No More Learning

86
Eccentric Positionality: The Human Automaton as a Provocation of Anthropology
The modernity of Comenius' school projects is clear not so much from its limitless optimism, which seems decidedly antiquated today; it comes from the radically technical definition o'f school as an integral learning machine. It is not without reason that Comenius emphasized that the reformed school, this workshop (officina) of humaneness, must function in the manner of an automaton. To understand this term, one must take into account that the seventeenth century began to honour God Himself as the first builder of automata. The later equation of automatism and soullessness - undoubtedly the great- est success of anti-modern semantics after 1750 - was still a remote notion for the engineers of the time. For his own part, Comenius aimed to construct a perpetuum mobile. As his notes reveal, he was determined to make such an object public - assuming he succeeded
356
\'<lITH HUMANS
In
he to it norin his own interests, the completion of the perfect machineP Here the adventure of cognitive modernization hinges on the identification of nature as the epitome of the God-built automaton. It formed the basis of the prediction that man, viewed by Comenius as the co-operator Dei, could soon embark in earnest on the reconstruction of natural machines.
Barely a century later, the anthropomorphic automata from the workshops of Baron von Kempelen (who had been appearing with his purportedly mechanical Chess Turk since 1769), Pierre Jacquet-Droz (who presented his immortal androids the Writer, the Draughtsman and the Musician in 1774) and Friedrich Kaufmann (who displayed his automatic trumpeter to the public) were on everyone's lips. From that point on, Romantic literature, including opera, raved about the possibility of confusing humans with statues, dolls or machines - with nothing to suggest that this motif could ever be abandoned again in technological civilization. 88
As early as the seventeenth century, then, or the eighteenth at the latest, anthropotechnics opened up a second front by projecting the impulse of artificial human moulding onto android machines. For Comenius there was no doubt: school had to become a machine. Its task was to send perfect reproductions of humans into the world - as genuine, well-formed humans. Anyone curious as to the things of which pedagogy once dared to dream can obtain the necessary information here. Here we also witness the reactivation of a disposi- tion that was already familiar to the Stoic teachers: when they gave the students who chose the philosophical way the task of working on their 'inner statue', this contained the suggestion that the empirical human should step aside for the ideal figure.
The popularity of anthropology from the eighteenth century on was triggered not least by the doubling of humans as androids and their human observers. If one takes this into account, it becomes clear why Plessner's 'eccentric positionality', correctly understood, is not merely a trivial self-transposition to the place and view of others, or the familiar human phenomenon of stepping out of oneself in front of the mirror. It not only reflects the increased demands of multi-situative 'societies' on the art of role playing; in addition, it is irreducible to the disadvantage of being seen, as illuminated by Blumenberg, let alone to an attempt to tum the disadvantage of visibility into an advantage. As much as this observation might offer a plausible explanation for
357
THE EXERCISES 010 THE MODERNS 1S
as the flight into visibility,H9
The awareness of eccentricity among the moderns primarily ration-
alizes the shock of the ability to produce human automata; at the same time, it mirrors the amusement that can be derived from playing with mechanical doppelgangers. The statue is alive, it may harbour unpredictable intentions, it is moving towards humans - the modern theory of the human being is unimaginable without these suggestions. If the moderns still erected statues, it was no longer simply to set up moral and cultural models; they also did so to learn new things from within the statues. Were not the anatomical maps of Vesalius, in fact, macabre statues that revealed what the 'factory of the human body' looks like from the inside - though the viewer of the Vesalian plates would be reminded less of a workshop than of a ballroom acting as a venue for modernized danses macabres, performed by men composed of blood vessels and organs in all possible cuts and projections? Was not the message of the human skeletons appearing in the scientific collections of the nobility, and later also as demonstration objects in publicly funded schools, primarily an anthropological one, as they were presenting the basic framework of the android? And did not the plastinates of the Beuys imitator Gunther von Hagens, which have caused a worldwide furore since 1996 under the name 'Body Worlds', merely clarify the idea of the modern statue - the statue that exposes
the inner android?
The plausibility of the anthropological mode of reflection from
the eighteenth century onwards stemmed from the fact that every individual was now confronted with the stimulus of understanding themselves as a composite of android and real human. 9o Thus the venerable body-soul distinction presented itself in a new state of matter. The heyday of body discourses in Europe for the last two hundred years makes this constellation clear to this day. Following the publication of La Mettrie's L'Homme machine in 1748, the recipients of the physiological Enlightenment could see what happens when automata learn to speak and machines become nervous. It is not without reason that somnambulism - alongside the fear of being buried alive91 - was the central psychopathological symptom of the nineteenth century. The sleepwalker presents the inner android acting independently after the subtraction of the ego's consciousness, while live burial evokes the complementary phenomenon: the pure ego as it appears to itself after the interment of its body. The psychoanalysis of the early twentieth century (a contemporary mask of practising life in a world where even mourning is described as a form of work) still
358
ART WITH HUMANS
leU"UPC,,",", to map onto relationship ego and
The constant back and forth between the poles of the android id and the human ego gave rise to the soul drama of the mid-Modern Age, which was simultaneously a technical drama. Its topic is best summarized in a theory of convergence, where the android moves towards its animation while increasing parts of real human existence are demystified as higher forms of mechanics. The uncanny (which Freud knew something about) and the disappointing (on which he chose to remain silent) move towards each other. The ensoulment of the machine is strictly proportional to the desoulment of humans. As explained in the first and so far only philosophically elaborated theory of technology, that of Gotthard Gunther, the draining away of transcendently misunderstood subjectivity into the outer world was the key metaphysical event of the Modern Age. 93 The most commonplace observations already show how humans come under pressure on two fronts at once: not only have humans constituted a tiny minority compared to images for some time - for every Western person in the twentieth century there are countless visual documents and reproductions - they are also becoming a minority in relation to anthropomimetic cognition-mimetic machines, namely computers.
The Interdisciplinary Continent
It was one of the terminologico-historical mishaps of the Modern Age that it reserved the word 'scholasticism' for the higher education of the Middle Ages and its philosophical-theological treatises. By now it is unmistakably clear how far modernity itself gave rise to a scholastic world form determined by didactic-disciplinary impulses, far beyond what medieval school culture, which was de facto only a marginal element in its time, could hope to achieve. Modernity is hyper-scholasticism. It is based on the universal invasiveness of the school, as well as the reciprocal transfer of disciplines between the subsystems of 'society'. We have already hinted at the transfer of monastic discipline to school life. Its consequence was a transforma- tion of humans into pupils, one that continued through all temporally conditioned forms of pedagogy - including the school-hating move- ments in the twentieth century.
A sufficiently complex civilization history of the Modern Age would, furthermore, have to show how all systems of social action interlock in a constant play of discipline transfer:94 thus it is not only
359
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERN"
"">l\H<""L"~ one, discipline discipline - the most example being the amalgam of monastic groom- ing and sublimated combat training in the companies of the Societas Jesu. All three areas of disciplines - the monastic, the scholastic and the military - not only act as matrices for the ordering projects of the 'police' and the professional shaping of the civil service,95 but also radiate into the sphere of craftsmen's studios, factories and trading companies. Those who had known the strict alliance of discipline and compulsion in these areas could experience the harmonious coexist- ence of discipline and freedom in the arts. In this sense, Europe was the interdisciplinary continent from the virtuosity boom in the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, and has remained it to this day. As such, it forms a network of total schooling. The constant stimulation of the skilled by competitors was one of the effects of the network's increasing density. Educators have often overlooked the
fact that one's rival is the most important teacher of all.
