Protect me from what I want
Protect me from what I want
A reminiscence
Protect Me From What I Want is the 8th offering in our translational series of Martin’s early works and was written in November 2000. Placing it within our series to date, it was written in the period after the publication of his second major work, Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche (published in 1999), and coincides with the original publication of Das Monster und seine Telematische Guillotine which was published in November of 2000. As a review of our timeline to date, we’ve presented:
Published before the 1994 publication of Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, his first major work.
In Working Memory (initially published in January 1990)
Published in the interregnum between die Metamorphosen and Geist der Maschine
Portrait of the Author, Electrified: On the Transition from Mechanical to Electromagnetic Writing, (presented in November 1995)
The Guillotine (presented in April 1996)
Published after the 1999 publication of Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, his second major work.
Time is Money is Time (presented in October 1999)
The Monster and its Telematic Guillotine (first published in November 2000)
Protect me from what I want (November 2000)
Like Time is Money is Time and The Monster and its Telematic Guillotine, this essay was written after Martin published Geist der Maschine, and this period goes hand in hand with reflexions on the political consequences of transitioning from the logic of representation to postmodernism’s operating system. In some respects, Protect Me, which deals with the intellectual vacuum of neoliberalism, anticipates the bursting of the Dotcom bubble –but also the 2008 financial crisis. Even more curious is how this text touched a particularly susceptible nerve in the German publishing world as he describes in the introduction to our original German posting:
Sometimes, texts have a strange fate. Like the following one’s whose original invitation was followed by a dis-invitation – quite obviously because its content was so intolerable to the team of editors, who had initially wanted to adorn their book with my name, that they were compelled to throw all of its civic considerations overboard, despite the book’s subject being that of a civil society. It was the time when the dotcom bubble had burst (and the so-called 'dumb bonuses' no longer represented a monetary advantage). Simplifying your life was the order of the day, and because intellectuals didn't want to stand on the sidelines, they'd jumped on the idea of a civil society. While Ulrich Beck had heralded the discourse with the credo: "We are undoubtedly living in an anti-hierarchical age", he also noted "a distance from both: traditional authorities and the authority of the state." And because people no longer saw their future in the institutions but outside them, the long march of the revolution of ’68 took a new turn - allowing for the merging of private happiness with the logic of privatization. This was the beginning of the juste milieu discourse that we're facing today in the form of a moral economy. Or put more soberly: it was the historic moment when ethics left the institutions of the state and entered the realm of NGOs. My attitude to this wasn't unfriendly but skeptical. As unquestionable as it seemed to me that a new, post-civil world was dawning with the digital age, the trust in a civil society's high moral standards seemed ill-founded - indeed, the whole pathos of a civil society seemed to me like a variant of the neoliberal logic of privatization.
You didn't have to look far to see there were highly questionable practices behind this. It was perhaps understandable how everyone was upset about the sluggishness of state institutions, but it was far less plausible for a city treasurer to sell his municipality's power or water plant to a New York consortium of lawyers and then rent it back to himself (or lease it, as the neologism went) - all the more so since this ‘write-off’ deal of depreciation was done only to fleece New York City taxpayers. Against this backdrop, the high-sounding pathos of a civil society sounded rather hollow, and another, much more profound reason for my skepticism was when I'd learned in my return to European intellectual history that the institutions we take for granted can be highly fragile entities. The transformation of the Christian Middle Ages into a modern polity had brought with it more than three centuries of civil war, imposing on its contemporaries the mental schizophrenia that Shakespeare's witches expressed in a succinct motto: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' And because I’d studied the history of money and the central bank, it seemed apparent I shouldn't take the idea of a civil society at face value – rather see it as the beginning of a movement that can be most accurately characterized as psychic inflation.
Protect me from what I want
Or: why it's better not to imagine a civil society [Bürgergesellschaft] 1
Martin Burckhardt – November 2000
What is a civil society? Is it a notion of sympathy, as you can read? Or, as I'd immediately speculate in view of such an advertisement: a conceptual monster, a smiling monstrosity? Perhaps this is a question you shouldn't even try to answer positively, as the term is shrouded in a strange aura, a haze of freedom and future – which, in the past, when ideologies were still recognizable as such, would probably have been called ideological. But what would be the ideology behind it? Here, we're confronted with a curiosity stemming not just from our thinking that we're above any suspicion of ideologies. What's really strange is that the ideas circulating about a civil society aren’t inherent in any residual bourgeois traditional ideology but have historically emerged precisely where the bourgeois epoch and its habitus have long since been, if even unhappily, laid to rest. In this sense, a ‘civil society’ may promise everything imaginable (citizen work, citizen money, citizen responsibility, and more), but this ‘citizen’ to whom it refers is a man without qualities, a man-woman, a Citizen without citizenship. So, it remains the case that this civil society (at its core) doesn't have an answer about which foundation it intends to rest on, or rather: on which initiative it intends to take. It’s precisely because of this emptiness that we don’t come across a positive thought – rather we stumble over a semantic solar eclipse through which we see only the thought's corona, not its energetic core.
