"Ms. Margaret" by Phan Việt

from the Vietnamese by CS

      Today, I had dinner with Margaret. Tomorrow, she's moving out of Brown. Margaret has already been living here for seven years. She's been doing her PhD at the university for ten years and she still hasn't finished. I had been at Brown for two months before I got to speak to Margaret. To start with, I thought she hated me. In the end, I found out that talking to Margaret was an achievement in itself because Margaret thought talking to anyone was beneath her dignity. Margaret had a room on the second floor, but she had also occupied a small, empty room in the basement. She spent most of her time down there. My guess is Margaret would've thought talking to me beneath her dignity too if she hadn't seen me reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in the kitchen one day.
       “Do you like it?" she asked.
     “Not that much. Everyone says Dostoyevsky's great, but I'm not convinced yet.” I said.

     “Hell, what would they know? One guy says Dostoyevsky's great, so they all go round saying Dostoyevsky's great. Who cares?"
      From then on we started talking. We became friends, although she had already decided to move out of Brown because she found Charlie more and more insufferable. Charlie was a guy who lived on the second floor. Margaret called him "the nutjob".

      “The nutjob wants to steal my ideas,”  Margaret said to me. “Last week I was talking to him about my thesis, I told him I was reading this book. So today I went to the library and who had borrowed the book? That's right - the nutjob."
      Charlie wasn't the only one Margaret suspected of stealing her ideas. Even her PhD supervisor was under suspicion. Margaret was doing her PhD in theology. Her topic was violence in the Book of Mark: the New Testament. She'd been at it for ten years, sweating over her research since her time at Princeton, which she'd left to come to Chicago because she suspected her old supervisor had been trying to steal her ideas too.
      “The old man didn't want to let me graduate so he could publish my research as his own first. When I found out, I told him I was leaving. You know what he did? He wrote all these nasty letters about me to people so I couldn't get into any of the other unis.”
      “So how did you get a transfer here?”
      “Well, the guy who's supervising me now let me come across. I met him at a conference and I told him about my topic. After that he just let me come across.”
      “What a great guy!”
      “That's what I thought at the start,” said Margaret. “But now I can see he wants to steal my ideas too. Now I'm just going to have to stay away from the lot of them. What do I need them for anyway? Let me tell you, when you've been researching in this tiny little field for ten years, there's no one who can teach you a thing. Nobody can bullshit me - see?”
     That evening, Margaret and I had dinner at a little Thai restaurant on 55th Street. The place was deserted except for me and Margaret and two white guys who were probably students from our uni.
      “Margaret,” I said, “there's something I really want to ask you.”
      “Ask away!”
      “Are you planning on getting married at any stage?”
      “No!"
      Margaret's answer was so direct and decisive I had no idea what to say next. Having said her bit, she applied herself to the Thai rice, as if it was up to me to work out all the finer implications that hovered around this "No" of hers. 
      “Um . . . May I ask why not?”
      Margaret put the plate down, took a sip of water and looked me straight in the eye. She then delivered the following clear-cut answer:
     “Because I have absolutely no desire to live with other people. No desire whatsoever. I don't like men. And I don't like people in general. Human beings make me sick. I don't want to see tham. I don't want to go anywhere near them. And I definitely don't want to hear a single word that comes out of their filthy mouths. People have no idea how stupid they are. Look at the way they talk. Look at the way they laugh. They think what they're coming out with is pure gold. It's disgusting, I'm telling you. Just disgusting.”
      The two guys sitting a little way from us almost certainly heard every word of this. They gave Margaret a funny look. Then they gave me a funny look. Then they gave each other a funny look. I was sure I could tell what they were thinking - "Look at those two bitches" . . .
      “Oh, c'mon. You can't tell me you hate your parents too!"
      “Don't talk to me about my parents. My parents are the dullest pair of phonies on this planet. My mother's Jewish. My father's a Christian. Both into religion like crazy. I can't stand either of them. When I was little, my mother said straight up - you're never going to come to anything. You're ugly, you're dirty and you're going to be unhappy in life. That's what she said, the bitch. Think about it, how could a mother possibly say stuff like that to a child? When I got into uni, I left home. And I'm never going back. She could die tomorrow for all I care.” 
     “But," I said, lowering my voice, "but haven't you ever been in love? Have you ever been on a date with anyone?”
      “Love, huh? I don't know if that's what I'd call it. When I was at college, I did kind of like a few people. But they were never interested in me, so I let it slide.”
     “How do you know they weren't interested? Maybe they were interested, but they were too scared to do anything about it? When I first met you, I was scared stiff!”
      “How are you supposed to know if someone is interested in you then, missy?”
      “Um, look, I'm not an expert, but I guess it's the way they look at you, the way they behave around you, what they say . . .”
      “I don't know. Sounds too complicated to me. Back then, if there were people I was interested in but they didn't tell me they liked me then I just let it slide. I don't want to get married. I told you already, I don't want to live with ANYONE. People make me want to throw up. Living alone is what makes me happy.”
      And Margaret was right in a way too. She was probably the happiest person on campus, at least as far as I could judge. She wore the same clothes the whole year round, the same black t-shirt tucked into the same bell-bottomed jeans, with an enormous khaki coat thrown over the top in winter. Margaret never worried what other people thought of her or whether they paid attention to her. That was the way she kept going, day after day, labouring away on her research into violence in the Book of Mark in the basement.
      Here's the thing though. Looking back, I still can't help thinking - Margaret was really pretty. Ms. Margaret Ziegner had one of the most beautiful faces of all the American girls I met during those years in Chicago. . .

