5
The universal subject is an absolute possibility of the intelligence unprethinkably inscribed in the MTT. This subject is not a precondition of the TCM universal, but rather its con-sequence. This con-sequence does not have a metaphysical source. It consists of determinations that have developed in accordance with the absolute possibility (i.e. necessity) of the MTT.
The subject is universal because it is an integral of the TCM universal. All of the subject’s properties accord with this integration. It is in the subject that the universal significance of technology.capital.medium recurs and is reaffirmed. The TCM universal finds its motivation in the subjective sphere.
The first of the universal subject’s properties is then intelligence. The subject emerges through the transformation of a quantity of intelligence into a certain quality of intelligence. It issues from the determinations of the inversion of the double topology. The subject is therefore able to become habituated to both poetic and mathematico-technological meanings. What makes this possible is language. It is this capacity that (infinitely) distinguishes the subject from less intelligent animals. It also gives the subject’s consciousness a quality by means of which it transcends animal consciousness. It is then the subject’s intelligence (an intelligence that qualitatively distinguishes its linguistic abilities and its consciousness from the capacities of the animal) that makes the subject an optimal integral of the TCM universal.
The second of the universal subject’s properties is desire or the will. It is desire that marks the subject as a universal body, a body that desires other bodies – both human and non-human. These other bodies are either absorbed or turned into symbols. Nutrients and nutrient-like entities (such as drugs and bodily fluids) are absorbed; entities that indicate the subject’s wealth and prosperity are turned into symbols.
The third property that makes the universal subject particularly compatible with the TCM universal, and which in a certain sense follows from the subject’s first two properties, is the occupation. The occupation is a con-sequence of the universal production process. It specifies the universal subject’s onto-functional position in the world. For Marx, the relation between human beings and nature consists in labour. Insofar as nature, however, is always mediated by the TCM universal, labour necessarily takes the form of the occupation. For in the TCM universal, what is essential is not that the subject work, but rather that she prove her worth within the ‘capitalist machine’. Labour is here only a necessary but not sufficient condition. In the occupation, labour loses its criterion and generates the difference between rich and poor. In the highest echelons of the TCM universal, the universal subject is able to transform the notions of labour and occupation. Intelligence then begins to play with desire. The subject revels in the freedom of money. The transformation of the occupation is a transformation of the subject’s onto-functional position: having overcome and acquired a freedom from labour and the occupation is the mark of a divine being.
The subject of the TCM universal is then a subject of varying intelligence who desires and has an occupation. On the basis of these fundamental characteristics, the subject then comes to acquire more specific competencies. These are used to perfect the interplay of its intelligence, desire and occupation. Perfecting this process also requires the political emancipation of the subject. Only the emancipated subject can take advantage of the possibilities offered by the TCM universal.
The possession of intelligence and desire, however, implies two different forms of freedom. The first form is completely integrated into the TCM universal. It consists in affirming one’s existence as a universal subject who disposes of intelligence, desire and an occupation. Through the interplay of intelligence and desire, this affirmation comes to manifest itself as the plus ultra of the subject’s power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power, and may ultimately elevate the subject to the heights of a god-like existence. The second form of freedom transcends this plus ultra in a non-quantitative manner. It consists in freedom from the freedom of the TCM universal.
5.1 The subject before the TCM universal: Solipsism and intimacy
Thought, or rather consciousness, has a solipsistic form.1 It involves a multi-dimensional inside/outside distinction between thought and the world, thought and extended bodies (things), thought and others, and between the world and thought, extended bodies (things) and thought, and others and thought. The inversion of these distinctions indicates that they are presuppositionless. I can neither say that there can be no world without me nor that there can be a world without me. Solipsism as the form of consciousness does not imply that consciousness opposes itself to an outside on the basis of the inside/outside distinction; this inside/outside distinction rather falls within the solipsistic form itself.
The strict difference between the inside and the outside corresponds to the limit between my consciousness – insofar as it is conscious of itself – and what appears within this consciousness. The subject’s solipsistic form is necessarily the form of the experience of what consciousness locates within itself as the outside. My experience consists in this passage through the (albeit limit-less) inside/outside divide – ’limit-less’ because solipsism consists in the fact that the outside is my outside, since it is in me that it manifests itself. The solus ipse is thus always already ‘outside’.