This lack of a core may give a positional advantage in the day’s debates (because of its argument's suppleness, which finally, freed from the weight of the world, has found the volatility of free thought). Still, it’s proof of a thorough embarrassment – one we could conclude is essentially a matter of not noticing the human condition in a post-bourgeois time as a defensive counter-spell. It's not coincidental that similarities to other, deeply problematic transitional eras are relieved-out when looking at the present from a different perspective. Just as the society of the 14th century attempted to rein in and tame the emerging capitalism with its invocation of prezzi christiani and fair exchange (and, as we know, without much success), an obviously post-bourgeois era seeks to counter the presently emerging conflicts by resorting to this very figure of thought which has long since ceased to exist. But this sort of stratagem seems a prelude to the very philosophical technique of simulation that Scholasticism's been accused of: being at home in hollow forms of thought, but not where the real world’s energy pulsates ('Truth lies in the street,' says Nicolaus of Cusa2). And because this also applies to the present, we might ask, with a post-bourgeois street scene in mind, why we're still speaking of the citizen and not the participant (who’s the actual addressee of a civil society's construction).
Quite obviously – as one answer to this – an emphatic promise of a story is needed to form a society; the promise of formal participation narration alone is insufficient. This is the precise moment the citizen of a civil society steps on stage and where its mission becomes apparent, consisting – no more, no less – of providing the indispensable social glue. It provides what the new society’s participant lacks: the self-evidence of traditional legitimization, and it also provides (albeit as a hollow form) the idea of a political subject: as identification. If we're reminded of the old description of man as a zoon politikon, it's entirely intentional, as Western Democracy's foundations are a good springboard for its trans-formation. But taking this intention as the thing itself is mistaken because, looking at the continuum, we would miss the concept's revolutionary counterattack. The remarkable thing about the civil society formula is it's no longer a superordinate framework (religion, kingdom, nation, or language) that’s the constitutive element of society; instead, it's the individual. However, this means a first-order crackling rift in power’s language: and it's running between the traditional, centrally-perspective system of rule to a decentralized form of society, from a monolithic block of rule to a dissipative, trans-local structure, from the tree to the rhizome. While many formulas describe this rupturing, its message is clear: the citizen, the liberated, and, at the same time, the allied subject, is to take the place of the nation-state sovereign. In this emphatic sense, the citizen, to whom nothing bourgeois is attached, could be the finally awakened subject of history, world soul, world consciousness, a world citizen. Consequently, it isn’t coincidental that this concept has a special effect where the traditional – which always also means the forms of society based on a central perspective and committed to a representation model – are increasingly being perforated and questionable. Because of this anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical momentum in the visions of a civil society, the first duty of citizens isn’t to remain calm but to take the initiative to intervene. Of course, negation, as such, doesn't make a state; rather, the question arises as how the different points of view can commit themselves to a common ground. How, asks Ulrich Beck, is a post-national and simultaneously political civil society possible? But as boldly as this question presupposes the abolition of traditional institutions, it remains pale and colorless as far as the physiognomy of its hero is concerned - the ideal image of the enlightened cosmopolitan is hardly more than that. Wishful Thinking or: The Revolt of the Decent.
In other words, seen from the power of the word: Its meaning lies not in what the word says but in what it promises, unfolding in the eclipse’s surrounding light. In this sense, the talk of civil society appeals not to the understanding of the real but the understanding of a possibility. If it has appeal, it's precisely because it isn't a precise image but rather a cloudy blueprint for the future that’s veiled but, therefore, extremely desirable. In this light, the dreams playing a role here must be examined to justify the concept and not disqualify it as a mere ideologem. What are its promises, and what are the everyday practices that this title of civil society has written on its banners?
First, it contains the romanticism of the citizen (which already inspired the civic movement of the seventies and eighties). Seen against this backdrop, this image of a civil society would be nothing more than a logical continuation of the old Enlightenment program: the liberation from a self-inflicted immaturity. Admittedly, it should be noted the extent to which its political message has, as it were, evaporated, that the pathos of revolution – which formerly indulged in a collectivist impulse – has retreated into a private sphere. The individual citizen established his political and moral cuckoo-cloud home there and, socially subsidized, made himself extremely comfortable in it (while giving it the physiognomically concise, if not convincing, formula of a ‘lived utopian’ reality). While this may be dismissed as hypocrisy and postmodern philistinism – viewed from a fundamentally unfamiliar historical perspective, this type of contemporary makes it clear which battery the revolutionary pathos of the 18th century was actually charged from: not from a dedicated political doctrine, but from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's religion of immediacy3. Understood in this light, modern politics would always have been a politics of identity and self-actualization (even where it was costumed in collectivist terms).
