Éducation sentimentale II
Éducation sentimentale II
The End of History and the Beginning of Another One
Perhaps only in the distance does a historical event take on a metaphorical grandeur. Up close, Francis Fukuyama's end of history1 was little more than a flickering television image lost in the noise of screen pixels. In any case, dismantled there a few miles away, the fall of the Wall felt less like a final triumph of Western democracies than that of a shakeup. And so the joy over the end of the GDR, as this last German authoritarian state, was mixed with a never-ending series of hairline cracks; details that seemed as bizarre as the scene at the Turkish greengrocer's where the merchant and a new Saxon citizen entered into a mutual expatriation contest. The thought of putting this into a simple and even more triumphalist formula was as far away as the moon. In general, the child who had entered my life shortly after the fall of the Wall was much more formative than the breath of this world's spirit. And at some point during one of those night watches, being only about whether or not you could calm the baby, the decision was made that I would dedicate a book to Question of the Machine. And when, in the pediatrician's waiting room, with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason still in my head from that night’s vigil pondering the impossibility of building an edifice of reason, the title of this book stood before my inner eye: Metamorphoses of Space and Time2. It would tell the story of a cultural transformation: namely, how the Middle Ages, having retrained the dear god as a watchmaker, had transitioned into the modern age and eventually into the digitalizing present. This question preoccupied me long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and led me to delve into the works of medieval thinkers. That I’d fallen for Nicole Orésme3 in the process was hardly surprising: he was the one who'd first formulated that proof of God's existence, which portrayed the All Mighty as a cosmological clockmaker. However, reading his books which (as revealed by the State Library date stamps) had long been in an untouched slumber, was even more confusing to me than what was going on around the city. So I brooded and puzzled over the meanings of his drawings for a long time in his De Proportionibus Proportionum, which showed triangles of various sizes. Eventually, I began to understand this medieval thinker had lived in a world before zero – that all these drawings documented his exercises of searching for this number, which he had called, most appropriately, the representative4.
It was a city that'd been abruptly catapulted from a deep sleep into the present — and articulated in gaps between buildings and the pulsating beats of Techno that didn’t want to match what I was reading in the newspaper. Sometimes, when I climbed the steps to Johannes Schmölling's new recording studio, I’d encounter a troop of underground ravers having their parties somewhere in this Kreuzberg building complex (behind which the S-Bahn trains ran to Gleisdreieck). Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Johannes had inaugurated the studio, this place had still been the epitome of world isolation as an enclave where we had concentrated on working with new acoustic spaces. Over where nature had taken possession of the abandoned railroad tracks, the first suburban trains were now advancing into the terra incognita of the city's eastern half. Everyone talked about the turnaround, but strangely enough, the concrete reality of life remained unmentioned; even more so, the intellectual strangeness that’d opened up between the two parts of the country within a generation. When I opened the newspaper, there was talk everywhere of DM [Deutschmark] nationalism – with which Jürgen Habermas, from the seclusion of his Starnberg domicile, had detonated a discursive bomb. While his New Confusion5 was, after all, an admission of a mental placelessness, this conceptual monstrosity seemed to me not merely to be a contradiction in terms; instead, it was a libidinous blend of self-flagellation and megalomania. The fact that this all had nothing to do with reality, that at the same time, GDR demonstrators were marching and calling for their annexation to this republic ("If the Deutschmark comes, we stay, if it doesn't come, we go to it"), didn't detract from this conceptual madness. Suddenly, the nation was involved in a permanent talk show, where people vented about the Fourth Reich, the evil DM and triumphant capitalism, yet the omission of the East German population's decided will didn't even appear.