Solipsism thus radicalizes the inside/outside difference to such an extent that, for the consistently solipsistic consciousness, it is ultimately annulled. The world is my world; my relation to it does not involve a limit, and so is essentially no relation at all. The inside/outside distinction is de-limited.2 As its punctual origin, the I functions as the indicator of this de-limitation. The solipsistic world thus amounts to the de-limitation of an inside in which the world is perfectly real and thus always already outside. The solipsism of consciousness consists in its having to continually enact this de-limitation just because it wishes to maintain the limit between the inside and the outside. For experience is only made possible through the de-limitation of the punctual origin. Consciousness always has to set out from and return to itself.
The solipsistic form of consciousness enables and accompanies all experience. I am always thrown back on myself. This movement concerns me alone. What happens (to me) can never affect another as it affects me. The other knows, or can know, that I always revert back to myself. Yet this movement can never have the same significance for the other as it has for me. And since this movement, by means of which events are presented to me, can never affect the other as it affects me, I am barely able to judge whether it affects the other at all. I am alone … I can always question and communicate with the other, but such communication is incomparable to that which I enjoy with myself. The other does not yet appear as such. To this extent, there is only me. One of the forms in which this expansive reduction manifests itself is egoism.
At this pre-social level, the other is in all respects an indifferent source of mobile meanings. The other is one of the determining factors of my movement through space and time. Things are also sources of meaning, yet they themselves do not move within these meanings. The other is a meaning that moves through space and time and differs from other such mobile meanings through her individual changes in significance. It is not me who differentiates this space of meaning. Social rules are inscribed within it, which serve to organize its movement. It is on the basis of these rules that the I begins to relate to others. The solipsistic form of consciousness then undergoes a transformation.
The formation of a social sphere governed by specific rules allows for a differentiated relation to the other. Yet this differentiation only affects the functional dimension of the social sphere. The subject herself remains indifferent and continues to encounter the other with indifference. Her relation to this other is delegated to the rules of social interaction. The TCM universal offers the subject many possible forms of social contact, yet all of these have a certain uniformity. But this is not yet to specify the kind of social contact involved. The various possible social functions include those of the ‘colleague’, the ‘superior’, the ‘client’, the ‘patient’, the ‘competitor’, and so on. These are indifferent meanings of the other, indifferent meanings of the subject in her normalized state.
In response to the claim that the subject is determined in certain ways, it might be objected that the subject does not herself experience this process of determination. For the subject – so this argument goes – what counts is only what appears in her consciousness. This is the precondition of a classical conception of freedom according to which the subject is characterized by her ‘spontaneity’.3 On this view, the subject is always capable of initiating actions (and thus of being responsible for them). These actions must then result from a conscious decision on the part of the subject.
Consciousness, however, does not simply consist in an internal sphere of impressions, ideas and fantasies. It is also subject to external conditions, which make their presence felt in states of sickness and old age, for example, or in drug-induced states. At such times, consciousness undergoes changes over which it has no control. It can only retrospectively observe that a change has taken place. Furthermore, it would also seem to be exposed to an ‘unconscious’ (in the Freudian sense) that has determining con-sequences. We only ever learn of such determining factors belatedly – through a ‘Freudian slip’, for example.4
Consciousness can then gain some awareness of the effects of its external conditions through its experience of them. Yet as consciousness it cannot come to know the causes of these effects themselves. Were it able to do so, it would no longer be this very consciousness. It can know only the effects of medication and not the relevant physiological changes themselves. It can only know the effects of aging, but not aging itself. It cannot know the cause of its aging. If it were possible for such unconscious forms to be revealed to it and for it to become conscious of them, consciousness as such would no longer exist.
It is therefore false to claim that the subject can only be determined by factors of which she is conscious. On the contrary, it is virtually impossible for consciousness to become aware of its external conditions as such. We therefore have to assume that these determining factors – of whatever kind they may be – always operate ‘behind the subject’s back’. This is also true of those factors that determine the subject’s social interaction. In interacting with others, the subject can never know the extent to which her actions are determined by her level of wealth; she can only assume that this is one relevant factor.
