11
As a determination of the MTT, the subject in the TCM universal is wholly integrated into the coplanarity of technology.capital.medium. She cannot but comply with the determinism of production – and experience it as freedom and emancipation. Through her integration, however, she can also share in the pleasure of freedom at a lower level. The mere possession of a technological object affords a certain pleasure, particularly when it grants access to the TCM networks. Anything other than access to these networks no longer has any reality. The subject therefore never has the possibility of experiencing herself as unfree.
There are nonetheless experiences that push even the most integrated subject to her limits and beyond. There she encounters what the TCM universal represses and has to repress in order to actualize its potential movement. These are experiences of violence, i.e. of the wounding or even destruction of life (as we have hitherto known it). They are traumas, which despite all our indifference and normalization we cannot avoid. The rupture they induce is both a collapse and a new departure, an ending and a beginning.
Trauma is a form of wounding that marks the subject; she is transformed by it because she is bound to it. Trauma always has a repetitive and belated character.1 The subject returns to the event again and again, while its previously unnoticed traces repeatedly make their presence felt. In such experiences, the subject breaks with the TCM universal and acquires a distinctive form.
What takes place here is the de-indifferentiation and a-normalization of the subject. An other subject emerges. An ‘other subject’ means here that an alterity buried under the TCM universal now comes to light. One of the previously unknown characteristics of this differentiated subject is narrativity. The emergent subject produces a narrative through which she distances herself from the indifference of the TCM universal, or rather, through which she comes to be ejected from the universal by the universal itself. Narrativity in general means that the subject differentiates herself by withdrawing from the universal, a-narrative typologies. The differentiated subject is the protagonist of a narrative of abandonment.2
Violence is first of all the possibility, inherent to the TCM universal, of harming or killing subjects. This possibility is realized in different ways, i.e. in different quantities. It manifests itself in the form of military action, geopolitical division, and the immanent regulation of the difference between rich and poor. Pragma-politics implies an operatively determined spectrum of violence. Politics here is continually translated into the organization of the social sphere. An intrinsic presupposition of the political violence of the TCM universal is that capital produces the only acknowledged difference between universal subjects. In this world, the difference between rich and poor is not just one, but perhaps the only, political question.
Violence de-indifferentiates by traumatizing. Since the unavoidable injuries sustained in the realm of production can be neutralized or repressed, the normalized subject is a relative integer. By participating in the game of commodities, she can extinguish the memory of the pain. Likewise, psychological and philosophical counselling serves to massage away any subjective sclerosis before the next day begins.
There comes a point, however, when violence becomes too much for the subject. Indifference becomes impossible. The subject is cut off from the sphere of TCM normality. Normalization collapses. The subject now experiences herself as a differentiated being. She has become an other. She immediately finds herself in a precarious situation – yet one to which the universal knows how to respond. Immanence has established institutions to reintegrate the alterity of the subject. The capital invested in the enormous therapeutic sector ensures that almost any trauma can be absorbed.
Yet still the differentiated subject remains. Differentiation manifests itself as asociality; the subject becomes estranged from her normal social ties and finds herself on the margins. She becomes unproductive – even if total unproductivity is reserved for the dead. At the same time, she finds an ambivalent refuge in an intimacy she is scarcely any longer able to leave. For those who no longer live anywhere other than the sphere of intimacy, the freedom of intimacy becomes more intensive. Trauma is intensity.
Violence manifests itself quantitatively. The seizure of property, for example, does not involve the same level of violence as a military operation. This quantification allows the TCM universal to sow violence universally. Yet the sowing of violence is not equivalent to the sowing of trauma. This is because the quantum of violence involved usually lies below the traumatization threshold. Poverty, for example, is only rarely experienced as traumatizing. It therefore rarely leads to the de-indifferentiation of the subject. It rather undermines any desire for differentiation. The violence of poverty leads to depression: it paralyses.
The difference between wealth and poverty thus has to be understood as a difference that remains unexperienced. It would otherwise be impossible to explain why the enormous socio-economic differences between universal subjects do not lead to uprisings or revolution. In the TCM universal, controlled violence thus serves to establish a normalized ‘peace’ that appears inviolable.3
These subtle forms of violence – unexperienced violence, violence that is already no longer violence – are organized more effectively by the TCM universal than by totalitarian systems with an excessive conception of violence. Excessive violence provokes resistance, which then has to be countered with ever greater quantities of violence. The universal subject’s non-resistance is then an effect generated by the TCM universal. An excessively violent universal would provoke universal resistance – an aporetic situation that would contradict the logic of the universal.
The normality of the emancipated, universal subject, as produced under the conditions of the MTT, is not traumatic. This is due to the MTT’s mode of determination. Trauma is alien to the internal conditions of mathematics and technology. The same does not hold for the PT. The PT produces narratives in which trauma plays a key role. The narrative that only emerges when the universal subject breaks with her indifference (as in Kafka, for instance) – when she manifests herself as an intimate being – requires loss, wounding and pain. The relative painlessness of life in the TCM universal is an echo of the MTT. In any form of pain, the TCM universal only sees capital. The strange con-sequence of this is that it will no longer be able to produce a universal narrative. Everyone will have to tell their own story.
Notes
1 Cf. my ‘Das Trauma des Holocaust als Anfang der Philosophie. Nach Hannah Arendt und Emmanuel Levinas’, Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 8 (2) (2007): 118–32.
2 This is shown in a striking manner in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film, Babel.
3 Cf. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014), 571: ‘The inequality r > g [private rate of return greater than rate of growth of income and output] implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.’ Piketty’s strange book aims to explain scientifically what should in any case be rather obvious. So, those who like to be scientifically informed now have the requisite ‘numbers’ (cf. 577). Yet these by no means point to an apocalyptic reduction. The claim that ‘the rich keep getting richer’ is a universal slogan devoid of any effect. Only immediate hardship will facilitate revolutionary action.