The new media of the Gutenberg era contributed to the expansions of practice zones. Thanks to increasing literacy, all nation-states saw the growth of reading populations who were exposed to insistent media fitness training: they embodied the equation of humans and readers. They were joined in the twentieth century by the telephone and radio peoples, who were subsequently sublated into the world people or the Internet. Media fitness is the element in which modern populations elaborate both their global and specific fitness. Why passive media consumption leads almost inevitably to unfitness (in technical terms: how the stimulating connection described by Comenius between seeing for oneself, autopsia, and doing for oneself, autopragmasia) would have to be explained via an analysis of nega-
tive training.
Art History as Asceticism History
Without the ubiquitous modern fluidum of disciplinary increase, it would have been impossible for the art industry of the Renaissance and subsequent centuries to function. It is time that the frequently told history of the visual and musical arts in the Modern Age was presented as the history of artistic asceticisms. This would not only show the phenomenon of art in a different light; it would also cast a new spotlight on the art of mid-modernity, which can be understood in significant aspects as the production of an increasing suspension of
360
ART WITH HUMANS
art' concerns art in the art of pushing them towards higher achievements, one of its most important chap- ters deals with the production of artists in the early modern 'house of discipline'. Suffice it to recall Richard Sennett's remarks on the ethos of the crafts, specifically his excursus on the goldsmiths of the Renaissance. 96
Only in the area of art singing and instrumental music does one find an unbroken and self-evident tradition of practice awareness that has survived all changes of style, taste, compositional technique and performance tradition from the Renaissance to postmodernity. Ironically, it is the great instrumentalists who stand in the limelight almost daily, trained in 'decent impudence' before the audience, who wallow in applause and thus feed the welcome illusion of that high artistic freedom which one likes to imagine first at the mention of repressive discipline. Because of their overwhelming practice work- load, these virtuosos seem more open to Foucauldian analogies than almost any other disciplined group. Many of them see the parallels when one compares their practice rooms to prison cells, and the torment of etudes to solitary confinement at the instrument. 97 One cannot, however, deny the relatively voluntary nature of their suffer- ing through discipline.
Though it may, at first glance, seem plausible to present the history of newer instrumental music as a classic case of 'disciplinary power', it actually forms a chapter in the metamorphosis of passions. If one looks from Czerny's notorious didactic piano works, such as The School of Velocity op. 299, Forty Daily Exercises op. 337 or Nouveau Gradus ad Parnassum op. 822, to the didactic devotional texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Thomas aKempis' De imitatio Christi (written anonymously around 1418) or the Exercitationes spirituales by Ignatius of Loyola (published in Spanish in 1533, in Latin in 1541), they give an idea of the wide-ranging changes in the willingness among modern humans to accept passion in the course of barely more than four centuries. They extend from the instrument-less passion of the spiritually co-crucified, co-dead and co-resurrected, who follow mystical instructions, to the instrumental virtuoso culture of the early nineteenth century that embodies the Romantic compromises between the artiste's bravura and a de-selfing in the face of the instrument's demands - to say nothing of the inter- pretative requirements of the works themselves. Whoever scans this stretch will immediately realize why the art history of the Modern Age cannot be understood solely as a history of works. In addition, it
361
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
always constitutes the history of passion exercises and their transfor- mation into artistic passions.
What I call the second history of art, then, is primarily responsible for the training procedures of artists in their disciplines. It thus also deals with the process of de-disciplining in more recent art history. With this dual focus, it shifts the focus from the work to the artist by defining the production of art producers as an independent dimension of art history - which, incidentally, is the opposite of conventional biographism. This re-focused art history thus becomes a branch of the general history of practice and training. Firstly, it gives techni- cally precise answers to the question of high art's creation, in so far as this is possible through the analysis of practice forms. Secondly, it can offer new ways to interpret the paradoxes of mass culture, for example the phenomenon that some international stars in the pop music scene still cannot sing after decades on the stage - which is only mildly surprising if one knows that a mere fraction of their practice time is invested in singing, whereas they automatically assume that less than three hours of working out at the gym are insufficient for their stage show.
If one transposes the history of art into the framework of a history of asceticisms, one gains not least a new perspective on the complex of phenomena which Hans Belting presents as a 'history of the image before the era of art' in his study Likeness and Presence. 98 This knowledgeable synopsis of iconic painting from late antiquity to the Renaissance is not so much concerned with venturing into a zone 'before art' - this would mean delegitimizing the secular artist and subordinating him to the artist-priest. In his book on icons, Belting rather discovers the possibility of rethinking art history as the medium for a history of art-bearing asceticisms. The author stops halfway, admittedly, subsuming art history Ii contre ca! ur under a general 'image history' - for him, one of the few resolute art essential- ists today, this was certainly only a provisional solution, in which the sense of different qualities had not yet been sufficiently explored.
In reality, it is not the liquidation of art history in favour of a general image history that is the order of the day - otherwise, the mass photographing of everything and everyone would be the culmi- nation of the history of image productions. What needs to be made explicit is rather the historical alliance of art and asceticism, which has thus far only been discussed indirectly. If one accepts this themati- zation, iconic painting can offer the most plausible starting point for a grand narrative of the procession of image-creating energies through
362
ART WITH HUMANS
ages - not one
because the icon embodies work
here art is applied asceticism, and high asceticism sometimes high art. The sacred image is not only an object of selfless prayer and meditation; the very act of painting from which it ensues is one of the most concentrated forms of prayer, meditation and de-selfing. The reason why generations of icon painters have devoted themselves to a single motif for their entire lives is that, in the spirit of Hellenistic- Eastern Christianity, they were obliged to keep submitting anew to a transcendent image that would then materialize through their work. This monothematicism shows that the image is only permissible in the service of salvation; hence there is no question of a free choice of motif. Through its restriction to a few archetypes, spiritual painting is capable of furthering flight from the world or ethical secession. Icon painters could never entertain the belief that they had created the perfect image; it was a sign of Satanic temptation to think that the divine archetype had chosen them in order to take on a worldly mani- festation through their work. Only the transcendent archetype could exhibit the fullness of perfection, not its inner-worldly projection -let alone the painter, a subordinate iconopoiete, however dissolved his ego.
Icon painting thus embodies art at its ascetic maximum - and the minimum connection to the world. Once this point has been fixed, post-iconic European art history can be presented as a multi-stage process entailing a shifting, expansion, loosening and dissolution of art-enabling asceticisms. In the disappearance of the monopoly held by religious themes, it was the visual art of the Renaissance that liter- ally opened new windows. The liberation of polythematicism was the true mission of the 'art of perspective'. Seeing perspectivally, after all, means affording the world the third dimension, depth, and with it the dignity of contemplability. Now the icon was everywhere: any image could be a sacred one, and every window opened on a true manifes- tation. Salvation no longer meant liberation from the temptations of the world, but rather liberation to experience the wealth of earthly wonders. The world became everything worthy of being shown.
