4. The Cool Persona in
New Objectivity Literature;
or, Figures Devoured by
the Shadows They Cast
UNDERMINING THE SOVEREIGN
The era of the first republic set the pain of separation and the desire for fusion-two sources of aesthetic fascination—at opposing extremes.[1] A bourgeois culture of shadings and mixed temperatures gives way to aesthetic segregation, the polarization of life spheres, and a fascination with distinct boundaries and clear contours. The phenomenon of fluid boundaries becomes as suspect in politics as in aesthetics. The art of terrible simplification grows attractive, not only because it offers relief, but primarily because it is terrible. In the hothouse climate resulting from rampant status inconsistencies, variations on cool make it possible to register distinctions;[2] the cult of separation operates to demarcate cool spaces of mobility in the overheated agglomeration centers of the metropolis. The record turns up high praise for nomadism, positive assessments of the social “ice age” that has descended, resigned acceptance of estrangement, a taste for statistical demystification, a rhetoric of forgetting, and the behaviorism of perception. Cool conduct's ritual, actions, and lifestyle inscribe themselves as traces of separation within the world of fusion's imaginary spaces: birth memories, faith in the completeness of the life cycle, longing for spheres of trust, praise for warm zones, a weakness for myths of origin.
The split into extremes of pain and fusion from what would otherwise be collective experience sounds an ominous note. Political camps
A look at the political implications of polarization reveals the one-dimensional images of the individual it sets up. At the same time, the split into opposed spheres obscures their reciprocal conditionality; both separation scenario and fusion drama draw energy from mutual negation and find in the other a horizon of uncanniness that keeps the universe intact.
One-dimensional figures of nai've pathos are singularly attractive as crystallization points of the Weimar imaginary. Institutions, in contrast, seem to some to offer a chance to repeal the separation, combining the desire for separation with the longing for fusion. Carl Schmitt, in his friend-enemy construction, formulates an ingenious key to the combination of familiarity and otherness. The pathos of distinguo, ergo sum he discovers here maintains the myth of the isolated individual intact, even while the formulaic consistency of the slogan preserves his shelter among the state-sponsored collective of friends. Paul Tillich, writing in 1932, captures the uncanny dynamic whereby separation wishes and fusion desires interpenetrate, flowing together in the stream of the National Socialist movement. “Contained in the call for community,” Tillich remarks in Die sozialistische Entscheidung, “is simultaneously a demand for the mother to be created from the son and the father to be recalled out of nothing.”[3]
Our examination of the theoretical constructions of the cool persona acquaints us with numerous variations on the attempt to recall the father out of nothing. If the writers held strictly to the slogan, we might expect to find literature populated by one-dimensional characters, but the scarcely concealed wish for the mother to be created as well lends a certain plasticity to the form. The program, announced with pathos, is threatened with destruction by the shadows its figures cast.
While Plessner transposes the idea of sovereignty from Schmitt's Poli-tische Theologie onto the individual, constructing his dueling subject, Walter Benjamin uses the landscape of baroque tragedy to expose presumptions of omnipotence, turning the stage's harsh spotlight on the prince to show “his status as a poor human being.”[4] Alongside his crea-tureliness, Benjamin notes the “decision-making incompetence” of the tyrant, who may indeed tirelessly emphasize his sovereignty “in stoic turns of phrase” but, subject to “the sudden caprice of emotional winds that can shift at any time,” unwittingly rediscovers himself in the role of the martyr.[5] The effect is the “dismantling of the sovereign, who is split into an ultimately ineffective, if bloody, tyrant, and a no more productive martyr.”
The introduction of the idea of sovereignty into the world of the tragedy does not lead solely to this disappointment, which seems to follow the logic of the imprisoned Mercier in Biichner's Dantons Tod: “For once, follow your phrases until you find the point where they are embodied.” Benjamin's point is a more terrible one. He dissects a character in baroque tragedy who, outfitted with all the attributes of the cool persona—“full understanding and an intact will”—holds the key to fate in his hands. Decision is his metier: he is the intriguer making strategic calculations to seize the mechanisms of the passions controlling others, which are in principle uncontrollable.
Following the trajectory of Schmitt's concept of sovereignty into Benjamin's book on baroque tragedy, we watch it dismantle the decisionists' glory, so that what remains in the end is a schemer. Benjamin registers the extremism of his contemporaries' political anthropology, but he locates their self-confidence on his tragedy's crooked plane.[6] Deprived of the illusion of a solid footing, they suffer vertigo, rushing-along with other insignias of domination—headlong into ruin.
The role of the body in Plessner's construction allows us to follow his isolated duelist into the aesthetic imagination.[7] Plessner's reflexive individual delights, as we have seen, in his possession of a self that exists in sharp distinction to the unconsciousness of physical being. In order to make an elegant presentation in society in physical form, the self must forget the body. Careful watch over the internal boundary by which the self secures its identity delivers it up to a state of chronic anxiety. If surveillance fails, blame threatens. Benjamin's aesthetic is not vulnerable to this threat. The culture of shame, and its self-evident concern for matters of distance and honor, appeals to him as well, but his writings reveal
Because, however, the most forgotten other is the body—our own body—we understand how Kafka called the cough erupting from his insides “the animal.” It was the most advanced outpost of the great herd.[9]
Schmitt's and Plessner's doctrines of sovereignty are ultimately inextricable from the world of the fathers. Both look for examples of decisions in the sanctioned space of the ancestors. Plessner admires Bismarck, brandishing him in opposition to the youth movement. Schmitt sighs over the “absence of the father.” “Legal positivism,” Schmitt still enjoys complaining after the Second World War, “kills its father and devours its children.”[10] Reading Freud's study of Moses prompts the thought that the “Yahweh religion” includes “a mythology of eating up the father” (311). Wherever he sees the figure of the father under attack, wherever he finds the father's place vacant, he senses the proximity of anarchism.
There is no place of honor for decisionist fathers in Benjamin's writings. From the early essay “Metaphysik der Jugend” to his Kafka studies there rings a craving for the destruction of the fathers' world. If it appears in the first as follows,
Daily we expend unmeasured powers, like a sleeper. What we do and think is filled with the being of our fathers and ancestors. An ungrasped symbolism enslaves us without ceremony.
we find it again in reference to Kafka's figuration of the powerful:
They are nowhere more dreadful than where they rise up out of the deepest ruin: out of the fathers.[11]
The armored figures that attract Benjamin's interest are not Plessner's or Schmitt's idols, men basking in the glory of sovereignty, but those who, subject to “the sudden caprice of emotional winds that can shift at any time, … rise like tattered, fluttering flags,” because their guide is not intellectual self-confidence but “physical impulses.”[12] On Benjamin's stage, the cool persona walks the crooked plane.
A variety of images of the cool persona surfaces in new objectivity literature, operating under the spell of total mobilization. The artists' favored self-enactment is in that pose. They stand in self-portraits in the posture of Nietzsche's North Pole voyager, casting a mercilessly distinguishing
The realism of disillusion characteristic of the time, however, means that even the heroic habitus of coolness is infiltrated by the body, its ambivalence exposed. Karl Bühler's Ausdruckstheorie analyzes the underlying physiology of coolness, isolating it for experimental examination. Philipp Lersch describes the physiology of the cool gaze—the vertical crease in the forehead, the fixed angle of vision, the narrowed eyes. After capturing the gaze in countless photographs, he subjects it to phe-nomenological interpretation.[13]
Vertical lines in the forehead had occupied theorists of expression since the time of Greek antiquity, Bühler writes, because they can be understood variously as symptoms of anger, antagonism, or concentration.[14] Lersch, in pursuit of greater descriptive precision, offers a primary explanation of forehead creases in a Darwinist mode, referring to the function of protecting the eyes from bright light, tracing them to alterations of blood pressure in the brain. Only then does he proceed to psychology, deeming them the result of an “actively antagonistic tension in which the musculature around the eye” is activated:
This concentration of psychological energy on the processing of some sort of sensory or mental object, in the sense of an adaptation to the vital intentions of the individual, is what we must always assume as given from a phenome-nological perspective, wherever we observe either the mimic act itself by which a vertical crease is made in the forehead or the lasting mimic traces of such an act.[15]
It seems plausible to Bühler to conclude that wherever we come across a vertical forehead crease, a concentration of psychological energy must be present.
Angle of vision and eyelid behavior are also part of the totality of expression. For the eyeball, depending on its direction one way or the other beneath the forehead crease, requires a specific adjustment of the eyelids and presupposes certain behavior on the part of the eyebrows. In the case of the cool gaze, what guides the focusing motion of the eye musculature is an interest. The impulse to squint is transmitted simultaneously to the muscles that lower the upper lids and raise the lower ones, and again to the muscles that open the eyes. A more or less narrow slit
Now, as concerns the psychological interpretation of the nearly covered eye, it is reasonable to conclude without further argumentation that, in the tendency to activate the lid-lifting musculature, a will to maintain apperceptive contact with the environment is at work.[16]
In situations where two people stand face to face, in which eye-to-eye contact occurs, a slight narrowing of the eyelids serves to prevent the penetration of the other's gaze. If concentrated vision through narrowed lids occurs in the absence of a human other, the assumption is that the gazer desires to master the object of the gaze. Situations calling for optical concentration place the person, like an animal in behaviorist experiments, in the mode of attack. Bühler finds the appropriate metaphor: “The gaze patrol either rushes ahead or turns back; the head first, only then the troops, the ‘torso,’ follows after.”[17]
The sharp gaze signals preparedness for action. It probes the environment intentionally, measuring and calculating what it strives to master, at the same time warding off intersubjective interference. In contrast to the habitus of contemplation, whereby eyes “rest on things,” letting them appreciate the vagueness of their contours, the sharp gaze of the attack habitus scans the environment, preparing the perceived object, as it were, for consumption. The cool gaze thus belongs to the habitus of a conqueror, the man who tackles something and, at the same time, shields himself from contact.
If it is easy to discover the traces of the cool persona in the artists' self-portraits, in their theories of perceptual acuity and characterology, it appears more rarely in the third person in their works. The causes of this disproportion reflect the Weimar Republic's absence of social structures in which such a figure could develop. Within the marginal spaces of artistic and literary production, the cool persona does thrive as an expressive figure. But here on the margins—at a remove from the machinations of power—it remains an aesthetic phenomenon, mocking the artist's ambition to penetrate to the centers of power. Somewhat frantically, therefore, artists search for points of connection with society's “cool apparatus,” finding them in the Communist Party, in the military, in the Freikorps. The situation is similar in the Catholic Church: the Fathers take their stand in the name of the mother church. They do not have to be called up out of nothing; for they have already besieged the republic.
The Marxists assume from the outset anyway that the individual traits of bourgeois heroes (the cool persona included) merely represent masks over the economic drive forces of society, which remain hidden even to the heroes. Insofar as such character masks appear on the stage or in literature, what interests Marxists is their class coding, the underlying guide to dynamic processes on the surface. Yet when the cool persona appears in the type of the party functionary, it is taken to be a figure with a direct line to the party command center.
If we search literature for the type in which Plessner's dual personality, his negative anthropology, and the conduct code of distance coalesce, we find figures of quite various provenance. We shall note that this wish projection blends an aristocratic resentment against the citizen-patriot with a plebeian hatred for the bourgeoisie. Thus does the cool persona appear in a variety of mixtures.
Whether the habitus of the cool persona resonates today depends on our view of aesthetics. From the perspective of the 19705 and 19805, which attributed therapeutic claims to literature, all the variations on the armored subject fell to annihilating critique. There can be no doubt —the habitus of the cool persona still has a repellent and even unhealthy aspect, even if its adherents, such as Ernst Jünger, live to be over a hundred years old.
Since the plea of this book is for a culture that encourages interrelation-of ego strength and productive regression, of arts of distinction and stopgap forms of fusion, of temporary armoring and its surrender, of clear and blurred boundaries alike—a culture that marks difference and has tolerance for diffusion, we bring a measure of its friendly skepticism to the following eight portraits.
The passage from self-confident cool persona to abandoned creature calls for a degree of personal participation but need not plunge us into a “catastrophe of ridiculousness” (in Plessner's terms). If history has not cast our figures in a comic light, they can nevertheless, as grotesques, be instructive.
FRAMING STORIES
Concepts such as type, icon, and character mask direct attention to a portrait's static contours. Literature nonetheless conceives its human images in the context of experiments that, in the style of the time, were designated as montage or demontage, and, in contrast to the following example, are only rarely comic:
| Don't talk about danger! | |
| You can't drive a tank through a manhole: | |
| You'll have to get out. | |
| Better abandon your primus | |
| You've got to see that you yourself come through. | |
| Of course you need money | |
| I'm not asking where you get it from | |
| But unless you've got money you needn't bother to go. | |
| And you can't stay here, man. | |
| Here they know you. | |
| If I've got you right | |
| You want to eat a steak or two | |
| Before you give up the race. | |
| Leave the woman where she is. | |
| She has two arms of her own | |
| And two legs for that matter | |
| (Which, sir, are no longer any affair of yours). | |
| See that you yourself come through. | |
| If you've got anything more to say | |
| Say it to me, I'll forget it. | |
| You needn't keep up appearances any longer: | |
| There's no one here any longer to observe you. | |
| If you come through | |
| You'll have done more | |
| Than anyone's obliged to. | |
| Don't mention it.[18] |
The armor donned by the subject in order to survive can, in the next moment, become a dangerous burden. The advice that we find in Brecht's Reader for Those Who Live in Cities seems paradoxical; but everything depends-this is the text's logic—on not allowing the paradox to paralyze us. The slogan calls, not for single-mindedness, but for agility, and the radar type Brecht presupposes is prepared to relinquish any “appearances,” including the militant one.
The Reader's world destroys the social conditions that were supposed to make inner-directed orientation possible: contractual systems are no longer valid; violence is not waiting on the periphery of the communal order but sets the tone of daily life; there can be no talk of fair competition; there is not enough money to go around; there are no peer groups in sight. Reduced to the lowest common denominator, not even the wish for existence as a creature survives. At the end of the successive reductions there is nothing but the body that slips through all the typologies. It appears momentarily, as in the poem “Cover Your Tracks,” as an abstract principle of movement, an energy quantum of negation, that does
The literature of this period plays through stages of existential atrophy as a way of dealing with the alarm an older character type feels at being overrun by civilization's sudden advance. The process does not go forward in secret. New objectivity slogans shine over the spectacle like neon lights:
The process leads straight through the mass ornament, not back from it (Kracauer).
The individual does not retrieve his humanity by getting out of the masses, but by going into them (Brecht).
As things unfold in the world of the body-in stories of ruin and of being flattened, of imposed conformity or isolation-they generate fear. Joseph Roth comments,
The future world will be such a triangular track of powerful dimensions. The earth has gone through several transformations-in accord with natural laws. It is going through a new one, according to constructive, conscious, but no less elemental laws. Mourning for the old forms that are passing-that is comparable to the pain of an antediluvian being over the disappearance of prehistoric conditions.[19]
Against this backdrop it would seem wise to present the process of montage without anxiety, as Brecht tried to do in Mann ist Mann. The history of the play's revisions, however, betrays a frantic attempt on the part of the author to supply his new hero with ties to the correct collective.
Storytellers in the new objectivity decade encounter a series of framing stories about modernization, which make themselves available as crude but nonetheless helpful procedural forms. One such is Max Weber's narrative of disenchantment, in which the idea of increasing rational feasibility in the world is linked to the feeling of increasing impotence. Novel stories are ones that declare their acceptance of the irreversible process of alienation, that argue in favor of accelerating modernization, exploring the question of whether the individual is able to endure the process at all. Such stories, spectacular as they are, belong to the category of marginal phenomena in the republic. We may expect to hear them from dadaists, the Brecht circle, Bauhaus architects, Asphaltliteraten (or, in right-wing terminology, Kulturbolschewisten), Bronnen and Jünger.
Much more influential in this decade is the decadence narrative, which finds in the gradual disenchantment of community the “successive stages of a fatal inexorability,”[20] from the “warm” landscapes of originary scenes to the “glacier” of civilization. Civilizing innovations appear from this perspective as signs of the loss of vitality.
In the mid-192, os, Max Scheler notes, in contrast, the epochal process of “de sublimation,”[21] signaled by the elevation of sports to cult status, by drive psychology, the revalorization of childhood, and the “desire for a primitive mythological mentality.” Scheler registers a “retrograde ethical movement” on the part of peoples who had at one time been the beneficiaries of European culture, a “countercolonization” resulting in the valorization of “barbarisms.” The youth movement, in “revolt against the earlier sublimation,” had struck back at the fathers' ascetic ethic of work and acquisition; World War I had also represented such an uprising.
Scheler is a skeptical observer. As long as the decadence movement goes on rejecting reason, he expects that desublimation will remain a critical aspect of it. Wherever it appears and no matter what ideas and valuations may contain it, desublimation-like the longing for the primitive, the childlike, a lost naivete—remains in itself a sign of the age and of “wearying of vitality.” The revocation of sublimation is for Scheler a process that spans the period from Jugendstil to the fascist movement. The culture industry of the new objectivity he understands as an integral element of the revolt against techniques of sublimation that had been developed in an age of inner-direction.
Disenchantment and decadence and desublimation: three names for narratives of social development, to which progress must be added as a fourth. Progress narratives found their secure foothold in the political organizations of the working class.
These four names stand for models available to narrators for their stories. New objectivity narratives elide disenchantment and desublimation. Ethical retrogression heralds the possibility of progress. “Street people,” written off in the decadence narrative as “deserters from life,” acquire value as nomads. The revaluation does not come off painlessly—even the comedy of these years (Mann ist Mann) cannot do without war. The legend of demystification as a “fatal inexorability” accompanies even the comedic restructuring of the new objectivity type. War, the lime pit, assassination, suicide, social degradation, commodification—all of these are inseparable from the scenario in which the modernization of the German subject plays itself out. Horvath begins one of his
Disenchantment, decadence, desublimation, progress—not even the sum of these narratives yields the historical process that appears to us in retrospect. For none of these narratives construct a future that coincides with what came in the 19305 and 19405. Their narrative future was blind to the reality that developed, and it is no wonder that new objectivity intellectuals ultimately felt deceived. The resulting bitterness explains the appeal of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” which, at the end of the 19305, combines the narratives of disenchantment and decadence, desublimation and progress, into the conceptual figure of the paradox.
