Éducation sentimentale I
Actually, the question of my counterpart was exceedingly simple. How does one come up with such thoughts as set forth in the Philosophy of the Machine? And my reaction to it was: “Because at some point, at the end of the eighties, I took a different turn.” I can’t say that this chosen path was a decision. Rather, it was probably a form of gradually becoming a stranger, a growing distance from my surroundings. Whatever ideas were floating around in public didn’t want to fit into the landscape of thoughts dawning in my head. Zeitriss – that was the title of the piece that had taken me back, as if on a pilgrimage, to the France of Gothic cathedrals, to the ‘Dark Ages.’1 It was the end of October 1989, and I was already returning to Strasbourg airport. The rental car radio was announcing unrest in the GDR – news that had accompanied me throughout my trip.
And, of course, there was the inkling that something serious was brewing in my hometown, just three kilometers from our Kreuzberg apartment. On one of my first visits to East Berlin, while using public transportation, I noticed that West Berlin did not exist on the Reichsbahn map. There was nothing, just a white area. This terra incognita seemed to me like a metaphor for this city, where each half was worlds away from the other. If on the eastern side this was due to prohibition, in the west it was more a form of fatigue. It seemed as if the gated community, in its self-centeredness, had stopped caring about the outside world. Looking at the map, terra incognita had entered my consciousness. In a way that is difficult to describe, it seemed to me like an explanation of why the television news felt like reports of Potemkin backdrop scenery; moreover, I realized the schism existed within me as well. Strangely enough, this schism hadn't the slightest thing to do with political or ideological issues. It was solely from my years with computers, instruments, and other recording devices in the recording studio. If the question of artificial intelligence had initially taken me to the United States and brought me together with various researchers and philosophers2, the trip to the France of Gothic cathedrals was an attempt to understand the strange absence of historicity that had characterized those conversations. There was the professor who, in the cafeteria at Tufts University, while eating his bagel, explained to me that the question of God could be answered in a very simple way: By thinking God, you transformed him into neuronal impulses and stored him in the brain. God is information as real as the weather report or the thought of a number. This proof of God seemed to me as strange as the idea that my brain was an information-processing machine. Therefore, I concluded, the terra incognita was not due to the German question but had become globalized, so to speak. That’s what I had taken away from the conversation with the drug pope Timothy Leary: that the world spirit had enhoused itself in Silicon Valley and that the computer was a mind-expanding drug, even better than LSD. The big unanswered question that had come up after all these conversations was simple: has there ever been such a technological epochal rupture in history? The answer was yes, of course. Even the Wheelwork of the Middle Ages can be understood as a Universal Machine. And because I wanted to know how this Machine had entered the world of the Middle Ages, I read Aaron Gurjewitsch’s World View of Medieval Man, Arno Borst, Georges Duby, and Hans Sedlmayr. In the course of reading, the realization emerged that the starting point of this new rationality lay in cathedral building. Thus, the decision to turn this journey through time into a radio program about the emergence of a new era. The Strasbourg Cathedral, the last station of the journey, was preceded by the cathedrals of the Île-de-France, the Albigensians, and Burgundians, but above all by the Cistercian buildings in Noirlac and Fontenay. In this monastery, located far from the city, in the middle of the forest, I understood what Bernard of Clairvaux had meant when he’d written
The tree is a fallen column (Bernard of Clairvaux)
If nature was thus declared as the fall of man, it was, on the other hand, postulated that the cathedral (as the man-made ideal) must be the archetype and starting point of all contemplation of nature. In late autumn, I was the only visitor wandering through these rooms – pondering how this built minimalism could grow into such a gigantic structure as the Strasbourg Cathedral.
That had been the last stop on this trip: this medieval skyscraper adorned by an astronomical clock and a puppet show (which had reminded me, as a child of pop culture, of the animatronics at Disneyland). Now, on the short walk to the airport, all those images disappeared, drowned out by the voice of the newscaster announcing the breaking news of the day: the second wave of refugees pouring into the Prague embassy, closing the border to Hungary, to Czechoslovakia.3
It wasn't like I was unfamiliar with the other side of the Iron Curtain. In the years before, I had been in East Berlin again and again, first as a tourist, then on my own account, and last but not least, as a courier who maintained contact with East Berlin authors for an editor friend. Finally, there was this appointment with an editor of the GDR state radio, who had asked me for a cassette of my sound opera4 – and because he was sure that the Reichspost would bag it, he had asked for a personal delivery.