The subject would nonetheless be incapable of participating in the differentiated functionality of the social sphere were it not for another essential dimension of consciousness. The continuity of the subject’s self-presentation in the functional, interactive space of the social and institutional world is ensured by an indifferent form of consciousness, which is only possible as the differentiation of another, primary manifestation of consciousness: intimacy.5
Though consciousness has a solipsistic form, this form is itself an epiphenomenon of a prior manifestation of consciousness. This manifest self-consciousness is intimacy. Unlike the solipsistic form of consciousness, it is capable of experiencing the inside as freedom with the other. We have of course seen that the inside of consciousness is inseparable from the outside. The outside is already inside. The intimate consciousness is nonetheless able to separate this divided inside from an outside. Intimacy is the space of experiences that do not presuppose a generally objectifiable outside. This does not mean that intimacy has the outside at its disposal.
There are indeed certain intimate experiences (those in which one is touched) that are initiated by an outside, by an other. The topography of intimacy is ordered by such hetero-affective experiences. Certain other intimate experiences are auto-affective. They are affected by themselves since there is nothing else that could affect them. In addition, there is a third kind of intimate experience, which is auto-affective and hetero-affective at the same time. This is the experience of the most intensive ecstasy, in which someone or something affects us in such a way that we also affect ourselves.6 In this experience of the most intensive presence, the inside/outside distinction can be overcome. At this point, the topography of intimacy is set in motion. A metanoia becomes possible.
In the functional space of companies and institutions, the normalized subject’s social interaction is indifferently guided by rules. The sole purpose of these rules is to ensure that social interaction continues smoothly along the path of increasing perfection. The subject’s intimacy is not supposed to play any role here. And yet, it is only because self-consciousness involves intimacy – only because it consists in intimacy – that the subject is able to move within the sphere of social interaction at all. Social interaction therefore always consists in a certain relation to intimacy. The nature of this relation determines whether the subject affirms the TCM universal – i.e. whether her freedom consists in the in-differentiation of her intimacy – or whether the subject negates the universal, i.e. whether her freedom consists in the explicit differentiation of her intimacy. In the first case, the absolutely ambitious subject binds herself to the production processes of the TCM universal; in the second she attempts to withdraw from them as far as possible.
Intimacy is a space of experience in which I encounter myself and the other an-archically (and in which I encounter myself an-archically because I encounter the other an-archically). There are no rules here, neither those of morality, nor of law, nor of the TCM universal. Contact with the other is naked. I heed every word the other says, attend to her every gesture, observe her breathing. Any rule would destroy this contact. Intimacy is the an-archy of the self, without the self itself becoming an archē. Intimacy is subjectivity freed from subjecthood.7
What takes place in intimacy is then nothing less than an ontological transformation of the world-form. Something occurs in the economy of the mathematico-technological sphere that cannot have originated from within it. The universal draws closer. Intimacy condenses neutralized and indifferent being into an intensive difference in being, into impossibility, freedom. In other words: the indifferent validity of the determinations of beings in the MTT is overshadowed by the emergence of differentiated and singular determinations from the PT.
In the intimate encounter, the de-limitation of the inside/outside distinction in no way leads to the identification of the I and the world, but rather to a liberation from this identity – a liberation in which consciousness leaves behind its solipsistic form while at the same time making use of it. For rather than levelling out my difference from the other, this de-limitation only increases it. In love, which is neither distinct from nor to be identified with erotic affection, the other is differentiated from all others. While the solipsistic form of consciousness is thus correlated with indifference, intimacy is correlated with in-difference.
In this in-difference, it is not just the subject that is differentiated, but everything whatsoever. It allows others and things to acquire an independence that, as it intensifies, can lead to a rupture. Only now does the rupturedness, the fragility of the world, come into view. The indifferent subject is confronted here with a hitherto unfamiliar temporal structure. In accordance with the rupture in the double topology, consciousness comes to be affected by a self-differentiating temporality. This form of temporality – the only form in which something like an event can take place – is defining of all experience in which the subject appears with a name, i.e. as an individual. It is the event of difference – the difference from, i.e. proximity to, the other.
