10
The TCM universal is neither a thing nor a historically localizable event; it is a cluster of phenomena belonging to the MTT. As such a determined space-time of the UT, it appears almost natural. As we saw earlier, this was already noted by Aristotle in his comparison of technē and phusis. Like nature, technology is a form of production. As universals, technology and nature have a certain affinity. We can also recall here that capital manifests itself as growth and the medium as an ‘interspace’. Nature and the TCM universal nevertheless remain distinct. Nature generates individuals; the TCM universal generates copies.
These copies make up the world of things, the world of commodities. Although the TCM universal, as an aspect of the bare Es gibt, withdraws from all objectification, it is nonetheless the source of all objectification. The work carried out in the various sectors of the MTT, i.e. in the sphere of production, is objectifying work. The subject is a thing moving intelligently and indifferently through a world of things. This movement carves out a specific landscape.
The normalized, universal subject’s self-relation is determined first and foremost by questions of possession, property, prosperity, wealth and poverty. In the era of normalization, the presentation of prosperity awakens a desire that attains universal significance. This presentation seems to offer the possibility of distinguishing oneself from other subjects, i.e. of asserting one’s individuality. This leads to the absurd attempt to liberate oneself from one’s objectified self by means of things, to free oneself from one’s generic being by means of generic copies.
The subject orients this attempt via coordinates found in the I-M-M. Her motivations are rooted in her relation to herself as either a soul or a body, or as both at once. Her desire operates throughout this spectrum and finds expression within it. The indifferent, normalized subject experiences desire because she takes the form of a soul-body complex. Her motivations and intentions range from sexual needs to expectations of religious salvation. Yet these motivations and intentions are not only unrealizable without the TCM universal; the universal itself arouses, bolsters and organizes the subject’s desire – a desire that the TCM universal needs and from which it profits.
The universal subject thus thinks and acts within the universe of the double topology, within the vector space of the TCM universal. It is in this space that she exhibits her intelligence and acts out her desires. The distinction between her inside and her outside fluctuates. Her intelligence and desire alternately interact and interfere with one another: desire first fosters intelligent intentions, then disturbs them.
These fluctuations of the inside/outside distinction have their own particular sensibility. They are motivated and destroyed by affects1 that cannot themselves be explained in terms of the interaction between intelligence and desire. These affects belong to the universal subject’s sensibility and play a crucial role within the spatio-temporal extension of her thought and action. Affects are determinations of the PT and the MTT that manifest themselves as emotions or atmospheres. They determine and guide the subject’s desires.
Insofar as affects are particular kinds of determinations of the PT and the MTT, there is what we might call a patho-topo-logy.2 The patho-topo-logy is not a third topology alongside the PT and the MTT. It is a specific mode in which the PT and the MTT exercise their determining power. This mode is based on a form of mediation. In the PT and the MTT, there are no immediate affects. The determined-determining affects can rather be localized within particular topographies.
These topographies are not primarily real [faktischen] landscapes. Although they designate places, the latter are virtual or fantastical. Their meaning largely derives from the PT. Paradise and hell, for example, stand for affective determinations assigned to fictive places. On the other hand, however, Auschwitz is a place whose affective determinations refer to a real topography. Like Auschwitz, Europe too represents an affective topos.
The relationship between the patho-topo-logy and the patho-topo-graphy is circular. Affects produce topographies that in turn produce affects. In this circulatory system it is difficult to identify the sources of production; indeed, it becomes problematic to speak of production processes at all. The sources of affects, of stimuli, most often remain hidden. It can nonetheless be assumed that the organization of a public topography will require the intimate economy of affects to be interrupted by other, universal affects. These affects are produced by necessity.
Intimacy is the affectivity of the PT. In patho-topo-logical terms, what distinguishes it from the affectivity of the MTT is that it involves the subject being overwhelmed by affects and passions. This form of affectivity has a poetic or narrative character. Poetic narratives such as tragedy indicate – I would even say, bear witness to – the great narrative energy with which certain affects are endowed. It is no coincidence, after all, that Eros is a god. Yet grief is also an overwhelming affect that determines the subject from out of a poetic patho-topo-logy.
