Collapsing Old Buildings

Or: How to drive Institutions into decline

©Metropolitan Transportation Authority

How modern was it that some time ago a band could give itself the illustrious name Einstürzende Neubauten [Collapsing New Buildings] – and all the more so when the roof of Berlin’s House of World Cultures, known in Berlinese as the Pregnant Oyster, complied with this dernier cri and collapsed without further ado. This may be history, but the dilemma of collapsing new buildings is far from over. Only recently, Berliners were forced to realize that not only does a city freeway bridge now need to be demolished because it’s in danger of collapsing, but also that a tenth of the city’s bridges are threatened with the same fate. Naturally, the question arises as to how those responsible could turn a blind eye to these catastrophes now being announced. And vice versa: what would have happened if the monthly salary for the State secretaries hadn’t been paid? If this had led to a storm of indignation, the collective silence of those responsible testifies to the fact that we’re dealing with flagrant institutional failures.^¹ If the usual response is a shrug of the shoulders accompanied by a sigh declaring how lazy the bureaucracy monster is, it’s worth remembering that the Prussian bureaucracy transformed a medium-sized city into a megacity of two million within half a century with downright frightening efficiency.² The bridges are symptomatic of a much deeper crisis manifesting itself in every conceivable area of society, and it affects schools, universities, healthcare systems, employment agencies, public broadcasters, the German armed forces, you name it. The fact that a citizen’s income was introduced with great aplomb, only to ultimately admit that up to 70% of the resulting costs represent administrative expenses,³ is a scandal no one has yet to take responsibility for, even if only in symbolic form. What could be termed a government failure would be more accurately described as a generational project. After all, just as a bridge doesn’t develop dangerous cracks overnight, an educational system can’t become dysfunctional with a mere wave of the hand - it requires a concerted effort. Or more precisely: a blindness to it. While medieval theologians devised the mortal sin of acedia for this purpose, in the secularized world, the memory of the sluggish torpidity [Trägheit des Herzens] has vanished, and even the understanding of why the chronicled sin of omission once counted as a mortal sin seems to have slipped away. This leads to the question that this text is concerned with - namely, how can such a decline occur in the first place: How can an institution slide into systemic dysfunctionality?

The great anthropologist Mary Douglas (to whom we owe an entire book on institutions) once aptly remarked that institutions are answers to questions we no longer remember. If we follow this interpretation, it’s at least understandable that institutionalization always comes with the risk of stagnation or even regression. The philosopher Heidegger traced the concept of an Institution back to the German word Einrichtung [Institution], in part because of the term’s inherent objective of Richtung – meaning: ›direction‹ - makes it clear we’re ultimately dealing with a social drive, an Engine [Triebwerk] that’s supposed to steer society in a particular direction. From this perspective, we might dismiss the initial question’s omission as a minor side effect and believe that the Institution (almost like a Luhmannian autopoietic systems) will steer society in the right direction. As an exemplar: although school is now taken for granted, we forget that the introduction of compulsory education in the 18th century was met with far from unanimous enthusiasm. The farmers, needing their children to work in the fields, revolted against it, prompting the authorities to introduce holidays during the sowing, weeding, and harvesting seasons. Seen in this light, the forgetting that endows the Institution with an aura of self-evidence is an actual gain. Following Newton’s Law of Inertia, which states that a body maintains its state of motion as long as no external force acts on it, the Institution does its job.

Problematic institutional amnesia arises only when there’s a change in direction and the Institution can’t adjust to the new situation. This is when institutional inertia becomes clear, and it’s evident that we’re not dealing with something merely given, but rather a social artifact that needs to be kept up to date and state-of-the-art. If this fails, the logic of decline that Otto von Bismarck summed up in a bon mot prevails:

The first generation creates the fortune, the second manages it, and the third studies art history.

While impending insolvency in the business world quickly becomes public knowledge, leading to the company in question leaving the market, the downward spiral of a public institution is a much more complicated matter. This is because such Institutions are designed to exist indefinitely and are therefore spared the embarrassment of necessarily proving their profitability.

