It is not enough, then, to set idle chatter in opposition to the authenticity of the spoken word, understood as being replete with meaning. On the contrary, it is necessary to discern the conversation (and sustaining) of being-with as such within chatter.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 1996
Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense.” What sounds like a commentary on our ubiquitous production and reception of images is actually Siegfried Kracauer’s description of what he observed in 1927, when, as he noted, the world seemed to have taken on a “photographic face” and strove “to be completely reducible to the spatial continuum that yields to snapshots.” Almost immediately, the doubt that comes through in his “if being informed” clause leads Kracauer to the opposite conclusion:
Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against cognition. Even the colorful arrangement of the images contributes to the successful implementation of the strike. The juxtaposition of these images systematically excludes the contextual framework that discloses itself to consciousness.
Kracauer’s doubt does not derive from the fact that images in illustrated magazines absorb the reader’s attention in a glamorous fantasy world, as suggested by the photograph of the film diva that Kracauer invokes at the beginning of the essay. The source of the problem precedes that distortion. It is located in the medium itself, based on the fact that “in photography the spatial appearance of an object is its meaning,” whereas, on the contrary, “in the artwork the meaning of the object takes on spatial appearance.” Hence: “the two spatial appearances—the ‘natural’ one and that of the object permeated by cognition—are not identical.”1
Along with the questions raised here about photography as a medium, a new one arises: Who decides the meaning of things? Is it humans or the things themselves? To perceive things at the level of their evidence, Kracauer argues, means to be prevented from gaining access to their truth. Baudrillard, later on, will frame this constellation even more sharply as the decision between the “philosophy of the subject” and the “anti-philosophy of the object.”2 Photography is a “means of organizing a strike against cognition” not only as a result of the intentional distortion of reality that happens in posed photos, where (viewed from the perspective of media theory rather than ideology critique) “the meaning of the object takes on spatial appearance,” as in a painting. This is the kind of meaning the film industry, following its logic, would like to create for the diva, for example. But alongside the cognitive distortion that is carried out via the medium, there is a second cognitive betrayal that derives directly from the medium itself: the suppression of any subjective perspective by the camera’s own vision, which reduces “truth” to the “naked” appearance of things in space. With the (apparent) self-presentation of the objects, the human observer finds herself operating at the level of reality rather than at the level of attitudes toward it. Whereas, in the latter case, attitudes are open to a claim of meaningfulness and truth that potentially permits contradiction, any such contest is superfluous at the level of reality, thanks to its evidential character. The result is “a society that has succumbed to mute nature that has no meaning.”3
The mute society Kracauer imagines is Facebook society, and its Kracauer is Bernard Stiegler, who describes the falling silent of society as attention deficit disorder and infantilization. The digital media already advance this process with their technological dispositif (multitasking, interaction, hyperlinks). The change is accompanied by a shift from deep attention to hyperattention, which, as “hyperstimulation” and “hyperactivity,” is associated with additional attentiveness only in the sense of a nonreflective “wakefulness.”4 Stiegler reads this psychogenetic mutation in terms of a theory of power, as a hollowing out of the type of reasoning necessary for every democracy. His cultural pessimism is as unvarnished as critical theory’s analysis of mass culture once was, and it has been described as an extension of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann analysis to our entire culture. Stiegler’s references for his critique of the present are the emancipatory imperative of the Enlightenment and the ethic of responsibility of the environmental movement. At the core of his critique is the “short-termism” that Stiegler views as embodied in consumerist economics and neoliberal finance capitalism, as “disinvestment” in the future and the establishment of a “society of carelessness.” This “short-termism” amounts to the victory of the hedonistic Lovell over the visionary Faust, through which, in Stiegler’s view, if nothing changes the world will be destroyed.5
The epistemological core of Stiegler’s critique is what he calls “cognitive and affective proletarianization”: the outsourcing of cognitive and affective matters to technologies and the downgrading of knowledge to information and of experience to knowhow. When Stiegler problematizes the uncoded memory of recording media such as videorecorders and computers because—unlike description—they do not actively involve the sender in creating the entity that becomes the bearer of the memory, this links him to Kracauer’s media-ontological discussion of photography and hence also to the photography-related view of Facebook society that is offered in this volume. Uncoded memory corresponds both to objects’ “spatial appearance,” in Kracauer, and to the automatic and automaticized entries on Facebook and visual communication via Snapchat. Stiegler’s answer to this loss of cognition is the psycho-technique of writing, as a process of “textualization” that, in describing, analyzing, and resynthesizing the objects under consideration, confers on them a “rational materiality.” But the development of social networks, as exemplified by Zuckerberg’s “frictionless sharing” and Snapchat’s forgettable snapshot communication, points in the opposite direction—toward a visual and indexical materiality that bypasses processes of rationalization. In everyday communication, this shift from thought to materiality is expressed in the move from summarizing to citing, for example when a video or text is no longer explained or summarized to a conversation partner but merely held out for that person to see on a smartphone.6
The popular counterpart to Stiegler is Nicholas Carr, who, in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain, described the internet as an ecosystem of distraction technologies leading to a “switch from reading to power browsing.”7 This, he claimed, renders human action superficial because the surface of the medium, with its link structure, multitasking, and network, works against any deepening of concentration. What other internet researchers and brain scientists praise as stimulation of the brain and as a mode leading to more intensive work is for Carr, along with the brain researcher Maryanne Wolf (to whom Stiegler also refers), merely a gain in sensory nimbleness that comes at the cost of cognitive acuity. Working online, Carr writes, “requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information.… We revert to being ‘mere decoders of information.’ ” He fears that the loss of deep reading and deep thinking will also result in a loss of memory, because the objects no longer enjoy sufficient attention to be able to be transferred, via synapse creation, from the hippocampus to the cortex, from short- to long-term memory.
There are four possible reactions to the cultural pessimism of this conclusion. The simplest is agreement. We may argue over how real the danger that has been identified already is and to what extent the interactive culture of digital media aggravates it. But those who join in the warning are on the safe side. How could we not regret the loss of concentrated reading? Who would be ready to declare publicly that we can do without complex thinking?
A second response is to doubt the conclusions arrived at by Carr, Stiegler, and others and to respond to the theory that all this makes us dumber with the theory that, on the contrary, it is all actually producing heightened intelligence. Admittedly, this cultural-optimistic view of the digital media usually rests on a discrete category shift from mental profundity to presence of mind. Claims that the use of digital media leads to more efficient processing of information and greater competency in problem solving harness neuroscientific research to glorify computer games, power browsing, and multitasking as good ways to keep the brain young and active. Whether this argument holds or not, it does not exactly undo the charge that the new media are turning us into mere decoders of information and encouraging a kind of unreflective wakefulness.8
The third response is to relativize the cultural-pessimistic finding by hoping that where there is danger, rescue is near—a rescue that can occasionally be found in the very media that are the source of the danger. This is also, in a certain sense, Stiegler’s position when he anticipates that the participation culture of digital media will lead to the replacement of the global “mercantile production of memory” with a new era of transindividual memory. The considerations laid out in chapters 1 and 2 cast doubt on this notion. For one thing, the present, precisely thanks to the participatory networks, is no longer really being experienced but merely being transposed so that it becomes a more or less uncoded reception of phatic communication. For another, self-description on social networks is more likely to encourage the episodic model of perception, which lives only in the moment, than the narrative model that serves reflection.9
The fourth reaction, finally, is the most problematic: agreement with the conclusion but without the usual negative evaluation. This position does not question the superficiality or antinarrative effects of Facebook but wonders whether this really entails a loss. It defends the episodic model of identity by citing the costs of narrativity—enforced coherence and pressure to respect causality, along with necessarily distorting selection processes—while simultaneously invoking concerns that are more far-reaching than anything mentioned above, such as the construction of ideological systems, cultural identities, and collective memories. In all these areas, namely, narrativity is employed in distinctly problematic ways, reaching from the exclusion and segregation of others to the heteronomy of individuals in thrall to preformed collective memory. Admittedly, once the value of narrative has been called into question, the negative value associated with its endangerment is also up for discussion. New cultural techniques such as hyperattention, episodic identity, and phatic communication begin to seem less like a danger or loss, and the threat posed by such potential future phenomena as a community based on superficiality or the culture of forgetting are no longer necessarily perceived as negative.
The intellectual adventure of the fourth reaction lies in the challenge of uncovering the negative consequences of an essentially positive phenomenon and, vice versa, the positive aspects of a process that is essentially negative. The decisive question is: To what extent are cultural narration and collective memory in conflict with the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and the contemporary debate over human rights? This broader perspective necessarily widens the scope of the previous investigation. We need to inquire, first, into the second aspect of the concept of “Facebook society” before taking another look at Facebook itself as a potential space for the practice of “groundless” togetherness. The starting point is hyperlinks, which are frequently seen, nowadays, as a source of evil but which for many people were once the central point of reference for critical thinking.
SYSTEMS THINKING AND HYPERLINKS
Hyperlinks are the mechanical incarnation of “point-time” and its fractured temporality. The permanent reiteration of arrival and departure that they encourage occupies the opposite end of the spectrum from the principle of continuity, coherence, and contemplation. Some historical distance was required before a critique of hyperlinks began to emerge. When they were new, because they undermined hierarchies and created alternatives, hyperlinks were enthusiastically welcomed as a practice of postmodern theory. Hypertext was celebrated as the “death of the author”—now readers could codetermine the structure of the text! Enthusiasts praised hypertext’s structure of networking, reconfiguring, and relativizing, its ability to open up closed texts, as encouraging a constructivist, rather than an objectivist, perceptual perspective. There were those who even foresaw a revolutionary turn toward irony and skepticism.10
Twenty-five years later, this nimbus has vanished. Once touted in academic circles as a symbol of critical thinking, hyperlinks are now more likely to symbolize the attack on deep, concentrated reading, as it is constantly interrupted by necessary navigational decisions and the ever-beckoning exit to other communication contexts. The hyperlink has become an antihero—unless we consider it in connection with a thought model that comes from the middle of the last century.
