternative cultures come into existence when humans find themselves in an irrevocable disagreement with the world. For this reason, today’s individuals with an alternative view cannot be seen as the inventors of the alternative. They are not the first ones to have their discontent with the world become confident and fundamental. In order to understand the meaning of alternative culture in a more radical sense, we must dig around in the submerged layers of our tradition of ideas. If we go back a few millennia, the archeological
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dig for traces of an old protest against the world will make a find. There, we encounter sediments containing the beginnings of high forms of religion and metaphysical interpretations of the world. What metaphysics presents as a philosophical phenomenon is not up for discussion; so too, its basic conceptual structures and the variants of its architectonics are of no concern to us at this moment. Metaphysical statements made by humans are only of interest to us insofar as a crucial chapter in the prehistory of discontent with the world connects to their emergence. We interpret the appearance of metaphysical forms of thought as an indication of the increased need for harmony and abstraction in the face of increasing social and existential dissonance. In this respect, metaphysics could not be separated from its pathogeneses out of the malaise in the high cultures. To convince ourselves, it suffices to see how the most painful fundamental experiences of human existence are hidden beneath the fabric of fundamental metaphysical words: the One, substance, reason, God, logos, cosmos, soul, immortality, idea, order. Admittedly, they are experiences that always appear within the pure text of metaphysics as something that has already been overcome. The purpose of the pure text is to report the success of metaphysical harmonization efforts. In it, we can already hear the logical triumphs of consciousness over the dark, hurtful world.
As people of today, we can no longer easily understand the texts of such victory reports, because we have come to use different weapons from the old metaphysicians in our battles against world- weariness. But if we go back to the fundamental experiences through which metaphysics was first crystallized, we can see how metaphysics emerged as the very core of the first alternative cultures. These experiences are probably inaccessible to today’s everyday consciousness at first, but they are available to contemporary conscious life at the very least when it comes to situations where treatments from modernity’s pharmacy are no longer helpful. Ironically, the modern-day crisis includes involuntary access to the metaphysical attempt at world management – after all, we are watching (with a perplexity that befits primal peoples rather than late cultures) an age of a second helplessness emerge on the passive side of modernity’s status as a jack of all trades. As a result, the present time, which is philosophically based on its fundamentally post-metaphysical position, has created a piquant community of experience with the old metaphysics-kindling world conditions. The threats that loomed over the world at the end of the metaphysical era reveal its beginnings as well, so much so that restorations seem inevitable. One glance at the New Age scene in North America and Central Europe gives the impression that we are dealing with a
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gigantic remake. A holistic consciousness industry has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic and it lives on metaphysical plagiarism. To put it a bit more amicably: countless contemporaries spontaneously quote from early metaphysical sources to articulate aspects of their current feelings about the world. They deem it necessary to skip over several millennia to find answers for their own questions. A portion of modernity must fall back on archaic speeches to say things for which no usable modern words exist.
What questions are we referring to? I will only discuss two here, which were essential in motivating the upsurge of thinking towards metaphysics: the inequality between different fates in life and the fear of all-devouring time. As for the first of these experiences, it was brought into language through the classical verses of the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal (one could add, with the mild somnam- bulist cynicism that is sometimes the privilege of poets):
Many will of course have to die down there
Where the heavy oars of the ships sweep
Others reside above near the helm
Aware of the migration of the birds and the lands of the stars. 7
This poetic meditation aims at balancing the inequality of destinies by way of a metaphysical world-housekeeping. On that higher level which constitutes the scene of metaphysical movement, everything is both closely linked and haphazardly connected to everything else; thus, the misfortune of the one comes together with the fortune of another in a sublime harmony.
But a shadow falls from those lives Across and into the others’ lives, And the light are bound to the heavy As the air is bound to the earth.
Through an awareness of connection, an evident scream to the heavens becomes music to the metaphysician’s ears. This desperate need for music is driven by the evidence that human destinies are unstoppably unequal and that there is no compensation for this inequality on a human level. Without a doubt, this experience points to the emergence of hierarchized large-scale societies and the separating of the fate of those at the top and those at the bottom. From there on out, the social world appears like an enchanted galley where rowing slaves perish below deck while a comprehensive view develops above in which the misery of others is redeposited into the harmony of the whole.
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Many fates weave alongside my own,
All are interconnected by a common existence And my part is more than simply this life’s Slender flame or narrow lyre.