While I, as a television viewer, was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the fact that the intelligentsia had nothing better to offer than their DM nationalism to counter the practical monetary union, I was becoming increasingly engrossed in the work of this 14th-century thinker. I was astonished to learn that he had not only a special place in the history of mathematics but also written a treatise on money devaluations. The title alone seemed like a mystery to me. How could a society, just having entered into a protocapitalist economy, have also had to deal with the issue of inflation? The problem that emerged in Orésme's text was of a thought-provoking, almost atavistic simplicity – and it was formulated as a question: Whose money is it? The background of Orésme's response then again confronted me with two disconcerting truths. So I understood that the 14th century hadn’t yet conceived of money as having intrinsic value but as a kind of thermometer – which reads the value of the object in question, just as a scale reads the weight of the object in question. And because the portrait of the king was imprinted on the coin, the task of minting the coins fell to him. It was precisely this monopolistic position that was at the root of the debasement problems. Because the princes and kings were the sole issuers of money, plagued by a constant shortage of funds, they resorted to techniques of counterfeiting coinage. And this was relatively simple. All they had to do was buy up their neighbors’ higher-value money, melt it down with lower-value metals, and put it back on the market as inferior coins – a vicious circle resulting in unrest and the currency wars (and on which the population literally cut its teeth). From this prospectus, Orésme's question about who owns the money was as precise as his answer. If the money belongs to the community, therefore, as an omnibus (an = for all), the monopolist position of the sovereign is a complete misconception. If, nevertheless, they wanted to leave the task of minting coins to the ruler, he must act only as a deputy, indeed as the highest employee of the polity. The representative Nicole Orésme had not yet been able to find in the case of zero, was clearly marked in the case of money – and so Orésme was able to lay down the underlying logic of a functional monetary system (and thus the operational logic of a central bank avant la lettre). In a sense, this was life’s practical counterpart to the missing zero – except it required another two hundred and fifty years, endless civil wars, and sacrifices to transpose this into a corporate architecture with the Bank of England. Even more peculiar than this delay was that the thread of Orésme's thoughts – and, with it: the problem of representation – had been severed. What had been a highly political question became naturalized – people proceeded to see the Central Bank simply as an analog human circulatory system transfused into the social body’s collective. However, with the German reunification’s impending monetary union, the ghosts buried in the depths of time rose from their graves. And while the editorials exalted the Habermasian conceptual monstrosity, I realized that the initial of the modern state lies not in exuberant national sentiment but in needing a standard, enduring zero point.
It was strange that not even the standard economic works mentioned this reference point. The only work I had been able to locate next to Orésme's slim tract in the State Library was the 800-page tome by a French historian who, in 1906, had undertaken the task of compiling an overview of 14th-century monetary theories.6 What struck me curious about this was that the problematic, which Orésme had described with the greatest clarity, wasn't merely absent in the heads of his contemporaries but articulated itself as a backlash, as a violent intellectual phantom pain. Consequently, the systemic question remained untouched while everyone lunged at the moral problem. Tract after tract castigated usury with the greatest disgust, conjuring up the phantom of a just price – as if the merchant’s malice was alone responsible for it. The idea that in a time of counterfeit kings and their demonetization measures, it was impractical to be modest with Christian prices (prezzi cristiani) remained a vacuous one. And so all the sermons dissolved into a clatter of words whose only significance was in the audible cross-fading of that temporal rift that haunted an entire society. And slowly, it dawned on me that much of what flickered across the TV screen was nothing more than – phantom pain. A speech whose only meaning consisted in the cross-fading of a loss – more precisely: the fact that one was confronted (so as in the Middle Ages) with an alien operating system. The concept of phantom pain was not vacuous to me, but it had accompanied me my entire childhood. Because my father, as a result of a war injury, had only one leg – and when I sometimes crawled into bed with him in the morning, he groaned as if haunted by a sudden pain. The fact that an absent part of the body also causes pain – and that this pain takes on a form of hyper-presence – was insofar not a metaphor but something that makes perfect sense. At the dinner of a political science journal for which I had begun writing, I listened to two professors who had held prominent roles in the Academy of Sciences (East) and now, confronted with a loss of status, were indulging in a boundless lament. And I understood that the loss of an intellectual system of order weighs more heavily than the loss of a body part, all the more so since it is indeed possible to deny this fact to the best of one's ability. If this was obvious in the former dignitaries and academicians' cases, the supposed victors' discourses seemed no less questionable. What had previously been an inkling now became a certainty: namely, that even a postmodern, supposedly fully enlightened society can be unclear about its zero point, its founding myth. A few years earlier, when I received my master's thesis, the first thing that caught my eye was a correction that my professor (the Conrady) had made to it. Most gruffly, as his sweeping pen stroke revealed, he had painted my formulation as the prevailing principle of unrealism and decreed that there was no such thing. Now all I had to do was turn on the TV, and it was clear that all the debates about values were nothing more than hot air; a storm of concepts in which, as in collective neuropathic pain, especially the phantasms of long-gone intellectual worlds were unleashed. The question which remained unanswered was what made up the social glue. Contrary to Habermas' assumptions, money was by no means the compliant instrument of German nationalism: It was just the other way around. The money economy had put the nation on the map – this was the story Orésme told.
In this sense, the zero, or more precisely: the representative, which this medieval thinker had, as it were, longed for, seemed to me like a figure of longing. The fact that it was not even visible as a possibility of thought in his contemporaries’ thinking had to do with the fact that their discourses increasingly had become a great social lament, a suada of outrage in which every innovation was castigated as a sin and moral aberration. And while I was thinking about this, a passage that I had read in Rainer Maria Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge ran through my mind:
Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, or said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had millennia to look, think about, and chronicle and let the millennia go by like a school break where one eats his sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that one, despite inventions and progress, despite culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would have been something with an incredibly dull fabric so that it looks like the salon furniture used during the summer holidays?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood?