The encounter between the most elaborated discipline and the most comprehensive attention to the world created the conditions for extreme culminations of artistic success. The possibility of such heights is not limited to the classical centuries, of course, being essen- tially present in all later periods too - including the present. As is well known, however, this creates a less favourable environment for new peak productions, as the all-infiltrating phenomenon of mass culture,
363
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to mixture
erance, is averse any normative notion to which it is supposed to compare.
It is unnecessary to trace the problematic role of twentieth-century visual art in the dissolution of 'standards', even - and especially - in its advanced-civilized wing. One of its passions, after all, was the propagation of an art without disciplinary premises: the topic 'Duchamp and the consequences' will continue to occupy art critics for a long time, and it is by no means certain whether the reputation held by the church father of art after art will survive such examina- tion intact. 99
On Military Drill
A significant side branch of newer art with humans, one that only receives scant interest and even scanter sympathy among contempo- rary audiences, is evident in the military world of the early Modern Age. We know that soldierly practice extends back to the early periods of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean state forms - the famous Greek phalanx and the Roman legions were already considered marvels of combat training and the overcoming of psychological probability (that is, the human inclination to flee in the face of mortal danger) in their own time. Nor was Cicero's connection of the Roman word for the army, exercitus, to its main function of daily weapons prac- tice, exercitatio, ever completely forgotten in Europe. In addition, ancient accounts describe how in battle, group fitness - demonstrated in impressive formations and coherent collective movements - far outweighed individual fitness in man-to-man combat. Although the medieval military system could not ignore this information, knight- hood established an entirely different notion of battle and victory, and it was only in the early Modern Age that a new type of warfare on the basis of resolute formation training emerged once more. Without this, it would be impossible to understand the controlled 'evolutions' of troops, both on the battlefield and on the drill ground, between the seventeenth century and the innovations of Napoleonic mobile warfare.
In the common descriptions of early modern reconnections to Greek and Roman cultural patterns in the fields of architecture, visual art and literature, it has often been overlooked that this was almost contem- poraneous - displaced by a few generations - with a military 'return
364
ART WITH HUMANS
of antiquity'. It is associated in particular with the work of the army commander Maurice of Nassau (with contributions from William of Orange and his brother, John VI of Nassau-Dillenburg), which, next to contemporary military-theoretical impulses, was based most of all on the renewed interest in ancient military writers. Thanks to his sound knowledge of classical languages, Maurice was able to study the original texts of authors such as Xenophon, Polybius and Onasander, as well as Caesar, Livy and Suetonius, but most of all the tactical writ- ings of Aelianus and the Byzantine emperor Leo VI. From these works he took precise instructions for the development of modern training rules. In the military reform he carried out for the Dutch troops in the anti-Spanish war of liberation after 1589, he drew particularly on the instructions - already tested by the Greeks - to set up soldiers in rank and file, a division whose effects could still be observed on the barrack squares of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a sort of involuntary Platonism, Greek and Roman warriors alike had adopted the central principle of the Republic, namely that the 'state' is nothing but a great man (makranthropos) - unabashedly equating the 'state' (polis) with a disciplined military troop. Such ideas suited the intui- tions of Renaissance strategists, because they permitted the projection of geometric figures and homogeneous movements (evolutions) onto larger masses of 'political organisms'.
Consistently with this, Maurice took the descriptions - some of them extremely precise - of the 'elementary movements' of army groups from the ancient tactical manuals, including such figures as about-turns, wheeling, countermarches and others. Here the soldier is shaped into the lateralized human being, who must not confuse left and right under any circumstances. Furthermore, the ancients had already discovered the significance of a simple and effective language in which commands could be conveyed unambiguously to the troops. Under this influence, all armies of the burgeoning European nation- states followed the Orange-Nassau model and developed their own native military codes, consisting of short one-word commands that would be internalized on the barrack squares and subsequently fol- lowed on the battlefield. The sections of the new rule books devoted to the use of arms, in particular the still-unwieldy firearms - a subject on which the pioneers of the Orange reform could not learn much from the ancients - even contain first descriptions of complex move- ment sequences whose ergonomic precision would only return in the positivistic investigations of early sport science in the nineteenth century, as well as the instructions for production-line workers in the era of Taylorism. lOo These studies were not surpassed until the last
365
THE EXERCISES OF THE lYlODERNS
trammg studies procedures, grams showing the metabolic rates of top athletes, and individualized training instructions for sporting disciplines of all kinds and levels the order of the day.
Human-Fitters in General
We have seen how the privilege of conveying the absolute imperative gradually left the hands of religious speakers and passed to a number of secular agencies at the start of the Modern Age. Notable examples of these were the early modern prince as a patron of human produc- tion, the Baroque educator as an expert on the pansophic moulding of humans, and the Renaissance commander as a classically schooled virtuoso of massed human arrangements in the war of formations. In time, these were joined by throngs of advisers and prompters who no longer addressed their fellow humans as messengers of the metanoetic imperative, but as bringers of practical innovations that concerned technical advantages more than moral improvements. I call these the human-fitters of the Modern Age. They were highly significant in the moulding of the 'human material' of their time, for, unlike some phi- losophers, they never succumbed to the ideology of the unequipped, absolute human being. 101 The new fitters chose the pragmatic way to access humans: they saw them primarily as clients, that is to say as participants in the world of goods and things who were surrounded by obtainable objects, were stimulated by objects and practised with objects. They never spoke of the single necessity as long as they could promote useful innovations. They suggested to their contemporaries that they should change their life through participation in current artificialities and raise their existential tonicity, and not least their competing power, through new means of information, comfort and distinction. This new market undermined the archaic either/or of ethical difference: now fundamentalists could transform themselves into customers, believers could become readers, and escapists could turn into manifest media users. Whoever wanted to change their life found themselves amidst an ever-widening horizon of life-augmenting and life-increasing accessories - these are the strongest attractors in the modern deluge of commodities, which is often unjustly described only in terms of consumerism. Their acquisition is tied to a share in elevated fitness chances and expanded gratifications. This extends from the first editions of humanist authors to flat rates for the net-
366
ART WITH HUMANS
from
von Berlichingen's day to the hi-tech implants of
the present, from the coaches of Emperor Maximilian's time to the luxury jeeps for the mobility elite of the last petroleum years.
The human-fitters are no mere sellers or market criers peddling accessories for an up-to-date life. If one takes their function as seri- ously as is absolutely necessary in the face of their significance for the material equipping of modern existence, one observes that what they offer is frequently no less than world improvement in discreet amounts - such as the late medieval invention of eyeglasses, without which reading and living in the Gutenberg era would have been inconceivable. 102 Even Petrarch, it is written, already made use of such a reading aid from the age of sixty. Modern paper also falls into the category of world improvements from the production line; this is the source of the pandemonium of commodities that are brought to the modern audience via printers, publishers, newspaper makers, cartographers, writers, scholars and journalists. Members of the paper-based professions here act as discreet drill instructors for modern humans. They change the life of every individual without reaching for their whole existence.
