If I had a salaried job, I would probably be into art as well. Department head at the radio and then poetry – that would be ideal.
Martin Walser, Die Gallistische Krankheit
The future of art1 – I would like to ask whether it is possible to consider a problematic heading like this seriously without fearing the worst for the person who has agreed to talk about it. Our first glance already tells us that the objectivity of this subject is such that it flees as soon as people start talking in the ‘talking about’ mode.
The future and art – two of the most explosive categories of the modern culture of reflection – are combined in an apparently harmless way. They are placed side by side like two boreholes in the intellectual consciousness or, if you like, two a priori defeats for the process of thinking about and talking about. Art: talking properly about art and to art and from inside art would require developing an adequate aesthetics of modernity, perhaps even an anthropologically based aesthetics, or resolving all aesthetics into a discipline of mental wakefulness concerned with perception and expressive emotions. And all this – as we have known for ages – is scarcely to be hoped for, as has been the case since well before Adorno’s death, and is too difficult for people living at present.
The future: this category entangles us in the paradoxes of the philosophy of space and time, which explains the presiding concept of the future as something unfathomable – it shows us how our intelligence will inevitably get lost in the depths of the temporalization of time if we spend too long now on the nothingness that is supposed to become temporalized as the something of a later moment. I think it is not exaggerating to say that the category ‘the future’ is totally overloaded. People nowadays talk about the future of art. I can tell you right away that this will end in melancholy. One should not judge such melancholy, of course: it has its merits; it is what creates space for doubts in us – it is, in fact, the aura of the defiant consciousness that might become entrenched in the statutes of a venerable academy. I would even go as far as to ask: what is an academy aside from institutionalized melancholy about the fact that art is long and life is short and we can neither solve crucial problems nor forget them?
Aside from the academic defiance shrouded in the elegant nimbus of well-established futility, modern reflection basically consists of two strategies to reduce anything that is too difficult to the format of the individual ability to think. Both of these strategies are clumsy. The first is to stab the problem in the back with critical ideology to deny its claim to its own kind of objectivity. The second is to blow the problem’s cover with the experimental methods of Gay Science, contravening the laws of academic gravity, to prevent it from becoming established as a serious solution. The seriousness of such Gay Science consists in turning its back on solutions per se because it is important not to solve the problem but to show that every solution becomes an accomplice of the problem.
Let us start by looking at the critical ideology process, which means critical rebellion against the objectivity of the object. A question about the questioner is used to expose the naked truth of what is being asked and to prove that it is trivial. What lies behind the question about the end or the future of art? Who is the person who wants to know what the future of art will be? Who must have which intention when he offers to extrapolate his future from his present situation today? Who is sitting so comfortably in the present that he only has to slide down the slope of his expectations to land up in his future seat? Critique of the interest that motivates the question about the future inevitably comes up against how the intellectual and material rights and power relations of our society are currently constituted. Critique of ideology is crime studies in reverse: in this case we do not deduce the criminal from the evidence of a crime but deduce the probability of a crime from the perpetrator, or start from a beautiful phrase to deduce the ugliness of the person who needs to utter the phrase.
As always in strategic thinking, the perpetrator is already known from the start because he can never be anybody but the person who gives his name to existing ideological and economic relationships – which are described today as neo-conservatism. His pictures were displayed on all the hoardings in the republic in the past year, but instead of being apprehended he was elected and delegated to take care of the future, if not of art then of public finances – which is, perhaps, also a kind of art but does not belong to Aristotle’s Categories.
Critique of ideology has a sharp ear – as sharp as the hearing of a semantics expert on the academic battlefront. The future of art – for someone determined to hear things that way, it is, of course, a neo-conservative option, a rejection of the ‘no future’ people in the squatters’ camps of West Berlin, a topic that the Bavarian Superior Court of Audit can consider as a valid reason for public expenditure, a subject with a positive and symbolic psycho-political effect that fits the times like a means to create trust in the plans for the apocalypse which will result from the spirit of goodwill. But concepts can lose their innocence; after the bankruptcy of social movements, media moguls can purchase complete terminologies on the cheap; entire systems of semantics can change owners. And if we are not deceived, the New Right has bought into the principle of hope and is donating free fatherland T-shirts to the nation’s voters, along with optimism badges, little boom flags, hope stickers and future ball pens. Wherever neo-conservative orders of the day are presented to a public that we can assume to be looking for meaning, and wherever the task is to produce the desired atmosphere of business as usual, people talk warmly about the future; for in a world that is already feeling the threat of collapse, the ‘future’ is the ideal word to hold on to. Even on the lips of those suspected of being the gravediggers of any kind of future, it is a symbol of the most fundamental human rights, the symbol of the right to life in a bearable present – bearable because such a present can keep on believing that it does not have to doubt the content of the future from the very start.
So much for critical ideology’s attempt to avoid the objectivity of the object by proposing a prior vote of no confidence in it to stop it from evolving. However plausible this manoeuvre may seem, if it succeeds, people will soon develop an aversion to quick victories of critique over the object of criticism. Moreover, critique, in turn, rapidly falls victim to a new critique because in principle the spiral of distancing and denial can rotate infinitely – until critique finally settles down comfortably to being in the same state of misery as those it criticizes.
If the enterprise does not fail early on and if the object itself begins to speak, the only thing left at present is to follow the path of the essay. The essay is a sort of good-natured uncle of criticism as an ideology, akin to this criticism in its undogmatic spirit but different from it in being willing to approach things in a non-destructive form, or, even better, to let things happen on their own. Count Hermann Keyserling once said that the shortest path to one’s self leads around the world. We could adapt this to say that the shortest path to an answer to the question of the future is a digression that allows us to approach it from a great distance. In this case, too, the essay is the right basis if we can agree that ‘essay’ is a codename for sophisticated thematic transgressions. This is what I shall present to you in the form of three pertinent digressions from the subject. I will begin by briefly outlining them.