Dicta and Contradicta: More Karl Kraus

I’ve noticed that the butterflies are dying out. Or is it just that children are the only ones who see them? When I was ten I associated exclusively with Admiralen in the fields of Weidlingau and I can say it was the proudest company I’ve ever kept in my life. Trauermantel, Tagpfauenauge and Zitronenfalter made for the extra colour of one’s youthful existence. Vanessa Io, Vanessa cardui – oh indulgence of indulgences! When I returned many years later, they had all disappeared. The midday sun blasted away as ever, but not a single flicker of colour was to be spotted. Instead scraps of newspaper were scattered about the meadows. Later I learned that wood from the forests had been requisitioned the production of printing paper. In short, with information in such abundance, the butterflies were considered to be in oversupply. One of our magazine’s well-wishers actually sent in the very last butterfly and a colleague took the opportunity to skewer it on his pen and look into the causes of its fatal isolation. The world (it was found) is in flight from all colour of personality; from which one protects oneself by getting organised. The butterflies were the only ones who’d neglected to organise themselves. And thus it came about that sub-editors, glimmering hacks, sip away at the flowery chalices of old and infuse their prose with the perfume of their experiences. Even the monotonal Kohlweisslinge (cabbage whites) had to give way, though the journos might plausibly have come to some agreement owing to a certain kinship between them. The war to the death with those little flying creatures represents the triumph of newspaper culture. Butterflies and women, beauty and spirit, nature and art get a painful taste of what it means for a Sunday paper to have 150 pages. Mankind hits out against butterflies with fly-swats. And wipes the colourful dust from its fingers, because they have to be clean for printers’ ink.

Prejudice is an indispensable servant who stands at the front door and turns away nasty impressions. The trick though is not to be thrown out by your servant yourself.

My spirit is stirred by my senses, my senses are stirred by the spirit of women. But what of the body? The body I think and feel into non-existence. Experimenta in corpore vili.

Hypocrites are not hateful because they don’t practise what they preach, but because they don’t preach what they practise. A man who condemns moral hypocrisy has to take care not to be mistaken for a friend of morality, which the hypocrites at least betray in private. It is not betrayal of morality that is worthy of condemnation but morality itself. For it is the sum and substance of hypocrisy. The scandal that needs to be exposed is not that they drink wine, but that they preach water. To show up contradictions between theory and practice is always an awkward business. What do the actions of the mass of men mean compared with the thoughts of a single individual? The moralist could well be in earnest in his crusade against a brand of immorality, to which he himself has fallen victim. Now if a man preaches wine, he could even be forgiven for drinking water. Sure – he contradicts himself. Yet he at least brings it about that the world's consumption of wine increases.

God be thanked I have often shot over the target but seldom beside it.

In earlier times I often got amorally indignant. But morality gets the upper hand here, there and everywhere and one gives it up.

A paradox comes into being when knowledge that's ripe before its time collides with the idiocy of the times.

Antitheses seem to be no more than mere mechanical inversions. Yet what a wealth of experience, suffering and knowledge one has to acquire before one may turn a word on its head!

It is almost ten years since I did any waking up to myself. The last time I woke up I founded a magazine in which to go to war against people.

My public and I understand one another very well: it doesn’t hear what say and I don’t say what it'd like to hear.

The masses don’t understand the German language; and I can’t tell it to them in journalese.

You get so little recognition, it's enough to drive you megalo-manic!

I can proudly say that I’ve spent days and nights reading nothing, and that I use every free minute, iron of will, gradually acquiring an encyclopaedic lack of education.

How much material I’d have if there weren’t any events!

He who wants to do no business with the world should let it be known that he intends to reduce his stock of acquaintances and to clear out his experiences at something less than their purchase price.

I've developed over the years into a hectic pursuer of social disadvantages. I keep on the trail of every chance to get rid of an acquaintance or lose an influential connection. Maybe one day I'll pull off one of the top jobs after all!

I was rarely loved, but always hated.

Hold your passions in check but guard against giving reason free reign.

Vanity is the indispensable guardian of a godly gift. It is nonsense to demand that a woman should relinquish her beauty or a man his intellect so as not to rub poverty up the wrong way. And it is foolish to claim that something valuable shouldn't draw attention to itself so as not to betray the worthlessness of another. Someone who accuses me of vanity puts himself under suspicion of envy – which is not as pretty a trait by a long shot. Someone who dares deny me my vanity however puts me under suspicion of impoverishment.

The sensuality of women needs as little of a tangible pretext as the artistic genius of men. The more unlikely the trigger, the more lavishly it unfolds itself. Spirit is bound to no class prejudice and lust is a perspective on life.

When we cast off an error, superficial characters continue to accuse us of the error and meticulous ones of inconsistency.

Wise men relent, but only those who got wise through suffering.

