We tend to assume that the world could be otherwise, both where our personal and our collective lives are concerned.1 Life, we take it, is not a matter of destiny; it can be changed. The individual is self-determining. The notions of revolution and utopia likewise trade on the idea that the present state of things is the product of chance – that if only we took matters into our own hands …
What we presuppose here is a freedom that seems to make us responsible not only for our own actions but also for the state of the world. Our moral life and our conception of law depend on it, and the meaning of the political, of democracy, is based upon it.
The idea that such a freedom exists, however, is problematic. The conditions and preconditions of our thought and action are by no means so neutral and contingent that they could yield another world than the one in which we find ourselves. There are no possible worlds. What is, is necessary, as it is.
The philosopher who elaborated this insight was Spinoza, and his thinking informs my own in what follows. It was Spinoza who explained that contingency does not exist and that human freedom consists merely in being unaware of the conditions and preconditions of our thought and action. Freedom is ignorance.
In other words: we are constantly surrounded by possibilities. All possibilities are open to us; they could not but have been and could not but be open to us. In accordance with the universal ontology constituted by technology, capital and the medium, they cannot not be open to us. In the universal of technology.capital.medium (TCM), all possibilities are gathered and stored. This TCM universal is the absolute possibility. There are no possible worlds; this world is always the absolute possibility. TCM is the universal of freedom.
Yet there are also other forms of freedom. As we will see, these are forms of freedom from the freedom of the TCM universal. The last and the highest of these is the impossible. Yet how can the impossible be freedom?2
Only philosophy is in a position to ask and answer this question. Only philosophy grants us the freedom from which freedom can be thought and perhaps even experienced. To be sure, academic philosophy, like everything else, is almost completely integrated into the TCM universal and its various channels. Whether we can still extricate ourselves from these channels is an essential question for philosophy. For if philosophy were to conceive itself wholly as an aspect of the TCM universal, it would indifferently abandon itself to the freedom of TCM, i.e. to a freedom determined by the TCM universal.
The subject, who comes to be determined as an individual and a person, is integrated into the TCM universal. The affectivity of this state is ambiguous. Whereas my generation, which grew up under the shadow of Auschwitz, largely gave itself over to the banal order of a life divided between work and the private sphere, younger generations seem at least to have an ambivalent relation to the power of the TCM universal. This power is nonetheless stable, as it cannot but be.
In this treatise on freedom and systematic universalism, my concern is to understand the integration of the emancipated subject into the TCM universal. My view is that in the world there is no alternative to this integration. Only beyond the world is there a form of freedom that can be understood as an echo of those hi-stories in which there was something else at stake than the subject’s inevitable integration into the universal unity of technology.capital.medium. Cultural critique, then, has never had it so good. With every step the subject takes, the authentic eye is alerted to the presence of technology, capital and the medium. Yet it still lacks understanding.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to lament the state of the world. Reality must be given its due. Nothing is real without reason. (And what is the rationality of reality – of our reality?) In the wake of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, we can of course no longer think like Hegel, who gave an unparallelled metaphysical justification of the real. Technology, capital and the medium nonetheless make up a world in which life is possible. We are as far from the apocalypse as we are from heaven. That may be tedious, but it is not tragic. Professional doom-mongers foresee the end at every turn, where in truth only delicate sensibilities are offended.
We embrace technological devices, capital and image channels of all kinds. We delight in the pleasure of the surface, the exposé and money. We love to consume. We no longer have any passion and belong to a time sober enough not to regard its aberrations too harshly. Loudly bemoaning the present time is itself bemoaned.
In the universal immanence of TCM, critique is anachronistic. This is because all critique is always already embraced by its object. The fact that capital welcomes its own critique pushes the critic to become ever more critical, ever more incisive. It forms her primary motivation. For we know that there is and can be no real alternative. All critique is thus in fact constructive … Perhaps it is then more important to understand the anachronistic nature of critique than to continue with it.
Nowhere is this more true than in the political domain. National, ideological and geopolitical differences have become anachronistic and thus meaningless. Like ghosts, they appear one moment only to vanish the next. There is no longer any place whose rules are not dictated by the TCM universal. Those who celebrate an ‘other’ beginning – a break with TCM – are condemned to mere rhetoric. They may be stars of the ‘left’ or ‘right’, but their efforts are hollow and in vain. Even those religious fanatics whose barbaric actions defy the imagination are sheer non-entities; their deeds are as empty as their victims’ suffering is great.
If what is more powerful than the subject is that which the subject cannot master, then this is true of the TCM universal. And if (a) God is the most powerful entity we can conceive of, then TCM is almost (a) God – almost, since, as we will see, it does not constitute its own beginning. Nor is it capable of entirely dominating the constituent elements of subjectivity, though these elements – the determinations3 of intimacy – are only accorded a marginal role within the world of the TCM universal.
