The Return of the Monster
An Economy of Loss and Resentment.
What’s so different about our world compared to our parents and grandparents? It’s a seemingly inconsequential thought that’s on everyone’s mind. The funny questions of Where do I fit? and How do I define myself? – ones Martin’s consistently ignored since publishing Digital Metaphysics in 1988. Considering these the wrong catechisms, the attentive German reader following his thought labyrinth has traced the development of a different leitmotif: the dividual. For the English reader unfamiliar with Burckhardtian thought, this is his realization that Identity is a state of flux – and, as such, a constant reflexion of our interactions with our social context. His curiosity about the relationship between genetics and the computer, stemming from a studio Sampler prompt to save a sample as ›hybrid,‹ has been about our Machine Culture and its Psychology. More specifically, it is about the cultural effects of Digitalisation. However, our daily exercises (booting up the computer, checking our e-mails, or copying things from here to there) force us to behave like dividuals. At the same time, cultural traditions have settled on defining Identity as the gold standard: My Authentic Self, so to speak. And because our present portrays our lack of authenticity and the need for self-improvement, Libertarian thinking offers us the infinite deferral of a future Greater Self: All You Can Be. While for pre-Boomers social roles were fairly defined, the Cultural Revolution of 68’ demanded that we become the artists of our destiny in search of a greater self. But what if everyone isn’t an Artist, and this exigence is an impossible mission that doesn’t serve the public good? What if we and the public good are best served by simply forgetting ourselves in the interactions with our social contexts?
Maybe the underlying cause of our current value cognitive dissonances is just that: not knowing what it is to be a dividual. Not accepting this destiny results in free radicals who not only demand Protect me from what I want but also Protect me from what I’ve done. On a social level, this leads to a kind of molecular civil war and the devastation of a closed future. In the following Lettre essay, which Martin published in 2016, we see what lies behind our recent Silk Road1 series: How libertarianism unleashes cognitive dissonances of the first order. Consequently, Senator Chuck Schumer, who could see a libertarian soul mate in the young Ross Ulbricht, turned into a relentless persecutor, crying out for protection from the very effects of what he’d created himself (as a reminder, he played a not insignificant role in the abolition of the Glass Steagall Act, a measure that led to the great global financial crisis). In the same way, we could watch Judge Forrester suppressing the evidence of Ross Ulbricht’s entrapment by Law Enforcement, who actually exploited the whole scheme for personal wealth – then, unsure how to contain this unleashed Hydra, using Ulbricht as the scapegoat of a sacrificial warning in hopes of containing the Western dream of American Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But beyond this exemplar, the essay also allows a relieving-out of what lies behind the inexplicable moments of Knisternden Zeitriss, those moments of stumbling lack of explanations we encounter in our various conversations on Ex nihilo, where the light comes in through the cracks of an open future.
The Horrors of the Hydra
On Headless Powers, the Atopic Web and the Treachery of the Subject2
There’s a man enrobed in an orange jumpsuit kneeling on desert sand as a black-clad executioner stands behind him, Scimitar held in his outstretched hand before the camera. An act the viewer’s head refuses to watch – despite the eyelids twitching in commemorative memories of pain that contract and rewind themselves in bewildering moments rapid cuts: the Twin Towers collapsing in on themselves, people staggering out of a subway shaft; the bloodied arms of the assassin who, with Scimitar in hand, steps into cell phone’s focus: Images form seductive needs of excising the viewer’s eyelids with their eyes-wide-open desires…With my eyes closed, my gaze is pulled inward into a gaping void. Where there was a wound, a bloody knot grows until a two-headed creature bursts forth, a Schizo-Twin in which the monster is born anew – just as every World Crisis carries all the horrors of previous ones and doubles them. And suddenly, there’s the certainty this double-headed horror belongs to a single body: the Hydra, which carries its poisonous doom [das Gift des Untergangs3 ]. As myth teaches us, the Hydra’s blood is poisonous; even its traces are poisonous. A toxic slime in which blood, money, and oil mix with the hatred of its thousand faces. Doesn't this also include the Data Kraken Edward Snowden told us about? How long ago did we celebrate crowds gathering on social networks as harbingers of a new age? And today? Now we see how hatred is brewing, how a Digital mob coalesces out of nowhere to attack and tear apart some unfortunate fool. And what's become of the once so highly praised civil society? Hasn't the angry citizen long since joined those drooling masses indulging in imprecatory formulas or conjuring up the West’s downfall by Tiki torchlight?
Hydra without Hercules
Paintings depicting the Hydra usually show the moment Hercules prepares to finish the monster off. We know, however, that we have nothing to oppose this Monster [Ungeheuer4 ]. The bomb detonating in a City's midday calm, the violence of a viral post going viral on the networks, the poison of doubt and disinformation – there's no cure or child's faith against it all. The very idea of an adversary capable of satisfying himself is a dead letter dissolving into a haze of placelessness, facelessness, and irresponsibility. Polycephaly thus resembles a rampant nothingness suddenly erupting out of the blue. More victims. Debts. Deaths. And this paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. Of course, the very fact we’re talking about a monster is a paradox.
