Twilight of the Mind
On the Disappearance of the Intellectual in Post-histoire
Twilight of the Mind: On the Disappearance of the Intellectual in Post-histoire is the third in our series of Martin’s later works. It was initially published in Lettre International’s 2016 Winter Edition – placing it between 2015’s Alles und Nichts: Ein Pandämonium digitaler Weltvernichtung and 2018’s Philosophie der Maschine; its central theme is the Fate of Intellectualism in Post-modernism’s wake.
The thoughts set down here deal with the question of the author, which has already been elaborated in Portrait of the Author, Electrified: On the Transition from Mechanical to Electromagnetic Writing, and in The Monster and its Telematic Guillotine. What is new is the eminently political slant: the realization that the intelligentsia has failed to deal with contemporary issues. In this sense, the text could be read as a new version of Julien Benda's La Trahison des clercs [The Treason of the Intellectuals], except that we’re not dealing with ideological blindness but with a sin of omission. It’s no coincidence that there’s a reference here to the formula of simulation: x=xn, which renders the code and the thinking of representation obsolete.
The new - that is, the decisive sentence - can only be conceived if one engages with its principles of construction. Deconstruction that is satisfied with mere know-it-all attitude is a vain and futile endeavor.
Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Twilight of the Mind
On the Disappearance of the Intellectual in Post-histoire
Martin Burckhardt
The Intellectual has left the public eye. Silently and without making a big fuss about disappearing. Why? Perhaps he was too refined; perhaps he suffered the fate of Kafka's Hunger Artist1, who lost the attention of his audience just as he was perfecting his hunger art. Of course, the disappearance of the Intellectual has by no means silenced the discourse – Au contraire. Just as in Kafka's parable, the Hunger Artist has been replaced by a ravenous predator; loudmouths have commandeered the post, the manners have become rougher, and the figures of thought more coarse.
You only have to watch limbo talk shows to witness the barbarization of public speech. Here, where loudness replaces arguments, where moral whisperings drown out the aporia, the foreign word becomes an unknown alien, and the space between the lines disappears – no doubt, no irony, no ambivalence. Public opinion craves flesh: The Real Thing.
And because the monster's maw is insatiable, all those experts who are never at a loss for a juicy recipe come rushing in. The expert feeds on the catastrophe as the liver enlarges with its detoxification tasks. If it gets bigger, he becomes a permanent show guest whose presence guarantees that things can be dealt with. But how? Thoroughly, with a heavy blow on the table. Theory? That’s a waste of time – as is the question of how the catastrophe could have happened in the first place. However, this DIY intellectual has its price. The historical horizon’s loss makes the intelligentsia discourse monothematic: Greece – the refugees – Aleppo – and this conceptual starvation fuels the excitement.
As the camera zooms in on the scene, the breath intensifies with excitement: Yes, here’s the spectacle: Scandal – Catastrophe! Every word becomes an exclamation mark, punctuation, an urgent prayer. And because the world's evolution is becoming increasingly illegible, the catastrophic nature of the disaster has to be wrapped in cotton wool for easier metabolism. The problem solver jumps to defend the problem denier as a word acrobat who, with the appropriate wording, dissolves realities into thin air. Packaged as digestible morsels, reality is itself suspended. What remains is an imbroglio of opinions whose toncadree is set ultimately by a cadre of incessant orators and filibusterers (Buddha figures in the mold of Peter Altmeier, who can't be driven out of their current conceptual fortress by anything, absolutely nothing). Already in the 1980s, Heiner Geissler proclaimed it was necessary to occupy terms and definitions heralded by an attitude that euphemistically referred to a denial of reality since its sole aim was conquering the symbolic air of sovereignty. In this sense, the spoken word – no, it is in the television performance – is evidence of an intellectual art of sealing as a rhetorical defensive spell in which one's position is spared the hostility of dirty reality. That even feature section editors diligently follow talk shows' goings-on, and even that these reviews demonstrate a suspicious resemblance to sports reporting (Gabriel attacks from the left flank), proves that athleticism has established itself here, offering strange similarity to the panopticon's freak shows. The idea that this hustle and bustle is seriously about enlightenment is as absurd as the idea that reality will conform to the demanding echoes of the television studios’ call into the wilderness. As Karl Kraus once said: 'The level has risen, but no one is on it anymore!'
