3. The Conduct Code
of the Cool Persona
Outside an earl, inside a pariah.
Gottfried Benn
The historical avant-garde of the years 1910–30 is fascinated by characters with simple contours. Free of the complexity of deep psychological structures, these characters appear as “metallized bodies,” innocent of organic frailty. Armored, they hold their own in the “force field of destructive currents.”[1] They strive for the greatest possible mobility and are constantly alert, “as if they had an electric bell going off nonstop inside them.”[2] They avoid public displays of emotion. If they should happen to suffer fatigue, they say only, with Charles Lindbergh in Brecht's Ozeanflug: “Carry me off to a dark hangar, so no one sees my weakness.”[3] Walter Serner adds a laconic corollary in the Handbrevier: “When you're not doing well, make an effort to conceal it.”[4]
Characters with simple contours may indeed be “subcomplex,” but they have the virtue of being able to make decisions. What they decide on remains in the first instance abstract; what they want is to be in motion inside a process that compels mobility. Avant-garde literature fills out the image, testing out how it will function in the organic world defined by the body.
THE RETURN OF GRACIAN'S COOL PERSONA THE PRISONER'S
MOBILITY DOCTRINE
“Man has one purpose: life, that is, to move,” notes Werner Krauss, a specialist in romance literatures. It is 1943; he is awaiting execution in
Our question now concerns Krauss's interest in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Gracian's midseventeenth-century code of conduct, which he reconstructs in the extreme isolation of his prison cell. What he finds in the Jesuit's precepts is first of all a challenge of intellectual engagement in the “border area between humanism and barbarism.” Gracian appears to Krauss as an advisor on how to behave in mined territory, where the placement of every step requires caution. In this situation, morality is not a compass you grip in your hand. If threats rain down from all sides, Krauss learns from Gracian, “the whole of morality comes down to tactical rules.” Gracian's book offers guidance for situations in which existence has been rendered “incredible” and the truth, afflicted by “signs of a severe flu” (83), has withdrawn to a distant corner.
These few words from Krauss's Lebenslehre (1947) may suggest the reason for the resistance fighter's interest in the Spanish Jesuit. In a letter of 26 March 1946 to Erich Auerbach, who was living in Istanbul in exile, he offers a succinct account of the reasons for his imprisonment:
At the instigation of the former Dean Tra'ger [dean of the Philosophische Fa-kulta't at the University of Marburg], who wanted to get rid of me, I was conscripted into the army in 1940. Ad arma cucurri, and I made it all the way to lance corporal. But my brilliant career met a sudden end when I was arrested at the end of 1942. for my part in the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen conspiracy. In January 1943 I was sentenced to death, along with countless others, by the Reich war tribunal. In May, after the judgment had been confirmed, I was moved to Plotzensee for execution…. It was possible to manage a transfer and, with the assistance of one of the tribunal justices (who committed suicide after 20 July 1944), to arrange for my psychiatric examination. I was moved from one prison to the other. Only at the end of 1944 was the death sentence commuted to confinement in a penitentiary. New danger from the Gestapo, which wanted to get me out of the military sentence and send me to Buchen-wald. My salvation was the hasty evacuation of the Torgau fortress, when I was able to take advantage of the confusion and flee in a hospital train.[7]
The commentary on Gracián took shape in this context.
A list of fourteen of the three hundred behavioral precepts from the Art of Worldly Wisdom will help clarify the reasons for Krauss's attraction. The criteria of selection reflect their astounding correspondence with precepts current in the 19205:
Hope is a great falsifier of truth; let skill guard against this by ensuring that
fruition exceeds desire, (no. 19)
Know how to withdraw. If it is a great lesson in life to know how to deny,
it is still greater to know how to deny oneself as regards both affairs and
persons, (no. 33)
Think with the few and speak with the many. By swimming against the
stream it is impossible to remove error, easy to fall into danger, (no. 43)
Never be put out. 'Tis a great aim of prudence never to be embarrassed. It
is a sign of the real man, of a noble heart, for magnanimity is not easily put
out. The passions are the humours of the soul, and every excess in them
weakens prudence; if they overflow through the mouth, the reputation will
be in danger, (no. 52)
Observation and judgment. A man with these rules things, not they him.
He sounds at once the profoundest depths; he is a phrenologist by means of
physiognomy, (no. 49)
Find out each Man's Thumbscrew. 'Tis the art of setting their wills in action…. Have resort to primary motors, which are not always the highest but more often the lowest part of his nature, (no. 26) Do not wait until you are a Sinking Sun. 'Tis a maxim of the wise to leave things before things leave them. One should be able to snatch a triumph at the end. (no. no)
Get used to the failings of your familiars, as you do to ugly faces. It is indispensable if they depend on us, or we on them. There are wretched characters with whom one cannot live, nor yet without them. (no. 115) Never complain. To complain always brings discredit. Better be a model of self-reliance opposed to the passion of others than an object of their compassion. For it opens the way for the hearer to what we are complaining of, and to disclose one insult forms an excuse for another, (no. 129) Never contend with a Man who has nothing to Lose; for thereby you enter into an unequal conflict. The other enters without anxiety; having lost everything, including shame, he has no further loss to fear. (no. 172)
Make an Obligation beforehand of what would have to be a Reward afterwards. The same gift which would afterwards be merely a reward is beforehand an obligation, (no. 236)
The Art of getting into a Passion. If possible, oppose vulgar importunity with prudent reflection; it will not be difficult for a really prudent man. The first step toward getting into a passion is to announce that you are in a passion. By this means you begin the conflict with command over your temper, for one has to regulate one's passion to the exact point that is necessary and no further, (no. 155)
― 36 ―Nothing depreciates a Man more than to show he is a Man like other Men. As the reserved are held to be more than men, so the frivolous are held to be less. (no. 289)
Be able to Forget. It is more a matter of luck than of skill. The things we remember best are those better forgotten. Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted, (no. 262)[8]
All the core ideas of the 19205 cult of objectivity are present here: the prohibition of ritual complaining; the disciplining of affect; the knack of manipulation; the cunning of conformity; the armoring of the ego; the practice of physiognomic judgment; and the reflection of behavior within a parallelogram of forces.
Much of the advice is difficult of access. “Sitting over this work with my hands in manacles,” as Krauss later recalled, “I understood the paradox of my endeavor.”[9] At first what interests the prisoner is only Gra-cian's understanding of the virtue of restraint (retentiva) and the art of hopefulness (espera)—as well as cunning during interrogations, for which the manual has advice to offer. “A player never plays the card his opponent expects,” states Gracián, adding: “and even less, naturally, the card his opponent would like him to play.”
Krauss's return to Gracián is not, I suggested earlier, an isolated event. It corresponds to a broader tendency on the part of the European avant-garde in the interwar years' “trench communities” (Marc Bloch), namely, its Nietzsche-inspired skepticism about any sort of “organic phantasm of the personality culture,”[10] which Gracián also calls radically into question. An early diary entry by Krauss, on 12 November 1932, shows how closely the scholar's protean ambition predisposed him toward his reading of Gracián:
Become what you are not. Thence man, rather than condition existence on change, draws change into his own ego, making of himself a monad determined by laws of change specific only to itself, which transforms the outer world in the process into a space for personal development. The innocence of becoming, as Nietzsche nicely blasphemed.[11]
What interests us here is Krauss's interpretation of the subject in the courtly codes of conduct. I want to build a bridge from his construct to the philosophical anthropology of the 19205 and then to track the codes' fate in new objectivity narratives. At issue for Krauss and his contemporaries is nothing less than an experimental attempt to Jepsychol-ogize the modern concept of the subject.
The subject with whom Krauss becomes acquainted in Gracián's code has no internal compass to call on when it moves into life-threatening territory. The inner regulator, the conscience, is precisely what the Jesuit has removed from the subject, because the conscience restricts freedom of movement. Gracián has in view a subject that requires an external voice for the sake of orientation. The persona the code presents knows neither the bourgeois's “worldless interiority” nor its Protestant variant, the conscience. Introspection is available to the persona as little as is the direction of conscience, raising the question of how it can establish identity.
Here Krauss discovers in Gracián's code of conduct a procedure that George Herbert Mead and Helmuth Plessner defined in the first two decades of the century as the “reciprocity of perspective.” The persona finds its identity by combining the perspectives of ego and alter ego. Gracián's persona acquires an instrumental image of itself by reading the perceptions of others, with which it is constantly vying. Since the shared world in which reflection takes place is “always merciless,” and the stakes are survival, the image of itself the persona finds reflected there corresponds to perfectly realistic self-knowledge. The only guarantee of mobility is a high-strung alertness and readiness to cut ties at any time. The complete persona, therefore, must never allow others to affix any firm characteristics on it. A total absence of characteristics increases the radius of action.
Gracián's persona is a master in the art of distinction. All “idylls,” which leave this (male) subject open to the wiles of passion, are to be avoided like “traps,” as he puts it; arcadian voices stir the nerves; too many possessions “overburden the run,” says Gracián, according to Krauss; for “man has but one meaning; that is, to move.”
We might well expect Gracián to advise against “excessive individu-ation” (113). A strain of authenticity could in easier times serve both uprightness and distinction, or even garner prestige. But on a minefield it is clearly a defect, and Gracián warns against it: “Individuating does nothing but attract unhealthy attention!” Little wonder that his Art of Worldly Wisdom would be deemed appropriate to a period of total mobilization.
And the maxims of the courtly mobility doctrine reconstructed by Krauss do in fact reappear in the literature of the 19205. The most extreme version of the code at that time is found in Brecht:
| Whatever you say, don't say it twice | |
| If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them. | |
| The man who hasn't signed anything, who has left no picture | |
| Who was not there, who said nothing: | |
| How can they catch him? | |
| Cover your tracks.[12] |
Why such audacity is useful emerges from a review of Krauss's book in 1950, in the journal Romanische Forschung. “If life is a battle,” concludes the reviewer, who was in equal parts impressed and perplexed by Krauss's book, “then morality is choosing the most successful path to triumph.”[13] The secret of Jesuit spirituality would be, according to Krauss, the conception of life as master strategy: the objective is to win the whole world, with no damage to the soul. But when the Christian goal starts losing its power to illuminate, the result can easily be double-entry bookkeeping for the conscience. For if every political path to the goal is justifiable, means and ends have no necessary ties between them. The radical methodology of politics prevails, while the Christian goal, “set on a distant altar,” no longer interferes with the method's inner laws. So goals become interchangeable, an outcome with unfathomable consequences:
Reading Gracián is no doubt a pleasure for a Marxist, if only because certain of Grecian's formulations all but invite him to strip away the life doctrine's mythical wrapping and reveal its valuable core, as the founding genius did with Hegel's dialectic.[14]
The possibility of retooling Gracián in this way naturally depends on Jesuit theology, for which Christ represents not an ethical intervention into the wicked world but the doctrine of virtue's “crowning achievement.”
THE MODERNITY OF THE PERSONA CONCEPT
Krauss's modern analyses of Gracián's concept represent a greater challenge today. “Gracián's persona is faced with the ceaseless task of ‘being somebody’ in a hostile and competitive world,” writes an American reviewer in 1949, wishing to emphasize the book's contemporary relevance.[15] Krauss's reflections on the idea of a persona reflect the experience of the ego as an illusion.[16]
In 1938, when Marcel Mauss traced the development of the fundamental category of “person” from the masquerade presented in the sacred
As Krauss elucidates Gracián's persona concept, he allows himself to be swept along the current of the new objectivity: self-knowledge, attending to conscience or the possibility of regret, is of little use as a procedure for maintaining an identity. Others' understanding of the self is the royal road to a secure self; for—the language of new objectivity pamphlets left no doubt about it—“the path of knowledge leads from outside in.” Krauss borrows the “emphatic image” of the persona developed in 1925 by his teacher Karl Vossler, who was searching for a concept of personal being adequate for both individual and collective use: “From mask or specter, from body or face, departing, in short, from an individual's externalities, the [concept of the persona] aims at our most internal, inalienable self. One is a person to the extent of one's success in arriving at the self by way of roles and their realizations.”
Another reference to Vossler's persona follows in Karl Löwith's 1928 book, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. Here Löwith defines the individual “in the existential category of the ‘persona’” as the otherwise bounded being whose essential existence derives from social roles, one who is “fundamentally and formally established for himself by means of his correspondence with others.”[19] The evidence delivered by others' perceptions is also the source for Krauss's idea of a personal environment, which is the only medium in which affective development can take place. Existence in the form of a persona fixes the individual's reactive character and dependent status in relation to others:
Gracián compares the person with a swimmer who has learned his skill through the threat of drowning. An activating stimulus is necessary-for the only way a person can achieve value is by going into the world. And there is no existence outside this value. The existence of a person is grounded in the unconditioned processes of social behavior. (107)
In a militarized situation, this version of anthropology-in which we hear echoes from the 19205 of Scheler and Plessner and also find concepts borrowed from Vossler, Heidegger, and Löwith—is highly explosive. If the battle gets decided in the social world, which, we recall, is “always irreconcilable,” then the individual is compelled to focus attention on matters of self-representation. Orientation—and this is fiendish advice—must be geared to the value judgments upon which social recognition and acceptance depend. There are serious consequences for the persona: under these circumstances, being and appearing do not form a pair of diverging opposites, and the difference between them can be altogether inconsiderable—when it is a question of success. Krauss takes the idea to its logical extreme:
Being needs appearance. What does not appear falls short of recognition. An increase in appearance does not reduce being; on the contrary, it doubles its substance, (in)
Behaving according to the laws of probability (Wahrscheinlichkeit) now comes to mean using appearance (Schein) to gain recognition for the truth (Wahrheit). In such circumstances, objectivity quite naturally gains the upper hand; for prudence in life often demands that the persona behave in a businesslike manner, calculating the value of things on the market (113).