In the space of this other temporality, the I-M-M comes to be determined as the PT and intimacy is able to give free rein to its fantasy. It is then only ever possible to leave the MTT through a topological transformation of language, through a decision to embrace a poetic mode of speaking, of saying. This decision is not made by the subject but results from the determinations of intimacy themselves. Incidentally, it may well be that poetry affirms the universal paradigm of production at an abstract level. In contrast to the visual arts, however, poetry is the explicit manifestation of a freedom that can only be experienced by the subject in the intimate encounter. What we experience here is the echo of another (bygone) world. It would then be a great misunderstanding to seek to carry this echo over into the sphere of the TCM universal.8
This would be misguided if only because intimacy has another kind of reality than the reality of the TCM universal. By definition, intimacy cannot claim to represent a world-form. There is no intimate world; intimacy is worldless.9 This means that in the context of the TCM universal intimacy has an illusory character. Love, as an essential event of intimacy, is then only real, as it were, in an unreal context.
5.2 The subject in the TCM universal: Indifference and normality
If the TCM universal, qua absolute possibility (qua ‘possest’), is absolute necessity, what form does the human being assume within it? The preposition indicates here that the universal is to be understood as a specific kind of space. Insofar as technology, capital and the medium together form a mathematico-technological space comprised of algorithms (the medium) in linear algebra (technology and capital), the TCM universal constitutes a vector space in which the universal human being functions as a subject. This subject first appears as an indifferent function point.
The indifference of the normalized subject in the TCM universal is a metaphysical determination [Bestimmung]. Indifference represents an affirmation of the conditions of the universal. It takes the form of a ‘pre-established harmony’, in the Leibnizian sense. For the TCM universal is ultimately consummated in an indifference in which the subject merges so completely with the possibilities of technology.capital.medium that it disappears into them. This mystical union is already presaged by the subject’s indifference.
This metaphysical form of indifference is that which the metaphysical tradition of philosophy has termed libertas arbitrium indifferentiae:10 the freedom of the will or arbitrariness. Indecision, i.e. freedom from preliminary decisions and motivating causes – the freedom of the equal (in)significance [Gleich(un)gültigkeit] of things – plays a crucial role here. I am initially indifferent toward the various actions open to me; I then make a decision that depends on nothing but my free will. In other words: indifference frees us from always already wanting something in particular.
It is this form of negative freedom that is experienced by the indifferent subject. I am free from the objects around me; whether these be other subjects, things, or laws, one is no more important than any other. Whatever the empirical sciences might claim, indifference belongs to the metaphysical order. That the subject can be indifferent at all is not something that can be explained empirically. In the real [faktische] world, however, indifference must be understood otherwise.
In the context of her social interaction, the indifferent subject is neither indecisive nor uninterested. She is always driven by particular interests and goals. She acts in a controlled and organized manner. In this social sphere of action, the subject is integrated into a network of rules that make organized action possible. These rules include: legal regulations; functional, work-related prescriptions; technological and media-specific operational guidelines (e.g. for using a computer); and habits. In this network, the subject becomes indifferent because all of the relevant rules are universally applicable (and are only acknowledged on this basis). Real indifference thus makes use of metaphysical indifference in order to invest it with particular intentions.
The indifference that pervades social interaction becomes especially evident when this network of rules is violated or simply disturbed. Such disturbances or violations may have a variety of causes, ranging from simple deviations from socially expected behaviour to unlawful acts. From the perspective of indifference, all such contraventions amount to disturbing forms of differentiation, which have to be returned to a state of indifference. For the primary goal of the indifferent, normalized subject is to ensure that her social interaction remains, if not entirely without friction (in the form of productive competition), nonetheless untroubled by any serious disturbance (and particularly in the work world). This is the source of the subject’s primary interest.
The metaphysical form of indifference extends further than the sociological form, which it conditions. As we saw above, while scientific and technological innovations are realized by extraordinary individuals in the TCM universal, who these individuals are is a matter of indifference. In other words: Isaac Newton’s development of classical mechanics on the basis of calculus was an enormous achievement, yet this achievement has nothing to do with the fact that a man named Newton was responsible for it. Classical mechanics had to be developed, and it would have been developed even without Newton.
The indifference in question here concerns the individual’s non-subjectively differentiable relation to nature. There is ultimately no individual access to nature. Classical mechanics is universal [all-gemein]. The same is not true of art. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a differentiated entity, created by a differentiated subject. The differentiation of the subject is a precondition of art as such. This is not the case in the sciences. In the course of her social interaction, however, the subject’s differentiation has itself become indifferent. Indeed, it is intrinsic to the artist’s indifferent existence in the medium that she should differentiate herself in an unmistakable manner.