The anthropotechnic effects of these services and products - the competence-elevating dynamic and the expansion of the operational horizon - are generally only granted full approval in their early days. At the beginning of an innovation it is the difference between users and non-users that is most apparent, while in the phase of market sat- uration, its entropic and abusive effects attract attention. That is why Comenius and Karl Kraus could not hold the same opinion about the blessings of the Black Art. As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.
This background enables us to understand a fact that is sympto- matic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the bur- geoning modern world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvement was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the
367
OF THE MODERNS
early
general training for contemporary performance ' v H . . . . ' - H
thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de {acto usually lead to weakenings.
Finally, we should speak of modern bankers, who, because of their role as lenders for people who seek to improve their situation, and, as business actors, often actually do so, prove the most effective motiva- tors for an intensifying change. Their work shows how a substantial part of the improvement imperatives under which the moderns live stem from the arcanum magnum of the modern property economy. If one formulates it explicitly, one stumbles on the categorical impera- tive of debt service: economize in such a way that, through an efficient use of resources, you can always be sure of being able to repay credit on time. The credit stress that forces growing populations of debtors into shape is a source of willingness to innovate that no theory of creativity has yet adequately acknowledged. As soon as one under- stands that modern disciplinings are based neither on the relationship of 'master and slave' nor on the opposition of 'capital and labour', but rather on the symbiotic antagonism of creditors and debtors, the entire history of money-driven 'societies' must be rewritten from scratch.
368
11
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics
In Praise of the Horizontal
In modernity, the metanoetic imperative increasingly changed into a prescription of 'outward application'. Its dissemination from the phil- osophical and monastic sphere into late aristocratic and bourgeois circles, and later also into proletarian and lower middle-class groups, reinforced the tendency towards de-spiritualization, pragmatization and finally the politicization of the dictate of change. Thus countless individuals in the centuries of modernization could follow the call to change their lives by opening the door to the typical products of their time. The magical paper products of the Gutenberg era - Bibles and non-Bibles alike - reached many, if not all, households over the years, decades and centuries. Whoever dealt with them seemed eo ipso on the better path. Printed texts accustomed their users to the dynamic of their time, which was still entirely opaque to them: that new media spread old content until different circumstances provide new content. This is in turn kept in circulation by the ageing media until the appearance of newer ones, which recycle the old media along with their old and new content.
What is decisive in all that followed is the observation that the demand for self-change and reversal no longer affected the change- disposed consciousness only from above: it need not always be the light from the vertical that casts the zealot to the ground before Damascus. The bright streak on the horizon towards which we wander on the ground now takes on a new spiritual and moral value. If the east is red, it cannot be a mistake to walk in that direction. The Reformation abolished the spiritual privileges of monastic life, as every point in the world is equidistant from grace. This changed the
369
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
preconditions for a radical rejection of the world in their most sensi- tive point. If the ascetics in their strict orders were no closer to the light than the laymen in public offices and workshops, the latter could also find opportunities to advance spiritually by worldly means. The Enlightenment was able to follow on directly from this. And more than this: since the beginnings of the lighting policies that gave rise to the lumieres, one could imagine the path to the illumination of all things as a gentle upward slope on which anyone with a vaguely good will who understood the signs of the times could move forwards. An inarticulate urge from within was now to be sufficient in order to find the right path; where there is an urge, there is a way forwards. From the eighteenth century on, a constant striding along moderately rising paths was rationalized as the authentic mode of progress. Cultura non facit saltus. 103 World improvement is the good thing that needs time. 104
It is impossible to overstate the consequences of the shift towards a moderation of ethical standards; the tempering of aims restored an awareness of the moral chromaticism of the real. The ethical distinc- tion moved to the level of nuances. It not only gave tepid Christians back their clear conscience; it even granted the worldlings precedence in the quest for the good life - in fact, it made it possible after mil- lennia of spiritual discrimination to rehabilitate the worldly life as a positive movement in the horizontal, provided it showed a certain upward tendency. Whoever denied or dismissed this tendency was immediately reactionary; whoever was not content with it would dream sooner or later of a vertical exit from anything that seemed horizontal, continuous or foreseeable: of revolution.
Progress as Half-Price Metanoia
Thus the idea of progress and development in modernity transpires as the worst enemy of old-style radical metanoia. It deprives the steep old-ascetic vertical of its plausibility, relegating it to the domain of 'fanaticism'. This change lies behind the thousandfold repeated misreading of modernity as the era of secularization. Certainly Christianity lost its predominance in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, but only a few Enlightenment zealots established a form of 'humans alone' movement that slammed shut all doors to the beyond and sought to transfer everything unconditionally to the realm of immanence. The general populace had always retained a vague awareness of transcendence, even in the supposedly secular
370
THE AVTO-Ol'ERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
simultaneously SUpposlt! on a
reality 'piecemeal supranaturalism', applying it also to himself. This disposition was perfectly suited to the pragmatic immanentism of the Modern Age, as well as the good logical manners of academia and the educated audience, and it is this familiar attitude that is attracting attention once more in the rumours currently circulating of a 'post- secular society'.
The central moral-historical event of this epoch was therefore not secularization, but rather the de-radicalization of the ethical distinction - or, if one prefers, the de-verticalization of existence. This is precisely what is meant by the once-great word 'progress'. The discreet spiritual sensation of the Modern Age was that the middle paths were now the ones leading to salvation. The moderation of demands for a radical disavowal of ancient Adam and his corrupt milieu gave worldliness a new dignity. They contributed to bringing about the cultural climate change in favour of a fundamental neophilia. It is unnecessary to demonstrate here how the inclination to welcome the new gave the Modern Age its futurist orientation. Since Hans Blumenberg'S central work, its debt to the rehabilitation of curiosity has been known. lOS
In its quieter periods, especially 1648-1789 and 1815-1914, and once more from 1945 to the present day, the newer era was, all in all, an age of half-price metanoia. In these times one could safely go along with the 'development' driving forwards grosso modo and let old Adam live in a bourgeois guise. To consider oneself one of the justi- fied, one of the good, it was sufficient to be in step with the times and follow the general trend of progress.
From a critical point onwards, the reversal of consciousness was even supposed to take place for free, simply by remembering one's natural goodness: Rousseau even managed to proclaim Adam the true human being and denounce all attempts by civilization to educate him, better him and make him strive upwards as aberrations. To this day, we do not know what caused the deeper culture rupture in recent centuries - Rousseauism, with its doctrine that true nature is free for all, or Leninism, with its fierce re-raising of the price for changing the world and humans. The latter spawned activists who prided themselves on large-scale killing for the good cause, while the former seduced countless educated men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into believing that one could restore the human being's inner truth by doing away with all cultural trappings and artistic superstructures. 106
The half-price metanoia that defined the moral modus operandi 371
THE EXERCISES OF THE lv10DERNS
compromise seH-improvement world improvement. While the former was still entirely the business of the change-willing individual, the latter depended on the perform- ances of the teachers, inventors and entrepreneurs who populated the social field with the results of their activity - pedagogical results on the one side, technical and economic results on the other. As far as changes of method are concerned, one notes how the emphasis increasingly shifts from the practising self-influence of the individual to the effects of teachers and inventors on the many from without. When Seneca wrote to his only student, meum opus es, this was barely more than a motivating turn of phrase, not to mention a charming expression of pedagogical eros. He himself knew best of all that even in the demanding relationship between master and student, everything ultimately depends on the latter's willingness to mould
themselves.