The first digression will explore the horizon of our relationship with the future. I shall begin by testing the market, or by a rhetorical investment consultation on the question of whether the ‘future of art’ as such is a secure investment topic. Do we have enough future that we can afford to worry about the future of art? Aren’t discussions about postmodernism and Young Wild Ones, about neo-populism and the aesthetics of uninhibitedness, about spraycan publicity and new sacredness, about the female way of writing and irony in post-history at risk of scaring audiences away because of certain irregularities in the coming of the future? This means I shall talk in the first place not about the future of art but about the future of the future, or, if you really insist, about the art of still having a future nowadays.
On this occasion I shall mention three aspects of our future future. More precisely, I will talk about a threefold erosion of today’s relationship to the future. I do not mean the doubts about progress that emerged a hundred years ago. Any further comment on that topic would mean bringing the middle-class concept of education into the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Excuse me, please, we are not promoting aestheticism here but exploring reality. Anyone who wants cultural critique can buy it at bookshops. We are not discussing the fear of social decline among the highly privileged. We are far more interested in the ideological and economic implications of the worldwide credit system that is the foundation of the material relationship that we all have to the future. I would like to remind you of the fact we have all repressed that nearly everything that happens today in the economic and political system occurs on the basis of loans, in several senses. For every car, on average three of the wheels roll on credit. For every newly built house, at most one in five roof tiles belongs to the so-called owner. Everything you can see of a building above the earth is a feat of refinancing acrobatics floating on an invisible cloud of hypothetical finances. Purchases and sales have long since been conducted in the unreal spaces of a ‘what-if’ economy. The public budgets of the Western hemisphere have such huge debts that if anyone were to try out the crazy idea of living from what ‘is really available’ at a particular moment, the coming generations would have to dedicate everything to balancing accounts.
Most ‘Third World’ countries, and some of the ‘Second World’ as well, have contracted loans from the economic powers of the ‘First World’ that span across generations and will last for a whole era, with the result that if those countries were mad enough to be realistic, they would have to adjust to spending the third millennium paying off their debts, at best by developing a national computer industry for calculating the interest. Beyond the private and institutional levels of debt, however, the core of the modern time machine, the international industrial system as such, is emerging as the bravest debtor of all, dynamically raising the debt levels on what it borrows from natural resources and on its balance sheet to irretrievable levels. As far as future debt commitments are concerned, there are no riddles or surprises – it just looks like a freeway into the void. The routes into the linear future are clearly signposted. Tomorrow was already over-built yesterday, like Germany’s autobahn network. We have invested our karma in the bank and the fate of our children’s children in the movement of compound interest. This future has the structure of a computer printout on which the repayment instalments of a surrealistic mortgage rise to incalculable sums. Social psychologists have statistically proved that ever since the older generation has realized what the younger generation is facing, even death has lost its terror for them.
In this world, this side of the boundary of any metaphysics of fate, we are living in a situation of irredeemable debt that entangles us like the equivalent of fate in the industrial age, or, rather, like a predestination surrogate for human beings who once appreciated seeing their history as self-made. Given these levels of debt, every responsible person behaves as if he or she were obeying the categorical imperative of a Kantian enlightened by the stock exchange report: act according to the maxim whereby the extent of your borrowing could become the principle for a general doomsday law at any time.
The death wish of borrowers who are so deeply in debt that hopelessness reverts into a joke leads to a second aspect of the future of the future, which I shall talk about at the appropriate point later – an aspect that reveals the existential attitudes of important creative groups in society and how they feel about life, which allows us indirectly to draw conclusions about the future of the future. I shall speak about a kind of blockade of the future that can be seen everywhere nowadays in discothèques, in the serious art business and in philosophical seminars as well as in the shopping precincts of the West. A new phenomenon that we could describe as an anti-dialectical mannerism of affirmation has taken over; a new, defiant colourfulness with a negative attitude to the future, a hopeless, because simulated, mood of ‘here-and-now’ is accompanied by flickering distraction and surrounded by a sense of ice-cold excessiveness. Cross-country vehicles drive wildly through inner cities; anyone who wants to make a name as a cultural theoretician only has to claim that the return of suspender belts signals the resurrection of eroticism (and Der Spiegel magazine will print it).
I call the entire complex of these phenomena the left-wing Dionysian syndrome. You could also call it nuclear Biedermeier or the age of fishermen’s choirs or the third Neo-Romanticism or Californian Late Antiquity or the electronic post-March era2 or the resurrection of ornamentation. It doesn’t matter what you call it because they are all labels for the same ghostly experience, a truly nauseating experience: namely, that our late capitalist normal time has shattered into a thousand pieces, that the world clocks of capitalist and socialist philosophers of history have gone completely wrong, giving everybody the hazardous freedom of being able to say what time it is for him or her. In an era like the present one, in which normal clocks melt and digital clocks keep on counting meaninglessly, we may suddenly realize that we are beginning to hear the drums of an internal Stone Age once more; that shamans appear in the pedestrian precinct; that snake power rises from the pelvic base and dances along our spine up to the thousand-leaved lotus under our cranial vault, and that after we have come down again from our high we can publish our Collected Wild Experiences with the publisher Matthes und Seitz.3
A third aspect that the future of the future shows us is a reflex reaction to the effects of the loss of monochrome illusions, the effects of the explosions of imaginary shared moments in time. Simultaneity no longer exists and Bloch’s construct of a simultaneity of non-simultaneous moments is futile appeasement in the face of the apocalyptic unfettering of the calendar. If it is really the case that each person nowadays claims individual status and withdraws into his or her endogenous growth period; that each culture publishes its own special calendar; that all militant groups rewrite world history for themselves and with reference to themselves; that every branch runs into other branches of social evolution; that the directors of every multinational corporation write their own screenplays to push through their options for the world history that is yet to be made – if all this is true, then it raises the inevitable question of where the people who are alive at the same moment today should look for the lowest common denominator for their contemporaneity. If they look, where will they find the connecting element between their paths in time, which follow different curves? Where should they find the principle that could provide minimal synchronization for all the worlds of time that have flown apart? I think this touches on one of the secret topics that are responsible for the present-day boom in catastrophe theories and philosophies of transitional periods. Anyone who, despite everything, wants to go for the jackpot – in relation to philosophy, diagnosis of our times, or social reform – needs a concept for a synchronicity that runs through all of life today, which means a concept for a time quality and particular flavour of the present moment in the context of universal history. How else can we achieve such an all-embracing synchronicity except with the thesis that we are all in the same temporal boat, that we all constitute a risk society defined by the philosophy of history – for better or worse – as a mutually supportive collective of cosmopolitan citizens in the transitional period, or as agents of an Aquarian conspiracy, or as an apocalyptic alliance of unexploded evolutionary bombs?