So what occurs (that was the question that popped into my head watching that long-running talk show, resulting in my taking such a different turn) when an epoch enters a phase of phantom pain? So what if you continue cultivating the misunderstanding simply because it is so exceedingly painful to say goodbye to a worldview? Unlike the inhabitants of the GDR, forced by the fall of the Wall to say goodbye to their certainties and habits of life; the victors were in no way forced to take an inventory of their value system. Quite the contrary. They could, à la Habermas, easily carry on as before – and in the absence of a rigorous reality check, an easy thing to do was indulge in the delights of phantom lust. In this sense, Victor Hugo's insight ("Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come!") would have to be modified:
Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has passed.
Because from now on, you can claim a thought below its purchase price.7 Or to put it another way: Money is printed – without considering that it only has validity and credibility as a nothing held in short supply by the state.
From that moment on, I was convinced in the same way that the Wheelwork automaton of the Middle Ages had changed the fabric of society; the capitalist operating system would change it with digitization, indeed that the Machine represented something like a zero point. Only that simulation had taken the place of representation. And when the editor of the journal Leviathan asked me if I could imagine writing a text about the rationalization of intellectual work (adding that all the professors who’d been asked so far had avoided this request), it was clear to me that this would be a text about abysmalness:
… that which the Enlightenment had hoped for as reason becoming more reasonable has long since staggered in the bottomless pit, a little like those comic characters who still move forward in the air for a while before they become aware of this circumstance (which then, according to the logic of the cartoon, coincides with their momentary crash).8
At some point, while walking around Wandlitz Lake with a friend (and my son in his stroller), I told him that the GDR Magnificos had set up shop in a backdrop landscape. That the streets on which they drove daily to the East Berlin Palace of the Republic or the State Council building had been totally modernized – in contrast to the rest of the city, which was rotting and decaying. And then I remarked that these Potemkin villages seemed like a metaphor for our own discourses. In response to his flabbergasted questioning of how I could fall for such a thought, I endeavored to take him back into the 14th-century worldview – but he only frowned, as if he had been told about an extraterrestrial species instead. But the deeper I immersed myself in this world as a writer, the more this transitional period seemed to me like a distant mirror in which, more than anything else, the immediate present became visible; a kind of haunted house that dissolved into a pure word bell [Wortgeklingel9], a structure made of words, self-assertion formulas and wishful figures. No, I didn’t experience 1989 as the end of history – instead, it was like stepping into a new narrative where I was taking a different turn. Unlike in the horror stories of literature, we're not dealing with an enchanted house but instead with a new, transparent and manageable architecture. No, it's the residents themselves who are increasingly being transformed into ghosts.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Read more:
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989)
Martin Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung [Metamorphosis of Space and Time: A History of Perception], Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/M, 1994.
Nicole Orésme was one of the most eminent scholastic philosophers and is generally considered the most significant medieval economist. Unfortunately, however, not many of his works are translated into English. [Translator’s note]
This is where Martin begins tracing the transition from rappresentare to representatio during the Middle Ages: seeing the zero-point as the equal sign within the mediating ratio of the central perspective. This insight is pre-figured in Digitale Metaphysik, describing how the digital metaphysics of representing a segment of reality as its zero-pilot simulacrum [nullnummer], making its infinite dissimulation possible, which he develops as major threads in his later works on the Philosophy and Psychology of the Machine. [Translator’s note]
Jügen Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Die Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates und die Erschöpfung utopischer Energien [The New Confusion: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies]. In: Merkur, No. 431, January, 1985. [Translator’s note]
Émile Bridrey, La théorie de la monnaie au XIVe siècle. Paris 1906.
The election campaign that the Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine waged against Helmut Kohl, the "chancellor of reunification" – and in which he poked fun above all at the Fatherland sentiments of old – betrayed a very different reading. Lafontaine reckoned without further ado that reunification was a highly costly project – which ultimately cost him victory over an increasingly unpopular Chancellor Kohl.
Martin Burckhardt: Im Arbeitsspeicher: Zur Rationalisierung geistiger Arbeit [In the Working Memory: On the Rationalization of Intellectual Work]. In: Leviathan Special Issue: Zur Sozialphilosophie der industriellen Arbeit [On the Social Philosophy of Industrial Work], Wiesbaden, 1990, November.
Wortgeklingel is a German derogatory expression translating as Word Bell as a formulation of something only superficially representing a problem or an object. Exemplar would be along the lines of “This sounds competent but quickly shows itself as a monstrously noisy word bell. [Translator’s note]