Because, historically speaking, the Hydra isn’t a mythical monster but a child of reason, a rationality that’s encapsulated itself within every smartphone.
Admittedly, this rationality is of a different kind than the Leviathan’s Logik, which always boils down to a last resort: that of the Ultima Ratio, the monopolist. Dissipative, decentered, seemingly chaotic. A modified plant stem that Deleuze and Guattari once celebrated as a subversively proliferating order, the apotheosis of art and counterculture, the brave Rhizome resisting power's axiality. But now, this being has grown to an unimagined size. Still an organless body, we've since learned this creature belongs neither to Natural nor Technological History but is the flesh of our flesh, the longing of our longings.5 When it begins to ring, we stand at full attention – or, sitting in the subway, we stare at the display in the hope that it’s not for anyone else: It's for us alone. When the human-all-too-human emerges in this intimate relationship, you sometimes become part of a dissociated mass that turns into a vengeful, slavering monster. It doesn't take much, a small, slipped remark – and the Digital Natives' malice runs riot. Unlike those 19th or early 20th-century masses, the Hydra isn't a hypnotized, collectively homogenized social mass [Megaleib] pushing its way through the streets of the big city, excited by proximity, sweat, and its collective movement. No, it’s formatted into an aggregate of fleeting individuals living out what everyday life’s laws forbid them behind a cloak of Digital invisibility. Spatially separated from each other, they're no longer connected by blood, sweat, or tears – but by an invisible bond: Hydra is electrified. A molecular cloud discharging its thunderstorm of free radicals – meaning it's a union to be found only in the imagination: an exploding intimacy. What's the motto of Anonymous? We are legion. We do not forget, we do not forgive, expect us.
The Distance of the World
From a historical perspective, the Hydra owes its existence to the rationale of countering the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb with a deterrence strategy. Because in the event of a communications blackout caused by the release of electromagnetic radiation, the desideratum was an intelligent network that, wending its way through the remaining communication threads, could notify Central Command of the incident – because only by using such a system could the injured Leviathan respond to a nuclear First Strike. If the bomb (as a phantasmic res publica threat) needed to remain reified as a state secret, there was also an emerging need to decommission and release the network for public use just as the global monetary system entered a free-floating state. Although the end of Bretton Woods in 1972 moved currency valuation from the hands of State Monetary Authorities to those of the headless financial markets, it remained as mysterious to the political caste as ARPANET's founding in 1969 – while long-term consequences of these two initials were far-reaching. This is because the degree to which the network – as a spatial synchronized sphere of action spanning the globe – gave rise to the large-scale movement we call globalization and its effects6. With the possibility of worldwide action in real-time, the perspective changes, and capitalism’s further disinhibition becomes noticeable as it has sought and found its justification in the writings of neo-liberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. Where the distance of the world is fait accompli, money becomes a remote weapon – and predatory instincts return just to the extent that you're no longer looking at your counterpart in the face.7 Breaking a thriving organization into quick profits is easy-peasy with a hostile takeover! Filleting it piece by piece, viable parts are sold off, while unprofitable parts are liquidated without further ado. First and foremost, the Hydra is a predator of efficiency – rendering its desired object of all fat and sending what’s left back into the race gnawed to the bone as a lean machine: All just in time!
If maximizing efficiency and profit are its main arguments, then a moment of headlessness is already priced into these raids from the start: Because if we don't do it, someone else will! Thus, globalization not only leads to an expansion of the combat zone but also establishes the logic that, in military terms, is known as asymmetric warfare.
Because the individual is allowed to hide behind a mask, a regime of structural alterity is established, and a logic of alienation permeates every place in the world as an elsewhere on which the weight of the World’s entirety can be imposed. ›No, it’s nothing personal, darling! Just financial stuff, derivatives, CDOs, junk bonds‹: Phantastical names we give our Avatars. If the Leviathan shackled the desires of Predatory Capitalism, the Hydra now unleashes them in full force. Consequently, its tentacles are grasping out into the furthest reaches of the earth as this monster's heartbeat shakes the World. That's how the 80s’ Yuppie becomes the Demolition Man, filleting corporations in acts of hostile takeover until engaged in fascinomas of the New Economy's infinite promises, he invests in virtuality. ›Why bother with the real economy when network effects and risk insurance models promise dizzying profits?‹ Hiding Ponzi schemes behind junk real estate, as exemplified by the Sub-prime crisis, allows for the blossoming of phantastical backdrops everyone participates in – from Wall Street's Whiz Kids American University pension funds or buyers of German State Bank offerings of carefree investment packages – as they jointly stumbled into the delirium known as the Financial Crisis of 2008.