PORTRAITS
TALLEYRAND ODER DER ZYNISMUS
That Franz Blei dedicates his 1932, novel, Talleyrand oder der Zynismus, to his Catholic friend from the bohemian days of his youth might appear simply a historical curiosity if the friend had not gone on to become the renowned constitutional lawyer who (also in 1932) formulated the legal justification for the chancellor to banish the Social Democratic government. Blei's dedication reads, “For Carl Schmitt, in friendship and respect.”[22]
Yet the dedication has more than a hint of irony, for Blei's novel about cynicism works to expose the shortcomings of the future Prussian state official. Taking Talleyrand as the “exemplary model of the consummate politician” (345), the novel illuminates the failings of the new Machia-velli: the French statesman did not “rise through the ranks but was born to his position” (15), his aristocratic resentment against the citizen-patriot intact. The passions and drives Schmitt had repressed in his political subject as a decision-making apparatus return in Blei's Talleyrand. “He is not exactly of a criminal disposition,” Blei repeatedly quotes the American envoy, “though certainly indifferent between virtue and vice” (12, [English wording in the original]).
A first glance at the novel displays the correspondences between the novel and certain of the slogans popularized by 19205 political anthropology. Axioms from Hobbes's Leviathan hang like signboards over the scene (using the new objectivity language of Bertrand Russell): “People do good to the extent that they are forced to do good, and bad to the extent
Blei's hero also betrays personal characteristics drawn wholly in Schmitt's spirit: Talleyrand's impassive exclusion of moral judgment from political considerations; his aversion for all forms of fundamentalism, in which Schmitt suspects a marriage of humanism and terror. The “political,” for Blei as well, has “no substance” to it; it takes place in the realm of the “conditional,” permanently split off from the realm of the “actual” (7). “The ethical concept of truth and lies is relativized wherever it enters into the fictional construction of the political.” The author cites, approvingly, the characteristics Balzac had given the prince in Pere Goriot: “There are no principles, only results; there are no laws, only circumstances” (330).
When politics cannot be derived from substantive values, when all that orients action is effect and principles become nothing more than functional values-when there is no “ground” beneath a man's feet-stability comes to depend on explicit codes of conduct. So, too, in the case of Talleyrand. His life trajectory arches over a landscape rocked by social historical earthquakes, wherein only the practice of an astounding degree of flexibility ensures stability within the relatively rigid behavioral codex to which Bishop Talleyrand—not contradicting his flexibility in the slightest—adheres even in risky situations.
Maxims from Talleyrand's manual are sprinkled throughout the book. Blei speaks of Talleyrand's “general apparatus of behavior” (34), which eliminates the need for spontaneity, even while it secures certain pleasures. The regulatory system is not original; Talleyrand holds with such as Machiavelli and models of // cortigiano; he is familiar with the French moralists and has absorbed his precepts from Gracián:
Avoid demanding anything that you know will subject you to unnecessary demands.
Show no sign of haste, although it were needed, but do occasion it in others.
In critical moments, assume an air of indifference. (34)
Talleyrand uses these rules to negotiate relations with Louis XVI, the Directorate, Napoleon, the Vienna Congress, and Louis XVIII. The apparatus supplied by his code of conduct effectively replaces the conscience, proving itself every bit as reliable a compass amid the temblors of revolution and restoration as it would, for example, following the lead of the finance bourgeoisie. To this point, the resonance between Schmitt's polemic against political romanticism and Plessner's code of distance and Blei's image of Bishop Talleyrand is still audible but stops as soon as Blei is required to explain what drives his hero. The motivations that a deci-sionist construction obscures are “lust after women” and an exceptional measure of monetary greed. What Schmitt tries to filter out of his theory of the decision-making machine—the economy and all greed—suddenly reappear center stage. Woman, in Blei's representation, is not only Talleyrand's vital elixir but also the secret of his diplomatic successes. That Talleyrand's friend Madame de Stae'l portrays him in a novel as a woman causes no offense to the bishop. The boundaries between diplomacy and amorous adventures are fluid; the “feminism of his being” (287) favorably influences his career, and his particular brand of wit makes even his crippled foot irrelevant.
Such a turn is little short of miraculous from the 19205 perspective of the armored self. We see here a political subject that is not afraid to seem undignified the moment it lays down its arms, a subject that shrugs off charges of cowardice, in the knowledge, shared with Gracián, that “a finely executed retreat is also worth something” (123). In Blei's novel, in other words, we encounter a character that is impossible in the political understanding of the decisionists. German culture had no place for the man of politics as gallant; the protean figure of the politician also fell victim to the fear of ridiculousness, leaving him interesting only in one of several “iron” variants. On paper, Plessner's duelist and Schmitt's decision maker are beings devoid of economic interest, while Blei's Talleyrand, for whom money is a “spiritual power,” surrenders to “unrestrained monetary greed” (175). He takes pleasure in the stock exchange and the market, a pleasure just as fundamental as that he finds in his amorous
If we compare this figure with the political subject imagined by Jünger, or Plessner—which never escapes the pathos of the solitary combatant even while serving the collective—what we notice is Talleyrand's lack of an essential element of the militant subject. “Attitude,” in the sense of a decision kept in effect over time, not only is essential to the militant construction but becomes a magic word more generally toward the end of the republic. Talleyrand's cynicism teaches that it takes more than attitude to survive.
In the historical period traversed by Talleyrand, what was the fate of “faster” politicians, those who were able to make split-second decisions, who suddenly emerge out of the nothing of the moment? Franz Blei's sideswipe at the future “crown jurist of the Third Reich” is unmistakable: Napoleon is described as a man who sought “to overcome the debacle of revolutionary achievements through the form of a total state” (235). Blei links Schmitt's terminology to the fast-moving Napoleon: the concept might perhaps serve its purpose for a time, but its days are always numbered.
On the eve of the Third Reich, Blei couples the idea of the total state with the fiasco of a fast-paced temperament. On his stage an extra wears the character mask from behind which he will enact the future terror. The “tactless Fouche” turns ups only on the margins of the action, where he demonstrates that ethical rigidity and cruelty are the inevitable elements of a petit-bourgeois blend. Still, this type is characterized by a greater affinity with the “ghostly abstraction of political officialdom, which is called reason of state” (137); the services it offers therefore fit the modern bureaucracy.
Fouche may indeed be lacking in the glamour of a cool persona on the model of a Talleyrand-he represents much more the banality of evil, which can be more easily institutionalized—but it is to him that the future belongs. In 1929 Stefan Zweig sketched Fouche's physiognomy in a gaslight, bleaching all the color from his skin, confirming the reputation of the police chief as “reptilian” in nature. In Zweig's likeness of the
He is neither ruled by his nerves nor seduced by his senses; his entire passion charges and discharges behind the impenetrable wall of his forehead. He puts his forces in play, always on the lookout for others' mistakes; he lets others be consumed by their passions, waiting patiently until they are exhausted or their lack of self-control exposes them: and then he strikes. Terrible is the superiority of this nerveless patience; a man who can wait like that in hiding can fool even the ablest…. Thus the coldness of his blood is Fouche's real genius. His body neither restrains him nor carries him away.[24]
Not long after Franz Blei's novel appeared there arose a political constellation in which Schmitt, the object of Blei's dedication, would become a legal philosophical prompter for a rival Fouche.
SERNER'S HANDBREVIER FU¨R HOCHSTAPLER
The counterbalance to the cool persona's aristocratic type is the confidence man. The social claims he makes do not coincide with his origins; should his actual heritage be discovered, his social existence is lost. Hence he moves on a terrain littered with traps set by the reality of his past. He moves in a world where the only mortal sin is to allow his at-tentiveness to lapse. The con man's life is the “as-if” existence par excellence, in which success depends on the virtuoso application of the behavioral codex of an alien class. “Appear civilized,” Gracián had counseled. The swindler makes this his creed: appearance is profitable. In line with courtly codes of conduct, Walter Serner declares: “Whoever you may be, say this to yourself: ALL THAT TRANSPIRES AROUND ME CAN ALSO BE FEIGNED. Then you will remain healthy and things will go well for you on earth” (maxim no. 42,2,). And maxim no. 325 makes it clear that in truth Serner's Handbrevier is a manifesto against the cult of sincerity:
The distinction between virtuoso dissimulation and genuineness is too small to be measured. The former can be acquired only through intensive practice, whereby you also develop the ability to recognize genuineness. If occasionally, however, it continues to exceed your capabilities, then forgo dissimulation (the great ruiner!) and say what you may not act out.
The “devilish” transgression of the line separating authenticity from artificiality is the characteristic movement of Serner's writing. What he prescribes in his Handbrevier he puts into practice in his crime stories: not even elemental feeling eliminates the possibility of being a “useful
[It is impossible to keep track of] where the truth of affective life lapses and where the performance of it begins. If something natural does manage to break through, ice-cold games of life immediately interpret and exploit it. Often the characters' excesses are cold hypocrisy; but they nevertheless remain under the pressure of real unconscious excess; at other times something ultimate does break out through a cocaine-paralysis of the soul.[26]
It is as if Serner sought to illustrate Plessner's anthropology with the example of the confidence man: there is no core self; the various masks have not only the function of adapting a substantial self opportunistically to a situation but also offer the possibility “of being the other to the respective roles.”[27]
Indeed, maintaining an insistence on being who one is, while certainly desirable, would be all but fatal if it were to congeal into a single role, and not only on account of the limitation entailed, but primarily because it eliminates the possibility of changing roles.[28]
It is easy to understand how the confidence man, as a type, can be fascinating in a situation broadly experienced as bottomless; con men appear everywhere, in the theater and film, in detective novels and the mass press. This eccentric character reveals how fragile are the strategies of distinction in a society in which money operates as the great leveler and what the market honors above all else is the pliability of one's attitude. In the con man, the ideal of personal autonomy appears only in the form of virtuosity in the changing of masks. He wants to be what he appears to be to others, but if he allows himself to become that, he loses the remainder of his autonomy, which exists solely in that latitude of difference.
In certain of his traits, the confidence man resembles the autodidact as described in sociology: he possesses little cultural capital of his own, learns from models, and is filled with anxiety over being discovered.[29] The broad public delights in the techniques with which he succeeds in
The practical part of the Handbrevier fur Hochstapler appeared in 192,7.[30] In it are blended the dada cult of indifference and Nietzsche's theory of masks with an ironic reference to the new objectivity imperative of action. The form is borrowed from Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom, as contemporary critics were already aware.[31] Serner's handbook contains 591 rules, divided into thirteen chapters. Rule no. 338 concerns intonation:
It is better to speak conventionally, rather than in principle, if you want to gain time, and better in a chatty, rather than informational, manner, if you want to gain power.
The maxims are delivered deadpan, in a manner reminiscent of Buster Keaton; the book offers guidance to those who are already ruined. “People tolerate you, because you cannot be ruined” is the consoling advice of no. 116. In the tradition of dada, the Handbrevier is a handbook for “the balancing act over the abyss of murder, violence, and theft” (Raoul Hausmann).[32]
The habitus recommended in the Handbrevier draws our attention to the figure of the dandy, an important link in the tradition of the cool persona. This nineteenth-century type extolled alienation as an art of living. Unscrupulousness and discretion were present alongside the fetishism of affective control, the treatment of nature and drives as mechanical systems, and the meticulous avoidance of the traps of relationship.[33] The exclusive figure of the dandy looked anachronistic to twentieth-century observers, but certain features of its habitus showed up, remarkably, in an artists' group as early as World War I. Dadaism, a laboratory of shaming and disgrace, practiced attitudes of indifference—“American Buddhism”—and its proponents tried, through a cult of meticulous exposure, to make themselves immune to power exercised to shame the subject. Even in advance of the Berlin dadaists, Serner extended the rite of self-shaming into language as such (“Every word is a Blamage”); he saw only one chance for self-consciousness: it must already have blamed itself. “Severely blamed. Outrageously blamed. Blamed entirely without measure. Blamed so horrifically, that everything else is drawn into the blame.”[34]
Conditions, however, are precarious for the modern dandy. Assimilation into the aristocracy's higher social standing does not facilitate his
From time to time, excesses are necessary [see Figure 6]. After two months of uninterrupted regularity, the body is sick of it. Allow it a brief, but furious storm, (no. 3 20)
Never show your hatred. (Hidden hate is a source of strength.) If the number of your enemies grows too large, show contempt; that will cause those whose hate actually consists in envy to assume that it would be dangerous to arouse your hatred. But where you must show it, follow it with the corresponding deed. (no. 337)
However complete your anesthesia against praise and criticism may have become, the danger of a relapse is always present, (no. 349) If suddenly you find yourself lacking the strength to lie, then at least be cruel, (no. 344)
In the Handbrevier's world no formula of authenticity is valid. The point in this hall of mirrors is “impression management” (Erving Goff-man); that is, the goal is to leave behind in others' eyes the impression of authenticity. As disconcerting and unscrupulous as this idea might be to a member of a guilt culture, for the inhabitants of a shame culture it has become a necessity. “In the case of shame,” we read from Agnes Heller, “the authority is social custom—ritual, habits, codes or rosters of behavior—represented by the eye of the other.”[36]
Serner's confidence man exploits precisely this circumstance, that he is the object of the other's gaze, playing out the various possibilities open to him. The point at which the ego-ideal of autonomy fears fiasco is where he begins the drama of his self-enactment. As a precaution he keeps with him at all times a small hand mirror so he can test his facial expressions before he puts them to use. Now and then it is advisable to make quickly for the rest room “to practice an expression” (no. 32,8). Since the distinction between dissimulation and genuineness is too small to measure on this ground of sheer mobility, the foreseeable effect of an expression is what decides whether it counts as authentic.
From time to time, excesses are necessary (Christian Schad, Der Pfiffum die Ecke [A whistle around the corner], 1917. With the permission of Christian Schad, G. A. Richter, Rottach-Egern.)
Above all, practice the effect of your eyes every day by standing in front of a mirror. Your gaze must learn to rest still and heavy on another, to veil itself quickly, to sting, to indict. Or to emanate enough experience and knowledge to shock your counterpart into offering his hand (no. 323).
The mirror serves the actor in the study of the self. The type of self-perception required is that which we have already found in the baroque duelist's conduct code: “The gaze directed at its own physiognomy in the mirror has assumed within itself the gaze of the others.”[37] The mirror of conscience, on the other hand, which a guilt culture demands that its members use offstage, is of no use to the actor. Serner's subject despises psychoanalysis, as befits the cool persona. Instead there are dietary rules: “Eat little meat (never fatty), but a lot of fruit salads and green vegetables. Take frequent deep breaths; bathe only twice a week (ten minutes, lukewarm)” (no. 316).
For melancholy moods, Serner recommends such tongue twisters as teremtete—the word games of the dadaists seem to be migrating to the ground of the soul. Unarmed, lacking a soldierly physiognomy, the dandy persona transplanted to the world of the new objectivity must not show its true face in public: “If you could appear visually as the monster of indifference you really are, a ten-minute stroll would leave you dead. No one could endure you for even a second, without falling upon you with both fists flying” (no. 108).
Werner Krauss discovers, as he reconstructs Gracián's code of conduct in the “enormous realm on which the Habsburgs' sun set,” that the “con-man morality” often occurs as a kind of “maintenance morality,” a survival technique.[38] Guided by Serner's Handbrevier, the persona moves about in a tertiary sector. It is ready to take on situations in hotels, train stations, post and telegraph offices, in vehicles of public transportation, and in private interchanges. In all these settings there is one fundamental rule: “If you stumble into a false appearance, combat it by maneuvering yourself into another false appearance” (no. 2,45). Gra-cian had already offered a roundabout version of the same advice: “One would not wish to be taken for a man of dissimulation, although it is not possible to live these days without it.” Serner's 591 tips take up the Spanish Jesuit's agonistic image—outfitted with modern requisites for moving successfully in the world of the new media:
Do not imagine that telephone conversations conducted in a hotel room or in the hall are not being overheard (no. 132).
― 121 ―Learn to telegraph in such a way that it appears to be encoded, without being so. And vice versa (no. 558).
Refuse banknotes bearing private signs and change them immediately (no. 576).
Do not go to masseuses, unless you want to be massaged. Otherwise it can happen that you will be seen and photographed (no. 433). Regard every ear within earshot as an enemy ear (no. 444).—In hotel rooms, undertake important activities very quietly and only with the curtains drawn (no. 452).
Make a habit of standing in front of shop mirrors. In this way you can conveniently observe what is going on behind you (no. 478).
Seiner's Handbrevier and Brecht's Reader for Those Who Live in Cities open a new chapter in the literature of the city. Urban decor, local color, facades, squares, building complexes or sounds appear before us only in an orienting function. The city is much more a specific terrain of behavior.[39] The eye assesses possible obstacles; it is a tactical organ and a trained physiognomist. The ear functions as an alarm, with the special task of supervising the voice's volume (and, when necessary, reducing it to a whisper). The focus of perception is entirely outward: it listens, probes, scents. The new media, such as the telephone, telegraph, and tickertape, convey the necessary information to Serner's character. Language acquires the function of an advance scout in enemy territory, identifying possibilities for movement by the person who remains undercover.
Obviously, Serner's gentleman is a virtuoso in the art of separation. Symbiotic relationships of whatever sort, even provisional ones, represent a trap. The ultimate in obligation is a “free marriage,” which Serner, borrowing from colloquial slang, terms a “mixed bag.” Here as well he advises distance: “Never live together with your lover. At most in the same building” (no. 2,13). The family is not only disqualified as a form of sociability and reproduction but also eliminated, in tip no. 3 59, as the locus of origins: “Blood ties are an invention. Not simply because only the mother can ever be sure. Once the cord is cut, it is over.”
Although Serner's con man is incomparably more flexible than Pless-ner's man of decision, the Handbrevier advises him to calculate carefully the danger of appearing ridiculous. He may surrender to mockery only in a single place, with a single person:
Everything can be ridiculed. Indulge this pleasure, however, only with your lover; it will increase her passion for you. (Every woman is a closet anarchist.)
― 122 ―Forbid it among men: it will paralyze your creatures; and your associates will quickly find you ridiculous, (no. 102)
While Plessner sought out a site of “mercy,” where the self worn out from fencing could recuperate, Serner is comfortable in the company of the female anarchist (a frightful image in the duelist's universe)—and she, of course, represents much more than an anarchist.
