In Review: Quarterly Essay 41

David Malouf, "The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World"
 

Let me go out on a limb and say that the greatest source of unhappiness in the contemporary world – or at least in the Australian corner of the contemporary world – is . . . wait for it . . . the long-term variable-rate home mortgage. Maybe that’s being a little unfair to the purveyors of home-loan products. Let’s say it’s not just mortgages, but the long-term debt-servitude which mortgages impose on a hefty proportion of the population. Hm, maybe “debt-servitude” is a bit strong. How about indebtedness in general? Or how about indebtedness combined with the whole increasingly unstable all-pervasive nature of contemporary work? Frankly, isn’t it just insane to think that people are going to feel happy in a world in which they are saddled with decades of debt and in which the permanent revolutionising of economic life simultaneously makes the very means by which they pay off that debt (work) ever more piecemeal, short-term, part-time, round-the-clock, and, possibly within a couple of years, obsolete? Add to it all what you might call the systematic technical complexity of contemporary life and Phillip Larkin’s boldly miserable counsel:


Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as quickly as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself

can start to seem like plain old-fashioned good sense.

By technical complexity I mean two things. Of course there’s technology in the sense of high-tech equipment - the all but self-spawning new generations of mobile phones, the unthinkably sophisticated white-goods, etc. But there’s also technology in the sense of abstract rule-governed mechanisms – the latter including the bureaucracy that exists (supposedly) to make rational decisions about social life based on informed deliberation, as well as the order-giving networks and techniques and procedures that regulate the lives of individuals and institutions, right the way round the globe.

Here’s the thought: if the individual gadgets were all there were to living in a technically complex world – if it weren’t for the All-Encompassing Technical Systems – then human life in the age of global high-tech civilisation would be a breeze. It would simply be a matter of deciding which of the gadgets makes a big enough positive difference to your life; where potential benefits seemed doubtful – you could choose not to buy the latest iPhone, or the mood-enhancing hair-care products. On the other hand, if your cost-benefit calculation came out pretty much evenly, you could buy all the new products and just take the risk of being annoyed, over-stimulated and, probably, over-indebted.

Of course the upside to living in a systematically technified world is not difficult to see. The multiplication of choice that all the gadgets and systems make possible is obvious, their convenience undeniable. And in any case, a systematically technically complex world is in many ways a matter of plain necessity: mass societies made up of lots of different sorts of people doing lots of different sorts of things simply wouldn’t function if all there were to hold the show together were the sorts of unspoken rules and rhythms that governed most of life until quite recently in the past. If you think that the world could be made to function much more simply than it does, then think about trying to organise a progressive tax system with liabilities calculated precisely according to income across an entire national territory, or indeed try organising national flood relief. Without a bureaucratic apparatus and a swag of complex technical systems in place both of these things, and many others we acknowledge to be good and necessary, would be simply unthinkable.

And yet, and yet. If the blessings of Technified Existence are something that are waved in our faces virtually every minute of the day, the downside is something we all know in our bones. Consider the big, rapid-fire changes technology continually makes to the conditions of everyday material existence – who doubts that they're disorienting, even when there’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air? Or consider the little-remarked process of technification going on in the realm of human knowledge: I’m thinking of the relegation of non-technical bodies of understanding-and-experience to the status of superstitious nonsense; whether it's sensitivity to art or sensitivity towards the rhythms and needs of the human body, living in a technified world seems to lead to non-scientific ways of grasping reality being written off as insubstantial or simply a waste of time. Consider the more or less acute sense of powerlessness that every one of us experiences every single day as we’re confronted with the fact that a once accessible, humanly comprehensible corner of our lives has become the preserve of experts whose help we now depend on to perform the most necessary tasks. Or consider the fact that, in dealing with the scattered agencies of a complex social world, we’re constantly confronted with the abysmal habit of our fellow human beings to invoke the naked authority of the Great Nothing in the Machine: yes, once again, the computer says no, and, let’s face it, in day-to-day life, no matter how tech-savvy we are, The Computer, The System, The Agent of Mechanised Necessity – that is, The Computer in the broad sense – does say no to us, time and time and time again.