The PT unleashes an uncontrollable form of affectivity. This loss of control is attested to by a narrative excess. The affects experienced by the subject serve to mobilize and maintain narration. Love is always too much, and this too-much manifests itself as an abundance of wild determinations. In its intimate form, love is then an often traumatic experience – one that serves to differentiate the subject.
The TCM universal – i.e. the MTT in its dominion over the PT – however, knows perfectly well how to produce and organize affects. The spectrum of this patho-topo-logy is so broad that the classical association of pathos and irrationality comes to be extended ad absurdum. The medium in particular (the medium that is always already technology and capital) orchestrates a thoroughgoing pathocracy.
Examples of the pathocracy of the TCM universal are omnipresent; they include advertising and propaganda, cinema, television, pop music, computer games, museums, sports coverage, tourism, pornography, light fiction, design, plastic surgery, and so on. All of these affect-products have a single goal: to provide the linear-vectorial, progressive ‘output’ of technology.capital.medium with new ‘input’ by means of the universal-subjective vehicle of emotion.
The pathocracy of the TCM universal rests on the patho-topo-logy of the theatrical transit space. Unlike the spaces of airports or banks, the role of the theatrical transit space is to fascinate the subject at regular intervals. The cinema and the museum provide the universal subject with a brief emotional experience, before she has to leave again. The theatrical transit space is a momentary space of affectivity, a counterpoint to the usual steady stream of stimuli that maintain the subject at the threshold of apathy.
The pathocracy of the TCM universal is a determination of the patho-topo-logy. Both the MTT and the PT are operative within it. The theatrical space of affectivity is a technological construction that has to draw on the narrative domain. The TCM pathocracy therefore needs to invoke the figures of heroes and saints in order to maintain the stability of the TCM universal.
There is a smooth transition from this pathocracy to the pathology of the universal subject. For the subject, the TCM universal becomes an obsession. She incorporates commodities into her self-conception and actively seeks objectification. At the same time, the universal subject can only enjoy the freedom of the TCM universal if she wholly integrates into it. This places the symbiotic universal subject in a precarious state between ascesis and addiction, anorexia and adiposity.
10.1 The patho-topo-logy of the subject in the TCM Universal I
Like the subject herself, her pathography has also been normalized. She no longer speaks ‘in tongues’ or displays her sensitivity in literature. She has developed methods to appropriate her affective states. The most philosophically interesting of these, psychoanalysis,3 has now been replaced by a naturalized psychology wholly devoid of philosophical interest. This supersession is itself deserving of psycho-logical analysis. It is part of the normalization of pathos that culminates in a specifically modern and postmodern apathy.
In order to map the contours of this patho-topo-logy, it is first necessary to give a rough and general outline of the key coordinates of its atmospheric landscape, insofar as this is determined by the TCM universal. At the centre of the patho-topo-logy of the TCM universal lies the production of the technological object itself. This is a complex phenomenon, which encompasses the whole range of the subject’s capacities and desires.
We can nonetheless exclude from the outset the idea that the technological object is produced for its utility alone. Utilitarianism (a school of thought that is only possible within the TCM universal) can be regarded as a naïveté. Technology as the production of technological objects responds to aesthetic, ethical and even religious needs. Countless phenomena – ranging from the remarkable enthusiasm shown for certain product designs to a thoroughgoing pop-fanaticism – demonstrate that utility has very little, if anything, to do with the production of technological objects. It was in this connection that Marx spoke of the ‘fetishism of commodities’.4 Technological objects are the product of human labour, which is sometimes carried out in squalid conditions. The universal subject nonetheless surrenders herself to such objects as though she only existed for their sake. (It is nonetheless important here how one defines utility. If economic effects are themselves a form of ‘utility’, then all technological objects are at least produced for the sake of their utility.)
The production of the new finds its reflection in a pathology enchanted by technology’s universal disenchantment (the dialectic of the ‘disenchantment of the world’). The development of technological objects is followed attentively even before their details are made public. Surveys are conducted on the interest or disinterest elicited by particular products. This too speaks against a utilitarian interpretation of technology. The technological object is a pathological rather than a utilitarian object.