The Artificial Paradises
Now, it'd be unfair if the architecture of decentralized networks were held responsible for their misuse. Foreseeing the excesses, it could just as easily be argued here we're dealing with a utopian social program that, with the help of a logic of augmentation, allows for lifting the World’s rationality to unimagined heights. Meanwhile, when the entire globe is enveloped in digital positioning systems, robots relieve us of our mindless labor, and every gesture incorporated into our working memory is available at will, the question becomes: What’s to criticize about all this? What objection can there be to computer simulations optimizing our energy sources’ efficiencies? What sensible person would deny the blessings of 3D printing, making the printing of ultra-complex objects anywhere in the world possible? Isn't this what the advocates of Ecologic Renewal have been preaching and the developmental leaps previous generations didn't dare dream of? The democratization of education while simultaneously individualizing it, the possibility of exploring the spatiality of knowledge, of being able to traverse it topographically...isn't this The Library of Babel that Borges dreamed of? A Universal Commonality with almost Communist characteristics? As incomplete as the list of these blessings is (and must be), it’s clear that technology’s demonization isn't in the nature of things but in the eye of the beholder. So, where does the unease triggered by these technological advances come from? That utopia and demonology, curse and promise are so closely related, it suggests this represents a paradigm shift breaking traditional ways of life and deeply rooted cultural conventions.8 In this sense, it isn't so much the rationale as it's the loss of a familiar system of coordinates marking the beginning of the Hydra story – our homeland, which has become uncanny; no, it’s become the birthplace of a monster.
Total Liquidation
So, how can we describe the state of affairs? If a political theory has assigned the different habitats of land and sea to our political entities, such as Leviathan and Behemoth, the Hydra is rooted in a transitional zone between them. The myth tells us that the Monster is at home in the Lernaean swamps, a terrain where our conceptual tools fail. If, as an autochthonous being born into a particular nation, you're used to citing reasons for your political stance, you must realize that these submerged foundations are spongy at best, and it's better not to overstretch them beyond their local. This moment of blurring liquefaction is, in reality, the essence of our Social Software – even before it became Capitalism's operating system. So-called ›Software‹ originally referred to the water-soluble paper used on U-boats for recording encryption codes during the Second World War – because it ensured the enemy couldn’t retrieve the codes from the boat’s wreckage even if it sank. While this Liquefaction Logic was initially experienced as a dissolution of boundaries, the longue durée shows it goes hand-in-hand with gradually bogging down institutions. When Capital flows into a region of the World, a form of cosmopolitanism begins pulsating in people's minds, allowing the self-restraint of established institutional structures to fade away.
Consequently, the treasurer of a city suffering from deindustrialization and its social costs doesn't find it strange lending his municipal waterworks to a New York consortium of lawyers (and thus making New York State taxpayers liable for any claimed depreciation) – any more than a State Bank head finds it strange setting up special purpose vehicles in other countries whose sole purpose is undermining the self-imposed rules of a public corporation. Au contraire, we can celebrate such coups until the social costs of such outsourcing become apparent – without any awareness that we've entered into a form of symbolic warfare undermining our foundations, ultimately washing them away. Because water flows to the lowest point, the Hydra's moral order always boils down to the lowest common denominator, the downsizing of a moral limbo dance. When profits are privatized, and losses are socialized, National institutions are robbed of their spiritual core, becoming vague as they lose their coherence and solidity. However, speaking of corruption here would be as misguided as trying to reduce the financial crisis to the greed of individual bankers. What drags it down is the heteronomous, duplicitous logic promising more rationality, speed, and efficiency that subcutaneously leads only to the acceptability of offshore companies’ pirate behavior. Greed becomes a virtue; a double standard becomes the program: moral hazard. All of this, in turn, is the product of a mindset that sees the Digital World as a split-off hinterworld, a Second Life in which other laws, or no laws at all, apply.
Behind the scenes, however, this drive [Triebwerk] as a split-off, increasingly powerful psychical apparatus begins determining not only Economic Fate but also Social Structures – and even Identity itself. If this insight is experienced as a stroke of fate, even as an act of violence, it’s because this space has been perceived as an inauthentic, inappropriate sphere, as a supplement that has nothing to do with people and their real economy. Like an addict who convinces himself he can do without his daily dose at any time, we deny our dependency – and yet: we’re attached to the Net like an addict to the needle. Now that the drug has become a universal lubricant, its consequences are no longer ignorable – all the more so as this monster has released its children into the world. Of course, Globalization's stressors haven't gone unnoticed as forms of resistance have emerged, all striving to repel the foreign body. While left-wing populism, such as Attac and Occupy, has defended itself against free-floating goods and currencies, right-wing populism positions itself against the influx of refugees and migrants. This resentment turns out to be particularly ugly because people, unlike goods without a history (which at best have a Made in China label stuck on them,) can’t simply shed their cultural imprint. As in Marx's needy capital, their language, culture, and religion cling to them like the mark of Cain – and in the refugee with a Smartphone, the clash of cultures becomes iconically magnified. As a split-off self, he represents what the enemy used to be: his question in a different form. When we urge deceleration, slow food, and online abstinence, don't we feel uprooted in our homes? And what is the empty chatter of our talk shows other than a speechlessness about the radical nature of change, the loss of certainty, and the feeling that, in a Globalized World, a return to home is no longer viable? The sudden blossoming of political resentment makes the violence of this change palpable.