Of course, I was late because the People’s Police officers on Friedrichstraße had unerringly fished me out of the stream of visitors and discovered the cassette. Hoping to confiscate some anti-state, subversive material, they had retreated to their command center and listened all the way through the tape – only to hand it back to me an hour later, shaking their heads. Far more than the establishment that met at the Akademie der Künste, I was interested in the writers of my generation who’d built up a kind of counter- or underground culture in Prenzlauer Berg. My first contact with this scene was through an American poet with a friend who, in turn, had contacts with underground writers. This young man, the son of a New York investment banker whom he hated implicitly (as he hated capitalism), had a wife and child and was the author of the most uncharitably produced travel books. When we met in a Kreuzberg café, his first question was about how he could benefit financially from my support – a request that his lyricist friend, embarrassed, was able to rebuff. And because I was willing to invite the banker's son for coffee, he let himself be persuaded – and dragged me along on his next East Berlin tour. What struck me was the transformation that my guide displayed within a few minutes. The ill-tempered Kreuzberg scene guy turned into a kind of urbane bon vivant. Before leaving a little note on the door of an absent writer, we chatted up a series of pretty nurses – and I realized that this man used the Iron Curtain as a kind of boudoir, a back world of desires kept happy by little souvenirs or ‘blue wallpaper.’ If the world of Prenzlauer Berg, viewed from the vantage point of Western newspaper editorials, was a haven of avant-garde literature, it dissolved into shades of gray when viewed up close. The readings, sometimes attended by hundreds of insiders, were usually of a remarkable simplicity, always about giving voice to the unspeakable – which is why the government was always portrayed as an ill-willed king and the audience, trained in slave language, practiced deciphering the allegory. If my counterparts proved to be more intellectually agile, they also often displayed a strangely iridescent chameleon nature. There was the young poet-star who had published a book of poems entitled Jeder Satellit hat einen Killersatelliten (Every Satellite Has a Killer Satellite) – and who, as we walked through the streets, informed me which pub, as a Stasi meeting place, wasn’t to be visited under any circumstances (which was probably so obviously clear to him because he, himself, was on the State Security payroll). And the more familiar I became with the world of my generational comrades, the stranger it seemed to me. The strangeness was not something that could be thematized in conversation, but instead, it referred to something that innervated itself as an underlying, visceral force, the sensory apparatus and taste. At one point, I was walking past an Internet store with a painter when she stopped and said, “Say, Martin, do you smell that?” I looked at her uncomprehendingly – and tried to make out from the surrounding smells what she possibly could mean, but there was nothing, only the smell of a disinfectant. But that was precisely what it was. And her rapt, almost enthusiastic expression: “This smells like the West.” It was not difficult to see a society in decline in the East Berlin of the 1980s: a community in need that’d settled into an Absurdistan. So the editor of GDR radio laid out his working world for me, saying his radio drama department at the state radio station on Nalepastrasse had about two hundred employees. And when I objected that the West German counterpart had, at best, thirty permanent employees, he said of his two hundred; only twenty regularly worked anyway. And when I asked how the rest of their time was spent, he said, without betraying any sense of absurdity: Alcohol, women, whatever.
As my plane took off from Strasbourg and I looked down at the sea of clouds turning red in the twilight, I was aware that the world that began behind the wall had slipped into the final stage of self-dissolution. And even though it was by no means foreseeable where this journey would lead East Germany’s future, the reasons were clear – and they all had to do with the East's enormous technical and economic backwardness. This connection, of course, which, in East Berlin, was almost imposing at every step, indeed had an olfactory quality (the coal stench that greeted you when you stepped out of the subway shaft in Friedrichstrasse into the open) was, on the downside, a blank mental space. Just to the extent that this world was unknown, Westerners indulged in a reverence that could occasionally turn into a form of idolatry. As if here, in the better Germany, things were ordered in an ideal way: the authors heroic, courageous and clear, the literature still – literature. Psychologically speaking (this was not difficult to grasp), this heroization was nothing more than an escape from a guilty conscience. Quite obviously, the Westerner reveling in his consumerist mania had become so deeply entangled in cognitive dissonance that he was inclined to imagine a strange, better world in the afterlife behind the Wall. Curiously, the relationship between the two societies seemed like a hall of mirrors in which the counterpart had the task of embodying its own void. On one of my last visits to East Berlin, the girlfriend of a poet had asked me why West Berlin authors, if they had access to photocopiers, didn’t initiate underground publishing houses themselves – and I had tried as earnestly as in vain to explain to her the world of the over-saturated consumer, that, for example, my editor had recently explained to me the station would in the future use a quota in its programming, that is, rely on the masses. While he appreciated my work, it was definitely below the threshold of measurability. And naturally, Sascha Anderson came to mind, who explained to me, en passant, which Western mass media he’d just negotiated an interview with. If GDR literature represented a form of dernier cri, the things that preoccupied me took place in a vacuum, at best noted as aesthetic marginalia, without any significance in the political sphere. And yet – in a symbolic sense, anyway – the work in the recording studio, on several levels at once, seemed to me like a revelation, as if one could catch a glimpse of the future. Or, more precisely: as if this were the way to arrive at a form of presence of mind.