Another, perhaps more significant source of energy for the phantom of a civil society isn't so much rooted in theory as it is in our contemporary practices and life experiences. It's the experience of cross-border mobility that extends the individual's radius of movement far beyond the borders of our traditional metropolitan areas. Those discussions on the end of nation-states that come along so carelessly light-footed today result from a new type of communication machine that's emerged in the form of the Internet – an entity that attracts new Leviathan thoughts not by chance. You could say that the unbounded individual outgrows what previously determined the imaginary body, defining the boundaries of his actions. So it's only logical that we believe ourselves to be a sovereign, as one above whom there is nothing higher (supera neus). This isn't just an individually felt emotion; there is already a symptom of this power shifting in the political sphere. When politicians compete for investment with an argument for locational advantage, they demonstrate a pragmatic sense of reality and, more importantly, the extent to which local power depends on free-floating global capital.
If you like grand formulas, you could say capitalism has entered a stage of post-nationalism in which the individual is granted unprecedented freedom of movement previously unthinkable. Where we once had a centralized control over the weal and woe of citizens, we now have ‘private individuals’ who no longer want to see themselves as industrial warlords but as providers, servers, and servant spirits. The shifting in terminology from citizens to private individuals intentionally sharpens the idea. But in reality, the image of the citizen (in which an 18th-century projection of the subject persists, with all its romantic implications) is of little help in dealing with this new kind of conflicted situation. In this sense, I'd classify private individuals not only as individuals but also as what is commonly referred to as corporations, where they aren't in opposition (according to the familiar pattern of individual versus society), but rather as a server and its client coalescing as an intellectual and ideological aggregate, a coalition formation of interests feeding primarily on the arbitrage profits that the act of privatization brings with it. The resources of a common good aren’t experienced as binding anymore and are transferred into the hands of individuals. It is not surprising that the corresponding ideology is economic neoliberalism, which – and this is significant - no longer pursues privatization in the register of political economy but instead in the sense of shareholder value. GETTING SMARTER TO GO FURTHER.4
The extent to which such a broad front of a private sector has conquered the state's sovereignty, dismantled traditional monopolies, and driven them out of the collective consciousness is remarkable. The impulse toward privatization isn't something coming to the system from outside. Rather, it is promoted and driven forward by the system itself - suggesting that there isn't any serious doubt about the necessity of this act. In practice, the social revolutionary moment only comes sharply into relief when we consider the commitment and quasi-religious pathos with which the nation-states of the 19th century pursued communicative networking, be it in the form of telegraph lines, railroad tracks, or industrial standards. Just as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages sought to build a heavenly Jerusalem on earth, the networks of the 19th century are ultimately to be understood as spiritual buildings, cathedrals of communication intended to weld a community together. While in the 19th century, the main concern was the construction of material architecture, the completed networks put the states of the 20th century (the democracies, but also the totalitarianism) in a position to celebrate the high mass of synchronization, thus anticipating, in a heated form, what we encounter today under different auspices (and in an unregulated form) as a media democracy.
Viewed in this light, the politics of modernity are always also productions of themselves; they have an operetta-like quality, a fatal tendency to aestheticize politics. This is not a coincidence or an aberration but a structure of modern society. Because the simulation of power is nothing without the power of simulation, people are inevitably attached to the batteries that ensure the charged synchronization of the community. Thus, leaders following the communication apparatus' charging logic are only successful to the extent they know how to use it.
Admittedly, a structural conflict is inherent here. The network always points beyond the limited space; in this sense, this cultically staged nation-state may go down in history as a mere interregnum, a transitional phase. In this respect, perhaps it's no coincidence our network's inherent logic of delimitation has resulted in paradoxical formulas such as the People Without Space5 (a desideratum fulfilled in the post-national citizenship of net citizens). Nevertheless, unraveling the net's construction from its final stage would be wrong because, from the perspective of its genealogy and architects, the nation-state framework has always been the point of reference; it was a state monopoly that, as a quasi-transcendental authority endeavored to provide for the individual national receiver and, depending on the case, to switch them into line with a caring or terroristic manner.
The connection between the telematic battery of power and the modern nation, or to put it another way: the electrification of politics, is a largely overlooked aspect of history. Nevertheless, once you follow this trail, you're confronted with a wealth of material. Whether you come across Lenin's formula that socialism is Soviet power plus electrification; whether you come across Goebbels turning the radio into the ‘brown house,’ the Ark of the German Reich (which he’s astutely being extremely media-conscious, already knew the consumer could only be expected to listen to ten percent propaganda, but otherwise fed with only light fare); whether you study the un-American machinations of the McCarthy era, which establish a strange link between advertising time and political acceptance; or whether you take a look at the production of soap bubbles from the trans-political realm of Silvio Berlusconi – it always becomes clear (across all ideological boundaries) that domination in the modern age is fed by domination over telematically-charged resources. Modernity’s sovereignty is an electric horseman. Seen in this light, the coup d'état, which first and foremost attacks the state television center as the information monopoly, is precisely the indicator of this order. However, taking this as a pretext, we can't help seeing the liberalization of telecommunications networks, which has been emerging for some time now, as a form of cold coup d'état. But what's surprising – especially given our previous history – is the silence and lack of resistance to this hostile takeover.