Where the foundations are shaken, horror vacui spreads, and that knotting of malignantly persistent thought arises from which the Hydra's heads burst forth.
However varied the ideologemes may be, their commonality is how they tie the emptiness back to a perpetrator. Wherever a scapegoat is needed, conspiracy theories flourish: be it that a supposed Fourth Reich is forcing Europe under its German thumb: no longer using tanks, but the Euro – or that the ruling elites are carrying out a population exchange to replace culture’s proud bearer with an equally compliant and globalized hybrid being. Now, this idea of the »Great Population Exchange,« which the French writer Renaud Camus insinuates in his Grand Replacement Manifesto, maybe more at home in the science fiction world of Body Snatchers. However, it’s still worth looking at Camus' reasoning – all the more so as it forms the ground of the rampant accusations of Population Exchange. This conspiracy theory explicitly refers to the idea that the individual can be substituted like a machine part or a digital module. This figure of thought’s radical chic stems from how it succeeds in marrying bloodless left-wing populist economism with Janus-faced xenophobia and self-aggrandizement. And just as the primitive ethnic groups once mobilized the armies of the dead to defend themselves against the colonizers’ superiority9, the phantasms of the past are now being marched out. In Cultural Wars, reasons that can't be used to counter reason are put forward – which means fighting windmills.
If these self-proclaimed defenders of the Occident are striking proof that the West must have perished a long time ago, they also demonstrate the toxicity of this new wave of indignation: the Hydra feeds on its own poison. Every split creates another split. But why is this so? One reason for this toxicity of the process is that an Identity lost can no longer be restored, and resentment is only nourished by rotting tissue and lamenting its decline and loss. And even if you form a bloc identitaire by firmly closing your ranks, the feeling of integration is gone. In reality, this union is only possible if you ignore the inevitability of loss and blame someone else for the undesirable effects of your practices. Instead of looking in the mirror where we would be confronted with the ambiguities of our thinking in the cryptic rationale, we create a cardboard comrade, a favorite enemy who serves as a projection surface for our disassociations.
Between Alphabête10 and Diabolical Order
This brings us to the question of how Identity is formed in the first place. Cultural spaces are by no means to be understood as natural facts but as representations of Symbolic Orders. The Symbolic must be written in capital letters. Because what we call the Occident is neither a product of philosophy nor of our Judeo-Christian worldview, but rather a product of the revolution set in motion by the Greek Alphabet. It's in the Alphabetic Sign as this sacred Scripturality preceding all faith that the separation from the barbarians took place and, at the same time, the Symbolic Order originated, which we still employ today in its polymorphic form: A=A=A.11 It's only because of this order that Science, Logic, Democracy, and Written Religion are conceivable. If we consider the birth of the West to be an act of self-generation born from philosophical spirituality, then the process of actual alphabetization leads us to a point in time where society emerges not as an author but instead as the expression of a scriptural fantasy – as an assembly of Alphabetical Natives.
Given this genealogy, it becomes evident that such a recoding of the writing system must elicit extremely disturbing social effects. If we understand this as our present-day driving force, it becomes clear we're witnessing a crisis in our writing culture. This crisis isn't limited to orthographic issues but has affected our institutionalized typewriters, who, like the Law, the Bureaucracy, or the University, are responsible for our society's self-reproduction. The previous mechanical order has been replaced by something new: a liquefied concept of writing that's as blurred as ubiquitous. Unlike lettering, which has marked its own sphere of abstraction, this writing intermingles within us as a nervous gesture getting under our skin. And just as our smartphones' navigation system turns us into an ambulant mouse pointer, we become an in-scription, an in-formation, a written body understanding itself as a Digital Native.
It is no coincidence that a community formation is repeated in the Symbolic conception itself. After all, symbolon stands for that which is thrown together, which arises from the act of throwing together (sym-ballein), in which a community is constituted in the Sigil of the Signs of this or that god, this or that idea of order. What happens when the resultant agreement becomes questionable can be illustrated by the concept of diabolon, which goes back to the verb diaballein, to slander and divide.
In precisely this sense, the Hydra is a diabolical being, a system of order that, instead of uniting, has entered into a process of dissection and conflict.
It's no longer a positive, formative speech setting the tone here, but slander, defamation, and rumor. When one head is cut off because of its bad reputation, two new ones arise in its place, each trying to outdo the other in malice. The proximity to the Symbolic Order, the fact that we’re dealing here with a perverted system of order, is more important than the phenomenology of human baseness. But what exactly is the perversion? And what does it mean that a system of order can become perverted?