The subject’s indifference is the result of a historical process, which is linked to another dimension of modern subjectivity. Max Weber’s seductive dictum of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ describes the necessary actualization of the TCM universal. In this process, the subject undergoes a form of rationalization that (following Edmund Husserl) we might conceive as a ‘normalization’.11 Normalization presupposes a norm. The norm consists in a form of pragmatized rationality. That this rationality has been ‘pragmatized’ means that over the course of history all of the possible metaphysical elements of rationality have been worn away, leaving only the element of pure usefulness.12 In the TCM universal, where questions of usefulness are of overriding importance, the old metaphysics has proved to be unpragmatic and thus unfit for purpose. It has been consigned to the past. It is then the TCM universal that supplies the norm.
Oriented as it is around pragmatic problem solving, the norm is a form of procedure. The indifferent subject becomes normalized by orienting herself on the basis of it, by adapting to it. This procedural dimension of the subject is bolstered by her indifference. In order to successfully adopt such a procedure, or even to become procedural oneself, it is necessary to avoid difference. Where the subject is concerned, then, indifference and normalization amount to the same thing. Neither is possible without the other.
In its procedural form, the norm of pragmatized rationality is bound up with a formal recognition of the other. The other’s social interaction is driven by the same interests as everybody else’s, including my own. In her distance from me, the other therefore presents me with a recognizable meaning. This meaning is of course related to her interests. The organization of social interaction consists in identifying and differentiating hierarchical, interest-based structures. Everyone has the same interests, but not the same field in which to pursue them.
The subject is an indifferent body located at a distance from me and motivated by the same interests as me. All of the subject’s hyperbolic definitions can therefore be regarded as obsolete. Descartes’s founding of metaphysics on a fundamentum absolutum inconcussum, Kant’s emphatic characterization of the subject as autonomous, Hegel’s identification of the subject with absolute subjectivity, Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Husserl’s transcendental ego, Sartre’s and Camus’s absurd man, Habermas’s enlightened, discursive subject, and a fortiori all of the hazy, delusion-prone philanthropic notions of the individual as an unconditioned and solitary moral, legal and political being are overdetermined idealist constructions. They fail to capture the normalized significance of the subject in the TCM vector space.
Normalization implies that the possibilities open to the subject in the TCM universal are strictly determined. The subject can only actualize what the linear-vectorial movement of technology, capital and the medium makes possible. She does so by assuming a self-referential function on behalf of technology, capital and the medium. The subject provides the TCM universal with feedback on technological, capitalistic and media-based processes (thus enabing its self-reflection) insofar as she incorporates a desire for TCM. The normalized subject affirms. We might say that she responds to technology.capital.medium.
The character of this response, however, is not easy to determine. It is less a response to a relatively open question than the ‘answer’ to an equation, or the output of a function. In the TCM universal, social positions thus come to be assigned solely as a con-sequence of the possibilities generated by technology.capital.medium. The affirmation of the TCM universal, however, is a wholly conscious affirmation. And where there is conscious affirmation, there is freedom. Freedom consists in an emancipation from idealizations (such as the Humboldtian educational ideal), which would only hinder one’s movement within the TCM universal. The universal subject has become emancipated for normalization, normalized for emancipation.
It is then necessary that there are philosophy professors, that there are talk show hosts, presidents, prostitutes, and so on, but it is by no means necessary that they are these particular individuals. It is this consistent indifference that distinguishes the subject and turns her into a point that keeps the TCM universal in motion and that is itself kept in motion by the TCM universal. The subject is nothing other than a vectorial integral within the con-formity of the TCM universal.
In the subject’s indifference, only one criterion allows for a quantitative, and ultimately qualitative, difference. This is the difference between rich and poor. In its superegoic role, the TCM universal rewards effective subjective functionalization with wealth and punishes ineffective functionalization with poverty. Unlike racist distinctions, for example, this difference can be rationally defended, since it is grounded in a pragmatic norm: the efficiency of the subject in the TCM universal. It therefore has little difficulty in acquiring social legitimacy. The difference between rich and poor is the truth of the TCM universal.