Serner's exercises give us no help examining our conscience, but he does offer tips on tactical skills aimed at the optimal exploitation of opportunities. The discursive ritual of confession, a favorite in late expressionism, is recommended only when it is sure to win territory; guilt feelings are dispensed with altogether. Self-knowledge can inadvertently come about, but it never results from plumbing the depths of the individual soul or cracking the family vault for secrets; it arises only in the mirror of the other's assessing perception. The individual sees himself surrounded by many gazes and uses all the vantages of surveillance to learn about his own identity in the focal point of hostile perception. Naturally, the practice demands a degree of mental awareness that can quickly lead to exhaustion, which threatens even a confidence man with melancholy. In such cases, however, the reader is referred to commandment no. 357: “If you take ill, take cover. That will make you well more quickly.”
Although many of the directives in the Handbrevier correspond to Plessner's behavioral doctrine of distance—not least because both derive from motifs of aestheticism—worlds separate the two. More precisely, what distinguishes the two texts is Serner's exploration of the underworld.
Serner bathes his unscrupulous persona in a comedic light; he teaches the armored ego dances that it can only perform awkwardly in combat boots, and, above all, a matter of life and death permits his character to be cowardly (no. 33). The attitude demanded by Plessner and Schmitt is for Serner so much ballast. Still, the comedic light is intermittent: in the end, the individual flitting through Serner's Handbrevier is as anxious as the others, as if pursued by invisible agents of surveillance. He, too, is in a chronic state of alarm: “It is easier give a pursuer the slip than it is to escape being pursued” (no. 470).
The only available shelter is the code itself, and even here conditions are precarious, for it is in the nature of language to undermine appearances. Rather than give the reader a false sense of security, Serner puts his practical manual of behavior at the beginning of the revised version
Every word is a Blamage, be it well noted. There is nothing to do beyond spewing out verbiage, performing circus tricks on suspension bridges (or over plants, canyons, beds).[41]
Serner's Handbrevier does not forget for a moment that the comedy of dissimulation it recommends is itself only a manner of speech, serving “to manufacture a redemptive heaven over this chaos of rubbish and puzzles.”[42] But, since the persona always acts only from within the awareness that unfeigned authenticity is not to be had-where language itself is already elementary dissimulation—the point becomes to deploy signifying conventions in the consciousness of their artificiality and expression in the knowledge of its schematic nature. The commandments of the conduct code thus propose the possibility of living “inside appearances” (Nietzsche).[43]
Yet the question arises of whether Serner manages to do entirely without authenticity. The crime stories that he collected in the books Der elfte Finger, Zum blauen Affen, Der Pfiff um die Ecke, and Die Tigerin lead us to locations where, he hopes, authenticity does in fact exist, in the cool version of the criminal underworld. There he comes upon an astonishingly rational codex, a high degree of self-reflection on the model of Gracián and Plessner, not nourished by interiority but dictated by the presence of mind of a chess master playing several games at once. Here he finds long-lost genuineness in a deceitfulness that has become first nature. Here too he finds the artful concentration on dissimulation that every one of his actors seeks to achieve, without forgetting about “the dissimulating, deceitful surveillance of the other,” which was one of the cardinal points of the code of courtly behavior.[44] Hope for a language of the heart runs through the criminal underworld.
In one of the stories from the volume Der Pfiff um die Ecke an international check forger wants to make a deal with the Scotland Yard specialist that has been put on the case. They share a brief moment of consensus: “Among high-level experts like ourselves, the only place to explore matters of trust with any security is at the dizzying edge of a cliff.”[45] Trust nevertheless remains a tactical move, subject, like all communication, to cynical calculation. The story of the “Ermordung der Marchese de Brignole-Sale” reports on the contact established by a male
“It's especially hard, practically impossible, to reach an understanding if at least a tiny little bit of trust isn't-given up. The way a better player gives up something to a weaker one.”
“But I'm always surprised when I pull it off. That's one of the clearest sources of mistrust.”
She fell silent. Sorhul thought he caught the hint of a smile.
“It's probably altogether impossible to talk, except as a wild gamble.”
“I'm not sure. Sometimes all you have to do is talk to recognize the opponent's aim. What actually gets said is entirely beside the point.”[46]
And then both walk right into the traps they have set for each other.
No other access to interiority seems to be available to Serner, and it is not surprising that later on he would also condemn this type: in the intellectual space of prefascism he identifies it as “cool romanticism,” alternating between iron hardness and suicidal tendencies. To this day, Serner's Handbrevier stands as a “cynical spectacle on the eve of the dictatorship.”[47] The judgment stems from the disarming quality of an amoral character about whose creatural substance nothing can be determined with confidence.
Annoyance with the type also stems from the difficulty involved in establishing anything definite about the person of its creator, beyond the evidence of his texts. By calling his crime stories memoirs, Serner cultivated a legendary identity even during his lifetime. Thomas Milch compares the author to one story's mysterious analyst of a “memorable conversation” in Florence. Responding to the question, “Who are you?” the character pisses his name in the sand, illegibly, and then disappears into the darkness. His identity has the substance of a dadaist artwork, written in chalk on a blackboard and then wiped out after the performance.[48] Serner cultivated the mask of the gentleman criminal, or the “baron among the soldiers of dada” (Hans Richter), the brilliant cosmopolitan regardless of circumstances, or the pimp.[49] For information about the “genuine” existence of the writer Walter Serner, we have to rely on the few documents that have been gathered over the course of many years' research: official records, birth certificate, university files, police reports, and hotel registrations—and deportation lists for the Theresienstadt concentration camp.[50]
The cult of sincerity does not come to an end until the inevitable anger of disillusion fastens on those who discover that even the unconscious, seemingly the last residue of spontaneity, is “entangled in inauthenticity.”[51]
If an actor rejects from the outset the attitude of sincere communication, then manipulation of the outer world, rather than the expression of his inner world, takes over his dramaturgic orientation.[52]
Those who squander the opportunity for “genuine expression” (and the assumption that the symbolic order in which it could take place offers a transparent, undisguisable glimpse into the inner world) need not wonder if what they suffer in exchange is defeat.
In his critique of American researchers such as Erving Goffman, who stresses the necessity of a dramaturgy of self-enactment, Sighard Neckel maintains that such “artificial” behavior inevitably goes wrong:
Wherever Goffman's “impression management” has become a social norm, the situative dilemma immediately comes up. It represents a particular serious latent danger where public exchange among individuals has a ceremonial coloration.[53]
Attempts to manipulate the codes of ceremonial communication always produce bad results:
The more powerfully … the protagonists of ceremonial behavior are driven … to maintain at all costs the “illusion of their own noninvolvement,” the greater may be the corresponding fear of losing their aesthetic distance from events, of bungling the performance, of suffering a minor interpersonal catastrophe. Fear as a rule only heightens one's vulnerability to embarrassment, which is precisely what coolness is supposed to reduce.[54]
Avoiding catastrophe was already the point for Plessner. The danger, for both him and his descendants, would be half as great if only they would give up the either-or attitude, combining the art of ceremonial behavior, when the situation calls for it, with the reflection that formlessness does not make a situation that has nothing to do with public formality any more authentic.
It is a macabre fact of German cultural history that the “end-to-sincerity” problematic had to be addressed through the medium of the Handbrevier—a handbook for confidence men, that relegates the possibility of humane nonliteral exchange to the criminal demimonde. Ser-ner's Handbrevier focuses on this sad circumstance through the genre of comedy, which is how a shame culture puts its humanity on display. As
Serner's fate after 1927 demonstrates that the German cultural tradition—unlike the French or Anglo-American-had no experimental space for his intellectual figures to operate in. Having had his small oeu-vre published by Paul Steegemann, he withdrew from sight, prompting legends at the time that he had vanished into the milieu of his stories. Today his disappearance suggests “the cliche … that the great cynic, after 1927, stepped down from the pedestal and lived out the lapidary bourgeois life of a married man.”[55] Thomas Milch, pointing out that Serner continued his restless life unchanged but simply avoided Germany after 1933, attempts to refute this tale of exhaustion. In 1938 Serner rented an apartment in Prague and married his longtime companion, Dorothea Herz. Their attempt, following the Nazi invasion, to get a visa for Shanghai failed:
Official documents of the time list Walter Eduard Israel Serner as a language teacher, and Dorothea Sara Serner as a housewife; they are registered in the Prague Jewish community under numbers 36213 and 36212. On 10 August 1942 they were relocated in Transport Ba (as numbers 253 and 1338, among a total of 1,460 people) to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and deported from there on 20 August in Transport Bb to the so-called east. The destination of their final journey is not known.[56]
What is it that prevents us from using the telescope of our research to peer “all the way through the bloody fog at a mirage” of the 19205, in order to recognize the humanity of that time in the refractions that, as Benjamin put it, would show it “in a future state of the world emancipated from magic?”[57] Reconstructions these days tend to raise the dictatorship and its horrors to a telos, which lends all the processes and intellectual motifs an objective function leading toward a wrong end. But in Serner's obscure case we can glimpse the mirages, which ultimately took on more concrete form far from Germany and innocent of the fear. This perception itself is practically taboo, for the faraway land was America and the place was Hollywood.
In Ernst Lubitsch's films, which he made as an emigrant in the 19305, con men, seducers, betrayers, and liars abound. Required of them as well is the mental awareness of the chess master, but the demand does not put them in the chronic state of alarm suffered by their German forbears in the 19205. In Lubitsch's films we see the slogan “Appearance civilizes” (see Figure 7) cast in the light of uninterrupted comedy. There
Appearance civilizes (Ernst Lubitsch. With the permission of Siiddeutscher Verlag, Munich.)
These possibilities are lost to German development because they arise in a place that suffers excommunication by German cultural criticism.
INFANTRY DOGS IN A BAUHAUS APARTMENT
In 1926 Bertolt Brecht tells a story of two male types who, having shared the narrow confines of the trenches during the war, meet again in the republic, in a Bauhaus apartment. There would be no story to tell were the apartment not the site of a catastrophe of ridiculousness, which, as we know, it is the aim of every code of conduct to avoid.
It has long since become an established fact that in November and December 1918 a very large number of men, whose manners had suffered somewhat, returned home with their habits and got on the nerves of the people they had fought for.[60]
Brecht begins the story with this sentence, deriving the appeal of the Bauhaus aesthetic from the experience of infantry dogs in the trenches. At the same time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that any such rational enclosure as a Bauhaus apartment also produces an “unfathomable desire” for chaos. An engineer by the name of Müller is of the sort whose manners got a bit wild. His counterpart is Kampert, another engineer, whose sole desire, having survived the mud and slime of Arras and Ypres, is to live exclusively in a tiled bathroom (see Figure 8). Ernst Bloch also remarks that functionalist dwellings had something of the “charm of a sanitary facility,” and the opening paragraph of the story explains—quasi psychoanalytically (which we would least expect from Brecht)—the longing of returning soldiers for hygienic rituals:
There's nothing you can say to these sorts that will entice them out of their tiled bathrooms, after they've had to spend a few years of their lives lying around in muddy trenches.
The drama begins when comrade Müller, along with the laconic narrator, yet another engineer from the trenches, is invited to Kampert's apartment. Its appointments follow all the rules of new objectivity design: black lacquered hooks in the wardrobe; American recliners in the simple white-walled living room; a Japanese straw mat hung like an awning in front of the oblique atelier window; a red mahogany cabinet for counterpoint; an iron spiral staircase leading up to the simple bedroom, with iron bedsteads and simple enamel sink; and, separated from it only by a chintz curtain, the spartan study with shelves and a pine table and a hard, low chaise longue.
Müller, having been conducted through the new objectivity quarters, mumbles guiltily: “Well, it's actually living just like a pig.” Where nothing is left to chance, an accident always occasions a minor catastrophe. The drama that now gets under way displays the return of the trench warriors to the scene of objectivity; or, vice versa, it reveals that the stylistic rigor of the apartment and its inhabitants represents a return of the heroic, which all three protagonists, in the mulch of Arras, had disdained. Kampert's retreat into the cool interior of Bauhaus design is a kind of civilian reassimilation of heroic armoring.
His sole desire is to live exclusively in a tiled bathroom (Soldiers killed in the trenches at the Western Front, 1917. Photo by Ernest Brook. With the permission of Imperial War Museum, London.)
The satirical element of the story can be more easily understood against the backdrop of Bruno Taut's defense of the new dwelling. Taut's book, Die neue Wohnung, went through five printings between 1924 and 192.8, reaching a circulation of 26,000 copies by that time. Readers learned from Taut to expect from the new interior the effect of a “refreshing bath.” Paintings hanging on the wall are outfitted, as they are in Kampert's apartment, with curtains: art works should not be witnesses to such banal necessities as eating and digestion. “Bodily hygiene must now be joined by mental hygiene,” Taut demanded. Contrarily, “there is no need to shut off conversation in a tidy environment,” justifying glass walls surrounding the dining room.[61]
Taut's leitmotif is the “elimination of atavisms,” which he suspects not only in the remnants of the “sumptuous Orient” of Griinderzeit apartments, but in all concavities and dysfunctional elements that upset the aim of being “indisputable master in one's own home.” Taut is building Plessner's fencing hall! Quite logically he also covers the chaise longue in his cool interior with polar bear fur, adding with satisfaction: “The fur is used as pure material, without any of the barbarism of gaping
“But I don't think,” Brecht's narrator continues the story, “Muller could have endured this deliberate harmony and reformist utility any longer.” In this ominous way the reader is prepared for the coming disaster. Muller develops a “battle plan,” and it is he who at the end reigns over the demolished furnishings.
The variants of warm-cool polarity play out in this story. At the warm pole camp the egalitarian “hordes,” with their anti-heroic tendencies, their spontaneity, and need for asymmetries. At the cool pole we find the disciplining of affects, the desire for transparency, the law of discretion and symmetry.
Reading the story as a satire of Bauhaus ideology admittedly simplifies it. Yet irritatingly, even an “inappropriate” piece of furniture has a delicately contrived place in the overall decorative scheme of the apartment; the visitors also dislike the way cool industrial functionalism is presented in the form of pieces wrought by individual artisans. The story takes place at a time in which industrial Bauhaus production was making its first inroads against the reform movement's commitment to the crafts. But, in all of Brecht's dramas, we can identify the Dionysian infantry dog who runs amok inside rational constructions. In the world he represents battles are being fought over the remnants of chaos, and these remnants contain the last of humanity. But chaotic natures in this same world are fond of setting traps. When Brecht announces that “man is the mistake,” he is breathing the same distressed sigh as the new construction architects when they see what has become of their new dwellings a few months after the people have moved in.
Brecht's 1926 story is also a disdainful postwar echo of the blending of aestheticism and the reform movement among the architects of the prewar period, who still entertained the illusion that architecture could be the means to educate the individual. The creed of modern architecture expected reform dwellings to enforce its salutary moral effects on character—representing a code of conduct in three dimensions. Brecht's story confronts architecture's claim with the rather unwieldy nature of foot soldiers and mongers of chaos.
His narrative recalls a painful episode experienced by one of the pioneers of the reform movement and modern architecture. Influenced by Ruskin and Morris, in 1894 Henri van de Velde had built a model complex, Bloemenwerf, in Belgium.[63] The reformer narrates in his memoirs —not without a hint of satisfaction—a delicate situation that arose in
So they did on one day in February 1896, when Toulouse-Lautrec was a guest at Bloemenwerf. Wearing a strawberry-colored gown, the blonde-haired Maria served the food: yellow eggs with red beans on plates that matched the violet and green dahlia design of the wallpaper in the vestibule. The excess of harmony activated a sarcastic streak in the guest from Paris. Mildly intoxicated, he leapt up onto the table and launched into a speech that, to the disgust of the host, threatened to degenerate into “obscenities.” “But,” writes van de Velde in his memoirs, “it did not go that far. The atmosphere of our house did not fail to have its effect, and Toulouse-Lautrec's remarks ended in words of gratitude. The singular nature of our house, normal and extraordinary at once, did not leave him untouched.”
Brecht's story lacks such a good ending. The moralism of the modernist credo remains powerful enough to trigger a small sense of guilt in engineer Müller but not to alter his behavior. Put in the form of a crude aphorism: modernism here lets down its postmodern hair, whereby the “post-” serves only to indicate the return of the repressed. The foot soldier's shame has become an object of comedy. Four years later Brecht will compose learning plays in which-under the enormous pressure of the last phase of the republic to declare one's commitments-no one gets to laugh at the same collisions between spontaneity and cool construction. Now he follows the rules of discipline to their fatal consequences. As a means of behavioral correction in the Communist Party school-house, engineer Müller, former infantry dog, is killed, his body tossed into the lime pit.
The avant-garde discovered in prebourgeois cultures a type characterized by affective discipline, constant alertness, and an ability to bracket considerations of morality. But in fact there was no need to go elsewhere in search of such a type, since a storehouse of images of the armored subject, acting without the benefit of an inner compass, lay ready to hand.[64] The military comprised a cool culture subsystem within contemporary Weimar society and, like out—of-the-way cultures in distant times, functioned mechanically like clockwork and froze historical change.[65] The
The army was for millions a site in which behavior was shaped under the pressure of mortal danger; in Brecht's Mann ist Mann, it is called “Mama” in the Fatzer fragment we are born “in the tank.”[66] In the army, the need for an internal regulation of the conscience falls away; the external voice of orders takes over. The cardinal virtues are the ability to discharge a duty and react quickly. The rapid change of persona, from affective control to blackout, from etiquette to aggressive frenzy, is the order of the day at the front.
The soldierly icon is hard to separate from the typology of the new objectivity. Neither the cool persona nor the radar type exists without a military shadow: in the “gray army” of white-collar employees (Theo-dor Geiger), sociology finds it in the midst of the consumer sphere. Even the creature (type 3) is often only the other side of the coin. Jünger's construction of the worker blends the persona type with the iron figure of the soldier. This amalgam was part of a tradition that regarded the industrial worker as a metallized body.
Even a writer as opposite to Jünger's sensibility as Joseph Roth, observing the worker against the iron landscape of the railway system, outfits him with soldierly qualities:
There a man in uniform saunters amid the bewildering systems of tracks, tiny; the individual in this context is important only as a mechanism. His significance is no greater than that of a lever; his effectiveness no more portentous than that of a switch. In this world all the potential of human expressiveness is reduced to the mechanical communication of an instrument. More important here than an arm is a lever, more than a wink, a signal. Here the eye is of no use, rather the lantern; not the cry, but the whistle of an open vent. Here it is not passion that rules, but regulations, the law.[67]
In the workers' literature of this decade, we rediscover the type of the cool persona in the person of the Communist cadre: Leninism is his Art of Worldly Wisdom. Existence from a distance defines his pathos, and morality comes to expression in the tactical rules of survival in the midst of a generalized threat. Coolness is the quality that marks him off from the warm zones of the tradition-minded Social Democratic communities.