Alongside this motif, with which anyone born in 1900 and educated in the decade of the new objectivity would be familiar, it is of note that Krauss also undertakes a revaluation of the concept of politics by way of Gracián, and that it also corresponds to ideas from the 19205. Krauss lays considerable emphasis on the claim that Gracián's code of conduct exceeds the bounds of a noble's breviary, restricted to the rules of life around the Spanish court. Court for Gracián is only a model, at once a “gathering place for life's dangerous creatures” and a “tempting laboratory” (119). Court affairs proceed according to life's most comprehensive law, to the forms of mutual obligation that typify aggressive or defensive situations. Gracián, as Krauss concludes in the theological spirit of Carl Schmitt, removes the concept of the political from the autonomous
The political persona cannot get by without a heroizing attitude, another idea that, we shall see, suggests the contemporary relevance of the seventeenth-century Jesuit. Having fenced to the point of exhaustion on courtly terrain, the persona is by no means able to regenerate itself in colorful popular activities, or take part in any history-making mass movement. It must distinguish itself. Gracián fears the people; there is no sign of latent sympathy in his intellectual bearing. “The people appeared to him an obstacle in the path, a harmful power in its lack of understanding” (79 ff.). At this point Krauss's reconstruction of the heroic persona begins taking on uncanny qualities. Gracián's hero must make his way on his own within an aristocracy riven with competition; there is no way to take refuge in a philosophy of history that values his deeds from the perspective of a meaningful progression; there is no getting lost in popular currents. Suddenly visible in the distant mirror of the seventeenth century are the essential features of a heroic attitude in the twentieth: the constructions of the philosophy of history lie in ruins; in the absence of group solidarity or autonomous historical processes, artificial apparatuses in the form of parties are forming; the people are not to be trusted.
Extremely isolated from historical forces that had ever offered reason for optimism, the Jesuit discovers the immediate relevance of theology. Since the exemplary bearing of the heroic individual has lost its anchoring in the “primal force of existence,” a theological turn becomes unavoidable. The heroic bearing “requires transcendence, a radiation by supernatural powers, for it to maintain itself in its distance from the people” (79 ff.). What remains of heroism when transcendence no longer radiates?
As Krauss, condemned to death as a member of the Rote Kapelle resistance group, formulates these ideas, he is already thinking in terms of a “popular front” strategy, although his skepticism about popular attitudes at the time of his arrest must have been considerable, judging from his report on a pamphleteering campaign:
Sch.-B. [Schulze-Boysen] thought it necessary to the cohesion of his group to undertake an action he himself regarded as of minor political significance. Of course it was not a question of using slogans to achieve a propaganda effect, but it quite likely did concern giving the population the feeling that we are
― 42 ―still alive and that power stands ready for mobilization inside. A representative of the KPD [German Communist Party] had been invited to attend the preliminary discussions as a nonvoting observer. Rittmeister hadn't even been informed of the meeting, since his rejection of the idea could be assumed from the outset. Professional obligations kept me from attending the discussions, so I sent Ursula Goetze to Thiel to represent a similar negative position. I thought that the time was conceivably a bad one, given the major offensive against the Russians slated for the summer, where early successes had to be anticipated. My further objection, that the effort was too great and too risky for a merely symbolic action, was dismissed with remarks that the posters had already been printed. Calling the action off now would completely demoralize the group. Once the question was resolved in this way, Ursula, as we had agreed for such an eventuality, declared our readiness to submit to group discipline and take part in the action.Thiel took over distributing the posters. We pasted up a large number of them around Sachsendamm the night of 17 May 1942. The affair made a big stir in Berlin, but all attempts on the part of the police to track down the perpetrators were in vain. We were mostly hidden at military positions.[20]
THE CODE OF OBJECTIVITY
When social ties fail and extreme agonistic tension fills the space in which individuals interact, the time has come for rules to govern behavior. Alfred Doblin called the Weimar Republic “a republic with no instruction manual.” In fact, however, there arose during this period a wealth of codes to guide conduct, from architecture to philosophical anthropology, from sexuality to theater. Each political camp had its own catechism. The disoriented subject was clearly in need of an external voice to tell it where to go and what to do.
In this situation Max Weber offered up his own Art of Worldly Wisdom, “Science as a Vocation,” his famous address from 1919 that founds new objectivity codes of conduct and simultaneously reveals the dilemma inherent in them.[21] For what sparked further discussion in his impressive document was less the idea of the dialectic of disenchantment or the polytheism of values than the closed habitus of those who want “purely to serve the fact (Sache) at hand”—even if it is transient, even if the chain of progress of which it becomes a part is “meaningless,” and its final evaluation falls entirely to fate. Weber proposes disenchantment and defiant awareness of fate's demonic power, which the results of the various rational intellectual disciplines cannot sublate. The intellectual style he recommends takes shape from within a particular habitus; because hope is no longer to be vested in the evolutionary process, attitudes
No summer's bloom lies ahead of us (Adolf Erik Nordenskjold. Photo by Graf Georg von Rosen. With the permission of Archiv Deutsches Schiffahrtsniuseuni, Bremerhaven.)
No summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.[22]
Weber's scientific type of the cool persona also manifests itself in his acceptance of the hard world of objective fact, in which all principles are relative and all developments are finally a matter of accident.[23] “Disillusioned realism” is the keyword. Karl Mannheim points out that this way of looking at things is also grounded in fear.[24]
We find in Weber the signature of the new objectivity: “Complete disillusion about the age and yet an unqualified commitment to it” (Benjamin). Only one ethical law applies to the scientific guild, and that is the relativism of variant valuations. Yet this ethical law, rather than allowing scientists to adopt a more relaxed attitude, makes them tensely alert to any intrusion of ethical conviction into their scientific practice and willing to maintain a defiant stand on the platform of negativity.
The 19205 is a boom period for codes of conduct. But their effective radius tends either to be restricted to expressions of the new objectivity itself or overwhelmed by the mass of rules they promised to relieve, which are rules generated by surrounding institutions, parties, and political camps. We meet here a generation of intellectuals whose readings of Sorel and Nietzsche, Marx, Le Bon, and Kierkegaard had been influenced by experiences of war, the suppression of workers' uprisings, and inflation. They were only all too familiar with the idea that law's origi-nary violence lay hidden in every legal institution, that latently illegitimate powers are at home in the houses of parliament. A small turn in the wheel of fortune was all it took for “naked” violence-violence not adorned with the insignia of legality-to emerge from within the machinery of the constitutional state.
In this intellectual context we can perceive the republic as “earthquake territory” and uncover references to codes of conduct conceived in the violent world of the seventeenth century. As Krauss formulated it, there was a demand for a methodology that promised to “delve systematically into the warlike character of existence” (12,0). In Gracián's cool persona observers recognized the figure of a mobile subject, without psychological depth, with a radius of action unhampered by moral intervention or the voice of conscience. Whether this figure merged with Nietzsche's ideal of the “intellectual nomad” or the nineteenth-century dandy, or—one of the tricks of the Weimar intelligentsia—appeared in the uniform of the soldier, the worker, or the Communist cadre, the cool persona had caught everyone's attention.
As Krauss reconstructs Gracián's code of conduct, it has three motifs that take decisive roles in the rejection of ethical commitment and the radicalism of its expressionist offspring:
Radical expression, as well as all discursive rituals involving exposure, confession, and sincerity seem silly to the new objectivity; these forms disarm the self and, as Gracián remarked, have the
― 45 ―single function of provoking the evil latent in the enemy. Impotence, in the 19205, loses the discreet charm it had enjoyed. “It would be ludicrous to believe,” as Schmitt puts it, “that a defenseless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance.”[25]In codes of conduct such as Gracián's, the elements of feigning (dis-simulatio) and “masking [were forms] of resistance to seventeenth-century Lutheran orthodoxy.” The Lutheran formula for authentic personal salvation was bound to heartfelt contrition, the free expression of pain, and the activity of the conscience. The arts of prudence and diplomacy, as well as the particular way Jesuits of Gracián's stamp assimilated foreign cultures, were “of the devil,” and at the same time fitting instruments in the world of appearance. Proponents of the new objectivity perceive in expressionism and its cult of the scream the tradition of Lutheran authenticity. They opt instead for Jesuit strategies, explore their fascination for the hybrid type of the dandy-soldier. They accept Gracián's slogan—“Appearance civilizes”—in an effort to transcend the traditional division of labor between the cultures of private salvation, on the one hand, and public wickedness, on the other.
Gracián relinquishes the plaintive cry over the loss of a more “authentic” community. In his Art of Worldly Wisdom there is no lament about how people have become estranged from some origin. His persona moves inside a space of “seamless estrangement” and accepts it as an inevitable condition.
In Gracián's words:
Time has moved far from its origin. There is nothing left to do but to live as one can, rather than as one would like to live. It is necessary to regard what fate bestows upon us as superior to what it denies. (86 f.)
In Plotzensee, Krauss discovers his agreement with Gracián in principle. His personal experience of the origins myth of the National Socialist movement has scarred him. In opposition to that kind of fundamentalism, he forms his persona in terms of the necessity for self-defense. Its cardinal virtues are “absolute alertness” and cunning. Krauss uses Gracián's code of conduct to seal himself off from the temptations of irra-tionalism and the seductions of community. The man he becomes is an
THE COOL PERSONA AS BOGEYMAN
This figure's prospects could not appear less favorable today. In the last few decades whenever science has focused its attention on the armored subject, the examination has quickly turned into a tribunal. Perhaps in political and rhetorical terms the concept of the persona serves as a neutral technical category encompassing observation of the self and observation by others, but the addition of coolness as a qualifying attribute all but guarantees a negative resonance. From the viewpoint of a culture of sincerity, the cool persona makes a ridiculous impression, a judgment that, in its expression, easily recalls Rousseau:
Cool temperaments and cool hearts are the active properties of the come-dic character, which derives its artistic and reflective senses solely from the brain.[26]
Cool personas are recognizable by their fraids poses; they are deaf to the heartfelt tones of lament, anaesthetized to all that is authentic. Their strong suit is the exquisite finesse with which they decline to lend their own voices to the cri de la nature:
At the proper time, operating coolly and according to plan, in unchanging conformity to their own will, they bring into play whatever guarantees their self-interest.[27]
In today's climate, the only legitimate interest in the cool persona is antiquarian. As early as 1943 Krauss drew attention to a pair of obvious shortcomings in Gracián's code, identifying precisely the points that had been taken to extremes in the 19205 and that would disqualify it absolutely today: Gracián's precepts construct a purely male world in which gender polarization effectively silences the female voice; the people appear in it only “in the armaments of a major power,” which is always hostile to the individual. The rule is “Always armored, never carnivalesque.”
It is easy to levy judgment: the cool persona implies a “masquerade of virulent narcissism.”[28] All truly human qualities—which, arguably, necessarily involve personal vulnerability—atrophy inside an armored ego.[29] So many easy reproaches beset Gracián and Krauss's new objectivity type nowadays that it would scarcely find life livable. Dissections
Feminist research has both multiplied these judgments and rendered them more precise. It uncovers in protective coolness a variant of male self-reflection, identifying in the cult of objectivity and coolness a compensation for the loss of the adjudicating father, and in the code of discretion a patriarchal division of labor (Ulrike Bauereithel), whereby women are expected to do all the work close to the home, while men are allowed to choose work at a distance (Claudia Szcesny-Friedmann).[31]
Already in 1923, Otto Rank conjectured that the remarkable cult of coolness he was witnessing among Weimar intellectuals was simply a “heroic compensation” for the birth trauma arising from the sudden loss of symbiotic community. Others found compulsive behavior of one sort or another embedded in the drive structure of all variants of the cool persona. Concealed behind an obsession with the state or a fetishizing of the collective is, in the words of one author, “men's deeply rooted fear of the female,” which stimulates a compulsive attempt to contain phenomena suggestive of chaos or fluidity.[32] Praise of coolness, an acceptance of alienation, the cult of distance, the courage to make decisions: in light of the Freudian teaching on neurosis, the characteristics of the cool persona appear as pathological symptoms. And the symptoms involve more than the deformation of individual beings. The armoring results from a civilizing process that links the idea of autonomy to the disciplining and “cooling” of the affects. The containment of the ego, as Theweleit claims, following Norbert Elias, goes hand in hand with the centralization of state power, so that the autonomous ego becomes something like “a centralized state power in miniature.”
If we pursue the question of the self-image implied in the judgments levied today—on the armored self, the metallic ego, the bunker personality—we find code words such as “relaxation,” “demilitarization,” “meditation.” According to this model, ideal individuals live in harmony with their moderate drives, have cast off all “illusions of perpetration,” and have no need to mark off bodily boundaries or zones of discretion. They pursue a policy of “active inactivity.”
Thus does Diogenes of Sinope wander unwittingly into the civil war
Where we have done nothing, there's no tiger on the loose and difficult to get off of. Those who know how to let things alone do not get dragged along by out-of-control projects; those who practice abstinence do not get caught up in the automatic self-replication of unrestrained physicality.[33]
Is it possible to imagine that society's power plays actually stop short of some realm of “unrestrained physicality,” as this image suggests? In this free space, can the human psychic constitution really be “tigerless”?
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGY
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
From the standpoint of the therapeutically inclined anthropology of the 19705 and 19805, the leitmotiv of the code of coolness sounds a bit shrill, the more so when set to the inimitably subtle lines from the “Ballad of the Inadequacy of Human Planning,” a popular song by Brecht:
| Man is no good at all | |
| So kick him with your boot. | |
| If you kick him with your boot | |
| Then maybe he'll be good.[34] |
Through the halls of the republic, from early dada pamphlets (“Man is not good; he's a beast”—George Grosz) to Brecht's Fliichtlingsgespra-che (“Man is good, veal is delicious”) resounds the scorn of new objectivity intellectuals for the idea of inborn goodness; it echoes, for example, in the title of Leonhard Frank's very successful 1919 collection of stories, Der Mensch ist gut. Robert Musil, examining goodness in the light of functionalism, comes to the conclusion: “For a good person does not make the world good in the slightest. He has no effect on it whatsoever; he merely distinguishes himself from it.”[35]
The view of man as harmless, according to Carl Schmitt, is either the quaint touch of a naive anthropology or the symptom of an infantile disorder, such as expressionism or some other comparable radicalism. Max Scheler sees salvation only in an energetic embrace of asceticism, which he supposes might help repress and sublimate destructive drives.[36] Helmuth Plessner warns against the “inherent baseness” in human beings.[37] Sigmund Freud speaks ironically of those good sorts who deny the ubiquity of destructive drives: “For ‘little children do not like it’
Seventeenth-century ideas stressing the destructive potential of human drives, as well as remedies cooked up to tame them, surface among avant-garde writers of every description.[41] In political theory, whether delivered on the stage or propounded in scholarly treatises, they focus attention on the “tiger's leap into the seventeenth century.” There is an undeniable appeal to the logic of extremes. The figure of the crude “wolf man,” which appears amid the wars of religion, is as fascinating as the horrors perpetrated in opposition by the burgeoning state machinery. What attracts the radical intelligentsia here is the implicit “aura of artificiality” because, whatever violence it entails, it promises to keep man's natural impulses in check.[42] A corresponding image also emerges: the figure of the subject, awash in this aura, lacking in conscience, dependent on external voices for guidance.