Such pathos-laden synchronization of everyone with everyone will naturally create a new asynchronicity, specifically between human beings who think they are living right now in the lofty super-age of the history of philosophy and others who reject the principle of solidarity with humankind in the form of a collective of the transitional period or an apocalyptic community and prefer to live watchfully on their patch and to await, with what Siegfried Kracauer described as ‘hesitant openness’, their fate.
It is probably symptomatic, and diagnostically significant for intellectuals, that some of the most sensitive present-day thinkers (such as Rutschky and Kamper) have recently reconsidered the experience of waiting as an intellectually honest form of existential cleverness (similarly to the ideas in Kracauer’s essay ‘Those Who Wait’, written during the early Weimar Republic).4 This waiting retreat from great history is an attitude which seems to me to be born of an experienced and straightforward subjectivity that is both in tune with the times and desolate – a subjectivity that derives its balance from a modernization process that ends, at best, in courageous scepticism.
We are now in a position to make some statements about the future of art. The art of the future will, of course, reflect the present worlds of its respective subcultures. On the one hand that means it will be an art for those who wait, for latently depressed but relatively robust individuals – in obsolete terminology they are called ‘adults’: in other words, people who do not want to travel under the big black sail of the new philosophy of history. Consequently it will be an art that is not in an apocalyptic hurry and can afford time for enlightened hesitancy; an art that will let the breath of tradition through – or, rather, the two traditions, the classical and the modern, for by now both of them have absorbed the postmodernist lesson that there are just not enough traditions to satisfy our need for permanent breaks with tradition. It will therefore be an educated but hypocritical and arbitrary type of art based on the neo-bourgeois comfort of a risk-free revolution against defenceless pasts. On the other hand it will be an art that belongs in one of the many regional and individual problem calendars, catastrophe timetables or New Age designs; the art of impatience and of immediate enjoyment, an art of ‘not knowing how to go on’ and of absolute reduction, an apocalyptic art of redemption or one that wants to begin arbitrarily in a new place somewhere; a do-it-yourself art for enthusiasts and model makers who start at random and play with materials and influences, reluctant to make associations, overwhelmingly neonaïve, bravely decoupled from the weighty heritage of what has already existed and what is overabundant; and, of course, an art that will lay beauty on so thick that the critical ego has no choice but to escape into cynicism: smashed-up humankind seems preferable to cafés for drug addicts.
So much for the first digression. I shall return later to what I have just outlined. In the second digression that I shall now sketch out I shall stress the sceptical attitude towards art even more by approaching the question of the future of art from a prosaic perspective – tackling the present interior minister’s question of what the purpose of art is anyway. In this section I shall make it clear that I approach the material – in Hegelian terms – from the standpoint of philosophy, meaning from the site of external reflection, or, to put it less elegantly, from the low-brow angle. Let me briefly remind you of the definition of ‘low-brow’. It describes someone who just wants to know how a thing works without really getting involved in the issue of what it is for, how much it costs, whether the Russians are behind it, and, most of all, what one could do instead. Seen from the radicalized low-brow position – or, we might just as well say, from the functionalist perspective –, the outcome for the phenomenon of art in the modern age is unclear. I will proceed as if this unclear situation had two sides that can be represented as ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’.
It follows that art belongs, on the one hand, to the compensatory social system. It has a symbolic role in collecting the human needs that are not satisfied by conflicts of political interest, either in the work sphere or in conventional communication in society or the family. Whereas classical aesthetics says that in the world of aesthetic illusion, conflicts between the individual and society that are irreconcilable in reality can appear to be resolved, functional analysis recognizes the phenomenon of ‘art’ as a subsystem in a network of therapeutic and compensatory institutions that run like veins through social life and help to regulate its chronic tensions. In this interpretation the arts as a whole would be something like an immune system that society concedes to individuals. It is a system that makes individuals less sensitive to indigestible realities and allows them expressive detoxification for frustrated yearnings and insults they have suffered. It follows that nothing can be better for social conservation than art, whether critical or beautiful, if art is rightly seen as a refuge for homeless dissatisfaction, as a poetic institute for needs or as a padded cell for prophylactic revolution – in short, as a kind of cleansing purgative in the frustration economy of a highly complex social order that inexorably forces people into denial.
This is where ‘on the other hand’ becomes relevant. The phenomenon of art starts developing a utopian and anthropological potential. In terms of the compensation theory I have just outlined it contains a mysterious kind of dysfunctionality. Anyone who has felt attracted to modern fine arts must know that the mood inside the aesthetic cyclone is not about satisfying the residual needs of modern human beings. What characterizes the self-interpretation and ‘pathos of truth’5 of the modern arts is that they are often presented to society as having authority over the most important issues of human development. We are not talking about the therapeutic use of leftovers, or about fictional compensation or fantastic vicarious satisfaction under normally adverse circumstances. This is not the place for bandaging the middle-class soul; rather, we enter aesthetic space as a protected reservation for the authentic, as a workshop of emancipation where human beings want to become what they really are. It is the place not where dressings are changed but where standards are set; it is the place not for letting out pent-up feelings but for defending a plateau of human ability to exist. It is a matter not of other-directed regeneration but of autonomous creation. Life forces are not neutralized here as they are in the sphere of consumption, nor destructively united and mobilized as in fascist ideologies, but productively applied with creative caution in the public arena.