The faker doesn’t believe in anything genuine. And if he were to believe he still couldn’t comprehend how anyone can be genuine in an age when nobody has any real need to be genuine.

Look, that’s still not the right sort of loneliness in which to busy yourself with yourself.

The only part of an ideal which ought to be attainable is called martyrdom.

What will torture you are lost possibilities. To be certain something is impossible is already to have gained.

Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those who offend my ways and desecrate my language.

It’s not true illumination if the faculty of understanding can't make a will-o’-the-wisp of it.

The philosopher thinks his way into daily life from eternity, the poet into eternity from daily life.

In a well-ordered intellectual household some thorough tidying up needs doing on the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

If you want a clear-cut estimate of your friends, consult your dreams.

We often have to reflect to discover what we're happy about. But we always know what saddens us.

More Neapolitan Proverbs

A new installment of proverbs from Naples, plus last November's installment newly improved. Minor liberties have been taken in translation, e.g. in adding specificity to the Neapolitan picture of exercising authority.

Nun facite maie bene, ca nun avite maie male.
Don't do good deeds if you don't want wicked deeds to come of them.

' O cumannà è meglio d' 'o fottere.
Giving orders is better than hot sex on the beach.

Ogne strunzo tene 'o fummo suio.
Every d*ckhead has his own special whiff.

'O palosso fa sempe mosse.
A man with a ridiculous side only draws attention to it with his attitudes.

Pulecenella, 'e fische 'e teneva p'applause.
When Pulcinella wheeled round and dog-whistled the audience he showed the true value of applause.

Quann' 'o diavulo t'accarezza è segno ca vô l'anema.
When your devil was still in short pants, mine already had his PhD.

Tutt' 'o munno è paese.
The whole world is provincial.

'O cafone tene 'e scarpe grosse e  'o cervello fino.
The definition of a peasant is someone with fat shoes and a fine mind.

Ommo senza vizie, menesta senza sale.
A man without vices is as insipid as soup without salt.

Quann' 'o tavernaro sta annanze â cantina, dinto nun ce sta nisciuno.
When the inn-keeper stands motionless in the entranceway, it means there's no one left in the inn.

Chi pava ampresso pava doie vote.
Paying up quickly is paying twice over.

'E pezziente so' sempe 'e chiù superbe.
Beggars are always the highest-minded of the lot.

Se venne Napule pe nu soldo e nun ce sta 'o soldo.
You could sell the whole of Naples for a dollar, but nobody would have the dollar to buy her.

Meglio 'o pazzo â casa soia ca 'o savio â casa 'e l'ate.
Better to play crazy at home than play the wise-man at someone else's place.

'A meglia parola è chella ca nun se dice.
The best word is the one that goes unspoken.

Chi cammina sempe pe l'ombra, offenne 'a luce.
A man who walks forever in the shadows is an offence to the light.

Chi nun tene pietà, pietà nun trova.
A man who has no pity will find no pity.

Chi guverna 'a robba 'e l'ate nun se cocca senza magnà.
A man who takes care of the goods of other people will at least manage to feed himself every day of the year.

Chi mette 'a pezza a culore è 'o vero duttore.
The man who knows how to rescue a situation is a true maestro.

Chi perde ave sempe torto.
The man who loses is always in the wrong.

Chi s'appiecceca senza raggione, fa pace senza suddisfazione.
Start a fight without motivation and you make peace without satisfaction.

D' 'o panno fino ce sta sempe 'o chiù fino.
When it comes to finery, there's always something finer.

'E morto chillo d' 'e pisciature; e che, nun se piscia chiù?
The guy who invented pisspots died. Do you think that means no one's pissing any more?

Fa' bene e scorda, fa' male e pienzace.
If you do good deeds, forget about it. If you do ill, keep it in mind.

Meglio 'o male pruvato ca 'o buono 'a pruvà.
Better to have suffered than to be compelled to enjoy.

N'ora 'e cuntiento fa scurdà mill'anne 'e turmiente.
An hour of joy makes nothing of a thousand years of suffering.

Chi va pe chisti mare, chisti pisce piglia.
He who travels these seas will catch these kinds of fish.

Chiove e malu tiempo fa: â casa 'e l'ate è buono a sta'.
When it's raining or the weather's bad it's a sweet thing to be holed up at a friend's place.

'O pirchio pare c' 'o culo l'arroba 'a cammisa.
The miser fears that his own arse will rob him of his shirt.

'E chiù fesse so' sempe 'e primme a farse sentì.
The biggest imbeciles are always the first to be heard.

Muntagne e muntagne nun se 'ncontrano.
All things come together except the mountaintops.

***

Ammore sincero dura na vita e renne allere.
Love that is sincere lasts a lifetime and fills the lover with high spirits.

Chi tene mamma, non chiange.
If you have a mother, you have no need to cry.

‘E figlie so’ piezze e’ core.
Sons are like pieces of the heart.

‘O figlio muto ‘a mamma ‘o ‘ntenne.
A son who holds his tongue is understood by his mother.

P’ ‘a sora zita ‘o frato è nu miezu marito.
To a sexy sister a brother is already half a husband.

Quann’ ‘e figlie fottono ‘e pate so’ futtute.
Once the children are f*cking, the parents are f*cked.