I can't say that I was particularly predisposed to the computer world in terms of background and intellectual attitude. Quite the contrary. The only contact I had with it until the end of my literature studies had been a patch panel that my American godfather had given me for my tenth birthday: Basically, it consisted of colored wires that could be plugged together according to a schematic to form a small calculating program that, in the end, was able to solve simple additions and subtractions. I had completed the exercise dutifully, but it hadn't impressed me very much. On the contrary, whenever I met a programmer, or the question of the computer came up, I would drop the remark, with tantalizing arrogance, that binary logic had not progressed one step beyond the evangelist's insight: "But let your speech be: Yes! Indeed! No! No! That which is above is of evil." That the world is broken down into zeros and ones seemed like a form of neo-primitivism to me – as presumptuous as the claim that any human sensation (happiness, awe, or sense of beauty) is nothing more than a neurochemical process. My haughty disdain only dissolved when an acquaintance, around 1983, showed me the word processing program on his Joyce Amstrad computer. But more than this handy tool saving me the tedious Tippex procedures of my electric typewriter, it was the recording studio that changed my outlook on several levels. As a young man who had played the piano for years and flirted with the idea of composition, I discovered two things: First, any noise can be used as an instrument (the beauty of a toilet flushing, producing the most wonderful harmonics in the slow rush); second, that the personality ideal of the high-speed virtuoso amounts to a futile labor of love – all it takes is a single turn of the knob to rev up the sequencer (and make the virtuoso green with envy).
These two discoveries were a mental jolt beyond anything I’d encountered in reading a philosopher – because they shook up my notion of what writing is and what personality is. When any noise, fed into a sampler, becomes an instrument, the world itself becomes an instrument. And this opens up a pluriverse of conceivable, as yet unexplored worlds. Not only does this space of possibilities go beyond everything that the traditional way of notation has provided, but beyond that, it also changes the role of the author (and thus the role that I had chosen for my life). If the authorial narrative position marks a god position, in which the author hovers over the signs like the Spirit of God over the waters, the world relationship that arises in the terra incognita of the sounds is one of immersion – the opening up of an unheard not created by oneself, but received. If the sequencer already meant a depotentiation of the virtuoso, it was unmistakable that the heroic creator consciousness stood in the way of experiencing this new way, indeed that it was necessary to stop in the literal sense — it was no coincidence that the noise opera (which I realized together with a sound designer) began with the words: Stop! [Hör auf]5 To enter the world of a sound, transpose it, stretch it, or split it into its waves and frequencies was like descending into one’s own unconscious perception. From this perspective, the digitalization of the world was accompanied by a slowing down mode, which, in turn, contributed to a sharpening of the senses. What irritated me nonetheless – and clouded the enthusiasm for the sensorium I’d had gained – was the disconcerting insight that the way sounds are manipulated ultimately amounts to a form of genetics. Like the geneticist transferring a natural growth into the world of clones and mutants, I, too, was busy releasing all kinds of strange characters into the world. Although this amounted to an unflattering self-portrait, the aesthetic seductiveness was more significant than the moral scruples. Indeed, I understood that sound design had always amounted to an aesthetic intensification, a Bigger than Life that cared very little about fidelity to reality. Seen in this light, the warning preceding some books or films (The resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental) was almost to be understood as proof of a contrary logic, a logic that was not concerned with depicting reality but which conversely aimed at making art come to life. Following the logic of the medieval mystic (the tree is a fallen column), the sound designers of the Hollywood blockbusters didn’t stick to naturalistic sounds either; instead, they started from an ideal sound architecture that appealed to the sensorium of the moviegoer to the maximum.