Nothing other than that the existing order isn’t valid in itself – but only insofar as it corresponds to social and economic practices. If a difference arises here, the emerging schism can be studied on the front lines where the dividing lines of a society begin. Exemplary cases can be found in the late Middle Ages as it fell victim to the Inquisition, anti-Semitism, and Witch Persecutions, which ultimately led to unending civil wars—just as Wheelwork Technology [Räderwerktechnik], Interest Rates, and the Printing Press were emerging. Looking at the heads that our contemporary Hydra has sprouted, we observe similarly bizarre division processes. The bloc identitaire propagandists never tire of building their supremacy on a negative image of the Foreigner. Consequently, the Other’s factually undeniable cultural difference becomes an excuse for not dealing with the underlying cause of change, the historical process of Globalization and Digitalisation. This phantom pain is followed by symbolic proxy wars, whose only purpose is simply to deny the Social Drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk].
It isn’t without a certain irony that these self-mobilizations, just like the fighting, take place in the very social architecture held responsible for the decline of our world. After all, there are no more manic Twitterati than those lamenting the erosion of traditional order. Interestingly, when it comes to the choice of weapons, this same moral flexibility applies to all those imagining that the Digital Age's hybrid creatures are symptoms of doom.
The Russian patriots, for example, who are furious about the decadence and effeminization of Europe, find nothing wrong with using social media for hybrid warfare – just as the human butchers of ISIS use the Kuffar's12 media and visual language to immortalize their iconoclastic acts of killing orgies. In other words: wherever the enemy is demonized, the Order of the Hydra triumphs – subcutaneously.
If we were Hegelians, we could assume a cunning of reason where the order of the symbolon is instituted from behind. If we have less confidence in Hegel's theodicy, Hydra's Law could be interpreted as an omen of an approaching civil war, as evidence of a profound Identity Disorder where metastasizing necrotic tissue sprouts all kinds of contradictions. But how can these acts of inner contradictions remain hidden? If we ask about its benefits instead of dwelling on this psychological puzzle, it becomes clear that demonizing the enemy immunizes our worldview. If we’re busily restaging past battles, we're relieved of the embarrassment of dealing with the recoding of our prevailing Order.
While the Hydra allows us to persevere in a lost position, it will enable our consciousness to behave schizophrenically – without considering this a form of psychopathology. Faced with the enemy, we can use all those demonized techniques, where such a practice represents nothing more than equality of arms and a legitimate measure of self-defense. Conversely, when operating in the Digital World, these techniques make it all the easier to defend the refuge of the Identitarian local museum [Heimatmuseum], as it’s no longer subject to reality testing. Consequently, the loss only appears as a temporary imbalance, disrupting an order to which you can return once the foreign body has been removed. However, this charged relationship, indeed the heteronomy opening up between the traditional order's Logic of Representation and the emerging Political reconfiguration's Logic of Simulation, is suspended. If you follow the Hydra, you're no longer in the field of the possible but in the field of mythomania – and the promise lies in being able to arm yourself against reality discursively. Preserving Identity: this is the common banner under which the divided parties are united despite all ideological differences. Consequently, it is no longer a question of asserting different positions; instead, the arguments are characterized by Manichean zeal and an apocalyptic tone. The Dark Germany fights against the Light Germany, the representatives of the system against the critics of the system, and the do-gooders against the misanthropists. Who cares that they're forming under the sign of mutual destruction? Because isn't that what you want to do to the enemy?
Obsession of the Borderliner
A few years ago, Peter Sloterdijk attempted to revive the thymotic – and in doing so, he somewhat inadvertently captured the Hydra's poison.13 In the ancient Greek term thymos, paradoxical feelings such as anger, courage, desire, and possession by a foreign power are mixed together; a state of mind prevails here, and the boundary between the inner and outer world becomes blurred, if not seemingly non-existent. If Sloterdijk's apology of holy rage was an act of heroic self-emasculation seen as an ennobling of the shallow contemporary in the highland thinker’s guise, then this term can be read as a moment of cultural obscuration harking back to Europe’s pre-Alphabetic stage before people learned to say »I«.14 Thymotics may help understand the accumulation of masses of the social excitement in Social Networks, but we're right doubting whether they can be used to create a state in the sense of the Digital symbolon. Instead, the thymotic obsession refers to the psychology of the borderliner, reacting manically or depressively to changes in the outside world while being completely gutted and hollowed out. In this sense, the Hydra functions as a thymotic collective body. In the aggregate, the individual can reassure himself of what he is missing. In the stadium, the crowds' enthusiasm makes him jump up as he’s inflamed by the masses’ fever curves, building up before his inner eye like soaring stock market prices. However, unlike in National Socialism, when the people's bodies demanded lockstep choral unison, contemporary metempsychoses afford public opinion an almost dance-like agility.
For this reason alone, the Digital multitude is many-headed, not an individual, but a dividual: a divided, dissociated, highly adaptable self. For the contemporary, the thymotic can only be understood as a diagnosis of a profound Identity Disorder – one that is in some ways unavoidable. Because wherever you communicate in the Digital Space, you're compelled to view yourself as a liquefied self, as an atomized data spur beamed through the ether at the speed of light.