Things look rather different when the modern school and the guild
of human-fitters set about their work: their life-changing intentions are undeniable, but their angle of attack is chosen in such a way that there can be no doubt as to the primacy of the outside influence. The early school drill has always pre-empted the student's own perform- ance; syllabuses lay down the courses of study before it can even occur to pupils that they might have an interest of their own in this or that subject; and for the buyers of competence-expanding devices, a possible contribution of their own is essentially meaningless from the start compared to the performance on offer. Each time it is the optimization from without that keeps the upper hand, even when the inner sediments of tuition and the habitual use of life-heightening means - works of art, prostheses, vehicles, communication media, luxury items etc. - become second nature for students and users.
World Improvement as Self-Improvement
These observations can be translated into a distinction: in the prac- tising life of the spiritual-ascetic, virtuosic or athletic type, the agent has a self-improving influence on themselves via the direct route of daily training. On the path of world improvement, by contrast, they become a user of objective optimization tools that modify their ethical status indirectly at most, albeit not insignificantly. This dis- tinction directly concerns the way in which the call to change one's life modifies the existence of the individual. As we have seen, where
372
IN THE AUTO-OPERA TIVEL Y SP ACE
IS at
business jargon - existence comes under a steep vertical tension: it
imposes the passion form of the individually chosen field on life, whether that of the 'religious', artistic, political or sometimes also the sporting sphere. If, on the other hand, the half-price imperative is adopted, as in the shallower forms of enlightenment, progressive thought and starry-eyed idealism, a mode of existence is established whose aims are facilitation of life, breakdown of vertical tension and avoidance of passion.
As long as the moderate tendency succeeds in presenting itself as the reasonable that is in the process of becoming the real, and thus claims universal validity, it is not overly problematic to compare and perhaps even equate technological progress with moral and social progress. For conventional progressism, the journey forwards and upwards is one that does not need to be completed under one's own steam; it is like a current that we can allow to carry us. Coming from distant sources, it has flowed through entire epochs; our ship of progress would not have travelled so far had it not been drifting on this current - though we have only recently started guiding it towards the port. Shame on anyone who has trouble imagining rivers that flow uphill! Today one calls complex masses in qualified movement 'evolving systems' to neutralize the paradox in the requirement that forwards should simultaneously mean upwards. 10? The postmoderns sheepishly note down the pale remnants of progress under the heading 'complexity increase'. As long as the early Enlightenment looking ironically over the shoulders of the 'positive religions' itself functions like a religion, however - as an illusion-training club for groups, and as a practice system for internalizing surrealistic assumptions among individuals - it is the duty of every decent human being to promote the conviction that there are indeed rivers which flow uphill.
Having-Oneself-Operated-On: The Subject in Auto- Operative Curvature
It is necessary to insist on these essentially familiar and established observations because the complications that will concern us in the following can only be understood against this background. They relate firstly to the intense frictions between the strong and weak forms of the metanoetic imperative in modernity, and secondly to the relationship between the optimizations I carry out on myself and the life improvements which, as a contemporary of advanced inventions
373
to retain our
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
I to the action as phrase 'having- oneself-operated-on' a logical choice for the second. Together, they refer to competing modes of anthropotechnic behaviour. In the first, I am moulded as an object of direct self-modification through measures of my own; in the second, I expose myself to the effects of others' operating competence and let them mould me. The interplay of self- operation and having-oneself-operated-on encompasses the entire
self-concern of the subject. ] 08
Modern conditions are characterized by the fact that self-competent
individuals increasingly draw on the operative competence of others for their acts on themselves. I call the referring-back of having-one- self-operated-on to self-operation the auto-operative curvature of the modern subject. It is based on a strongly evident fact: whoever lets others do something directly to them is indirectly doing something for themselves. This leads to an altered way of integrating suffering into actions. The competent subject must not only attend to the expansion of its own radius of action; it must also extend its responsibility for 'treatments' through others.
It is easy to see why this is the only possibility in a modernized world. Individuals are not only unable to take the entire work of changing the world upon themselves - they cannot even take care of everything required for their own personal optimization by them- selves. By exposing themselves to the effects of others' ability to act, they appropriate a form of passivity that implies a roundabout or deferred way of acting themselves. The expanded passivity compe- tence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one's own interests.
The Treated Self
Welcome passivity takes on numerous forms: having oneself informed, having oneself entertained, having oneself served, having oneself sup- plied, having oneself aroused, having oneself healed, having oneself edified, having oneself insured, having oneself transported, having oneself represented, having oneself advised, or having oneself cor- rected. Unwelcome forms of passivity supplement this series, begin- ning with letting oneself be blackmailed - through the dimension of disadvantageous employment contracts, for example, as examined by Marx, who took them as indicating a state of 'exploitation'; it follows from this, incidentally, that as soon as exploitation becomes chronic,
374
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED
a
we mention letting it
relevant in situations where the subject cannot cover its need for self- deception alone and, in order not to relent in its desire, turns to a qualified illusion provider who can supply what is needed.
Whatever the subject lets others do to it, it not only appropriates the 'treatments' after the fact, but seeks them of its own accord and integrates what is done to it into what it does to itself. From this perspective, one can see through Sartre's worn-out statement that we must make something out of what has been done to us as a one- eyed version of the passive-active interconnection. As is well known, Sartre always emphasized the act of self-appropriation, which puts an end to the previous acceptance of heteronomy. With this act, the subject breaks away from its being-object-for-others, thus realizing its freedom; at the same time, it does away with the bad faith that made it pretend to be a powerless something: whoever claims to be a thing among things has originally deceived themselves. It is not hard to recognize the model of resistance being applied to the philosophi- cal analysis of existence here - and one can even discern the dramatic shadow of the French Revolution in the projection's background. In addition, this accelerated the shift towards the externalization of the dictate of change, as its ambivalent outcome called into existence the modern forms of radicalism: dissatisfaction with the results of the revolution produced the concrete desire for its repetition; dissatisfac- tion with the repetitions produced the abstract longing for its perma- nence. Sartre was lucid enough to transfer the chronic dissatisfaction from the outer front back to the inner one. The consequences speak for themselves: if self-realization is presented as a rejection of passiv- ity that must constantly take place anew, the ghost light of permanent revolution takes hold of the individual's self-relationship - and Sartre, referring to Trotsky, in fact spoke of true morality as a conversion permanente. 109 This approach could only produce one result: the simultaneous destruction of politics and morals.