‘O parlà chiaro è fatto pe l’amice.
Clear speech was made for friends.

Si nun vuo’ perdere l’amico, nun ‘o mettere â prova.
If you don’t want to lose a friend, don’t put him to the test.

È viecchio sulo chi more.
Don’t say you’re old till you’re dead.

‘O viecchio ha da murì, ‘o giovane pô murì.
An old man must die, a young man can die.

‘A monaca d’ ‘e Camaldole muscio nun ‘o vuleva, ma tuosto dice che la faceva male.
The Camaldolean nun said she didn’t like it floppy, but when it was hard it hurt.

Cazzo ‘ntustato, sempe rispettato.
A stiff pr*ck is always respected.

‘A vita è n’affacciata ‘e fenesta.
Life is short, like a glance out the window.

Dicette ‘a morte: - Se ‘n Catania vaie, ‘n Catania vengo.
Death said – If you’re going to Catania, I’ll come to Catania.

Casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata.
An orderly house is a mortuary waiting to happen.

Chi ‘int’ ‘a chiesa s’ammacca ‘o pietto ‘e ponie, è fauzo e demonio.
A man who beats his breast in church is false and is a demon.

Chi nun rispetta ‘o Criatore, nun pô rispettà ‘a criatura.
A man with no respect for the Creator has no respect for His creatures.

Dicette Dio ‘nfaccia a Dio: - Lasammo fa’ a Dio.
Even God sometimes turns to God and says – Bah, leave it to God.

‘O Pateterno primm’ ‘e fa e po l’accocchia.
God in Heaven makes ‘em, then copies ‘em.

Si ‘a fatica fosse bona, ‘a farriano ‘e prievete.
If work were fun, priests would do some too.

Auciello ‘ncaiola, o canta p’arraggia o canta p’ammore.
The bird in the cage sings either out of rage or out of love.

Che ce ave a fa’ ‘a gatta, si ‘a patrona è pazza?
Why blame the cat if her mistress is a nutbag?

Quann’ a furmicula mette ‘e scelle, è segno ca vô murì.
When the ant grows wings, it’s a sign he wants to die.

Quann’ ‘o perucchio saglie ‘ngloria perde ‘a scienza e ‘a memoria.
When the louse ascends in glory it loses all trace of science and memory.

‘O pirchio pare c’ ‘o culo arroba ‘a cammisa.
The miser fears his own arse will rob him of his shirt.

Si ‘o prestito fosse buono, se ‘mprestarria ‘a mugliera.
If loans were a good thing, you’d loan out your wife.

Meglio ‘o pazzo â casa soia ca ‘o savio â casa ‘e l’ate.
Better to play crazy in your own home than play the wise man in someone else’s.

‘E galere so’ chiene ‘e gente ca tene ragione.
Prisons are full of people who are in the right.

‘A casa cu doie porte ‘o diavulo s’ ‘a porta.
A house with two entries is at risk of the devil.

‘A spieca è fatta ‘o ‘ gnurante.
Explanations are for the ignorant.

‘A femmena bella nasce matertata.
Beautiful women are born married.

[from the Italian - i.e. not the Neapolitican - by CS]

Robert Walser: Meta

I only dimly remember the short but moving scene: one night as I wandered home in a wild drunken tumble I came across a woman in one of the monotonous streets of the great city who invited me back to her place with her. She was not beautiful, though she was beautiful in a way. Being in the state I was in, I tried out on the midnightly being all kinds of ridiculous and drole figures of speech, highly amusing above all to myself, and as I did so, true to the gifts of drunken inspiration, I noticed that I appeared to be having quite a comic effect on her. In fact it was more than that: I was actually attractive to her and, as we walked a little further, I formed the impression that, gentle-hearted as she was, she was abandoning herself to a certain weakness vis-à-vis her new companion. I wanted to go my own way, but she wouldn’t let me be. “Please don’t leave me," said she. "Come with me, dear friend. Are you going to be cold-blooded about this? Do you feel nothing for me at all? Don’t be this way! You’ve had a lot to drink, young man. Still, anyone could see that you’re sweet. Are you going to be horrid and turn me away and humiliate me now that I’ve grown fond of you? Please don't! If only you knew . . . But women like us aren’t meant to come at men with feelings like this, are we – otherwise all you do is sneer at us. If only you knew how I suffer from all this coldness, from the emptiness of all these pleasures that are my fear-inspiring, tragic trade. Till today I thought of myself as a monster, worth nothing but a good kick. Now I feel something mild, something sweet, something godly – you have awakened this in me, dear young man, and now you – you want to throw me back into the monstrous abyss? Please don't! Stay with me, stay, come with me. Let’s laugh away the whole night together. I know I’ll be able to show you some fun, you’ll see. If you’re kind-hearted, then weren’t you created to have some fun? After a long time – the longest time – I – I’m happy again too. Do you know what that means for one like me, who's been so degraded? Do you? Are you smiling? You have a lovely smile – I love that little smile of yours. And now you want to behave like a loveless lump, turn your back on our noble friendship, tread underfoot the happiness I feel looking at you? Are you going to destroy what makes me happy, what makes me happy again after a long – the longest – time? Dear, dear friend! After all the creepy nonsense I had to go through – the leaden horrors – aren't I allowed to give myself up to something that's a true pleasure for once? Please, please, don’t be cruel. I’m telling you – you won’t regret it. You'll bless the hours you spend with the vilified one, the dishonoured one – you’ll give thanks for them in your innermost being. Be kind and come with me. Don’t be kind on my behalf ever again, but be kind now, now only, join with the abused one and trust her. Look how the tears well up into my eyes! Can't you hear how I’m pleading! If you go off into the night without a friendly word, all around me will be darkness. But if you’re kind to me, the sun will shine brightly into the depths of night. Be the friendly star in my heaven tonight, be as auspicious as you seem to be. You’re a little touched? You’re giving me your hand? You’ll come with me? You love me?” – –