But we should be careful in joining the lamentations new state’s enemies too quickly. After all, it’s conceivable – and precisely this hypothesis will be substantiated below – that the nation-states of the 19th century were by no means naturally autochthonous entities but were constituted by the media complex that is now working to abolish them. This is something that they have in common with the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, which provided not only an overarching vaulted moment of community but, in the shadow of the cathedral, also bred the very techniques (division of labor and the vital need of capital transaction) that would ultimately destroy the medieval communities. In a sense, the theory is that this privatization process we're witnessing is a historical necessity, and to give this idea, which would otherwise be little more than a mere figment of the imagination, the necessary conciseness, I would like to propose a seemingly bizarre assertion. My thesis is that the Internet isn't an artifact of our time but originated in 1746 when a memorable scene took place. In this scene, 600 Carthusian monks stand in a large circle, several hundred meters in diameter, connected with an iron wire. One of them touches a water-filled bottle with an antenna sticking out. And what happens? All the monks begin twitching at the same time. The solution to this strange experiment is easy to find. The container filled with water is a Leyden jar, in other words: electricity – and the underlying question: how fast is electricity? The answer: electricity is so fast that there isn’t a time lag; all the monks twitch together in real-time.
Isn’t a computer processor’s characteristic that there isn’t a time differential between point A and point B’s spatiality – that they are both synchronized and clocked – and it’s against this background that we could call the circle of twitching monks a human processor. Asking what the individual’s functions are in this circle, it's evident the concept of the individual makes little sense where one-is-in-the-other. A much more precise description would be to speak of the dividuum. This dividual is grounded, per se, in a mass being, even where the wiring has entered a moment of invisibility or merely symbolic relations.
The significance of this scientific experiment for political theory is that here, for the first time in history, a cluster of people comes into a consciousness of itself, or perhaps more precisely: not so much a consciousness but as a sensation-of-its-sensations, a visceral, all-sensory sense of community. This clustering of people constitutes a new body type, which - astonishingly - has hardly been recognized as an entity. Although there's a wealth of mass theory literature, the classical theories of Le Bon, Freud, Broch, and Canetti are largely silent on physical mass. As an exemplary in Freud's case, it’s all the more astonishing as Freud's intellectual instruments are based on the scientific concepts of electricity (resistance, charge, transmission) – feeding the suspicion of how this new and unprecedented type of mass thoroughly breaks with traditional forms of thought. Reading Freud's Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego6, you can see how Freud aligns his concept of the mass with the spirit of the father – that he considers projection mechanisms at work in the artificial masses of the church and the army, which follow a father substitute in the form of the spiritual or secular leader. Now, it isn't without irony that Abbé Nollet (who devised the electric monk’s experimental arrangement) draws precisely on these two historical mass formations, that he proves, in one fell swoop, the soldiers’ field strength – just as he makes his Carthusians twitch together – he powerfully demonstrates that these heaps of people no longer need a projection figure to come together as a mass. When the bodies are welded together into a mass, it no longer happens through some idol or representative; it doesn’t even happen in the sign of something, but it occurs directly – but that’s not right; immediacy is fundamentally wrong because there is a medium: electricity. This is a re-coding of the first order because now the non-personal agent takes on the father's role. So perhaps it's no coincidence that the masses, newly informed about themselves through this process, soon rid themselves of their King to devote themselves to highly metaphorical entities: the Supreme Being and the nation. In this sense, the King died long before the French Revolution’s turmoil, for he's necessarily the foreign body in a world where one is plugged into-the-other, and all hang together on the battery of the masses. Perhaps this is what the French revolutionaries were really celebrating when they inaugurated the Festival of the Supreme Being: not man, but the battery that charges him with a sensation-of-its-sensations of being-one-in-another. Liberté. Egalité. Fraternity.
The protagonists of 1746 may not have been aware of all this. Still, it’s evident (when, in retrospect, it virtually reads like a series of inevitabilities) what fantastical ideas spring from the body brought into formation: what today is called the information society (which tends to neglect the historical genealogy, also the question of what is meant by in-formation). Since electricity welds the monks together into a real-time aggregate, space no longer seems to be a boundary; virtual communities, republics of scholars, and global citizenships can be imagined, which are no longer imposed by birth but are constituted by free choice. Equally, there’s a desire to transcend limitation itself. The circle of monks, or, put more abstractly: the telematic network, is to become world-spanning and world-citizen-like. This formation of a practical transcendental philosophy anticipates what preoccupied the most profound minds at the turn of the 18th century. Globalization, which has been stirring the press’s talk for perhaps two decades, has long been anticipated in the intellectual history of modernity - meaning we're not dealing with a novelty but with a legacy of the 18th century.