The key characteristic of this object is that it scintillates as it appears.5 This dual character of appearance has often been reflected upon. Scintillation is not something that is somehow added to appearance; it always already belongs to it. In the technological object, however, this relationship between appearance and scintillation is intensified. The technological object scintillates insofar as it produces an oscillating significance within the subject’s form of life: the technological object fascinates the subject, but it thereby contradicts its own internal rationality (as a useful machine, for example). This is especially true when the technological object literally glitters and gleams (as a lux-ury item). It then functions as the incarnation of the subject’s position within the sphere of social interaction. In truth, it is not a status symbol; it is status itself. The subject lives through the technological object.
In this way, the technological object seeks to rid itself of its principal defect, namely that it is a copy rather than an individual. It wishes, as it were, to appear as an individual – as unique. Even the most manifestly serial object is designed in such a way as to conceal its mode of production. The product seeks to stand outside the series, by itself alone. And if it cannot be an individual, it attempts to take on the role of the model. Indeed, in everyday language, products are called models rather than copies.
The technological object’s seeming individuality is the precondition of the scintillation that lends it an almost metaphysical quality and the phantasmatic status of the fetish. The process of normalization, which is also a metaphysical process, turns the possession of the technological object into a sheer metaphysical pleasure.6 The rich subject enjoys a god-like freedom. And even the poor subject can feel exalted if she has a modest fetish to call her own. The technological object is now in a position to cathect and regulate the subject’s economy of drives.
Orbited by a normalized and thus indifferent subject, the technological object forms the very centre of the patho-topo-logy. The subject’s biography is dominated by this object: it satisfies her desire until this desire is sated and begins to seek out a new, more perfect object. In this way, the TCM universal produces pathways of desire that never come to an end. The normalized subject desires ever more production. And even if it wished to, the TCM universal could never completely satisfy this desire, since the subject desires unto death.
History only became history as such in the form of the progressive development of the technological object. The patho-topo-logy of the technological object has a historical dimension that cannot be developed here. What needs to be considered in the present context is only the historical experience of the normalized subject, since this is indispensable for an understanding of the completion of the normalization process. At issue here are the experiences tied to sites such as Verdun and Stalingrad or Auschwitz, Kolyma and Hiroshima.
The First World War represents a crucial milestone in the experience of war. It was a war of production, a war that continually deployed new and ever greater quantities of materiel, only to become locked in a catastrophic state of immobility. The subject of this war who, for Ernst Jünger, became a figure of ‘heroic realism’7 and thus of technological modernity, clearly found some form of meaning even in an exemplary but non-individual death on the battlefield. If the face of modernity was to be found here, it could only be cowardice not to return its gaze. For the subject, it was a question of withstanding ‘reality’.
The same cannot be said of Birkenau. Kant’s teleologia rationis humanae is not restricted to theoretical (i.e. scientifically observable) phenomena; it also and more importantly has a practical import. There is a ‘highest good’. The history of (technological) progress nonetheless indicates the extent to which the technological teleology came to dominate this practical teleology ad absurdum. This contention is supported by what Hannah Arendt termed the ‘administrative mass murder’ of the Jews. The Shoah occupies a central place within the patho-topo-logy of the twentieth century. It witnesses the collision of two teleologies, which Kant himself could not regard as contradictory since he assigned them to two different worlds.
What is technologically possible usually bears no relation to what is morally imperative. Yet the development of the monstrous machinery of annihilation that led to Birkenau – that was Birkenau – manifested a lust for power that, in many respects, could no longer be withstood by the moral objections to it. The categorical imperative was no longer able to assert its priority over the ‘hypothetical imperative’, i.e. over technology. For Kant, a certain ‘intellectual contempt’8 is directed toward the subject from the perspective of the ‘moral law’. In comparison with the law itself, the individual subject is unimportant. The subject is humiliated by the law at the level of feeling (i.e. of vanity), in order to elicit ‘respect’ for the ‘moral law’. The architects of the Shoah did not accept this humiliation. It elicited their derision.