In January 2010, the Times (London) likened continuous navigation among different websites to the behavior of a fox. The comparison is based not on the Mozilla browser icon Firefox, which shows a fox embracing the globe, but on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which was written in 1952 and put forward different thought models for the two animals. While people who resemble the hedgehog “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel,” foxes pursue contradictory aims and
lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.11
In experience and thought, the fox is the episodic type, who doesn’t combine different elements into a greater whole but lets them be in their individual distinctiveness. It is the relationship model for Facebook society, since the internet (according to the Times, fifty-five years after Berlin) has turned us all into foxes: “We browse and scavenge thoughts and influences, picking up what we want, discarding the rest, collecting, linking, hunting and gathering our information, social life and entertainment.”
Following Berlin, a newly positive value is ascribed to hyperattention in political terms, as well. According to the Times, hedgehog thinking is fundamentalist, while the fox’s method of thinking threatens totalitarian ideologies; this explains why “the regimes in China and Iran are so afraid of the internet.” The conclusion may be a bit hasty—totalitarian regimes don’t only fear the lack of ideology; they also fear ideologies that oppose theirs—and it is quickly abandoned. But the starting point corresponds quite well to the media-theoretical assumption that new media change not only the way knowledge is presented and distributed but also the way we treat it more generally. Thus, the printing press, by providing identical, paginated, and relatively affordable editions, made possible an intensive scientific discussion that was not confined to religious topics. And, thus, the internet, with its democratic, grassroots-created, and hypertextually structured publications, encourages knowledge creation “from below,” along with a mode of thinking that is searching and nomadic rather than lingering and deepening. Does this mean the internet does away with ideological rigidity? Despite all the criticism it has received, could power browsing, as the material realization of foxlike knowledge management, be not the decline and fall but instead a progressive evolution of culture?
The first step in finding the answer must be to note that, for Berlin, the fox was the better of the two models. The world, Berlin thought, is a place of manifold perspectives and contradictory ideas about value, contradictions that cannot be resolved within an orderly system such as the monist Marxism he was criticizing. A person who stubbornly conceives the world from a single perspective will want to convert others to the same worldview, conceivably also using means that go beyond verbal exchange. Foxes, it can be assumed, are more comfortable with irreconcilable views and values and therefore better prepared than hedgehogs for the underlying conflicts of global, multicultural societies. Yet foxes, too, if they don’t want everything to come to naught, must also pull things together in some fashion. The model for this is wit, which one of the most famous German foxes, long before the advent of the internet, placed at the center of his aesthetic and pedagogical theory.
The Frankish poet and cosmopolitan Jean Paul12 was infamous around 1800 for “grotesquely combining things which have no real connection with each other.”13 Jean Paul elevated the criticisms of his work by the systems philosopher Hegel (whom Berlin counted among the hedgehogs) to the level of a program: connecting disparate things. And also: breaking up things that were connected. This can be seen not only stylistically, in Jean Paul’s poetics of interruption and digression, but also substantively, in his vehement critique of the construction of systems. In the name of a single dominant idea, systems of thought—here Jean Paul’s view resembled Berlin’s—boycott everything that doesn’t fit in with this idea. “Finally, a guild of systematizers becomes unable to understand anything (except its lingua franca), including, it follows, every opinion.” This was the basis for Jean Paul’s advice not to wrap oneself in a specific theoretical construct but to be at home in all and none of them: “Defend your higher poetic freedom against the despotism of every system by studying all systems.”14
Jean Paul’s critique of system making was just as grounded in a philosophy of language as postmodernism is. It also had political consequences, for example when Jean Paul, during the Napoleonic occupation of Germany by France, did not take sides with either the Bonapartists or the nationalists.15 In his Levana, or the Doctrine of Education, Jean Paul devoted a whole chapter to this critique, under the title “Development of Wit.”16 It referred not to punning but to a kind of mental open-mindedness toward things that are outwardly heterogeneous, for wit is the “disguised priest who copulates every pair” by revealing the sameness hidden beneath diversity and distance. Unlike acumen, which takes the reader by the hand and leads her from Alpha to Omega, sequentially and step by step, wit does not give access to its workings but presents the result as a surprise all the more effective for being unexpected. The “soul” of wit, in Jean Paul’s formulation, is its brevity. Its “aha” effect is often an intuitive insight whose trustworthiness must be put to the test by carefully retracing the steps that were omitted. It is for this very reason, because wit as an intellectual practice is an exercise more of thought than of memory, that educating children in wit is so central to Jean Paul’s pedagogy.17
A particular form of this pedagogy of wit is “learned wit,” which makes reference to everything—“all customs, eras, knowledge”—and thus brings different social and geographical circles of knowledge together so as to include, for example, scholars of religion and law, residents of big cities and small towns, trainees and businesspeople. The purpose of bringing all these circles together is profoundly political: “Namely in the end the earth must become one country, humanity one people.” Thus, wit, which, whether “learned” or “coupling,” can be likened to the concentric circles of Stoic cosmopolitanism, becomes the central tool of a pedagogical and political utopia. It serves an informational model that transmits knowledge across all borders and beyond all expectations. It is the “little brother” of printing, for books, as Jean Paul noted, also create “a universal republic, a club of nations or a Society of Jesus in the more beautiful sense or human society.”18
An obituary for Jean Paul described him as having been far ahead of his contemporaries and pictured him waiting at the gate to the twentieth century, “until his laggard people catches up with him.” Since then, Jean Paul researchers have been debating his (post)modernity. The 250th anniversary of his birth, in 2013, found him as out of touch with the times as he had been when he was alive. But when it comes to new media, the conclusion should actually be rather different. Hasn’t encyclopedic cosmopolitanism taken concrete form in the “Cosmopedia,” as the utopia of knowledge society on the internet, which transcends all national borders? Hasn’t systems critique become a daily practice, in the form of power browsing? Doesn’t the “development of wit” occur in a continuous encounter with hyperlinks? Before we answer these questions, we should explore some related issues more deeply, and so we turn to a German philosopher who may not have been among the “laggards” but who in a certain sense was nevertheless among those who couldn’t quite catch up with Jean Paul.19
In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer, in his notes on thinking for oneself (Selbstdenken), warned against reading too much, because in the continuing encounter with foreign thoughts the mind does not get around to any formulating of its own:
To think with one’s own head is always to aim at developing a coherent whole—a system, even though it be not a strictly complete one; and nothing hinders this so much as too strong a current of others’ thoughts, such as comes of continual reading. These thoughts, springing every one of them from different minds, belonging to different systems, and tinged with different colors, never of themselves flow into an intellectual whole; they never form a unity of knowledge, or insight, or conviction; but, rather, fill the head with a Babylonian confusion of tongues.
Accordingly, the possibility of achieving a coherent system of thought is inversely proportional to the number of influences on its ideas. The critique is directed avant la lettre at the foxes’ desire to be in many places at the same time. Schopenhauer contrasts “minds which are full of mere antiquarian lore; where shreds of music, as it were, in every key, mingle confusedly, and no fundamental note is heard at all” with those thinkers who, like Berlin’s hedgehog, are “strong enough … to master [knowledge], to assimilate and incorporate it with the system of [their] thoughts, and so to make it fit in with the organic unity of [their] insight, like the bass in an organ, [which] always dominates everything, and is never drowned by other tones.”20
The warning about a Babylonian confusion of languages in Schopenhauer’s notes on thinking for oneself was by no means original. At the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder had already been complaining that, in the “printed Babel” of the world of books, the ideas of all the nations were flowing together and that “innumerable competing foreign thoughts” were endangering the peaceful development of the individual’s own ideas. Herder’s conclusion in the 1790s shows that information overload was recognized as a problem long before the dawn of the information society:
And if, every day, only ten daily newspapers and journals fly at you, and in every one only five voices resound in your direction; where, in the end, do you have your head? Where do you have time left for your own reflection and for conducting business? Evidently our printed literature is invested in completely confusing the poor human spirit and robbing it of all sobriety, strength, and time for quiet and noble self-cultivation.21
Jean Paul also reported that “the book-pollen flying everywhere brings the disadvantage that no people can any longer produce a bed of flowers true and unspotted with foreign colours.” But at the same time, the system critic, lover of wit, and conjurer of a universal republic of books also saw in all this an advantage, namely in the promise that “through the Ecumenic Council of the book-world, the spirit of a provincial assembly can no longer slavishly enchain its people” and that “the citizen of the world … under the supervision of the universal republic, will not sink into the citizen of an injurious state.”22
At first glance, Jean Paul’s and Schopenhauer’s perspectives both seem plausible for the diagnosis of Facebook society. For one thing, the internet, even more than book publishing, undermines the sovereignty of every nation-state when it comes to controlling information. For another, modern knowledge management via search engine, copy-and-paste, and hyper-reading nostalgically recalls Schopenhauer’s reminder that an insight a person “could have found … all ready to hand quite complete in a book and spared himself the trouble … is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired it by thinking it out for himself” because “it is only when we gain our knowledge in this way that it enters as an integral part, a living member into the whole system of our thought.”23 After the revolution in reading that took place around 1800, the history of media, except for the early years of radio, seems to have gone against the hedgehog. “Radio, television and newspapers,” observed the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo at the end of the twentieth century, have become “elements of a general explosion and proliferation of Weltanschauungen” that render “any unilinear view of the world and history impossible.”24
Since then, the internet has increased the number of voices even further, and it would thus appear that the media, in their development, are putting into practice the very slogans advanced by postmodern philosophy: difference and pluralism. In media society, “the ideal of emancipation modeled on lucid self-consciousness, on the perfect knowledge of one who knows how things stand,” begins to be replaced by the ideal of an emancipation based, in principle, “on oscillation and plurality and, ultimately, on the erosion of the ‘reality principle.’ ”25 Self-skepticism as emancipation, plurality in place of unshakeable conviction—Vattimo’s statement clearly puts him closer to Jean Paul than to Schopenhauer. So, is Schopenhauer untimely, and Jean Paul, with his wit, as up to date as Isaiah Berlin with his fox? Does the internet, with its mash-up of the most divergent things, operate in the sense of Jean Paul? Of Berlin? Or Vattimo?