In this context it is easy to show why major art in the modern age is so often associated with an aesthetic of rawness, rejection and negativity. For great art in an age of devastation cannot simultaneously believe in itself and in the applause of a crowd that obviously acts as an agent of devastation. It cannot seek agreement with people who agree with the embodiment of the horrors that define everyday life in modern times. The irreconcilable nature of important works of modern art results from the utopian anthropology of artists rebelling against the realistic anthropology of positive sociologists with their cynical doctrine of compensation. What is being demanded here is nothing less than a new world constitution, because for the feelings of great artists (and for any kind of positively childish human beings), the only truly bearable world would be a world that does not need further false beautification or aesthetic compensators, not to mention illustrious deniers and negation elites. Instead, people are demanding a world in which the most temperamental aesthete could come home like a returning exile to a liberated country to create things there in beauty without lies and legitimately to compose harmonious songs – in a spirit of second innocence and unforced reconciliation.
For this reason a major part of important modern art is art of the unhappy conscious mind, and rightly so. But the art of negativity is a kind of art that intrinsically wants to end. It must ultimately have the will to negate itself and make itself superfluous; for everything that is only a response to pain and transgression is encapsulated by the very apt Mephistophelian dictum that it would be better if nothing had been created.
If we inquire about the future of art from this perspective, we are also asking about the future of painful things in society. The answer comes from the social relations of suffering and conflict themselves. I can imagine that the future of social life as a whole will be increasingly dependent on the development of therapeutic and compensatory enclaves and islands of living warmth – structures that modern jargon describes as alternative lifestyles. The further the crisis of the industrial society of work and armaments advances, the more clearly we can see the profound depth of the alliance between the modern tendencies of aesthetic and therapeutic practice. (Let me remind you of Odo Marquard’s famous essay that illuminated this constellation of art and healing arts in terms of the history of philosophy.6 In fact, I could often cite Marquard’s theses in this lecture and generally agree with them.)
It is not exaggerating to say that this alliance of art, medicine and the art of living determines one kind of future of Western societies. After all, today we are witnessing a process by which wage labour is rapidly dismantling social synthesis, with the result that the old clamps that held together a large-scale society regulated by the work ethic are losing their hold in increasingly dramatic ways. In the face of such tendencies – leaving aside the defensive delaying tactics of labour unions – I believe that only the alternative productive forces of aesthetics and therapeutic methods, of neo-kynical7 arts of living and non-escapist groups with new religions, will be capable of developing bearable lifestyles for the new majorities that will soon pitch their tents at the gates of the traditional world of work. It is the challenge of aesthetic-therapeutic-ecological forces and new religious forces to foster a process of cultural life outside the establishment, and if this fails one doesn’t have to be a prophet to foresee an era of post-historical brutality and barbarization.
Subcultures that still have some idea about the essential relation between beauties and freedoms also have to question whether future society will move towards an anaesthetized and wired police state that has to achieve social synthesis using the most modern means of violence to control a nation of isolated asocial people, or whether it will succeed in proving how desirable and achievable a polycentric, aesthetically wakeful society can be – a society that will not find any contradictions between universalism and particularism practised under the banner of the ethics of unarmed neighbourliness.
Hopefully I will not irritate you if I move on from this outline of the second digression from the topic to the announcement of an internal digression that at least has the virtue of referring to the title of the present essay. ‘Good-for-Nothing returns home’ – what can that mean in this context? To begin with, the figure of the good-for-nothing is ideal for illustrating the two sides of the ambivalent theory of art I have just outlined. At first glance, Good-for-Nothing, the jobless offspring of German Romanticism, seems like the compensatory figure for bourgeois dissatisfaction as such. He was the comic vagabond person of the late pre-industrial age, a fantastical globetrotter whom benign fate sent for a rest cure in the south. For the bourgeois soul in the age of the first factories and industrial class struggle, his adventures were like a relaxing dreamlike voyage in beautiful foreign parts to repair the damage caused by indigenous banality and to recover from bourgeois frost in the balmy nights of an Italian summer when the post-horns sound in the distance, the scent of lilacs wafts on the breeze, girls burst out in sudden laughter full of promise, and skirts rustle in the gardens.
Good-for-Nothing is called by that name because he emerged from the relations of production like a sleepwalker; because he does not perform wage labour or create surplus value. He is happy because still he has no idea that those who stayed at home, deeply discontented, would end up someday claiming even his talent for dreaming as a force of social production. Good-for-Nothing, the evasive genius, represents the modern escapism of art in its most successful version. It is the perfect compensatory model for the inmates of institutions with mostly sedentary jobs.
At the same time, as we know, this is not the whole story. If Good-for-Nothing still bewitches us today, it is not just because he represents a construct of sublime poetry, however much Eichendorff’s art of storytelling may move us,8 but rather because everybody who encounters the poetic Good-for-Nothing has to remember that he or she has already seen this figure in reality somewhere at the margins of society, passing by almost invisibly, usually with harsher contours and much darker shadows than in vagabond poetry.
And yet, ever since middle-class society has existed, the domesticated imagination has wrestled with dubious marginal figures who are suspected of having escaped from the network of social pressures to live a life entirely based on whim and wilfulness, on quick wits, wanderlust and mobility – people who know the extremities of human existence and are not affected by the dullness of bourgeois society’s middle layers. At every point where the civilizatory process became more firmly established, Good-for-Nothing appeared, or, rather, disappeared, in new modernized metamorphoses, and it is no exaggeration to say that we can identify the emergence of new stages of socialization when a certain type of person goes underground – the type who is later invested with the Good-for-Nothing fantasies of those left behind. A figure that is a mixture of refusenik and fortune’s pet, Good-for-Nothing became a symbol of the most charming possibilities of existence in a very flawed form of modernity.