©pixabay

A Lesson

As a young man, I was suddenly confronted with this problem. It was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I’d been tasked with staging my own script in a Public Radio recording studio⁴. The fact that I’d been granted this privilege (and a whole week of post-production time to boot) instead of it being given to one of the station’s highly paid in-house directors was because I had already proven my media competence with a self-produced project⁵. And, because even back then, as an exception to the rule, the station’s department was committed to producing high-quality audiophile productions under the heading of sound art, I wasn’t overly surprised to discover a multi-track machine when I entered the studio—and I was pleased thinking it’d be a wonderful machine to work with. However, the sound engineer hastily interjected that the machine was defective—which, as my editor later admitted to me, was nothing more than a white lie since the machine had hardly been used since it was installed, simply because none of the studio staff had been willing to figure out how to use it. Because they relied on the human factor instead, I spent the following days, instead of intelligently editing the material, rushing two assistants from one tape recorder to another in an absurd choreography—which turned the mixing process into a wild improvisation. This seemed absurd, or even more so: a deeply counterproductive theater. Regarding the mixing of my work, after this experience, I decided only to record the actors at the station and digitally edit the material myself to create a program. Despite this, I still had the dubious pleasure of performing these absurd dances for over the next seven years because I was organizing a joint acting seminar at the University of the Arts with one of the station’s editors. And because this resulted in a one-hour radio feature, I was confronted with the recording studio situation year after year—observing how the staff, entrenched in their refusal to embrace digitalization, turned into a fortified camp, an analog zone. However, since the digital world was progressing in the outside world, the taboo multi-track recorder ultimately found its way into the computer, as did the entire machine park of the recording studio—a metamorphosis that I witnessed firsthand in the recording studio of Johannes Schmölling, a musician from Tangerine Dream with whom I had worked on joint productions for many years. Since I’d persuaded Johannes to help with the university seminars—and we were now mentoring not only actors but also sound engineering students at the University of the Arts—the station editor eventually proposed showing the students how the professionals operated at the station. Naturally, this idea was completely nonsensical, as the university already had a state-of-the-art digital recording studio in the early 1990s. However, because the editor insisted, half a dozen sound engineering students arrived to witness the spectacle. Year after year, it took less than five minutes before the first one came up to me and whispered in my ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious?« After a few minutes, it was clear to every student that this was a case of digital illiteracy running rampant; the people at the station hadn’t even begun to grasp how the digital world not only demanded new forms of production but also represented an aesthetic revolution and an enormous expansion of vocabulary. They simply carried on as before and never tired of emphasizing that, unlike the cold, impersonal world of computers, they were concerned with people and real life. The further they fell behind technologically and aesthetically, the more those involved indulged in this absurd theater of productivity, while producing not entirely unsuccessful mixes met with applause. Subconsciously, however, those involved were well aware that they’d long since said goodbye to the rest of the world. A sound engineer I bumped into in the hallway of the station once confidentially asked me whether I thought anyone in the outside world would still employ someone like him who didn’t have digital studio skills. While such a question might have been taboo within the station, the editors I had worked with over the years were quite frank with an outsider like me. An editor at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, who had bought one of my externally produced programs, told me with a sigh that she felt she wasn’t just working in an institution, but in a big money-wasting machine, while my editor colleague, with whom I did the university seminars, was convinced that he belonged to the last generation (and this was in the early 1990s, mind you). And, in this sense, the remark that they were in an Institution was a relatively mild criticism of the conditions. Even if no one would ever have admitted it publicly, everyone was well aware that this Institution had long since lost touch with reality. However, the most disconcerting aspect of it all was that the Institution’s dysfunctionality was slowly spreading like mildew that couldn’t be attributed to external stressors. Those involved weren’t subject to overly intrusive program management or any form of micromanagement. Money was not a problem either – every permanent editor or sound engineer knew that they would be able to retire on 90% of their salary, a circumstance that only caused embarrassment when the authors (in other words, those who’d been brought into the station from the outside world) were made aware of its limited resources. All in all, it was paradise. Nevertheless, despite the princely salaries and complete security, a strange emptiness—indeed, a profound dissatisfaction—was palpable. You could call it a luxury problem: an ennui stemming from a loss of faith in the significance of one’s work. This was precisely where the gateway for innovation emerged; in retrospect, it seems highly peculiar: namely, the broadcasters’ decision to subordinate their own work to quotas, indeed to regard quotas as the decisive criterion for quality. Because a State contract guaranteed the fees and the station was mandated to »offer contributions in particular to culture«,⁶ no one was compelled to compete in any kind of market. Quite the contrary: just as the station had once committed itself to promoting sound art, it would have been only logical to do pioneering work in the field of new media. The fact that, instead of turning to the digital future, the broadcaster began measuring the relevance of its own activities in terms of ratings in the early 1990s was related to this creeping loss of significance – highlighted by the shocking realization that certain programs fell below the threshold of measurability. While this could have been attributed to intellectual complacency, it was also due to a loss of quality awareness (»Are they serious?«), which had never become a topic of discussion, just as it had never occurred to those in the recording studio to embrace the expensively acquired multi-track machine. In this context, ratings served as a way of absolving everyone of responsibility for their actions.⁷ From then on, it was possible to claim, like a mantra, that they were merely busy supplying the audience with what it craved, while the trick was how this argument enabled them to avoid anything remotely uncomfortable or unfamiliar. And because this move into a limbo economy had given rise to a kind of intellectual inertia manifesting itself as populist demagoguery or hostility toward intellectuals, an audio cutter recently found it perfectly acceptable to rebuke an author like me for expressing views that, in her opinion, were incapable of winning majority support. However, the real trick was that this allowed them to eliminate reason, which had long since become the Alphabet of audio and video production out there in the digitalized hinterland.