Initially, links may seem like a technical updating of Jean’s Paul’s wit. But on further investigation, also taking into account the hyperactivity they create, links are revealed as something closer to its demise. Links do not operate like priests or couplers, bringing apparently diverse things together; instead, they operate as duplicators of themselves, busily and noncommittally linking to other links that, in turn, lead to even more links. In multitasking and power browsing, links are subjected to the treatment Jean Paul’s wit received at the hands of its female readers: “If they happen upon scholarly wit, they don’t cry out rudely, or complain of being disturbed, but rather read on quietly and—the more easily to forgive and forget—do not even want to know what was actually meant.” In the era of hypertext and hyperattention, this so-called light reading of “womenfolk”—a “girlish gaze,” it is called elsewhere—is the new norm. A link that does not offer up its content to intuitive understanding leads not to a search for the deeper context but to “turning the page.” Nor does it come to an indictment, as Jean Paul imagines, in the form of a court battle of readers against his digressive turn of thought, for an indictment of things that are incomprehensible would necessarily assume readers who would go to the trouble of understanding.26
The ironic tone of forbearance in Jean Paul’s quoted remark on female reading habits becomes more imploring elsewhere: “The flood of books dries up, leaving only a couple of husks, floods your memory once again, and after this ebb and flood there remains in your soul not a single watered plant, but a wet, sandy desert.” This is how Jean Paul describes the dementia-like effects of reading too much too quickly. To counteract this, he recommends not Schopenhauer’s readerly diet but a second and third reading of the text. Jean Paul’s answer was excerpting and indexing. He filled notebooks upon notebooks with curiosities and created indices to provide an overview, in a process that anticipated databases. In this way, he created order in multiplicity—an order, however, that, like databases, does not shy away from the reorganization that necessarily always awaits the person who harvests multiple, diverse fruits of reading far from the comfortable cultural circles of home.
Jean Paul’s image of the wet, sandy desert describes the condition of Facebook society more accurately than Berlin’s fox. The sandy desert symbolizes the loss of deep reading and deep thinking, for the likes and shares of the hyperactive seek neither to excerpt nor to recombine things but merely to get rid of them. Could this also be the contemporary continuation of the emancipation ideal that, according to Vattimo, characterizes the mass media? Is the sandy desert the expression of radical oscillation and plurality—so radical that nothing that runs through the fingers during the leap from link to link can still manage to take root? Is it, perhaps, just these wet, sandy deserts of people’s memory in which the future of the world is growing? The extent to which this question is justified will become apparent in the course of reflecting on the antipluralist aspect of collective memory. Before that, however, it is necessary to shed some light on how memory works and on the capacity of the internet to function as memory, an inquiry that will take us even further back in history, before Berlin, Schopenhauer, and Jean Paul.
MEDIA MEMORY
Once upon a time, the Egyptian god Thoth wanted to give King Thamus the gift of writing. The king refused, arguing that if people could write everything down they would forget how to remember. This is what is written in Plato’s Phaedrus, which gives a very early explanation of the relationship between memory and forgetting, couched in terms of contemporary media development. The invention of writing is the first caesura in the interrelationship of media and memory, for, with it, memory was no longer tied to individuals who remembered, and storage was no longer a matter of oral transmission. Whereas in oral cultures rhapsodists and priests determined how the past was remembered, written transmission strengthened the position of the past within the present. For when words become separated from the speaker, the dead can also join in the conversation.
This, it is true, can happen only in conformity with the requirements of the living. Written material is always picked up and communicated by actual individuals in concrete situations. If the past is externally stored, more can be retained than any one person can convey to another or would wish to. This is why research on memory distinguishes between storage memory and functional memory. The data that are needed—to use an analogy with computers—are fetched from the depths of society’s hard drive (past tradition) and transferred to its random access memory, or RAM (present communication). Society’s spokespersons and discourse leaders determine which data are required and permit only those things to rise up to the collective memory of the present that correspond to the politically desired version of the past. Undesirable memory material does not form part of the desired tradition and is suppressed, until, under the leadership of new spokespersons, its hour comes. For an important part of strategic remembering (for example, acts of nation founding and their heroes) is strategic forgetting (for example, the violent deeds that may be associated with the events in question). While storage memory—the archive—contains what can be said, functional memory determines what is said.27
The selective mobilization of stored material transforms the “passionless archive” into an “emphatic site of memory” that can be used to create collective meaning.28 In the context of the present discussion, a media-theoretical parallel can be drawn. Namely, the archive of storage memory relates to the functional memory of things currently being recalled the way photography is related to painting. While photography takes in whatever happens to be in front of the camera lens, painting records only what happened (somehow) to be (in some sense) in the consciousness of the painter (and hence was important to him). Thus, for Kracauer, photography’s inventory-like quality—as “barren self-presentation of spatial and temporal elements”—corresponds to historicism, which was related by Nietzsche to the third, “antiquarian” type of relationship to the past: a “blind mania for collecting,” pedantic and passionless, that salvages the past for its own sake, while “monumental” and “critical” relationships to the past both treat the latter as being, respectively, emphatically either positive or negative.29
Historicism’s passionless mania for collecting corresponds to the archivist’s passion for preserving things, with an emphasis on their registration. The ideal archivist, typically, is not interested in a meaning-creating history in which diverse data assume the role of evidence. Archivists are not storytellers—out of respect for the material. Narrative takes place outside the archive, in the media, in schools and universities, on monuments and days of commemoration. The emphatic memory sites of a nation are the sites of “exosocialization” that serve to construct and communicate national identity through the corresponding creation of historical events and national myths. This is where the national biography is written. Like autobiographical narratives, it provides orientation in the present by retroactively constructing the meaning of the past.30
Even if archivists are more like “photographers” than “storytellers,” the archive is not a photograph of the world. It cannot store everything that happens in the world, and it is no less determined by its choice of specific perspectives toward the world than photography is. Unless, that is, the world itself is taking place in an archive. Increasingly, this is precisely the case.
The most recent caesura in the interrelationship of media and memory is the internet, which, with its social networks, invites people, on the one hand, to communicate their private information, while its search engines make it possible, on the other hand, to open up the archive that is created in this way—at least to the extent that everything happens this side of the dark net. Since, in principle, everything that exists in digital form is archived and can be accessed, the internet signifies the end of forgetting. There is still a life outside the internet, but on the internet there is (almost) no life left outside the archive. If photography was “the general inventory of a nature that cannot be further reduced,”31 then the internet is the general inventory of digitally represented society. The internet of things, which lets our cars, items of clothing, refrigerator, coffee machine, radio, heating system, lights, etc., talk to one another, expands the terrain invaded by inventory by transforming even the objects of daily life into small, powerfully effective archives that all tend toward the creation of one gigantic central archive. The internet—not in the way it is used but in its content—restores to the archive the innocence it had lost, at least since Michel Foucault’s critical works on the archaeology of knowledge and the genealogy of power. The foreseeable future is the archiving of the entirety of existence, complete with all its everyday and less history-worthy details—a kind of 1:1 map that, unlike the 1:1 map in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science” or, before that, in Lewis Carroll’s novel Sylvie and Bruno, is actually quite useful thanks to search engines and algorithms.
With the internet, and especially since the Web 2.0, the problem is no longer to be found in the lack of capacity to remember but rather in the disappearing possibility to forget.32 However much we may like to live in the moment (or, in our eagerness to communicate, may in fact not even properly experience it), and however little we may experience ourselves as part of a history (a history that makes some kind of sense and has something in mind for us), technically every Now becomes an unlost past. Every casual communication on social networks continues to be stored somewhere and fills the data pool from which sociologists, marketing specialists, and secret services look forward to deeper knowledge of society.
The increased storage function of the internet should not be seen only in relation to these new technical possibilities, however. It is fundamentally the technological radicalization of a social trend that was already diagnosed for the 1980s: a massively expanding mania for archiving, accompanied by an explosion of discourse on memory. While the twentieth century began with visions of the future that, after the socialist revolution in Russia, contributed to a fear-inducing realpolitik, it ended with an obsession with the past. The fact that the temporal focus has shifted “from present futures to present pasts” can be explained by the loss of hope in the future but also by a vanishing familiarity with the present, as the acceleration of social processes leads to a “shortened stay in the present” and as the end of grand narratives contributes to a “culture of memory.”33
The culture of memory and the cult of archiving may spring from the same causes, but when it comes to their goals, they are not only different but quite contradictory. While discourses of memory aim at a narrative (re)ordering of the past—brought about, among other things, by the round-number anniversaries, during the 1980s, of events that occurred under National Socialism as well as by feminist and postcolonial critiques of previous images of the past—the obsession with the archive sidesteps narrative order in its turn toward the facts as such. As the French historian Pierre Nora describes the situation: “Memory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution. Its new responsibility is to record; delegating to the archive the duty of remembering.” The construction of history gives way to the archiving of history, while “the emphatic site of memory” is replaced by the “passionless archive,” which remains neutral in terms of content and the impulse to remember.34
The shift from the narrative structuring of events to their indifferent registration recalls Jean Paul’s “wet, sandy desert” where unprocessed information lies fallow. At the same time, the “outsourcing” of the unremembered past to the archive reenacts the previously discussed shift from long-term experience (Erfahrung), as meaning-conferring interpretation, to short-term experience (Erlebnis), as distanced information, inasmuch as, once again, the individual fails to make the perception fully “her own.” The basis for this shift is the gradual suppression, in the course of media development, of the “Aufschreibesystem” (notation system) writing, which, as a mode of description, is inevitably subjective and meaning conferring, and its replacement by recording techniques like photography and (video)recording, with their objective registration. The mechanical reproduction of reality, which became a mass phenomenon with the availability of inexpensive cameras at the end of the nineteenth century, expanded audiovisually during the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, thanks to digital media, it took a further qualitative leap in terms of its reach, extent, and analytical possibilities. The “self-musealization per video recorder” in the 1980s now appears to have been the modest prelude to the twenty-first century’s permanent and automatic self-archiving on personal websites, social networks, and diverse self-tracking apps. This self-representation aims, as was demonstrated in chapter 2, less at narrative self-understanding than at the creation of an archive of the self in the mode of recording.35
Having established the distinction between archiving of the past and memory of the past, we can now give the statement that with the internet the possibility of forgetting is shrinking a sharper dialectical focus. The internet is the end of forgetting, to the extent that it potentially archives everything, but at the same time it is also the end of memory, to the extent that the unlost past is no longer a formed past at all. The stored information lacks the structure of narration and the perspective of the storyteller. The internet is not “memory in an emphatic sense,” which would keep the past meaningfully present; it is a “radical presence (or latency) of data in storage.” This is why it is seen by some not as an intensification but rather as a “withdrawal” of (cultural) memory: “The World Wide Web, as an apparently navigable archive, claims memory, but practices its opposite: amnemic [sic] rituals of cybernetics.” The internet, through its ideology of “contentism,” basically creates “digital amnesia.” It is—the distinction is crucial here—not a memory that has processed experience but merely an archive that has deposited information.36 What does this mean?
