12
The MTT has integrated the PT into the universal TCM topography. This does not mean that there are no longer any narratives, that there is no longer any poetry or art – far from it. Yet poetry and art can no longer exert any influence on the TCM topography, let alone rupture it. Instead, they are used in and by the Hollywood machine (which includes the art and literature markets) as objects of the TCM universal.
Freedom in the TCM universal consists in acquiring, under the conditions of the universal, a plus ultra of the power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power. In doing so, the normalized universal subject accedes to the central point of the universal topography. The universal subject is the universal’s ambitious agent of movement. In her indifference she represents the only difference of which she is capable: the universal difference between the qualitative quantities of wealth and poverty.
The MTT has integrated the PT into itself; it has not exterminated the PTT. It is still possible for particular determinations of the PT to unfold. While these will never be able to override the determinations of the MTT, they nonetheless still constitute (non-anachronistic) possibilities. They disclose a form of freedom that bears no relation to the freedom of the TCM universal. It is an other freedom, if not the other freedom.
This other freedom can never supplant the freedom of the MTT. The two freedoms exclude each other. What emerges from the freedom of the PT is thus an other, intimate topography. The freedom of the PT is intimacy, which traverses an other landscape than the indifference of the universal subject. This intimate landscape will never be able to overrun or displace the landscape of the TCM universal. The wilderness is restricted to the sphere of intimacy. Yet this does not mean that intimacy is capable of returning to the human being all that she had (and wished) to repudiate within the universal topography.
In the wilderness of the intimate topography, narratives and poems remain possible. One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s late poems speaks of the freedom of intimacy:
Inclination: truthful word! That we should experience each one so,
not only the newest that a heart still withholds;
where a hill, in gentle country
slowly inclines to the receptive meadow,
let it not be any less ours, let us grow;
or let the bird’s generous flight
give us heart-space, make the future unnecessary.
All is abundance. For then
it was already enough, as childhood shook us
with infinite existence. Even then
it was too much. How could we ever be curtailed
or betrayed – we who with all pay were
far overpaid?1
This unfinished poem calls ‘inclination’ a ‘truthful word’. ‘Inclination’ here does not refer simply – or perhaps at all – to a subjective motivation, but rather to the movement of a landscape toward a ‘heart-space’. A ‘hill’ ‘inclines to the receptive meadow’, yet this ‘gentle’ contact also touches us. The landscape belongs to itself, yet this need not make it ‘any less ours’.
Rilke writes: ‘That we should experience each one so.’ This is not a demand or an appeal. It is rather the admission that we are incapable of doing so. Even the ‘newest’ inclination ‘still’ remains withheld from us. The desire that this inclination should ‘not be any less ours’ only confirms our inability to live up to it.
‘Let the bird’s generous flight / give us heart-space, make the future unnecessary.’ ‘Heart-space’, ‘inner-space’ [Innenraum], ‘world-inner-space’ [Weltinnenraum] and perhaps even ‘pain-land’ [Schmerzland]2 are Rilke’s terms for the intimate topology. My life is gathered and manifests itself in the ‘heart-space’, where I am liberated from the apathy of the indifferent, universal subject – where, indeed, a form of freedom arises that differs from the freedom of the TCM universal.
In its arising, this freedom makes ‘the future unnecessary’. The freedom of intimacy is a form of experience. Insofar as the primary meaning of experience is that every experience is itself its own meaning, experience coincides with the present. In essence, I cannot say: yesterday I experienced the ‘bird’s generous flight’. Experience indicates presence. And I am this presence – even with the other.
This does not mean that I cannot recall past experiences. Indeed, Rilke speaks of the unique memory that is ‘childhood’. It is so unique that it even plays a part in enabling the freedom of intimacy. Without childhood, there is no intimacy, no intimate freedom. It is no surprise, then, that in the TCM universal childhood can at best appear as the infantile. The fragility of the child contradicts the stability of the TCM universal in every respect.