Walter Benjamin reconstructs the “catastrophic landscape” of the seventeenth century in categories that describe the intellectual situation after the war:
The beyond is emptied of everything in which there is even the faintest breath of the world, and the baroque takes from it a multitude of relentlessly formless things, at the high point of the period exposing them in drastic form to the light, so as to clear out this one last heaven and, as with a vacuum, make ready one day catastrophic violence to destroy the earth.[43]
A view from the perspective of this nihilistic landscape makes available the conceptual image of a negative theology that will prove critical to twentieth-century dialectics. Since the path to redemption has been set off on the detour of transcendence,
German tragedy has buried itself in the inconsolability of its earthy state. If it knows any redemption at all, it is one rooted in the depths of this fateful development itself, rather than in the completion of some divine scenario of salvation.[44]
Philosophical discourse in the seventeenth century undermined the theological assumption of an internalized seat of judgment and control, drawing attention to the obvious conclusion. Only the external force of
In his polemic against the fixed idea of “inborn goodness,” Schmitt reveals a dangerous aspect and leads us along another track. From Schmitt's perspective all the talk of goodness is not only a sign of naivete and pious humanism—liberalism's rallying call—but, far more alarming, an index of anarchism, which lays the blame for perversions of goodness on the state. In both liberalism and anarchism he sees subversive forces working against the state: the one by demoting it to a mere instrument of the market and replacing struggle by never-ending liberal “palaver” the other by dissolving it altogether, abandoning institutional restraint for the descent into chaos.
For Lorenz von Stein, the greatest threat is from political liberalism, the way it strives for the “blurring of boundaries between hostile elements,” the “interpenetration of opposing forces” through the medium of parliamentary exchange. In the face of this danger, the armored ego opts for defiance (though Schmitt is eager, by way of a kind of “authoritarian liberalism,” to cozy up to industrial capital).
In the course of retrieving the negative anthropology of the seventeenth century, the thirty years' war of modernism (1914–45) also involves a remarkable resurgence of rules of prudent behavior, likewise a growth industry in that catastrophic century. Having lost the mooring of an external metaphysics, people begin scavenging the ruins of historical systems for an orienting codex of conduct, which is to say, the tools of self-stabilization. The principles underlying Hobbes's precepts of rationality return in modern variations:
Always follow that system of rules which, if enacted, promises you the greatest personal advantage.
Follow these rules even in situations in which violating a rule promises greater personal advantage than conforming to it.
It is unreasonable to continue following this system of rules when generalized nonobservance transforms the greatest advantage that would pertain given general compliance into the greatest disadvantage.[47]
The fundamental right in a violent world is the right to dissimulate. “Open-heartedness,” as the decade of expressionism finally learns, is an unerring index of self-surrender. This explains why the time is so favorable for the political-pragmatic genre of conduct codes and the associated rhetoric of dissimulation. In the decade of the new objectivity the idea dawns that seventeenth-century rhetoric was far advanced over the critical concepts of the eighteenth, “because it reflects the mediation of communication, the polyvalence of signs, and the opacity of relations.”[48] This discovery, of course, goes hand in hand with a fatal underestimation of the modernity of the eighteenth century, in particular its discovery of “history.”
Along with the use of external force to rein in dangerous drives and a set of behavioral roles to enhance stability, the new objectivity reclaimed a third element from the world of eighteenth-century thought. This is the construction by Hobbes of physics as the scientific foundation of ethics and his conception of man as a motion-machine.[49] “Coolness, as a tendency,” Osip Mandelstam reminds us in his 1930 commentary on Dante, “stems from the incursion of physics into the moral idea.”[50] Hobbes's perception of reality is physicalist in tone: the world consists of moving bodies; mental processes are an element in this system of mobility. Subjectivity appears to him as a “thing among things” and results in an increase in the reflexivity of behavior. Reason is a kind of compensating apparatus within the mobility system of the individual person; it harmonizes the dynamics of personal drives with state power.
The avant-garde greedily took up these aspects of an anthropology that had been overwhelmed by the nineteenth-century cult of psychology; they also filtered out the last traces of humanism in which Hobbes's anthropology was embedded. While few today would assert that Hobbes had reduced social action to the “reflected reciprocity of instrumental-ization” (K. O. Apel), we can barely imagine the aesthetic appeal in the 19205 of the behavioral liberation implicit in that standpoint.[51] The idea
HELMUTH PLESSNER'S ANTHROPOLOGY:
CLOAK-AND-DAGGER, NEW OBJECTIVITY-STYLE
“This radical thought of modernity, the Weimar symptom,” Peter Slo-terdijk concludes his analysis of cynicism,
uncovers emptiness at the pole of the self and otherness at the pole of the world; but how an emptiness is supposed to recognize “itself” in an otherness is something that our reason, with the best of wills, cannot imagine.[52]
At the beginning of the 19205, Helmuth Plessner could well imagine a form of self-knowledge that specifically did not opt for the path of introspection Sloterdijk has in mind. Plessner's assessment of the intellectual situation corresponds to Sloterdijk's dictum: the heavens of metaphysics, following the world war, are “cold and empty.” “Vacuum” was a popular scientific term at the time, used to designate that condition; the 1918 revolution had been termed a “vacuum cleaner.” Plessner captures the disillusion in a statement that many of his contemporaries would have underwritten: “Nothing may be expected of an arch, except that it will collapse.”[53]
Where the heavens no longer arch protectively over the individual, where the “endless cooling” of modern society provokes fright, “the warm glow of community,” in Kracauer's words, looms as an ideal haven.[54] But he, like Plessner, warns against a panicked flight into security. Plessner outlines a code of conduct suited to the “coolness of society” (11–133). His Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Ra-dikalismus appeared in 192,4.
Combining the concepts “community” and “radicalism” in a single title, Plessner addresses himself to one of the central aspects of German ideology. Community (Gemeinschaft) stood as a polemical term opposed
With the term “radicalism,” Plessner attacks worldviews based on a conviction that there was any good to be had from “a return to the roots of existence.” To the wish projections of “primary unity” and radical therapies, Plessner opposes his behavioral doctrine of distance and bases it on the anthropological principle that every human being, from the moment of birth, leads an incomplete existence. “That is why man is ‘by nature’ artificial and never in balance.”[57]
Plessner's text draws its polarity schema from a long iconographic tradition that associates images of community with the warm pole and those of society with the cold one; in this dualistic model, society is a sphere of permanent separation.[58] Plessner resolves to make his “way into the glacier” of society (Theodor Lessing). In this glacial space, the point is to save face.
Plessner understands the reasons people would wish to immerse themselves in a “warming sphere of trust,” but he sees what he believes are fatal shortcomings in communitarian ideology.
The idea of community harbors the illusion that it can overcome its inherent violence. It masks the life-saving function of differences among individuals, obscures internal hostilities and the necessity for spheres of mistrust, which it projects outward. Community forgets too easily that it necessarily operates inside the technological forms of social intercourse and comes into being only by setting itself off from others.
The fundamentalism inherent in the notion of community works a ruinous effect on the individual. The “purism” of its system of values tears down the individual's bodily boundaries. Its cult of “genuineness” is a close relation to terror; its demand for “authenticity” appeals to a substance that simply does not exist.
The cult of “essentialism,” which community puts at the center of its concerns, is a phantom; in the light of a code of conduct, it dissolves into nothing.
Plessner often mentions contemporary artistic and literary disputes, especially whenever he senses the presence of the cult of sincerity, which is the immediate target of his code of conduct:
Industrialism is the exchange form, expressionism the art, and social radicalism the ethic of tactlessness. The cry for physical hygiene, which contents itself with overhead lighting and tiled walls, is the perfect accompaniment to an art that will stop at nothing to get at the essence of things, to a morality of reckless sincerity and the acceptability in principle of causing oneself and others pain, (no)
Plessner does not tolerate the enactment of “naked honesty” or “eruptive authenticity” either in contemporary design, whether the new objectivity interiors of Bauhaus architecture—“with overhead lighting and tiled walls”- or in expressionist stage sets. Hygiene resides for him at the cold pole, “reckless sincerity” at the warm. He takes aim at all forms of unmediated directness, pleading for moderate temperatures and indirect lighting, for art and literature of whatever type as long as they eschew intimate self-revelation in favor of the regulating practice of distance.
Here Plessner not only adopts motifs from Georg Simmers sociology and takes up Max Weber's opposition to an “ethics of personal conviction.” His voice joins that of others, from avant-garde manifestos to vehement communitarian ideology itself, all of them reacting to negative wartime experiences and the old order's decline. The Hungarian aesthetic theorist Erno Kallai writes in a 192,3 manifesto:
Constructivism is a-ethical…. Ultimately there is no wiser humanism than one that takes specific and effective steps to protect us from constantly colliding with the interior lives of others…. It is better for us to devote our efforts to securing for each individual the free space necessary to separate him from his nearest and dearest. This means more fresh air for everyone, more mobility, unprejudiced openness, and—fortunately—less monumentality, heroism, and tragic ethos.[59]
Unlike the avant-garde, however, Plessner avoids the anti-heroic bearing that works to such advantage in Kallai's text. Instead, in a move that will assume dangerous form in his 1931 text, Macht und menschliche Natur, he finds in his doctrine of distance the underpinnings of an existential pathos.
His earlier manifesto, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, from which the passage quoted above comes, is already a strange and valuable document in the culture of distance. It attacks the “tyranny of intimacy,” as
Like Sennett, Plessner argues that the cult of authentic expression generates more suffering than it relieves:
Sincerity offers no reliable guide to behavior among strangers.… A brief collision is necessarily followed by the return of worldly coolness. (107)
Unlike Sennett, however, who mourns the loss of warmth in the public sphere and wants to restore it, Plessner seeks to turn public coolness into a medium that accepts vitalizing boundaries. Sennett looks for orientation to public dialogue in the eighteenth century, while Plessner's theory breathes the air of seventeenth-century French classicism.
Opposed to the overheated images of a closed community and un-differentiated unity, Plessner installs an image of society, which he defines formally as an “open system of traffic forms” populated by unacquainted individuals. What characterizes society in this view is its value neutrality; founded in violence and hostility, it nevertheless has an ever expanding range of possibilities for individual participation. Individuals never appear in Plessner's system in raw form but always in roles; in their interactions with others they define themselves. In the process, people must create a functioning balance for themselves between spheres of trust and mistrust, relying on the instrumentalities of ritual ceremony, prestige, diplomacy, and tact, all of which work to regulate proportions of distance and closeness, objectivity and familiarity. Social interaction, in Plessner's view, requires a virtuoso's ease “with forms that bring people close to one another without meeting, that allow them to distance themselves without causing offense” (80). Plessner aims here at the maintenance of a moderate distance, reminiscent of Schopenhauer's famous parable of the freezing porcupines.[63]
Strong people, according to Plessner, are those who master the rules of the game (society's only “moral law”) and surrender to the artificiality
True virtuosos ultimately achieve a kind of aristocratic elegance in their game playing, which was also an aspect of Gracián's cool persona:
The separation necessarily existing between people is raised to the nobility of distance, in which the forms of courtesy, respect, and attentiveness render ineffective the insulting indifference, coolness, and rawness of people living past each other in a common space. (80)
We return to Plessner's anthropological principles of 192,4 only after this reading of Grenzen as a code of conduct because, in the light of this reading, the principles appear to reflect a specific habitus. Plessner's directives are not necessarily the result of an anthropology modeled on natural science, although he makes reference to zoology, medicine, and paleontology, presumably in order to represent his code as grounded scientifically in the constitution of the individual. If we are correct in this assumption, then what we have in Plessner's most ambitious work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, is the naturalization of an eccentric code of conduct.
The principles of his 192,4 anthropology may be stated concisely: man is by nature artificial. He is born into the world in an eccentric position and requires the artificiality of a second nature, which is available in the surrounding cultural context, in order to be able to live at all. History becomes a process in which human beings are continually busy developing objective structures to which they submit as the medium and measure of their existence.[64] This recognition of the artificial conditions and forms of human existence will have far-reaching consequences for the development of anthropology; Arnold Gehlen will later erect his theory of institutions on the principle that people are by nature cultural beings.[65] In Plessner's early work, however, we can still separate out the elements of the artificiality axiom, ranging from Nietzschean motifs to the cult of technology, and examine them one by one. We can see how indebted the artificiality axiom is to the polarizing tendencies of vitalism[66]—here the vitalist bogeyman of chilled estrangement abruptly takes on a positive valence. We can understand the switch more readily by taking a brief look at the great mediating figure of Georg Simmel.
Simmel assumes from the outset a fundamental and tragic contradiction in life:
Life in its creativity is constantly producing something which itself is not life, something that is always bringing it to a standstill, something that poses its own legal claims. This something cannot express itself except in forms that are other than it, signifying independent meanings. This contradiction is the real and pervasive tragedy of culture.[67]
Here in Simmel's words we find the intellectual structure of an epoch that constructs tense polar oppositions between internal drives and social compulsion, between the creativity of life and expressive conventions, between unalienated being and reification. Plessner is among those thinkers seeking to transcend a tragic contradiction by giving its polarized expression a surprising turn: only the medium of social compulsion allows drives to develop humanely; conventions alone make humane expression possible. Freedom must thrive within the alienated space of society. The point for Plessner is to accept the developed forms of commercial, convivial, and urban intercourse in their human dignity.[68]
Four years later Plessner reiterates the principle of artificiality, borrowing from the classic formulation in Scheler's major work: “Man therefore lives only when he lives a life.” Man realizes himself in social figurations, which make up the natural medium of his existence. Cast out of the nest too quickly, he relies for survival on an environment contrived expressly toward that end:
Existentially needy, internally rent, and naked, man finds in artificiality the perfectly appropriate expression of his nature. Artificiality allows man to travel an eccentric detour to a second fatherland, where he is absolutely rooted in his true homeland. Placeless, timeless, released into nothingness, the eccentric life form creates its own ground. It is his only in that he creates it; only he can carry it. Artificiality in doing, thinking, and dreaming is the internal means by which man comes into harmony with himself as a natural living being.[69]
From such a statement it is possible to derive all the fundamental conditions of the psyche. All psychological expression is subordinate to the systematic lawfulness of artificiality (or, in today's terms, the symbolic order, the public sphere, and institutions); “mediated immediacy” is the lot of man. In order to come to himself, man must first set loose the psychological aspect of his being in a foreign medium.