When remembering—rather than forgetting—is declared to be a void on the internet, the concern is not with its archival subfunction from the perspective of a materially oriented media theory. Naturally, access to stored material depends on the present availability of past storage techniques. The format of the bearers of saved material itself becomes something worth saving, as everyone who, in 2017, tries to open a Windows 98 file or load a .gif file from a floppy disk knows. Digital media have a “memory Darwinism” at their core, according to which only things that are continuously utilized (and thus constantly demonstrate their significance) remain in storage (when it is updated to the contemporary format). The problem here is not the obsolescence of soft- and hardware but the insecure status of the medium itself, starting from the fact that every individual who has or can obtain access to the server is able to manipulate the stored material. While analog writing on solid surfaces enables the presence of the dead in the discourse of the living, digital writing on the internet allows the present to secure a place in the discourse of the past. More decisive than possible human intervention into the archival material, however, is the media-specific response of the archive to the individual who is accessing it.
The unreliability of the internet as memory is inherent in its paradoxical nature as an individualized mass medium. In the context of our current discussion, this is less a matter of the possibility for potentially all individuals to address themselves to potentially all other individuals than it is a matter of the customization of the content, in each case, for the specific user by means of cookies, browsing histories, login data, and other forms of identification. While conventional media—books, newspapers, radio—provide all recipients with the same news, the internet adapts the news to the recipient. Processing is personalization, as anyone knows who, for example, compares the results of a given search with the results obtained by a different person who poses the same question at a different place and time. In the course of this “mass customization,” the search engine produces “memories that have admittedly never been thought before and are merely the product of the context-related commands of the user.”37
The dynamically produced information already represents a turning away from collective memory, for it addresses the individual not as part of a group but in her particularity. The questions an individual asks of society’s memory—Where do I come from? Where do I belong? Who are we?—are preceded by the trace-following algorithm: Who is this user? What websites has she previously visited? When the individual becomes the pretext and context for shaping the information provided, her specificity determines the current presentation of collective memory rather than the materials of collective memory affording the context for the individual. Cookies are the negation of collective memory inasmuch as they gather data on an individual rather than a collective basis and distribute information (including collective memory) on that same basis. In this case, the individual’s behavior does elicit the information, but it does so unconsciously and only via computer-generated surveillance.38
The technical disposition of the digital media is not only detrimental to collective memory by virtue of the individualizing function that cookies perform. Hypertext, as a technology of necessarily individual text montage, already poses a challenge to collective memory. For as soon as the elements of a text can be mounted in varying ways, the principle of invariance and replicability, as the fundamental model for memory, is endangered. Whereas writing, as a technique, replicated reality in ways that were more standardized than the previous oral tradition, hypertext leaves it once again open to individual variation. Basically, this trend toward individualization is a tendency that is already embedded in computer functionality, since the computer is a machine with no set determination, which can be utilized for the most diverse purposes—as an adding machine, typewriter, reading tool, television, or supermarket—and always operates in interaction with its environment. Thus, when it comes to information transfer, the computer also provides a user-oriented selection process incorporating heterogeneous components in which cookies, hypertext, search engines, and dynamically constructed websites are both the means and the result. Since the Gutenberg galaxy, collective memory has lived on in individual objects that serve as their bearers (printed books) while varying with the individually specific mixture of these objects based on an individual person’s reading. Now, in the era of digital media, the provision of the material of memory to the entities that serve as its bearers (individual computer screens) is already variable.
* * *
Memory, to sum up, is shaped both by specific social forces that determine the content of the archives and also by the media employed for this purpose, which bring specific techniques of remembering with them. The past is not a construction that is only cultural. It is also media dependent, and media are not neutral bearers and conveyors of the content of memory—they also shape the modalities of remembering. Whereas writing secures the material of memory against the variability and loss entailed by personal reproduction in an oral culture, and printed books multiply the reliable replication of the past, photography and video, with their optically unconscious fidelity to detail, also recall what was not perceived in the past. The internet, finally, potentially archives everything that is presented on it. To the extent that this archiving occurs without selection by experts or intentionally appointed persons, it can be understood as a democratization of the archive. To the extent that it is all-embracing, in a certain respect it signifies the end of forgetting.
The cost of this end of forgetting is the relinquishment of recollection. Memory and recollection are meaning-creating (narrative) processes for structuring archival material. The selection processes they use are constitutive of (collective) memory and are binding for their addressees. This very practice of collective remembering is undermined by the technical dispositif of the internet: by hypertext, process dependency, and personalization. The internet is not detrimental to collective memory because it would be unable to secure the archiving of the material. On the contrary, the deterritorialized, participatory nature of the internet even makes possible new forms of recollection while simultaneously rendering potentially repressed memories globally accessible. However, these new possibilities of collective remembering only exist within a technological framework that is detrimental to collective recollection because the processing of the material, for the reasons previously mentioned, must necessarily be unstable. At the concrete level of the content of a static website, this may not be noticeable, but at the general level of information accessibility on the internet, we have to say: “The digital engineering of collective memory is no longer a function of social filters but of programming.” The canon of collective knowledge, which has traditionally been passed down indiscriminately to the members of a cultural or national community via sites of exosocialization, is now dissolving into the computer-generated personalization of knowledge.39
The uncertain future of collective memory, though, appears less threatening in view of the problematic consequences entailed by this type of memory. Collective memory, as the orientation and construction of meaning, is always also a normative straightjacket that contains readymade conceptions of value and predispositions to action while more or less unforgivingly pursuing deviance. To put it pointedly: “To claim the right to memory is, at bottom, to call for justice. In the effects it has had, however, it has often become a call to murder.”40 In this context, a “culture of forgetting” could seem attractive. Let us take a closer look at the negative sides of collective memory and of the cultural narration connected to it, paying attention both to the relationship between memory and narration and to the relationship between identity and cosmopolitanism. In this exploration, the new media will retreat into the background for awhile, only to return in the final section of the chapter, where Facebook is presented as the site of a global community bereft of memory, narration, and identity.41
NARRATION AND ENFORCED COLLECTIVITY
The critique of the paradigm of narration began, in chapter 2, with the defense of the episodic personality type against its narrative corollary, the turn of postmodern poetics against the illusion of coherence, and the view of automated biography as a protection against techniques of narrative self-deception. Now, it is necessary to complement this perspective, drawn from literature and autobiography, by looking at its political dimension, in light of the fact that narrative self-perception always takes place in a realm influenced by cultural and social symbolic systems. These symbolic systems overlie individual perception and narrations of reality and inevitably lead to discrimination, exclusion, and distortions that favor a coherent identity and perfect identification. The accusations made against cultural narration and collective memory are essentially three: perceptual distortion, enforced coherence, and heteronomy.
Heteronomy comes into play when success in life is bound up with the success of an individual’s narrative as a meaningful, goal-directed story that conceives the I as part of an other-directed project: as the child of specific parents, the citizen of a specific city, the member of a specific professional grouping, clan, tribe, or nation. “Identity, like memory, is a kind of duty” is how Nora puts it, continuing: “I am asked to become what I am: a Corsican, a Jew, a worker, an Algerian, a Black. It is at this level of obligation that the decisive tie is formed between memory and social identity.”42 The little history of the individual is subordinated to the big history of the collective and is determined by the latter’s culture and memory. Doubt about the ethical force of narrative is thus expanded to encompass a critique of the narrative form of self-observation as a means of social discipline—as the instrumentalization of the Now under the sign of a future projected forward by the past of others. The alternative is to be found, accordingly, not in a counternarrative but in narrationless snapshots. This points us back to Facebook’s episodic status updates.
Even before stories and their relational content, the heteronomy, or other-directedness, that narration imposes on the individual begins at a formal level, with the requirement of coherence. The “seamlessness” expected of narration suppresses the breaks and contradictions of individual life histories and identity concepts and may thus obscure the truth precisely in the interest of presenting a formally anchored illusion. Narration is then not only not the better form of self-understanding but possibly even the worse one. As Judith Butler puts it in Giving an Account of Oneself, “if we require that someone … be a coherent autobiographer, we may be preferring the seamlessness of the story to something we might tentatively call the truth of the person.” The ultimate consequence of this perspective is a suspicion that ethical responsibility may lie precisely in the “non-narrativizable exposure that establishes my singularity.”43
Both of the points made by this critique—the content-related one of narration’s goal-directedness and the formal one of its coherence—need to be discussed not only in the context of individual identity formation but, more broadly, at the level of culture(s). Cultural “metanarratives,” to employ Lyotard’s concept, are also continuously constructing coherence and suppressing alternate perspectives. Individuals are compelled (or may themselves seek) to evaluate actions and interactions from an external narrative and to perceive their “daily narratives” only as elements in a “unified narrative”:
There are second-order narratives entailing a certain normative attitude toward accounts of first-order deeds. What we call “culture” is the horizon formed by these evaluative stances, through which the infinite chain of space-time sequences is demarcated into “good” and “bad,” “holy” and “profane,” “pure” and “impure.” Cultures are formed through binaries because human beings live in an evaluative universe.
The goal is to homogenize difference, in the illusion of a secure identity that is then advanced in opposition to other cultural identities. Moral and political autonomy—this is where the political weight of the critique of narration is to be found—exist only through the possibility of acting outside the framework of the cultural narrative, including the option of bringing opposing narratives and loyalties together as one.44
The tension between “first-order deeds” and “second-order narratives” is comparable to the tension between event and narrative in historiography and also to that between archives and memory in the discourse on recollection. The difference, in each case, is one of ownership. As an event, the phenomenon belongs to all; as an element in a narration, to those who are telling the story. “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name,” Nora writes, while history “belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.”45 The contradiction behind this tension between event and narration, individual and culture, is ultimately that between universalism and particularism, in which something unbound and unique (an event, an individual) winds up closer to the universal than to the particular. This perspective moves our theme nearer to politics and the discussion of universal human rights as a corrective to standards of cultural identity. A productive starting point for this reflection is the Enlightenment’s debate on cosmopolitanism, which followed the debate on the Babylonian confusion of languages considered earlier in this chapter.