If I say now that Good-for-Nothing returns home, there is something surprising about this statement – surprising in a way that arouses deep suspicion. For it cannot imply that the world has reached its moral peak in recent years so that the last aestheticizing troublemaker is able to return to a generally mild state of reality where people can speak without lying and participate without cynicism. ‘Good-for-Nothing returns home’ can only mean that something extremely uncanny and strange is disrupting the world’s structure with unforeseen dislocations; that the old lines of demarcation between the pressure of the daily routine and the dream of liberation are beginning to dissolve; that an unknown form of communication has begun between outside and inside. When Good-for-Nothing returns home ... , well, what then? Do we have to leaf through the prophecies of Nostradamus to know that at the time of the return of an artistic gypsy with unusual blue eyes a difficult world is lurching along at the edge of the abyss? Oh dear, these are bad times for prophets when environmental reports and strategic studies predict more disaster than the blackest book of oracles. When Good-for-Nothing returns home; when the romantic man of absence suddenly seems to have been brought to reason; when the boundaries are blurred between dream time and productive time; when former dreamers become realists and realists discuss variations of the apocalypse, then it is time to accept that this is a sign not of an arbitrary and transient episode in the modern cultural whirl but that an unconceived event is brewing and trying to surface as a concept.
Allow me to indulge in an additional digression in telling you that I am about to launch into an internal digression within the announcement of the second digression from the topic. I want to use a different argument now for the high symptomatic status I am giving to the return of Good-for-Nothing: I shall use the philosophy of history like a lantern to light up the position of Good-for-Nothing in modern times. In the past two hundred years, the figure of Good-for-Nothing has been indispensable for making the life of the bourgeois hero bearable. This can partly be explained by the fact that he acted as a fantasy figure to relieve the stressful everyday life of progress. Indeed, he was better than most other figures in providing alibis for people who were tired of society because he personally incarnated the alibi of the modern age. I shall explain this in more detail by reading out the profile of this bourgeois deserter. Good-for-Nothing was definitely a deserter – a deserter from the unreasonable demands of the bourgeois-social revolution, a useless runaway from the Jacobin hypermoralism of absolute subjectivity and from the principled outrage against everything that simply exists without us having improved it. Good-for-Nothing, the eternal deserter, was chronically indisposed when it came to working on the Creation that needed correction and eliminating the printing errors of an old-fashioned God. Since time immemorial he was overcome with nostalgic nausea at the prospect of having to work on the industrial overhauling of the world. He was the left-handed rascal of art, drunk on life, who never got up before noon; the first integral tourist, the German cousin of the bastardo nobile who is still up to his tricks today, glittering in southern kynicism; the absolute escapist, blown away like the status quo’s last sigh. His goal is the blue flower of the Romantics; his time: blue Monday, washing day; his space: wherever there is more blue sky than clouds; his strange habit: the complex about the south; his passion: crossing borders; his borders: the constant pull between wanderlust and homesickness; his favourite idea: both for and against; his motto: hen kai panta, which means, philologically, one-and-all. But there must have been more to it. Good-for-Nothing spent the industrial age in an exotic backwater. He took the liberty of staying far away from the modernization massacres of two centuries. In emergencies he obtained sick leave from the bloody and imposing workplace of history. In short, he was the bourgeois son with the most solid alibi; he was the person who could not have been the culprit because he was never at the scene of the crime but always in lovely spots where the only crimes committed were acts of omission.
When the survivors in the years of the French terreur saw the dark side of modernism emerge for the first time and demonstrate how political murder can become systematized, Good-for-Nothing was already in the deep south and sighing on the track of his dark Annadiva. When the survivors were fighting each other in two world wars, Good-for-Nothing was roaming through Ticino, wild and lonesome, or walking beside Alexis Zorba across the Cretan hills, or sitting on the sacred mountain Arunachala at the foot of the enlightened Bhagwan Shri Ramana Maharshi, immersed in the experience of ahamspûrti, the vision of the true self. While clouds of terrible smoke billowed in the sky above Auschwitz and showed those who were still there something unimaginable that they had witnessed all the same, Good-for-Nothing was living in retreat in a Japanese monastery or writing a novel in Californian exile about the musical and moral depths of the German soul.
Good-for-Nothing is plainly one of the few people who was not guilty and did not fall under suspicion because he never seemed to have the slightest connection with the catastrophe in his home country.
It is odd, however, that his alibis were usually accepted by all sides without envy and nobody dreamed of seriously challenging them. For everyone is dimly aware that this refugee is absolutely indispensable – indispensable because one can borrow something from him that money cannot buy otherwise. I mean the feeling of being not guilty, despite everything, in the same way as the person who is present; the feeling of being allowed to carry on, despite everything, in a manner basically not permitted, not even once, to people who were there at the time. It is a borrowed feeling, since nowadays even innocence seems to be available for loan, and one will have to give it back someday, as each of us knows deep down. All the same, we could not continue living without the moral loan from the imaginary deserter; we would actually be swamped by our complicity. The distinction of Good-for-Nothing’s absence has illuminated the dubious relationships that those left behind never escape from and has reminded us of the possibility of another kind of innocence. The only authority that can promise the people of the age of world wars this innocence is a futurology based on aesthetics and morality. The perfect absence of what the collective dream took along to its faraway place created a vacuum in which all the restless dreams of alternatives and changing could develop under modern auspices.
Good-for-Nothing’s metaphysical mission was to symbolize the great Other of modernity that inspires all kinds of change. We inevitably conceive the Other as ontologically absent and in the future tense. Expressing this touches on the logical nucleus of the madness that is emerging more clearly day by day as the cell of the prevailing reality principle. It is just as controversial as the European structure of alienation generally because the futurist projection of the better Other describes how selfhood and otherness are linked up to ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’ to become the logical pattern of permanent alienation and transgression against the self in our times.
Nobody can claim, of course, that it is easy to leap out of this logic of postponed otherness. The whole lightness of being of a Good-for-Nothing involves staying at the level of merely imagining his or her life and ideas being transformed into radical categories of here-and-now. This lightness is held in check by the gravity of circumstances and by the serious principle that cloaks the madness at the core of reality with an aura of reason and goodwill. Because improvement does not recognize the present, people who live in the mania of transformation have lost any criteria for knowing what it means to have done enough. We have forgotten that the purpose of all action is not to have to do anything more. But what do today’s agents of the world of labour and armaments base their ideas on, if not the otherness and superiority of future securities and enjoyment? Isn’t every agent of the system and every system of action hopelessly indebted now to the hope of something better? What exists today is legitimated not by existence but by its prospects, not by privileges but by promises to do better, and not by abundance but by increase. Everywhere that the industrial time machine has been installed in modern consciousness, life becomes distorted into rushing forward into a different entity that always forces itself on us as more of the self we are missing and an intensification of what things were like yesterday. Wherever the industry of the age of improvement has begun to dominate, life has turned into hectic borrowing on the future so that today’s lack of verve and frivolity with its peaks and troughs is overwritten with cumbersome, dead certain dreams of improvement.