It was Max Weber who traced the origins of capitalism to the Protestant work ethic.13 And it was Sigmund Freud who in his metapsychology recognized the ‘character of the father’ in the ‘superego’.14 If we bring these two ideas to bear on the TCM universal, we can see that the latter performs just such a paternal function of rewarding and punishing its subjects through its distribution of wealth and poverty. If we draw the two lines of thought even closer together, it becomes clear that the TCM universal punishes and rewards its subjects like a god.
This dimension of the TCM universal is linked to its con-formist, integrative dynamics. In the sphere of social interaction, this serves to exclude any form of class consciousness and any resultant class struggle. This form of social differentiation is abolished and consigned to its place as an obsolete, if formerly necessary determination. In the TCM universal there are of course great social differences, and there are even certain interests that manifest themselves within them; yet there is no subject who could resolve to challenge them. The indifferent subject better satisfies her needs by integrating into the community of interests than by combatively highlighting social injustices. The TCM universal guarantees a peaceful society.
Furthermore, any rebellious breach of indifference only serves to confirm the integrative dynamics of the TCM universal, since protests, uprisings and revolutions are themselves specific forms of production. For the critical consciousness, it may seem obvious to want the wholly other and to seek to realize it; yet as long as this other obeys the logic of production, i.e. the TCM universal, it cannot be wholly other. Just because they have to be effective, revolutionary theories are not revolutionary. They too are governed by the absolute possibility of the first universal. The uprising collapses in the face of the latent realization that replacing one mode of production with another is not worth the sacrifice it demands. And this realization is correct.
The TCM universal thus favors liberal-democratic regimes. They are simply more integrative, i.e. more productive than ideologically or religiously motivated systems. Dissidence inhibits the fluidity of social practices and is therefore to be excluded in advance through the integration of as many opinions as possible. The outcome of the so-called Cold War showed that the economic potential of non-ideologically organized functional systems is greater than that of ideologically organized systems. The ideological restriction of capital flows, the disturbance of the MTT by the PT, upsets the equilibrium of the TCM universal, leading to delays, interruptions and limitations.
Normalization is of course not restricted to the subject’s political or intellectual function; it extends to the subject’s life as a whole. The various life goals to which subjects may aspire are condensed into an orderly catalogue, which offers the subject an array of biographies, all drawn from the possibilities generated by the TCM universal. It is organized on the basis of the difference between wealth and poverty, between social success and failure. It is almost impossible to avoid being inscribed within this difference. Even the most varied anomalies, such as psychical deformations, are turned into techno-capitalistic-media-based possibilities, i.e. necessities. The same TCM universal that produces these necessities also profits from them: burnout syndrome is an ‘output’ that becomes an ‘input’ for the pharmaceutical industry, this most efficient element of capital.
One of the key characteristics of the normalized subject’s indifference in the TCM world-form is that it never manifests itself, even though it is everywhere at work. This particular mode of non-manifestation is ensured by the third segment of the universal, the medium. Across the media spectrum, we find subjects who act as though the seconds, minutes and hours in which they manifest themselves on screen or on the air affirm their individuality, as though the medium graced them with uniqueness, or – even more blindly – as though they might convince the medium they had earned the right to escape the indifference of the vector space.15 The more they strive to manifest themselves within this segment of the universal, the more indifferent they become. The medium represents one of the most straightforward means of inscribing oneself within the universal difference between rich and poor.
This inscription allows the indifferent subject to make herself completely at home in her world and in the enjoyment of things. She can invest all of the passion of her intellect in this pursuit, can engross herself in things with all her cynical and ambitious interest. She can become a specialist. The TCM universal offers the specialized subject a wide range of opportunities to distinguish herself. Where the aesthetics of the TCM universal are concerned, for example, she can acquire an almost grotesque level of sophistication as a consumption and design critic.16 Her integrity is proven through her professional integration into the TCM universal.