BRECHT'S HAND ORACLE FOR CITY DWELLERS
Toward the end of the republic, attitude—a decision made for the long run-comes to occupy a central place in political ethics. “Attitude”—sighs Benjamin, in a review of Krieg und Krieger, an anthology edited by Ernst Jünger—“‘attitude’ is the third word in all their speeches.”[68] Those who have in fact surrendered to the direction of powerful institutions seek to demonstrate through an attitude of decisiveness that they have determined their course themselves.
Whenever attitude becomes a fundamental value, it spawns invulnerable-looking monsters. As a rule, however, keeping up the requisite steely appearance taps all available resources, so that the monsters are exhausted before they have ever undertaken a truly risky step. Fear of disgrace undoes them. Making the most of an aesthetic of disgrace, dadaism refined the acceptance of indignity. In Serner's new objectivity Handbrevier, “cowardice,” Gracián's notion of a “finely executed retreat,” and the art of minimalist survival still center on character. In contrast, Brecht's tips for city dwellers abandon the anchor in character.
The character that specializes in a steely attitude, as we have already seen, encounters a dilemma:
| Don't talk about danger! | |
| You can't drive a tank through a manhole: | |
| You'll have to get out. | |
| Better abandon your primus | |
| You've got to see that you yourself come through.[69] |
The topos of an earthquake landscape appears in an advanced stage in Brecht's Reader for Those Who Live in Cities. No landmarks of collective memory are left-even their ruins are gone. We saw this social space in Gracián, Plessner, Blei, and Serner: a space shot through with agonistic tension, peopled by compassless navigators who must therefore rely on external voices. And these voices urge: seek distance; regard shelter as provisional; separate yourself from your cohort; cut family ties; avoid exaggerated individuation; pull your hat low on your brow; retreat from all sources of warmth. But Brecht's Reader does not stop with these tips for the existential nomad. Total mobilization defines the
| Part from your friends at the station | |
| Enter the city in the morning with your coat buttoned up | |
| Look for a room, and when your friend knocks: | |
| Do not, o do not, open the door | |
| But | |
| Cover your tracks! | |
| If you meet your parents in Hamburg or elsewhere | |
| Pass them like strangers, turn the corner, don't recognize them | |
| Pull the hat they gave you over your face, and | |
| Do not, o do not, show your face | |
| But | |
| Cover your tracks. | |
| Eat the meat that's there. Don't stint yourself. | |
| Go into any house when it rains and sit on any chair that's in it | |
| But don't sit long. And don't forget your hat. | |
| I tell you: | |
| Cover your tracks. | |
| 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. | |
| See when you come to think of dying | |
| That no gravestone stands and betrays where you lie | |
| With a clear inscription to denounce you | |
| And the year of your death to give you away. | |
| Once again: | |
| Cover your tracks. | |
| (That is what they taught me.)[70] |
This code of conduct, like the others we have examined, requires its adherents to specialize in separation. What they must separate from is clear, but not why or to what end. The question we find posed in Brecht, therefore, is what his hand oracle could possibly promise, when the behavioral commandments of an anonymous voice offer no provisional guarantee of a place to rest beyond the chronic state of alarm.
The person who follows Brecht's injunctions gets nothing back, beyond the certainty that his gravestone will bear no inscription that could refer to an identity. Thus new objectivity conduct codes finally arrive at zero, which indeed guarantees a maximum of mobility but leaves
To be sure, the imperative “Cover your tracks!” remains very puzzling. It has become standard to see in it an order delivered by “reality itself.” Gratefully following the tip Brecht offers in the tenth poem of the cycle,
| When I speak to you | |
| Coldly and impersonally | |
| I speak to you merely | |
| Like reality itself …,[72] |
we find in this self-denunciation the solution to the puzzle. The subject speaking here, as Heidegger put it, was the “they” as the “subject of dai-liness.” The anonymous voice recommends the rhetorical simulation of alienation in order to demonstrate that its logic leads to self-dissolution. What remains awkward, however—as Rudolf Arnheim remarked—is that “reality” never “speaks” coldly and in general but always individually and with promises of warmth.[73] And the process by which the personal becomes anonymous proceeds apace, without anyone having to force it. In the logic of escalation that Brecht demands from his persona, what we see at work here is not so much a mimicry of negation but an assumption of the individual's ability to cover his tracks. What therefore appears as the null point of the disappearance of the subject can be read as the fulcrum of subjective empowerment; neither social institutions nor obscure historical processes cause the city dweller to disappear—the ego itself flees into the future, where death is waiting.
Gracián's persona comes back into view; Plessner's dueling subject and Serner's confidence man resume their roles, avoiding the hordes and gambling with the enemy … But for what purpose? under which magical eye? for what reward? Here the Hungarian Marxist Bela Balazs offers an instructive intervention, revealing that poems like this one document an especially perverse form of the “Dionysian frenzy of self-denial.”[74] From behind the Marxist mask of the artist comes the voice of Nietzsche. What does this interpretation add to our understanding of the subject?
Brecht's poem of self-dissolution itself bears an ineffaceable signature, which has prompted an entire series of analyses. The poem about covering one's tracks has come to appear to us as nothing but tracks. Reactions to Brecht's poem over the long run reinscribe sharp subjective contours
The poem remained Benjamin's obsession: he inscribes every possible political turn in the text, to which he denies all personal memory. “The destructive character,” Benjamin concludes in 1930, “is a signal. As a trigonometric sign is subject to the wind from all sides, so is the destructive character vulnerable from all sides to talk.”[77] In a journal entry of 1940, he registers the appearance in the poem of the spirit and figure of the GPU.[78] Later yet, Franco Buono discovers the “urban guerrilla” in the poem (“rules of behavior for underground fighters in occupied cities”).[79] The psychoanalytic climate of the 19705 brings its sadomasochistic elements to the fore; in favor in the 19805 are its implications for communications theory.[80] And in the 19905 readers discover in it a little forgetfulness machine, apt for reuse in deconstruction theories.
The list is not a random assortment. Analysis alternates between the extremes of the armored ego and the unbounded self. The value neutrality of the poem facilitates extension to various notions of the self-empowered subject; its conceptual development toward destruction makes it possible at the same time to retract the empowerment. Of what use, we may ask, is the updating of the venerable tradition of Gracián's code, when this external voice sends the persona in all possible directions? When the moral vacuity of the code in its terminal stages spurs desires to melt into communities promising to combine strict behavioral directives with meaning? “And when death brings at last the desired forgetfulness,” says Nietzsche, it “sets the seal on the knowledge that ‘being’ is merely a continual ‘has been,’ a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.”[81]
While Nietzsche, however, registers the human inability to “learn to forget,”[82] Brecht puts forgetting before the subject as a daily lesson. Does it make any sense to see the poem as an aquarium in which Nietz-schean motifs and fragments of court maxims swim like colorful fish? We could easily add other swimmers, like the slapstick figures of American
Here the poem slips into a tradition of rhetorical irony that we encountered first in Gracián's code of conduct. There and elsewhere dis-simulatio attracts suspicions. It lies in the negative act of concealing what the speaker actually means; the defining characteristic of rhetorical irony's other mode of speech, simulatio, is to present positively what is not actual.
“Simulational irony accordingly consists in the transparent feigning of a contrary standpoint, and dissimulational in the discernible concealment of one's own conviction,” we read in a discussion of the fundamentals of rhetoric. Presupposed here is a sovereign self in control of its boundaries that raises itself out of the sameness of communication through its special capacity for double negation. In a complex process of simulation, an unmistakable “authentic personal style” comes into being through the conspicuous use of the double negation and the bland-ness of laconic language. Thus we can deduce the presence of an individual exploiting the scenarios of separation that allow the poem to form a versatile self playing out-in its black-colored mundus rhetoricus—images of “alternative possible being” to the point of self-dissolution.[84]
Repetition is the medium for the practice of rhetoric, and memory is its reservoir. What, therefore, is to be done if storage in memory, along with rhetoric itself as the vehicle of oral transmission, is to be extinguished? The poem provokes an image of the clever pedagogical salvation of the self-empowered subject, only to drive it into paradox. For where is the site of speech concealed and what is the fate of the self in the entire cycle of the Reader? In Brecht's intention, the site of speech was a phonograph; he conceived the cycle's ten poems as recorded texts. Between the poems, readers see an injunction “(This record needs to be played more than once.)”[85]
The search for the speaker's location draws attention to a complication that, fully in line with the reception history, we cannot avoid. The
Speaking in the second poem of the cycle is an imperial “we,” a collective instance that threatens exclusion and at the same time juxtaposes to the commandment “Part from your friends” a “staying”—the cohort strikes back; the relation between the external voice and the subject is agonistic. In the third, the prodigal son simulates the voice of the fathers who would have the former “vanish like smoke.” The voice of the fathers is suspiciously resonant with the voice in the first poem. In the fourth, we encounter to a particular degree the presumption of a subject: “I” occurs thirteen times. A young woman strives to find her identity through reflection in a hostile environment, and at the same time to relax—just as Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom recommends; she overexerts herself-in vain. The fifth poem marks the strangeness of the other person (“That's something I've heard a woman say.”). Here woman, traditionally the object of virile codes of conduct, is reduced to sheer matter. On this level of reduction, she acquires a historical philosophical charge: “the wind / Fills my sail.” The principle of “rising from the ruins” is played through the first time on a woman's body. The sixth offers a report (“That's something I've heard people say before now”) of the embarrassing spectacle of expressionist sons who, ignoring the new objectivity conduct code, proclaim deeds in the old manner of youthful indignation, tactlessness, and penitential pilgrimages, without realizing that they are thereby condemned to decline. With no exterior voice, the seventh poem presents us with a distinguished, armored subject as a
Throughout the cycle the authorial voice wanders restlessly, splitting itself among different instances that threaten to absorb it. Boundaries between an authentic “I” and the impersonal “one” are lost; the sixth poem delivers the tone of the complaint and its disarming in the bygone manner of parody. Authenticity has nowhere to hide for the winter. The foundation of the ironic rhetoric is undermined.
“Cover your tracks” deprives an ironic rhetoric of its basis in a secure subject. Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom displaces it into paradox. Nietzsche's concept, whereby the subject is put into vigorous play, which informed Brecht's early poetry, falls under the influence of institutions dangling the prospect of relief or threatening extinction. What continues to appear here as an uninscribed gravestone will quickly turn into the drafting table for engineers plotting measures. Their voices are already intervening in the world of the city dwellers. The “I” begins to dissolve into the “they,” so that action becomes possible by way of participation in this subject of the world of daily existence-toward what goal, remains unknown. As in Heidegger's Being and Time the “it” of the unconscious has shifted into the external world of the “they”[86] in systems of action, the “I” fancies itself a subject, although the “they” has long since destroyed the humane horizon that the subject once constructed.
This general “they,” into which the persona threatens to dissolve, is no neutral medium. It exists under the law of the fathers. One unprepossessing thing in Brecht's text draws attention to this fatal circumstance. It is the only object that the scenarios of forgetting do not forget: the hat.[87]
Twice it comes into play. The first time, pulled down over the eyes, it serves to hide the face, so that the parents are unable to recognize the son. It returns then in the third verse, which instructs the nomadic reader not to forget his hat. Whatever is tied to the figure by a possessive pronoun—“your parents/face/ideas/death”—is delivered up programmatically
In the mid-192, os, the hat concealing the face is a conspicuous trademark of new objectivity portraits: it is a characteristic feature of new objectivity paintings by Anton Raderscheidt, George Grosz, and Christian Schad; Hans Richter sets hats to dancing in his film Vormittagsspuk. Faces in expressionist painting remained expressive surfaces open to internal stimulation; now the head's contours close it off. The interior of characters becomes opaque; the hat pulled down over the face prevents expression from coming into view at all. The sixth poem in Brecht's cycle presents us with one final anachronistic expression of outrage. The habitus of proper rage here requires that the hat be “tipped back” so that attention can be drawn to the individual signs of private rebellion (Brecht associates them with hesitation over making a practical decision). This is rebellion in the manner of the expressionist “sons,” who never learned the ABCs of violence, which is the property of the fathers.
Up to this point, the origin of the hat has not been mentioned; the poem says, “the hat (Hut) they gave you.” The injunction is never to forget the parents' gift (perhaps the souvenir of a behiitetes [sheltered] upbringing?). Anyone who follows all the instructions remains tied, through the gift of the hat, to those from whom he wanted to separate.
A radical separation from the parents (cf. Serner's precept no. 358) is one of the initiation rites of the city dweller. In an early draft of Mann ist Mann we read:
he will advance one day (he) will float on one of these steamships up to
the big city he is the man for it he has no parents.[88]
The man on the steamship, to return to the image of the Reader, floats off with the hat from his parents on his head.
Is this inseparability from the hat an indication of the desire for the “continuation of parental care” that Jiirgen Manthey finds at work everywhere in Brecht's writings?[89] Or does the hat instead signal why the persona finds itself in a chronic state of alarm? Does it lead the reader, as Susanne Winnacker ventures, to the idea of the potlatch, a gift designed to destroy rivals in the next generation? Or, as Hans-Thies Leh-mann supposes, does it suggest the ineradicable burden of a debt—for example, the debt incurred by the son's mere existence-so that only death could occasion the desired forgetfulness?
Those who follow instructions so strictly that they wind up accepting absurdities never pull free of the spell of the paternal law, which they
Is this reference to the law of the fathers the secret revealed in the avant-garde act of forgetting? Is it indeed the case that “the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past”?[91] Brecht's poem puts these ominous readings of the avant-garde act into play by means of a curious thing—a hat. It brings the paternal law onto the crooked plane of the text and relativizes the fathers' revenge in the light of comedy.[92]
Thus a memory of the paternal law appears in texts in which we would least expect it. Just how explosive the appearance can be is expressed perhaps in Paul Tillich's formula cited above: that the call for community contains the demand “to create the mother from the son and to summon the father out of nothing.”[93] The father is supposed to appear with the authority of the state, in order to sublate the world of civilized separation in favor of symbiosis, to reconstruct the mother and in doing so conceal the “origin.” This “superfather” is clearly in a position to recreate, by means of his ice-cold measures, the maternal warmth of “community” and keep her constantly under watch—a paradoxical procedure, which is hard to bring off. “Political romanticism thus suffers its most severe disillusion at this point,” remarks Tillich; “nowhere is the contradiction between desire and reality felt more painfully than here.”
Brecht's poem reminds us of the desire to call the father out of nothing, in order to enact disappointment by means of a curious object. With a touch of humor, it haunts the Reader for Those Who Live in Cities. Soon, however, the law of the fathers will appear in the learning plays, no longer playfully, but with relentless insistence, in the name of a collective.
DIE MEHLREISENDE FRIEDA GEIER
If the new objectivity served the “function of social and compensation for a generation of men who had lost their identity,” the appearance of a woman armed with Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom seems inconceivable.[94]
The supreme commandment of someone doing business with someone else is that the former must never step into the latter's shoes. Compassion cripples.[96]
Acknowledging the other's right to existence unavoidably diminishes your own substance. Whatever you've not gotten your own hands on will be stashed away by someone else.
People are only too eager, for anyone they take to be an outsider, to hang the breadbasket a little higher. That means you end up with nothing but the table in your teeth.[97]
Business trips and sex are like a gauntlet for Frieda Geier; she endures them with mixed feelings because others are always intent on curtailing her mobility. Her lover, a sports idol (selected from the “breeding material” of the provinces) cannot cope with this “double being”: he cannot merge symbiotically with a figure who is at once “sensuous female” and “ascetic with short hair.”
This restless creature, you have to hold it down with every fiber, hold on to it with all your might.[98]
To the small town she ultimately seems to be a vampire, undermining the businessman's livelihood, draining the athlete's vitality. Surrounded by a pack of men, the heroine is forced to disappear so that her lover can overcome his crisis, in both his athletics and his business. She reappears one final time, but the idol's comrades lie in wait for an ambush—at the Jewish cemetery.
Individuals must stand up, experience ostracism firsthand, and with their slender selves stomp through the thicket of reigning opinion.[99]
If the cool persona in the figure of a woman cannot be instrumentalized as a prostitute, she is hunted as a “witch.”
Marieluise Fleißer's novel is a medium that exposes the self-destructive aspects of new objectivity leitmotivs. The transfer of themes of winning mobility through anonymity, incognito, or minimalist survival—woven through a soldier's mentality or a dandy's attitude—to a woman evokes a (thrilling) note of Angst. In the handbooks—whether composed
Fleißier had already put into words a woman's experience with men of the sort of Plessner's duelist in her collection of stories, Ein Pfund Orangen, which appeared in 1929. “She got to know men,” says one of her characters, “and one was like the other, having a system for women, but no mercy.”[100] We encountered this system in the conduct codes of distance; Fleißer directs her outsider's gaze at it, registering its unshakable rule: “The man determines the distance.”[101] And the system assigns a place to the other sex: “she was warmth, and not a person.”[102] As a lesson for women, it prescribes the code of virile distance:
These were the frosts of freedom [see Figure 9]; she had to learn to freeze. No one depends on anyone.[103]
But the female characters in Fleißer's texts get a lesson in a decisionism of their own. The author sends them into the system of the conduct codes, where they learn to their horror that “the natural enemy is them.”[104]
Perhaps what we see here is the shadow that Schmitt's Begriff des Politischen throws over the battle between the sexes. Or perhaps it is the deeper ground from which the theory developed. We recall Schmitt's definition:
The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity in union or separation, in association or dissociation.[105]
The “enemy” in this conceptual system is always “the other,” and it suffices for “his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.” This kind of knowledge, which the female characters learn firsthand, offers them neither a standpoint from which they can deal with the other sex nor a feeling of self-determination that would enable them to draw boundaries. The lesson is imposed on them. For a time they seem to assimilate the principles of boundary drawing in
These were the frosts of freedom (Karl Hubbuch, Improvisiertes Fruhstuck [Improvised breakfast]. With the permission of Myriam Hubbuch.)
an initiation rite granting them access to the combatants' fencing hall: “Maturation meant that a light had gone on about the enmity prevailing among people.”[106] But since women have to represent the estrangement of first nature inside the sphere of trust, their claim to their own subjective artificiality suddenly ends up in the sphere of dissociation, where the intensity of the separation they embody is too much even for separation specialists. Those who sermonize on the “frosts of freedom,” says Brecht, eventually shy away from the effects.