At the end of History
As an advocatus diaboli might object, could this decline be a reason for wishing the return of those popular educators who trumpeted their do-gooder formulas to the world in the pre-Internet era? Doesn't such a scenario of decline go hand-in-hand with a nostalgic longing to reduce complexity, ascribing to intellectuals a significance that, de facto, they’re not entitled to? As an exemplar, was it really a stroke of genius when Habermas warned of colonizing the East, indeed of an emerging Deutch Mark nationalism, at the very moment when the citizens of the GDR were marching on the border ('If the DM comes, we stay; if it doesn't, we go to it'?) Can a lack of expertise be compensated for with the correct worldview? Isn't it a sign of poverty when a society outsources its conscience to heroized individuals as evidence of a profoundly authoritarian structure? And isn't it also part of the unpleasant truth that intellectuals seek refuge in Leviathan's vicinity at the very moment when they were threatened with losing their power? How could the system's former critics mutate into apologists for the war, behaving in a more state-supporting, gun-toting manner than the civil servants themselves? In other words, isn't the retreat of this type of know-it-all a blessing?
The progressive loss of the importance of the Intellectual didn’t happen overnight; it has a long history. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the ‘end of history’ in 1989, he heralded the end of the historical-philosophical Machine of progress that’d already profoundly modernized feudal Europa and whose tone and direction had always been set by a small avant-garde. This made Intellectualism the spectral embodiment that had already appeared in the Communist Manifesto, part of a socially free-floating stratum foreshadowing the rumblings that, albeit with some delay, also spread to the masses. It’s not surprising that when the philosophy of history had fulfilled its mission – in other words, when the world spirit had triumphed on its way to death – its mouthpiece, the intellectual, also appeared superfluous. Where the question of the system no longer arises, and instead, free-moving subjects can articulate and negotiate their (usually economic) interests with each other, there’s no longer any dispute over dogma, no need for ideological exacerbation, no need to explain the world. Instead, pragmatism prevails, as demonstrated by the grumpy former chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s dictum: ‘If you have visions, you should see a doctor.’
In post-histoire, managers replace visionaries, and industrious teams take on the role of founding fathers. Where the religiously glowing core of an ideologist cools out, questions of faith become administrative procedures, and, at best, the world spirit finds a home as a systems theorist (exemplar in the form of Niklas Luhmann, whom we won't do injustice in characterizing him as a Hegel for Administrators). In this respect, the transitioning of social systems into autopilot modes – a paradigm shift Luhmann presents in the form of autopoietic systems – testifies that societies no longer depend on heroic interventions but that there are mechanisms at work here no longer be controlled per Ordre de Mufti. If we wished, we could speak of an intelligence articulating itself from behind the scenes, an informal logic of domination that can assert its claims independently of the world horizon of its users. In any case, we encounter an intelligence that no longer needs the intellect.
The X-ray Vision of Reason
What is an Intellectual anyway? What's their role? Its meaning is so complex that in tracing its etymological roots, we soon find ourselves excavating Philosophy’s historical caves. During the Roman imperial period, intellectus appeared as a loanword for the Greek conception of the mind’s apprehension (nous2), and it generally stood for the philosophical faculty of knowledge. As a Roman-Greek compound term from inter (between, among) and legere (Greek legein, to collect, read, say), intellectus could be understood as the ability to read between the lines. Thomas Aquinas states: ‘The term intellectus is derived from knowing the inner nature of a thing; intelliger therefore means: To read the inside.’ In Christianity, this X-ray vision becomes a divine prerogative3, which Meister Eckhart succinctly states, 'God is intellectus. Although this perspective recedes into the background as God’s worship diminishes, the intellectual’s value and esteem are retained.
In contrast to Scholasticism, which defined ten different layers of knowledge (as substance, as potency, as intellectual power, as the activity of cognition, as the habitat of philosophical principles, and the like) in Modernity, we’re content with the distinction between abstract insight (intellectus possibilis) and intervening thought (intellectus agens) – the Intellectual's domain of success in the late 19th century.
As the avant-gardist of reason, an Intellectual’s job is not only to read social conditions but also, in communication with the masses, to change them: J'accuse! It's easy to see that intellectual prominence doesn't come from within the self but has political and media aspects. When the Intellectual becomes the consciously eloquent representative of a larger crowd, it's because print, and later radio and television, spread his message en masse – which implicitly presupposes he’s willing to put himself into a cause’s service. However, with his willingness, the Intellectual chains himself to the question of power – just as he submits himself (following scientific materialism) to utilitarian principles which, according to that decidedly pragmatic attitude towards the end of the 18th century, declared the happiness of the greatest number, thus of the masses, to be the highest goal of human action.