Post-script: Could this not be Circe – she who beseeched the knightly sea-faring Odysseus to stay with her? He wants to get home – she pleads with him not to leave her. She is an evil sorceress – one who turns all men who look at her into grunting swine. To be sure, she disputes that; according to her, she’s not a sorceress, but has herself come under an evil spell. Nor would that be impossible. Into the bargain, she is beautiful in the most moving way. She has a soft voice and a lisp – her eyes are indeterminately sea-green or sea-blue, as the eyes of cats from faraway places sometimes are, and from those eyes a wonderful, dear, proud radiance breaks forth. She isn't unhappy and yet she isn't happy either. In Odysseus she seeks and finds her happiness – and then he wants to leave her and return to his ever-patient Penelope. Tragedy of tender hearts!

Among other things she says to him that his companions have turned into swine all by themselves. The blame and shame of the whole episode is on their heads, not hers. Because they behaved like swine, they’ve become swine. She smiles and a tear insinuates itself into that smile. She has her ironic ways and is at the same time quite in earnest, she’s risqué and melancholy all at once. “Don’t you see,” she says, taking his hand in hers, “that I’m not the sorceress anymore, but that you are the sorcerer? Be my friend, my protector, my dear magnificent sorcerer! Protect me from Circe. I’m not Circe, if you’re here with me. She keeps her distance when you stay near.” That’s what she says, heaping affection on him. And yet he – he in the end – – sets sails. He leaves her to Circe, he leaves her to herself, he leaves her to that indwelling cruelty of hers, he leaves her to the shame whose slave she is. Can he set sail? Is he so hard-hearted?

Karl Kraus: In praise of a perverse way of life

From the German by CS and MM:

In praise of a perverse way of life

I had come all too soon to feel the unhappy effect on body and soul of the “normal” way of life I had been trying for a time. So I resolved before it was too late to begin living unreasonably again. Once more I see the world with a special rosy gaze that not only helps me deal with the reality of earthly misery, but grants me so many exaggerated notions of life’s joys as well. I am a living demonstration of the healthy principle of a perverse way of life within a perverse world-order.

I too was once a master of the art of rising with the sun and going to bed not long after it went down. But the unbearable objectivity with which it shines indiscriminately on all my fellow citizens, on all deformity and ugliness, is not everyone's cup of tea; whoever can spare himself in timely fashion from the peril of seeing the world clearly by day acts wisely, he has the good fortune of being avoided by the very people he flees. For when the day was still divided into morning and evening, it was a pleasure to awaken at cockcrow and go to bed when one heard the night watchman call. But then it all got divided up differently – into the time for the morning paper and the time for the evening paper, and the world began to lie in wait for Events. If one has observed for a while how shamefully the latter debase themselves before human curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the spiraling lust for information and how time and space finally become nothing more than the modes of experience of journalistic souls, then one turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. “Oh tired eyes, seize this opportunity to close yourselves again to the sight of this shameful earthly abode.”

And so I sleep well into the day. And when I wake, I spread the whole papery disgrace of humanity out in front of me to find out what I’ve missed, and I am happy. Stupidity rises early, and so events are in the habit of happening in the morning. Much can indeed take place before evening, but in general the afternoon lacks the raucous bustle with which human progress wishes to show itself worthy of its good name up till its lunchtime feeding hour. A true miller awakes only when his mill comes to a halt; whoever wishes to have nothing to do with people whose idea of existence is being in on the act - rises late.

I cross the Ringstrasse and watch them prepare for a parade. The racket goes on for four weeks, like an enormous symphonic poem on the theme of money-grubbing. Mankind rigs itself up for a holiday, the carpenters knock up the stands and the price-boards and when I consider I’m never going to see the splendiferous end result, my heart too begins to beat more gladly. If I led a normal way of life, I would have to leave town because of these festivities; now I can stay put and still miss the whole thing. An old king of Shakespeare’s waves his followers away: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’th’morning.” His fool confirms the perversity of this world and adds: “And I’ll go to bed at noon.” But if I have my breakfast in the evening, everything will already be over and I can find out the day’s total number of sunbeams at my leisure in the papers at a later date. 