A symptomatic example of the discussion of universalism and nature versus culture and the nation is found in the Freemason conversations Ernst und Falk, written by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1778. On the subject of world citizens, Lessing noted:
If a German meets a Frenchman at present, or a Frenchman an Englishman, or vice versa, then it is no longer a mere man meeting a mere man, who by virtue of their identical nature will be attracted one to the other; but a particular kind of man meets a particular kind of man, who are conscious of their different tendency, which makes them cold, reserved, suspicious of each other, even before they have the slightest dealings with one another for their individual selves.
The mere human being who is addressed here, the human being per se, is the human being beyond cultural memory and social-political reality, as opposed to the concrete human being within a social context. The unavoidable cultural identity of humans, as Ernst and Falk ultimately also agree, seems to be an anticosmopolitan fact of life.46
The utopia of universalism barely survived the end of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century became a century of nationalism. In Germany, this also took the form of a theory of education: Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Fichte’s addresses, in contradiction to Jean Paul’s treatise on education only a few years previously, by no means call for the exercise of wit or for systems critique. Instead, they call for “creation of that supersensuous world order in which nothing becomes, and which never has become, but which simply is forever.”47 It is the revocation of Jean Paul’s (post)modernism of in-betweenness and becoming. Education, in the nineteenth century, had become a place for training people to be German, French, or English. As a site of exosocialization, the education system shapes collective memory. This is where national narratives are passed on and put to the test; it is where the nation is created as a narrative. In the twentieth century, nation-states, which had assured themselves of their own identity by means of exclusion, carried out two devastating world wars. In the twenty-first, the human rights movement is salvaging the utopia of universalism that was entertained by the Enlightenment and is carrying it forward as “a new universal language” for strengthening the “unbounded universal ‘we’ ” of humanity against the “bounded ‘we’ ” of nations and cultures.48
If, around 1800, the line of conflict was drawn between universalism and nationalism, now it falls between human rights and multiculturalism. While multiculturalism strengthens the untouchability of the given culture, universalism emphasizes the rights of the individual over those of the group. This position rests on central characteristics of the Enlightenment, modernism, and postmodernism that can by no means be assumed or required of numerous other cultures. Therefore, according to a justified objection, the conviction that individual rights rank above collective goals is nothing but “a particularism masquerading as the universal”:
For mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges.49
In other words, the mere human being that the liberal, culturally indifferent perspective aims at is always already a particular kind of—liberal—human being. The expression of this contradiction is not confined to tensions with Islamic fundamentalism or disagreement over the freedom to publish caricatures.
The defense of universal human rights against the pluralism of multiculturalism is absolutely necessary as a protection for individuals, including women, against their cultures’ repressive requirements of conformity. At the same time, the affirmation of universal values is not unproblematic, because, in a turn away from the postmodern position of inescapable difference, it assumes absolute rights outside of concrete contexts for action or understanding and thus restores the belief in eternal values.50 Whatever position one takes in this debate, it is evident that the liberation of the individual is, at the same time, an attack on the collective memory of the culture to which the individual “belongs,” or into which she is born, and which now functionalizes her life as a part of its “project.” The possibility of absolutely disarticulating these things must be considered doubtful, for the individual only becomes a subject through language, and it is through language that the subject is simultaneously addressed and constituted. There is no articulation of the self by which a subject could escape this prehistory of a “we.” In Butler’s pointed formulation: “I always arrive too late at myself.”51
Nevertheless, we can only conclude that the more individual and impervious to the influence of collective narration the subject understands herself to be, and the more she expresses this, the closer she moves to the position of the human being as such. This human being as such should, however, not be conceived as empty and abstract but also, simultaneously, as such a one, possessing her incomparable individuality (or mix of identifications), which transcends any cultural or national categorization (German or English, Muslim or Christian). In this sense, the human rights debate operates on a level both above and below collective identities, with the goal, if not of dissolving, then at least of upending the hierarchy: First, a human being is a human being as such (per se and for herself) and only then such a one, that is, part of (and in the service of) a community. This change in emphasis implies another—critical, skeptical—look at the authority of the cultural narratives the person has grown up with. It leads, as Lessing, once again, made clear, to conflict with the fathers.
In his play Nathan the Wise, Lessing makes no distinction among Christians, Jews, and Muslims but treats them all simply as human beings. With this, he offered up a more optimistic model of society than he had in Ernst und Falk, where the differences between Germans, French, and English appeared unbridgeable. The change may be a result of the altered perspective, for now Lessing is discussing the abstraction of humans from their concrete environment in terms of religion, not national and territorial identity, and is doing so in the form of a story, not a philosophical dialogue. It is a narrative, if you will, about the way postmodernity deals with old metanarratives.
The play takes place in twelfth-century Jerusalem, where Recha, the foster daughter of the Jew Nathan, is rescued from the flames of her burning house by a Christian Knight Templar. One day, the Muslim ruler Sultan Saladin, who needs money, asks the rich merchant Nathan to tell him which of the three great religions is best. Nathan answers with a parable about a father with a miraculous ring that he turns out, after his death, to have given to each of his three sons. The judge called in by the sons refuses to decide which ring is the genuine one and proposes a competition without a finish line, arguing that if the ring really makes its wearer beloved among men, the owner is probably the one who is loved by the most people. Since this question cannot be answered by the brothers alone, the judge orders the “children’s children’s children” of the parties to reappear before his bench in “a thousand thousand years” (3.7).
Nathan, with the ruse of Scheherazade, rescues himself from Saladin’s trick question by telling a story. But Saladin refuses to accept this flight into aesthetic fancy and presses for a clearer answer, whereupon Nathan explains the interrelationship among truth, memory, and cultural identity:
For do they not all ground on history?
That’s written or traditional? —And is
Not history the only thing which must
Be taken on good faith? —Or is it not so?
Well whose good faith then is it? Which the least
We doubt? Is it not that of our own people?
Not theirs? Whose blood we are? Not theirs, who from
Our infancy did prove to us their love?
Who ne’er deceived us, only, where to be
Deceived was the more wholesome thing to us?
How can I give less credit to our fathers
Than thou givest thine? Or on the contrary.…52
The commonly held view, in religious circles, that a person can only be truly tolerant if he is firmly convinced of his own belief is not one to which Lessing’s Nathan adheres. Instead, Nathan’s insight into the partisan and contingent nature of a person’s own convictions points forward to the skepticism and irony that postmodern philosophy will later recommend as the adequate perspective when it comes to questions of truth and falsehood. This postmodern position avant la lettre is a point of criticism that was leveled at Lessing again and again in the reception history of Nathan the Wise. People not only disliked the view that a human being is a human first and only then a Christian, a Jew, or a Moslem; the critics also disputed that Lessing
by tolerance had meant the democratic pluralism that today rules the academic as well as the political scene, that suspects every insistence on long-held truth of being dogmatism, and that promotes the free competition of different views within the community of citizens or of academics as the ideal.53
We should not be surprised when a critique of this sort ultimately suggests that the “multitude of contradictory opinions” resembles “a big collection of products,” which “appears for its own reasons and offers something for everyone.” In more recent theatrical productions, this critique becomes all the more obvious when Nathan, the merchant, appears in a designer suit, thus showing a lack of seriousness toward the expression of personal convictions and demonstrating that tolerating multiple opinions is symbolic of market logic and a consumerist model. The situation appears less clear if one views the relationship between consumerism and ideology in a way that transcends the usual explanations and understands the consumer model as a kind of “pragmatic cosmopolitanism” and as “global society’s immune system against the virus of fanatical religions.” At this point, if not sooner, the notion of tolerance butts up against its internal paradox, which actually consists not in elevating the human being as such over people such as they are but, instead, in using the model of consumption as a cure for the model of religious conviction.54
Lessing’s play ends in a “general embrace of all,” for Recha, the Knight Templar, and Saladin turn out to be siblings, and uncle and niece. Two figures are excluded from this embrace: Nathan himself and Dajah, Recha’s lady’s companion. While Nathan’s place at one side of the stage remains ambivalent (his efforts to make “all men brothers” having been radically subverted by the metaphor of actual blood relationships), Dajah’s exclusion (she does not appear at all in the final scene) is unambiguous. Dajah, as Lessing has Recha remark, is “one / Of those enthusiasts who think they know / The universal, only truthful path / That leads to God!”55 Dajah cannot accept Nathan’s imponderability clause on the evaluation of religions or, along with it, in today’s terms, the abstract, coldhearted, elitist, and imperialist tolerance model of cosmopolitanism. With her absolute strength of religious belief and “weaponized” identity, she represents the majority of people—not only in Lessing’s time.56
Our look at the psychological and political problematics of narrativity leads to the conclusion that there is a dual heteronomy of the subject, which consists, on the one hand, in narrative structure’s compulsion to be coherent and, on the other hand, in the readily available content of collective narrations that either offer themselves to the subject as a “home base” for its thoughts and actions or are imposed in the form of tradition. Human rights discourse, in contrast, treats the subject as outside any collective narrative or memory and hence as having recourse to Enlightenment ideas. To the extent that the concept of universal human rights is based on a narrative (the narrative of Western liberal individualism), the only solution that may—possibly—allow the individual to find the free space she requires is negotiating among the various different narratives. This negotiation, one can argue, is more successful the more unconsciously it takes place. The more the mixing of narratives is not just the normative telos of a theoretical concept but also the practical outgrowth of a concretely lived life, the more sustainably it appears to be anchored. Examples of this un- or semiconscious, “factual” cosmopolitanism are the “cosmopolitanism from below” found in multicultural metropolises and the “banal,” everyday cosmopolitanism that is an outgrowth of global economic, cultural, and communication networks.57