Unlike our world of things, which silently surrenders to its liquefaction, the diffusion of traditional values provokes vociferous protest, be it by lamenting the decline of culture, the speed of computer culture, or its coldness. If a thing doesn't bend to our will, we speak of the perfidy of an object; where, instead, we should be speaking of the perfidy of the subject, closing itself off to change with obstinate insistence, often with an elaborate »docta ignorantia« in its impedimenta. And so the Digital Age's new man is a long time coming, while modern online surfers like copy-pasters, networkers, and profile sharpeners are proving to be strangely hermaphroditic creatures. Although they use new possibilities while surfing various user interfaces, instead of equipping the new world with an adequate set of conceptual toolkits, they insist on their traditional privileges. They are content with pretending that the old still exists. But this doesn't resolve the conflict between the solid and the liquid; it denies it: at what cost? The foundations give way in the stream of data, and the solidity that promises security – the bloc identitaire – dissolves, or more precisely: begins to fade away. In the stagnant waters of this erosion, sludge and gases form as a process of involution occurs. The most substantial evidence of this intellectual swamping process is the Populists shooting up everywhere – or instead, bubbling out of the muddy depths as flatulence (as flatus voci), producing those errant phenomena that populate our discourses, which are little more than the revenants of necrotic phantasms haunting our thinking like a foul-smelling brew.
It isn't rationality but denial that creates the Hydra. And because this denial prevails not only on the fringes of society but also in the juste milieu, society's center has also been affected by its swampiness. You don't have to look far to see signs of decay: Educational institutions no longer fulfill their mission, instead making do with a magical nominalism; symbolic politics are content to substitute words for reality; all with an inability, indeed, a downright unwillingness, of wanting to get to the bottom of things – for what else would you find there but rot? Thus, State Representatives no longer find it worth mentioning their institutions' complaints about medieval equipment. At the same time, bureaucratic quagmire is simply a natural fact of society that is best met with irony. This is how Public television has become a pension fund with broadcasting operations, and the University is a stronghold of sham production with a pseudology proving its own excellence in fraudulently acquired doctorates defended with tooth and claw. Where simulation becomes the art of governing, the art of the possible is exhausted in rhetoric. Representatives no longer claim to want to shape the world beyond photos or tweets. What would be the result other than an airport that isn't there for flying? Nowhere is it more apparent how low we've sunk than in the complete absence of the National government in the public’s Digital sphere. While the Chancellor declared not so long ago that we were breaking new ground, the bitter truth is that this space has long since been left to private entities, meaning any hope that the State will reach these redemptive waters is a pious one. Conversely, State institutions have become so illiterate that they fail at even simple registration tasks. So, the refugee with a smartphone encounters a country clearly showing signs of decay in its dysfunctionality and is no longer able to support itself.
Identity and Folklore
Why a metaphor when what is at stake refers to rationality? Well, the Hydra has been a topos of political iconography since time immemorial.15 Even Plato speaks of the need for reason to tame the Hydra of desires, while elsewhere, he equates it with the Sophist, who becomes entangled in the contradictions of wild thinking by creating illusory truths and phantasms at best. Our use of metaphor expresses beyond its classical usage that reason itself has taken the form of a decentered network: a many-headed, polyarchic power dispositive that’s nevertheless not recognized as such and translated into an institutional structure. We encounter the paradox of a reason that cannot or will not come to reason. Instead, we're limited to the local museum's wisdom, with those engaged in an obsessive effort to maintain a status quo that’s no longer sustainable. Unlike in the Platonic setting, where Philosophy plays the role of arbiter, desires have seductively subjugated reason as the demoscopic excitement curves of Social Networks that determine discourse. And it's improbable this will change in the foreseeable future since the gaping political vacuum has released children into the world that have taken on a life of their own. Who would risk interpreting these confused ideas of the bloc identitaire as symptoms of the Digital Revolution?