All important accidents occur in the morning. I know of them only from hearsay and by always arriving too late I maintain my faith in the excellence of human affairs. In the evening papers, it is not only events that are reported, but the names of those involved too, so that one feels one is at a safe distance from the scene of the fire, but still has the opportunity to count the heads of one’s loved ones, of whom not a single one is absent. One turns to one’s advantage the transformation of the cosmos into a local fragment as best one can; one avails oneself of that new technique which turns time into jam and calls the jam jar a newspaper. The world has grown uglier since it began taking a look at itself twice daily in the mirror. So let’s make do with the reflection, and avert our eyes from the original completely. It is uplifting to lose one’s belief in a reality that matches the descriptions in the papers. He who has slept through half the day has gained half of life.

All exceptional stupidities occur in the morning; a good citizen should only wake after the Close of Business. After his evening breakfast, he will step out into life’s stream when it is free of politics. Admittedly he won’t be able to learn from the evening papers that all assassinations occur in the morning; for most of them are missed by the dozy-eyed correspondents too. There was once a newspaper that sent one correspondent after another to Paris to report presidential assassinations as they happened; would you believe it - one president after another met his end and each time the death of the president had its mirror image in the sleep of the correspondent. When the German princes sojourned in our city, I knew nothing of it. But this occurrence had no adverse effects either - the worst was that I didn’t get my regular beefsteak for breakfast and so had to renounce a cherished habit with which I had given demonstration up till then of my affiliation with the city I live in. The waiter apologised and told me in a consoling tone of the consolidation of the Triple Entente – the true step forward taken that day and one that put local interests in the shade.

When a theologian fights his way through to disbelief in the immaculate conception, it occurs in the morning; when a nuncio disgraces himself, it occurs in the morning; and it is surely better still that the noise of farmers storming universities or the cries of “Away with universal suffrage!” disturb our morning sleep rather than the peace of afternoon. I can only remember one minister ever resigning after lunch. By chance I was on my way past. How very messy the afternoon version of the resignation-business was. At 3 the police were handing out fines to the crowd that had been calling for the honourable minister Badeni to walk. By 3.15 they were already telling them to pack it in “’cause Badeni packed it in a while back himself!”

And what of justice? She is blind only in the morning, and if by exception a judicial murder ever occurs at a more advanced hour, it's bound to be someone exceptional who’s being executed. What sometimes happens in Germany is that the details of some sexual escapade are on the march, sometimes for 25 years in fact, and then, to be sure, truth needs the aid of the afternoon hours. To let an event like that escape one’s notice it’s no use withdrawing to your bedroom – it being a well-known fact that the bedroom has proved the least secure of refuges from the lust for truth.

Though sleeping through the operations of government bureaucracy is indeed one of the pleasures of life, I'm sorry to have to say that there is one area of my policy where I've no luck at all, and this is the realm of art. For it has been established that most opening-night flops occur precisely in the evening. One’s compensation is that at night there’s complete calm across all general fields of public activity. Nothing stirs. There is nothing new. The rubbish van alone makes its way through the streets, like the symbol of a perverse world-order, and spreads the dust that the day has left behind, and when it rains the hosing truck moves along behind it. Otherwise, all is quiet. Stupidity is asleep, and so I go to work. In the distance, I think I hear the noise of printing presses: stupidity is snoring. And I steal up to all that stupidity and take pleasure in harbouring murderous intentions. And when the first morning paper appears on the eastern horizon of the cultural world, I go to sleep . . . Those roughly are the advantages of a perverse way of life.

Vienna, 19 June, 1908

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.

Karl Kraus: Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Others. . .

From: Pro Domo et Mundo
Of Society

I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.

Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.

One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.

They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.

There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.

The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.

I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.

There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.

The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!

I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls

The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.

The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.

In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.

The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.

Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.

I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.

Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.

Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.

They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.

Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.

The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.

What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.

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)

Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009)

An English translation of Peter Sloterdijk's "Revolution of the Open Hand" ("Die Revolution der gebenden Hand" - FAZ, June 13, 2009) is yet to appear and to go by Axel Honneth's response to the piece (below), it might be better if an English version never saw the light of day. For those readers who feel they need something to go by in English from the object of Honneth's attack, a translation of a similar argument by Sloterdijk can be found here.

Honneth's views appear here in translation, not because they are sanctioned by The Great Stage, but because they are expressed with a flair that our local journalism, our local "public philosophy" radically excludes. Honneth's are impassioned arguments of intellectual substance. From the point of view of Australia's degraded media landscape, it must surely seem remarkable that they appeared in a broadsheet newspaper at all; however Honneth himself might recoil from the "childishness, superficiality and useless blather" that thrive as part of the democratic culture of today, reducing the idea of democracy to a nonsense, it nonetheless says something about the possibility of expression and argument in current-day Europe that his own antinomian views became available in a mainstream print medium (Die Zeit, September 24, 2009).

Honneth's attack appears here, in short, as an implicit - and no doubt ineffectual - rebuke to the print media of mainstream Australia - to the self-infatuated schizoid ramblings of Catherine Deveney, the brainless navel-gazing of Kate Holden, the interviews and monster pictures that make up The Age's former book pages, and to the small fleet of "stream-lined, slickly got-up semi-intellectual magazines that give the reader the feeling of being 'advanced' without actually forcing him/her to think."