The freedom enjoyed by the indifferent subject in the TCM universal is the freedom of movement and the affirmation of movement. The subject desires mobility. Freedom is initially nothing but freedom of movement17 and finds its expression in global travel. What the subject loves, however, is not only the fact of movement; the technological apparatuses that enable this movement are also objects of subjective desire. These means of mobility vary with respect to their range, their speed, and the pleasure they afford (the parameters of technological freedom). It is only when this freedom is curtailed that the subject’s desire starts to fade and she begins to resist. This also explains why the revelation of a previously unknown level of surveillance of the private sphere has no effect, for it has no bearing on the subject’s freedom of movement.
The more the subject affirms this freedom, the more she can share in the products and possibilities of the TCM universal, the more she can take advantage of the means of mobility, the more she can benefit from insurance policies, the more she can dispose of private property, the more she can see herself reflected in cultural (and particularly artistic) institutions, the more she can invest in cultivating her body, the more she can ensure that those closest to her (such as her family) are able to distance themselves from the compulsion to produce and devote themselves to free production. The subject who disposes of all of the above is subjectively free.
An ethics is always required by the subject where specific applications of the TCM universal call for specific rules. At issue here is the entire sphere of so-called applied ethics. As the human being in the TCM universal comes to approximate La Mettrie’s homme machine ever more fully, ethical questions come to be raised with increasing urgency. Human beings discover that they are one of the possibilities of mathematico-technological space. They come to understand themselves – and above all their bodies – as part of nature. In the medical sphere, it is not only possible but even necessary to take an objectifying approach to the body. This approach changes according to the technological innovations that shape it. The question is how much scope it should be given.
What is already evident, then, is the highly technical character of this ethics and the problems it is concerned with. Specific situations call for specific competencies, which are concentrated in ‘ethics councils’. To have an ethical competency is simply to be a specialist in certain sectors of the TCM universal and to be able to link one’s knowledge to supposedly moral principles. The activities of such ethical advisory bodies are important, since the normalized, indifferent subject lacks the ability to understand the techno-scientific developments of the day (in medicine, for example), let alone assess their ethical import.
The TCM universal demands a techno-ethics that accords with the needs of the indifferent, normalized subject – an ethics that can be integrated in a seamless (i.e. inconspicuous and undemanding) manner into the pragmatized social sphere. This ethics more or less arbitrarily determines what may or may not be done. By means of this network of rules and associated legal structures, the TCM universal has succeeded in establishing a worldly space [Weltraum] in which an authority such as the ‘conscience’ has become superfluous (the ‘conscience’ rather belongs to the world-less sphere of intimacy). The praxis of the indifferent, normalized subject can now unfold wholly within the bounds of the applicable rules and laws. These suffice to organize social interaction between subjects. And even the event that might be capable of sabotaging the subject’s integration into the TCM universal is no ethical event. On the contrary: the differentiation of the subject is an anarchic transformation that normative morality first seeks to prevent and, failing that, to destroy.
The collapse of the normalization process opens up new horizons that then reflect back on the subject and her world. Everything that takes place on the margins of the TCM universal – philosophy, art (excepting the multi-million dollar art market), religion and love – begins to assume a form that cannot be seamlessly integrated into the universal. The subject acquires a mode of existence [ein Dasein] in which she comes to terms with her fragility. In other words: she takes the measure of her intimacy for the first time.
In the intimacy in which the subject experiences the intensive difference of impossibility, she is torn from her indifference. The differentiated subject is denied the possibility of a union with the TCM universal. She can no longer see herself reflected in its possibilities, since she has been violently ejected from them. She is therefore a subject on the margins of universal actuality. She leads a marginal existence. This margin nonetheless opens on to an atopology in which another form of freedom can be experienced.
The subject’s differentiation allows her to enter into an intimate narrative. Only someone leading a marginal existence can become the protagonist of a comedy or tragedy. On the margins, the individual anarchically acquires what in her integration into the TCM universal she could not. She is now receptive to a pathos that makes her indifferent life under the watchful eye of the TCM superego seem like a wasteland. Should she attempt to make herself at home within the intimacy of being, however, she will not escape the ‘punishment’ meted out by the universal. The determinations of the universal generate con-sequences that reintegrate what has dis-integrated.