In an era of globalization, when the significance of the nation-state is shrinking and attention to the cosmopolitan aspects of everyday life seems to be a methodological prerequisite of any social analysis, it is only natural if the digital media also (and above all) play a central role. As the most advanced media, they fundamentally define the psychological configuration of the present. And if, as Jean Paul’s “universal republic” of books and Vattimo’s praise of pluralism in radio and television demonstrate, print and electronic media were already spaces for negotiating the universal, it would seem that the internet, operating beyond the control of nation-states, is advancing the mixing of we and they, here and there more powerfully than ever. This supposition is understandable in view of the medium’s superregional, intercultural networking possibilities but overhasty if it mistakes the potential for cosmopolitical information processing for its reality. For while national media are as cosmopolitan and multiperspectival as the self-understanding of the country and state in which they operate, the stateless internet is only as cosmopolitical and multiperspectival as its users. Without the oversight of democratic institutions, the individual filter bubble can shut out unwanted information and unpopular perspectives more effectively than ever before. In this process, the easier creation of homogeneous interest groups and the faster, more superficial mode of communication by no means result in increased sensitivity to the other, unfamiliar.58
The cosmopolitan impact of the internet very likely lies elsewhere and takes a different form—that of phatic communication on social media. This claim is easier to comprehend if we approach it more psychologically than politically and follow the approach taken by the communication theorist Vilém Flusser, who was born in Prague and emigrated to Brazil in 1940. In his characterization of patriotism, Flusser points to the etymological context of “habit” as “habitation,” as a dwelling in which individuals have made themselves at home and feel safe and secure. This perspective gives the usual characterization of patriotism as warmth and comfort, in contrast with the abstraction and coolness of cosmopolitanism, an information-theoretical valence that also has an aesthetic intent: “The noises that approach the dwelling are ugly, because they disturb the habitual. If one transforms them into information, they become beautiful, because they are then built into the dwelling.” Patriotism, which is often associated with passion and which in many instances is primarily pride and amour propre, is for Flusser the “symptom of an aesthetic sickness” that mistakenly understands what is familiar and comfortable as beauty. This metaphorical approach makes it possible to recognize the theme of difference and tolerance as a problem of information processing that transcends religious, national, cultural, and ideological specificity and to open up new ways of approaching it.59
The remarkable thing about Flusser’s perspective is his claim that noise that has been processed into information is automatically beautiful. This may appear intuitively plausible, since information says something, while mere noise eludes understanding. However, if we give the aesthetic perspective a semantic turn, it becomes clear that only noise that has been processed into a statement can take a position vis-à-vis other statements and, among other things, is potentially able to contradict them. Information is not only a gain in knowledge and a broadening of the capacity to assign value; it is also, potentially, an experience of difference that destabilizes habits of valuation. To borrow the language of the opening quotation in a way that also challenges it: At the level of the models of values and orientations that we experience as “at home,” disturbance of the habitual first takes concrete form when the cognitively foreign (the unknown) is recognized as normatively foreign (as a contradiction); in other words, when noise is transformed into information.60 Flusser’s overhasty talk about the beauty of information per se is only comprehensible in the context of the normative cosmopolitanism on which it is based, which bravely regards every gain in knowledge as enrichment, even when a person’s own system of thought is being called into question. Here, we have a communication utopia that recalls Jean Paul’s wit and Berlin’s fox and that conceives “dwelling”—homeland, identity—not statically, as being, but dynamically, as becoming. Consequentially, Flusser then also sees the real responsibility of humanness as being underway, in a nomadic removal from everything familiar. The migrant, whom the “loss of the original, dimly felt secret of homeland … has opened to the secret of being with others,” thus becomes its missionary, as the bearer of the “awakened consciousness of all those who have homes, and a harbinger of the future”: making a home in homelessness.61
Flusser’s communication utopia is an actualization of “elite cosmopolitanism,” which is set out as a noble goal, not lived as a banal practice. Still, the passage previously cited is central to the discussion that we need to have here, for it contains—let us provisionally assert—the catchword for the factual cosmopolitanism of Facebook society. Perhaps the basis of communication across borders lies not in negotiation but in an ignorance of opposing positions. Perhaps the mutual acceptance on social networks results from a connection that, in the phatic mode, never actually takes account of the other as Other. Perhaps the unreflecting cosmopolitanization on the internet consists precisely not in translating noise into information but in enjoying it as noise, or chatter. The proposal may appear absurd (and is not supported by Flusser’s communication theory), but in a certain sense it is the recipe for a philosophical theory that, in the final years of the twentieth century, asked us to think a communality that transcends cultural, religious, or political narratives and identities. With this theory in mind, and with reference to some of what was considered in chapter 2, we should now, after the discussion of the relationship among culture, narration, and identity, ask what the social networks’ model of phatic communication and episodic self-presentation contributes to an identity formation outside collective narratives. The answer, sensibly enough, begins with the question of the extent to which social networks themselves generate a cosmopolitan narration.
GROUNDLESS COMMUNITY
In 1997, under the title “Birth of a Digital Nation,” an article in the Californian technology magazine Wired described the emergence of a powerful new form of community on the internet: “young, educated, affluent … libertarian, materialistic, tolerant, rational, technologically adept, disconnected from conventional political organizations.” Tolerance is listed as one of the fundamental characteristics of these postpolitical and self-referential “citizens of the Digital Nation,” as the result of a generous indifference toward specific cultural values and individual forms of life:
They don’t merely embrace tolerance as an ideal; they are inherently tolerant. Theirs is the first generation for whom pluralism and diversity are neither controversial nor unusual. This group couldn’t care less whether families take the traditional form or have two moms or two dads.62
This notion of an “internet nation” was also entertained in more academic writing predicting that “the netizen might be the formative figure in a new kind of political relation, one that shares allegiance to the nation with allegiance to the internet and to the planetary political spaces it inaugurates.” The rationale behind this assumption was the well-established claim that a medium is not simply a tool but carries its own message, able to promote “deep cultural and social changes.”63 The assumption has survived into the present, as demonstrated by the ninth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, in 2014, which held: “Clearly, the Internet provides the basis for a community with its own interests, an incipient identity, its own norms and modes of living together.”64 But is it still possible to hold on to the notion of a nation as media usage at a time when this nation cannot, by any means, still claim exclusive usage of the medium by a technical avant-garde? Can enthusiasm for a technology cover over differences of a religious, cultural, or political nature? Is the talk of the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, Narrative Clip, and other platforms about “our community” anything more than rhetorical boosting of a business idea?
Reference to a shared currency of the digital community (bitcoin) isn’t sufficient to answer the question, and even a consolidated internet time, independent of local time zones, would not suffice as evidence that technology can create a feeling of community.65 Even a digital nation is not constituted by shared units of measurement but by shared values, behaviors, and information sources. These, then, will have to be sought (in a way that recalls the cosmopolitan approach) beyond the cultures of geographically and politically framed communities. In the case of cosmopolitanism, this abstraction gets caught up in the contradiction that the ideal of a universal human rights regime beyond specific cultures is by no means shared by all people. In the case of virtual communities, whose identity is considered no less “thin” than that of universalist communities, the questions arise: What communicative contents create the feeling of togetherness? In what does the narration of the “digital nation” consist, and what can be said about its memory?66
One of the theories about the internet goes as follows: “Where natural social collectives build connectivity out of memory, virtual communities build memory out of connectivity.” The conclusion sounds convincing for a “thick virtual community” such as the WELL, which Howard Rheingold described more than two decades ago in his book The Virtual Community.67 Today, too, it is possible that smaller, exclusive virtual communities, whose feeling of belonging is based on shared values, losses, and hopes, may still create a collective memory out of their connection on the internet. But it is doubtful whether the wealth of updates on Facebook shapes stories that can be retold in such a way as to create the collective memory of a “Facebook community.” Rather, we may suppose that the basis of the new feeling of community is to be found in phatic communication: beyond meaningful contents and points of reference, in the communication as such, which recalls nothing but its own doings. This amounts to a reformulation of the theory mentioned previously: Virtual communities create neither connectedness based on recollection nor recollection based on connectedness. Instead, they constitute themselves in the mode of shared forgetting.
Up to this point, the discussion suggests that we not think of forgetting as a lack but rather see the absence of concrete cultural definition as the possibility of a cosmopolitical opening. This proposal is by no means without precedent. A 2002 essay on Europe’s postmodern identity declared that the only way for the various peoples and cultures of the European Union to develop a common feeling of belonging was not via an emphasis on collective remembering but through a collective loss of memory that would aim to forget, together, the centuries of war and conflict of Europe’s peoples and nations.68 The proposal recalls notions of reconciliatory forgetting, which, in the interest of future harmony, helps cultures and nations surmount negative events in their past. However, as soon as it is a matter not of reconciliation between two ethnic or national identities but of the construction of a common identity, the question arises as to whether the “higher” feeling of belonging does not have to consign all the boundaries that arise out of cultural differences to forgetting. Or, to pose the question a bit differently: To what extent does the alternative to the different cultural identities and collective recollections lie in “cosmopolitical forgetting” rather than “global memory”? Can the “universal we” that is constituted in the human rights debate via the memory of horrific deeds (with the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Rwanda serving as symbols of atrocities committed against humanity as such and thus relevant for each one of us) emerge from a void?69
Communication of lived experiences on mobile media and social networks was described in the first chapter as a kind of community that individuals constitute through their “techno-communicative activity with each other.” What is noteworthy about this conclusion is the understanding of this communication as an “advanced form of ‘dis-membering.’ ”70 “Dis-membering” refers to overwriting or “bleaching out” the individual past through the application of a universal written history, as was customary within the Cistercian order, where adult novices’ secular biographies were so imbricated with the biblical text universe that every memory of the former was automatically associated with passages from the latter, and an image drawn from court circles, for example, now also called up its spiritual counterpart. This “spiritualization of personal memory images” signifies a “conversion of private memories into memories of the community,” that is, not a loss of the memory but its bleaching out under the aegis of a new collective feeling.71 If we apply this concept in the context of social media, we should therefore ask about the “bleaching” and “spiritualization” that convert the personal into the communal. How might we think forgetting, or alternatively “bleaching,” in the context of a digital nation?