Joined seamlessly to Plessner's concept of action and embedded in his code of distance, these principles are at the center of his anthropology: the directness and authenticity that the ideology of community demands
Plessner's code is among the more accessible of the documents attesting to the new objectivity of the younger generation that was trying to balance bodily forces that long for community while demanding interpersonal distance. His Grenzen is a rare civil and civilizing document of German cultural history, raising a controversial issue, namely, the boundary as the necessary condition of a living body.
As clear as it may seem in retrospect, in 1924 the principle of the boundary had not yet been fully defined. Along with several other intellectuals of the decade—Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Jhering, Erich Engels, Walter Benjamin, Erno Kallai, Paul Tillich, Karl Mannheim—Plessner puts greater emphasis on the anonymity of the public sphere as a necessary medium in which life, in all its shadings of otherness and familiarity, can fluctuate. Remarkably enough—and perhaps thanks to a shared legacy in Kierkegaard, vitalism, or the tradition of cultural criticism—Plessner's description of the public sphere lists characteristics that Heidegger will identify with inauthenticity but assign diametric value to: distantness, lightness of being, restlessness, distraction, uprooting.
In all the phenomena listed, Plessner welcomes the open horizon of potential that characterizes existence. Emphasis on the reflexive aspect of conventional forms frees social exchange among individuals of fundamentalist expectations. The turn away from the complex of “fortified in-teriority” (Thomas Mann) and the move beyond division into a private sphere of contemplative well-being and public ordeal of deeds open a new chapter in which the horizon of man's ability to do defines his essence. There is no doubt that Plessner is setting out a new formula of authenticity, this one based on the objectivity of the human sciences. It removes the criterion of expressive “genuineness” from the framing conditions in which it had been set previously—impotence, remorse, unconsciousness, and paralysis—binding it instead to the reflection of behavioral effectiveness in reality.
But the deep fissures in Plessner's concept of the person, as well as inadequacies in his arguments and political allusions, remind us that the
As others have noted, Plessner's axiom of eccentric positionality rests on the concept of the boundary.[71] The sovereignty of Plessner's persona is beset by the continual challenge of conditions arising out of the natural equipment of every human individual; people constantly find themselves in “border situations,” which they can obviously not surmount without the bravura of marking a boundary.[72] Plessner's stage is like a brightly lit fencing hall in which combatants face each other. The hall is closed; there is no opening through which the drives' darker world (or the economy's raw representatives) can gain access. But this image is also skewed. Elementary danger does not threaten from outside or from opponents; the fencers themselves bear it. The more brightly lit the space of reflexive behavior, the sharper will be the shadows cast by a subject's contours. “Wherever a lot of noise is being made about narcissism,” remarks Leon Wurmser, “shame is always silently present.”[73]
The question is, why must individuals be properly armed to enter the public arena, this patriarchal space? Plessner answers the question with enviable clarity: “Whenever the psyche ventures forth nakedly,” he says, “it runs the risk of appearing ridiculous” (70). Here is the one risk that even a man committed to risk must not take. For at stake is dignity,
There is also a question as to whether any knowledge would be gained by conceding the objections. The tendency at present is to regard exposure as a point of critical superiority; the Freudian theory of neurosis allows us to unmask the dualism of male subjectivity sentence by sentence. It may be more productive, however, to follow the fear of exposure's inner logic. We can get at this logic by considering four different readings of Plessner's central claim that man is by nature artificial.
Plessner elucidates the body-mind dualism, around which his anthropology revolves, by examining the “crisis of ridiculousness.” At first glance, it may seem as if the principle, “man is by nature artificial,” solves with one ingenious stroke the problem of dualism: the body has no natural aspect, because the instinctive level of human being is bracketed within the cognitive, and sense perception is a thoroughly artificial reflex product; “the senses are themselves structured by mind.”[74] But that is not the case in the context of Plessner's code of conduct. Here his principle takes the form of a commandment: man should be artificial by nature! A first careful reading uncovers an imperative in the fundamental statement of his anthropology.
Plessner constructs a subject that is required to balance countervailing psychological impulses, as if walking a tightrope: the tendency to reveal and to expose must constantly counteract the tendency to be ashamed and to conceal. Whenever the maneuver fails, resulting in “unchecked affective expression,” the psyche appears “naked” in public (in violation of consensual protective conventions inscribed in the symbolic order). The penalty is others' merciless laughter, which, by offending the dignity of the persona, produces shame. From the failures of an ethics of personal conviction and expressionist politics, Plessner learns that the bourgeois public is not the secularized seat of merciful judgment to which the subject may, in creatural impotence, submit without injury. “Uninhibited self-surrender to spontaneous expression” can in certain conditions be fatal; it is in all situations ridiculous. Plessner seeks the
For the subject in the grip of an impulse, spontaneous expression occasions an extreme state of emergency, whereas conventional forms keep a state of appropriate animal perception. Moreover, well-worn verbal conventions are available in the symbolic order for such irresistible expressive impulses (one such impulse leads to “kitsch”). Plessner resolves the disproportion between a subject's claim of uniqueness and cliche according to the embarrassing “tickle” of ridiculousness.
The fantasies of potency accompanying every passion stand in comic contrast to the absolute defenselessness of the passionate subject.
Passion of whatever sort requires the discipline of form if its bearer is to cut a good figure in public.
Plessner's prescription of artificiality is intended to ward off embarrassment. In defending against ridiculousness, however, Plessner's anthropology gets drawn back into the shaming theater of the Weimar Republic, which it was trying to get away from in the first place.
Leon Wurmser proposes a phenomenological definition of the fear of shame Plessner's anthropology parades before us as an elementary danger. It is “a fear evoked by sudden exposure, signaling the threat of scornful rejection.” “All eyes seem to be fixed on the person who is suffering shame, penetrating him like stab wounds.” Reactions range from dim anticipation of the consequences to panic. Shame, in its prophylactic function, is supposed to guard the boundaries of intimacy, and so avoid exposure. And exposure, via the processes of shaming, leads to punishment. In this marginal situation, it has failed. In the final analysis, the fear and dread of being ridiculous represent “the fear of being abandoned.”[75]
In this fear of ridicule, two opposed moments in Plessner's anthropology collide. First, a living being needs to defend its core identity against the danger of exposure; at the same time, however, this isolated being must go into the world, become acquainted with the human collective, and preserve itself there under tyrannical conditions. Fear of ridicule is one of the most important stabilizing factors among “primitive peoples”;[76] it is what guarantees the durability of institutions.
In the fear of ridicule, therefore, two factors that Plessner had largely
A second reading of the artificiality axiom lays stress on both its backward-looking aspect and its aspect of bold innovation. Plessner's Grenzen marks a break with the generation of expressionist youth by going back to retrieve elements of Nietzsche's turn-of-the-century aes-theticism.[77] From Nietzsche, Plessner takes the art of drawing distinctions regarded as valid among those who are “noble”:
Care for the most external things, insofar as this care forms a boundary, keeps distance, guards against confusion.
An apparent frivolity in word, dress, bearing, through which a stoic severity and self-constraint protects itself against all immodest inquisitiveness…. [Disguise]: the higher the type, the more a man requires an incognito. If God existed, he would, merely on grounds of decency, be obliged to show himself to the world only as a man….
Pleasure in forms; taking under protection everything formal, the conviction that politeness is one of the greatest virtues; mistrust for letting oneself go in any way, including all freedom of press and thought, because under them the spirit grows comfortable and doltish and relaxes its limbs.[78]
Plessner's sociological discovery of roles as a protective medium is informed by Nietzsche's claim that every profound spirit needs a mask; his anthropology centers on this paradox: “Only masked is a man entirely real.”[79] Oscar Wilde's motto—“Man is least of all himself when he speaks in his own name. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth”—echoes through Plessner's code of distance. The obligation assumed by the dandy, “to be as artificial as possible in life,” becomes in Plessner's hands a basic element of anthropology. Thus we may conclude either that aestheticism fundamentally penetrates the existential conditions of modernity or that a major work of philosophical anthropology in the 19205 still unconsciously observes fin-de-siecle convention.
The mask theory expressed in Grenzen—like the fear of ridicule—reflects the dilemma at the heart of Plessner's anthropology. On the one hand it assumes at the outset that the essence of man consists by nature in a “mediated immediacy”; on the other, it stresses the constant risk of a relapse into immediacy. As a result, there are two aspects to Plessner's mask theory: it counts masks among the artificial tools responsible for
The individual generalizes and objectifies himself by means of a mask, behind which he, to a certain extent, becomes invisible without that causing him to disappear completely as a person. (82)
Those who would find self-realization in the public sphere “have to play the game,” in order to produce the effects that characterize their particular function. The game requires a mask. “The maskedness of the public individual” (94), however, not only exists as a formal technique of social intercourse but shelters a precarious inner substance that must not be delivered up defenseless in the public sphere.
“The armored individual,” says Plessner, “wants to fence. A form that renders one unassailable always has two sides: inwardly it protects, while outwardly it generates effects” (82). Inwardly, the form of the mask inhibits the “tendency for self-exposure” outwardly, it produces the effects of the “official physiognomy” (85). It conceals the expressive elements of “eruptive authenticity,” which court the danger of public shaming. And Plessner welcomes the mask's dual role because it offers a chance to breathe the cool air of diplomacy. The mask alone displays man's freedom in the realm of artificiality.
Here we see how the findings of anthropology, the moral precepts of a code of conduct, and elements of turn-of-the-century aestheticism blend in Plessner's argument: “It is part of the fundamental character of the social ethos … to desire masks, behind which immediacy disappears” (2,09). At the same time, Plessner's artificiality axiom frees anthropology from the grip of cultural pessimism, bringing it into the range of new objectivity's obsessive interest in precipitous modernization. The realm of artificiality now shifts to technology and the new media: the dueling subject becomes an engineer, with the cult of technology occupying the site of artificiality, forcing individuals from an exclusive fencing hall into a space pervaded by the hum of the electronic media, the noise of rotation presses, the signals of the modern traffic system, and the machinations of power.
The artificiality axiom leads to bizarre collocations in the image world of the new objectivity. In Brecht's Fatzer fragments we read: “we are born a second time in the tank”; in the Hauptmann manuscript of Mann ist Mann there appears a character who plans to swim out to a coal freighter one day to get to the big city “because he had no parents”; in Bronnen's Ostpolzug, we find a subject “born on the seventh floor, nursed on condensed milk.” Aldous Huxley's Brave New World makes a precocious appearance.
All the scenes of exposure Plessner plays out are characterized by a failure to adequately protect a boundary. People, reduced to defenseless objectivity, are suddenly subjected to the gaze of others; “impotent,” they have nothing to present in public beyond their existence as creatures. But that, according to Plessner, makes no “sense.” For “sense” Plessner attributes exclusively to the fortification of the closed self in an agonistic situation. His entire attention is occupied with avoiding situations in which “nonsense”—uninhibited affective expression—takes place. Advertising defenselessness, such expression can only weaken the individual. Plessner concentrates on avoiding exposure; he correctly sees in the discursive rituals of confession, which he identifies among the expressionists, the foil to his code of conduct.
Situations in which appearing armed has an involuntary comic effect —and the military getup becomes an index of nonsensical heroizing-escape Plessner's attention because they do keep making sense. But the fixation on situations in which nothing seems to happen beyond armored egos fleeing ridicule is symptomatic of Weimar's new objectivity intelligentsia (and the point of Plessner's conceptual contact with Schmitt).
The image of the displaced man armed for combat became the material for dadaist experiments with disgrace and the psychoanalytic encyclopedia of shame, Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, by Magnus Hirsch-feld. Occasionally such a comic war hero also appears in the theater. In this latter guise we find a man wholly accustomed to absolute unassail-ability in a situation in which he wants nothing more fervently than to be gently intruded upon and touched. If a woman does not take the initiative to disarm (as she does in Hofmannsthal's Der Schivierige), he is left to brood on the iron code of distance.[80] Whenever the armored ego resolves to be genuine, it inevitably turns sentimental. Precisely that sentimentality becomes the trademark melody of the new objectivity.
The question of what prevents Plessner from adopting a comic perspective
Even in his very first moments this miserable creature, with no instincts, issuing forsaken from nature's lap, was a freely expressive and rational creature, bound to improve himself, as no other course lay open. All his failings and requirements as an animal set him, with all the powers at his disposal, the more urgently to prove himself as man.[81]
Herder's work anticipates both the theory of the environment, which Jakob von Uexkiill elaborates, and the doctrine of the artificial sphere, in which man, by nature, must realize himself as man. “From the midst of his failings” (which appear against the measure of the animal economy), poor “forsaken” man finds his composure in relation to the world, which he creates as a “sphere of reflection.”[82]
Arnold Gehlen honors Herder as a predecessor in his most ambitious work, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (1940). He comes to the conclusion that philosophical anthropology “since Herder had not advanced a single step.” Nor need it do so, Gehlen adds, “for this is the truth.”[83] In contrast, Plessner does not mention Herder in the works under discussion here.[84] Whatever the reasons for his omission, substantive reference to Herder might have saved Plessner from some of the more obvious failings, crudities, and dualisms that mar his theory. From the outset the theory's sphere of artificiality both stresses the agonistic character of society—which calls for armoring as a basic requirement in the human sphere—and expresses alarm over the danger of unleashed human drives—which require discipline. These elements move Plessner's theory in the direction of the negative anthropology of the seventeenth century and reflect the broader tendency in the 19205 to underestimate eighteenth-century modernity.
The dramatic literature of the seventeenth century shows us Plessner's type, a man “without any human weakness or inconsistency, constantly vigilant, constantly rational, [who] steadily pursues the coolly premeditated plan which goes with his part.”[85] Erich Auerbach points out that this type, in Moliere's comedies, is absurd. If Moliere is looking for instinctive, uninhibited, and sadistic traits in this character, he does so
only for the sake of making them appear ridiculous and unnatural. For the court and polite society in seventeenth-century France, naturalness means being fully and effortlessly at ease within reigning conventions; the ease is a product of “culture and breeding,” which regulate social intercourse among individuals, maintain distance, and ensure the per-sona's invulnerability.[86]
We see this construction of the noble persona in Plessner's duelist. It develops at an extreme remove from popular instincts, which Plessner consigns to ridicule, and an alliance with moral wrong only enhances its nobility. Like the tragic hero, the modern subject remains at all costs bodily intact. Stripped of all trace of physical and creatural frailty, it finds in death an occasion for pathos and a lofty style. Yet where a seventeenth-century audience saw in the noble persona a healthy human understanding and an authentic correspondence between what was natural and probable, the modern critic sees a necessarily eccentric character. This claim, of course, does not rule out its appearance on the scene, like the character of the storm trooper commander in Ernst Jünger's In Stahlgeivittern, as a member of one of Freud's “artificial groups.”