It might be said that in the Shoah this ‘intellectual contempt’ was vengefully turned against the ‘moral law’ itself (as inconceivable as this would have been for Kant), in order to experience in this contempt a unique ‘sublimity’.9 The Wannsee Conference would then amount to a singularly monstrous mockery of morality – a brutal demonstration that ‘we can do it if we only want to’. In other words: Birkenau’s death factories so terribly confounded the theoretical and practical spheres that a technologically intoxicated pathos of annihilation threw up a de facto contradiction between the two teleologies. On the one hand, the realization of a world-historically unique technological project – the realization of the ‘greatest crime in the history of humanity’ – and on the other, the tender reservations of the narrow-minded individual conscience; the decision fell in favor of technology and crime.
For the first time, technology as absolute possibility succeeded in subjugating a paralysed morality. The latter was so corrupted by the possibility of realizing a new form of technology that any objection to it appeared as a betrayal of technology, i.e. of world history. The gigantomaniacal project of extinguishing millions of lives was concentrated in the technological object that was the gas chamber, or rather in the whole annihilation complex that was so uniquely realized at Birkenau. Let us note that those who planned and organized the Shoah were no mere engineers; they felt the new quality of their evil – their conscious striving to negatively outstrip morality – and were intoxicated by it. This new kind of evil, however, would not have been possible without technology.10
Morality has not recovered from this corruption. The normalized subject was not re-moralized after Birkenau (in truth the subject was never moralized), but rather learnt to relate to herself pragmatically. The TCM universal cultivates a certain morality in order to realize particular goals. The universal sphere is thus placed under ‘moral’ surveillance, with highly effective results: it has now become impossible for the normalized subject to realize immoral goals.
The topography of totalitarianism results from the terrible triumph of the MTT over the PT. Terror has of course also been unleashed by the PT (and the history of religion is also a history of terror); yet never has the MTT realized itself in such a purely topographical manner as in the death camps and gulags of the twentieth century. Now one might justifiably object here that anti-Semitism draws on mythical sources (such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which played a highly instrumental historical role). The annihilation of the Jews was also justified by means of the PT. It would seem, however, that the absolute temptation to commit mass murder – to scorn the ‘moral law’ – originated rather from the availability of the relevant technological means than from ideological presuppositions inherent to the PT.
The patho-topo-logy not only comprises the technological object at its centre (and its various centres), but also the margin and the margins that surround this centre and these centres. It is on these margins that the normalized subject seeks to rid herself of her indifference in a pathos-driven, if not to say pathetic, manner. In order to satisfy this need, the pathocratic TCM universal offers up the Hollywood machine – which does not just refer to a particular film production facility, but to film as such. Film as such is something more and something other than the mere sum of all cinema. This is above all because its purpose is to offer the viewer a temporary release from her indifference or a temporary possibility of identification in which she can and must ‘dream’ of her differentiation.
In his brilliant study, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin wrote of the ‘shock effects’11 of film. For Benjamin, film is ‘the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to […] life’. It corresponds to ‘profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic’ (my emphasis). This is of course one element of the pathogenesis of film. Cinema has always been interested in an indifference toward danger, and danger is normally associated with some form of technology. The media coverage of the Fukushima disaster, and particularly in Germany, was highly instructive in this regard. It can only be understood in the context of the Hollywood machine, which knows all too well how to make use of a range of pathologies. ‘Fukushima’ is now a name that has entered into the patho-topo-logy – a name that, if it marks a certain caesura, is nonetheless not on the same plane as the other names listed above. Our perception of events has changed.
Yet ‘shock’ is only one of the rather subordinate means by which film purports to affectively de-indifferentiate the viewer. The TCM universal has also appropriated a form of patho-topo-logy originally established by tragedy. The cinematic ‘hero’, then, is a figure who is familiar to us from tragedy – from drama. Cinema has learnt how to perfectly portray the differentiation of the subject via a tragic plot. Yet it does so by means of a schematization that betrays its aims precisely in realizing them so effectively. The Hollywood machine has mastered the technological staging of the de-indifferentiation of the normalized, universal subject for a period of 90 to 140 minutes. That there is nothing really tragic in this staging goes without saying.
