Modernity means a change in the gospels. The bad and the good news are no longer safely in their appointed places. Decorum is so shaky that the obedient and disobedient swap places. From now on we have to keep trying over and over again to work out what can be a model. Imitation seeps into all the cracks, over-attentive, on the track of other people’s success. The business supplement, the sports section, cultural pages, society news – these are the social guides to jealousy. Society is the sum of its competitions.
From Zarathustra’s landmark speech to his followers: Submit to tests! Set up your file. Collect evidence that makes it clear you had to exist. Position yourself, get started on your topic! Don’t forget to set up your sign because the power of positioning is all-important. Take part in the experiment that will show what goes and stops; admit that many things fail by their very nature! The world has become an experiment – anybody who has not tried will not have come into the world. There is only one mistake, that of remaining latent. In future, cleverness means resisting temptation by leaving no traces.
Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ is the verbal expression of the new state of the world. The command to experiment, like the law and love in earlier times, desires proclamation. We should not let it confuse us that in this case temptation is called creation. Tightrope walkers are also experimenters and creators of daring acts. They take part in the new move towards risk. Their fall is like a signature under a work and Zarathustra acknowledges them as colleagues. As the prophet says in his new blessings that proclaim the temptations:
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is loveable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.1
Modernity: that means feeling the pressure to choose between keeping oneself going in stationary relationships and improving through trying. There is only as much modernity as there is willingness to experiment more ambitiously to follow on from the accepted state of art up to the present. The search for the actors of modernity is the consummation of the modern age. This is another thing Nietzsche announced through his prophet. It is a provocation that divides those who make a gambit from those who want to hear nothing more about trying. When the prophet of the people of the future throws his phrase ‘the last human being’ into the crowd, he is challenging those who are not last to declare themselves. When the last human beings strike up with the phrase ‘After us, ourselves!’, then those who are not last gather under an irrational banner: ‘After us, the star!’
Modernity: that means that the chaos inside people can become scarce. It is a bizarre definition of chaos: as if it were not an event around us that we find ourselves in or stumble into, but rather an internal resource that could be described as not yet used up. Nietzsche was the first to conceive chaos as a remnant. He envisaged it as potential that could be exhausted. He saw it as a magnitude that demands us taking a position: chaos is the authority of the monstrosity which creates conflict for people who usually exist in an ordered and finite situation. Sublime chaos tears subjects open – provided they can realize that they have chaos in them. The monstrous is a self-relation that human beings express variously as guardians of order, sleepwalkers, players and artists. Anyone who takes the liberty of reminding other people of their relationship with the monstrous is identified as a new type of disturbing element. ‘I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.’ Who talks like that? A mad person who wants to convince other people to share his madness? A metaphysical griper in search of an audience? An unredeemed soul that draws fellow sufferers into its self-therapy?
Modernity: that means asking about the conditions of production. ‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.’ This is the true voice of recent aesthetics – at its clinical and romantic extreme. Production is still unerringly regarded as birth; chaos still has to serve as a uterus in which the work is formed silently and incredibly; Nietzsche is still acting the role of the gynaecologist-philosopher of the arts. His creative insult is aimed at the fertile and the infertile. Advised by the old nurse Baubo, he knows that the creative being is a woman who has reasons not to show her reasons. Chaos’s favourite son is not the devil of denial but the daredevil. He is the means by which as yet untried things take their place in the work. The aesthetics of genius, gynaecology and belief in mediums: they are all part of the same matrix.
Modernity: that means finding the rule by exception. What do you actually possess when you have chaos in yourself? A gas, a yawn, a gape, a shapeless mass, a dark emptiness. The idea that this is the birthplace of stars is a sad kind of physics. When Nietzsche makes his dancing star emerge from chaos, he is merely admitting that the most fragile person comes from crude parents. However, chaos only contains stars as a Dionysian element – by Dionysian, we mean torn and divided, angry at itself, condemned to self-duplication. Being capable of giving birth means needing a world of expression for suffering. What saves the turbulent foundation of life from itself? Only the ascent into a glorifying form. Productive chaos is nothing but the suffering, dreaming god. Aren’t most people behaving very rationally in refusing to hear about creative human beings? The Superman, the star, the yearning? These are words from a life that still needs such things. A person who is one of the inventors of happiness is beyond that.
Modernity: that means mistrusting the illusory images of communication. Zarathustra may well feel that his provocation has already failed before the first word. Nobody among those whose pride he addresses would be prepared to harbour what the speaker says is still there. Those who imagine themselves in terms of the monstrous can have no illusions about the outcome of the sermon. Zarathustra, who has neglected to mention the pride of the last human being, will ask himself whether it would not have been better to address their sensitive point. The art of how to talk to nobody has been tried and tested. Is Zarathustra himself too proud to make a second attempt, this time for everybody? I tell you: you still have otherness in you. You are still different from yourselves and still a hope for your own future. A little bit evil and a little bit untidy, a little bit unpredictable – that is capital composed of chances that can lead to further chances. But I can see the time coming, the time when nobody will have anything left in them that is evil, messy and unpredictable. When the starting chances are no longer distinguishable from the subsequent chances the era of emptied human beings will herald. They will make more than ever before but the history of creation will be over, and with it everything that presupposed a difference between the interior and the exterior. The history of improvements will reach its conclusion. Its continuation will happen without you in storage systems, networks and processors.
Modernity: that means that prophecies turn against themselves. The forecasts are vectors that ensure things happen differently. They regenerate chaos in internal and external settings. The refutations develop in situations where the end of creation out of the chaos-inside-you is expressed as an open possibility. Unexpectedly for the star abolitionists, the evidence for chaos will be provided as soon as the star appears.