The comedic option is not available to Plessner. His phantasm of the dueling subject remains under the spell of historical models that do not allow for the “feminine” solution. This point leads us to a fourth reading of Plessner's axiom. His idol is Bismarck, whose willingness to take risks he extols, whose amorality at the moment of decision has a Luci-ferian appeal about it, and whose disdain for the bourgeois vernacular he shares. In Plessner's eyes Bismarck is a decisionist of the first order who-in stark contrast to the type of the democratic politician-never indulges in “the luxury of a rentier's harmonious conscience.” Spengler had already celebrated Prince Bismarck as the “last Spanish politician.” The prince serves Plessner as a protector against all forms of political indignation:“‘Disarmament is not a political concept,’ wrote Bismarck to a plaintive civil servant in the margin of the file”—as Plessner remarks in full agreement (78 f.).
It is no surprise, then, that Plessner, as early as this 192,4 work, does make reference to Carl Schmitt. From the latter's political theology Plessner borrows the notion of sovereignty, transferring it to the individual (at the cost of “romanticizing” it, from Schmitt's perspective). And Schmitt outfits him with arguments against a conviction-based ethics and fundamentalisms of all kinds. Plessner sends Grenzen into the world as a kind of operating manual and code of conduct. But its intended
Plessner's concept does leave open one place beyond reach of the fencing hall and its public treachery. It is a private place, and the calm available here owes nothing to the cool persona or the combatant. Its source is a figure who has made no earlier appearance in Plessner's anthropological arena. The figure is woman. By the “merciful gift” of her love, a man can, exceptionally, let himself go. Except for this glimpse, Plessner allows woman only one more appearance, as a single line in the code. He settles her down outside the sphere of life ruled by power and contents himself with the remark that woman, “as we know from the romantics, [is] nature at home with herself” (76). Banned from the world of artificiality, as in the eighteenth century, woman is still the preserver of first nature (see Figure 4), because she is incapable of realizing an identity in the “second fatherland” of the symbolic order.[87]
This exclusionary clause reminds us of the axiom's fourth reading: man is by nature artificial. In his scholarly memoirs, Plessner simply places the infant boy on the fathers' stage in the form of a little organic bundle, but it also fits the logic of Plessner's principle. His mother does not appear. From the very outset she is absent—barring the possible presence of a woman waiting offstage, to see to the regeneration of the weary warrior.[88] At this point the marked similarity between Plessner's work and Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom becomes easy to explain. If we compare both documents with French epigrams or English conduct books of the seventeenth century, or even with the elegies of John Donne, what immediately strikes the eye is the German deficit.
The intellectual avant-garde from 1910 to 1930 loved referring to pre-and nonbourgeois cultures. Thus we encounter in Plessner's Gren-zen the cloak-and-dagger tale of a shame-based culture. There the ego experiences “the collective of others as eagle-eyed inspectors”; a vigilant public has dug itself deeply into the individual's interior. Plessner's persona is constantly beset by rivalry in a theater of its own imagining. It is not conscience but the public, that, as the source of ultimate judgment, metes out punishment.[89] That is why Plessner is fixed on the desire for masks as a “safety factor” for human dignity. Masks are the only way a man can gather his strength on the stage of a culture based on shame.
Woman is still the preserver of first nature (Karl Hubbuch, Martha mit Bauhaustischchen [Martha with small Bauhaus table], ca. 192.7. With the permission of Myriam Hubbuch.)
Reading Grenzen as a manifesto of the new objectivity seems to confirm a thesis Peter Gay elaborates in his analysis of Weimar culture. He identifies in the new objectivity the return of the fathers, a finding that has since been reinforced by some feminist research, which sees in the cult of objectivity a compensation for fatherlessness.[90] We shall see, however, that this judgment, though applicable to a number of programmatic statements, misunderstands what several important works have in mind for the recalled patriarch. The reactivation of the dark side of the
ALTERNATIVE IMAGES OF MAN IN THE NEW OBJECTIVITY DECADE
Do you know what they call the Leidenfrost phenomenon in physics? Alfred Doblin asks Hocke, an idealistically inclined student, in 1931. It has to do with the way a drop of water will dance over the surface of a hot plate. Were the drop of water to think about it, says the materialist, it would consider itself free—as you do. It would sing proudly of its magnificent ability to defeat the law of gravity and dance.[91]
By referring to this minor miracle of physics, Doblin is at once satirizing contemporary materialism and offering a corrective to the wide-eyed naivete of the student, who had insisted on the autonomy of the will:
I acknowledge the force of the economy, the existence of class struggles. What I do not concede is that these economic and political phenomena proceed according to physical laws that are beyond the reach of humanity. People are involved in these phenomena, people like us, as actors and, if it can be put this way, when we drive or when we're driven. People don't just take part in them. No, class and class struggle are the living phenomena brought into existence by the social being called man. Perhaps not everyone is able to examine economic theories in their abstraction …, but more than a little is known about man, about individual being and about social being. For example: that we operate with values, with judgments, and preconceived notions, that more elemental instincts are right there in the background. Those considerations suddenly put a different face on the economy, and even more on intellectuality, which otherwise always looked something like nice boring literature. It has teeth. It does indeed bite. It is there, and there in a way that is quite like ourselves. The economist juxtaposes “empirical conditions” and “mere will” with great discipline and precision; but he obscures the fact that the will is part of empirical conditions. What happens in the economy may well have a lawlike aspect to it—today it is the crisis cycle, the way the process is driven by crisis—but the way people react, the way they make judgments, their specific social way of having values and applying and practicing them, is involved in the lawlike systematic!ty of economic processes—it is internal to the economic laws. Such tricks! The vulgar Marxist turns the economy into a fetish, a thing like “fate,” and everyone is terrified and starts fainting. What makes people faint—is themselves. We are ourselves the beings whose fates play out here. Images, personifications, and word fetishes serve in this way to cripple people.[92]
Doblin is seeking to balance factors that his contemporaries largely regard as terminally irreconcilable. He combines a theory of class struggle with biology, blends value-free scientific investigation with political decision-making, applies the results of individual positivist disciplines-anatomy, medicine, and animal behavior research, for example—to social projects. In short, he seeks to couple political strategies with the anthropological question, “What sort of thing is man?” What kind of politics can be expected of human beings? On what biological foundation can the modernization project go forward? How does the inertial force of existing mentalities deform desirable undertakings? How are economic mechanisms tied to human drives? In harmony with the findings of the philosophical anthropology of his decade, Doblin recognizes that clarification in these areas can only be achieved by overcoming the reigning mind-body dualism.
Against this foil of contemporary philosophical dualism, it becomes possible to define more precisely the specific weight of the human self-image in the new objectivity, and to cast new light on the artistic figure of the subcomplex subject.
We have so far neglected anthropological currents that identify drives as the essence of human being, obscuring the rise of psychoanalysis to a position of considerable influence in the 19205. It had no institutional power but was so present in the scandal it stirred up that key terms, such as “complex,” “repression,” and “Freudian slip,” made their way into new objectivity jargon.[93] In the theater, plays such as those by Ferdinand Bruckner, which served up a popularized version of psychoanalysis, found a wide public.
Nevertheless, the majority of new objectivity authors actively resisted psychoanalysis, refusing even the technical descriptions of the psyche offered by the new science. Freudian images of the psyche as a regulatory apparatus that absorbs charges, releases them in dreams and aggression, stores up energy quanta in the manner of steam-engine dynamics, do not appear in the literature. Instead, writers reach back to the older mechanical model of the clockwork—but they combine that image with one borrowed from another of the latest scientific models, the electric field.
“Psychology from outside” dominates new objectivity literature. The distinction between inwardly and outwardly directed explanatory models comes from Max Weber: if we talk about the acquisitiveness of an entrepreneur, we can do so “from inside,” identifying a passion or interest
In the literature of the new objectivity, both of these perspectives are internally rent. Shifting attention to the motor and functional aspects of human action causes authors—if they do not simply resort to a black box explanation-to fall back on notions of instinct, which they legitimate in the spirit of Nietzsche's revaluation of the barbaric. The Marxist term “character mask,” in contrast, emphasizes the economic drive forces that act on the implicated subject.
Doblin shows no pronounced resistance to psychoanalysis. His argument resembles in certain respects the views Max Scheler put forward in 1927 in Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos.[95] Scheler aims his polemic not so much against the materialists (he finds the Marxists among them positively idealistic in their conception of man), as against modern variants of decadence. Scheler's own view is informed by the most recent findings in biology, paleontology, and animal behavior research, and by an acceptance of their “dismal” conclusions: in comparison to the animal world, man is characterized by weak instincts, surplus drives, and primitive organ development. It is on these findings that Scheler and Plessner base their views of man's special status, which consists in his openness to the world.
If research by Jakob von Uexkiill had proved experimentally that animals inhabit a necessarily species-specific environment and that they behave according to innate instinctive schemata activated by environmental signals, Scheler concludes that the human being-having mind at its disposal—can separate itself off from the body schema. Behavior can be independent of environment. At the same time, mind impinges on naked drives by way of ideas, which it dangles as a kind of “bait” for the purpose of getting them infused with life and seeing them realized in the world. In opposition to another powerful intellectual current, which regards mind as an “adversary of the soul” (Ludwig Klages), Scheler emphasizes the concept of sublimation. Through a “basic renunciation of drives,” the mind can offset all the human failings identified by modern physiology and biology. Man's mind makes him into the social being that he is.
This theoretical sketch points out the extent to which physiological factors condition individual human existence. And, more important, it
Max Scheler died in 1928. And in that year a second major anthropological outline, Helmuth Plessner's Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (examined above), was published. While Plessner remains to this day in Scheler's shadow, his work shows greater affinity with the new objectivity's characteristic relationism. Among new objectivity commonplaces of the period are statements straight out of Plessner—“man is an ensemble of functions” or “man is by nature artificial”—and, once in circulation, they prove themselves as provocatively brazen as they are untenable. Plessner sets out the anthropological foundation for the floating construction of the cool persona. He frees the human self-image both from the prevailing notion of an inner-directed subject operating within the horizon of humanistic values and from characterizations of a being fully under the sway of drives. In Plessner's structural analysis, the eccentric structure of individual life becomes the key to knowledge:
A basic lack of equilibrium …, and not the onward flow of an originally normal and once harmonious life system (which could become harmonious again) is the “cause” of culture.[96]
Drawing on the results of the same hard scientific research into “man as a thing of nature” that Scheler cites, Plessner concludes that man makes himself what he is by taking action: man lives only in that he conducts a life. Plessner's reflections here could not be more consonant with new objectivity motifs: individual self-realization takes place within the social configurations that make up the medium of his existence. Forget originary myths of community. Man “civilizes” himself in an obligatory balancing act forced on him from the outset by his “basic lack of equilibrium.”
This new objectivity anthropology not only challenges the originary myths current at the time in the decadence narrative; it also disputes the thesis of Jesublimation as a means of recapturing vital energies beyond the artificiality of society. In the cool persona's virtuoso balancing
The literature of the new objectivity, in its attentiveness to human action, conduct codes, and positive revaluation of civilization (as opposed to community), presents remarkable correspondences with Plessner's anthropology, which privileges the reflexive type and represses all awareness of man's creatural aspect. Correspondingly, the cool persona and the radar type populate new objectivity writing, as it carries out a positive revaluation of civilization. There are allegories of eccentric existence and bizarre legends that might well derive from the artificiality axiom. Brecht and Benjamin, in harmony with the behaviorist tendencies of Communist pedagogy, cultivate for a time the myth of the “cool child”: without the secure wrap of bourgeois family ideology, the proletarian child experiences the cold space of class struggle even before birth. The understanding that even life in the womb lacks security predisposes it to class consciousness. Warmth is available to such a being, if at all, only in the collective. In this legend, too, we glimpse the new objectivity insight that individual human being—not indeed by nature, but by dint of social forces—is eccentric.
The feminist critique of new objectivity anthropology brings into relief the element of the male cult that informs it. To the extent that virile objectivity stresses the moment of necessary separation and self-conscious conduct in post-symbiotic states, the image of the mother risks either sinking into historylessness or being swallowed up by natural creatureliness.
| Forgetfulness is good! | |
| How else is | |
| The son to leave the mother who nursed him? |
as Bertolt Brecht put it, in his Lob der Vergesslichkeit.
People who experience themselves as sovereign beings only within the artificiality of the second fatherland, as Plessner's code of conduct demands, are obliged to forget their real origins. Only when institutional crisis threatens to destroy the second fatherland will they long for reassurance in the phantom of maternal origins. Hence new objectivity novels toward the end of the republic show us once secure men, their lives
EXPRESSION, LOSING FACE, AND
A RETURN TO THE BODY'S RHETORIC
Rodin, as we know, one day made a man with no head: a man in his stride…. The simplest thing we can say about this is that Rodin was unable to imagine a head that went with the body, that would stride along with it. Simplicity, in any case, can be carried no further than this. Nor will any expression come from the strider…. We need only think of men who took part in the war: their motives were as various and changeable as the clouds in the sky; but no matter; their bodies were already under way.
Alain, Spielregeln der Kunst, 1921
The shift of attention to the observation of behavior has far-reaching consequences for psychology in the 192, os.[98] The category of expression, as a form of inner experience, undergoes a dramatic devaluation. In a positive revaluation of scientific procedures, the eyes of the other acquire the power to secure and validate the self's identity: only that which is subject to simultaneous registration by at least two observers—ultimately suggesting phenomena that can be captured on film—can be accepted as “fact.” The decline of expression as the signifying counterpart to an interior psychological event ends the ideal of authenticity that had dominated German culture since the eighteenth century. The decade of the new objectivity turns to a rhetoric of visible behavior, of physiognomy and pathognomy.[99];
Among the behavioral sciences, ethology and social psychology arrive reluctantly on the scene in Germany, often under the banner of American behaviorism or Russian-Soviet reflexology (Pavlov and Bekh-terev). Here, and in sociological theories of action stemming from Max
If subjective motivation is to be inferred only from observable behavior, phenomena identified as “expression” must be either bracketed off from scientific analysis or redefined as a form of behavior. And in a variety of scientific disciplines, we accordingly see expression being integrated into the field of action and gesture, for example, in the theory of expression formulated by psychologists and the linguistic theorist Karl Bühler.[101] In anthropologies exclusively geared to action, such as Arnold Gehlen's, there is no longer any place for “pure” expressive gestures.[102] The banishment of expression also does away with attempts to overcome ambivalence. With the rise of the traffic topos, every expression becomes a signal.