The metaphysical impulse demands that thinking make this climb out of the inequality and confusion of life into an order-creating contemplation, and insofar as efforts towards order of this kind simply belong to the very nature of thinking, we can never entirely eliminate the metaphysical or “cosmic” holdings on the activity of the mind – unless this activity were willing to become as incom- prehensible and confused as the reality it works on, but then we would lose the difference between mind and reality and confused de facto existence would no longer relinquish any work to the mind. Some mystics have indeed taken this path of indifference. But for metaphysical thinking its task is entirely unambiguous: to show messy life the pathways that lead to order. For us, the claim to validity of the old metaphysical cosmic ideas of order fails because of a simple logical distinction: an ordering contemplation is not the contemplation of order per se. Music and metaphysics rise up against the noisy physics of life as an unstoppable first alternative because the will to order is at the very root of the entire impetus. Metaphysical study turns away from the desolate “surface” of things and looks down into depths or up into heights, from where intel- ligible order shines towards us, if we are willing to look away from the all too visible and not see through the intrusive glow. In order to advance to such order, the not yet refined eye and the not yet spiritualized ear must shift to more abstract forms of hearing and seeing – to seeing with the third eye, hearing with the third ear. This alternative – metaphysical seeing and hearing – is always already an overseeing and overhearing as well; a hearing all the way to the end and a seeing through, a not listening and a looking away, a right hearing and seeing, an inner listening and a seeing inward. The metaphysical break with the “superficial” world of appearance grips the organs of perception first: to ensure the effect of order, they have to spiritualize themselves and withdraw from the gross turbulence of what is present and existing. With that, the first step into an “enlight- enment” is made – it leads to a culture of transparence where all existing things shift from the state of being naturally lit or shaded to that of a logical transillumination. Thus, the analytical mythos moves into its invasive phase. The analytical mythos no longer sees the world as a sovereign play of light and dark onto illuminated non-luminous things; instead, it becomes the object of constant transillumination where a permanent intellectual light pierces
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through fleeting phenomena to reach eternal structures and bring them to definitive determinations. There are grounds for suspecting that the history of nihilism begins with the advent of such transillu- mination ontologies. If so, this history would be identical to the fate of analytical rationality which sees right through the facts to grasp their cause, through appearances to see their essence, and through structures to understand their function. This suspicion contradicts the vulgar idea of nihilism that sees the phenomenon as a modern affair and derives it from the collapse of the metaphysical “sphere. ” In reality, what has gone by the name of nihilism for a hundred years could only be the latest explication of the basic nihilism that has inhered in the transilluminating, backwards-leading, and, from presently tangible appearances, refraining rationalizations of the world since their emergence.
Next to the irremediable affronts on thinking by the mysteries of inequality and dissonance, the experience of death and tempo- rality by all individual life plays a decisive role in the emergence of metaphysics. Essentially, they form one complex, and time and death are not two different experiences, but a single experience that consists of temporality. The eventual death of all individual life is already implied in the fact that everything real seems to exist “within time” and that nothing living can escape the decay that comes with the passing of time. Whatever exists in the passing of time must suffer from the illness of becoming and the injury of passing away. Whoever is born in the passage of time owes a death to nature. The Greek myth of Kronos who devours his children captures this idea in its pervasive morbidity. It speaks of life bound to time as fateful self-consumption. This idea of time has defined the Western “civilizing process” (ow! ) and modernity has advanced this “fall into time” (first registered by the old metaphysics) to a consummate “chrono-latry,” to quote Massimo Cacciari’s baroque term for the modern cult of time. 8 But what is obscured by the contemporary dictates of clocks was glaringly obvious in the early metaphysical experience of time: Chronos,9 the passing of time, is fundamentally a period of suffering, lack, failure – a deadline for the inevitable undoing of life.
Older metaphysical thinking was aware that the time of Chronos moves directly towards death. Metaphysics (Christian metaphysics above all) understood that, being mortals, we are zombies: the living dead, walking around in their own corpses with the ghastly pretense of being alive. Indeed, this perspective forces itself to be accepted by a thinking that has conceived of all individual life as falling prey to all-consuming time. Those who conceive of life as occurring within time and understand time as an indomitable process do not only see
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themselves as continuously dying but must also imagine themselves already as those who will have died. Together with their physical and moral being, they fall victim to Chronos – not just in retrospect, but at the outset. Life must cope with this outrage if it has understood the predicament of time in its universality. From that point on, one of the fundamental questions of conscious life is how it can cope with its irreversibility. Full of horror, the one who can imagine the passage of time with respect to their own existence will see their own flesh fall from their bones – flesh and bones that are already no longer really one’s own, but that we have been dispossessed of from the outset by all-devouring Chronos. There is a reminder of this kind of shock brought on by the sight of the ephemeral in the Buddhist legend that tells of the first time that Gautama ventures outside of his father’s protective palace and sees with his own eyes the suffering nature of life falling prey to time in the form of the sick person, the beggar, and the deceased. The shock penetrated so deeply that thereafter the young man no longer wished to have his “own” eyes so they could captivate him with the deadly play; he wanted to detach himself from the sense of sight and what it perceived both at the same time.
Emil Cioran is a witness to this kind of feeling in our time. In a text called Paleontology, he recorded the shudders of an unredeemed metaphysician when confronted with the flesh:
An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology. . . . Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed on its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves . . . the solidity, the seriousness of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life. 10
Flesh and bones stand in ontological opposition to each other. While the flesh obscenely passes away, a promise of eternity belongs
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to the essence of bones. With cynical self-sufficiency, the bones perform metaphysics’ rejection of this temporary life; grinning, they bode beyond flesh and transience. A gaze that looks upon the disease of life and remains unshaken can only emerge from empty eye sockets.