The TCM universal necessarily produces forms of life that fall out of sync with the universal’s present determinations. I term such forms of life anachronisms. The universal’s primary anachronism is perhaps religion. Fundamentalism is nothing but a reaction to the realization that the god of religion is no longer the highest power in our world. If religion should continue to exist at all, it will only be as a dimension of intimacy. Its explanatory power – its capacity to explain the world to the collective by narrating it – is exhausted. Those who cling to such anachronisms know this, but are reluctant to renounce the comforting security of the old stories. They are all the more aware of it insofar as these stories – universally, and not just in ‘the West’ – have long since come to be incorporated into the production processes of the universal. Like everything else, they represent capital. Even anachronisms are forms of capital: nostalgic capital.
The power of the universal is so pervasive that the question of revolution and its failure to materialize has again come to be raised in certain quarters. It was once said that ‘ethics applied to history is the doctrine of revolution’.4 Yet even a revolutionary of the order of Ulrike Meinhof ultimately doubted whether one could ‘make’ a revolution, since now there is ‘no place and time’ from which ‘you’ could begin.5
The style of the present text is terse – hard even – and the book is not without its ironic and parodic passages. In order to see the necessity for this concision, however, it is important to consider the detailed footnotes, which reference the philosophical sources tacitly referred to throughout the text.
Parts of the book were written in February 2013, during a Caribbean cruise on the MSC Poesia (!). The ship rounded Cuba without dropping anchor in Havana; the island remained out of reach.6
As Godard showed in his Film Socialisme, the cruise ship is in many respects a parable for contemporary society. But unlike those who would perhaps hold strictly to historical events, I am of the view that the cruise ship is unsinkable. I would even claim that the Titanic, the shipwreck par excellence, in truth never sank. Its dead – particularly those whose names we know – are not dead.
But the cruise ship is also a place where it is possible to grasp the infinite intimacy of philosophy, its inviolable impossibility, whose invisible shadow spans millennia. In other words: we must still philosophize, yet ‘beyond the human’. What follows is an untimely ode to philosophy for our time.
Notes
1 Translator’s note: My thanks to Achim Wamßler and Graham Wetherall for their invaluable comments on numerous passages in the original text and the translation. I am also grateful for the opportunity to pose Peter Trawny a number of questions on the work and for his generous responses. My particular thanks to Paola Ghetti for her constant support and encouragement throughout the time of this translation.
2 The project as a whole can be seen as an elaboration of the following fourfold textual constellation: Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Continuum, 2003), 279–304; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, ‘Technology and Science as Ideology’, in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy Schapiro (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 81–122; Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126. Heidegger’s reflections provide the overall thematic framework; Marcuse recognizes and deepens this problematic, but develops rather lazy solutions to it. Habermas’s essay is a masterwork, and perhaps the most important text he has written. Althusser interprets the concept of ideology as a form of medium. The period separating Marcuse and Althusser was one that took its leave of the revolution – which brings us to our contemporary situation. The project is given further impetus by Jacques Derrida, who writes: ‘A set of transformations of all sorts (in particular, techno-scientifico-economico-media) exceeds both the traditional givens of the Marxist discourse and those of the liberal discourse opposed to it. […] [These mutations] disturb political philosophies and the common concepts of democracy, they oblige us to reconsider all relations between State and nation, man and citizen, the private and the public, and so forth.’ Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 88. Philosophy’s present task could hardly be more clearly stated.
3 ‘Determinationen.’ The latter term can refer on the one hand to the constitutive qualities of a thing (i.e. to the particular way in which it is determined or determines itself), as when Kant writes: ‘Existence is not a predicate or a determination of a thing’ (Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–70, ed. and trans. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.72 (117). On the other hand, ‘Determinationen’ can also refer to the factors or conditions by which something – such as our behaviour, the political sphere, etc. – is determined. These two senses can also overlap, and the Determinationen that are generated by and constitutive of the TCM universal, for example, can themselves function as Determinationen of our behaviour. For the sake of consistency, ‘Determinationen’ is usually translated here by ‘determinations’, except when it seems clear that only the second sense is intended. In such cases, ‘determining factors’ or ‘determinants’ are used instead – TR.
4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Zur Geschichtsphilosophie, Historik und Politik’, in Fragmente: Autobiographische Schriften. Gesammelte Schriften VI, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 91.
5 ‘As a result of the market’s complete penetration of all relationships within imperialism and the nationalization [Verstaatlichung] of society through repressive and ideological state apparatuses, there is, however, no place and time of which you might say: there I begin [von da geh’ ich aus].’ As cited in Peter Brückner, Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976), 176. An interesting semantic shift takes place in this statement: setting out from rather commonplace ideological conceptions, it then turns to a direct personal experience, namely that there is now ‘no place and time’ from which ‘you’ could begin.
6 Things have changed in the meantime. Cuba’s links to the TCM universal, which of course already existed, are now being intensified. It is only a matter of time before Cuba is integrated into the universal topography. Its liberation has begun.