Notes
1 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981), 5.64: ‘The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.’ Solipsism, ‘strictly carried out coincides with pure realism’. This is also suggested in Proposition 5.63: ‘I am my world. (The microcosm).’ The solipsistic form of the subject does not lead to a denial of reality. It rather determines the subject’s position in the world. The subject is a ‘limit of the world’ (5.632). If the subject is ‘solipsistic’ (or intimate?) and if solipsism coincides with ‘realism’, then there is essentially no ‘metaphysical subject’ in the sense of a universal entity at all. If the subject exists, then the world is limited by it and comes to an end at this limit.
2 ‘Das Innen/Außen-Verhältnis ist entgrenzt.’ The hyphen in ‘de-limited’ is intended to indicate here that this de-limitation is to be thought as the removal of a limit – TR.
3 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 484ff. (B 472ff.). At issue here are the ‘antinomies of pure reason’, i.e. the question of whether the subject is determined by a ‘causality in accordance with laws of nature’ or whether there is also a form of ‘causality through freedom’.
4 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Alan Tyson (London: Vintage Classics, 2001).
5 Cf. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 50ff., 65ff.; cf. also my Ins Wasser geschrieben: Philosophische Versuche über die Intimität (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013).
6 This is what Sartre, in his singular philosophical description of sexual desire, calls a ‘double reciprocal incarnation’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes [Abingdon: Routledge, 2003], 413).
7 ‘Intimität ist die von der Subjekthaftigkeit befreite Subjektivität.’ Subjekthaftigkeit here implies the state of being tied or chained to one’s subjective being – TR.
8 Certain problems in Heidegger’s and in Nietzsche’s philosophy are bound up with an ignorance of the difference between intimate and institutional thinking. The key point here is that while institutional thinking (the sciences) can acknowledge the formal existence of intimacy, it is unable to explore what materially takes place within it. And while intimate thinking, on the other hand, can take an interest in ‘scientific knowledge’, the latter’s public mode of discourse is unsuited to its own form of questioning. This leads to significant problems where certain political programmes are concerned. These may simply involve an attempt to make the political sphere more intimate – which cannot but fail. Habermas’s thinking, by contrast, never runs this risk, since it is not interested in the anarchic, intimate consciousness – i.e. does not seek to philosophize from out of it. This nonetheless means that the subject of such thinking is the indifferent, normalized subject.
9 Cf. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950–1973, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, vol. 1 (Munich: Piper, 2002), 372–3.
10 Cf. Nicolas Malebranche, Recherche de La Vérité, in Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Charpentier, 1871), 9 (translated as The Search After Truth, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 5): ‘D’où il est facile de reconnaître que, quoique les inclinations naturelles soient volontaires, elles ne sont pas libres de la liberté d’indifférence dont je parle, qui renferme la puissance de vouloir ou de ne pas vouloir, ou bien de vouloir le contraire de ce à quoi nos inclinations naturelles nous portent.’ ‘From this it is easy to see that although natural inclinations are voluntary, they are still not free with the freedom of indifference of which I speak, which contains the potential of willing or not willing, or even of willing the contrary of what our natural inclinations carry us toward.’
11 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 137.
12 The MTT is neutral. It by no means represents ‘reason’ in the sense of enlightened rationality. Max Weber’s insight is important here, which Habermas nonetheless counters by claiming that instrumental rationality overlaps or absorbs communicative rationality. It is ultimately difficult to see, however, how ‘arguments’ might be distinguished from ‘instruments’. I therefore cannot subscribe to Habermas’s notion that a form of ‘communicative rationality’ might prevail against the instrumental economy of the institutions of the TCM universal.
13 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001).
14 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, in The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (London: Vintage, 2001), 34.
15 As Badiou remarked in a 2009 interview, ‘That does not change the fact that the laws of commodity production, the market, and above all of conformism also apply to the media. Such a TV presenter, for example, is a star who mixes only with important people and represents the social type of the ruling class: he makes a lot of money, uses it to increase his prestige, and thereby corrupts himself – not because he wishes to enter into some kind of conspiracy, but simply on account of his role.’ Cf. Alain Badiou, ‘Das Kapital ist an der Macht’, www.zeit.de/2009/49/InterviewBadiou (accessed 21 May 2015).
16 Cf. Wolfgang Ullrich, Alles nur Konsum: Kritik der warenästhetischen Erziehung (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2013). Ullrich is among the most intelligent exponents of an aesthetics of the universal.
17 Cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 145: ‘Liberty, or freedom, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition.’