Faced with it all, the choice is seemingly ours – to ruthlessly accentuate the positives or to swallow hard and battle on. But to decouple ourselves in a truly satisfactory way - to pursue some sort of ideal of quiet self-cultivation without the help of the machines and the wider systems seems practically impossible; in a lot of instances it would be palpably insane. Happiness in the sense of settled contentment has fled from the world.

So we have a rough answer to the question why happiness eludes most of us, even now that the historical sources of human misery – disease, back-breaking labour, food shortages – have largely been dealt with, at least in the Australian corner of the global village. It’s a pity David Malouf doesn’t have an answer of his own to give us in QE41 – at least not one that addresses itself directly to the contemporary world and the extraordinary phenomena of misery that often seem to dominate it.

Part of the problem lies with the title of QE41: “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”. It’s simply misleading, and I suspect it wasn’t the author’s own choice. Malouf himself is much more interested in what you might call ideal images of happiness, particularly those deriving from the ancient and the early modern world, rather than the world of today; the position from which he wants to meditate on happiness is not in amongst the jumble of today’s world, with its gadgets and products and systems, but from his own version of Montaigne’s secluded “little back-shop” where we can be “all our own, entirely free”. In fact, the little back-shop is the place he wants to encourage us to seek out happiness of our own.

However the main problem lies less with QE41’s title than with its overall argument.

Malouf gets himself into trouble early on by making a categorical distinction between happiness, which he says belongs to “our personal interior” realm, and liberty, which is supposedly a more social virtue. (Life, to add the third of the rights Jefferson’s American Constitution calls inalienable, belongs for Malouf in a third category, that of Nature.) Dividing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness between three separate existential domains in the way Malouf does generates a pseudo-problem. If happiness is largely personal and liberty largely social, how can you square the demands of the two except by a sort of legislation that is bound to detract from the former? Happiness turns out for Malouf to be a strangely ineffable state of personal being impervious to the social duties and constraints that liberty brings with it.

After teasing out what Jefferson means by the “pursuit of happiness”, Malouf goes on two long excursions. The search for contentment in modernity is determined negatively, we learn, by our inner restlessness and positively by the pursuit of bodily pleasure. Restlessness is something like a primordial given of the human condition, and technology on this picture, far from being just a modern fetish, is an expression of a rollicking human-all-too-human disquiet that has been with us since the start of human history. On the one side, modern man complicates his restless, technically inventive nature by forming a Faustian compact with the machine in order to satisfy his material wants ever more completely. On the other side, he discovers new, or really not so new, modes of happiness: as the medieval Christian consciousness of sin recedes in the early modern world, sex and bodily pleasure come to be seen, in roughly classical Graeco-Roman terms, as more than just a source of temptation; the art of Rembrandt and Rubens creates its own monuments to the world-historical moment - not to the terrors but to the joys of the flesh, and to the nuances of interpersonal feeling that the joys of the flesh light up.

At the end of this circuitous historical path, QE41 gives us a peek at “how we live now” – and not a minute too late. Some of what for Malouf are the deeper sources of contemporary anxiety are turned up at last. The world has grown so big! (While human consciousness for most of history hardly extended beyond the distances we could see or walk, it now extends to the ends of the earth.) Yet the world has also grown so small! (The extension of our consciousness, and our physical powers, now confronts us with a definite image of planetary life as a limited – and decidedly fragile – totality within a vast and indifferent-seeming universe.) All in all, the big-small out-of-shape world has developed proportions that fail to square with our existence as embodied beings with limited powers of sensory perception and movement.