Perhaps this underlines how shocking that little phrase is: ‘Good-for-Nothing returns home’. After all his escapades he has had second thoughts. He has realized that he has served out his time as an alibi creator, a lender of innocence and a total imaginary escapist. Good-for-Nothing, whose profession was to cross the boundaries into the other world and explore beautiful faraway places, has set out on his last journey. By now he knows that banality cannot be shaken off and that ‘background’ means a ‘future’ that cannot be dismissed merely by acting out one’s desire for otherness. The projections in space and time have collapsed and experience has ground down the illusions of tourism and futurism. The principle of hope has turned out to be a useless stopgap.
In the meantime Good-for-Nothing was everywhere, just not here. Now, however, he is here and everything becomes mildly chaotic. Old inhabitants rush towards the newcomer: ‘For God’s sake, didn’t you have a good time in those faraway places? After all, everything was different there and it was the difference that interested you. And now you are back here we beg you to tell us what you want to do differently here.’
I assure you, questions like these will largely dominate the social debates of the future and the ensuing arguments will be all the more provocative, not only because Good-for-Nothing has no idea how to answer, but also because the people who stayed behind are not aware yet that they have risked their necks with this question.
After a long absence Good-for-Nothing is still not very talkative and certainly not at his rhetorical best. He talks hurriedly about unilateral disarmament and filters in factory chimneys. Now and then he even uses the word ‘totality’, which is terribly embarrassing. He gives the impression of not telling everything yet, whether or not he is willing or able to. But even if he has difficulty with the rhetoric, he is obviously on the ball with a naïve kind of panache. As if accidentally, Good-for-Nothing jumps the five per cent barrier9 and can paraphrase Lord Byron’s remark that ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’ by saying ‘I awoke one morning and found myself ready for a coalition.’
The future will show whether this kind of homecoming was an end to aesthetics in every respect. From today’s perspective, however, Good-for-Nothing seems incredibly busy, which is probably not very lucrative in terms of the superior art business but does offer the beauty of energetic naïvety. He opens vegetarian restaurants, boutiques, hotels, studios and travel agencies; he sets up countryside communes, health food shops, research institutes, discothèques, meditation centres, therapy practices and other repair businesses; he disrupts church conventions and parliaments and concentrates on everything he does as if he had enough energy to breathe some pleasure in existence into a world that has become tired of life.
Good-for-Nothing has not realized yet that his return means something more and bigger than cocky children of the bourgeoisie coming to their senses. He is only dimly aware that if he just sits down among us like that in his harmless manner he is endangering a kind of metaphysics; he is corrupting Western logic and ethics; he is plunging the world calendar into even more date crises and threatening the history timetables of already nervous imperialist systems.
Can’t he see what he is doing when he moves the outermost extreme into the interior, when he filters the utopian foreign future into an indigenous present and, utterly seriously, retrieves otherness from its temporal exile in the chronological tomorrow and brings it back into the here and now? Everybody has secretly wished that this annoying returnee would go to the devil at some time or another. There is, however, nowhere left for the devil to dispatch him, for the separation that logicians and Doctors of the Church negotiated between heaven and hell has been abolished. It is possible to prevent shocking mixtures of red, green and black, but whatever is mixed together, a little bit of blue will float over the whole thing, the blue of a sky that is often cloudy but is the sky of home.
Well, here is Good-for-Nothing sitting among us and grinning with this slightly idiotic, over-friendly grin and smiling this dubious smile devoid of strategy and tactics. This dear human being who has been cast adrift, with whom nobody can be angry – if only he hadn’t returned the mission for the future to its sender and made us feel like strangers in our own homes. Suddenly we feel condemned to actuality; it feels like a reformed prison. The alibi of improvement has collapsed, the objections to change have been resolved: we are facing the decisive moment like convicted loan swindlers and are not prepared for most of its reclamations.
By now I think it must be clear why I did not want to discuss the future of art in the first digression but the future of the future instead, and before I come to that I want to indicate briefly what I shall say in the third digression from the subject of art.
It will be confined to a short reflection that uses a radical turn in thinking to revitalize the risk that was once called philosophy. In this third digression I use meditational philosophy to attempt to interpret the essence of an existentially significant experience of art – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I am assuming, incidentally, that it is already absolutely indispensable now to have a kind of art whose future form I can describe – but indispensable in a way that is not affected by Hegel’s thesis about the end of art. Conversely, I assume that a kind of art which can prove its indispensability will provide for itself in its own time and defy any kind of expectation. In fact, it will clearly show that essential experience of art can only be gained by rejecting conscious expectations.
Finally, it remains to be asked why aesthetic experience through art is sometimes indispensable. The answer is so elementary and the aspiration of this elementary quality is so radical that neither the answer nor the aspiration can be formulated philosophically, because philosophical thought is not elementary enough or radical enough for this answer. It can only be formulated with the additional qualification that the formulation will destroy and distort its object. There is no alternative, and the mistake that will become clear here is a mistake it is impossible to avoid making. The reason lies in the nature of the thing itself because being mentally awake inherently means being able to withdraw from the idea as it is being formulated – with the result that, at most, all that remains of the mental awareness in the formulation is a remnant like a shed skin which indicates that we would have found quick thinking here yesterday if we had happened to be here but now we have to be content with its traces, with the present signs of an absent person.
Having said that, we are in a position to answer the question of indispensable things in the arts. Art can prove its indispensability (even, and especially, after Hegel) if and because, in the midst of the modern culture of reason and will, it embodies the most important and best-legitimated approach to the dimension of mental alertness. From the arts it is a short stretch to what philosophical jargon calls ‘decentred consciousness’, meaning the form of consciousness in which the self surrenders the strategic centre of being-in-the-world in favour of a state of belonging without a central focus. It is the state of being of meditation – if we can quickly agree not to use the name of meditation for the state in which some people sit half-asleep in a holy stupor with their legs crossed, only to lose the last link with reality. Instead, the concept of meditation should stand for those forms of practice that can help to dissolve the illusion of the psychic central perspective and the focus on a strategic self.