Operating in the sphere of mistrust, Frieda Geier learns the enemy rules of behavior:
“Men must be destroyed, or else they destroy you,” a woman friend had said. Suddenly a thought came to mind-knowledge cuts to the quick.[107]
The point is that it cuts her. Describing these techniques, the female author clearly has need of a certain masochism to set her heroine down in enemy terrain-allowing her to “swim free,” I might have said, were swimming not the domain of the sports hero she is trying to thwart.
Bela Balazs, in a polemical remark aimed at the coolness doctrine in Reader for Those Who Live in Cities, notes Brecht's effort “to howl with the wolves” as a way of deceiving the pack; Balazs clearly fails to recognize the usefulness of the pack. Fleißer's heroine experiments with her enemy's code of conduct. In the social structure inhabited by her heroine, the maneuver comes at the cost of real-life substance. “She cannot howl with the wolves.”
Plessner, Schmitt, Serner, Brecht, and Jünger present variants on the cool persona. “Watchdog,” Fleißer will later term this avant-garde type; it watches over the boundary drawn by the dueling subject.[108] A paradox develops from its simultaneous resistance to and desire for decentering, whereby what Musil termed the “dis-armoring of the ego” (a genuinely modernist impulse) undermines the will to be a “subject in armor” (a motif of the decisionist avant-garde). Marieluise Fleißer's novels show us that the woman who allows herself to be pulled into this melee of virile narcissism gets cut to the quick. That pleasure can be gotten from the act is testimony to the uncanny dimension of Fleißer's texts.
GINSTER—A SWAN SONG
In 1928, Siegfried Kracauer's novel Ginster: Von ihm selbst geschrieben appears, throwing a comedic light on the dilemma of the self-assured subject.[109] In Kracauer's hands the fetishes of objectivity become the stumbling blocks of conformity. Ginster, the hero, a new objectivity egoless phenomenon, stumbles in the general mobilization of 1914–18. Like the other characters under discussion here, he loves the anonymous life, seems even to have halfway internalized the precepts of Serner's Hand-brevier when, having escaped the unpleasantries of the war and revolution, he sighs, “So nice, a proper hotel. He was sorry that, as of tomorrow, he would have to go back to sleeping in private quarters.” This attitude, along with all the others drawn from the spirit of objectivity, fails him, though he takes great pains to adapt them to circumstances. Thus Ginster knows the utilitarian value of Brecht's new objectivity minimalism. Faced with a threatened call-up to the front, he tries to increase his chances of survival by eating as little as possible: “The skinnier he got, the smaller he was as a target.”[110] Nor did Ginster have anything against failing to be on hand for important historical moments. He cultivated a talent for missing them:
Ginster always had bad luck at public events. He either came too late or, to his surprise, got an excellent seat, which, however, as he soon found out, was free only because it faced the wrong direction.[111]
For a time Ginster is a gunner with the Cologne infantry, and he strives to adapt numerically to the heroic discourse. But, as Inka Mulder-Bach puts it, “he always misses the right tone by a decisive nuance”:
The daily reports are also so nicely stylized, Ginster noted, aware of his desire to slip in an appreciative statement of some kind.[112]
In the hero's inability to make the discourse of militant objectivity his own, Joseph Roth saw one of the brighter aspects of the republic, distinguishing Ginster—“the civilian pure and simple”—from the more general run of the army. In 1928, at the beginning of the boom in war literature, Ginster's appearance, though easily overlooked, was a minor sensation. Among the martial figures of gray marauders, the impossible civilian seemed born of American slapstick; Kracauer's hero was greeted by contemporary critics as a “sociological Chaplin.”
Ginster, always eager, like Serner's characters, to hit the road, is innocent of their compulsively melancholy rituals. Rather than take flight, he merely stumbles along. Since nothing connects him to the popular mass, he differs from the good soldier Schwejk; where everyone else reacts quickly, his sluggish reflection works a subversive effect. He contemplates the “grammar” of the barracks talk, which reveals to him the thinglike character of the man in uniform but does not exempt him from the category of thing.[113] The military hierarchy brings him face to face with other problems that semiotics tempers:
In the barracks, in the hallways, on the street, superiors loomed before him, with the impenetrability of a hedge in a fairy tale. To get the hedge to yield, he had to make a special sign to it. He suddenly stiffened up like a wall, the vegetation dying out, his eyes two holes….
Ginster …, for his part, had to direct his eyes at the subordinate officer without, strictly speaking, looking at him or letting the sight of him prompt any thoughts; so that his eyes became openings into which the officer could pour orders. Like cemetery urns, suitable for anyone's ashes.[114]
What makes the awkward hero stand out against contemporary attitudes of heroism is his essential other-directedness. As Mulder-Bach notes, Ginster does not act—“he behaves.” His resistance consists not in protest but in “his kind of receptivity.” Ginster suggests a type that appears only in vague outlines in the scanty civilian literature of the republic, which we shall describe in more detail in the chapter on the radar type.
JÜNGER'S FALL INTO THE CRYSTAL
Silhouettes The habitus of the cool persona is determined by the claim it stakes on perceptual acuity. Ernst Jünger, in the foreword to Der Arbeiter, maintains that an understanding of the new reality depends entirely upon “the precision of the description, which presupposes eyes with complete and unbiased powers of vision.”[115] Desires for perceptual acuity become powerful whenever a traditional interpretive frame is in collapse. Such situations generate calls for a retrieval of “pure” perception of “sheer facts.” Perception, exhausted by the drone of prescribed discourse, regenerates itself by focusing on meaningless things.
Programs aimed at the restoration of perception, however, do more than prompt a passive registration of objects and events. Aggression sets the effort's fundamental tenor; its tone is not without a hint of sadism. The sharp-eyed persona is fond of comparing itself with the surgeon, while the habitus of perceptual acuity requires that the subject transgress moral boundaries. The precision of a moral norm's negation not only lends expression to a new objectivity habitus but also reinforces its claims to the empirical sciences' exactness. Stripping perception of moral judgment necessarily Jepsychologizes the observed object, reducing it to its basis in physiological or economic data and assimilating it to the rules of natural scientific discourse. The intrusive gaze thus becomes an instrument of pure perception.
It is a commonplace among avant-garde artists that the precondition for seeing an object “sharply” is removing it from all moral entanglement in its environment.[116] By excising the object from its moral, pragmatic, and atmospheric integuments, the artistic gaze isolates it in its razor-sharp contours. If people are its object of observation, the sharp gaze works by changing them into physical objects in the sway of mechanical laws. The emotional effect of coolness stems from this act of transformation. “Coolness as a tendency,” remarked Osip Mandelstam in 1930, “stems from the incursion of physics into the moral idea.”[117] We read in Benjamin, writing at the same time, that precise observation becomes possible only when “the moral personality has been put on ice.”[118]
In the early 19305 essay “Uber den Schmerz,” Jünger suggests a view of human beings as alien objects, without regard for their pain, their passion, or complaints.[119] The discourses of the sciences facilitate this cooling off of perception, according to Jünger, and, carried over into literature, are capable of producing “subzero temperatures.”
“At such temperatures,” Jünger repeats later in Strahlungen (1949), “flesh and erotic contact also lose their luster; their physical condition comes to the fore.”[120] Perceptual acuity calls for an anthropology that understands people as physical objects, making a retrieval of seventeenth-century modes of anthropological understanding the next obvious step. Likewise attractive is the incorporation into literary writing of the new scientific discourses of animal behavior research, psycho-technics, and sociometry.
Having identified these areas of overlap with scientific styles of thought, however, we need to stress the value placed by advocates of the cool gaze on the “cult of evil” taken over from the nineteenth-century dandy. The dandy juxtaposes his perceptual acuity, as an “apparatus of disinfection and isolation,” to bourgeois moral conventions.[121] The dandy's descendant finds himself in a world transformed by the technical media's progress. As technological devices, still and moving picture cameras appear to possess the prized characteristic of perceptual sharpness. Jünger attributes to the camera the same quality of impassiveness he expects of the cool persona:
The photograph exists outside the sphere of the emotional [see Figure 10], which lends it a telescopic character; one notes that what happened has been seen by an unemotional and invulnerable eye. It can just as easily capture a ball in midflight as a human being in the moment he is being ripped apart by an explosion.[122]
The transposition of “horrific vision” to the world of the apparatus lends it the value-neutrality of a technical norm; the transfer of this mechanical competence back to human perception frees it from the demands of morality.
By the end of the 19205 the trenchant critique of the conceptual realists counters the ideology of the camera's eye, disdaining the “romanticizing” attitude of “pure” perception. Brecht's famous line from the Drei-groschenprozeß documents the change: “A photograph of the Krupp Works or A.E.G. yields next to no information about these institutions. The real reality has moved into the functional.”[123] Kracauer's polemical remark in the first chapter of his study of white-collar workers argues similarly: “A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory but remain for all eternity a hundred views of the factory. The reality is a construction.”[124] Both authors emphatically distance themselves at the beginning of the 19305 from the pathos of perceptual acuity, to which both had earlier appealed.
The photograph exists outside the sphere of the emotional (Publicity still for At the Rim of the Sahara Desert. With the permission of VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)
Musil calls on the results of cognitive psychology and phenomenology in his formulation a few years earlier:
It is known that we see what we know: ciphers, signs, abbreviations, attributes of the concept; permeated and carried merely by isolated dominant sensuous impressions in a vague plenitude of the rest.[125]
Musil is convinced that seeing in ciphers corresponds to the “necessity of the practical orientation.” Formulaic stereotyping is not only a characteristic of concepts but equally typical of “our gestures and sensual impressions, which after a couple of repetitions become just as habitual as imaginary processes tied to words.”
The conceptual realism of the 19205 that we just observed in Brecht, and in Jünger and Schmitt as well, transfers the claim of perceptual acuity onto the alleged precision of the concept. Acuity works its effect in their thinking by way of a maneuver identical to that by which the bracketing of moral judgment aims to make human beings visible as physical objects. The position of the conceptual realists on perception—which we continue to find today in rationalistic theories of perception[126]-runs as follows: the eye, because of its biological structure, cannot be unbiased. “Pure” vision is a fiction. Every visual perception is a goaloriented
The phenomenologist Alfred Schiitz assumes that an “intentional ray of reflection” interrupts the stream of formulaic repetitions that suffuse daily life: a concentrated packet of light illuminates a circle in the environment, which is filled with the darkness of unconsciously experienced schemata. But for phenomenologists, the overall perceptual space outside what is intended remains filled by a fog of reflexes, anonymous noises, tactile impressions, and smells. The horizon surrounding the core area under visual inspection is permeable and “soft.”[128]
The boundary line for conceptual realists, however, is “hard” and impermeable. The conceptual realists among the artists of the 19205 intervene into the perceptual space, in order to cut away the soft edges of phenomena, arrest fluid movement in freeze frames, and do away with ambivalences. They scan the visual field, concentrating on the isolated parcels in which their “specimen” is captured for examination.[129] Figures are separated out from one another until there finally appear “pure” phenomena. While it is indeed no longer possible to have any palpable experience of these phenomena, conceptual realism maintains the claim, as in Jünger's construction of the worker, that they are the result of perceptual acuity carried to an extreme.
The contemporary aesthetic appeal of the focus on sharp contours is not to be underestimated. In opposition to the impressionist blurring of boundaries and loosening up of subjective unity, the “calendrical objectivity” of conceptual silhouettes resulting from these surgical interventions into perception appeals to advocates of the cool gaze because it aims at the effect of the uncanny but uses a quasi-scientific manner: “So also in the bright transparency of loneliness does everything become clearer and larger, but above all it becomes more primal and demonic.”[130]
Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy theory imposes a perceptual grid on the amorphous bodies of liberal society. It lights up areas of semi-darkness and assigns all vacillation and wavering to the category of betrayal. The metier of the cool persona is to isolate elements in the mix, distinguo ergo sum its slogan (see Figure 11).[131]
Since this attitude implies a claim to perceptual acuity, it is not surprising that conceptual realists go around with cameras around their
Distinguo ergo sum (August Sander, Kiinstlerehepaar [Artistic couple], Cologne, 192.5. With the permission of Pho-tographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, August Sander Archiv, Cologne; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)
We encounter here the individual, whether alone or in a group, in a strangely slack and nonreferential bearing, needing twilight all the more as a way to make excuses. Thus the love for such motifs as gardens in the glow of Chinese lanterns, boulevards in the artificial light of the first gas candelabra, landscapes in the fog at dusk or in the shimmer of sunlight. (122)
Impressionism had gone beyond the clear distinction of significant objects from the environment and atmosphere. Its observation put the
Jünger's attitude toward photography draws on motifs that Vilem Flusser describes a half century later.[132] Jünger's use of hunting metaphors draws our attention to the importance he accords to the distinction between mere visual perception and “scouting.” Arthur Schopenhauer referred to the difference between the two, explaining that scouting, as opposed to looking, is an act of seeing that is subordinated to the will.[133] Flusser associates photography with “being on the lookout”:
It is the prehistorical stalking pose of the Paleolithic hunter in the tundra. Only the photographer pursues his game not in the open grassland, but in the thicket of cultural objects, and his secret paths are determined by this artificial taiga.[134]
The photographer's thicket is made up of cultural objects, “which have been ‘purposefully placed’”:
Each of these objects obstructs the photographer's view of his game. He sneaks through them in order to stymie the intention hidden within them. He strives to emancipate himself from his cultural condition, strives at all costs to capture his game.[135]
Since for Jünger the “purposefully placed” cultural objects that threaten to obstruct the photographic gaze consist primarily of the nebulous things of “modern humanity,” the initial task, if the aim is to get a snapshot of reality, is to get them out of the way. Flusser, however, refers in this connection to the way the photographer by and large surrenders himself to the categories of the apparatus. He also comes to the conclusion that photography delivers “an image of what has been conceived,” but the concepts in Flusser's case are those for which the photographer has been programmed by his apparatus. While Jünger ties the photographer's habitus to the bearing of the cool persona, which uses
In his reasoning about photography, Jünger races through several fields of thought, here pointing out the “predatory nature” of the apparatus,[137] there emphasizing the photographer's philosophical capacity to observe the world through a categorical apparatus, to demarcate visual fields, and record a series of distinct pictures;[138] then again he makes the photographer into a “functionary of the apparatus.”[139] In any case, the technological instrument delivers pictures with sharply defined contours (12,2,).With this conception Jünger puts himself provocatively at odds with Kracauer's theory of photography.
In 1927, Siegfried Kracauer complained that the story of an individual lies “buried under a photograph as if under a blanket of snow.”[140] Now Jünger praises the capacity of the camera to freeze the visible in the unequivocality of the sign. Jünger seems to have read Kracauer's essay; it is not without a provocative gesture that he praises the aspects of a camera that Kracauer criticized, while devaluing the specific accomplishment of photography that Kracauer praised as characteristic of the nineteenth century. Thus Kracauer discovered the camera's ability to record meaningful debris-refuse material that no theory or pictorial tradition had yet captured. The new technological medium encompassed society's “previously unseen natural fundament” unregistered in existing sign systems, the detritus of visibility not yet permeated by concepts, the space of the visually unconscious, optical noise: “The photographic archive gathers together in illustrative form the last elements of nature estranged from meaning.”[141] For Jünger, the conceptual realist for whom the notion of types has put its stamp on every item in his visual inventory, this salvage operation does not occur.
The 19205 offer a favorable climate for conceptual realism. Its practitioners offer countless theories as devices for “sharpening” perception: theories of physiognomy and mimicry; typographies of functionalist psychology distinguishing the “introvert” from the “extrovert” sociological theories categorizing people according to social roles (secretary, tax accountant, pastry cook, and so on). Probably the most popular and the catchiest of them all is Ernst Kretschmer's constitutional psychology, which correlates character variations with measurable physical
Typologies turn the body into something that can be read. Their attractions are endless: typologies bypass the stress of prepredicative experience, stripping the other's orientation of ambivalence; they make judgments easier to form, clarify lines of opposition, and accelerate the decision-making process. Typologies thus provide the ideal framing conditions for decisionism. They take over the fatal tendency of the “physiognomic gaze,” for which Ursula Geitner offers the formula: “Exclusive intimacy, with anxious pigeon-holing as the outward orientation.”[142]
Typological thinking dominates the human sciences of this period, which would be little cause for concern if, as in Max Weber, types remained the products of a critical epistemology distinct from an unfathomable substratum of life. Martin Lindner draws attention to the way these years give rise to a “conversion of heuristic typology into ontology.”[143] Now each individual type becomes a variation on the general structure of life. Only such an ontological perspective explains the “mythical” image of human being—such as Jünger's worker-that does away with individualistic psychological explanations of individual beings. Kretschmer's Korperbau und Charakter (192,1) is an indicator of this ontological conversion of typological thinking. It becomes deadly when combined with a new historical metaphysic, which is what occurs at the beginning of the 19305.
“Type,” according to the Philosophisches Worterbuch of 1934, also means “primal form.”
If the type itself represents an objective structure of life, it takes on a particular meaning in a historical situation in which one human type (in the descriptive sense) seems to be crystallizing and superseding another type. It is precisely this of which many observers in the 19205 felt themselves capable: The collective type was superseding the bourgeois type. This process alone was enough, according to the conception of history by vitalist ideology, to show that “life” was behind the new “type.”[144]
Aside from Jünger's Arbeiter, one of the most extreme literary examples of this ontological conversion that blends typological thinking, historical metaphysics, and aesthetics is Gottfried Benn's essay “Dorische
The state, power, purifies the individual, filters out his irritability, makes him cubist, outfits him with surfaces, makes him capable of art. Yes, that is perhaps the way to put it: the state makes the individual capable of art.[145]
What the ontological typologies have in common is an emphasis on visible phenomena, on processes and behavioral patterns, and a resistance to introspective psychology. Jünger adopts Malinowski's ethnological slogan “Study ritual, not belief” when he remarks in Der Arbeiter:
The gesture with which someone opens up a newspaper is more informative than all the lead articles in the world, and nothing is more instructional than standing for a quarter hour on a street corner. (132)
The automaticism of traffic, which he is observing here, is for him a sign that people are in motion about some secret center in accord with “silent and invisible commands.” Jünger's ethnological gaze seems to bind signs to the body but counteracts the effect by a simultaneous dissolution of the physical; it stamps meaning so blankly on the brow that the body disappears behind the sign. Jünger, when he wants to, sees nothing all about him but allegories of his theory of mobilization.
