8
Within the universal topography, there are certain elements that turn against the TCM universal and its products. Now and then, a nationalistic rhetoric echoes through the political sphere, seeking to resist the demise of the nation state. Here and there, the power of the revolution is invoked. In the religious sphere, fundamentalist movements respond to the increasing de-theologization of the world with strict orthodoxy. In literature, the idea of dropping out of or withdrawing from the TCM universal is celebrated.
These are anachronisms. An anachronism is an interference in the relation between the PT and the MTT. This interference is double coded. An anachronism exists (1) when an anti-position is adopted with respect to the present; (2) when this anti-position is put forward using the means of the present itself. Adopting an anti-position while renouncing the means of the position under attack, however, does not constitute an anachronism.
To give two examples: the jihadi who uses a smartphone to marshal his insurgents is an anachronism. The hermit who withdraws from the world and renounces its means is not. The jihadi is integrated into the TCM universal (even if he wishes to annihilate its representatives) and it is on account of this integration that he is anachronistic. The hermit retreats from this integration, and in vanishing from time avoids becoming anachronistic (indeed, since the hermit disappears sans phrase there are essentially no longer any hermits at all – or at least we no longer receive any data from them).
From time to time, the PT manifests itself in the form of warlike events that do not revolve around objective goals such as the acquisition of raw materials. While nationalistic narratives may trigger military conflicts, however, they will never succeed in rehabilitating the nation state as the political actor. Religiously motivated terrorism may claim many victims, yet it will never undermine the normality of the TCM universal. Like their causes, such events are anachronistic. They serve as reminders that the PT still exists (and it will always exist), yet the reign of the MTT continues unabated.
Anachronisms are not untimely. The untimely is that which does not belong to its time. The anachronistic is that which stems from another time and yet wishes to colonize the present – that which, coming from the past, acts as though there were no difference between the past and the present – as though there were ideas that endured for all time, immune to the TCM universal. The I-M-M does not produce such ideas. Only the idea of the universal itself has no spatio-temporal signature. Yet this idea cannot be anachronistically instrumentalized.
The possibility of the anachronism always rests on a chron(olog)ical dislocation between the MTT and the PTT. Anachronistic positions and projects are founded upon bygone myths, stories and legends – upon narratives. They appear anachronistic within the universal topography just because they are wholly integrated into the TCM universal by means of this narrative mediation. Even when they seem to break through this mediation, it always catches up with them again. The claim that there is still a religious world in which we could live therefore tends to be rather disingenuous. Such a world no longer exists, nor will it again.
This raises the question of whether the PT as a whole is not an anachronism. And one would indeed have to say that the PT is the source of all anachronisms. The PT’s primary anachronism is religion. No other area of life has suffered so much under the inversion of the PT and the MTT. The transformation of the world into the world of the TCM universal has turned religion into a specific form of capital – one that represents metaphysical needs. Marx himself did not consider that the ‘opium of the people’1 might itself be a form of capital. Yet this does not mean that the PT is purely and simply an anachronism. Intimacy is always ready to rupture the MTT. The temporality of intimacy is discontinuous. This reflects back on religion. Is it not in the sphere of intimacy that the divine is to be found? Does (the) God not seeks us out momentarily in our innermost being? Is then religion – as an institution – not a misunderstanding?
Whether or not something qualifies as an anachronism is determined by the criterion of technological development, which sets the rhythm and tempo of time. Such technological development transforms the life of the universal subject like little else. In previous decades, this transformation was brought about by cars and aeroplanes. Today, it is the think tanks of the world-leading software and hardware developers that determine the state of normality down to the minutest detail. This does not mean that the universal subject has to follow the progress of technological development with particular curiosity, enthusing over each new invention, but rather that the rhythm of the TCM universal’s normality is determined by such technological innovation.
In this way, the normalized TCM universal has come to constitute a field of absolute immanence. Any attempt to distinguish oneself from technology.capital.medium will only fall back into this universal sphere. This is particularly true of ‘critique’. For any ‘critique’ of the medium itself has to be communicated via the medium. ‘Critically’ invoking the signal, ‘neoliberalism’, for instance, will itself have ‘neoliberal’ effects. Publications along these lines amount to capital movements that are then continued via anti-‘neoliberal’ reviews, which in turn generate further capital movements. As long as ‘critique’ remains untroubled by this performative contradiction, it will only repeat an old ideal that plays a crucial role in stabilizing the normality of the TCM universal. The TCM universal needs ‘critique’. And since such critique – in the mould of a bygone ‘critical consciousness’ – reproduces the illusion that it can and must keep an intellectual check on the universal, it is not only hypo-‘critical’, but also anachronistic.
Anachronisms are an intrinsic element of the world of the TCM universal. Were they to disappear, the indifferent universal subject would be immediately confronted with a potentially traumatic reality. In a rather vague yet nonetheless resolute manner, the subject has to affirm these irrevocably past narratives and assert herself through them. The artist and the critic have to believe that what matters in art is an aesthetic dimension independent of the internal conditions of the TCM universal. The writer who appears on a talk show has to believe that can be herself there, that she is not out of place. To face reality would be to see that poetic activity is just another way in which the indifferent subject is integrated into the conformity of the TCM universal.
Anachronisms are thus normal phenomena. They arise because, on the one hand, almost everyone is unwilling or unable to renounce the TCM universal’s power of disposal and pleasure purchasing power, while, on the other, there is a widespread desire to maintain a certain distance from this universal. This is a performative contradiction. The fundamental problem of all media critique is that it too must be communicated via the medium. Since such forms of critique appeal to (exhausted) values, they are anachronistic.
Nothing new can begin from an anachronism. The possibilities of the PT are exhausted. The idea that anything could proceed from poetry, religion, or art is both a performative contradiction and anachronistic. The anachronism is then something like a beautiful zombie, a lascivious vampire playing out its futile role in the TCM universal.
Note
1 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in Collected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 175: ‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ The suicide attacks and other acts of violence committed by contemporary Islamists have to be understood as an expression of this ‘opium’, which is congruent with the unacknowledged and unavowable, anachronistic status of religion.