BÜHLER'S ACTION THEORY OF EXPRESSION
Who knows what would be left to express were it possible to wean man of the need for fiction, masks, and role playing in every form.
Karl Bühler, Ausdruckstheorie
Plessner's Grenzen involved a shock for those accustomed to the bourgeois concept of culture based on interiority. A comparison of his 192,4 leap into the science of behavior with Bühler's Ausdruckstheorie: Das System an der Geschichte aufgezeigt, published in 1933, works to sharpen the contours of Plessner's polemic against the cult of expression. Karl Bühler's book is part of a rhetoric of the body; it begins with observations on the gestural language of the cinema and ends by reproducing Quintilian's discussion of the rhetorical functions of miming and gesture. In his look back into history, Bühler lays out a panorama of lexicographic and physiological explanations of expressive movements from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the physiognomy
His point of departure is a principle that has meanwhile emerged as a commonplace of the new objectivity decade:
It is necessary for us to have a living organism present before us in the space in which it acts, if we are to discern from its movements in what way and toward what end it acts…. A behaviorist can do this by observing the reactions of an animal or a child in a given experimental situation, and we can also do it in natural life situations, in which we follow animals and our fellows with an understanding gaze. There is only one type of observation for which it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to fix what is seen neatly and simply in its own scientific language, and that is introspection, when the attempt is made to discern from experience as such what can at bottom be seen only with outwardly directed (physical) eyes. (163)
From the perspective of action, the theatrical doctrine of Johann Jakob Engel, published in 1785–86 under the title Ideen zur einer Mimik, moves to the center of Bühler's historical investigation, because this text understands every expression as the “action impulse” and elaborates it in the form of self-enactment.
Amazingly enough, Bühler devotes the most extensive chapter of his book to the image of the introspective observer; when it comes to analyzing experience, he has high regard for Ludwig Klages, the representative of this scientifically suspect procedure, and praises him as a graphologist. Bühler's focus on Klages also gives an opportunity to articulate both his own critique of behaviorist reductionism and his elementary objections to the psychophysiology of Wundt. In contrast to tendencies in experimental psychology (“Expression becomes consumptive in the laboratory, when one attempts to produce it in experimental subjects outfitted with pulse and respiration meters”), Bühler emphasizes, Klages never loses sight of the whole. Bühler calls on others, who disdain Klages's work as “obscurantist” from the standpoint of the “exact” sciences, to take his challenge seriously; he names Klages the “first consistent relativity theorist of expression” (137), because the latter explains even the most inconspicuous expressive gesture in relation to the whole.
Bühler's objections to Klages's theory of expression are nevertheless so fundamental that his praise pales in comparison. The problem is that Klages assumes the existence of unfalsified expression as “pure emotional outpouring,” which can take place independently of such physiological
In order to lay bare pure expression, Klages has to free it of three extraneous elements:
Whatever has passed through consciousness, becoming through reflection the means to an intended end, Klages excludes from the sphere of pure expression.
Expressive movements bound up in historical or culturally determined conventions, which are therefore variable, cannot be regarded as genuine outpourings.
“Spontaneous” movements that are in fact the product of a learning process or take place merely as a reflex response to an external stimulus have no more claim to the status of expression than gestures that serve to accomplish intentional communication.
Will represents for Klages a “universal inhibitor” that must be excised from expressive motion if expression's origin is to be recognized; the will can never dictate genuine expression. Klages illustrates the point with the following example:
When the destructive urge is discharged in the pounding of a fist, it is directed neither against the table nor against any other things but aims instead at the impression of resistance, because only in palpable resistance can breaking, destroying, or overcoming be experienced. The condition of anger, the destructive drive, is fulfilled in the breaking of resistance, and the self that falls prey to it executes the movement as if driven to do so, thus entirely without consideration of what occasioned it. Expressive movement is always goalless, in most cases even inappropriate, as indeed the example of pounding on the table, which results also in the inkwell falling to the floor, reveals. If we regard this as a reason for calling the urge to emotional expression blind, still we may not overlook the fact that it is no less sensible for being so. Given this qualification, we may formulate as follows: arbitrary movement completes a prior intention; expressive movement follows the stimulus of an impression.[103]
Ludwig Klages separates will from expression with a “pure cut.” In his terms, all arbitrary movements are movements that have been constrained by the will: “What is the aiming of a marksman but the constraining
The contrast to Plessner's attitude toward expression, as we shall see, is considerable. But, while a comparison with Ludwig Klages's theory of expression makes us aware of the dimensions of noninstrumental playfulness Plessner leaves out, Klages's ousting of the theatrical, masks, and all elements of self-enactment reminds us that unfalsified feeling and pure expression remain part of his relentlessly exclusivist fundamentalism, that he subjects it all the same to an extreme formal discipline.
Bühler's critique of Klages's theory of expression is coolly composed and informed equally by the latest results of animal behavior research and the insights of the Russian and Soviet reflexologists. Regarding anger, he remarks dryly:
A man who is burning with anger sometimes pounds on the table purely for purposes of discharge; that is true. It may be that something analogous sometimes occurs in the animal world; but it is a mistake to regard the substance of animal behavior as parallel to the sort of human outburst that results in the inkwell tipping over. For, first of all, it seems dubious to me that inkwells in animal habitats would be located as regularly as they are among humans in precisely the spot most inconvenient to the angered being. And, second, an accumulation of serious impairments wrought of such affairs would necessarily critically impair survivability for any living being. Our first and second reason here are inherently related, and research into animal life has shown how they are related, how animals learn to avoid subjecting themselves to serious impairments. Klages indeed adopted the old formula, already put forward by the stoics, whereby animal behavior subsequent to such outbursts is blind, but “no less sensible”; but he has left it entirely up to us to guess how he really imagines the harmony between what is subjectively sensible and the objective requirements of life. (175)
Bühler's criterion of objective requirements recalls the perspective that guided science and the arts more generally in the new objectivity decade. In contrast to Klages, he emphasizes expression's inextricability from verbal conventions, its contingence on physiology, and its dependence on factors of socialization, but Bühler does not do away with the latitude left over for creativity in human expression. As a former physician, he is eager to refer back to findings in physiology, anatomy, and re-flexology to undercut the theory that pure expression is not learned behavior. Klages may assert that genuine expression takes place in a manner just as unmediated as changes in physical digestive processes, given a change in food; but Bühler notes that Pavlovian experiments with trained animals had demonstrated the extent to which physiological secretions and digestion are conditioned:
Saliva and glandular excretions are both subject to conditioning. According to the comparison Klages himself puts forward, so presumably, to a degree that must be established, is imitative expression. (158)
In the future, Bühler hopes, the empirical sciences will achieve greater clarity concerning neurohormonal regulation of the affects. A climate of disillusioned realism forms the modern context for his treatment of Klages's theory of expression as a relic of the human sciences: Klages ignores the discoveries of the natural sciences in order to avoid obfuscating physiologically the notion of a pure outpouring. The theory may indeed represent an awareness of the whole; still it is archaic.
Bühler, however, goes on to note that in film and theater, as well as in the lifestyle of his contemporary sophisticates, pathetic expressive movements were giving way to restrained gestures, indirect signs, and broken voices. He claims that the contemporary lifestyle—which a trip to America had doubtless helped him study—eschews all types of gestural displays “carried out for purely expressive purposes and therefore removed from objective action and objectively representative speech.” In this way, he foregrounds the social function of mimic movements as a means of communication. Gestures—rather than being (recall Karl Jaspers's claim about the masses' existential form)—have come to affect all sectors of culture. Bühler directs his attention to the function of expressive movements in social traffic; his “semiotics of the affects” investigates the intersubjective “game” of mimic movements, of reciprocal processes of address and response (50, 2,2,, 136). Even the most fleeting of expressive phenomena in the most everyday situation contain a “dramatic
In contrast to the theorists of expression from the fields of medicine or psychophysiology, to which the theater remained suspect, the grammar of “illusory gestures” is of great scientific interest to Bühler. He values the moment of self-enactment in communication and studies actors at work to analyze it. The ubiquity of masks in early human history not only indicates a magical mind-set; it also prompts him to inquire into “the meaning of the motionless mask, as a staple in the inventory of an actor's properties, what it has to offer and what it leaves out.”
What it offered must have been valuable at the time and what it left out must not have been worth pursuing; for it is a priori unlikely that the mask is nothing but a historical relic and that that which it excluded was entirely unknown. (16)
Bühler's positive assessment of mask coincides entirely with Plessner's code of conduct, even if it remains true that, in contrast to Plessner, Bühler emphasizes the intersubjective function.
Bühler also addresses a problematic that we discuss later in the context of Ernst Jünger's theory of perception. It has to do with the rise of the new technological media, and the way they are put to work in an experimental psychology of expression. Bühler believes that Philipp Lersch makes exemplary use of film in experiments he reports in his 1932, book, Gesicht der Seele. Lersch filmed unwitting subjects taking personality tests and analyzed their eye behavior, including eyelid coordinates, angle of vision, and eye movement. Photograms—shadowlike images on light-sensitive paper—allowed Lersch to make precise measurements of the “position of the eyeball in the coordinate system of the eye socket” and compare the “expressive valences of the eyelid movement” with the subject's overall habitus. The procedure suffers, however, from the problem usually associated with the use of the new media: it isolates the phenomena. Isolation, as Bühler himself points out, is among the accepted procedures in the “house of science.” At the same time, however, science threatens to mistake its object in favor of methods designed to ensure scientific precision. Lersch makes great use of scissors: from strips of film he cuts out particularly suggestive frames and uses the scissors again to separate the eyes and surrounding area from the nose and mouth. In this case, Bühler considers the isolating procedure a success, because the selection includes the “fruitful moments” of facial play, which, in addition, represent the “successive forms” of expressive movement (81).
Thus did it seem possible in certain situations to classify physiologically based narrowing of the eyelids with basic expressive valences (of active coping, for example).
The physical rhetoric gets lost in a technologized space, which no longer corresponds to what Quintilian had in mind in his treatment of the uses of gestures and facial expressions. In the writings of Walter Serner and Ernst Jünger, the use of technological apparatuses designed to record expressive movements begins in fact to condition them.
PLESSNER'S EXCLUSION OF EXPRESSION
We have already seen that in 1924 Plessner feels obliged to combat expressionism. What he means by the term is, variously, the fundamentalism of the radical movements, with their cult of authenticity and ethics of conviction, which Max Weber had criticized, or the unconventional manners of the youth movement. He takes these diffuse variations of the concept for signs of an inner experience of impotence, perplexity, and frenzy stemming from the memory of defeat. Expressionism is its symptom.
Plessner is not alone in this estimation. “At bottom the reaction of expressionism was more pathological than critical,” we read in Walter Benjamin. “It sought to overcome the times that gave rise to it by making itself the expression of those times.”[104] In all the expressionisms identified by Plessner he discovers phenomena that, by virtue of a self-disarming gesture, range dangerously near a zone of “ridiculousness,” in which the body is delivered up defenseless to its attacker and the price levied for expression is abandonment. Consequently, the urge for unbroken expression cannot in Plessner's anthropology indicate an attempt at meaningfulness; rather, Plessner uses this category to mark off the animal kingdom from the world of human being:
Animals are ultimately direct and genuine in expression as well. If it all came down to expression, nature would have remained at the level of the most elementary beings, sparing itself the indirection of man. (106)
Those, therefore—so runs the logic—who would elevate “genuine expression” to cult status blur the boundaries between the animal and the human, rob themselves of the defensive protection of distance, and soon fall victim to ridiculousness.
In Plessner's new objectivity anthropology of 192,4, he cries out for a militant front against “everything expressive, all forms of eruptive genuineness” (107). His code of conduct proclaims that untruth that protects
Plessner's call for a civilized “hygiene of the soul” (87) presupposes the use of violent means to channel the raw energy of drives. But if man is “by nature artificial,” why use force to prevent the “raw” psyche from following the path of least resistance to expression? Via the risk of spontaneity, the dualism between mind and physical drives sneaks back into Plessner's anthropology. Scheler, on the other hand, registering the same set of facts, derives the need for sublimation.
The violent means with which Plessner diverts the urge for direct expression are as follows: tactical maneuvering; conventional masks; diplomatic balance—a series of stratagems that he summarizes all together as Verhaltenheit
[*] “Restraint,” though the best rendering here may be “mannered behavior,” to preserve the root meaning of Verhalten as behavior.
The term itself suggests that behavioral self-reflection can be a guide to psychological externalization. Among its extended meanings are a range of techniques for slowing things down, for deferring gratification, or even for a self-destructive holding (Verhalten) of the breath (Diogenes supposedly used this technique to exit life voluntarily). From putting a damper on “eruptive” emotion all the way to suffocation, Verhaltenheit suggests an act of mental awareness, which is what Plessner demands of his “practical occasionalists.” The mime of Verhaltenheit is the smile; it avoids “the extreme of the affectively charged grimace.”[105] The effect is pleasant: inside Plessner's fencing hall sounds are subdued (and the hordes roar from farther away).The concept of Verhaltenheit introduces a remarkable fissure in Plessner's thought, which once again bears on the special status he accords to woman. “It is not good,” he repeats once more, “to disappear totally in expression,” illustrating the dictum with a comparison that would recant
The cry for a corsetless form of dress deserves an echo only in the case of very good figures. Why should it be otherwise in the psychological sphere?[106]
That there could be such a thing as a naturally “good figure” in psychology, supposedly bound exclusively to artificiality, Plessner had categorically denied in his code of male conduct.