If I was busy reconciling the geneticist with the disappearing author, the world with hyperreality, it was unmistakable that all these questions, as existential as they seemed, made sense perhaps in the silenced atmosphere of the recording studio or the author's head, but could not hope for the slightest understanding in the outside world. In this sense, what I was doing increasingly seemed like an expedition into rough, unexplored terrain. And while the political arena was preoccupied with other issues (it was the time of the NATO Double-Track Decision and the Strategic Defense Initiative), I immersed myself in the history of Arctic expeditions. Strangely, even the sound engineers at the stations I regularly visited at that time did not have the slightest sense of these issues – or if they did, they saw the approaching digital technology only as an attack on their jobs. In this sense, digital was synonymous with a computer-generated, barren world – as if it were not one's own head and its aesthetic sense that were at stake here, but as if this world had been instilled into one's head (as if through a Nuremberg funnel). And so, as I moved into the world of sound, the distance from the outside world increased – as if one could penetrate into the interior of silence. But if one thing was clear, it was that the computer played a crucial role in this transformation of the aesthetic vocabulary and the authorial image – and that this changed how society will tell its future stories. From that point of view, the recording studio seemed like an experimental field, a laboratory in which postmodern society practiced new production techniques (production techniques that would sooner or later migrate into every industry and every field of work). When delving into the literature, however, it was conspicuous that this point of view was largely left out. When dealing with this esoteric matter, the debate revolved mainly around the question of artificial intelligence (the substitution of the human mind by a computer), whereas the mental change, the shift of the historical space, was not given any attention. While Jürgen Habermas preached the New Confusion and the exhaustion of utopian energies6, a new utopia spread under the sign of digitalization. And it was this novel, alien intellectual continent that prompted me (as intellectual terra incognita) to my first independent attempt at thought, an essay entitled ‘Digital Metaphysics.’ What aesthetically calls attention [Aufhorchen], as articulating having to Stop! [Hör auf!]7, here heralded the farewell to the Frankfurt School, indeed from the patriarchal thinking of the philosophers at all: "If there is an image for what the philosopher calls New Unclutteredness, for this state of liquefaction and softening of the solidified, then it is the electronic billowing of the video clip, that garland of colors where, in the rhythm of the heart, things rehearse the uprising, where apples mutate into pears and finally into the physiognomy of some outstanding contemporary, where objects, shriveled up, crushed and crumpled, lose their form and transform into something else – namely, into free-floating signs that follow a different regularity than in reality."8 If you read the turn of 1989 against this background, it can be said what Fukuyama called the end of history was the entry into another history – and that this had been in the making, clandestine and unnoticed, for years. And ultimately it was this that had catapulted me back into the France of the Gothic cathedrals, or, in terms of intellectual history, into the Dark Ages – the realization that history may be Man-made, but that this in no way means that you have to be clear about your own motives.
1 It was renamed Die Zeit läuft to suit the masses and was broadcast by SFB in 1990
2 This journey became the program Change Program Please, which was broadcast on SFB, but many years later, in 2008, was published as an audiobook by Parlando/Random House.
3 This is in reference to the Velvet Revolution. All during 1989, East German citizens – camouflaged as tourists – had been crossing the border into Hungry from Czechoslovakia. In late August, a group of them began occupying the West German Embassy in Prague, demanding exile to West Germany. By September, because of his diplomatic mediation to ensure refugees could leave the FDR without detours, the West-German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher was able to announce, “We came to you to inform you that today your departure…”. While the rest of his sentence couldn’t be heard above the cheering crowd, it marked a coffin nail in the collapse of the Berlin Wall. [Translators Note]
4 Here Martin is referencing his work Die Zeit läuft (see fn. 1) and Metamorphose der Stille, his first collaboration with Johannes Schmölling. [Translators Note]
5 Rush Hour. A radio play (together with Hans-Peter Kuhn).
6 In: Merkur, No. 431, January 1985.
7 Aufhorchen, when used as imperatively, almost exclusively means to quit, stop – to stop listening, and pay attention – which Martin brings into relief here with Hör auf! [Stop it!]. What he’s getting at is a strangeness in telling someone to stop listening, so they can listen to something different because you can’t stop listening to something entirely, despite the command to do so – pointing towards the opening up of a new world of sound creativity, even beyond what a creator may have intended. [Translators Note]
8 Martin Burckhardt, Digitale Metaphysik. In: Merkur, No. 734, April 1988.