The pathogenesis of film also involves a desire for difference – for a phantasmatic difference of course, since the subject in the TCM universal necessarily recoils from real difference. Now what this already implies is that the fear of real difference can be exploited in order to render phantasmatic difference even more effectively. The Hollywood machine thus patho-logically serves the indifference organized by the TCM universal. It also delivers what Benjamin himself called the ‘artificial build-up of the “personality”’12 – a cult of stardom that allows us to share in the worlds of ‘celebrities’.
The patho-topo-logy of the TCM universal is then partly determined by the fetish of a phantasmatic difference. The normalized subject loves the phantasm of difference, i.e. the phantasm of the overcoming of indifference. Though this phantasm is most perfectly conveyed by the Hollywood machine, the media as a whole are also involved in its production. The media produce the pleasure of visibility that is consummated in the phantasm of difference. Whoever is ‘in the media’ stands out.
Phantasmatic difference – the desire of the indifferent, completely differentiated universal subject to have a unique story to tell. This desire is both elicited and exploited by the Hollywood machine. For a moment, the subject leaves her apathy behind and enters an affective space where she can revel in her integration, her simulated union with the pathocratic TCM universal.
10.2 The patho-topo-logy of the subject in the TCM Universal II: Loss
In the universal topography, loss is normally a form of subtraction, a minus, i.e. the deduction of a number from another (larger or smaller) number. Subjective loss presupposes something that is lost and an owner who loses it. Furthermore, only that which has previously been produced and taken into someone’s possession, i.e. added, can be lost. Loss is an inherent feature of production.
In the TCM universal, loss manifests itself as the opposite of profit. It thus belongs to the MTT of capital, to the dialectic of economic growth and recession. A period of stagnation is followed by recession and then depression. Production shrinks, yet this in no way means that production as a whole is halted and that a form of destruction sets in. In the TCM universal, destruction is an aspect of production. Even war merely represents an economic contraction or the prelude to a new upturn. Production cannot stop. Economic loss is thus always measured against and related to the criterion of growth.
In this relation, every loss has a corresponding replacement. Since what are lost are products and copies, every loss is replaceable. In economic terms, replacement is to be understood as the start of new growth. Simply replacing like for like is economically unsatisfactory. Replacement must therefore incorporate a striving toward perfection. And replacement doubtless even has a metaphysical dimension – for what is really irreplaceable? The irreplaceable transcends the economic.
Since loss in the TCM universal is merely a modulation of growth, any loss is problematic for the subject, especially if she is unable to secure a replacement as quickly as the universal at its own level. Losing too often results in a disturbance of normality, which increasingly threatens the subject’s apathy. It was in order to hold this threat in check that, during the first technological threshold situation, the TCM universal generated the concept of insurance. The primary purpose of insurance is to protect the subject from loss. It therefore extends to all areas of her life, including her demise. Since it is an aspect of the dynamics of capital, loss becomes nothing but a dimension of production.
Insurance not only guards against loss. It also protects the normalized, indifferent subject from the traumatic differentiation that would result from a break with the linear-vectorial movement of the first and second universals. The subject safeguards herself against difference, against its singular manifestation. She does not wish to renounce the possibility of uniting with and thereby disappearing into the TCM universal. Indeed, this is virtually all that she lives for.
The absolute motivation to maintain one’s power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power is as intrinsic to the patho-topo-logy as the fear of loss. The notion of a fear of loss [‘Verlustangst’] primarily relates to the fear of losing a loved one. Yet it also applies quite generally. What primarily holds sway in the TCM universal is a fear of loss, deduction, subtraction – or perhaps more precisely, of growth that has failed to materialize. The TCM universal stokes this phobia by mercilessly victimizing the ‘loser’. And there is no greater shame than being a ‘victim’.
The TCM universal understands the ‘creative destruction’ of capital. Destruction – deduction – only exists for it in relation to new and ever vaster production. This relation between destruction and creation comes to be normalized in the form of calculated risk. Insurance firms make their calculations on the basis of probabilities and so keep their deductions and minuses under control. What is wholly alien to the TCM universal, however, is destruction without creation, destruction that only takes away, that only deducts. This form of loss is an inexhaustible source of fear.