What is decisive, in fact, is the free cultivation of the passive ele- ments in the individual's self-relationship, corresponding to the auto- operative constitution of modern existence. For this we certainly do not need to choose the perverse exploitation of the suffering position, masochism, where the sexual relationship is embedded in a game of domination. In one of the most impressive sections of his early central work, Sartre showed this mode of having-oneself-operated~ on as the paradigm of a cunning, voluntary becoming-object~for­ others - brilliant in literary terms, but factually misleading. 11o The
375
THE EXERCISES OF THE . M. ODERNS
interest in far more
the perverse contract of pain-seeker appointed
expresses; it is also much broader than one can grasp via the critique of power and domination. If I arrange for a transport company to take me from A to B, I take on board the driving service offered as an acceptable suffering - rides in hired vehicles only actually turn into masochistic ordeals on certain days. If I go to see my doctor, I usually also welcome the unpleasant examinations which his special- ized competence enables him to grant me; I subject myself to invasive treatments as if I were ultimately performing them on myself. If I switch on a preferred channel of mine, I nolens volens accept being flooded by the current programme. McLuhan's punning remark that message is massage makes philosophical sense if one recognizes it as a competent statement on the 'question of the subject' in the media age. Having oneself massaged symbolizes the situation of all those who act on themselves by allowing others to act on them.
In all cases of voluntarily sought passivity, it is easy to show how the passive aspects connect back to independent activity. This involves suspending that activity for the duration of the outside influence without abandoning the prospect of its resumption. The result is the phenomenon I here term the auto-operative curvature of actions in a highly labour-divided, or rather competence-divided and practice-divided, space of action. From the subject's perspective, its insertion into the curvature determines its actions through the ability to suffer. It does not mean submitting to domination, but rather sharing in a foreign competence. If the operation endured leads to the desired result, the suffering subject will believe that it performed an act of self-concern by handing the law of action to the operator. The statement 'I took myself in hand' is now replaced by a more complex formulation: 'I put myself in other hands so that, after completed treatment, I would once more be able to take myself in hand. '
If it were possible to keep its pietistic connotations at bay, one could mark this figure of a passivity underpinned by independent activity as the manifestation of 'calmness'1l1 that is constitutive of modernity. Calmness means passivity competence - it is the small change of ability that carries greater passions. It comes into play in situations where the subject is ready and willing to take the position of a client and profit from the savoir-faire of the operating partner. It is thus more a mode of prudence than the modern substitute for wisdom that Heidegger wanted to see in it. We recall: the philosopher had recommended 'calmness' [Gelassenheit] so that the modern human
376
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
own once more to treatment itself. In behaviour is part of the game intelligence of humans in an elaborated networked world, where it is impossible to make a move without simultane- ously allowing others to play with one. In this sense, calmness is inseparable from the self-conception of experienced actors for whom the philosophical chimera of the subject residing at the centre of its circles of action has faded - or rather, has lost its utility value as the self-description of the day. It is replaced everywhere by concepts for agents who operate and are operated on, 'prosumers' and users of technical interfaces. ill Bazon Brock had already anticipated the figure of 'passivity competence' in the field of art observation decades ago: from 1968 on, he set up 'visitors' schools' at the 'documenta' in Kassel, and has meanwhile developed these further into the fourfold concept of the certified consumer, the certified patient, the certified
voter and the certified recipient.
In the Operative Circle: Medical Calmness
One of the most important modifications of calmness comes into play when the subject visits its 'treating' physician. Although the recent culture of having-something-done-to-oneself - which I shall here call a general form of having-oneself-operated-on - generalized the figure of the client, the medical field contains an older form of passivity for which one normally reserves the word 'patient'. It would not be sur- prising if it disappeared from the vocabulary of the medical system in the course of the twenty-first century, surviving only in conservative subcultures where sickness is viewed as a chance and the accident as a medium of self-experience. De (acto, this area too has been subject to clientization for some time, assisted not inconsiderably by the juridicization of the doctor-patient relationship. But whatever one calls the relationship between the doctor and their counterpart, it becomes acute when the latter entrusts themselves to the former for a surgical operation. Now one conventionally speaks of having-oneself- operated-on, meaning that faced with a serious diagnosis, the patient must be prepared for subjection to an invasive treatment. The content articulated in the old medical maxim vulnerando sanamus - we heal by wounding - translates on the patient side into a hypothesis: by allowing the infliction of skilled injury on myself, I contribute to my recovery. Although the asymmetry between the roles of patient and operator is great here, there is no doubt that the patient is an indirect
377
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
co-actor, meets action in space.
The curvature is rounded into a complete circle if the operator is the operated - a rare exception, but one that appears several times in medical history. A notable example is the doctor Leonid Rogozov, who was forced to perform an appendectomy on himself in 1961 during a stay at Novolazarevskaya Station, a Russian research station in the Antarctic. A famous photograph shows him lying on a table wearing a surgeon's gown with a face mask, having just opened his lower right abdominal wall. An even more sensational case was that of the American mountain climber Aron Ralston, who performed a spectacular self-amputation: following an accident during a mountain hike in Utah in April 2003 in which his right arm was trapped under a dislodged boulder, he decided, after attempting in vain to free himself for five days, to break his lower arm bone and sever the flesh with a blunt pocket knife. Afterwards he travelled the world as a speaker, describing his unusual act of self-concern to packed venues. In 2000, there was considerable attention in the media to the case of the then twenty-nine-year-old British performance artist Heather Perry, who performed a trepanation on her own skull using a local anaesthetic and a special drill - supposedly to cure her chronic fatigue and attain a higher level of consciousness. Furthermore, we know from the life story of the Indian wise man Ramana Maharshi (1873-1950) that he underwent surgery several times towards the end of his life for a cancer on his arm, and each time turned down the anaesthetic in favour of a Yogic form of pain neutralization. For an illuminated
man of the old school, it was clearly out of the question to accept a treatment by Western methods that violated the spiritual axiom of constant wakefulness.
As a rule, the auto-operative self-reference that enables the subject to tolerate technical modifications to its body displays a gentler cur- vature. Since around the eighteenth century, it has expressed itself in the extensive use of stimulants among enlightened Europeans. Their application increased from the twentieth century on, to the point of a massive use of doping agents in every possible discipline. It is no secret how dependent authors like Voltaire and Balzac were on caf- feine, or how much Sigmund Freud owed to his nicotinism. Equally, connoisseurs of Sartre's later career know of the extremes brought about by his alternating alcoholism and amphetamine addiction. In all these cases, the decisive question was obviously what the stimu- lated parties made out of what the stimulants had made of them. Sartre's addiction to amphetamines was not without a certain irony:
378
IN THE AUTO-OPERA TIVEL Y CURVED
was to create
October Revolution: The Ether Anaesthetic
From the mid-nineteenth century on, surgical operations saw the inclusion of anaesthesia, without which having-oneself-operated-on in the narrower sense would be inconceivable today. Its appearance on the stage of medical options was accompanied by one of the most profound modifications of the human self-relationship in modern times. If there has ever been a technical innovation that merited the use of the word 'revolution', it was the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic. Its first successful application was on 16 October 1846, in the operating theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where it was administered to the patient Gilbert Abbot with the aid of a specially constructed spherical ether inhaler for the removal of a neck tumour. The operation took place in the presence of the Boston medical elite, who constituted a rather sceptical audience after the failure of a similar attempt in the same auditorium using laughing gas. Once William Morton, the constructor of the ether ball, had induced the patient to take a few deep breaths from it, the surgeon, Dr Warren, carried out the operation in just under three minutes (before the reintroduction of the general anaesthetic in surgery, speed was of the essence), with no pain whatsoever felt by the patient. After completing the demonstration, Warren supposedly turned to those present with the words: 'Gentlemen, this is no humbug. ' Thus the strongest neo-evangelic message in medical history was conveyed by the greatest understatement. l13
This surgical 14 July, which entered the annals of medicine as 'ether day', changed the anthropotechnic situation of modernity more radi- cally than any individual political event or technical innovation since - including the biopolitical experiments of the Russian Revolution, as well as all attempts at genetic manipulation thus far. While the Bastille was immediately torn down as a supposed 'symbol of despot- ism' (the 'patriot' Palloy, a quick-witted building contractor who had appeared on the scene with a demolition crew as soon as the fortress was stormed, supposedly received the commission to demolish it as early as 16 July), the American doctors reverently preserved the scene of the rebellion against the tyranny of pain. The 'Ether Dome' at Massachusetts General Hospital can still be visited in its original state today. A painting by Robert Hinckley from 1882 captured the
379
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
scene. news America
by sea in almost separate messages, European
doctors received it with almost universal enthusiasm, welcoming it like a secular gospel and imitating it to massive success; only a group of sceptics and algophilic traditionalists, who defended pain as part of the human condition, initially refused to consider the new method for disabling pain. Among the vast majority, there was a wave of emulation based not on mimetic rivalry, but on a long-felt need for deliverance from an epochal evil.