Any contradictory rational activity is generally suspected of being l'art pour l’lart: an academic indulgence. Thinking about Mary Theotokos’ birth may be of scientific importance for the theology of Origines, but it doesn’t win a flower pot in social discourse. Insofar as the intellectual is already the description of a dilemma: damned to make himself useful while also running from the masses – making the avant-gardist a paradoxical figure whose only goal lies in self-annihilation: in sinking into the crowd itself.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Therefore, the disappearance of intellectuals could be seen as the inevitable solution to this problem. Politically, this diagnosis corresponds to Fukuyama's message: that the ideological conflict has dissolved with the triumph of liberal democracies. However, the political rupture is underpinned by a media reversal going much deeper than the tremor resulting from the Berlin Wall’s fall. With the birth of the internet, citizens previously exposed to one-way media could now become broadcasters themselves. Where individuals can make their voices heard, there's no longer any need to gather in a representative's shadow. Consequently, the end of history is more precisely understood as the end of representation – as that historical moment when the social machine renounces the great individual and instead submits to abstract control principles.
It's no coincidence that representation’s end goes hand in hand with sovereignty's own crises. Ultimately, it's clear that the governance of a modern society can no longer be left to individual arbitrariness or even to a self-appointed elite's planning horizon.
The lesson to be learned from the collapse of the Soviet power bloc is that the path from planning to wishful thinking is shorter than expected. Given the bankrupt fantasy of planning and feasibility, capitalistic realism must insist that the notion of rational planning is unquestionable simply because the social machine's complexity is much greater than anticipated by planning – which isn't a significant concession under the auspices of an ‘invisible hand.’ If the Intellectual (who was granted class status in the Soviet Union as the intelligentsia) was already expressing doubt about free-floating reason, his disappearance could be read as fundamentally shaking up the very notion of reason. Martin Heidegger makes this connection in a short lecture4 from 1957, in which, in a radical turn against all metaphysics, he proclaimed the end of philosophy and wanted to assign a new task to thinking: To the Point! – Not coincidentally, after having intensively studied the writings of an early cyberneticist, Gotthard Günther. But instead of turning to the matter of thought (and thus the world), philosophy crawled into the university's confines; meanwhile, the significant problems of the time were being articulated where mind and society collided – such as in Foucault's teaching, which traced the order of things, the birth of the clinic and the prison.
However, this turn towards the concrete changes the Intellectual's task. According to Foucault, his role is no longer of speaking the silent truth of all those who lack eloquence and consciousness; rather, his concern must be to decipher the principle of order as a dispositif5 of power – dissecting out the latent strivings (which Foucault demonstrates using the madman as an exemplative, whose excluded and made invisible as a heteronomous principle in the age of Enlightenment).
Following these hermeneutics of suspicion, discourse analysis and deconstruction become magical words. From that moment on, intervening thought consisted of questioning reason – and sovereignty legitimizing itself through it. While the classical Intellectual could still rely on a positive concept of reason (and a historical mission), now there’s a self-division and fissioning of reason – it's no coincidence that the Schizo offers himself as a key witness. In his name, the epistemic field can be deconstructed, and a subversive desire machine can be positioned against it: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, such thought figures have also long since acquired a patina, gaining acceptance and self-realization in social media. One fascinoma is the Deleuzian rhizome, which has equipped an entire generation of Intellectuals with a stratagem of social counter-power. Indeed, one or another grassroots movement still invokes it, but only at the cost of a sustained deniability of reality, a self-imposed ignorance believing that the very act of networking constitutes a grassroots democratic measure. This is because the rhizome, which has become a fundamental architectural principle in network topologies, has long since lost its emancipatory power. Although the deconstruction of the central perspective power pole has undermined power, it hasn't contributed to its disappearance as hoped. So, the Internet no longer represents a monolithic pole of power. Still, as a ubiquitous, all-enveloping web of data, it embodies the largest aggregate of power the world's ever seen. Interestingly, this is precisely what we witnessed in the failed Turkish coup. While previous coup attempts were successful when the insurgents, with the help of the army, were able to take over the state television station, Erdogan was able to mobilize his supporters using Facetime and other decentralized (though otherwise often censored) text messaging services. In this way, the government could compensate for and ultimately reverse the loss of its headquarters – namely, its state television stations.