Just a year after the publication of Grenzen we find a more moderate attitude in Plessner's short essay, “Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks,” which nevertheless will have far-reaching consequences for the further development of the theory of expression.[107] The dualism is obscured, the pathos absent from his delineation of the dangers of expressionism. Perhaps he owes this pragmatic turn to the Dutch zoologist Buytendijk (identified as a coauthor). Buytendijk's experiments with toads supply a broad range of new considerations, reaching ultimately to Klages's theory of expression. At issue for Plessner now is an image of movement in its entirety: in expression he recognizes the relationship between changing internal states and the external environment understood as a structured field. He discovers the “intermediate sphere” of the “social world” as an expressive space in which the “play of functions” in interpersonal relations becomes visible. This behavioral stratum, the sphere of the “reciprocal mutuality of bodies,” is where the formal language of the psyche develops. It neither originates in a “mimetic ur-alphabet,” as Klages maintains, nor slots into categories of instrumental activity. Rather, it is an element of intersubjective coexistence. Plessner's emphasis in this text falls more radically on the turn outward than it had in Grenzen but eschews dramatization in any form. The “internal localization of the psychological in the body,” he remarks laconically, “is understood as nonsense.” Expressive movements are part of the formal language of behavior; knowledge of the situation in which they occur makes them understandable. While the civil war atmosphere remains evident in Grenzen, the new essay concentrates on a third sphere, the sphere of relaxed interpersonal behavior.
Scheler's 1928 Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, in contrast, displays a generalized upgrading of natural expression. Against Darwin, who saw in expression an “epitome of atavistic instrumental actions,” the rudiment of a practical gesture that had lost its communicative meaning, Scheler accords expression the status of an urphenomenon of life.[108] It is present even in plant life but acquires the function of understanding
In Scheler's understanding, the question of the “genuineness” of expression-in the sense of its immediacy-therefore does not arise. Nor does he consent to Plessner's rigid behavioral admonition, that letting oneself go in expression courts the “catastrophe of ridiculousness.” Scheler's advice is to tolerate the risk of being ridiculous. He wagers on the doctrine of nonresistance to evil, recommended by Spinoza in his ethics, because drives are malleable only as they come to expression. He knows that the militant negation of drives leads only to the opposite of what one intended; in his view, it would thus not merely be unreasonable but directly counterproductive to attempt, as Plessner does, to prohibit “eruptive” expression. Reason is not capable of regulating passion, unless—thanks to sublimation—it becomes a passion itself.[110]
CONVENTIONS OF PAIN
It is impossible for a man, with his arms all akimbo in strenuous defence, simultaneously to open his mouth to scream out loud, for the simple reason that the arm movements presuppose a chest taut with the pressure of expiration.
Charles Bell on the puzzle of Laocoön, 1806
The critique of expression reflects not only the influence of behaviorism, the concentration on observable behavior, and the general struggle against psychologism but an idea found in Nietzsche as well. The critique's target is almost exclusively the expression of pain. The experience of war had unleashed extreme and contradictory expressive movements focused on pain: the cultivation of cool armoring to achieve honor and hardness; the metaphysical interpretation of the meaning of suffering; and unmediated “naive expressions of pain and suffering,” in which pain simply remained pain.[111]
Suddenly abandoning his own cool armoring in 1916, Scheler found a human way out of the situation. Now, directly alongside the armored ego, the figure of the defenseless creature achieves currency: “The scream of the creature, restrained so long, once again echoes freely, bitterly through the universe.”[112] Plessner would rescind the distinction between the icon of the warrior and the icon of the creature by elevating once again to ideal status the discipline of Verhaltenheit that Scheler had dropped; Plessner draws a veil over the icon of the creature, thereby withdrawing from the public gaze.
Under the banner of the new objectivity, writers in the 19205 explore the convention of pained expression and its social function. Nietzsche's idea comes in for an update. “Every sufferer searches instinctively for the cause of his suffering; more precisely, he seeks a perpetrator,” writes Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals. The search begins, in any event, not within the body but in the world outside it. From an evolutionary perspective, this search is “rational” behavior: ultimately the species that understands its pains primarily as indicators of external sources of suffering, only turning later to possible internal causes, will gain a survival advantage.[113]
New objectivity writers focus their attention on the social constellation in which pain makes its appearance. That suffering in the form of “pure outburst” might be able to find an adequate literary form for itself is an idea that inspires Brecht to mockery:
People also say that this or that writer has had some bad experience, but he has lent fine expression to his suffering and so can be grateful for it: something came of the sorrows; they expressed the man. Besides, in being formulated, they have been ameliorated in part. The suffering passes, the poem remains, they say, smartly rubbing their hands. But how is it when the suffering has not passed? When it remains there just the same-if not for the singer of verses, then for those who cannot sing?[114]
Pain always comes to expression within the frame of convention, so that it is difficult to say in what form pain finds its genuine expression. Karl Bühler compares two attitudes toward pain, without deciding which of the two deserves the seal of genuineness:
The so-called primitive man suffering pain and sadness breaks out in loud plaintive tones, rips his clothes, and injures himself by his own hand; all of this in essentially the same situations in which man today remains silent, wraps black crepe around his arm, and goes neatly about his business. (166)
Programmatic literary statements that bluntly repudiate the cult of expression offer three general arguments. The first is that the creature's scream always counts on being heard in some seat of judgment, whether in the universe or the republic. In 1920, the expressionist Rudolf Leon-hard offered the following to his readers:
For the word is not a means of conveying information, but rather a means of expression, is expression itself…. It is a sound issuing from the depths of isolation, and the miracle of communication lies not in the mouth but in the ear. The most sacred mystery is that we are heard and understood.[115]
The expression of pain has the quality of an appeal and therefore does convey information; it is not the act of solipsism that it pretends to be. Embedded in the convention of the “penitential pilgrimage,” it anticipates grace in heaven or a merciful audience on earth.
At issue in the expressionist topos of the creature's scream was the medium of writing itself. Since the conventions of writing could not replicate the scream unchanged, the expressionists pursued the detour of the form, in order, on the one hand, to forge a way for the primal utterance and, on the other, to reflect the inappropriateness of artificial signs.
The decade of the new objectivity held out the possibility of calling on the techniques of the physiognomic gaze to get beyond the dilemma inherent in writing, as the older expressive medium. The medium of photography, the camera's eye, meant that immediacy had finally found its neutral medium in technology. The physiognomy of the screamer could be photographed; the unwritten scream came out of the radio, without mediation—like music.
A second argument for the critique of the cult of expression insists on the performative aspect in every expression:
When bankers express themselves to each other, or politicians, then we know that they are acting at the same time; even when a sick person expresses his pain, he also signals with his finger to the doctor or others gathered around,
In the epic theater, Brecht replaces the category of expression with that of the gesture and—as Plessner does—defines it as “expression in the light of an action.” The gesture reconnects the abstract signs of communication to the body. If the sign exists within the exclusion of the body, the gesture returns the body to center stage; the gesture brings the sign back to the site and moment of its production (Carrie Asman). The danger of this reconnection, however, is that the supremacy of the sign will overwhelm the body, leaving nothing but a ruin with an allegorical meaning attached to it.
A third argument for the repudiation of the cult of expression has to do with the way the repercussions of prescribed, ritualized expressive conventions on the emotions become the focus of attention. The earlier psychological finding, that physiological movements produce emotion, that crying not only is rooted in sadness but can also occasion it, acquires a new currency under the influence of behaviorism.[117] The technique of producing affects mechanically travels from the theater to the marketplace, and from advertising back to theater. A new field of philosophical and sociological reflection opens up; research begins to describe the conventions of symbolic interaction as a medium of expression in order to uncover the historically variable core of expression. The criticism of expression combines the critique of ideology with a search for the hidden center of power behind the expression. Benjamin discovers in the poetic signs of allegory not only the convention of expression but also the expression of convention, which is, “therefore, the expression of authority, secret as befits the dignity of its origins and public in accord with its sphere of validity,” as he formulated it for the baroque period.[118] For the modern period, of course, no authority can claim the dignity of an “origin.”
The new objectivity subjects expression to the functionalist gaze and makes a corresponding reduction in its existential weight. If man is conceived as “a being poised for action” (Plessner), it is the pragmatic aspect of expressive gestures that captures all the attention. To those who fear that the result will be a “flattening” of expression, the functional-ism of the new objectivity points to a gain in the spatial breadth of action. The idea of psychological depth comes in for a hearing as to whether it necessarily makes the field of action smaller. The mobile subject upon
The critique of expression opens up a new space of sociological reflection focused on symbolic forms. Expression is no longer an unfiltered manifestation of a stimulus center, as Klages had claimed. Scheler emphasizes the intellectual element in the spontaneous; Plessner notes that every expression, as soon as it appears, becomes subject to the regularities of the symbolic order. Karl Bühler describes expression in terms of its conditionality, between physiological states and external stimuli in the field of communicative action. Kracauer stresses the camera's ability to undermine the conventions of the expressive arts, in order to make visible the natural foundation that exists unconsciously in the frozen gesture. Brecht recognizes the intersubjective significatory character of self-expression, drawing far-reaching consequences from it. Communicative signs depend on conventions, and these conventions underlay the regularities of class, the public sphere, the media, and the market. The conventions represent the anonymous dark side of the expressive intentional mirror-its reified nature and commodity character—but do not mean disaster. The arts and sciences of the new objectivity decade have confidence in their ability to bring some light into the darkness of reification. This sense of self-confidence makes them part of a historical process that will soon be demanding new formulas for the authenticity of pain. In the 19305, attention will turn to the natural history of the expressive mirror's other side.
PLESSNER-SCHMITT:
ASSOCIATION AND DISSOCIATION
In the end phase of the republic, Helmuth Plessner radicalizes the political elements of his theory.[119] The inclination toward Verhaltenheit, which tempered the advice he was giving in 1924, is gone. Now an emphasis on decisions gives his anthropology a practical edge. If he once considered it “a crime to employ brute force, instead of the logic of play,” now his code of conduct leads into the realm of political anthropology, which (for the sake of conceptual clarity as regards the “political”) includes, provisionally, the physical killing of the other.
In his 1931 book Macht und menschliche Natur, in any case, Pless-ner has no reservations about relying on Der Begriff des Politischen (1927), by Carl Schmitt, who in turn refers to Plessner's work in Begriff's second edition (1932), as an adequate anthropological foundation for his theory.[120] The affinities of Plessner's 1931 text—which sets aside or drops the central concepts of 192,4, such as balance, compensation, play, tact, Verhaltenheit, and diplomacy—and Schmitt's study of politics are little short of astounding. Plessner has meanwhile gone over to the idea that, “in an epoch in which dictatorship is a living power,” it has become impossible to continue reflecting naively about politics within the categories of classical liberalism. Politics, says Plessner now, means a struggle for power, and the task of the anthropologist is to discover the extent to which this will to power is part of man's essence.
Plessner now realizes that the agonistic political sphere is not some contingent physical existential state external to man, but that the “origi-nary relation of friend to enemy” is to be counted among his fundamental anthropological conditions.[121] In opposition to Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, whom he reproaches for contriving images of a “genuine” human being, Plessner strives in his anthropology to understand the individual as an “accountable subject” (Zurechnungssubjekt) in the violent world. Those, like these two rivals, who stretch philosophical anthropology between the poles of the leap into genuineness, on the one hand, and the forgetfulness of Man, on the other, manage only to update Luther's split between a private sphere of salvation and a public sphere of violence.[122] In contrast, Plessner insists that the individual, as a being consigned to artificiality from the moment of birth, can realize himself only in the sphere of “man.” He voices the suspicion that these existential doctrines, obsessed with genuineness, actually underwrite political indifference and are the real sponsors of violence. Therefore he demands the politicization of anthropology, which he supposes will keep politics from setting an ambush for anthropology.
The theoretical alliance between Plessner and Schmitt, their exchange of arguments and approving references, went on for a decade-after 1933 Plessner allowed the episode to sink out of sight; and in the decades following 1945, the issue of the liaison, which might have occasioned deeper insights into the fate of the Weimar intelligentsia, was simply not taken up. While the correspondences between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt have meanwhile become the focus of extensive research, the investigation of affinities between Plessner's early works
It is remarkable and telling that all three, Plessner, Benjamin, and Schmitt, felt themselves drawn to the baroque period. The “stage and theatrical feel of those engaged in political action in the seventeenth century” obviously confronted them with an extreme example of representation, and it fascinated them.[123] Equally conspicuous is their combination of the new objectivity concept of action with the aestheticizing of evil. “You must give the Devil his due,”
[*] The phrase is in English in the original.
writes Plessner, as a motto above the introduction to his Grenzen of 192,4. In an incidental note, he registers the “Luciferian” appeal emanating from decisive men. The motif of gambling with the devil leads directly to a principle the new objectivity shares with the seventeenth century's political codes of conduct. As soon as the hope for religious redemption disappears, the political subject tries to intervene in the machinery of violence. The cult of evil is an inversion of the salvation narrative.[124] We read already as early as 1649: “For he / who would live among the foxes and wolves / must also howl with them.”[125]Max Weber, distancing himself from the youth movement's passionate impatience, put the principle in terms of the saying: “Mind you, the devil is old; grow old to understand him.”[126] He points out the need to immerse oneself in an enemy's assumptions and empirical characteristics, study and assess them, rather than increasing the enemy's power by disarming or taking flight. Plessner seconds the idea in Grenzen, coining the new objectivity slogan: “Dealing with reality means dealing with the devil” (12,6). Benjamin lays stress on the way a patient study of fascinating evil can also bring its weaknesses to light: “Lucifer is beautiful…. The beautiful brings to expression the fact that what he lacks is an ultimate totality.”[127] Schmitt, Plessner, and Benjamin—along with the contemporary avant-garde—dream of amoral mobility, which searches for spaces of lawlessness in which to indulge itself, turns against security-mindedness of neutrality, and cultivates the consciousness of danger. Readings of Kierkegaard and Sorel, Nietzsche and Lenin, Schopenhauer and Hobbes blend strangely in their minds. Remarkable correspondences run straight through the various political camps.