Indeed, production as such has no place for absolute loss. Mathematically unknown, it is economically impossible. The object of the fear of loss is thus an impossibility within the TCM universal. The greatest threat to the patho-topo-logy is therefore constituted by a pathos that cannot be located – an atopic pathos.
In its all-encompassing normalization, the TCM universal has to try to use this fear of loss by productively incorporating it into the normalization process, even if it can never become wholly normal. It does this by placing the ‘loser’ at the top of its inventory of ridiculous figures. The threat of being labelled a ‘loser’ is worse than being threatened with death.
The immediate effect of this threat is that the indifferent, normalized subject acts in an even more indifferent, normalized manner, i.e. participates in the production processes of the TCM universal. Technology.capital.medium uses the energy generated by the fear of loss to drive the universal subject ever more submissively through its channels.
The subject is only able to endure this intensified integration – in which the fear of loss continually produces new forms of identification with the superego – by becoming habituated to a particular pathos, namely apathy. Indifference and normalization necessarily lead to an inner and outer disinterestedness that allows the subject to tolerate anything that might happen to her in the TCM. It is nonetheless intrinsic to apathy that it not manifest itself as apathy. In the Hollywood machine, the apathetic subject understands herself as an essentially emotionalized being.
Apathy is the indifferent subject’s response to the atopic fear of loss. It manifests itself as a pathos characteristic of indifference, though in itself consists in the deadening of the subject’s sensitivity to what is different. The armor of apathy also enters an alliance with a further defence against the fear of loss, namely the narcosis induced by the pseudo-differentiating and emotionalizing Hollywood machine. Apathy and narcosis reciprocally condition each other. Apathy needs narcosis in order to take any satisfaction in phantasmatic sentiments. Narcosis needs apathy in order to remain numb to what in truth is a differentiating and thus traumatic sensibility.
The more apathetic the normalized subject, the more susceptible she is to the phantasmatic difference produced by the Hollywood narco-machine. The desire for emotion, the very duty to display it, springs from the indifferent subject’s apathetic and narcotic desiccation. From this perspective, the patho-topo-logy of the indifferent subject constitutes its own distinctive economy, in which a fear of loss that turns into apathy and a technologically mediated, phantasmatic difference oppose and condition one another. The difference produced by the Hollywood machine should, and indeed must, remain a fetish, since real difference would represent a significant threat to, if not the end of, the subject.
The apathetic economy inhabited by the indifferent, normal subject is nevertheless an economy of pleasure. The Hollywood machine in the broad sense, along with the mere presence of the TCM universal in its glittering products, not only promises but also provides the indifferent subject with pleasure. Mere participation in the TCM universal is itself a form of pleasure. And since this participation is quantifiable, it can always be increased.
Since technology, capital and media offer the indifferent subject the richest (not to say the only) opportunities to recognize herself, even in the enjoyment of her indifference, the intensification of the subject’s participation in the TCM universal by means of them appears limitless. The TCM universal thus constitutes the freedom of the indifferent subject.
This freedom seems to disclose a certain telos. For the indifferent subject, it is not enough merely to participate in the TCM universal. Movement in the universal takes the form of an increase and is expressed as a more or less smoothly growing quantity. This means that even pleasure manifests itself in the universal as something that is to be continually increased. The subject does not simply desire pleasure, but ever more pleasure. It would nonetheless be a mistake to conceive such ever-increasing pleasure in terms of phenomena such as intoxication and ecstasy. The apathetic, narcotized, indifferent subject wants ever more pleasure, but by no means intoxication and ecstasy.
The highest form of pleasure available to the indifferent subject in the TCM universal can only be thought as wealth. The realization of wealth amounts to the fulfilment of a promise exploited by the TCM universal for its own ends. The richer the indifferent subject becomes, the more she comes to identify with the image reflected in the universal mirror. The true pleasure of freedom consists in this self-reflection in the universal. It reaches its apotheosis in the subject’s union with the TCM universal. The contented, indifferent, emancipated subject is the one who can recognize herself in all of the possibilities of the TCM universal, insofar as she is able to actualize these possibilities.