In my opinion, the arts have represented the most important complex of quasi-meditative exercise systems in the modern tradition. They have created, as it were, a school of Western sensual and intellectual yoga, a way of symbolic exertion. It seems to me that in alternating between aesthetics of regulation and freedom of expression and between skilled discipline and relaxed play, they evolved the most effective kind of Western Tantrism, if we may call it that – a non-dualist amoral discipline with the intensity of things that occur without a subject, and this intensity gives it the seal of truth. The modern arts that can be interpreted through Tantrism offer many individuals the experience of a sensual, physical, non-conceptual school of consciousness of being.
We should not forget, however, that this para-meditative quality of modern arts has been generally suppressed today because the artist has become more important than his or her medium. The majority of artists see the disciplines of art as an excuse for lack of discipline – in other words, for an opportunity to spit into the spittoon of the public arena. They easily forget that art, by its nature, is an anonymous master whose truth unfolds only by externalization. However, people who unconditionally surrender to art, the master that begins with seduction but later becomes unyielding, can discover in the moment of success that they are in the grip of a gentle, yet revolutionary experience. They can discover that beyond knowing and wanting they have always been part of a consciousness that is non-protruding and non-objectifying. Anyone who learns this as an artist is superior to any philosopher, just as a mentally alert person can win the argument against a blabbermouth.
In the living process as it happens a kind of eventful calmness may emerge that overrides the highly developed consciousness of the skills of strategic, technical and artistic subjectivity. This is, in fact, the salient point of meditation: in the pure process of meditation there is a dissolution of the distancing mechanism whereby the self as self is ‘positioned’ in relation to objects. The voracious transitivity of productive action and imaginative thinking is arrested and transformed into the intransitivity of the unimaginable event. Anyone who knows this also knows the magical flare of the present. And he or she knows the dimension of life that can never lose its spell, even under the pressure of the theoretical and practical banality of modern objectification. The fusion of otherwise ruptured subjectivity into the accomplishment of the work of art is part of the metaphysical hallmark of the modern arts. Its power is based on captivating the divided and divisive self through the experience of an undivided, intense presence.
It is clear, then, why the arts are indispensable, on the one hand, and very confusing, on the other. We have already talked about their indispensability. Their confusing danger is due to the fact that art often does not know what it is. Artists are very happy to forget that only a hair’s breadth divides the path of symbolic exertion from the narcissistic career. The arts have become a wonderful excuse for confusing the way with the goal. The arts have long since become goals in themselves and have strayed onto the path of stupidity: the path of top achievement, of commitment, of the imposing artist – and of helpless good intentions. Art is magnificent, artists are skilled at doing what they are skilled at, and the arrow always hits the mark. But the important thing is to know that if you hit the mark you miss everything else.
Ladies and gentlemen, so far I have explained how my text is structured. As there is not much time left, I should speed up to get to what I have announced. But I am sure that you have already seen through this ploy long ago. If everything is done the right way and if announcements have to be followed by what is announced, then I should now be obliged first to speak about the future of the future, then about the so-called social dynamics of the field of aesthetic therapy in modern society, and finally about the fundamental principles of art in relation to meditational philosophy. The only question for now is whether everything is being done properly. You have probably already guessed the answer. Nothing will come of all this – we probably went too fast today. Normally this three-part announcement would have to roll towards you frontally, so to speak, and I could guarantee you that the whole of the next hour would seem quite familiar to you. I will put it differently: if a future plan really contained the future, if the grammatical future were the ontological mortar for establishing future events and speeches, or if a loan were really paid back in the same currency in which it was made, we would all be in a miserable situation; our life would almost belong to the bankers; the prophets of apocalypse would be necessarily right; then the peace that was loaned with weapons would be paid back with war; and in the end I would have to read out word for word everything that I have just presented in the compact style of an announcement.
And you would recognize it as precisely that and would think, ‘We’ve heard it all before, and for God’s sake don’t repeat it; please give us something new, something worth the effort of being here and paying attention.’ I do not mean the attention from earlier for the phrases from earlier, because those phrases are already at the place where the dead are to be found, the place where realists through the ages have sat on the ideological sidelines and reckoned with the eternal return of the same thing because they know that when we are mentally absent, repetitions define reality. No, I mean the latest attention, the wildest and most incredible attention we have; I mean the almost malevolent wakefulness where nothing has to be said twice.
Well, I can see that you have seen through my ploy. You have heard that I have said everything I announced through to the very end as far as possible, here on the spot. This is a very simple tactic: it involves shooting the arrow of expectation into the future in such a way that it can always fall back onto the soil of the moment. It is a matter of looking ahead openly and steadily without repeating oneself. I admit it was a rather cheap ruse. But I didn’t find a better one for expressing what is involved in the future of art or in the future of the future as such. When I immediately do and say and not do and not say what is really to be done, to be said, to not be done and not be said, then there will never be anything left to do, to say, to not do or not say. Every challenge will meet people who are there to accept it. But that is rarely the case when absence of mind holds sway. We always arrive too late. We always arrive just in time to see that we have arrived too late. For if I immediately do and not do, and say and not say, what should happen and should not happen, I will later have to scrape yesterday’s burnt intentions off the bottom of today’s pot. I will be preoccupied by the fact that I have postponed yesterday until today. I will be shackled by incomplete negativity. Failures and reminders will pile up on the desk of life. Missed chances will crowd at the entrance to the present like relentless creditors. We will only leave the house armed with good excuses. Life becomes a very complicated and frustrating business of fulfilling plans and catching up, a miserable game of postponement and avoidance, a refinancing and repayment action of the kind required from people who live in the blessed times when announcing, postponing and borrowing money are still supposed to help. Incidentally, what is called world history is only this kind of refinancing action on a large scale arranged between the generations; it is what results when too many people postpone too many things for too long – in the absurd hope that they will get away with it this time. But if people live in a state of postponement, the unfinished past that defines them will inexorably catch up with them. In this respect Heidegger’s maxim that our past is mostly what lies ahead of us is very apt.