It is the deadly tendency of typologies to have anchored the ordering model of the system of writing in the obscurity of the bodily world, and this in a historical situation in which the monopoly of writing is being called into question by the magic of technologically produced images. For a time, typologies can also seduce a writer like Robert Musil: “More is said to me today by the three words, ‘asthenic, schizothymic type,’ than by a long individual description.”[146]
The omnipresence of typologies in the 19205 forms the background and medium for the elaboration of conceptual realism. Political camps tend to their respective typologies, giving form to frightening schools of perception in which people learn how to order racial and class physiognomies. The capacity for drawing distinctions takes on a dreadful “sharpness”: people learn how to distinguish, on the basis of physiognomy and behavior, labor aristocrats from proletarians, lumpen proletarians from Social Democrats, Trotskyites from social fascists, white-collar employees from bourgeois, Jews from Aryans, friend from enemy.
A body's role is so distinct that a photographer like August Sander can snap its photograph. This “bourgeois” artisan, to be sure, does not come quite up to the standards of the conceptual realists; critics reprove
If our position on Sander's work in itself is thus completely positive, still we might wish for a sharper and clearer sociological formulation in regard to classification. Here the goal must be a herbarium, so to speak, of human existence: standpoint, year, activity, class affiliation, as we understand it in Marx's definition: “but we have here to do with persons only insofar as they are the personification of economic categories, the bearers of specific class relations and interests.”[147]
What we see here is the reconnection of a new medium, which delivers “meaningless” visual impressions, to language, as described by Jünger in Der Arbeiter, in its ability to draw distinctions. Jünger later acknowledges that his tendency at the time was to use the “scissors of the concept,” to cut life to a predetermined pattern.[148] The silhouettes offered by the type are practical: they unburden; they orient; they facilitate decisions. In the hand of the dandy-soldier, they are part of the “cult of evil.”
In Jünger's essays toward the end of the republic, the striving for perceptual sharpness combines with conceptual realism in spectacular fashion. His writings also demonstrate, however, that his belief in the actual existence of concepts unwittingly conditions the fixed boundaries of things. Benjamin shows in reference to the French surrealists how easy it is to slip “from the logical realm of the concept into a magical realm of words.”[149] He refers to the dadaists' “impassioned phonetic and graphic games of transformation.” And in Das abenteuerliche Herz, Jünger steps into the magical. But is this kind of magic not simply the dark other side of his classification frenzy?
What we find in Jünger's magic is much more what Arnold Gehlen designates as a sign of magical thinking: the overestimation of order in nature, so that a secret center guides and interprets any nocturnal flapping of wings, flash of steel, dream, or gesture. This magical order also explains the formal intactness of Jünger's verbal construct. His work is not subject to the distorting aim of mediating the experience of complete alien determinacy with the assumption of the autonomous subject, which was responsible for the deterioration of the grammatical structures of other writers in Jünger's generation.[150]
The Cool Persona and the Sensation of Pain
Jünger's problem is the century's problem: Before women could become an experience for him, there came the experience of war.
Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht
The juxtaposition of Jünger's essay “Uber den Schmerz” with Der Ar-beiter demonstrates the way that the call for perceptual sharpness, on the one hand, and the construction of the object of observation from within the cool persona's code of conduct, on the other, condition each other reciprocally. In both texts we encounter the same parallel process: the demoralization of perception goes hand in hand with the Jepsychol-ogization of the observed object, which then behaves in the manner of a physical body. The latter not only slips out of sight from an ethical perspective but in doing so loses its organic quality. All the while, thus disembodied, the object under observation is supposed to gain in substance.
In “Uüber den Schmerz” the mutual conditioning of perception and the construction of the object is especially palpable. “At all times,” Jünger maintains here,
the uniform encompasses an act of armoring, a claim to be protected in a particular fashion from the onslaught of pain. This is already obvious in the way it is possible to observe a corpse in uniform with greater coolness than, for example, a civilian who has fallen in a street battle.[151]
The armoring of the gaze also allows the object of the gaze to claim the uniform as a shield.
It is no surprise that Jünger's diagnosis of the era agrees with the cool persona's code of conduct, which requires any person who would exercise power to transform his counterpart from an organic and moral entity into a physical object. The cool persona must learn “to treat the body as an object”:
This procedure admittedly presupposes an elevated site of command from the perspective of which the body is regarded as an advance outpost, which the individual, from a great distance, is capable of sending into battle and sacrificing.[152]
In contrast to Brecht and Serner, Jünger “covers the tracks” of the classic Art of Worldly Wisdom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to distill from his essay the following precepts:
Adopt an appropriately cool gaze, which can penetrate the fog banks of morality, gain distance from the hazy influence of compassion, so that things can once again be seen as horrific and demonic, and therefore made subject to command.
Prepare yourself for a life of pain, but don't let it come to expression.
Avoid resorting to the narcotic of humanism, which represses the knowledge of pain from your consciousness.
Learn to accept discipline as a form capable of eliminating the presence of pain from your consciousness. Then you will be able to develop the “cooler consciousness” that allows you to perceive yourself as an object.
The burden of the essay “Uber den Schmerz” is not to set the conditions of perception. Jünger is primarily interested in articulating a typology of pain-resistant persons, as he observes them in the republic's civil wars: the lumpen proletarian, the partisan, and the worker-soldier. If these identifications are surprising, it is because Jünger overlooks the social space where more obviously cool candidates gather. Renaissance princes, field commanders or generals, martyrs or hermits lack the requisite ideal traits. Jünger is not searching for exceptions. For the pheno-type of transgression in the bourgeois world, he looks in the sphere of labor. The criterion according to which Jünger measures the otherness of this type is its relation to pain.
The critique of the expressive cult of pain, which we already encountered in Plessner's early anthropological text, takes its most radical form in Jünger's essay. It not only confirms the prohibition to which Plessner's conduct code subjects “eruptive expression,” as a relapse into the animal realm, but uses the prohibition to draw a sharp boundary separating the world of the worker from bourgeois society. The bourgeoisie's “world of sentimentality” takes the body as a value in itself and derives principles of “humane” treatment from the core idea of the inviolability of the body. But Jünger points out that the bourgeoisie has an ambivalent attitude toward pain.
The bourgeoisie's strategies for avoiding pain set up a disguised form of the division of labor. Confined on the margins of sentimental societies, in barracks, clinics, and cloisters, is a type that specializes in pain, that constantly awaits its application. In the nonviolent intermediate zones, the individual can repress the surrounding world of pain or-occasionally exposed to it—complain loudly and expressively. He devotes
Jünger searches instead for a type that has set up a “life with pain” at the center of society, without allowing it the ritual vent of plaintive expression. In the civil war landscape, he finds two uncanny embodiments of the desired type—the lumpen proletarian and the partisan. Both violent types stand out against the diffuse, easily outraged masses, since they appear to be immune to pain; they remain uncanny, because their actual strength consists in their ability to disappear at critical moments back into the “amorphous body of the masses.” They lack the clearly defined contours of the external enemy, in Schmitt's silhouettelike portrayal. They infiltrate the body of the state, make their armored appearances when their moment comes but then vanish from sight whenever they run the risk of being overpowered. Whereas an armored vehicle can easily disperse protest demonstrations, it must search out the rioting lumpen proletarians in their hideouts. In all cases of modernizing transformation, the lumpen proletariat takes an important role, forming, as Jünger observes, a “subterranean reserve” at the end of the Weimar Republic. With a side glance at the National Socialist movement, Jünger notes that the measure of a modern political movement's elemental force is the extent to which it includes such people as these, who are “familiar with the pleasures of torture.”
The defining activity of the partisan as a type also takes place outside the ordered zone of legality. Nor does it adhere to the rules laid down by the friend-enemy definition, so that its contours are lost in the sea of the urban population. The figure of the Communist cadre operating illegally appears in Jünger's work in the mask of the partisan, displaying a bedeviling similarity to Brecht's character from the Reader for Those Who Live in Cities. “Cover your tracks!” is a slogan that can drive the distinction artist to distraction. In Jünger, the partisan must extinguish his bourgeois identity, simultaneously falling outside the honor code of the uniformed soldier:
The partisan has no cover; short shrift is made of him whenever he is caught. As he is deployed in war without a uniform, in civil war he turns in his party card before taking action. The affiliation of the partisan, accordingly, always remains uncertain. It can never be determined whether he is spy or counterspy, belongs to this party or the opposing one, to the police or the vigilantes, or to all at once—indeed, whether he acts on behalf of anyone at all or is simply engaged in his own personal criminal deeds. This twilight is part of the nature of his task.[153]
This blurring of contours strikes the cool persona as a provocation—and truly so when it turns up inside the state apparatus and in the “amorphous body of the masses,” becoming conspicuous in the commotion of Sundays and holidays, in the tumult of the streets, or in the “gray hordes of demobilization” as the “ferment of decomposition” (no).
The outlines of the worker-soldier type, which Jünger juxtaposes to partisans and lumpen proletarians, never blur. They have been tempered in war's “death zone.” Wherever this type appears, all the usual distinctions of race, class, estate disappear. A modern human being, the type realizes the dream of synchronization between organism and technical apparatus. Its being is integrated into technology. Enclosed within an “armored cell,” it is the intelligence of a bullet; an electric machine replaces the functions of a central nervous system. Jünger presents the type in centaurlike images, in the concentric encasement of body and machine, as an “organic” construction. The images Jünger paints of this electric human crustacean correspond to his ideal of heroic realism: we encounter this figure in the troops encased in an armored police van on Alexanderplatz, cutting through the protesting crowds—like a “human sea”—we see how “inconspicuously” it operates the controls of its fighting machines or, “masked and enclosed in defensive shells, it marches through clouds of tear gas” (98); it pilots a Japanese torpedo;[154] or it crouches “in the fiery vortex of a falling fighter plane, in the air pocket of a sunken submarine on the bottom of the sea” (107). Radio signals inform us that a being yet lurks inside the metal shell. Or is it just the radio simulating its presence?
Perception has created the fitting object for the cool persona. It gazes indifferently back.
Armor from a Different Perspective To replace this military vision of the persona trapped in the metal shell of organic construction for new objectivity images of civilian life offers a certain relief. But the habitus we
New objectivity painters prefer representing the individual fully clothed, packed in as many casings as possible. They paint people defended by suits, vests, ties, leather jackets, coats, by gloves, hats, and caps. Raderscheidt shows us a young man standing in a black suit, with yellow gloves and a bowler, alone on a vast square before a geometrically standardized architecture taken directly from the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, apparently transposed into the modern world. He wears his closely fitting clothes like armor, protected from fear and cold, but for that the more isolated from his surroundings, and the lonelier.[155]
In Plessner, the social role forms a protective shield, maintaining distance, filtering expression, reducing friction. In Jünger, masks protect people in daily life, evoking “for men, a metallic, and for women, a cosmetic impression” (171). Everywhere we find the desire for an impenetrable shielding-against external danger or against internal decomposition and daily shaming.
Panzer, which in English means armor, shield, and tank, is one of the magical words in the republic's masculinity cult. On the one hand, it recalls legends of the fallen warrior, overcome only by dint of material superiority; on the other, it accepts the necessity of a form of resistance that assimilates the tools of the aggressor. Mythologized in this way, armor also takes center stage for the enlightenment discourse of the republic, which sought to demystify it.
For psychoanalysts, the formation of a “cool armoring” begins early, as a reaction to birth trauma (Otto Rank) or occurs as an element of the “collective neurosis” of a society become fatherless following the collapse of Wilhelmian authority.[156] Toward the end of the republic, Wilhelm Reich, discussing his theory of character analysis, speaks of “ego armoring” as a defensive apparatus intended to mount an offense against the stimuli of the external world and intercept the libidinal transgressions of the id.[157] He sees a neurotic element in the armor, because fear is continually involved in maintaining it. Its sole function of averting “disgrace” draws ego armor into the “catastrophe of ridiculousness” that the cool persona tries at any cost to avoid and can lead to severe neurotic idiosyncrasies.
More popular than Reich's explanations of neurosis, however, was a finding of individual psychology according to which the superiority habitus of the armored ego implies the compensation of an organic
Others have put psychoanalytic insights to persuasive use, explaining certain of the types in our portrait gallery of the cool persona.[159] I summarize this approach here primarily to introduce a story that develops an explanation of the superiority complex into a satirical text about organic construction. Jünger, in “Uber den Schmerz,” remarks:
Just the fact that the individual is closed up inside rolling vehicles lends him the appearance of greater inviolability and does not fail to work its effect on those being attacked.[160]
In his story of “Der Riese Agoag” (1936), Musil transfers Jünger's heroic notion of a “living torpedo” to the banal psychology of everyday life.[161] The hero of the story, attributing his scant attractiveness to women to his skinny body, compensates first by reading the boxing news and later by devoting himself from morning to night to body building. Always, after using his day to the fullest in just this way, he goes to sleep, first
spreading out all the muscles he can muster all at the same time, then lying there in his own muscles like an alien piece of meat in the claws of an eagle, until, overcome by fatigue, the grip loosens and he falls straight down into sleep.
The image of Ganymede in the grip of the eagle (Adler) suggests that our hero leaves something to be desired on the aggression scale and that he might more securely fantasize being wrapped in the wings of homophilia than confronting the woman (if the mention of bird of prey does not refer only to Adler's compensation theory). In any case, it is no surprise that our bodybuilder gets beaten up shortly after by a “fat blob of a person,” an incident which causes him to lose favor with the woman once again. Only now is he in a position to appreciate the advantages of an “organic construction.” When he chances one day to witness an accident in which a city bus runs over an athlete, our hero seizes the opportunity
Electric Fins for Leviathan What separates Helmuth Plessner's construction of the duelist from Ernst Jünger's construction of the worker? And is the distance between the landscape of Jünger's “electromagnetic force fields” and Walter Benjamin's sketch “Zum Planetarium,” the concluding piece of his 1928 book Einbahnstrafie, one between disaster and welfare?[162]
In Jünger's book Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, the icon of the warrior fascinates the gestalt of the cool persona. The warrior's physiognomy—beneath a steel helmet or a crash helmet—is metallic, “galvanized, as it were.” “The gaze is steady and focused, schooled in the observation of things that can be captured in high velocity conditions” (107). This icon appealed to readers on the right, while the modernism of the diagnosis put them off. Readers on the left, who registered Jünger's sympathy for planning and his quasi-Marxist theory of simultaneity, did not know what to do with it. Theorists, finally, who admire the way Jünger's book reveals the relationship between war as an instrument of modernization and the domination of the technical media, tend to distance themselves from his horrific images of “heroic realism” by relegating them to the status of contemporary coloration.[163] Ideology critique, for which the book has become easy prey, deprives it of any diagnostic value, although its findings are as proximate to Giinther Anders's An-tiquiertheit des Menschen as to the chapter on the “culture industry” in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectik der Aufklärung.
The book's foreword of July 1932, names all the elements we have come to expect from a new objectivity code of conduct. Jünger connects the demand for perceptual sharpness, which is supposed to render visible
Jünger's book aims, like the other conduct codes, at a lifestyle. Once again we encounter the fundamental motif of the codes, which is to cultivate a distance from the body. Jünger's spiritual exercise aims at a “metallic coolness” of consciousness that enables the individual, in the extreme situations of the death zone, “to treat the body as a pure instrument, forcing from it a range of complicated accomplishments beyond the bounds of self-preservation” (107). The book offers instruction in the habitus of the sharp gaze, counting “high treason against the mind” as one of the “horrible pleasures of our time” (39). Like all codes of conduct, Jünger's works with a theory of masks, so that a series of precepts can be distilled from the book:
The hardness of society can be mastered only by hardness, and not by any form of trickery (28).
The more cynical or spartan, Prussian or Bolshevik … a life can be, the better it will be (2,01).
Reality is determined, not by moral precepts, but by laws. Therefore the decisive question to be posed is this: is there a point from which it can be authoritatively decided whether a particular means should be employed or not? (191).
There is no escape, no move sideways, no move backward; the point is much more to increase the fury and the speed of the processes in which we are caught (194).
Nothing is as constant as change…. When unrest comes to a stop, every moment becomes a starting point of an Asiatic constancy (172 £.).
By listing Der Arbeiter among the conduct codes examined here, we risk obscuring its novelty. Jünger's compendium, like the others, serves the education of an “aristocracy” and an “order.” But his nervous gaze discovers it in incipient form in tank and submarine crews, in the ranks of the security troops of a political movement or cadre-in a type that can be reproduced in masses, not in the individually prominent dueling subject. The habitus of this type corresponds to its metaphysical “stamp” (Gestalt). If the cool persona of the art scene comes into view, Jünger delivers it up to the derision of his type, which finds amusement
A special ceremony has been developed in which the modern individual, in the disguise of a quasi-aristocrat or quasi-abbe, to the sound of what has become very general applause, executes the practiced mortal thrust according to all the rules of the art. This is a game for which existential quantities have become two-edged concepts. More important for us is the hand movement with which the streetcar conductor rings his bell. (229)
In the world opened up by this book there are no reserves left over, no “last bits” of “something dangerous” preserved “as a curiosity” (52). The activities of the artist shift from the periphery of the romantic space into the sphere of power. Only here, according to Jünger, is it possible to experience the “elemental.”