Power Quake
Because the Intellectual's loss of significance is a side effect of a much broader historical shift, its disappearance is comparable to the death of the canary in the coal mine, used to indicate an accumulation of dangerous carbon monoxide to the miners in the shaft (what the miners call bad weather). Insofar as the Intellectual's disappearance heralds a re-coding of the power dispositif as an Intellectual, but more importantly, a political change in weather. While initially manifesting as a growing lack of clarity, as a clouding of the sky in which the formerly familiar fronts of left and right became blurred and ideological arsenals lost their recognizability, the turbulence of globalization has made it clear that the existing nation-state power aggregates can't keep pace with the reasonableness of technical artifacts. The decision about what's politically relevant is no longer the responsibility of those sitting behind the levers of power but now depends on parameters they no longer influence. If a formerly up-and-coming emerging country is no longer considered profitable, it's punished mercilessly by the global financial markets.
But how do these judgments come about? Is it a case of a clique of people who, after joint judgment, find themselves ready to take concerted action? Of course not. What we substantiate as a market is a gathering of faceless, disparate individuals, not an association, but a random accumulation of people – a cloud that's also augmented by artificial intelligence and bots and algorithmized repercussions that amplify (or distort, as the case may be) the excitation curves of the statistical collective. In this sense, the market for financial securities could be understood as a materialization of the network structure itself, as a possibility to intervene – and intervene in events anywhere in the world. While this power may be apocryphal, it's by no means irrelevant.
This power may be apocryphal, but it’s not irrelevant insofar as it's merely an anticipatory obedience when political rulers feel compelled to adapt their governmental actions to determine whether the markets approve of a particular measure.
For this reason alone, the much-vaunted primacy of politics sounds increasingly hollow if we ask to what extent this factually changed power structure is compatible with prevailing institutions and regulations.
Whereas the public sphere used to be where a measure’s enforceability was decided, it’s now the market – the difference being these entities aren’t socioplastic units that can be assigned to a certain mindset beyond the pursuit of profit. As a result, reason itself has become a dependent variable in the political arena. What counts now as beneficial to the masses are numbers and quotas.
Because every electrical impulse and every mouse click is reflected in a database (where it gets lost in the statistical noise or agglomerates with one of those significant trends), for a long time, people have been able to convince themselves a highly reasoned facelessness has settled in the markets, as a data corpus transcending the limited worldview of the individual to form a stochastic all-round view. People trusted in this, convinced they could replace observational speculative reason with statistics as automated warning systems that signaled trends as they approached. With the financial crisis, this trust in the predictive power of statistics-based reinsurance and risk minimization programs has dissolved into nothingness. Instead, it’s become apparent that a much-vaunted world or swarm intelligence (the wisdom of the many) often leads to socialized idiocy, the herd instinct of risk-averse lemmings stumbling together into an abyss.
Excursion into the bestiary
Comparisons with the animal kingdom are usually an invitation to biologism – and should be taken with a grain of salt. But what about anomalies when instinct and natural history go astray? One of these delicacies was discovered by psychologist Paul Watzlawick in the Mexican army ant (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). This genus doesn't have a fixed burrow, so the population follows a vanguard’s scent, moving through the country like a civil war army, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. If we read the insect state as a swarm intelligence, then what's the function of the ant vanguard in this ambulatory community? Do they belong to a more highly developed leadership caste, a vanguard with a special forager's scent for promising feeding grounds? While this assumption of a leadership quality seems obvious, it's fiction, as the colony’s vanguard never catches up with the rearguard – unless it encounters an obstacle slowing them down. And what is the result when they do? The colony begins moving in circles, sometimes even entering a death spiral from which there is no escape – which proves the colony's movement isn't planned but a more or less erratic progression.
Undoubtedly, this narrative provides a neat metaphor for our society, where the so-called elites are characterized by their ordinariness and that, thoroughly disillusioned, any thought of a supposed avant-garde has been placed under a general suspicion. If an elite excels in any discipline, their brilliance lies in reflecting the rearguard's movements and calculating their recurring patterns.
This means that the widespread denunciation of all unwieldy, cerebral intellectuality isn’t just an aberration; it’s inherent to our understanding of the past 30 years of politics as practiced without any political philosophy.
Demoscopy, polls, the priority of economic thinking – not to mention the elevation of quotas even where there is no need for them, such as in public television – all this follows a concept of society that no longer understands the individual as an end in itself, but as a statistical variable, as a consumer and mass being. And if this weren't a fundamental categorical error, we could speak of a general proletarian cult – with the difference that it’s no longer glorified work but service and consumption. The general suspicion of deviant subjectivism isn't even ideologically motivated but inscribed into the psychical economy. Lord Keynes' example of the beauty contest, in which only those who meet the mass taste instead of following their ideal of beauty are economically successful, serves as a paradigm. Success, in other words, is mass psychology; it’s the art of running after the rearguard as the vanguard. Always in circles.