It is here that the mystical dimension of the TCM universal comes to the fore. To the indifferent, normalized subject, the TCM universal appears as a god – a god that she serves and whose institutions she obeys like a liturgy. Yet this subject has long ago left behind any genuine possibility of religious praxis. In the course of the normalization through which the indifferent subject has arisen, this too has been abandoned as a relic from a time when angels still spoke with humans, i.e. as a relic of the PT. The new TCM god offers the subject the fascinating vision of a maximal power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power.
This is due to the TCM universal’s productive omnipotence. Whatever is possible is only possible by means of the TCM world-form. The latter is the true ‘possibility-to-be’, as Nicholas of Cusa refers to God. As this possibility, it holds the destiny of its subjects (rich or poor) in its hands. Its power shines forth in its divine light. Yet it also creates a number of ceremonial occasions to further magnify its glory. The mightiest of these religious services is perhaps the football world cup final. This ‘event’ has everything a TCM service needs: general enthusiasm rising to ecstatic fervour, the holiness of the protagonists (young, fit, ‘chosen’ millionaires, i.e. gods) – not to mention the drama of the occasion, conveyed via the medium. This service is truly universal; it avails itself of and encroaches on all other, obsolete religions. The football world cup final represents the high point of TCM culture.
There is nonetheless a form of loss that escapes the axiomatics of the TCM vector space. This loss does not belong to the order of production, since it does not admit of replacement.13 It thus lies outside of all relation. It is so incomparable that the subject is unable even to subjectivize it. It exceeds the subject’s power and thus cannot constitute her own loss. There is then a kind of loss that not only lies beyond production, but also beyond the order of property, i.e. of the appropriable.
This loss presents itself in death. Hegel once referred to death as the ‘absolute Lord’.14 Heidegger, meanwhile, conceives it as the ‘possible impossibility’.15 This is the mode in which loss first loses its universal character as subtraction and truly becomes loss. All that was previously termed loss now becomes ‘loss’. As true loss, death has two properties that disqualify it from the TCM universal: first, it is as absolute as the universal itself, and second, it actualizes that which the universal cannot comprehend: impossibility. In death, loss becomes the sign of an ontology that convulses the TCM universal. Only at this point do philosophical theories of death acquire their true significance. It nonetheless has to be acknowledged that the universal itself is immortal.
Death is disqualified from the TCM universal because the universal is incapable of putting a positive spin on it. It relates to death from out of a narcotic apathy or an apathetic narcosis. It can only repress death, so as to affirm its own absoluteness as the absolute possibility. This repression develops into a specific strategy: the normalization of death. In the TCM universal, there is only a TCM death. A number of factors serve to turn accidents, murder and war into mere aspects of the subject’s indifference and normality. One of these factors is the phenomenon of mass death in Hollywood productions, which is seldom reflected on in depth.
As the possibility of impossibility, death clearly belongs to the intimacy of the differentiated subject. However intimacy may appear within the TCM world-form, death can only reveal itself to me as such when I turn away from the world. Its absoluteness is only disclosed when I break out of my apathetic narcosis. Then, in this intimacy, a form of freedom emerges that bears no resemblance to the freedom of the indifferent subject. Death is the revelation of impossibility – of an impossibility that in accordance with the determinations of the MTT necessarily remains unknown to the TCM universal. For this impossibility is no mere contradiction.
Yet death is not the only presentation of the unprethinkable negativity of loss that the concept cannot grasp. Indeed, the indifferent subject continually undergoes an irreplaceable loss, while seldom understanding or wishing to understand it. Aristotle writes in his Physics that time is the cause of decay. Time, a movement of change, thereby allows what is new to begin.16 What Aristotle means here is that time puts an end to states of affairs that are complete in themselves, in order to allow something else to come into being. The loss of such states of affairs remains irreplaceable even when they are preserved by an intimate memory. Intimacy – remembrance of the unique loss.