The 16th of October 1846 is the key date in the history of the operable human being: since then, the rediscovered possibilities of having-oneself-anaesthetized have enormously expanded the radius of having-oneself-operated-on by surgeons. Through the develop- ment of such new anaesthetics as Evipan (1932) or Propofol (1977), as well as highly effective opium derivatives, professionalized anaes- thesia has for some time also had efficient short-term narcotics at its disposal, enabling a significant reduction of wake-up time. Thanks to intensive research, the depth of the narcosis can now also be closely controlled, and the constant improvement of the necessary equipment rounds off the optimization of anaesthesia.
What made these rediscovered possibilities was the fact that between 1490 and 1846, European medicine almost entirely forgot the anaes- thetic techniques of antiquity and the Middle Ages, especially the formally well-known and frequently used 'soporific sponges', which contained highly effective extracts from poppies, henbane, mandrake and hemlock. This amnesia, which is still virtually inexplicable, was a factor in the harsh climate of reality throughout the Modern Age until the mid-nineteenth century: in this era, surgical operations were almost always torturous affairs that amounted to agonies for the patients.
On the Human Right to Unconsciousness
In philosophical terms, the reintroduction of complete anaesthesia marked a caesura in the self-relationships of modern humans. Not only because the contemporary subject's attitude towards its physical body and its operability is simply incomprehensible if one does not take into account the new possibility of consenting to the disabling of its sensitivity to pain. As self-awareness is often extinguished along with it, the subject faces the dramatic choice of temporarily resign- ing from its being-for-itself and entirely adopting the position of
380
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
an unconscious in-itself. It not only agrees to this injury in its own interests - the precondition for all having-oneself-operated-on in the stricter sense - but also affirms artificial unconsciousness to gain an advantage. This is significant because it explicitly articulates a previ- ously unimaginable thesis: that humans can no longer be expected to endure every state of wakeful being-in-the-world. In this context it is worth mentioning that before the term 'anaesthesia' was officially established in the early nineteenth century, one sometimes spoke of suspended animation. This better expressed the central principle of the general anaesthetic: liberating the patient for the duty of 'ani- mated' passion.
One could say that in October 1846, the human right to uncon- sciousness was established - the right of not-having-to-be-present in certain extreme states of one's own psychophysical existence. The claim to this right had been prepared by a fashionable gesture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the proverbial phenomenon of fainting due to over-stimulation, which was accepted in particularly sensitive people - those of the female sex - as a mark of cultivated weakness, and flourished in the hysterical symptoms of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, the techniques of animal magnetism and artificially induced somnambulism, both discussed throughout Europe after 1785 and both early forms of what became known as 'hypnosis' in 1840, enabled modern subjects to become familiar with the advantages of suspended animation. These methods, which became common from the late eighteenth century on under the name of Mesmerism - also in the context of social vaudeville entertainment - occasionally served among doctors after 1800 as a forerunner of chemical anaesthesia. Mesmerism enjoyed an intensive reception by the Romantics and German Idealists, as it could be inter- preted as the royal road to the realm beyond everyday consciousness, almost a form of experimental theology. 114
This play with artificial unconsciousness reached its pinnacle in the 1830s, when laughing gas became the party drug of the British upper class. At the same time, elegant opium eaters and educated narcoma- niacs could be sure that their confessions would be read attentively by a public interested in anaesthetics of all kinds. Even two genera- tions later, the propagandists of the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) - Helena Blavatsky (1833-91), Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Leadbeater (1847-1934) - who showed a precise feeling for the spiritual market in mixing European mysticisms with Indian psychotechnics, found an audience that longed more than ever for instruction in the art of self-renunciation in the service of the self.
381
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
Typically modern techniques for expanding one's passivity compe- tence were rehearsed in all these forms of conditional self-renunciation, though not always with ego-strengthening prospects. The element of auto-operative curvature manifests itself most clearly in the medically required general anaesthetic, as it constitutes a borderline case of tem- porary not-being-oneself in the service of being-oneself. It indicates a liminal zone that can only be shifted to regions even more distant from the self through an artificial coma - provided that the prospect of a controlled return to waking life is assured. Consent to this type of suspended animation means the last possible level of calmness. lIS
Revolutionary Un-Calmness
Alongside the subjective appropriation of technological and social progress in the context of calmness culture, or the system of con- ditional passivities, modernity brought forth a culture of un-calm- ness based on the declared unwillingness to await the results of slow progress. It includes a profound distrust towards most forms of letting-something-be-done-to-oneself. This regularly brings the domination-critical motif into play, namely that power and its abuse are synonymous. Un-calmness and the general rejection of passivity are the root of the extremisms that began to take hold in Western Europe and Russia in the nineteenth century and led into the 'revolu- tions' of the twentieth century.
Medical progress, on the other hand, aligned itself with the gradual model of the bourgeois Enlightenment. This taught its adepts to view every improvement achieved as the starting point for further opti- mizations. This applied not least to anaesthesia-supported surgery, which, despite its great leap forwards around the middle of the nine- teenth century, generally remained a case of cumulative skill increase on the path of progressive moderation.
The simultaneity of optimism and realism in the standard concept of progress was tied to an ambitious cultivation of the feelings of the time: at every moment, satisfaction at what had been achieved was meant to balance out impatience at what still had to be achieved - everything already possible had to be viewed in relation to the pros- pect of the not-yet-feasible. In any case, participation in the 'great work of uplifting mankind' was unattainable without constant train- ing in patience and impatience. Both attitudes were based on the tacit assumption that the path to further civilization was itself a civilized journey.