The Delights of Psycho-Logistics6
But what would be the gratifications that the avant-garde rearguard could enjoy? How can the erasure of subjectivity be compensated for? To adequately answer this question, it's essential to remember that the digital social Machine's unique feature is its ability to scale. Because every digitized product and service can be reproduced at will, with their marginal costs tending towards zero, this phenomenon is as old as binary logic itself. And even if it’s only recently made the economic latecomers wake up from their long sleep, its basic formula, x=xn, is understood as a promise of scaling – or a threat of proliferation, depending on the case.7
In this respect, the computer can be understood as a machine for managing populations: literally, the res publica. Wherever a portal opens into the digital space, an economic potential gap to the so-called real economy also opens up, a promise of rationalization resulting in profit margins exploding precisely to the extent that computerized processes replace human labor. But because the gap is abysmal, its fall into rationalization is irreversible.
Since the Machine operates at the speed of light, humans don't represent serious competition; since it enables telematic action, it leaves cultural and nation-state institutions behind. What we call globalization is an epiphenomenon of the digital revolution. This is because microprocessors, which are programmable and networked, have proven decisive for real-time remote trading, as they (far more than arbitrage profiteers from the financial industry) have acted as capitalism's pacemakers.
In speaking of a crisis of sovereignty, this only applies to traditional institutions. Suppose we instead focus on the database masters as digitally augmented rationality where the rule is of man over man. In that case, it is a disruptive battle zone: a fundamental revolution.
The fact that six IT companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM) and two communications companies (AT&T and Verizon) are among the ten most valuable corporations in the world is an expression of this shift. These power aggregates no longer produce anything but represent socioplastics in which members are the actual product.
At the extreme, we could imagine a Social Machine like Google that knows where people's shoes pinch; like Facebook, links hundreds of millions of people together; like Amazon, supplies them with every conceivable good; like Apple, equips them with the appropriate mobile gadgets; who, along with Microsoft, provides them with operating systems, movies, video telephony, cloud services, and so on – thus, representing our new psychoplasm. In all of this, the actual resource is the data that people have fed into data banks – a resource, mind you, that isn't considered res publica but private property. In this appropriation, it's no longer just a person's labor that's exploited, but it’s the provider emerging as the master of the user's interests and desires; as such, the data bank’s owner often emerges in possession of their secrets – those they entrust neither to their loved ones nor they can justify to themselves. Following this logic of domination, as intimate as it's totalitarian, we find the providers' business model consists of accompanying its users in all situations, even cradling them in a digital amniotic shell. The fact that Google adopted ‘Don't be evil!’ as its corporate motto suggests a power so extensive that it can only be hidden and made invisible. What is euphemistically called data mining is generally digging into those layers of personality that were removed from capitalist value-added production in earlier times.8
In any case, the intellectus of all these undertakings is a special kind of administrative knowledge: a form of psycho-logistics in which people's decisions can be calculated and predicted from behind the scenes. This isn't necessarily detrimental to users, as it can also lead to an increase in socially valuable insights and services. Since it’s not just individuals but entire populations recorded in a database, statistical and machine-learning methods can be used to record specific patterns of behavior so that experimental arrangements are conceivable, which could revolutionize medical research, for example. Of course, following capitalist rationality, the main incentive lies in scaling up existing business models: maximizing profits. Insofar as here, what's articulated as the Mexican migratory ant's death spiral can be understood as an economic limbo dance, a radically disruptive willingness to replace human labor with a symbolic machine performance. Even if a critic (using the Mexican warrior ant analogy) discovers late capitalism's death drive into an economic spiral, the profits are genuinely dizzying from the investor and executive’s perspective. For example, David Tepper, one of the best-paid fund managers in 2013, collected a bonus of $3.5 billion for himself – a sum equivalent to Gambia’s gross national product (the working output of 1.8 million people.)
The Body of Writing, Electrified
Viewed from a cultural history perspective, the most fundamental reason for the Intellectual's loss of significance lies in what we’re witnessing as a profound transformation in our notions of writing – from alphabetic writing to electromagnetic.