CS

"Fatal Profundity" - by Axel Honneth

Nothing of what Peter Sloterdijk has written over the past couple of decades has seemed compatible either with the dominant spirit of the times or with the adversaries of that spirit. A principled scepticism about all the achievements of social modernity separated him from the advocates of extending the economy into all corners of life; a proud refusal to take the side of the weak and disadvantaged distinguished him from the hesitant objections of the critics of capitalism. A tone of militant anti-conformism meant however that he was met from many sides with reverence and admiration. As The Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) seemed to signal, a true free spirit had here stepped on to the intellectual stage again at last, someone who, with the lonely resolve and radicalism of a Nietzsche, took issue with all the habits of thought that had long ago given our era an almost unbearable sloppiness.

Where Sloterdijk’s intellectual calculations fell flat because he had done violence to morally well-founded principles, he was quick to shoot off further argumentative smoke grenades; their effect was that the atrocity ended up shrouded in further darkness, taking on the grandiose status of previously unthinkable thoughts. It was tough to get a handle on Sloterdijk’s thought over the years from any real moral or political angle.

However, Sloterdijk has himself recently put an end to the game of cat-and-mouse that the arts pages of our newspapers have ingloriously taken part in. In an article for the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung], he has let slip what historical developments actually capture his interest as a philosopher of history. Readers may have always suspected that his own resentment was at the bottom of that Nietzschean critique of ressentiment he has successfully mimicked. That his own resentment now shows its face in so petty-minded a way must simply have dumbfounded them though.

From the start, Sloterdijk’s preference for essayistic philosophy was connected with the rise of a social group that had nothing but contempt for the capitalist welfare state’s forms of cultural expression, though without having any workable idea of its own how to shape the future politically. In their academic youth, which fell in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the representatives of this new elite had read the words of Michel Foucault; because of their unfixed, elastic intellectual attitude, their readiness for bold intuitive leaps, they had quickly ascended all the conceivable heights of power, where they now found themselves awaiting inspiration – a transcendent word of clarity that could provide our epoch with an intellectual signature. In this milieu, which included the editorial desks of broadsheet newspapers, the cafeterias of banks, architecture offices and advertising agencies, there was agreement on one thing alone – that the welfare mentality of the social democratic age should be brought to a decisive end. The majority of Germans seemed too dependent; the culture was too attached to the open hand of the state for it possibly to give birth to any sort of powerful idea or way of life.

Admittedly their contempt was directed less towards the needy classes themselves and much more towards the latter’s intellectual representatives, who, in the “old” West German republic, had been presumptuous enough to put themselves forward as political spokesmen for a general redistribution. They enthusiastically read every article demonising the politics of 1968, they noted with deep satisfaction that the leading disciplines of the declining post ’68 era, sociology and psychoanalysis, were finally getting their comeuppance. The word of redemption was to be different from the jeremiads that the ideologues of old had delivered in the name of the weak and socially disenfranchised. It had to have something of the courage of intellectual grandeur and keep well away from the jargon of social impoverishment.

The representatives of this new class didn’t have too long to wait – soon a writer came out to meet them who had the right prescription for all their anxieties and hopes in his hand. At the very outset of his intellectual development, Peter Sloterdijk may still have been undecided whether he should set off down the path of philosophically inspired social criticism, or that of a mystical or speculative interpretation of history and the world. It may only have been the rapid success of his first books in the milieu just mentioned that finally led him to serve its disciples as a seer in impoverished times. He didn’t lack the power to create concepts and metaphors that seemed to throw open the world; he was also gifted with a certain capacity for diagnostic condensation; now all the intellectual preconditions had been fulfilled for Sloterdijk to take on that much-eyed prophetic mantle. Since then a string of essays, books and speeches have issued form his fertile mind year by year; if they aren’t all read by that stratum of his devotees, nonetheless they’re surely leafed through.

Poetry Translations 3: Heine

Heine - romantic, ironist, leftist, visionary - the bard of heaving breasts and bemused diagnosis - died in Paris in 1856, having spent the better part of the previous decade bed-ridden. The Nineteenth Century asssumed that syphillis was the cause of Heine's debilitating condition, as it was to do in the case of several of its other black sheep. Recent clinical tests seem to indicate that progressive lead poisoning was the cause of the agony which, at the time of the composition of today's poem, "Lord Have Mercy", still had several years to run.

The poem displays the typical symptoms of Heine's later attitude to Christianity: wisecracks at the expense of catholic dolts and Christian chokers by no means exclude a genuine religious sense of the poet's more-than-bodily wretchedness and need of more-than-worldly deliverance. Late Heine's cast of mind is basically deeply heterodox - a personal amalgam of Jewish, Christian and pantheist belief that would have been deeply unacceptable to the religious mainstream of Heine's day and to the orthodox Judaism and Christianity of our own day. His alleged last words were "God will forgive me. It's his job" - a line in which you might hear an undertone of anguish for sins committed or heresies proclaimed - a line in which for the rest of it what you hear is a man whose beliefs are something which, however deep, he always puts an ironist's inverted commas around.