I am sure, of course, that it is unfair, not to say disrespectful, to use word games to turn an occasion for calmly creating theory such as an academic lecture into a mindfulness exercise in meditational philosophy. How can that be justified? My reference is what I attempted in The Critique of Cynical Reason10 as the beginning of a philosophical anti-philosophy. In that book I showed the need for a kind of mental wakefulness that evolves beyond automatic moralizing ideas and the normed discourse that are presented as theory, and beyond the routine reflex activities that are popular as ‘practice’ among people of sound common sense. The Critique of Cynical Reason, however flawed, was an attempt to bring philosophy a step forward towards a school of mental wakefulness. We have to go beyond the outworn duality of theory and practice, of imagination and production, of concept and execution. An expansion of intelligence into new dimensions is already present in the current process of theory and practice. Much depends on whether we succeed in responding to these new constellations of theoretical and practical intelligence. To overcome hopeless pragmatism and even more hopeless Young Hegelianism, today’s philosophy is taking off into the dimension of mental alertness, which has to expand, in a way, as a third dimension above theory and practice. Borrowing from the great tradition of Eastern and Western schools of mindfulness, I call this third dimension of an intelligent way of being-in-the-world ‘meditation’ or dhyana. The current talk about the end of philosophy can assume a new, positive meaning if we realize that what is smarter in the relation to theory cannot be a different kind of theoretical philosophy, just as what is smarter in relation to practice cannot be a different practice, even if it is the practice of the theory. Rather, theory and practice must submerge together and be transformed into the medium of a kind of meditative atmosphere that includes mental alertness. Philosophy after the end of philosophy will be meditational practice and meditational theory. At the higher levels of complexity of a scientific, political and aesthetic intelligence communicated by mental wakefulness we are dealing with a new combination of dimensions of intelligence: in other words, with meditation on theoretical practice, theory of practical meditation, practice of meditational theory, and so forth. A combination like this offers the contours of higher-level forms of intelligence, and the earlier a culture of meditation becomes more widely accepted on the modern level, the better it will be for a world threatened with destruction by the proliferation of clever idiocy and narrow-minded intelligence.
Many avant-garde groups experimenting with new forms and connections in science, technology, art and meditation are already developing a new process to create more subtle communications and more useful divisions between ideas, actions and events. I would argue that this is where the real art of the coming arts is emerging. I am certain that it is the beginning of a new ecology of spirit, and the present announcement is not made as an empty prognosis or the credits list of Never, Never and Co. It is made in the form of the growth of real intelligence. This can be witnessed by anybody who decides to be a person of our times and to make his or her home in the sphere of mental wakefulness.
I will end by being a trifle indiscreet and revealing a secret to you that Albert Einstein told me recently across the ether. Einstein appeared to me in a dream about a week ago. He was very friendly and open and actually refrained from sticking out his tongue. He seemed to be in a very good mood, like somebody who is mischievously happy about a new discovery. He told me that he had recalculated his much misunderstood energy equation with his colleague God, or, rather, with God’s third person, and he almost went mad when after slightly changing the factors he suddenly found the universal formula – in fact, much more than that, he became the universal formula himself. Well, I do not have the slightest idea about modern physics, but my sceptical hackles rose at such an arrogant hypothesis. So I told Einstein that I couldn’t imagine it, however hard I tried. When he offered to tell me the formula, I had to admit truthfully that it would be a waste of effort because I am such an absolute ignoramus about physics.
But Einstein showed such childish enthusiasm for his new formula and was so obviously enjoying the interdisciplinary inspiration that in the end I felt obliged to say politely that I thought his discovery was very interesting. He then went over to a blackboard to write out the formula and was poised to do so when he started becoming very transparent and watery. I was worried he would disappear at any moment without his formula. But he pulled himself together and as he wrote himself on the blackboard I discovered that I couldn’t hear or see because, if I remember rightly, he wrote: ‘Universe (U) equals Intelligence (I) minus Anti-intelligence (AT), with the condition: I equals Meditation divided by the resistance factor of imagination in time; AT equals resistance material multiplied by the square of the average of chair glue.’ After Einstein had nearly filled the whole blackboard he mentioned that his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker11 was already on the right track to the universal formula, but that for the sake of the world he should really put the persistency coefficient in a different place. Then Einstein and the blackboard blew up together and all that was left of the whole show was a sort of ticklish feeling in the atmosphere that I immediately identified, despite my deficient knowledge of physics, as cosmic background giggling.12
To conclude: the present will show which past the future will bring. If the past is the space in which the Persian wars, the Crusades and the First, Second and Third World Wars all happen at the same time, the future is the space in which we shall see whether Einstein’s dreams are made of froth. Today, as a follow-up to philosophy, a form of consciousness conducive to new kinds of relationship between mind and event is emerging, helped by a mentally awake way of thinking – a consciousness beyond the outworn old European duality of theory and practice. If the main event of history is human intelligence itself, the emergence of a superior intelligence will become the condition for history to go on, which it will do only if human beings survive the self-imposed risk of a dull, numbed intelligence tied to the egoism of strategic self-preservation. In this higher process of emergence, doctrines evolve that could be called non-Euclidean studies in cleverness in subjects such as acting with restraint, intervening out of meditation, guiding processes by letting things happen, trusting intelligent impulses, and revolutionary calm. In the process, new exchange regulations for seriousness and lack of seriousness will develop after good old irony proves inadequate for communication with a world that thinks the apex of cleverness is to have destroyed itself by being wonderfully astute in a future past. Enlightenment today, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but using the perspective of meditational philosophy to overcome the Exact Future. Enlightenment today takes the form of something produced by a meditative cybernetics to promote a present with a future and an art of being mentally present and aware. And however much we have tried to escape into mental absence, we have already taken at least one step into this state of mental awareness.