This process began in the 18th century and, as a swelling current, accompanied the rise of modern mass society: radio, television, telematics (which, incidentally, Lenin already grasped when he proclaimed: 'Communism – that is Soviet power plus electrification'). Now everything that can be electrified can be understood as a character and a data point: The bead of sweat on the forehead, the involuntary blush, the impulse that is discharged in an index finger twitch, not to mention phenomena that elude the human sensory apparatus altogether: the dance of nanoparticles, the position data of a whale, the sensory data the probe on the surface of Mars transmits back to Earth.
Before the prospectus of this world, the classical Intellectual, as a homme de lettres paying homage to a literal concept of the world, is an obsolete model.
This means that interpreting our data universe’s encephalogram requires an understandable view of writing's sensory evolution, a view that is particularly aware of binary code's total abstractive nature. For nothing in the computer is what it is.
While the user interface's skeuomorphism may suggest we're looking at a surface made of paper, metal, or wood, it’s just a simulation: a letter is the description of a letter, a number the description of a number, a machine the description of a machine. To grasp the elements of binary writing, we'd have to switch to the computer’s logic and programming – to the computer’s domain where there’s no lack of, or even differences in, materials since everything has been dissolved into electricity as pure data.
Insofar as the lines the Intellectual reads between are no longer written in black and white on a book’s pages: they're written now in binary code. Not only has interpretation undergone a profound change, but also our writing of the world.
Because whatever can be thought of informatically becomes fait accompli when transformed into machine code: Said and Done! In this respect, programming corresponds precisely to the demands of the 20th-century Intellectual: intervening thinking. Of course, since programming, as part of RAM, can always be transferred into the Museum of Work, it means that the programmer is confronted with some form of skin shedding: having become a program, his intellectus agens is ready to be detached from him and transformed into social writing. And with this expropriation, authorship, even the very concept of personal sovereignty, becomes questionable. Consequently, the notion of the individual dissolves into the dividual: the one who sustains himself solely through communication with his peers. This thwarts an ideal that's been cherished for centuries; its reinterpretation is tantamount to narcissistic humiliation – yet another reason why Intellectuals are at a loss for words.
The Dead Live Longer
So, in the end, can we call for the death of the Intellectual? Yes and no. Yes, because the great writer or philosopher's representative function has had its day – shattered by a world whose interior can no longer be penetrated, at least not as long as its secret order is ignored: the code of simulation. This alone makes Enzensberger-style sweeping attacks (‘Throw away your cell phone!’) evidence of a thorough inability to satisfy – where you charge unarmed toward an opponent who's as unconcerned about such battle cries as the windmills are about Don Quixote's sense of honor. Since he still doesn't know how to help himself in any other way, the Intellectual regresses to the sad figure of a knight. That of a retarded person who may find concerned listeners at church congresses or local museums but has lost the mastery of grammar: the code through which things are ordered – and thus the world is established. If Julien Benda located The Treason of the Intellectuals in particularism and partisanship, we could see the loss of writing as the decisive cause of the Intellectual's loss of significance. However, this agraphy isn't a certainty. Where the relationship to the grammar of domination still exists, there's reason to answer the question of the Intellectual's death with a decisive no! No, because the function of the Intellectual – the ability to read between the lines – hasn't become superfluous: Quite the opposite!
It’s necessary more than ever now that writing is no longer just contained between book covers; it’s conquering the entire world – making the Intellectual's void nothing short of a tragedy with the res publica succumbing to blind technophilia on the one hand, and amorphous resentment in response to the unexplained shift in political tectonics on the other.
This structural change in the public sphere already results in discourse running wild. At the same time, an absence of our skeptical historical awareness leads to a rabulism and denunciation conquering the public stage so that you might almost believe large parts of European intellectual history never took place. The disappearance of doubt, irony, and ambivalence – all those virtues cultivated by reading between the lines – gives way to a mob rule that regards its one-dimensionality as a core competence, aggression as authenticity, and loudness as persuasiveness. This rampant primitivism (which, as an absurdly apotropaic gesture, has pinned the values of enlightenment and humanism to its banner) not only appears as a caricature of earlier forms of discussion, but it's also in complete contradiction to the intellectual discipline needed if we want even to begin understanding the rupture that our electromagnetically written culture has emerged from.
The much-lamented soullessness of the computer is as erroneous as the belief that programming belongs to the field of mathematics – and not the humanities. Consequently, in the apotheosis of our technology, we’re overlooking that the digitalising of society is nothing other than looking at our own desires in the mirror – and, insofar as simply limiting ourselves to its writing in a purely technical sense isn’t sufficient.