382
AUTO-OPERATIVELY
was
what can happen if this precondition is rejected. The adherents
extremist positions refused to participate in the balancing exercise between patience and impatience, voting instead for radical accelera- tion. According to them, the truth lay in imbalance: good, for them, was one-sided and partisan. Never give up impatience - this was the axiom of the desire committed to radicality. According to the pur- veyors of the extreme, the only respectable form of progress - the one that would tackle the social question at its roots - does not come gradually, but must rather constitute a sudden and irreconcilable rupture in the usual way of things. It is not an additional step on a prescribed path - more like a wild ride through uncharted terrain. The revolution builds its own roads in the direction it chooses; no slip road from the past can dictate where it should go. In the conquest of the improbable, yesterday's realists are out of place as route planners.
The followers of such ideas rely on the objection that one must not be taken in by the illusion of the necessary gradualness of progress, for it conceals the reprehensible slowing of development by a class of ruling preventers who are secretly determined to keep the people waiting until the end of time. They say 'progress', but what they mean is the perpetuation of the status quo. The most familiar version of this thesis is the Marxist one, which states that only the 'greed for profit' of the capital owners prevents the general release of 'pro- ductive powers' in favour of the workers, who are usually blithely equated with the 'people'. Another popular idea was the anarchist maxim that the preventers were first and foremost among the rep- resentatives of the states and its notorious ally, the church, which meant that only direct violence against both could bring about the necessary destabilization of the situation. Only dead souls accept the principle of gradual progress. Whoever is still morally alive listens to the voices testifying here and now to the intolerability of the prevail- ing conditions. These voices give the individual in revolt the mandate of immediate overthrow. The young Marx unforgettably formulated the categorical imperative of the revolution: it is the absolute duty of the activist 'to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being'. 116
Radical Metanoia as the Will to Overthrow
In reality, the rejection of the gradualness model of standard Enlightenment, to which the liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth
383
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
centuries clung as much as the social democrats and Christian demo- crats, by no means stemmed solely from the pressure of social crises. It occurred because of a moral option whose inherent logic demanded a break with the existing state of things. This choice constituted the political continuation of the original ethical distinction between the own and the non-own as made since the beginnings of ascetic seces- sion. The central nuance lies in the fact that everything which is now to be viewed as non-own is assigned to the past, while the own lies exclusively in the future. The ethical distinction is temporalized, split- ting the world into things past to be rejected and future things to be welcomed. There is no hope in the present and the continuous - that applies in equal measure to ancient escapism and to the modern devaluation of all old regimes. But after the ontology of the finished existent was abandoned and the becoming of a 'different world' tran- spired as increasingly plausible, indeed inevitable, the future became an attractive home for those who made the great ethical distinction anew.
Thus it becomes deplorable to seek the attainment of satisfying conditions via the gentle slopes of bourgeois world improvement. Whoever chooses this pass has essentially already decided to leave everything as it was, no matter how many changes of detail might give the impression that the affirmability of conditions is on the increase. In truth, the primacy of the past remains in force as long as the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions is defined by the dominance of the latter. What the world lacks are not people willing to go along with changes on the plain; what it needs are people in whom an awareness of the vertical is reawakening. A few years before the October Revolution, one of the most distinguished authors of biopolitical utopianism in the early Soviet Union, the poet Alexander Svyatogor (1899-after 1937), had founded a group whose programme included the abolition of death, the scientifically achieved resurrection of the dead and the technological domination of the cosmos; the group called itself the 'Verticalists'.
Only those who take the idea of world improvement utterly seri- ously will arrive at the view that world improvement is not enough. Identification with the principle of externalized metanoia leads to the insight that the existing world, that is to say the given 'social' order, will remain incorrigible until its basal construction flaws - class society and the unequal distribution of material and immaterial wealth - are rectified. Thus the world of the 'existent' must not be progressively improved but revolutionarily eradicated. With the help of reusable elements from the old construction, the new construction
384
IN THE AUTO~OPERATIVELY
can 111
'achievements' - past and futures ones Conventional progres- sism must be rejected so that the good intentions underlying it can take effect. It seems that the naivete of the progressives has been seen through once and for all: they sincerely believe they are doing a service to freedom by opting for small, controlled steps. In reality, they are allying themselves with what is quintessentially bad - with the conditions based on the private property of world-improving means.
The notion that property is the means to all other means was ruled out by the new radicals. The deep-seated ressentiment towards private property, indeed towards anything private, blocked the conclusion that follows from any impartial examination of wealth- producing and freedom-favouring mechanisms: an effective world improvement would call for the most general possible propertization. Instead, the political metanoeticians enthused over general disposses- sion, akin to the founders of Christian orders who wanted to own everything communally and nothing individually. The most impor- tant insight into the dynamics of economic modernization remained inaccessible to them: money created by lending on property is the universal means of world improvement. They are all the blinder to the fact that for the meantime, only the modern tax state, the anonymous hyper-billionaire, can act as a general world-improver, naturally in alliance with the local meliorists - not only because of its traditional school power, but most of all thanks to its redistributive power, which took on unbelievable proportions in the course of the twentieth century. The current tax state, for its part, can only survive as long as it is based on a property economy whose actors put up no resistance when half of their total product is taken away, year after year, by the very visible hand of the national treasury for the sake of communal tasks. What the un-calm understand least of all is the simple fact that when government expenditures constitute almost 50 per cent of the gross national product, this fulfils the requirements of actually existing liberal-fiscal semi-socialism, regardless of what label is used to describe this situation - whether people call it the New Deal, 'social market economy' or 'neo-liberalism'. 117 What the system lacks for total perfection is a homogeneous worldwide tax sphere and the long-overdue propertization of the impoverished world.
Against the background of the beginnings of a history of the ethical distinction outlined above, it is immediately apparent how the offen- sive articulation of communist and anarchist radicality opened a new
385
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
Its most COIn- cides the strongest tendency to external application. This is why the twentieth century was the age of the 'commissars' who believed in changing the world by external and extreme means - we recall Arthur Koestler's essay 'The Yogi and the Commissar', which was published in 1942, in the heart of Europe's darkness, and in 1945 supplied the title for a volume of essays on the moral situation of the time that
gained international recognition. 118
Political Verticalism: The New Human Being
On the eve of the Russian Revolution, then, 'verticalism' could no longer assume its original form, in which it would purely have con- cerned individuals. Since the beginnings of ethical secession, it had been entirely down to them to force the impossible and remould themselves through tireless asceticism into wise men, god-men, new human beings - preferably alone, or in co-operation with other like- minded individuals if absolutely necessary. Even the wise men on the throne - Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in the West, Milinda and Ashoka in the East - did not think for a second of turning their individual philosophical metanoia into a state metanoia, a reversal for all. Even Paul, whose message was of the end of the world of death, was only actually speaking to the few who, through concern for their salvation, would be capable of joining the ranks of the saved before the imminent end.
In the course of its progress through the age of immanence, the absolute imperative turned into the dictate 'You must change the world - down to the very last elements of its construction, and with the involvement of everyone. ' Whoever sought to execute this dictate as a mere constant progression - through the synergy of school, the market and technology - would be falling prey to the most dangerous of all temptations from the start. They would be succumbing to the siren song of the bourgeoisie to choose the path of conformity, on which the old state remains intact beneath the semblance of constant improvement. The revolutionary, however, has themselves tied to the mast like Odysseus. Undaunted, they traverse the ambivalent zones where liberal and social-democratic sounds tempt them. The better they know what they are refusing, the more cold-bloodedly they remain committed to their mission.