This lesson may have a personal side to it, but it’s nevertheless representative of the public sphere in general, or more precisely, of an Institutional failure observable across the board. Subsequently, whenever I gained insight into the anatomy of a government organization, variations on this story caught my eye.⁸ If Mary Douglas understood institutions as a form of the social unconscious, it could be concluded that every form of normality leads to oblivion, even to a Law of Inertia. So far, so unspectacular: Nothing new under the sun! However, what distinguishes this lesson from the Institutional Law of Inertia is the fact that Institutions, represented by the Digital Revolution, face a social disruption that fundamentally transforms traditional roles, working methods, and even the concepts of added value, efficiency, and quality. Indeed, it isn’t at all inappropriate to see the recording studio as a metaphor for the symphonic orchestra (which Lewis Mumford already saw as a Social Machine [Gesellschaftsmaschine]). Here, following a carefully crafted score, a gathering of virtuosi collaborates in the recording studio to create a symphonic sound sensation that, having undergone a paradigm shift, now utilizes sampling technology. Not only did the recording studio’s machinery disappear into the computer⁹ in the early 1990s, but the musicians themselves became occasional guests. While Bernard Hermann assembled an entire orchestra to perform the film music for Hitchcock’s Psycho, today’s film composers operate almost entirely behind closed doors.

It wasn’t as if the people involved in the Institution were unaware of the coming changes – they knew, albeit in a rather vague way, that the advent of digitalisation would bring about radical changes. This made their desire to hold on to the old ways and their deep, determined unwillingness to embrace the new all the more telling. Accordingly, my colleague’s sigh of »We are the last generation« could be understood as a form of present-denial, as a secret Luddite attitude. Secret because, unlike the weavers of the early 19th century, they weren’t forced to tear down the machines, but could simply ignore them as foreign objects. And no one was forced to admit this to themselves.

©snapwire

While the Institution’s staff may have convinced themselves that, unlike the soulless computer world, they embody true humanity (an argument based on physical presence that teachers continued to use during the coronavirus pandemic), the excluded rationality isn’t concerned with sentimentality, but rather it continues to develop. The result is a growing divide of increasing intellectual backwardness. The question is: How do those left behind react to such a threat, which is perceived as extremely dangerous because it is based on reason, thereby representing a threat of rationalization? This is where the repression mechanism comes into play, which, although implied in the image of the slow tanker, isn’t clearly captured in its psychological dimension. For if the collective continues as before, the growing rationality gap conveys the feeling that one is on a sinking ship. The solution for self-consolation in the face of this inner vacuum is finding meaning elsewhere. With this in mind, it’s understandable why public broadcasters have taken refuge in ratings. By focusing on the audience (which, according to the mantra, must be catered to where it currently is), mediocrity, or rather backwardness itself, became the program, allowing those responsible for programming to shirk any responsibility. Now, the dilemma of ratings is what led them to a limbo economy, at the end of which stand kitsch and pulp fiction, sex and crime. And because this self-abasement was incompatible with the grandiose self-image of being the people’s teacher, a way out had to be found that spared those involved from the threat to rationality posed by the present. This explains the special appeal of moral outrage. It creates urgency and gives the messenger greater legitimacy. Marshall McLuhan summed this up in a wonderfully mischievous remark:

»Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.«¹⁰

»Guilt and remorse« McLuhan continues, »retrospective by definition and exempt the guilty party from any redeeming act of expiation or creative renewal. Guilt and remorse are forms of despair and sloth.« Because the moralist fights the battles of the past to escape the rationality of the present, we are ultimately dealing with a camouflaged form of escapism, a logic of restoration that allows the damaged narcissist to feel the Great Again! In this sense, the evasive movement into hypermorality, which can be observed in politics everywhere as the ›rebellion of the decent,‹ is evidence of backwardness, just as it’s an expression of a vacuum. You could call it inverted nihilism: self-hatred projected outward. Because the roles are distributed here with good and evil carefully separated from one another, the moralist can take pleasure in a noble spectacle—it ensures that any thought of creative self-renewal is left out. Such a view of nihilism may come as a surprise; after all, it contradicts the image of the anarchist whose dissatisfaction with the world is vented in a bomb explosion, just as it is incompatible with Nietzsche’s pathos of »God is dead!«.

While Nietzsche’s» Everything is permitted!« recalls its origins as the Assassins’ motto legitimizing the killing of enemies, the postmodern version of anything goes has transformed into a vague feeling of indifference. This emptiness is so unbearable that it becomes necessary to outsource the scandal that you embody—which may explain the ubiquity of the Metaphysical Nazi that Matthias Brodkorb writes of. In the longue durée, however, it becomes evident that the outrage conjoined with the social prestige of those left behind isn’t truly sustainable. Because when institutional inertia causes bridges and school buildings to collapse, the gap between moral economy and institutional dysfunction becomes a scandal in itself. In this sense, the collapsing buildings merely manifest a long-cultivated, carefully concealed vacuum. At the latest, the astonished audience now realizes that these highly paid actors have succumbed to psychological inflation—the ethos of empty rhetoric. This, of course, leads to a paradox. While those responsible have spent a long time cultivating a phantastic image of themselves and the world, it isn’t clear what exactly led to this collapse or what past sins of omission were committed. Consequently, engaging in a game of musical chairs and delegating responsibility to one’s predecessors isn’t difficult. It becomes more difficult to admit that the poorly disguised nihilism is merely a mask for intellectual backwardness—and that these dizzying heights of hypermorality have led to an abysmal escapism. If you’ve been able to revel in a competence simulation for all these years—a Potemkin logic in which truly productive people cannot survive for long—it’s no wonder that you also fail to remedy the abuses and only demonstrate your own impotence. The answer is not to reverse course, but rather to accuse the critics of pointing out the abuses of baseness and moral depravity. With this in mind, it is easy to understand how the flagrant failure of the State has led to Authoritarianism, even a bizarre form of Neo-Statism... but that, I fear, is another story. So: to be continued.

Translation: Martin Burckhardt & Hopkins Stanley

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1. The direness of the situation is evident from the fact that Berlin’s transport authority is now looking for a structural engineer on LinkedIn: See Tagesspiegel, March 31, 2025.

2. In 1858, Berlin had 458,637 inhabitants; by 1900, the population had grown to nearly 2 million, or 1,888,848 to be precise.

3. According to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, German administrative costs have increased by 39 percent to €6.5 billion over the past ten years, partly due to rising salaries. Meanwhile, the funds available to support basic income recipients have remained at €3.8 billion.

4. German Public Radio is part of Germany’s joint regional public-service broadcaster network [Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland aka ARD] funded by State funding sources.

5. Rush-hour, produced and recorded with Hans-Peter Kuhn in 1984

6. This remark can be found in Section 11 of the program mandate—just as the special status of public broadcasting primarily derives from its cultural mandate, namely the promotion of the arts.

7. This is precisely the explanation given by Wolfgang Herles, who has devoted an entire book to the issue of quotas: complacency. From then on, editors were relieved of the obligation to discuss quality standards, as they could simply refer to the quota. See Im Gespräch mit ... Wolfgang Herles, Ex nihilo, Dec. 19, 2023.

8. A very amusing story that happened to me in the 2000s involved the head of a spatial planning authority. He’d already startled his subordinates by throwing a paving stone out of the meeting room as a kind of inverted, revolutionary gesture, and shortly afterwards, he gathered his staff in the courtyard and asked them if anyone thought the public would notice if the Institution ceased to exist. The answer was unanimous silence – but that didn’t prevent the employees from showing up at the office the next day and going about their daily work.

9. Today’s DAWs(Digital Audio Workstations), whose functionality would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in the 1990s, are now available free of charge – as exemplified by Cakewalk – offering unheard-of sound editing tools back then.

10. See McLuhan, M. – The Hot and Cool Interview, in Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication, eds. Michel A. Moos, Amsterdam 1980, p. 65.

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