At best, it produces devout apparatchiks, experts promoting digitalisation as techno-evangelists unaware of the phantasms guiding them. True art would engage with all of this – not in subordinating ourselves to the Machine's Spirit – but through learning its grammatik techné as we move into this new state of self-awareness. Whether we succeed in this or not, attempts to read the space between the lines are accompanied by a double relativization: the calling of Scriptural Writing absoluteness into question – and the possibilities of deciphering the phantasms carried within the Holy Scriptures’ wake as unconscious counter-attachments. However, under our current conditions, such critical exploration seems as remote as colonizing an exoplanet, leaving us with only uncritical affirmations or fundamental oppositions.
The absence of a critical consciousness has had its fatal effects, as the cloudy debates on digitalisation make clear – which, politically understood, should have been more about the code of simulation: the new technical power that grinds down and replaces the old code of representation institutions. The fact that the debate on NSA surveillance merely produced a demand for data sovereignty (whatever that is) but has left any serious discussion of how digitisation affects the general political character hollow indicates a fatal lack of intellectual presence. The absence of this long overdue discourse – which would also involve clarifying how this process fits into the historcality our psychical economy – means that, in effect, we're mindlessly and unconsciously surrendering to our fate, metaphorically speaking: that our social systems are shifting into self-driving auto modes. The fatal effects of which are made clear by our political discourses, which, instead of turning to the dawn of our globalized world, persist in the illusion of being able to escape this world and maintain that infantile stage when wishing still helped.
Among Ghosts
If we think of the Intellectual not as a partisan who takes sides but as someone whose position is derived from their relationship to Scriptural Writing – that is, from a place of reading between the lines that neither demonizes nor canonizes its Scripturality – then their task would be the relieving-out of this double phantasm’s repercussions on the dividual and society. Now, there may be several people who can still meet this demand to be found among those busily constructing the brave new world. No doubt this stratum is becoming vanishingly small as a priestly caste distancing itself from the community as its thoughts drift away from it into a hieratic, hieroglyphic strangeness. But is the silence that reigns over their strangeness astonishing, or are they simply not being listened to?
Indeed, it may be that this story is quite different: it isn’t the Intellectual who has left the public sphere, but that the public sphere has left the Intellectual. But why? Undoubtedly, one reason is the networked world has made grassroots democratic dreams come true, no, even more so: that it offers the narcissism of the individual a world stage. In social media, the world melts down to a self-referentiality that only functions as an echo chamber, amplifying our yearnings for self-aggrandizement. The public use of common reason falls victim to privatization: an ego with a selfie stick, larger than life. Now that empty acts of representation have led to the meltdown of the public sphere in a chain reaction, toxic fallout is raining down on society – replacing the shared commonsense rationality that once arched over society. Nonetheless, this contamination, which poisons the social forms of interaction and self-understanding, isn't experienced as a loss – but as a logic of empowerment, even disinhibition, in line with the maxim: Once your reputation is ruined, you can live a completely carefree life. Everyone can be comfortable on their cloud, protected from intrusions by a digital amniotic cavity. If we’ve spoken of a transformation of our concept of writing in the wake of digitalisation, it still remains unrecognizable to large segments of the population, a transformation that’s more a gift than a tribute.
You don't have to understand the world to be able to control it. Au contraire, the universalization of writing enables even the digital analphabetic to use the Machine’s computerized navigation system.
If you follow the user interface's instructions, you're whisked away into a world of phantasmic power, a spectrum of possibilities that increases in its seductive power year after year. The net's scaling logic means that in addition to consumption – strong feelings, resentment, group affiliation, fear, and sloth are also intensified – as if the internet had been invented to prove the existence of ghosts and paranormal activities. And, already, the material phantom pain – the substitution of the individual by the Machine – corresponds to an emotional inversion as phantom lust and desire: the notion that simply using an operating system is itself an act of writing, indeed a form of world domination.
At the time of the Reformation, when Luther's teachings detached the faithful from the Catholic mediation process, as it catapulted them into God’s immediacy, users suddenly felt empowered and electrified by the Machine, magically convincing themselves that they were the greatest. Of course, it was a ghost. Nevertheless, talk of a post-factual worldview proves that this detachment from the reality principle has become a mass phenomenon. Where any strangeness can be easily assimilated with a quick copy-paste, the actual reference to the cryptic interior of writing must seem like a spoilsport of humiliation, an equally ill-tempered and insidious reminder of the alterity that the glossy surface wants to make us forget.
