6
In the beginning, politics was a field of activity in which the MTT and the PT spilled over into one another. The political sphere, with its symbolism and rhetoric, was particularly dependent on the poetic topography. Momentous political decisions were legitimated on the basis of founding myths or stories of a long-lost origin, a golden age, or a tragic decline. It was not uncommon for the MTT to be placed in the service of the prodigious goals of the PT. History came to appear as a battleground on which individuals sacrificed themselves for political visions.
This was less true of the Roman Empire than of the Christian missionary project – a prime example of cultural conquest. All political theology belongs to the poetic topography, since it is based on the narrative of a divine origin of power, of a beginning within or beyond time. It thus needs places that represent this origin – places that have to be distinguished from other, profane spaces. A universal topography contradicts the spirit of political theology, particularly when such a topography stems from the MTT.
Revolution also belongs to the poetic topography. It needs symbols that can be destroyed in symbolic acts. The body of the king must be torn asunder, fortresses must be razed, and flags must be changed. Furthermore, revolution can only be mythologically legitimated. It has a messianic character. All of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century invoked their revolutionary nature. In their ideologies, the double topology lost its bearings.
As the PT comes to be integrated into the MTT, politics begins to lose its symbolism. The extent of the loss is difficult to measure. There remains a certain cultivation of historical memory, which is granted constitutive political significance. Yet it is unclear whether this cultivation serves or even can serve any other purpose than the stabilization of the universal topography. The MTT determines the remaining symbolism of the political sphere according to its own requirements. These symbols are by no means limited to the signa of states and state institutions. Indeed, the symbols of wealth and prosperity prove to be far more effective.
This determining process has a normalizing effect. Not only is the event in which beginning and end are condensed (the revolution) excluded from politics; political problems are also systematically reduced to their rational dimensions through the exclusion of any ideological presuppositions. Politics is no longer a question of ‘ideas’ in the sense of ‘ideals’. The ‘truth of democracy’1 consists in an endless openness. The politics of the MTT knows neither an A nor an Ω.
What this politics of the universal topography does know is the number. Both the populist and the democrat agree that where there are no longer any principles or ideologies, the number, the amount, and the mass become the keys to political power. The number represents neutralized power. It provides more legitimacy than anything else – more even than enlightened reason.
In order to acquire the power of the number, ideas or ideals are put up for public consideration. In the field of pragma-political strategies, however, these ideas only serve to make rhetorical distinctions. They no longer enter into a genuine polemos of ideas, which in a political context oriented around objective problem solving can no longer exist. Political ideas are not only exhausted; they have also become superfluous. By themselves, they are incapable of generating any potential power. At most, ideas and ideals constitute potential means of persuasion. The TCM universal integrates and extegrates politics: it extegrates politics because politics in the narrow sense is not part of the TCM unity; it integrates politics because everything that is achieved in the political domain is determined by the MTT. It would then need to be asked whether the MTT does not contain the possibility of foregoing politics altogether and organizing the universal topography through a form of automatic administration. This could presumably only occur if nobody were any longer excluded from the TCM universal’s power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power. This would be a state of total consent.
A politics without principles is of course not an inhumane politics; politics rather liberates itself from principles in order to respond more flexibly to the problems of modern societies. Ideological forms of politics, by contrast, remain faithful to their principles. They create their principal enemy. The subject of this politics without principles has emancipated herself from religion and ideology. Indeed, the rise of democratic freedom cannot be understood in abstraction from the subject’s emancipation from religion and ideology. Yet even if the subject succeeds in liberating herself from such erroneous principles, she is unable to emancipate herself from the TCM universal. She rather emancipates herself for the possibilities of the TCM universal. For it is the progress of the TCM universal itself that furthers the emancipation of the subject.
The MTT normalizes a political system that aims to solve the population’s bio-technological problems as efficiently as possible. Politics thus becomes pragmatic – it becomes a pragma-politics. The TCM universal provides it with all the means necessary to implement its pragmatic policies. A symbiotic relation emerges between this pragma-politics and the TCM universal, one that makes it almost impossible to recognize any genuinely independent and non-indifferent political actors.
Modern democracies are oriented around the number: a particular number of votes – a majority – gains a greater power of disposal than a minority. Yet since the latter also represents a certain number, it cannot be wholly excluded from power. The TCM universal is not an exclusively democratic order. The quantitative interpretation of power nevertheless enjoys a certain plausibility. A state of affairs in which everyone has access to power in some way is seen as more ‘just’ than the concentration of power in the hands of a small group or an individual. The politics of the number – democracy – thus emerges as the politics of the universal.
The difference between the democratic politics of the number and the totalitarian politics of the number is that the former involves a pragmatic and the latter a monumental understanding of quantity. Totalitarian regimes characteristically present themselves in terms of their ‘greatness’. In the 1930s, Heidegger spoke of the ‘gigantic’2 character of technology, which he described as a form of ‘machination’ (Machenschaft). This ‘gigantic’ character manifests itself in the measured enlargement (and reduction) of all that there is. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film, The Triumph of the Will, showed how the world celebrated the gigantic. A well-known example is Albert Speer’s hypertrophied and ultimately touristic ‘Germania’ architecture, in which each new building, such as the New Reich Chancellery, was intended to outstrip the last.3
Notes
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Although this text is full of perceptive insights, it also becomes clear that it bears witness to a certain renunciation of political philosophy. In the form of theoretico-discursive thinking, the latter has given itself over to a consideration of the procedural questions that determine the real political sphere. Once such thinking has established the appropriate legal basis for the peaceful organization of the public social sphere, it is then only a question of refining the legal dimensions of democratic decision-making processes. A form of political reason that might still be distinguished from economic reason retains its sedimented significance here. Yet since a metaphysical form of technology.capital.medium has necessarily been inscribed within every modern political foundational project, it is ideologically naïve to say, as does Alain Badiou, that ‘If I had to give my opinion on technology, whose relation to the contemporary demands of philosophy is fairly scant, it would much rather be to regret that it is still so mediocre, so timid. […] Capital bridles and simplifies technology whose “virtualities” are infinite’ (Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999], 53–4). While capital without technology is conceivable, it never in fact exists without it [niemals ohne sie gegeben]. Indeed, capital is only as technology (and the medium). It is therefore inconceivable that capital should ‘bridle’ technology. The ‘relation’ of the TCM universal ‘to the contemporary demands of philosophy’ thus consists in its repulsion of the latter, such that philosophy comes to be concentrated in the sphere of intimacy. There it is free.
2 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 106ff.
3 In his Inside the Third Reich (trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston [New York: Macmillan, 1970], 56), Speer writes: ‘By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.’ The so-called ‘ruin value’ of this architecture indicates the difference between the PT and the MTT. Only buildings that present a narrative, a collapse, can be ruins. Buildings constructed in a purely technical style cannot tell the story of their decline; they rather objectively disintegrate into remains. The narrative ‘ruin value’ of the Parthenon, for example, is the precondition of its touristic value. Gothic cathedrals, too, are already ruins, even where they are still in use.