Lucifer may have been their identifying sign—the angel who fell from heaven like a lightning bolt and claims, as prince of darkness, to be the bringer of light.[128] While coming to some arrangement with the idea
In 1932 Schmitt acknowledges that Plessner's anthropology, through its “venturesome” realism in the construction of man as a risky being and its “positive reference to danger,” may well come “closer to ‘evil’ than to goodness.”[129] Everything depends for both thinkers on the moment of decision “out of nothing.” Lacking a solid basis in nature or a sheltering metaphysics, an individual makes an unending series of decisions in order to lead an active life and, in doing so, secure his identity. Schmitt, admittedly, has very stable moorings. His metaphysical shelter is Catholicism, and his decisions rest on the pillars of a “healthy economy inside the strong state.” Like Max Weber, he continues to adhere to the liberal age's uncontested dogma of separate spheres for production and consumption, price-setting and the market, with no guidance from ethics or a specific worldview, and most certainly not from politics.[130]
Plessner's Grenzen already has conceptual figures that blend easily with Schmitt's friend-enemy formula of 192,7. In Macht und mensch-liche Natur, Plessner elaborates his thesis of the individual's eccentric position, taking it in the direction of a political anthropology. Yet Plessner's individual, in contrast to Schmitt's, has to see to his own needs, so that institutions can take nothing away from him; he must continually reconstitute his native spheres, which were not his at birth, as he endlessly makes and remakes his “open foreignness.” Thus he takes over an area between the native zone and the “uncanny reality” of hostile foreignness.[131] In the psychophysiological dynamic of drawing boundaries between the familiar circle and unfamiliar otherness—the line traced with a duelist's foil—Plessner glimpses the original constitution of man's essence.
Since the sphere of familiarity has no natural boundaries, uncanny forces threaten every moment to colonize it. According to Plessner, no humanitarian concept offers to protect it. But what then? Plessner's reference to Schmitt means in this context that the two agree on the necessity of violence, which in turn necessitates the drawing of boundaries. In certain concretely existing circumstances, otherness can imply the negation of “one's own form of existence,” and in that case, Schmitt writes, “the real possibility of physical killing” becomes part of the meaning of the friend-enemy concept.[132]
This extreme, which marks the borderline case in Schmitt's 1927 text, may seem to be the point where the two theories coincide but can also
Degrees of intensity in separation had an aesthetic appeal for the Weimar intelligentsia equal to that of coolness. Plessner's persona constantly draws from the mirror of the other as potential enemy an image of a self that would be adequate in that reality (a figure in the mirror stage of identity formation is always in flux). Schmitt's theory opens up the possibility of escape from the spell of isolation, of leaving the area of that which has been distinguished, in order to enter the terrain of political relevance on the level of the state. Now, before a broader public, Plessner wants to frame the necessary decisions anthropologically.
That Plessner, in contrast to Schmitt, failed in the endeavor is not merely the consequence of external conditions. To this day, the single extensive work devoted to the case comes to the conclusion that Schmitt's theory of the state is the “congenial complement” of Plessner's anthropology. It calls Schmitt's theory of the political the “operationalization of Plessner's anthropological analysis of the present.”[134] This judgment obscures other possibilities and I cannot agree with it. Yet if we read the two works in their political context as a single text, we can use the putative identity to rescue both thinkers from the intellectual taboo hovering about their temporary connection. And we can more easily reconstruct the contours of the individual theories and chart their divergence.
For while Plessner's theory hinges on the myth of the individual, Schmitt's concepts put the state at the center of attention.
Perhaps in 1932 both thinkers would have energetically denied the possibility that their theories would clash on the stage of the historical process. They probably read each other's work extremely selectively. The seed of conflict was already there in 1931, in Plessner's orientation toward Dilthey's historicism and his penetrating understanding of aspects of psychoanalysis. Referring to Freud, Plessner defines the “other as that which is familiar and surreptitiously one's own externalized, and therefore uncanny.”[135] Schmitt approaches this definition only after the Second World War, recalling Theodor Daubler's formula, “The enemy is the form assumed by our own question.” Schmitt's empty matrix of the friend-enemy relation arbitrarily brings in substances at any time, whereas Plessner's definition of the other categorically excludes biological determinacy. He takes over the relativity of all boundary markings from historicism:
Cultural history manifests the unremitting displacement of the horizon of the uncanny and, correlatively, of the sphere of friendly familiarity, so that the figural transformation of the friend-enemy relation can only be investigated historically.[136]
Was it Dilthey's relativism that prevented Plessner from constituting as absolute the familiar sphere of a people (Vo/&)? Was it his aversion to community, which the legal theorists of the state sought to instrumen-talize? Since Plessner's initial point of departure was not an ontologically determined marking of boundaries but rather one variably informed by the play of power, he was unable for theoretical reasons to follow Schmitt when, in 1933, the latter definitively introduced racial identity into his matrix, as the criterion for friend. An anti-Semitic turn-in “hatred of the concept of law” (Raphael Gross) as the defining characteristic of Judaism—marks all of Schmitt's commentaries on constitutional doctrine in the 192, os.[137] Racial identity now irrevocably becomes the substance, enriched by power, of Schmitt's sphere of familiarity; as a result of racial politics, the sphere necessarily became for Plessner one of mistrust.
A further indication of both like-mindedness and differentiation is apparent as early as 192,4 in the agreement of Plessner and Schmitt in their admiration of the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.[138] Even in the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky's character
When Plessner published a new edition of his book Die verspatete Nation in 1959, he lumped together Schmitt's decisionism and Heidegger's anthropology, ascribing to both the “aestheticizing of politics,” which, in Benjamin's formulation, gave impetus to fascism.[140] Plessner's student Christian Graf von Krockow had a year earlier published the first conclusive work on decisionism in Schmitt, Heidegger, and Jünger. Von Krockow, who quotes the critique of communitarian radicalism from Grenzen (1924) and the “principle of the indecipherability” of the historical from Macht und menschliche Natur (1931), does not mention the interconnections between Plessner's and Schmitt's conceptualizations. We infer indirectly from the introduction what he regards as the differences between the two. In the aftermath of Nietzsche, according to von Krockow, it was not only conceivable but consistent to imagine an individual who throws off all transcendental norms in order to run the risk of his own decisions. Throwing them off, he elevates the burden of existence to the extreme. “For, having renounced all authoritative ties, the individual would find himself surrounded, in normative terms, by ‘nothingness.’” Von Krockow recapitulates the intellectual situation Plessner experienced in 1924 in order to supplement it with an idea that leaves open the possibility of rescuing decisionism in humanistic terms:
Insofar as the humanity of the individual is indicated by his being in the midst of decision, the outermost step would perhaps produce something like humanity as a life form—but it remains a difficult question, whether such a life form is tolerable or even at all possible.[141]
If at this point a free exchange of arguments among Plessner, Heidegger, and Schmitt even remains possible within a humanistic frame, the next step is to separate out their respective positions. Von Krockow's invocation of the burden of existence has already suggested that the individual, constitutionally overburdened by the permanent pressure of making decisions
Helmuth Plessner decides on the hazards of exile, although of course it was really not a decision.
A HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR THE CODES OF CONDUCT
Plessner's code of conduct aims at achieving the participation of the single individual in existing structures of power. He depicts an individual who, with a high degree of reflexive alertness, is supposed to find his identity in a balance between the demarcation of his physicality, the bracketing of his longing for community, and dissociation from the enemy sphere. Where in the Weimar Republic do we find a social carrier for such a concept? Within recognized political camps, certainly, it would be hard to locate.
Literary examples come spontaneously to mind—the character of the confidence man in Walter Serner's Handbrevier fur Hochstapler, for example, or the image of the storm troop commander, conceived by Ernst Jünger. In Jünger's construction, we find the tense alertness demanded by Plessner. Here is the image of a metallic subject whose intellectual awareness never lapses, as if he “had an electric bell going off nonstop inside” him. In this figure of the maschino are elements of aestheticism, self-demarcation from the horde, the pathos of decision-making out of nothing, the defense against or colonization of the other under “cool” skies—all of these blended together in their military variants.
Jünger's figure also dispenses with the orienting mechanisms of social institutions and minimizes integration into social collectives. Economic motives, on Jünger's stage, as on Plessner's, flash brightly in their absence. The spotlight shines on a rare example: the sovereign subject acting alone, putting its awareness to the test in an unending series of duels—yet betraying no consciousness of imperative drives or other determinants that mediate its identity. This fabulous figure of the individual was obviously a key figure of the imaginary that held the Weimar public in its spell. Where, however, were its institutional moorings? In what uniform did it enter the arena of politics? The communitarian ideologies of the left as well as the right formed the warm spheres that hatched the cool idol with its armor intact.
By publishing his anthropological treatise on the subject of power in the Fachshriften zur Politik und staatsbiirgerlichen Erziehung, Plessner was seeking to gain a hearing for his ideas inside state institutions, but Carl Schmitt, who incorporated them into his theory of power, was probably the only one who understood the ramifications of the complicated text. Once it becomes clear that there is no social carrier for the boundary subject's code of conduct, however, there remains nothing much to it—outside characterology! In the final analysis, the code thus amounts to a lifestyle conceived as a style of power.
The courtly codes of distance as the Weimar period updated them do not end with this deadly trajectory into decisionism. We follow their remarkable transformation in a different social stratum in a later chapter about the radar type. The modernization of the codes in heroic form, however, seems to have run its course at the close of the 19205.
In the 19305, politically cut off from the actual developmental space in which the modernization took place, exiled intellectuals begin to reconstruct a historical context for the courtly code of conduct. Norbert Elias, escaping to Switzerland, France, and England, undertakes his cultural historical studies in a search for another type of subject. He identifies a “rational type,” set aside in favor of its successors, the professional bourgeois ratio and the inner-directed subject of the Protestant ethic. Elias finds this example of “existence at a distance” in court society, beneath the rubble of the nineteenth-century cult of psychologizing.[142]
In a world lacking in security, the prebourgeois rational type finds orientation in a set of behavioral rules that teach him to gauge degrees of intimacy and distance. He is required to move about on terrain in which “free-wheeling emotion” of any sort is penalized with social decline or degradation. Conspicuous in Elias's reconstruction of courtly behavior is an anti-expressionist impulse, reminiscent of Plessner:
The dosage of an affective discharge is hard to calculate. Unmeasured, it exposes the true feelings of the person in question to such a degree that it can be damaging; it can mean giving up trump cards to a rival in the struggle for favor or prestige. It is ultimately and above all a sign of inferiority; and that is precisely the condition that a member of court fears most of all. The competitive struggle of court life thus forces the restraint of affects in favor of a precisely calculated and thoroughly nuanced bearing in social intercourse.[143]
The constraints on historical reconstruction of the 19305 inflect its critique. A self-critical concession that reality had pulled the rational type off balance, leaving it only the option of resistance, sets off a search
Removed from the dramatic decisions of the republic's end phase, and outside the compelling forces of mobilization, Werner Krauss, Nor-bert Elias, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Kantorowicz, and other scholars of court society lay bare the repressed dimension of the behavioral codes. They discover the horizons of humanism that, in Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom, allowed an admixture of goodness and virtue in moderation that was absent from the preceding decades of the avant-garde. Unable to find a political landscape in Germany for the rational type's development, they uncover a textual space in history bearing witness to just that possibility.[146]
One of the macabre aspects of German intellectual history is that the avant-garde thinkers began to excavate humanism's buried potential at a time when exile largely deprived them of any possibility for action. During the 19205 and 19305 they failed, to their own disadvantage, to recognize the modernity of the eighteenth century. Historicism, the phantom enemy, the great adversary of that passionately impatient period, was once again in demand as a medium for the recall of humanistic principles. Now readers could enjoy Gracián in all his dimensions, celebrating his attentiveness to the friendly gentility and magnanimity of the soul, the virtue of timely introspection, and the value of faithfulness. In Plotzensee and Torgau, Krauss retrieved these aspects of the Jesuit's thought.
Erich Auerbach, reacting in October 1947 to Graciáns Lebenslehre, which Krauss had sent him just after its publication in Frankfurt, refers to a merit we have not yet discussed:
I have just come across a page of notes that I made, at the very beginning of my ocean voyage [to America], reading your works. And if I'm not mistaken, I've not yet written to you anything about it. In my memory … everything pales in comparison to the Gracián book, the density and richness of which
― 98 ―is never far from my thoughts. Not only the figure of Gracián himself, but all the relations and connections that you uncover and pull together, concerning, for example, the court sphere or the concept of moderation; they are extremely interesting to me and will prove fruitful also for my own work.[147]
The atmosphere of the 19305 humanist turn is particularly evident in the chapter on Gracián's concept of moderation. Here Krauss stresses the worth of the middling virtue. This median value is not an average or a compromise. It is an “extraordinary accomplishment of combined intellectual capacities” that mediates extremes rather than eliminating them. Krauss demands achievements that may appear paradoxical: “discreet audacity” and “prudent daring” (149). Risky acts of balance transpire in the middle space. Only exceptional natures can achieve the art of balance, he concedes; they realize they must neither annihilate extreme affects with “stoic asceticism” (108) nor act them out without reserve but instead neutralize them by means of another passion. They do not tame the affects' wildness but turn their force in another direction. This balancing of affects creates a passion for balance in the service of a special interest, which is subject to political, economic, and moral definition.[148]
Ernst Jünger's diaries during the Second World War have a comparable treatment of the logic of extremes, turning it to the service of the virtue of moderation. Enforced contemplation weakens the spell of the philosophy of history in which his mobilization fantasy originated and increases his interest in what is humanly possible. An approach to the tradition of the French moralists recalls to Jünger's mind some durable humane insights, at a time in which they are being consciously called into question.[149] In his Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen, on i January 1943-shortly after he witnessed the involvement of regular army units in carrying out the genocide on the eastern front-he notes three resolutions:
First, “Live moderately,” for nearly all the difficulties in my life have stemmed from violations of moderation [see Figure 5].
Second, “Always have an eye out for the unfortunate.” Man has an inborn tendency not to perceive genuine misfortune; indeed more than that: he turns his eye away from it. Compassion lags behind.
I want finally to do away with thinking about individual salvation in the maelstrom of possible catastrophes. It is more important that one behave with dignity. We cling to the surface points of a whole that remains hidden from us, and it is precisely the escape we devise that can kill us.[150]
Krauss also compares Gracián's worldly arts with the French moralists, elucidating Gracián's circumscriptions. They distance him from the
Live moderately (Ernst Jünger with Lieutenant von Krienitz, at Regnieville, 1917. With the permission of Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach a.N.)
Nevertheless, Krauss stresses the benefits of the virtue of moderation in Gracián's code, in contrast to the fanatic attitudes of his own time. He
Not to be bad from an excess of goodness: that is the lot of someone who never gets angry. These insensitive sorts scarcely deserve to be called people (personas). Their condition does not always stem from indolence, but often from incompetence. Sensitivity, given an appropriate occasion, is an act of personality: birds often make fun of a scarecrow.