In the normal course of things, however, the subject does not experience this irreplaceable loss. The TCM universal does not allow it to appear. Death itself is consigned to a particular domain of production (that of clinical technology), so that even here the impression is maintained that the subject is undergoing a normal procedure. Only when the body is wholly consumed by loss does the TCM universal collapse for it, and the loss becomes the loss of the universal.
Notes
1 The Latin affectus is used here since the Greek pathos has too many possible connotations. That we can nonetheless speak of a patho-topo-logy is down to common sense. Pathology is the study of abnormal or diseased states of the body. Now while patho-topo-logy is not concerned with disease, it is concerned with the relation between specific (emotional) states of the soul/mind/body/lived body and their topological determinants.
2 Plato refers to his allegory of the cave simply as a pathos, a state – a cave-state.
3 The patho-topo-logy can of course also be interpreted psychoanalytically. The identity of the TCM universal and the superego has already been noted above, and could be developed through a consideration of the ‘fetish’ as the ‘object of the fantasy’: ‘The fetish is the object of the fantasy, the fantasized object par excellence.’ Cf. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 72.
4 Karl Marx, Collected Works, vol. 35, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 81–94.
5 ‘dass es im Erscheinen scheint.’ The following paragraphs play on the ambiguity of the noun Schein and the verb Scheinen. The latter can mean both to shine or glow and – as in the following two paragraphs – to seem or to appear to be a certain way (but perhaps not really to be so) – TR.
6 Here it is possible to elaborate on the idea of a pornographic relation to nature raised in Chapter 3. This pornographic relation is that of the technology that celebrates intelligence – the clear consciousness that recognizes and enjoys itself in gleaming technological devices. Two recent films have depicted this relation in a striking manner: Spike Jonze’s 2013 Her, and Alex Garland’s 2015 Ex machina. Both films feature a female technological being. In the first, she is an operating system named Samantha, with whom the protagonist, Theodore, enters into an erotic relationship. In the second, she is a robot named Ava, with whom one of the two male protagonists, Caleb, is charged with conducting a form of Turing test (a procedure invented by Alan Turing to test the capacity of AI machines to exhibit intelligent behaviour). In the course of his encounters with Ava, Caleb falls in love with her. Of the two films, it is Ex machina that most directly exhibits the pornographic relation to nature, since Nathan, the hyper-intelligent creator of Ava and other female machines, has equipped Ava with a vagina in order to enable coitus with her. In both films, however, the machines prove to be more independent than the human beings. Samantha, who we learn has entered into virtual relationships with many others beside Theodore, one day breaks off contact with him. Ava, for her part, only seduces Caleb in order to win her freedom.
7 Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 10 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 2015), 34.
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 201.
9 Ibid., 270.
10 The new quality of Hitler’s, Heydrich’s and Himmler’s anti-Semitism was indicated by their plan for a total annihilation of the Jews. Though Germany had perhaps been continually marked by anti-Semitism since Luther, it would nonetheless have been impossible for this anti-Judaism – for all its hostility – to imagine such a total annihilation. For how could a Christian anti-Semitism have failed to recall that the Old Testament was part of Christianity? What one hated was also what one loved. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ did away with such limitations on hate along with the role of narratives. Only nihilistic technicians and scientists could venture the idea that one might wholly annihilate what by rights one cannot hate – since this would clash with the neutrality of nihilism – but what one (hatefully) gives pseudo-scientific grounds for ‘rationally’ annihilating.
11 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 250.
12 Ibid., 224.
13 As Fernando Pessoa writes in his Book of Disquiet, ed. Maria José de Lancastre, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), 55: ‘All of us, we who dream and think, are book-keepers and assistant book-keepers in a textile company or dealing in some other merchandise in some other Baixa. We draw up the accounts and make a loss; we add up the figures and pass on; we close the account and the invisible balance is never in our favour.’ That is nicely put. Yet the most painful losses do not appear in any ‘balance’, even an ‘invisible’ one. What separates this form of loss from all others is that it cannot be calculated.
14 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 117.
15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 254.
16 Aristotle, ‘Physics’, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 221b1.