The answer takes us on a detour via the community model of Jean-Luc Nancy, who was already mentioned briefly as the author of a philosophical rationale for social networks in the sense of phatic communication and whom we will now consider in greater detail as a possible precursor to thinking about an identityless—and memory-free—community. Nancy’s philosophy is shaped by the insight that politically and culturally defined communities are characterized, in the best case, by individual heteronomy and boundedness toward external forces and that, in the worst case, they end in political terror, social violence, and nationalist aggression. His concept of community therefore inquires into the possibility of human beings who would transcend the perspectives and standpoints that distort humanity and aims at a concept of human beings that would be prior to culture: “Can we think an earth and a human such that they would be only what they are—nothing but earth and human—and such that they would be none of the various horizons often harbored under these names, none of the ‘perspectives’ or ‘views’ in view of which we have disfigured humans [les hommes] and driven them to despair?”72 Fundamentally, this is about human beings as such, the way the Enlightenment imagined them. Thus, for Nancy as well, the essence of community lies not in a common substance, as something that would be shared by everyone, as communion, but instead in the etymological obligation of the cum as being-with-others, a being together that does not presuppose a common being. “What this community has ‘lost’—the immanence and the intimacy of a communion—is lost only in the sense that such a ‘loss’ is constitutive of ‘community’ itself.” In other words, what is felt as a lack proves to be a gain, on which it is necessary to build.73
If community is thought prior to any definition of its content, hard and fast referents, or essential characteristics, then phatic communication ultimately also plays an important role. It sustains the conversation, the contact, the being-with, precisely by demanding nothing more than the gesture of conversation. Even “chatter” is evidence of the wish “to maintain oneself as ‘with’ and, as a consequence, to maintain something which, in itself, is not a stable and permanent substance, but rather a sharing and a crossing through.”74 Here, in examining the theme of sharing and connection on an abstract level, Nancy comes as close to Facebook as it was possible to do a decade before its creation. Since then, social networks have variously been described as “phatic technologies” that are more about community building than exchange of information, and Facebook itself has been described as a place where, based on “disinterested interest” in their respective status updates, people develop “disinterested sympathy” for one another. It is even claimed that the resulting “pan-sympathy” surpasses the “natural sympathy” described by David Hume.75 Is Facebook, then, where connections are created from connections rather than from common interests or values, the site where Nancy’s society becomes reality, without anything to bind it together? Is there more behind Zuckerberg’s talk of “our community” than self-advertising and self-deception? Is Facebook’s “community” the “digital nation” evoked above?
In a certain sense, the “ecstasy of communication,” in which, for Nancy, “singular beings” face one another as separate entities without blending together, occurs all the time on Facebook, in the intoxication of status updates. These are connections without commitment, a community lacking ground and work.76 That longer, more complicated posts receive few likes is perfectly plausible from this perspective, since the person who is seeking content undermines the model of phatic community. The breach lies in the search for a ground of communication that would go beyond being together in the act of sharing. In this regard, the concept of episodic identity, which was introduced and critiqued as an impoverishment of experience in chapter 1 and quasi rehabilitated in its opposition to the narrative type of identity in chapter 2, is ultimately also revealed in its social function. For the narrative individual is a “work” that, secure and self-aware, steps forward to face or confront other individuals: “Individuation detaches closed off entities from a formless ground.” To this individual immanence, Nancy opposes the “singularity” that emerges out of nothing and returns to nothingness: “It is not a work resulting from an operation.… Its birth does not take place from out of or as an effect of.” Its ground is a “groundless ‘ground’ … [in] that it is made up only of the network, the interweaving, and the sharing of the singularities.” From this distinction, the title of Nancy’s book Being Singular Plural derives its sense of opposition to any culture-pessimistic interpretation à la Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011). Nancy’s ungrounded community of being with—herein lies the source of its “ontological ‘sociality,’ ” beyond the “idea of a social being of humankind” as a “zoon politikon”—is a “community of singularities” that, unlike Turkle’s “addition of individuals,” is no longer conceived sociologically or psychologically but fundamentally already mathematically.77
As abstract and idealistic as Nancy’s model of community may appear, it represents an important objection of contemporary philosophy against the metaphysical ground of previous concepts of community. At the same time, Nancy’s concept appears quite compatible with the existence of the uprooted subject in globalized late capitalism and with the “man without substance” or belonging, like Tikkun’s description of the Bloom type: “man who became truly abstract,” liberated by social alienation and loneliness to participate in “veritable community.”78 Is Nancy’s concept compatible with the globalizing media of late capitalism, as well?
Nancy never connected the question of community with the question of the media and new technologies as clearly as one would have wished. But when he announces the condition of “struction” (which, as “the uncoordinated simultaneity of things, or beings” and “the pure and simple juxtaposition that does not make sense” is equally far removed from construction and deconstruction) as “the lesson of technology,” this can be read as a statement about “inserting ourselves into a technosphere,” with technology as the central actor in the meaning of history. Then the withdrawal of meaning that Nancy describes appears as a “technological shift of meaning” to the externality of technique, so that it becomes possible to connect it with cybernetic theories about technology as a constitutive environmental factor in human culture. However premature this connection may be, its appeal for thinking about a utopian society beyond cultural differences lies in the prospect that the sense of being is determined technically rather than culturally and that technology itself is not cultural—or, if it is, then only in a global, unifying manner that transcends specific cultures with regionally, nationally, religiously, etc. based differences. In other words, if the being with of the inoperative community, if the uncoordinated copresence of struction is to be thought, after all, within the framework of a binding context beyond the merely biological, then the point of reference for it would be not culture but technology. The hope behind theories like this is concentrated on the technical unconscious, which, in the information-rich environment of ubiquitous computing and the internet of things, creates a “cybernetic subjectivity” antecedent to the mental and collective structuring power of linguistic signification.79
Such a vision of the future can currently only be asserted and sustained at a highly abstract level, which does not have to respond to small-minded calls for evidence drawn from real life. If, in the meantime, we want to seek signs of the overwriting of various cultures by a global technology in the arena of practical life, our attention, once again, will turn first to social networks. Are they the space in which we—as members of a virtual community without any binding foundation—experience ourselves more as human beings than as citizens, more as a singularity than as individuals? Is Facebook the place where it is precisely the postings drawn from concrete life that point toward the abstract humanness of the communication partners? Does politics, as critics of the cybernetic paradigm declare (and complain about), take a back seat to a “being with” and “being next to” that has no meaning?
The assumption that Facebook could be the practical equivalent of Nancy’s philosophy of the postpolitical (or even its cybernetic radicalization) initially seems to be contradicted by the impression that in the twenty-first century Facebook is the central site of the political—an impression generated by headlines like “Facebook revolution” in the context of the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, by the manifold possibilities for messaging and mobilization on Facebook, the large number of political Facebook groups, and the fact that in millions of cases profile pictures on Facebook are used to make political statements, in the form of “JE SUIS CHARLIE,” tricolor national flags, or—launched in the form of an app by Facebook itself—the rainbow colors of the LGBT community. Naturally, no one will regard Facebook, solely on this account, as the wellspring of a political consciousness that would question the social status quo and look for social and economic alternatives in the sense of critical theory. It is telling that Zuckerberg never portrays Facebook as a tool for political change but always invokes its mission of a general “brotherhood” that transcends concrete political action. And it is unmistakable that when Zuckerberg talks about a universal human right to the internet, he is operating not so much politically as with an eye to the profitability of his company. Facebook’s stance may be “libertarian” and “tolerant” in the same way the “postpolitical young people” of the “digital nation” were described some twenty years ago, but when it comes to social philosophy it is definitely conservative.80
Facebook assuredly does not question the existing political-economic system. Rather, it secures it in four ways: (1) data analysis makes it possible to personalize advertising, which increases its efficiency by heightening market acceptance; (2) the mix of personal information and advertising accustoms us to seeing ourselves increasingly as part of consumer culture; (3) the possibility of comprehensive control of individual and collective behavior on social networks leads to subtle forms of self-censorship; and (4) the primarily phatic communication and growing extent of nonreflective relations with self and society undermine the intellectual basis for political opposition. Facebook does not operate directly to suppress politics, but it significantly encourages a nonpolitical stance. How detrimental this can be for a culture of political discussion is demonstrated by empirical studies showing that political postings are often ignored or blocked. Even on political Facebook pages, the interest in garnering greater numbers of visitors often means that substantive discussion is supplanted by uncritical agreement with seemingly obvious positions or by sensationalism and simplification. Critical network theory therefore describes the dialectical character of the internet as a space of alternative forms of communication and generation of critical views that, at the same time, is controlled by big corporations and that, as fragmentation of the public realm, represents a new form of “repressive tolerance.” To the extent that critical network theory continues to support the notion of communicative deception (Verblendung), it also holds fast to the hope that alternative digital technologies, far from commodifying freedom, could have a politically emancipatory effect. On the other hand, if we regard the problem from a more anthropological than political-economic perspective, we are led to suppose that the reason why Facebook is so successful is precisely its effectiveness when it comes to suppressing the real political controversy.81
This conclusion does not apply only to Facebook. It is equally valid for other social networks that have a lasting impact on Facebook society. Hossein Derakhshan, who spent six years in prison in Tehran for his political blog, provides a contemporary account of the political impact of these networks. His view of the internet, in the year 2015, is full of disappointment over the “loss of intellectual power and variety” and the untapped potential that the internet “could have for our plague-ridden times.” Derakhshan sees the problem specifically in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, which are driving the shift from meaningfulness to popularity, from complexity to short-windedness, and from text to image. On social networks, he argues, text is increasingly displaced by videos and pictures, and the decline of reading in favor of seeing and hearing ultimately represses listening as well: “I miss the time when people took the time to be confronted with differing opinions, and were ready to read more than 140 characters.”82
The fact that Facebook offers a platform for political contents along with everyday banalities does not disguise the fact that its technical and social dispositif, by encouraging less reflective forms of communication and a focus on everyday contents, stands opposed—in principle—to a culture of political discussion. In light of Nancy’s postpolitical model of community, this depoliticization should not be too quickly dismissed, however. Instead, we should think of it, initially, as Facebook’s actual political function—as a defense, in Nancy’s terms, against identification as foundational event. The question of “dis-membering” and “bleaching out,” which was posed in the context of social networks, should be answered in precisely this sense (of Nancy’s opposition to all forms of collective identity). There is no “spiritualization of personal memory images” taking place in the interest of creating a new relational framework; private memory is not being converted into communal memory. The accompanying lack of political, national, or cultural confession is a confession of a very particular kind, one as constitutive for Facebook society as, according to Nancy, the lack of individual immanence is for society as a whole. The value ascribed to this lack leads to the more profound problem of “identityless identities.” In the context of this discussion, two steps are required for this question. Thematically and historically, they take us back to the beginning of this chapter.