As Nietzsche noted, resentment is highly inventive – but, mind you, only with nihilistic intent. It’s because of this reactionary tendency that ghosts of the past creep out of its repository. Indeed, a glorious Identity acquired at a bargain price can be used as a defensive spell against the incendiary nature of the Real – and it is even nicer if a Digital following can confirm your power. In the long term, such a disguise remains as flimsy as fruitless apotropaic gestures. Worse still: mere summoning becomes a maelstrom, causing those persevering to sink deeper precisely to the extent they resist sinking. By doing so, they bring to bear, subcutaneously at least, that hated structure against which they’re striving to fight with all their might. That the Politics of Resentment prefers referring to »culture« or »religion« can be interpreted not as evidence of particular sophistication or religiosity but, au contraire, as a marker of their precise absence. This misuse, which can be read as a kind of semantic ghoulishness, is by no means limited to the so-called Fundamentalist Camp. It's also observable where the Hydra is imagined as overcome and tamed Multiculturalism – and while our cultural mainstream takes credit for this achievement, this deliberative self-praising overlooks how invoked tolerance is often exhausted in indifference, allowing the Identity problem to sneak in again through the back door. It starts with a general suspicion of the »Universal Subject« as a philosophically disguised mask of white, heterosexual men whose unacknowledged purpose is solely cementing existing inequalities and discrimination. Conversely, when the disadvantaged groups demand their rights, it always references a Female, Gay, Lesbian, Black, Muslim, or whatever Identity that’s invoked and garnished with the accusation the power structure [Machtpol] suffers from the corresponding phobias or lack of sensitivity. Identity Politics is undoubtedly an excellent stratagem in Diversity discourses. But it's no less totalitarian than the supposed opponent – after all, the individual always risks becoming the group in question's spokesperson and imposing a certain self-image upon it. This volte-face is exemplified by the debate leading to feminist Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues being branded a sexist play in the USA. And why? Because the play, insofar as it equates the woman with the vagina in a biologistic way, excludes transgender candidates – and therefore isn’t inclusive. Now, such casuistry isn't an aberration but deeply anchored in the intellectual toolkit theorist Judith Butler provided. According to her, Identity is only an arbitrary social attribution, so the role is evacuated as a mere speech act that can be paraphrased at will: a logic of self-assertion that, in borderline cases, takes on the characteristics of a private language:
I may not look like Al Bundy, nor am I recognized as such, but because I feel exactly like him, I insist on being Al Bundy and being treated accordingly.
Like the Identitarian recourse, the Identity Carnival also feeds on a phantasm – on the idea that Identity, whether inherited or established, is a possession.16 In the Digital Age of Hypermodernity, which provides the possibility of an Avatar and any Identity, the predetermined role has become superfluous; the social straitjacket can be slipped off without further ado or replaced by a different costume. Identity? No, at best, it’s a strategic mask that can be used situationally and playfully. Wanting to ennoble such a stratagem into a fixed quantity, as Judith Butler does, is a pseudology claiming the computer culture's Anything Goes without paying its due price. What does this consist of? Nothing other than the surrender of Identity itself.
Delights of the apocalypse
The illusion of not needing to pay this price is the illusion that turns technical ratiocination into a Monster – it is like giving a child a tool that endows it with superhuman powers. Perhaps the most bizarrely illuminating evidence of such regression is exemplified by the religious warriors of ISIS, who are often referred to as the Hydra of Terror. While Arabic fundamentalist ideology emerged as the phantom pain of a world region disconnected from modernity, its more cosmopolitan contemporary terrorists show us it's perfectly possible and permissible to combine the user interfaces of Social Networks with atavistic thought patterns: while their fathers' literalism reasoned using toilet paper was incriminated as a defilement of sacred material, computer culture has long since become an extension of the individual's sphere of action requiring any need for absolution as immunization. By implication, the purchasing of a sex slave stands unconnected to the warnings of modesty and purity laws being disseminated in YouTube videos as this paradoxical asynchronicity prevails. Consequently, an enemy's decapitation is also staged as a pleasurable media event becomes illuminating on several levels. Firstly, the decapitation marks the dividing line between the Kuffar and the Orthodox and thus acts as an Identity-preserving act. Secondly, since the staging follows Hollywood's Image Language, they can feel part of an avant-garde exposing the Great Satan’s deceptive media halo.17 by outdoing it. By carrying out the killing as an execution, the reality principle can be claimed for itself because the decision over life and death gives each Mujahideen a sovereignty that only Leviathan is entitled to in the West. Thus, these killings also serve as a political message, humiliating all those Crusader Nations whose machinations are blamed for the Mujahideen’s backwardness. Finally, the act of killing, fed into Social Networks, is a viral advertising measure that can help attract more followers, fighters, and money. All of this comes together in a moment of apocalyptic radiance, in which the nature of terror can be recognized, but also the thymotic excitement – the monster, understood in its moment of self-empowerment. This all makes sense in an Economy of Terror.
Nevertheless, this thinking doesn't succeed in creating an optimistic worldview; it finds its inner purpose only in the martyrdom of a cult of death. Or the ›Art of Death‹, as it is called. Perhaps the only thing characterizing this moment is the symbolon, taken hostage, perversion into the diabolon.
The Hydra, as Ovid puts it, became wealthy through loss. Consequently, its laws can be studied precisely where phantom pain is particularly pronounced. Hydratization – the perversion of the Symbolic Order – doesn't have to take place in a drastic form, such as an unbeliever’s decapitation. Resentment is quite prepared to pay itself back in small change. In this country, the losses are accumulating gradually below the perception threshold. Nevertheless, no Hercules will come to our aid. After all, the Digital Revolution, like the previous affronts to humanity, is an unavoidable imposition that leaves no one out. If the psychological insult was that the ego is no longer master of its own house, the imposition of hydration is that this ego no longer has to see itself as an individual but as a divider, and even that the house is beginning to disintegrate. A counter-reaction ensues if this fall into bottomlessness is experienced as a loss of home or an abysmal threat. If we look at the crisis brewing these days, we encounter the Hydra everywhere: in terrorism, in hybrid forms of war, in the powerlessness of Europe, all in which the heads of nationalism are once again gaining strength. Even in bourgeois, dignified respectability lies a form of denial of the world and reality that will one day manifest itself in an ugly form. Even now, it only takes a glance at newspaper comment columns and Facebook accounts to recognize the symptoms of bourgeois derangement. No matter who you write against now or in the future, no matter what cultural battles you fight – one thing is certain: the Hydra is not the others, but it is us. And it will remain a Monster as long as we don't see it as a portrait of our future selves but as a foreign body. And because no Hercules or philosopher king will help us with this task, we must make friends with the many-headedness of our rationality. How can we do that? Perhaps by learning, like Baron Münchhausen, we can pull ourselves out of the mire by our bootstraps. With a horse, mind you. And knowing that the future no longer lies in the ground but in the bottomlessness and the flight of thought.