Given this abysmal logic of self-empowerment, you can understand the hatred of Intellectuals, indeed the deep contempt that's spread through the international community of cat video lovers. The primary aim is to ignore the matter's inner nature, instrumentalizing it as a wish machine for every conceivable desire. But this only succeeds if you ignore the mediating character, indeed writing itself – as exemplified by interpreting it as a kind of second nature, as a cloudy gift from heaven, or as a fate of globalization. However, under no circumstances should it become recognizable as a system of rules that already, at least informally, determines the actionable power of our political institutions' legislative and framework of action.
In this sense, the disappearance of the Intellectual foreshadows evil – it seems that we're heading for a social zeitgeist in which not only bad weather but also bad blood will prevail. But if this is the case, it's because an entire society has deluded itself over needing a long overdue and much-needed political reprogramming.
Insofar as behind the Intellectual's disappearance lies the much darker question of a collective somnambulism, a mental dream and night-walking that risks plunging us into the depths at any moment. How can we approach a fundamental change without thinking about the historical significance of this caesura? How can we preach disruption while seeing it as little more than a buzzword promising maximum profits in the operating system of digital capitalism? How can you imagine flying with writing while leaving the space between the lines unoccupied? How can we ultimately believe we can pursue politics in a self-driving mode of governing by sight? And this is perhaps the most urgent question posed by the dawn of intellectualism – why have all these questions never been asked?
Martin uses Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist from the last book Kafka prepared before his death, as a leitmotif capturing what’s wrong with Post-modern Intellectuality. Notice how the artist, dying of starvation, confesses he shouldn’t be admired as a martyr, for he fasted because he couldn’t find any food worth consuming – as he’s replaced by the spectacular presentation of a roaring lion, who indiscriminately consumes anything easily digestible. [Translator’s note]
Nous is generally defined as intellect, mind, thought, or reason. Missing in these glosses is its reflexion of apprehending something and intuiting it, which the Greeks named the highest intellect – meaning the Divine’s reflexion: The Divine Gift of Man’s apprehending first principles and eternally intelligible substances as what’s true and real. What’s essential is understanding that its meaning is relieved-out from pre-history into Greek history as being between intuitive reasoning (nous) of what something is and does, compared to the economic rationality (logos) of how and why something does what it does – and how this distinction of reading between the lines becomes glazed-over and blurred in our everyday language. [Translator’s note]
While Exegetics or critical textual interpretation is traditionally applied to religious works (as exemplified by Holy Spirit-inspired biblical interpretations); it’s the critical interpretation of any textuality, either written or social, including the Dispositif and the Psychotope. Methodologically, it includes investigating the historical origins, cultural practices, original audience, and the Grammatik techné of the textuality under examination. Sometimes referred to as Hermeneutics or a hermeneutical style. [Translator’s note]
Heidegger, M. – The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking; in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York, 1972. [Translator’s note]
There’s a linkage between the Psychotope and Dispositif, which needs to be relieved-out. Foucault defines the Dispositif as a code of representation apparatus of power, as a rhetorical speech act always connected to the agency, making it a puppeteer’s language game. He forgets about the Machine’s material side of symbolic logic and money. The Psychotope refers to our alienation from nature using our power of imagination [Einbildung] as a practice of shaping the world, meaning there’s no agency or puppeteer other than our shared psychical attention and interest that’s linked to the Machine; it’s Alphabetic Wheel [Typenrad] and grammatik techné. In short, Foucault doesn’t see the shared psychical economy of interest and attention that his Dispositif is relieved-out from. [Translator’s note]
Here, Psycho-Logistics, a term we first saw in our translation of a lecture Martin gave shortly after the publication of Vom Geister Der Maschinein 1999. Here, we see its continued development as what he’ll refer to as Psychoökonomie in Philosophie der Maschine in 2018 and as the Psychotope in his first Englisch lecture, titled Alien Logic: The Universal Machine and the Psyche of the Social Apparatus in 2021. See fn. 4 above and From the abuse value. [Translator’s note]
This formula, which goes back to the founder of binary logic, George Boole, expresses the peculiarity that a 0 multiplied by itself always results in 0, and 1 always in 1, ergo x=xn, what mathematicians call idempotence. See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. – All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, MIT Press, Massachusetts, October 6th, 2017.
In the realm of ends, says Kant, everything has either a price or dignity. However, this distinction becomes blurred in the attention economy, meaning that dignity now also has a price.