The individual as the “intersection” in a “network” of “cross-cutting currents”—this viewpoint is registered, without the reservation of cultural pessimism, for the first time by Jünger. The individual is hooked into the system by a cipher code:
The power, traffic, and news services appear as a field in the coordinate system of which the individual is to be understood as a specific point. One “gets a bearing on him,” for example, by turning the dial on an automatic telephone. The functional value of such a tool rises with the number of people connected—but this number never appears as a mass in the old sense but is always a quantity that can be expressed in precise numbers at any moment. (139)
A person in the modern media landscape who remains “immersed” in printed material, Jünger could only say ironically, will be made aware of the connections that nevertheless persist to general power circuits. The newspaper reader Jünger observes pursues a “different kind of reading,” that is not to be understood in the sense of immersion:
This becomes clear where one has the opportunity to observe the reader in situations, especially situations of public transit, in which merely making use of it already means going to work. An observer here will register a simultaneously alert and instinctive atmosphere, in which a news service of the greatest precision and speed is appropriate. One seeks the impression here that the world has changed during the reading, but this change is at once constant, in the sense of a monotonous change of colored signals flying by outside the windows. This is news inside a space where everything that happens involves the presence of atoms bombarded at the speed of an electric current. (264)
Jünger's praise of precision is for the technical medium. The news itself (for instance, a launching, a mining accident, or a motorcycle race) and
There is something anxiety inducing, recalling the mute glow of a traffic signal, when suddenly one or another excerpt of this space—whether a threatened province, a big trial, a sporting event, a natural disaster, or the cabin of a transoceanic airplane, becomes the center of attention and thus the effective moment as well, and when a dense ring of artificial eyes and ears closes around it. (256)
If we look for the stylistic move that allows Jünger to produce the images of networking circuitry, we come on a maneuver that is as simple as it is astonishing: he changes the central technical metaphor. Jünger is one of the first writers to place the model of the electric circuit at the center of social analysis. Electricity, with its force field, network, connection, replaces the steam engine, the model of a psychologically oriented literature. Whenever he singles out a phenomenon's systematic quality, electricity is the dominant image; the combustion engine serves better to emphasize the dynamic quality. The electric topos recommends itself when one element in the total space requires an explanation: “The arrangement of atoms thus takes on the sort of nonambiguity that prevails in the electromagnetic force field” (266). Jünger attributes a special status to the electric media; they possess the quality of machines that replace, not only muscle power, as in the case of the older generation of technical apparatuses, but the functions of the central nervous system. Alongside these characteristics derived from electricity, Jünger finds an additional reason to elevate them to the central metaphor of his systematic thinking: the electric network comes under the administrative authority of the state, which controls all the connections and integrates every user of current into an “energy association” (215). The individual automatically has the status of an “organic construction” (275).
The metaphor of the electromagnetic force field, incidentally, enters the work of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Joseph Roth. Research
In terms of content, the invisible electromagnetic force field, which, for example, arranges a previously chaotic pile of iron filings all in the same direction, opened up the possibility of an analogous assumption of energies operating supraindividually, as in the formation of structured communities out of masses.[164]
The penetration of electric metaphors into philosophy and literature stems from the way in which they lend expression to the otherwise ineffable quality of the elan vital. At the core of the force field metaphor is an image:
the existence of energetic tension between two opposed poles. This datum could be used to connect the polarized thought of classical Rome with the specifically vitalist idea that a life of intensity can only take place between two extremes.[165]
Jünger relocates this vitalist idea, using the electric metaphor only to characterize the monodimensional, systemic quality of the society of the worker.
Electricity, for Jünger, is an index of simultaneity: Those who sit under an electric light discussing the return to nature (223) or put the body of Christ next to a microphone or broadcast an encyclical over the radio (73) are hooked into the network of modernization. The synchronization of divergent mentalities with the highest technological level is already a fait accompli, even while it is still being vigorously called into question. Like his Marxist contemporaries, Jünger has in mind the lightbulb-hanging on a public utility wire—when he recalls a famous sentence from Marx's work Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie as he interprets society: “It is a general light into which all other colors are dipped, which alters them in their specificity” (98).
The new media are the leviathan state's electric fins. Even in extreme situations-in the air bubble of a submarine on the ocean floor, in the cockpit of a crashing fighter plane—the electric media remain connected to the all-encompassing network, with which the individual can break contact only at the threat of being extinguished.
What drives the cool persona in the “electromagnetic force field” of such a space? Networked and run through with circuits, it might well fizzle
In the landscape of the electric media, we see the cool persona in a man “bent over his cards to the hum of the telephone and the clatter of the news agency teletype.”[166] He resists distractions but cultivates the awareness of the chess master; in fact, the cool persona ignores any sound that cannot be clearly deciphered, any amorphous acoustical signal. But the technical channels' white noise triggers a state of permanent unrest. On the battlefield, the persona is forced to probe even the most insignificant sounds for their meaning. There are reports from the First World War of the use of aural locator devices, equipped with giant reception horns and superhuman frequency ranges, which allowed soldiers to identify enemy artillery installations from twenty miles away.[167]
The new media open up new possibilities. They do not, as writing does, filter whatever the screen of the symbolic order allows to enter but are automatically part of “the roar of the real.”[168] Their deployment in war only reinforces the ordering function of writing. No detritus of meaning remains, as meaningless undergrowth, optical garbage, or acoustical nonsense: the media register everything. A final corner of the perceptual field not yet occupied by meaning—a deserted bit of woods, the rustling of a newspaper page, an unknown tonal frequency, the irregularities of a crater landscape—comes clear. “Meaningless” disturbances of regularity are especially in need of decoding, because they might well be points of enemy incursion.
With the help of the electric media, the mesh of the symbolic becomes finer, the environment of understanding perception more hermetic. In Jünger's system, every sound is under the high voltage of meaning. An American study claims that Jünger's “fascist modernism” promised “to liberate the imagery from the Jacobin tyranny of the symbolic order”;[169] nevertheless, in 1932 Jünger did more to reinforce the omnipresence of the symbolic order, by binding the electric media to writing.
When Jünger's cool persona steps into the field of reality where Schmitt's distinguo ergo sum resounds, fuzzy contours suddenly clear. Everything becomes a clue pointing to a secret center. The new media amplify the power of distinction. Probably a statement like Musil's at the end of a puzzling story—“But it is like whispering you've heard or merely a rustling, without being able to distinguish it”[170]—is irritating to the cool persona. The latter demands clear, if possible, sharp articulation. If sounds are to reveal enemy conditions, they must be audible
Jünger cannot do without verbalization in the imperium of the worker. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify in his work a double movement in regard to language: he ascribes to the new media all the restrictive characteristics that present-day media theory attributes to writing, in order, at the same time, to present as the music of the future a form of archaic communication in which the auditory is primary: the anxious attending to the voice coming from the secret center. Jünger's desire for a “competent reserve of illiterates” (2,03), necessary for the empire of the worker to function, is understandable. Only illiterates, he hopes, will submit absolutely to the commands of the literate stratum of rulers.
The language that Jünger admits into his system does away with the openness of verbal references, the instability of meaning and meanings, the ambivalences of expression, the labyrinth of correspondences, in short, the entire potential range of speech and thus all that is emblematic of linguistic life. Language keeps only its function to signal and warn, to instruct and command; it is always referential language, an element of a “secure and closed world of forms.” Fearing “endless dialectical talk” (227), Jünger seeks to disempower speech. He mistrusts all texts that admit ambiguity: “There is absolutely no doubt that a textbook today has more meaning than the latest spinning out of unique experience by the bourgeois novel”(141), he comments.
Since Jünger regards books that make up an individual's memory system as so much ballast, he gives his own book an appropriate form. Although prompted by countless findings in books in libraries, he eschews references of any sort, names no names that might remind the reader of alien, strange, or canonical influences.[172] Thus the book suggests that it is itself “marked” as “metaphysics,” which is also supposed to be registered in the form. That accounts for the book's curious individual qualities that amount to the author's handwriting.
We saw one theoretical component of Jünger's “total artwork” in the avant-garde movement. The world disintegrates into meaninglessly disparate component parts, glaring nonsimultaneities, dingy twilight spaces, craters, trash, and magic only-in an audacious move on the part of avant-garde thinkers, joining this perception to the circuit of modernization—to sparkle like a crystal in the “icy geometry of light”
Jünger's topos of modernity as an earthquake landscape-in which “ruins appear to be more significant than the fleeting quarters that get abandoned every morning” (83)[173]—displays certain similarities with the landscape of baroque tragedy, as conceived by another avant-garde thinker, Walter Benjamin, at the same time: decaying landscapes, squares both abandoned and overpopulated, the whole overcast by the cold heavens; rebellion offering no escape from this disconsolate earthly state. “The earth,” as Jünger puts it, “is covered by the rubbish of crumbled images. We are taking part in a spectacle of decline comparable only to geological catastrophes” (74). A desolate space through which generations have passed, leaving behind “neither savings nor monuments, but solely a certain stage, the flood marks of mobilization” (165). As soon, however, as Jünger illuminates these images in his laterna ma-gica from the “constant light source” (99) of a center, everything makes sense. Everything takes on the coloration of the “crystal,” the total work space. Every bit of grenade shrapnel becomes an allegory of strategic meaning; every bodily movement occurs in the service of mobilization; to the keen observer, the broadcast signal, however distorted it may be, holds an encoded reference.
“There is nothing more regular than the axial orientation of the crystal” (2,2,0), we read in Der Arbeiter. Carl Schmitt terms the hermetic system constructed in his 192,7 philosophy of the state a “Hobbes crystal.” Jakob von Uexkiill presupposes in 1930 that life develops like a “crystalline formation.”[174] For Arnold Gehlen, a “crystalline structure” is the defining aspect of the standstill of history.[175] From modern biology we learn that total symmetry of this sort—however fascinating aesthetically—means death in the world of living organisms. Ernst Jünger was never one to promote the “myth of the avant-garde's innocence.”[176]
COOL PERSONA-IN THE BELLY OF THE FISH
Nothing so threatens the cool persona's sense of Luciferian grandeur as the “banality of evil.” How can its habitus survive dictatorship, holocaust, and war? Does a point come when attitude must be put at risk for the sake of experience, or does focus on such a point simply reflect a desire for expression? Further, does the cool persona's refusal to mourn after the Second World War compulsively repeat an attitude after the First
No other intellectual of the 19205 acted out objectivity's trademark role-gambling with the devil—more consistently than Carl Schmitt. No one managed to contrive such an alliance with moral evil on the lofty plane of the state. Our question now concerns what remains of this Luciferian figure after the Second World War. Does it ask, like the exhausted Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight, to be carried off “to a dark hangar, so no one sees my weakness”?
The Diary Schmitt's diary, published in 1991, begins after his release from an American internment camp. The entries run from late summer 1947 to August 1951. He writes as the Cold War was beginning to spread its atmosphere of bitter enmity over all debates, and it comes as no surprise that in his diary Schmitt refers sarcastically to the taboo against taking international animosity as the starting point of theoretical reflection. Schmitt draws a straight line from the taboo to artless talk of the “just war,” in which, according to Schmitt, fundamentalism blends with unregulated killing. His thoughts return insistently to the question of whether putting an end to the political definition of enmity might not enhance the possibility of civil war and the ritual atrocities that accompany it. And he ponders, as could hardly be expected otherwise, the problem of depriving the vanquished of enemy status in order to subject them to hearings and judicial judgment as criminals.
The diary's appearance undermined the assumption humanistic Schmitt scholars had cultivated of a turn marked by the publication of Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre von Thomas Hobbes in 1938. With this book Schmitt supposedly broke off his dalliance with state fetishism, which dated from 1919, in order then, in the 1942, text Land und Meer, to carry out a kind of “mourning.”[177] The diary disappointed expectations, maintaining with undiminished vigor all of Schmitt's theoretical motifs, from his 1916 hymn of praise to Theodor Daubler's Nordlicht to the enemy formula of the 19205, from reflections on linguistic magic, taken over from his friend Hugo Ball, to the anti-Semitic outbursts of the 19305. Any break in the continuity of his thought, writes Schmitt, indicates nothing more than a “mental disturbance” (105). A diary necessarily produces “photocopies of the palimpsest character” (130) of thinking, he maintains, offering a definition we could work with, were it not part of a defensive strategy that allows
The manifest outrage many reviewers expressed over the diary's publication reflects their disappointment. They expected a document of the guilt culture and got unrepentant effrontery. While the reviewers' moral indignation was no doubt justified, a thoughtful look at the ideas expressed in the diary would not have hurt them. These ideas revolve monomaniacally around the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena, sine lege, which is the title of a verdict that Schmitt had circulated in hectograph in 1945. The diary's contents include a collection of timely maxims. Infamous maxims, too, can instruct:
A good conscience that is expedited by the judiciary is the worst. (90) Most people think taking off a fake beard is a metamorphosis. (107)
Whoever is right a few years prematurely is wrong. (144)
Scholastic asceticism is an ethical plus, but it falls short of theoretical accomplishment. (113)
Reading the book historically, we can ask what became of the cult of evil after the Second World War, which had held in its spell such disparate minds as Helmuth Plessner and Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn and Walter Benjamin, E. R. Curtius and Bertolt Brecht. Of greatest interest in this connection is the combination of self-enactment, compulsive brooding, and complaining that always turns the Glossarium's lofty figure of the cool persona into a infantile ventriloquist. Schmitt's diary shows as well how the cool persona and the creature are uncanny doubles: “What is man! The circulation of blood, cast in the light of a poor will-o'-the-wisp” (314).
A few basic motifs of the old avant-garde made it through the dead of winter to sprout in the diary: the “joy in the acceleration” (31) of fatal processes, which Schmitt shared with the intellectuals of the left; the return to seventeenth-century anthropology, which welcomes in the state a great machine for keeping the “terror of drives” (2,07) in check; scorn for the faith in law as the “instinctlessness of a living being condemned to decline” (23, 50, 301), in which he marks his agreement with Brecht, Lukacs, and Lenin;[178] and the pleasure involved in having a “sa-tanic” (5) reputation. In these notes we find slogans (e.g., “The primitive thinks in substances, the civilized man in functions” [161]) in which the new objectivity jargon lives on. Also the pathos of invulnerability and mobility that surrounded the new objectivity's mechanical man comes
The classic characteristics of the cool persona remain present in the years from 1947 to 1951; boastful and fascinating in public presentation, subdued in private notes. For the diary bears the remarkable characteristic of that “compulsive brooding” Benjamin saw in Jesuit spiritual exercises:
This torment of intellectual consciousness is predestined for authoritarian rule through its complete lack of substance. It has lost all relation to the essence of individual being and it offers absolution, depending on how one wants to look at it, either mystically or mechanically, like a sacrament. The tension of penitent torment, displaced to that purely intentional zone, at the same time leaves moral life resting in a certain apathy, in which it now reacts not to its own impulses but rather to carefully weighed and considered stimuli of spiritual authority.[179]
The habitus that undertakes spiritual exercises with no grounding in morality coincides, predictably, with the attitude of the mendicant creature. Tossing aside Gracián's precept no. 129, “Never complain,” the Glossarium engages in a plaintive discursive ritual: “Injustice is always ever again my lot” (2,52,).
From the angle of Benjamin's book on German tragedy, Schmitt's self-portrait in the diary is that of an ousted intriguer who mopes, while refusing resolutely to adopt the role of the melancholic. Schmitt slips on all the masks of the poor supplicant creature he finds in his extensive reading, from Kaspar Hauser to Kafka's defendant in Der Prozess, from victims of ritual murder to the prophet Jonah inside the whale:
Three times I was in the belly of the fish. I have tasted the defeat of the civil war, inflation and deflation, revolution and restoration, changes of regimes and burst pipes, currency reform, air bombardments, and interrogations; camps and barbed wire, hunger and cold, ragged clothes and hideous bunkers. (81)
Schmitt's Shame Culture After 1945 Schmitt repeats an attitude that corresponds to the post-World War I Zeitgeist: he does away with elements of the guilt culture—troubled conscience, remorse—and erects once again the artificial realm of a heroic shame culture. The difference that springs painfully to the eye, of course, is that the idea of a post-World War II shame culture is a phantasm, with no corresponding public discursive space in which to unfold. In the context of the Nuremberg trials, the statement of the Protestant church, and denazification, a guilt
The key concepts of the shame culture are honor and disgrace. After World War I the issue was the “disgrace” of imperial collapse, which, according to the rules of male association and bonding, had to be reversed. At issue now for Schmitt is the “honor” of which he was deprived as a vanquished foe. Everything that the Allies undertook with Schmitt, during his incarceration and afterward, he experiences as a shaming ritual, in which he, suddenly abandoned to the resentful gaze of the enemy, isolated from his fellows and discriminated against, must armor himself. He experiences his stay in the cell of an American camp as exposure. “Man is most naked when he is stripped and made to stand in front of another who is clothed,” he writes in April 1947 in his “Weis-heit der Zelle.” “The clothes that were left to me,” Schmitt continues, “only confirmed my objective nakedness.”[180] The effective factor in a shame culture is not the admonition of the individual conscience but the scorn of others, enacted in the form of public disgrace. Following his release from the Nuremberg prison into the American zone, Schmitt, rather than return to Berlin and the forum of a despising public, goes to Plettenberg, where he believes that he is immune to disgrace. From here he fires off condemnations of the Protestant guilt culture, striving to keep his distance from its “spectacle of a brawl between preachers of repentance” (30). He is “disgusted” by the pathos of moral indignation, and he notes bouts of “depression,” because people expect “from me tips for memorial inscriptions in the confessional style.” On “Der Fall Jaspers” (the case of Jaspers), he later records the derisive verse:
| How his penitential speech offends me | |
| How disgusting are his rotten fish | |
| Now he's gotten where he ought to be: | |
| In the news and on the German telewish. (io4)[181] |
“A jurist,” Schmitt reflects during the summer of 1946, still in the American internment camp, “steers clear of psychological self-depiction. The impulse to offer a literary confession has been spoiled for me by such ugly examples as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and poor August Strind-berg.”[182] Schmitt is not among the public “self-torturers.” “If you want to make a confession, go find a priest and do it there” (77).
He unrolls once again the old banner “Tout ce qui arrive est adorable!” (8), carried by the avant-garde and the militant Catholic Leon Bloy too; but the slogan he writes in his diary presumably has little to
But the treatment Schmitt experiences in no way accords to his status; what he has to say has been banished from that space of consensual resonance, so that he screams “with no voice.” Since he is not prepared to repent, he receives no license for publications. His power of definition lacks a place to be exercised in public; worse yet, he has lost that power to the “enemy.” And the latter, by virtue of its monopoly on making distinctions, incriminated his practice since 1933—which is for Schmitt a serious logical error.
The power of definition had been Schmitt's elixir, the axis of his sovereign consciousness. At the center of his Glossarium we find the motto that also belonged to the creed of Weimar's leftist intellectuals:
Understand the power that is trying to get you in its grasp; do not confront it with countermeasures on the same level; rather, test your power to understand against that power. It will also try to grasp your understanding. But let it. It will cut its paws. (145)
Nor can he, in the seclusion of his refuge in Plettenberg, resist circulating “dangerous definitions” in letters. Still in the role of “hunted game” (174), he wants to classify his hunters. Sometimes he manages to get his views—as a kind of smuggled contraband—published in an organ approved by the occupation powers. Then he rejoices that his contraband, in good new objectivity manner, is allowed to ride on a commodity:
In the weekly journal Christ und Welt, a nice little gloss of mine has been printed, via an advertisement for Nivea cream. It is good so. In czarist times the Russian nihilists hid their bombs in flower pots. Why should I not frame my analogous concerns with Nivea cream. Or, conversely, make my own appearance as the frame for Nivea cream, so as not to agitate the persecutors.