The problem here is not exactly that Malouf is wrong about any of this; his problem is giving a sense of depth to the homespun wisdom his observations suggest - without a bit more analysis, the observations dissipate into the kind of intellectual haze familiar to us from 1001 newspaper opinion pieces. And without more details, the observations also seem decidedly gainsayable. Yes, most of us have trouble giving specific meaning to the macroscopic and microscopic worlds that four centuries of unlimited scientific discovery have opened out (though the fans of sci-fi and Steven Spielberg aren’t completely lost for directions here). But, as Malouf himself says elsewhere in the essay – where the world exceeds the body’s grasp, there the mind and the imagination can more than make good our sense of unease; concepts and the intuitive rush of feeling are part of a deft existential move that we've been making since long before science and technology put distant galaxies and microscopic creepy-crawlies within the range of sensory experience.

Then there’s what science has been discovering about the brain and genes and . . . oh, and The Economy: more indefinite sources of disquiet. All three worry Malouf because what we’re learning about them suggests they have a will of their own; they play havoc with our conventional notion of ourselves as autonomous agents. The Economy in particular Malouf thinks functions in the mental universe of today roughly the way Fate did in mental universe of the ancients. Economic events are often spoken about as if they are both absolutely vital to our survival and taking place way above our heads. Whether The Economy lifts us up to the pinnacles of wealth or shoves us all the way down to misery, It/She/Whatever it is often seems inscrutable and cruel. Again, it all seems broadly true, but a tad unilluminating.

Papering his main insights together on the very last page of the essay, Malouf tells us:

For all the scope, both of time and space, that contemporary forms of knowledge have made available to us, what we can fully comprehend – that is, have direct sensory experience of – remains small; and only with what we have fully comprehended and feel at home in do we feel safe. . . What is human is what we can keep track of. In terms of space this means what is within sight, what is local and close; within reach, within touch. . . What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.

The last bit is fair enough, maybe. It seems to pick out one feature of globalizing, technology-driven mass society, viz its impersonality, and render it in slightly damp plaster-cast prose. But if you ask me, what comes before – in particular the idea that what is "truly human" is what we can touch and see - is simple-minded rustic empiricism: it suggests nothing so much as the muckiness of small-is-beautiful nostalgia. Malouf’s sense that the mind has autonomous powers of reason, speculation, image-making and story-telling that are there to complement the activities of the body seems to have deserted him at this point. And that’s not all that gets left out of the picture. If the rejection of the Christian vision of the body as a source of sin is one of the early modern world’s happier innovations, does it remain an unambiguous one? The body is something that is subject today to a truly miserable range of constraints and pressures whose origins lie far from the ascetic ideals of Christianity. In being liberated for the experience of pleasure, bodies are increasingly treated as mechanical instruments; primed and polished, they become the target of vast commercial campaigns of improvement that seem to leave a lot of people feeling insecure within their own skins just as radically as Christian puritanism did. The early modern world might, up to a point, make it possible for human beings to experience bodily joy, but the technological civilisation that modernity eventually gave rise to also makes the human body tendentially irrelevant, as more and more work, and more and more social life in general, is conducted without the need for human beings’ physical presence.

Building up to the topic “the way we live now” by surveying some of the key historical moments in the pursuit of happiness from pre-modernity and early modernity might seem like a good idea. But Malouf’s conclusions are inconclusive. There are some ritualised worries about all those medical advances not having cured us of our deeper discontent, and some equally conventional muttering about the bad news delivered to us daily by the media about the health of the planet. But then strangely we’re back with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian image of man, which suggests to Malouf the classical Graeco-Roman notion of proportion and measure, then, lastly, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Shukhov – the man who has another 3500 days to spend in a Soviet gulag and who, by the end of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, is able to rest content with a fruitful day’s scrounging and scheming. By an irony that strikes me as rather gruesome, and not entirely willed, Malouf offers up Shukhov as a sort of paradigmatic happy man of modernity. The lesson seems to be that Shukov has discovered a secret that many of us never hit upon – that true happiness is only attainable within limits – in moderation, or, again, in a – kind of – classical proportion. And that’s pretty much where the deepest problem with QE41 lies. Malouf’s essay continually falls away from the question of happiness in its radical contemporary form in favour of a rather ill-focussed search for the sources of happiness, or the lack of it, in the worlds of literature, art and history. What Malouf manages to uncover in passing in Plato, Montaigne, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vitruvian Man, etc. has an interest, and a sensitivity, of its own, but a lot of the time it’s simply irrelevant to the question it feels like his editors set him. The problem is that there’s a strict limit – for instance - to the explanatory value of suggesting that The Economy functions like Fate or that Technology is a sign of a primal human restlessness. The analogies drawn from the art and philosophy of the past to illustrate those two generic points are all right as they go, but QE41 fails to really pin them down or follow them through. And that makes it decidedly light-on as a piece of serious reflection.