It's not just the global village that's been on the agenda since then, but also the end of representation. The mass of modernity is no longer formed under the sign of a third party, no longer in the logic of representation, but directly: as a quasi-physical quantity. This makes the model of representation, which has been a desideratum since the Middle Ages and a practice of rule since Hobbes, questionable. Paradoxically formulated, you could conclude that the modern nation-state was inscribed with its dissolution, a post-national destiny, so to speak, from the very beginning.
In other words, what masquerades today as a civil society has been a constant undercurrent since the 18th century. Seen in this light, we should study the conceptual project of this subject at play here. Admittedly, we’re confronted at this point with a strange absence – a lacking problematic awareness of what constitutes the conditio humana of the modern dividuum, with all of its divisions and ambiguities – instead, we encounter a simple model of self-realization in which it's easy to locate the remnants of Rousseau's philosophy of immediacy. Against the backdrop of representation’s critique, or conversely, against the promise of direct democracy, an examination of Rousseau is exceptionally illuminating, especially where you encounter not content but rather the emptiness of his political theory. As he is empathetically sensitive to his time, he senses that the idea of representation has ended; more than that, he denounces it as the fall of society, the prelude to social bondage. In contrast, he presents his ideal model of society, Clarens7, as a society of intimate soul mates who live together in a frugal, beautiful way. But how do they find each other? It’s the consonance of souls bringing them together, a miraculous agreement that can’t be mediated or conveyed by anything. When Rousseau encounters mediation, however, he suspects corruption, decline, and slavery. Against this background, it is no coincidence that money, in particular, is perhorresed: ‘The word finance is a slavish word, unknown in the city-state.’8 In other words: the sensitive soul wants immediacy, but it doesn’t – under no circumstances –want to take notice of the abstraction bond that Abbé Nollet’s electric monks illustrate so beautifully.
Here, I come to the problematic core: the question that the German notion of a civil society conceals rather than exposes, the question of the constitutive element that forms scattered clusters of people into a society. Against the backdrop of seemingly natural nation-states preferring to define themselves by blood and soil instead of understanding themselves as a construction of Psychotopic mediality - and thus as simulations of themselves - this is no easy undertaking. Admittedly, if we consider the genealogy of the European nation-state with its noblest privileges (such as the monopoly on the use of force, conscription, and the right of general taxation), we're then confronted dealing with an artifact - an artificial product that is relieved-out in the form we know today only through endless effort and suffering. The origin of this form doesn't come from a particular national sentiment, despite what some might think. As late as the 14th century, the inhabitants of Normandy could revel in their hated neighbors (the Bretons) being of such a weak constitution that they were killed like flies by the plague. More importantly, the necessity of finding a common symbolic means of transportation, brought about by large-scale economic transactions, accounted for much more of the nation-state's constitution. Up until the Middle Ages, issuance of coinage was a matter for the sovereign – and, as the coin's owner, the sovereign could freely choose the substrate of the money; instead of gold, he could just as easily have chosen leather, paper, or another inferior material. When communities demanded gold currencies and the first princes (such as Ludwig the Saint) complied, the obvious thing to do was to mint an inferior coin, that is, to counterfeit it so as to gain possession of a higher-value coin – and quite a few princes succumbed to this temptation.
Against the backdrop of what became known as the currency wars, Nicolas Oresme, a thinker of the 14th century, posed the question: Who owns the money? Unlike the theologians of his time, who were fixated on the idea of a just price (and thus, on the ethical dilemma), Oresme declared money to be a community matter and, therefore, belonging to everyone – in other words: an omnibus. But so this omnibus can run, its doors must be closed, and a non-profit-making body must be elected to supply society with its coin, meaning the person sitting at the wheel and driving this omnibus receives a fare (a tax) from the passengers – and is no longer sovereign in the fullest sense of the word but a representative.
Historically speaking, the primacy of an economy is a fact; the dilemma posed by money dictates the nation-state’s creation and its foremost institution: the central bank.