In late Heine, the impulse to mock and kick at those whose religious belief takes on the form of doctrinal insistence is always a little stronger than his sense that the world has a stable religious meaning. In short, if the poet who "lay seven years on the floor of a garrett in Paris unable to die" can be called religious, then any belief you attribute to him has to be one that acknowledges the primacy of the anti-religious backhander. . . [CS] 

1. Lord Have Mercy

I do not envy Fortune’s sons

Their lives, instead I’m smarting

At the way they meet their deaths

Their quick and painless parting

In festive garb, heads wreathed in laurel,

Smiles upon their lips

At life’s banquet’s grand array

Death’s scythe down on them slips.

In golden cloaks, bedecked with roses

Their blossoms still to savour

They reach the realm of shadows, those

Whom fortune deigns to favour.

Untroubled by infirmity,

Their brows without a line,

They’re welcomed graciously to court

By Empress Proserpine.

Their fate fills me with envy for

It’s seven years I lie

Writhing sourly on this floor

Unable still to die.

O Lord God shorten this my torment

Bring me death’s recess

The gifts one needs for martyrdom

You know I don’t possess.

I’m gob-smacked by your contrary ways, Lord,

Please don’t get the irits

The cheeriest poet you ever created

- You rob of his high spirits.

Pain dulls live minds and adds to life

A melancholic salt

If this grim fun does not stop soon

I’ll end a catholic dolt.

Then I’ll howl your ears full Lord

Like other Christian chokers

O Lord have mercy, thus departs

The best of literary jokers.

2. Body and Soul

Said soul to body in soulful pain

I cannot leave you, I’ll remain

With you – in death’s night I’ll with you sink,

Of death’s dispersion with you drink.

You were my ever-faithful second,

Flung me round, or so I reckoned,

In a festive cloak of satin

Warmly lined, of flawless pattern.

Woe is me, now naked, wracked,

Bodiless and quite abstract

I’m to lounge in blissful blight

Above in realms of heavenly light

In heavenly halls ‘midst heavenly norms

Where Time’s great surge in silence forms

Itself into a Yawn – where saintly trogs

Clack round bored in leaden clogs.

This is one second-rate result

Dear body, stay, and I exult!

So body said to downcast soul:

Take comfort and show self-control

Bear in peace with patient frown

What fate for each of us set down.

Burn out I must as our lamp’s wick,

But you, the spirit ever-quick

Will in heaven no doubt go far,

Will twinkle like a little star

Of beamiest purity – me, I’m junk,

Lumpen matter, a dead tree’s trunk

Slumping to the ground I become

That which I was – an earthly crumb.

Now fare you well and end your sighs,

Think, maybe there are funnier guys

Than you now believe up there.

And if you pass by heaven’s great bear

(NOT MEYER-BEAR) Some place in heaven’s starry sea

Say ten-times hi to him from me.

Auf Deutsch

1. Miserere

Die Söhne des Glückes beneid ich nicht

Ob ihrem Leben, beneiden

Will ich sie nur ob ihrem Tod,

Dem scmerzlos raschen Verscheiden.

Poetry Translations 2: More Heine

The Wandering Rats

There are two kinds of rat:

The hungry and the fat.

The fat ones stay content at home,

The hungry ones though, they hungrily roam.

They roam for many a mile,

Relentlessly lacking in style,

Straight on along their miserable track,

No wind nor weather can hold them back.

They climb over mountain peaks,

They swim the murkiest lakes;

Many have broken their necks or drowned,

The living pass on without looking around.

Take a look at these louts

With their fearsome ugly snouts;

Heads shaven bare they're at physical peak -

Radical chic - ratty and sleek.

The radical rodent squad

Know nothing of Heaven or God.

Their whelps run unbaptised and free,

Their wives are common property.

The sensuous rats of the fleet

Want no more than to drink and to eat,

No thought while they gulp, slurp and chortle

That our souls were created immortal.

Such wild and savage rats

Have no fear of Hell or of cats;

They think though they haven't a cent to their name

To divide up the world so we all have the same.

The rats are a'roaming here too,

Coming to a suburb near you!

I hear their squeaks, straight on they press,

Their multitude is numberless.

Alas! By now its too late,

They're already at the gate!

The local council and the mayor

Are shaking their heads in brainless despair.

Good citizens ready to arm,

The church bells ring out in alarm.

In peril is something by which we set store,

Our property values, our whole rule of law

No tolling of bells, no pious old pleas,

No majestic parliamentary decrees,

No squadron of cannon, no hundred pounders

Will save your children, your statues of founders,

No help from the verbal poptarts

Of weary rhetorical arts.

You don't catch a rat with a logical trap

So spare me your fine-spun sophistical crap.

To the hungry inside of a rat in a group

Appeals only the logic of dumplings and soup,

Arguments smelling of pig on a spit

With a side-dish of porky political wit.

A taciturn cod stewed in butter for hours

Is what pleases the radical powers

Far better than any Mirabeau

Or all the orations since Cicero.

Auf Deutsch - Die Wanderratten

Es gibt zwei Sorten Ratten:
Die hungrigen und satten.
Die satten bleiben vergn ügt zu Haus,
Die hungrigen aber wandern aus.

Sie wandern viel tausend Meilen,
Ganz ohne Rasten und Weilen,
Gradaus in ihrem grimmigen Lauf,
Nicht Wind noch Wetter hält sie auf.