Schmitt directs his attention to the unsecured terrain of postwar society and, as in the 19205, it remains now: when orienting parameters collapse, it's time for codes of conduct.
On i May 1948 Carl Schmitt, following the familiar model of Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom, notes seven maxims, to which he will later add a few others. The Spanish Jesuit, we recall, replaced the internal regulator, the conscience, with an external voice—a code of
If you end up in a loudly screaming chorus, you must scream the text yourself as loudly as you can. Anything else would mean your certain ugly death. Your hearing and brain would be shattered from without if you didn't defend yourself from within by screaming along; I can only recommend to you then a purely physical means of defense against annihilation by sound waves. (144)
Go into the shelter when the signal calls for it; raise your hands when you are ordered to; don't forget that the relation between protection and obedience is no longer certain and self-evident; the shelter can be the gas chamber. (144)
Beware of every loudspeaker; beware of every microphone that conducts your voice into the false public sphere [see Figure 12]. Every amplifier is a meaning counterfeiter…. But beware of the false echo that arises in the byways of the catacombs. (172)
Borrowing from Thomas Hobbes's theory of the state, Schmitt assumes from the outset a reciprocal relation between protection and obedience. Just as the protector can demand obedience, those who obey have a right to protection. Where this arrangement is violated, behavior can no longer be steered in a way that ensures protection. The result is that everyone is delivered up defenseless to circumstance. Schmitt thus formulates rules for situations that, from his perspective, are no longer subject to regulation. Bitterly, he elaborates his precepts ad absurdum; for their validity is restricted to honor-based social groups. He lays responsibility for his rules' absurdity at the feet of the dishonorable victorious powers.
Phonomania and Creature Schmitt's behavioral rules recreate the world of mobilization as an acoustic space. He advises in favor of purely physical defensive mechanisms, which are supposed to guarantee survival, while the command's substance or the song's text is of no matter. Schmitt's diary thus documents a remarkable form of phonocentrism. It reflects his resistance to the concept of law and clarifies his childish fixation on the “voice of the father.”
Through three hundred and twenty pages of diary entries, there is scarcely a reproduction of a visual impression to be found. The diary leads us into a world of acoustic phenomena, into a laboratory of echoing voices. Ultimately, the friend-enemy theory receives a phonetic basis. Even close friends appear without facial features; in the case of Jünger, Schmitt registers the “pathetic larynx” (104); for historically more distant
Beware of every microphone! (Carl Schmitt. With the permission of Ullstein Bilder-dienst, Berlin.)
Schmitt reacts idiosyncratically, as if irritated and impatient, to any argument based in any way on appearance. It pains him, leaves him
If the goal is to arrive at principles of law, the eye must be eliminated as an organ of moral judgment. While visible facts have no argumentative status (with the exception, incidentally, of the “visibility” of the judiciary itself, which he sees as establishing its “substance” [2,35]), every conceivable acoustic signal prompts thought. No excuse is too paltry. On 19 February 1948 he writes:
I hear (mornings at 6:00, in the dark, still half asleep) a factory siren, accompanied by a vision of the wide-open jaws of a huge fish. I would like to pursue the immediate simultaneity of an acoustic impression with a visual image. That would likely be more productive than researching the problem of radar. It would offer a glimpse of our inner sensorium. People who hear, instead of church bells, only factory sirens are supposed to believe in the God who is worshiped in church. They are more likely to believe in an iron-hard Moloch, (no)[183]
The foreground point raised in Schmitt's depiction of his acoustic space is the sovereign's voice, which is supposed to reach the ears of the subjects undistorted by the medium. At issue is the problematic written medium of the laws, which distort, absorb, or extinguish the voice, allowing it to reach the ears it is intended for only in diffuse, ambiguous form—the ears of “nonlistening jurists,” who occupy themselves producing technically neutral analyses of reigning opinion. In his construction of the state's acoustic space, his thoughts return to ways of regaining the sovereign voice and eliminating legal positivism. Actually, however, as Sombart suspects, the real point is for the voice of the tone-setting constitutional law expert to reach without impediment the ear of the ruler.[184]
Setting down his thoughts on the omnipotence and wretched impotence of the sovereign, on 23 May 1948 Schmitt paints the melancholy picture of a ruler who seems to have migrated directly from baroque tragedy into the Cold War: “Ultimately, the sovereign, blocked off by the anteroom and his chief of staff, sits in the icy solitude of his omnipotence” (152). What Schmitt is tracing here is the mirror image of the lonely prompter, who has been unjustly dismissed from service. For the
Schmitt's image of the sovereign recalls an anecdote from Pushkin, told by both Ernst Bloch (in Spuren) and Walter Benjamin (in his Kafka commentary), which explains the conditions of sovereign rule. In Benjamin's version, Potemkin (according to Meyers Enzyklopadie of 1906, a skillful courtier who “combined deceitfulness with old-fashioned Russian brutality but was altogether unfamiliar with noble moral ideas”), governor-general and ranking military officer for Her Grace, Catherine II, suffered from severe depressions, during which access to his chamber was strictly forbidden. One day, with stacks of unprocessed files reaching alarming heights outside, an insignificant chancellery bureaucrat chanced into the palace anteroom, where the councilors of state stood wringing their hands. Scarcely waiting for an answer to his question, “What's up, Excellencies?” he took the files in hand, heading off with the bundle under his arm through galleries and corridors to Potem-kin's bedroom, where he turned the doorknob.
Having found Potemkin, dressed in a tattered nightgown, chewing his nails, hunched over in bed, he—“wasting not a word”—dipped Po-temkin's quill in ink and slipped the files one after the other onto his knee, whereupon, as if still in sleep, the latter applied the required signatures. Triumphantly, swinging the files in his hand, the bureaucrat made his way back to the councilors, who, having ripped the eagerly awaited papers from his hand, stared back in horror. Only now did the little man have a look at the signatures, discovering there that, instead of Potemkin's, his own name had been written.[185]
That could not have happened to Schmitt, because he knew that it was necessary to gain the ruler's ear. The bureaucrat would have been for him a typical example of the “nonlistening jurist,” who is fixated on handwriting. And with this, we come to the central motif in Schmitt's assessment of the ear and the voice: his visceral reaction to “the law.”
In the draft for a letter on 19 January 1948, Schmitt writes as follows:
I would like to say, right away, in surrealistic openness, that the word, and now for the first time properly, the concept of the “law,” unleashes in me all manner—conceptual, theoretical, associative-psychological, and, last not least,
[*] The italicized words are in English in the original.
phonetic—of shudder and outrage. Outrage namely at the orgies of the typesetter and the terror of the “settings of the settings.” (185)As Raphael Gross has demonstrated, a “hatred of the concept of law” runs from the earliest writings all the way through Schmitt's works.[186] Already in his second legal publication, in 1912, we find, “The law is always full of holes. That opens the opportunity for the judiciary and the levying of judgment.”[187] Our misfortune, according to Schmitt, lies in our being ruled, as the legal positivists would have it, by the “sovereignty of the law,” which could never be anything more than an “over-compensation for the absence” of the actual sovereign.
The question of who is responsible for this cursed confinement of the judicial function to the letter of the law leads directly to the problem of Schmitt's anti-Semitism, for this concept of the law, according to Schmitt, is a product of the mental type of the Jewish people.[188] Law in this conception, as Schmitt would have it, becomes a technical means to restrain the all-powerful leviathan, cut it into pieces, and consume it. The fact that Schmitt, both in the Weimar period and in occupied Germany after the Second World War, feels besieged by positivist legal technicians appears to him proof that the Jews' assimilation was successful; for when one Jew was assimilated in one village, then the village had become Jewish. Yet the Jewish victory instanced in legal positivism could, as Schmitt continues, be no more than provisional, for faith in law is part of the “instinctlessness of a life-form condemned to decline” (2,3).
The ear of the ruler and the role of law—here are surely two important aspects of Schmitt's phonocentrism that, remarkably enough, evade his own reflections on his phonetic obsessions. The latter revolve instead around three other critical elements in Schmitt's construction of his acoustic space, namely, the command, conceptual realism, and speech magic.
Potemkin, in the grip of his melancholy, was in no condition to issue commands; the handwriting that the petty bureaucrat managed to get from him strikes back at those who, by virtue of the office they held, were fixated on writing. At the center of Schmitt's acoustical space, we find the command. An oral command is a form of language, establishing a direct connection between sender and receiver. The possibility of splitting speech between the speaking subject and the subject of speech, which characterizes written forms of language, is excluded by the command. With a command, the translation of the verbal appeal into action is regarded as unproblematic, or at least potentially possible. Schmitt's appreciation of the command relies on the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, who had held it to be “the greatest charity of language, for without it there would be no community among people, no peace, and
Schmitt's conceptual realism is another of the constituent elements of his acoustic space. In retrieving the term realism in its medieval sense, Schmitt assumes that the truth contained in the spoken word does not reside in the thing it refers to (116). Unlike writing, which is characterized by the capacity merely to produce the illusion of the presence of the absent subject of speech, the spoken word is inseparable from the instance of speaking. Only in sound does the word take on its corporeal reality; only in sound does it create space. When Schmitt then terms himself a “concept-ballistics man” (Begriffs-Ballistiker) he is attributing to his definition the material quality of a projectile.
Schmitt's view of conceptual realism acquires its uncanny dimension in combination with his reflections on speech magic. Every word, as he puts it in the diary, is a “phonetic hieroglyph,” an “echo of primal worlds” (159), which “impresses itself on memory with hypnotic power.” The point, therefore, is to find key words that articulate a fundamental experience—like Dezision (decision), Raum (space), or Feind (enemy)—and have phonetic qualities that stamp them on the memory. The purely phonetic qualities are ineffaceable. Schmitt believes that his key concepts achieve such a result, so that the cut of the umbilical cord is present in Dezision; that the primeval land is available for perception in Raum, bounded by the sea, defended by the father, and cared for by the mother; and in Feind, on the purely phonetic level, he hears the full intensity of one's separation from the other (16).[190]
His enhanced sensitivity for the tonal aspect of words (76), his atten-tiveness to the phonetic qualities of speech, stem from a time in which he was on friendly terms with Theodor Daubler and the dadaist Hugo Ball. Ball also remarked, referring to his famous performance of sound poems in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the First World War, that his voice, as soon as he surrendered to the mere sound of the words,
The provisional results of our reconstruction of Schmitt's acoustic space suggest that the structure of command stills the furor of his logocen-trism, that rites take up (when possible) the magic of the word. The acoustic space seems to be a very stable construction—which it is not. Schmitt sees threats stemming from two sides: from technology and from the body.
In the diary Schmitt repeatedly proclaims his favorite motto—distin-guo ergo sum (69)—but also knows that the certainty it suggests is illusive. Space—even in the mouth, at the threshold of expression—is always crisscrossed with other sound waves (60, 63). Permanently at play in acoustic performance is “something wildly alien,” a “mass” that bends the word and distorts meaning (52). Between “microphysical sound stimuli” and “macrophysical sound amplification” lies the disaster of the technological world. Thus the advice, in one of his behavior precepts, is to “avoid the microphone.”
A suspicion naturally dawns that this point of cultural criticism serves in the first instance to relieve Schmitt of a certain responsibility. He counts Hitler a “sound amplifier,” the National Socialist dictatorship a technocracy that necessarily distorts every word. And since Schmitt perforce used a microphone to deliver his commencement speech to a group of teachers in the national legal association, the speech necessarily took on the quality of a call for a purge of Jewish lawyers from the association. To this extent, his dialogue with the diary (the problematic of writing as a technical medium occurs to him only in reference to law) provides an ideal terrain for the word.
Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that Schmitt, precisely in this refuge, feels the interference of a force that undermines his notion of autonomy; he recognizes somatic influences on the articulation of language, even on his own power of definition (16 ff.).
In Helmuth Plessner's anthropology, we encountered the cool persona as that highly reflexive dueling subject, its ego sharply distinguished from the unconsciousness of bodily being. It needs, as we noted, to forget its body in order to present itself properly as a physical form. The task of overseeing the boundary to the unconscious, with which the ego
Our experience with the decisionist as a conceptual type during this century suggests that the more precisely it circumscribes the space, the greater is its longing for the amorphous condition of the bodily. Schmitt notes on 2,2, June 1948:
The fundamental precondition of the ability to make good definitions is a rare ability: to bound and exclude what cannot be circumscribed…. That is the first of all distinctions, just as all virtue for the stoic begins by marking off the sphere of our own power from the sphere in which we are powerless. (169)
As if echoing previous certainty, the inevitable comment comes a month later:
I am not in control of what penetrates into my consciousness, and not of that which remains unconscious to me…. Nor, therefore, am I able, as the stoic would have it, to distinguish what is in my power and what is not, and, on the basis of this distinction, master the one and accept the other. (180)
Somatic currents, bodily impulses, and physiological conditions of articulation determine what penetrates into consciousness, and they come into force with the articulation of a word—for example, Dezision or Feind. The secure ego, from this viewpoint, is only a “swamp light,” and when Schmitt repeatedly indulges the satirical verse Cogito ergo sum, summ, summ, summ, Bienchen summ herum
[*] Summen = buzz; thus, “little bee buzzing all around.” The rhyme occurs in German nursery rhymes.
he also betrays his suspicion of the emancipated signifier, as could only please a deconstruc-tionist: we seem to have found the vulnerable point in the steely structure of the command as well as the ritual structure of his acoustic space, in which language turns into indecipherable sound and command collapses. Here, we could maintain, Schmitt succeeds in punching holes in his definition discourse by way of Nietzsche's “guiding thread of the body”; here we have a lapse back to the literary avant-garde, or at least a case of geriatric anarchism.And yet the evidence of the tie back to Hugo Ball's word experiments
Vilém Flusser has coined the term “pyramidal discourse” for the kind of auditory communication Schmitt has in mind. It functions in societies that, while hearing, are not supposed to answer:
That is the reason for having relays between sender and receiver. The sender becomes inaccessible to the receiver. This model presupposes pyramidal hierarchies such as the priesthood, within which the messages of a distant God are transmitted through authorities toward receivers. The mediator has a twofold function: to keep the messages free of noise and to block the receiver's access to the author.[193]
The point may be a surprising one: insofar as Schmitt's phonomania plays itself out in the context of a pyramidal discourse, it remains a creature of the technological communications paradigm of the interbellum, the radio. Confirmation for this point comes from another direction: making the human word absolute, we read in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectik der Aufklärung, is a “false commandment,” which is part of the “immanent tendency of the radio.”[194]
Schmitt's Kafka If people face the decision of becoming kings or couriers, “in the way of children,” according to Kafka, “they all [want] to be couriers.” So the world is full of couriers running around, shouting out their reports to one another. But in the resounding absence of a king, their reports have no meaning. This is Kafka's space, founded on the murmur of couriers' voices.[195]
What could be more distant from Schmitt's acoustic space revolving around the command axis than this world of Kafka's? And yet Schmitt feels the magnetic attraction of a world in which the messengers can only get started with their task once the commanders-should they appear at all-have died, in which the couriers get lost in the labyrinths of palace hallways or dimly lit lofts, where those for whom the messages are meant are forever deprived of the true word or have to dream up the
In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course; I've been told it's being used there all the time; that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now, this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you'll hear, everything else is deceptive. There's no fixed connection with the Castle, no central exchange that transmits our calls farther. When anybody calls up the Castle from here, the instruments in all subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments-I know it for a certainty-didn't leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a distraction, especially in the evenings and at night, and may hang the receiver up. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that's merely a practical joke.[196]
Schmitt is fascinated by novels that measure the constitutional nation's lack of foundation, that create the sense of a permanent “state of waiting,” which for him signifies the epitome of Judaization (37). The representation of decisions being made out of nothing unsettles him-while in Kafka the much ballyhooed “decision” amounts to a gesture, to a little finger smoothing an eyebrow.
The contrast between these two anti-worlds might explain Schmitt's fascination. Its basis, however, is more ominous than the model of the attraction of opposites can suggest. On 2,9 August 1950 Schmitt notes in his diary:
But I (in contrast to Heidegger) name names out loud, like a child, and am for that reason predestined to be the sacrificial victim of ritual murder, like Kafka's defendant in Der Prozess. (309)
Schmitt believes he has fallen into the cogs of the legal machine, which lets him go on vegetating there, as he goes on to say, only because it is too worn out to carry out the traditional ritual murder.
Seven entries on Kafka document the way Schmitt follows the mores and customs of the constitutional nation in Kafka's novels. Kafka's writings illustrate for him the condition of a world in which the final judgment of the father is willfully nullified, so that people are left with no alternative but to feign his presence. It is a world in which faith in the law prevents the individual from perceiving the holes in the law, from which-in the father's voice—all that is good could be expected and in which —were the father's voice to be heard—it would demand nothing of the son but self-liquidation. In Das Schloß, Schmitt discovers the drama of
Franz Kafka could write a novel: THE ENEMY. Then it would become evident that the indeterminacy of the enemy evokes the fear (there is no fear but this, and it is the essence of this fear to sense an indeterminate enemy); in contrast, it is a matter of reason (and in this sense of high politics), to define the enemy (which always implies simultaneous self-definition), and with this definition the fear ceases, with only dread, at most, remaining.
But how—sighs Schmitt in this connection—how are we to snatch something from indeterminacy, “if we have no concepts in common?” (148). Shared concepts are lacking, no doubt, because no one else makes use of Schmitt's definition of the enemy, which demarcates the existential other.
For Schmitt, it is the font of all evil that humanity will no longer accept a paternal authority, and that instead in the father's place is the “objectivity” of law. There for him lies the disgrace of the November revolution and the failure of the majority of the Weimar Republic's legal scholars: “legal positivism,” so he declares in the diary, “kills its father and devours its children.” The worst form of “father devouring,” however, he finds in “Americanism” (148), first in the new objectivity decade of the Weimar Republic and later in the postwar Federal Republic.
As children of this Americanism we have been trying for thirty years to stand up to a form of political romanticism that, as Paul Tillich formulated it, appeared “to create the mother from the son and call the father out of nothing.” That is why it is no cause for sadness if acoustic conditions for the call for the father remain pretty bad during our lifetime.
Incidentally, Kafka did write a little piece about the enemy; it is called “Der Bau” (The burrow) and shows us an animal that lives underground and loves silence. The silence, in Siegfried Kracauer's commentary, “that prevails, or ought to prevail, in his lightless structure is also truly the only radical antidote to the true word.”[197]