In this sense, the nation-state is a monopolist of force and a sign system (reflected in the 'legal tender' figure, as in the threat to severely punish any offense against this sacred good). But since money is materially backed only to a certain extent - the economist Hajo Riese found the remarkable formula for this: Money is a scarce nothing - from which we can deduce a more general formula: the function of power is the production of appearance. Only in appearance does the society we blindly presuppose in the sign of the nation-state come together. Now, we come across a strange variant in this general contextual blinding, which the Frankfurt School has critically scrutinized. Strange because this general contextual blindness (the money illusion) is the constitutive element of the modern state, inscribed in it as a form of Psychotopic constitutional unconsciousness. Only to the extent that the subject doesn't have to worry about the origin of the illusion does the illusion gain validity - and can circulate as money. The social contract is ultimately based on the fact that it is not acknowledged. In this sense - if we want to put Marx's concept to better use - the nationality of the nation-state is a superstructure phenomenon, that is, the necessary dose of intoxicants needed to avoid acknowledging the uncertain foundation on which society ultimately rests.
But occasionally, you get to see society's foundations, or more precisely, its abysmal nature. One of the most astonishing examples of the effectiveness of the money illusion is perhaps the process of German division and reunification. A good 40 years of political, intellectual, and cultural segregation were enough to create a feeling of mutual alienation between the two parts, thwarting any notion of natural unity. However, what created unity was the desired sign system (manifested in the demonstrators who marched along the border in 1990 and chanted: ‘If the Deutschmark comes, we stay; if it doesn't come, we go to it!’).
The production of appearances isn't as unproblematic as it used to be (per ordre de mufti). And it's here, at the historical breaking point where the notion of a civil society emerged, that a revolution of the first order can be found, a revolution that hasn't yet penetrated the consciousness with all its implications - not least because the importance of politics superstitiously still haunts people's minds. We are talking about the end of Bretton Woods (which, for its part, marked the end of an order profoundly linked to the existence of the modern nation-state but which had already been subjected to an endurance test at the beginning of the 20th century). Firstly, let’s ask what’s the historical significance of the events heralding the end of Bretton Woods which ushered in the era of free-floating money is. In 1944, after the interwar period's financial disasters, the leading nations met at Bretton Woods and agreed on a system of fixed exchange rates based on the dollar, backed by the gold reserves stashed in Fort Knox. The agreement stipulated that every foreign sovereign could exchange its dollar reserves, held in the form of bills, for gold at 35 dollars per troy ounce of gold at any time. In essence, this arrangement, grounded in the catastrophes of the 20th century, was already a reminiscence of an attempt to restore the golden age of the nation-state. Around the middle of the 19th century, when nation-states monopolized the telematic battery as a state affair, the British Empire began issuing its own gold currency - and other nations followed suit. This resulted in a highly stable global monetary system lasting until the outbreak of the First World War. If you ask the reason for this astonishingly durable architecture, especially at a time when the ruling nations were jealously fighting over the rest of the world, the answer is that the states of the 19th century were primarily concerned with the ability to achieve international satisfaction (that is, the ability to trade and act) and weren’t hampered in this endeavor by populist considerations.9 However, this changed radically when WWI’s social upheavals gave rise to the idea of democracy and a growing tendency to start banknote printing for the sake of domestic pacification or to raise one's political profile, that is, sacrificing monetary policy to social policy. In turn, this inequitable illusory production impacted the international financial markets, leading to the fatal devaluation spiral of the 1930s; from devaluing its own currency, a country could promise itself an advantage over a foreign currency. This is about the moment when the mass society of our modern age sacrificed its ability to satisfy international demands to the collective wishful thinking and produced its respective phantasms - and the corresponding financial catastrophes.
In an almost Orthopedic act of discipline, Bretton Woods laced itself into the corset of a gold backing to prevent a repetition of this monetary catastrophe. Thus, the bill’s dilemma was averted for at least twenty years. However, in the early sixties, it was already becoming apparent – as an effect of increasing international interdependence – that the gold reserves of the United States were no longer sufficient to keep up appearances. There were isolated attacks on the dollar, particularly from France, which forced the decision, or rather the emergency measure, of implementing a free-floating currency was finally taken – and after doing this, because there was no alternative, the central bankers had no real idea how such a system would work.
But what does the transition to free-floating mean? First of all, it means a substantial re-coding of money. The monetary sign is detached from its corporate representative; it's deauratized, pure, electrical information. Perhaps more important is: that the information circulating in the global information networks can no longer be centrally controlled.
Although the nation-state issuer still decrees money's nominal value, the reality is that it's the sum of all market participants deciding the value of money. Instead of an all-powerful centralized power, we're now dealing with a polycentric communication process. Now, you could, tempted by the fact that the nation-states are still the sole issuers of money, doubt this assessment. However, it becomes much more plausible when considering the reverse situation: if a sovereign should insist on its supposed privilege, does this alone determine the value of money? It's only at the price of complete isolation and disconnection from world affairs that this privilege can be realized in an era of free-moving capital. Real existing socialism collapsed precisely because of this, and not by chance at a time when the industrialized world began to become massively interconnected.