All in all, QE41 has a bit of a leaf through the lengthy catalogue of modern misery we keep on adding to at one end and failing to shorten at the other. It makes clear that the way the catalogue is filling out so rapidly at the front has something to do with our inability to stop scratching the technological itch, with the super-size free-market economies we’ve created, with all the associated complexity and impersonality and formal rationality, and with the sense that the world presents itself to us as a scatter of piecemeal problems to be solved: Malouf knows our faith that the world is improvable by such gimcrack problem-solving means has itself become problematic. Yet in the end he’s unwilling or unable to really look into the heart of darkness – for that’s where his swag of images from aesthetic life don’t fit him out with the necessary equipment.

The problem QE41 sets for itself is happiness and the problem Malouf founders on is the key one. The ideal of happiness he is pleading for – the singular life within “our personal interior realm" where we can settle down and meditate philosophically - is itself something of an antique. The very way he sets up the ideal seems to require ignoring that any contemporary version of Montaigne’s little back shop would by definition be systematically interconnected to a degree that would’ve been inconceivable to Montaigne – from the inside of the technically primed physical body all the outward.

In the end there’s something deeply unchallenging about Malouf’s vision – something as unchallenging as all those Sunday broadsheet pieces about how busy the modern world is, and how insensitive we’ve all become to the beauties of contemplation, solitude and silence. Don’t the authors of all this stuff notice the insistence with which people are exhorted to seek out, and do actually seek out, exactly the thing they’re said to be incapable of? Malouf is roughly in the same boat: gesturing towards an ideal that is already an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying fragment of the real. As for endowing our Shukov-like struggles within the fateful encampment of the planetary economy with a resigned sense of classical proportion – well, in the sketchy form QE41 presents it, the ideal comes across as a bit of a cop-out: it just raises the question why we should settle for anything less than understanding how we got to this dark place where we’re equally the prisoners and the camp-guards and the camp itself.

If we understood how we got here, maybe we'd actually be less miserable - and maybe making a break for the gates wouldn’t seem so crazy. Indeed, why should the illuminati of humankind really be happy with anything less?

Gernot Böhme: The End of the Baconian Age

For anyone looking for a little more in explanation of one of the claims in my recent Böhme translation, a rough English version of the opening page and half of B's The End of the Baconian Age (Am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters, 1993):

The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme

We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.

The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:

"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."

Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .

Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 1

Invasive Technification - Introduction (from the German by CS)

1. Deep within the Brain

Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.

The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.

Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.

Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.

Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.

The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?

2. The Iron Cage

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.

By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.

Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.

A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:

"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]

Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.

The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.

3. Material Substitution

In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.

By way of introduction: Gernot Böhme, Philosopher

Gernot Böhme (born 1937, Dessau, Germany) - German philosopher

Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.


Classical Philosophy, Ethics


Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.


Aesthetics as Aisthetics


Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:


"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."


An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.

Karl Kraus By Night

The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .

"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."

"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."

"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."

"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."

"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."

From: By Night (1919)

Eros

Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.

Art

That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.

I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.

There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.

A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.

He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.

Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.

Time


The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.

What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.

If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.

1915

The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.

Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.

Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.

By Night


Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.

The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.

Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.

“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.

(Trans. CS)