In his 1994 essay “Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age,” the American philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus described the internet as a place without values and meaningful communication. Dreyfus’s critique opens by referring to a text that recalls Schopenhauer’s remark about the “Babylonian confusion of tongues” among people who read too much: Sǿren Kierkegaard’s Two Ages: A Literary Review. In that book, which appeared in 1846, Kierkegaard mounted a critique of the disorientation and paralysis that he claimed afflicted individuals as a result of the overabundance of contradictory opinions and the effect of newspapers and cafés on the expanding public realm. As Dreyfus summarized, “Everything is equal in that nothing matters enough that one would be willing to die for it.” Like the daily press for Kierkegaard, for Dreyfus the internet, with its openness to multiple opinions and lack of accountability, is “the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment.” His final conclusion mobilizes three of the most important, sweeping judgments on the internet, calling it “unreal, lonely, and meaningless.”83
Ten years later, Evgeny Morozov reopened Dreyfus’s discussion with his book The Net Delusion, in a chapter called “Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism.” For Morozov, “slacktivism” —a net-cultural neologism formed from “slacker” and “activism” and carrying the same negative charge as armchair activism—symbolizes the form that modern political “engagement” has taken. A person retweets the link to an anticorporate video because she also hates big business; he posts the yellow umbrella as his profile picture to announce his sympathy with the Hong Kong umbrella movement; she joins an interest group for the defense of the environment because it is chic to belong to it; he signs an online petition or blocks the link to a video by Anonymous. Morozov’s critique has been challenged—even Facebook groups that a person joins for tactical reasons can awaken or sharpen political consciousness. But his complaint seems justified at least when “click activism”—to borrow another neologism—is used to justify a person’s inaction in reality.84
The reference to Kierkegaard, however, is problematic. Kierkegaard’s critique of the pluralism of opinions and his praise of unconditional engagement no longer seem appropriate in the era of ideology and language critiques. Would it really be desirable if a combination of distraction and consumerism were no longer able to mask the absence of meaning and if netsurfers were to seek refuge from the despair of meaninglessness in offers of supreme meanings and immovable ideologies—which, after all, are not offered only by Islamic fundamentalists? Or in new legitimating metanarratives that are again worth living for or, if necessary (as Kierkegaard says), dying for?85 Is it appropriate to accuse the current generation of students of “fuzzy-headed nonsense about tolerance” and “inability to take a position” and to demand that instead of an “undecided-optional ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ ” they adopt a clear “whoever is not with me is against me”?86 Can the identity crisis of the postmodern individual still (or once again) be solved using this sort of vocabulary? Naturally, what matters is why and under what circumstances a particular stance is called for. Who could take umbrage at an “unconditional commitment” to oppose poverty, disease, or environmental pollution? The unconditional stance becomes problematic, however, in the context of ideological belief and political consequences, when, as Adorno warns in his essay on commitment, the feeling of being on the right side too easily seems to justify injustice toward “others.”87
It is this danger of conviction that makes Nancy seek the foundation of a new community outside of a communal common ground, beyond shared (politically, religiously, or culturally determined) convictions, which always have the potential to divide the community. Only the void represented by the absence of such perspectives promises universal accessibility, for the absence of anything essential is also the absence of a boundary separating different essential forms of being. This, admittedly, is precisely the point where critics start to worry about Nancy’s “philosophism,” which seeks to grasp “being with” as such, beyond concrete politics and empirical sociology, and fails to account for the “we” of the hoped-for community in its concrete context. Nancy thinks “being with” primarily from the perspective of the “with,” even though the latter is subordinate to being: We are always already in concrete life situations, which tend to work against the “with” not only because in them it is always also a question of access to resources and power but also because we grow up as individuals rather than as singularities. The I’s of “being with” are no longer a tabula rasa; the void is lost as soon as it can be named, for with language, the world fills us, and it fills us within the forms and boundaries of this language. Nancy’s concept of community lacks a political theory of contention, to clear up all the differences and conflicts that work against formation of the desired community. The critique necessarily also applies to Facebook, which has been viewed here as the practice that corresponds to Nancy’s theory. The second part of our evaluation of the lack of political debate on Facebook takes us back to the critique of the narrative paradigm.88
The academic discourse on narration as an offer of meaning and of a home even in ethically problematic constellations finds, in light of the decline of narrativity at the end of the twentieth century, that humanity cannot get along without meaning-founding “cultural narratives” but, at the same time, that it should regard them with skepticism, as “cultural constructions.” What is called for is a type of narrative that is conscious of its ethical ambivalence, of having to serve as both a source of orientation and a blockade that keeps out alternative perspectives: “metanarrative reflections on the tension between the infinite complexity of experience and our necessarily selective narrative accounts.” What is called for are dialogical and self-critical “metanarratives,” under the sign of pluralistic interpretation. The goal is not the end of stories but the end of their innocence.89
This demand asks more than it admits, for it fails to discuss the extent to which narratives, if they are self-critical, are actually able to create meaning and identity. Is it still possible to believe, after Nathan’s critique of origins and his self-skepticism, that a person can feel “grounded” in this way? Won’t a person be more likely to hold on, like Dajah, to life in the sole possible truth? The demand for self-reflective metanarration leads logically to Vattimo’s concept of the “ ‘weakened’ experience of truth” and a hermeneutic model that includes an understanding from plural perspectives—an understanding like the one Vattimo develops, in the context of the postmodern critique of reason, with his concepts of “weak thinking” and the “nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics.”90 This thinking is “weak” because it also reflects on its cultural and social preconditions, which constitute humans as such, and because, based on this insight, it retains a solid skepticism toward itself. The proposed hermeneutics is “nihilistic” because it will accept no interpretation as the true one, from which any deviation would simply be an error. On this basis, every statement, every adherence to a position or profession of belief occurs under the sign of irony and relativity, with an ethical, highly political purpose: “Thinking that no longer understands itself as the recognition and acceptance of an objective authoritarian foundation will develop a new sense of responsibility as ready and able, literally, to respond to others whom, insofar as it is not founded on the sternal structure of Being, it knows to be its ‘provenance.’ ”91
Does Facebook, as a social network and as a company, practice this type of response, which would exemplify a new sense of responsibility? Does spontaneous, narration-free communication on Facebook provide a corrective to the strong, steadfast thinking promoted by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Fichte, and most likely also by contemporary critics of “slacktivism” and “fuzzy-headed nonsense about tolerance”? Does sharing, as the central rule of Facebook culture, founded on nothing but the desire to connect, encourage a feeling of “being-with” regardless of whether the participants share a common substance? How ethical can phatic communication be?
The problem is antecedent to the act of answering: Phatic communication has no time to listen. Its nature is to be ultimately disinterested in the person it confronts. Communication as “being-with” ultimately lacks “being with for Others,” as Martin Heidegger once defined hearing: as the “primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.” The pressure to “share” on Facebook—and this is true increasingly of Facebook society in general—values speaking over listening in a profoundly impatient, not infrequently self-infatuated way that usually prefers snippy comments to serious reactions. The mocking, ironic stance underlying phatic communication sabotages the philosophically grounded irony that results from the acknowledgment of alternate perspectives. Empathy, understanding, comparison—these are the tools of “weak thinking,” whose strength lies precisely in the turn toward the other. Vattimo speaks of the “liberation of local rationalities” as the insight that “in a world of dialects” my dialect “is not the only ‘language,’ but that it is precisely one amongst many.” The irony that springs from this acknowledgment knows whereof it speaks. This irony is not playful, ignorant, or mocking but serious and enlightened. It confronts the other not with indifference but with awareness of equal validity.92
When Mark Zuckerberg tirelessly refers to Facebook as “our community” and declares that its mission is to increase worldwide understanding, he is by no means talking about taking an ironic approach to narration and identity. Facebook pursues its mission of global embrace by screening out everything that separates people—above all political, ideological, or religious convictions and comments. Communication on Facebook operates in the phatic mode; it flows past as the kind of pleasant, information-free white noise that is where we have surmised the factual cosmopolitanism of Facebook society is to be found. To this we should add that while exchanging phatic communications may not mean that we are “learning” a system, it also does not mean that we are learning to disbelieve in any system. The next question is whether cosmopolitanism, as a conscious position that could be sustained even in changing social constellations, can be the “side effect” of an objective, more or less unconsciously or conceivably even intentionally imposed process of cosmopolitanization and thus enter through the “back door,” as it were.93
Without empirical data, skepticism is the recommended response. That factual “cosmopolitanism” on social networks does not promise or presage any long-lasting cosmopolitanization can be seen when the exchange of banalities is disrupted, now and again, by conflict between different political or religions viewpoints, and when the busy quiet of general indifference gives way to a usually completely unironic, often self-righteous, not infrequently aggressive style of discussion that occasionally escalates into a virtual lynching. Web 2.0 does not seem to cultivate acceptance of the Other in any confrontation, something that is hardly astonishing, given a culture of sharing and delegated enjoyment in which the model of reflective experience over time is replaced by a phatic model of short-term lived experience. Distanced, differentiated, self-critical discussion is the first victim of this shift. The question is not whether Zuckerberg the businessman believes in Facebook’s mission but whether Facebook’s technical and social dispositif is constructive. The doubts follow from the opportunism of phatic communication, which achieves the utopia of generalized understanding only by excluding everything that is in danger of drawing boundaries. The phatic element does not offer protection against the outbreak of new “truths” whenever the flight into hyperactive distraction—and happiness in the mode of consumer culture—no longer succeeds.
Basically, Facebook, with its affirmative like(able) culture, is a big feel-good party that can be compared to certain participatory art projects that, since the end of the twentieth century, have aimed to produce, on an aesthetic level, something social networks have been practicing on the cultural level since the beginning of the twenty-first. The critique that has been leveled at this form of “relational aesthetics” in the debate over art should be addressed to Facebook culture as well: The foundations of a democratic society are secured by reflection and cognition, not sensation and immersion. Even a deconstructive subjectivity must be construed with awareness of its context. How this happens concretely is a question that should be asked of Nancy’s concept of community, as well. A start, for social networks, could well be to stop misunderstanding the bond that is sought and experienced in these exchanges as the shared celebration of individual existence and instead see it as a reaction to a shared deficit, in each case, when it comes to the meaning—Nancy would say the “grounding”—of life and as an insistence on holding fast to this deficit as its actual sense.94