The change that goes hand in hand with free-floating could be understood as an act of self-decapitation or, if you like, as a symbolic guillotining of the modern sovereign10. Capital is no longer at home in nation-state capitals but everywhere and elsewhere. Looking back at the Abbé's experimental arrangement, we could say it was at that moment, when the circle of monks became electrified, that the social aggregate was translated into a symbolic order. From now on, it's the market, or more precisely: the sum of all market participants who decide on the value of a currency. This shifting of the center of power, even if it took and is taking place in reality, has not yet penetrated our social consciousness's awareness. A significantly prominent exemplar may illustrate the historical astonishment and the perplexity the event caused its originators.
In 1974, when the oil price shock occurred, just one year after the world monetary system finally entered a free-floating state, the neoliberal economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote a short text entitled The Denationalization of Money. This text is interesting as it shows his double astonishment as an old man (Hayek was already 75 years old at the time) as to why a fundamental question of economics (the question of legal tender - or ex negativo: the question of why individuals don’t have the right to print money?) represents a blind spot in his discipline. This really is a curiosity of the first order. If you consult a library and research economics textbooks, you will find money actually falls from the sky. Milton Friedman, the other great advocate of neoliberalism alongside Friedrich Hayek, draws the picture of an island over which helicopters fly and drop sacks of money. A market is created, prices are negotiated, and so on – and the national economist, who develops monetary theories as a strict monetarist, always presupposes what he wants to resolve. Money, as I said, falls from the sky.
Hayek is already an old man when he finally goes beyond his colleagues' superstitions by posing a child's question of political economy once again. Why does the sovereign alone have the right to issue money? Why is there such a thing as legal tender? Has this state prerogative not been abused in the most terrible way in the 20th century? Hasn't the state – again and again – pauperized the masses and robbed them of their wealth? Now, as a practical thinker, Hayek didn't like delving into the depths of psychology. Instead, he strives to propose an alternative vision to replace the dysfunctional central banking system. His solution is the slogan of neoliberalism, and it is, as always, 'that the market will right itself.' But what would the market be in the case of money? In Hayek's conception, these are large banks issuing money and competing with each other for the quality of their currency. Of course, a dilemma arises here. Because once this bastion has been broken, each individual should be free to issue his own currency. But it isn't only in this case that Hayek shies away from considering the idea's logical consequences - he also stumbles back into dark times regarding how such a currency could be backed. Gold, the barbaric residue of the economy, is supposed to stand in for the goodness of money.
Here, in the arcanum of neoliberalism, we encounter another embarrassment of the first order. Although neoliberalism is preparing to liquidate all social institutions, the liquidator – money - is supposed to be exempt from this process. Behind this is the helpless wish that money has a natural limit. But money is no longer attached to gold, but to electricity – or rather, it's connected to the codes that allow it to flow through telephone and satellite lines worldwide – and this material volatility stands in irrevocable contrast to the limitations and territoriality of nation-states. Because insofar as money circulates in global data networks, it has become a global citizen, that is, a political issue; and a characteristic of this political issue is that as a global citizen – money is freed from all considerations and, consequently, it pokes holes in the traditionally limited territories and corporations. This is generally taken into account with the metaphor of the ‘shy deer,’ which does nothing to establish the truth but evades it - because we aren’t dealing with a natural phenomenon. Unlike the commonwealth markets, speculative markets aren’t interested in stability but in volatility. Since speculation is no longer bound to the natural limit, it has an inherent tendency towards excessive fantasy and delirious imagination. Money in the age of free-floating follows the laws of the imagination, becoming hysterical, phobic, chaotic.11
With the dematerialization of money, a new dilemma arises that doesn't hang on money's electrical substance – but in the form that it’s sent through the global data channels: digital code. To see the difficulty, you only have to look at the mathematical foundations of digital logic formulated by George Boole in his 1853 Laws of Thought. If you take zero times zero times zero, you get zero; if you take one times one times one, you get one. Formalizing this, you arrive at the formula profoundly affecting our society: x=xn. Or, put more concretely: any object that's been digitized suffers from a suspicion of proliferation – or – a promise of proliferation, whichever the case may be. Here is the abbreviation of our modern production processes, but it’s also a formula that could describe the modern dividual, the figure of the one-within-another. Once something has been digitized, there is no longer an original; the figure dissolves into a series of transfigurations, and the datum becomes the gene pool of itself, the donor of its own superfluousness. This unleashing of production signifies a first-order caesura, as it renders the basis of classical economics obsolete: the earth, as the star of scarcity, is replaced by a world of abundance, of limitless proliferation, x=xn. This formula, the intellectual core of the so-called computer revolution, is the reason for the fantastic; you could even say delirious hopes that the so-called new economy has triggered.