Translation by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
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Burckhardt, M. - Die Schrecken der Hydra: Über kopflose Mächte, das atopische Netz und die Tücke des Subjekts, Lettre, LI112, Spring 2016.
The German phrase Das Gift des Untergangs translates as the poison, toxin, or venom of loss, destruction – and resentment. Notice how the German Gift reflects the notion that a gift can be poisonous in the way it sometimes engenders hatred toward the receiver in the feelings of powerlessness and resentment it often engenders in its receiver.
A monster translates as the kind you see in a movie and can laugh at, while Ungeheuer denotes more generally that undefinable moment of uncanny evil [Unheimlich Böses] which is the reflexion seen in Nietzsche’s use of Ungeheuer in »Any fighting Monsters must take care not to become a Monster himself. For if you gaze into the abyss for too long, the abyss may also look into you.« Etymologically, we see the connection with geheuer that has a positive meaning as something nice, friendly, and simple-minded, and there’s also a connection here with Heirat, which refers to marriage. This means: heheuer is everything that makes you feel safe in your home. Consequently, Ungeheuer is the negation that turns it into an uncanny Monstrosity.
This refers to the symbolon/diabolon of the Machine’s desirous seduction, which is nothing more than our own. After all, the Machine, in the form of Artificial Intelligence, is nothing more than the reflexions of our genius —meaning ›Artificial Intelligence‹ is a misnomer as it’s actually a Reflective Intelligence. It’s a strange mixture of Protect me from what I want and our Burckhardtian re-phrasing as Protect me from what I’ve done.
Of course, Globalization is really the result of the Western Psychotope’s Digitalisation of the World, and as such, it sometimes masks its actual drives and Psychologistic effects. See From the Abuse Value, Life in the Attention Economy, and Capitalism – Dead or Alive?
Joseph Stiglitz described this mechanism using the NAFTA Agreement as an example. In this agreement, social considerations, which played a role in the US context, gave way to the right of the strongest in the international context.
This again refers to the leitmotif of symbolon/diabolon we noted in footnote five above. Here, it is indicative of the electrified crackling rift [Knisterden Zeitriss], where the light comes in during the interregnum between the transition from one Universal Machine’s Psychotope into another – and the tension of social discontent during this period of uncanniness often felt as a sense of loss and the poison of its resentment. [Translator’s note]
The Ghost Dance is a Native American circle dance that was believed, when correctly performed, to reunite the spirits of the dead in an army to save them from American Expansionism. [Translator’s note]
Alphabête or Alphabestie is a Lacanian neologism Martin uses to describe the Minotaur who must die as the Bull’s Aleph sign to become the Alpha in the alphabetic interplay between the Lost Form and Typenrad. See Im Labyrinth der Zeichen [In the Labyrinth of Signs] in Burckhardt, M. – Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999 and Die Untoten der Philosophie [The Undead of Philosophy] in Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin, 2018. [Translator’s note]
Martin brings this notion of the Alien Logic’s interplay between the Alphabetic Typenrad and the Lost Form into complete relief in 2018’s Philosophie der Maschine. [Translator’s note]
Kuffar is a word of many meanings, which, »through sloppy usage,« has come to mean non-Muslims, i.e. non-believers.
See Sloterdjik, P. – Rage and Time, New York, 2010.
Bruno Snell elaborated on this in his »The Discovery of the Mind«. The discovery of the ego is co-emergent with the Alphabet, coinage, codified law, and what historians have called the Hoplite Revolution. The latter can be read as a social principle of equality, as a tendency towards democracy. See Snell, B. – The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, Oxford, 1953.
It was used primarily in the French Revolution, where the people, in the role of Hercules, had to chop off the heads of the monstrous Ancièn régime.
Here, the argument is that I can legally enforce any Identity I choose, which is another way of using my Identity as a central bank emitting my personal currency. For a more in-depth explication, see Burckhardt, M. – The Bill of Identity, Ex nihilo, 2/23/2024.
This is the term that can be found in Abu Bakr Naji's Management of Savagery, a text regarded as the archetype of the more recent variety of fundamentalist terror, which, unlike Bin Laden's organization, was designed as a decentralized order from the outset. See Naji, Abu Bakr – Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass, Internet, 2004.