‘All is abundance’: this is the experience, the freedom of the ‘heart-space’ – the freedom of intimacy. The experience of things and others as beings that make possible my intimacy, that indeed are this intimacy, is always ‘too much’. I am never equal to the meanings of this experience; they always exceed me.
They exceed me insofar as they affect me, strike me, wound me. The experience of this ‘abundance’ can be traumatic. The ‘childhood’ of which the poem speaks is something that ‘shakes’ us. It is something to be suffered, even in the joy and freedom of play. Play is exhausting. Yet trauma is something else again. It invades and destroys the game; the child loses herself and only finds herself again in a damaged state. Trauma is a particular kind of experience – one of which we cannot say quite when it takes place. We are no match for it.
There is nothing negative about this; it does not detract from this experience. It is intrinsic to the very intimacy of an experience that we cannot live up to it. How could I live up to my daughter’s love, to a walk with a loved one after the storm, to a talk with a sick friend? All of this is ‘too much’ – and it is just this ‘too much’ that differentiates us into free beings, without our needing the universal subject’s power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power.
And yet – does Rilke not speak in economic terms here when he speaks of an ‘abundance’ [Überfluß] and of ‘pay’ [Lohn]? Does the universal TCM economy not invade Rilke’s poetry unbeknownst to him? To be sure, Rilke’s use of the word ‘pay’ does not rank among his most exquisite moments of poetic inspiration, yet the hyperbolic use of ‘overpaid’ here indicates what is really at stake for him: the overcoming of the economic.
‘Abundance’ and ‘overpay’ are not quantities; neither are they qualities. It is difficult to say how such an ‘abundance’ and ‘overpay’ ought to be defined beyond the negative sense of the ‘too much’. An ‘abundance’ is not a discrete multiplicity; it is a one that outstrips and thus exhausts our capacity to live up to it. Capturing it in numerical terms is impossible and it has no parts – unless each part is itself an ‘abundance’. How, indeed, could one quantitatively grasp love, mourning, or joy, or ever explain this ‘too much’?
The freedom of intimacy is a possibility of the PT. Only this freedom gives existence its depth. Here life becomes a biography, a narrative I share with the other and in which we both play a part. We are differentiated into individuals who speak in a unique manner to unique human beings. This only occurs, however, when the TCM universal loses its validity. This is the precondition of the appearance of the other.
The PT contains the possibility of a freedom that, like the freedom of the MTT, is known to everyone. It is the freedom of intimacy, a freedom inaccessible to the freedom of the power of disposal, just as this TCM freedom is inaccessible to the freedom of intimacy. In intimacy – this freedom from the freedom of the TCM universal – we receive what remains withdrawn from us in this universal.
The relation between the PT and the MTT is by no means neutral and indifferent. The two topologies exclude each other. The intimate topography and the universal topography are irreconcilable. The more the world becomes a universal topography, the more the intimate topography disappears. Yet it is impossible that it should vanish entirely. This would only be possible if the human being were to disappear.
Alongside the freedom of intimacy that is a possibility of the PT and the freedom of the TCM universal that is a possibility of the MTT, there is also a form of freedom that is a possibility of the UT. Universality itself is freedom.
Notes
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2006), 759. The translation that appears here is my own (TR). An alternative, freer translation by J. B. Leishman can be found in Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 81, yet this latter version is unsuited to Peter Trawny’s detailed reading of the poem. The original runs:
Neigung: wahrhaftes Wort! Daß wir jede empfänden,
nicht nur die neuste, die uns ein Herz noch verschweigt;
wo sich ein Hügel langsam, mit sanften Geländen
zu der empfänglichen Wiese neigt,
sei es nicht weniger unser, sei uns vermehrlich;
oder des Vogels reichlicher Flug
schenke uns Herzraum, mache uns Zukunft entbehrlich.
Alles ist Überfluß. Denn genug
war es schon damals, als uns die Kindheit bestürzte
mit unendlichem Dasein. Damals schon
war es zuviel. Wie könnten wir jemals Verkürzte
oder Betrogene sein: wir mit jeglichem Lohn
längst Überlohnten …
2 Rilke, Die Gedichte, 811, 619, 833.