What is a fantastic promise in the field of production becomes a no less fantastic threat when applied to the problem of the monetary sign. Because money only attains validity insofar as it resists arbitrary reproduction. In this sense, it isn't the material value of gold so much as the limited supply of gold that's made it a privileged monetary substrate. This natural limit has fallen away, and if we take a tentative epochal, that is, fundamentally alien, ethnographic look at the past thirty years, we can note that the free-floating flows of capital have increased enormously, or to put it more abstractly: that money no longer adequately fulfills its function as a metric of scarcity.
But in a post-national world lacking the appropriate regulatory bodies, who can take on the task of keeping a nothing, which is the basis of the social, scarce? What will be the nature of a power that produces this appearance? And how will it be possible for an appearance to circulate as such - to pass the general credibility test that gives it credit and functionality in the first place? It’s clear to whom this task will fall. This power has long since made itself known, radiating towards us from wherever the communicative battery follows the laws of the remote control: stochastics – from our television screens and stock market index displays. However, it's questionable to me whether the advocates of a civil society will recognize the model of a civil society they have in mind in the products of a direct democracy’s mode of production – and, even more, questionable it seems to me, whether the sovereign at the remote control, the couch potato, will be able or even willing to meet the desiderata of a post-national and political civil society.
With these questions, there is no doubt that we’re entering the dark room of a refined society that's given itself the honorary title of civil society. It may well be that we're subsequently invited to believe the purpose of this smiling Monstrosity12 is more than anything else to drown out what lies ahead: not a civil society, but a progressive decomposition of the social stage into a civil war society.
One way or another. ‘The truth is on the street13.’ She has a baseball cap on, and it says: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.
Translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Bürgergesellschaft roughly translates as civil society, which has its roots in bourg or as the dweller of a Medieval castle or the market town adjacent to it, where the burghers or citizens were initially residents and defenders of the castle. [Translator’s note]
Nicolaus of Cusa was a 15th-century German cardinal known for his metaphysical treatise, De Docta Ignorantia [Of Learned Ignorance], and was one of the first proponents of Renaissance Humanism. The Neo-Kantians rediscovered his thought in the 19th century when he was hailed as the first modern thinker by Ernst Cassier in the debate on whether he was a Medieval or Renaissance thinker. ‘Truth lies in the Street’ refers to a line from his De Apice Thoriae [The Apex of Theory]: ‘The clearer truth is, the easier it is. (I once thought that truth is better found amid the obscure.) Truth, in which Possibility itself shines forth very brightly, is of great power. For it proclaims [itself] in the streets, as you have read in my book about the Layman. Most assuredly, truth shows that it is everywhere easy to find. See Hopkins, J. – Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations – Six Latin Texts Translated into English, Minneapolis, 1998, p. 1425.
Jean Starobinski's illuminating remarks in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, transparency and obstruction, Trans. Goldhammer, A., Chicago, 1988. The original French edition, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l'obstacle, Paris, Plon, 1957.
Frech kommt weiter [GETTING SMARTER TO GO FURTHER] was a slogan from the 2000s seen on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and cards that essentially meant: be bold, and you’ll have an advantage. It eventually found its way into advertising items such as cars, coffee, and films. [Translator’s note]
Volk ohne Raum [People without Space] is the title of a trendy novel written by Hans Grimm in 1926, which became a common saying during the Weimar period taken up by the German eugenicists as a national slogan as a way of legitimatizing the War against Russia of resources such as oil and grains. [Translator’s note]
In his 1921 monograph, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, Freud defines a mass as a ‘temporary entity, consisting of heterogeneous elements that have joined together for a moment.’ And, in this exemplary, Martin’s leitmotif of the dividual understands this mass as Le Bon’s descriptions of a ‘psychological crowd’ where a ‘magnetic influence given out by the crowd’ becomes a unified charge that becomes outsourced within the Psychotopic structure. This charged, electrified heap transforms into a synchronized single entity composed of one-in-the-other dividends, which Le Bon describes as ‘An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’ Note how these notions also play out in Martin’s leitmotifs of dieta and metabolism within the Psychotope, particularly in Enzensberger’s notion of ‘Molecular Civil War.’ [Translator’s note]
Clarens is the name of the village of Rousseau’s ideal society. [Translator’s note]
Rousseau, J.J. – The Social Contract (1762), Trans. G. D. H. Cole, New York, 1993, p. 73.
See Eichengreen, B. – Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, 2nd Edition, New Jersey, 2008. [Translator’s note]
See Burckhardt, M. – The Guillotine, Ex Nihilo Substack, November 2023. [Translator’s note]
You should be careful not to see international capital as a monolithic block but as class-bound. Thus, the worst stressors of stock corporations are the associations of small investors – an exemplar is the Aldi Capitalists. This leads to the paradoxical situation that those who can count themselves among the first victims of the impending rationalizations are pursuing them most relentlessly.
See Burckhardt, M. – From the abuse value, Ex nihilo Substack, May 2023. [Translator’s note]
See Fn. #2 above.