What thrilling times those were, when Faust made his pact with the devil in order to change the world. Yes, it was also about women. But anyone who has made it past Part I of Goethe’s Faust knows that the Gretchen story was only the prelude (a delay, certainly, but also an inner preparation) to Faust’s real role as a ceaseless, ruthless world-changer. This ambition is already evident in Faust’s pact with the devil, which he formulates as a wager: “If ever I plead with the passing moment: / Linger awhile, oh how lovely you are! / Then shut me up in close confinement, / and I’ll gladly go to my destruction.”1 Faust is required to give his soul to the devil, in exchange for the latter’s services, only if he halts the forward movement of internal and external time—but not so long as he continues to strive, try to understand the secret of what keeps the world going, and attempt to change it.
Does Faust still live? Did the devil come for him in the end? Today, we are probably most likely to find Faust in Silicon Valley, where all kinds of technologies are developed that, as we are constantly reminded, will make the world a better place. In the information age, this generally means improving the flow of information, the form of communication, and the degree of interconnectedness. The Gretchen question of the present is therefore: And how do you feel about Facebook? Which naturally includes the question: How do you feel about the passing moment?
If we turn the question back on ourselves, it looks, at first, as if we were all hopeless losers of Faust’s wager. Who still wants to change the world? Who still believes, like Faust (or Adorno), that the history of humankind hasn’t even really begun yet? Who among us doesn’t constantly hold onto the moment as if it were essential to never let it go? Our devices and Facebook pages are full of photographic witness to beautiful moments, which in the Chinese equivalent WeChat are in fact called “Moments.” But: more is less! Along with the number of moments that we hold onto, the suspicion is also growing that something is wrong.
At least since the proclamation of the “experience society” and “experiential industry” in the 1980s, the postmodern subject has been in hot pursuit of experiences, rather than working toward a goal. Liberated from old structures, traditional role models, and categorically imposed life plans, the subject develops an identity that does not let itself be determined by the past or obligated to the future. It is free to do whatever it wants, without having to want anything and also without knowing what it should want. Thus it lives on, in the delirium of an endless present, ceaselessly underway from moment to moment.
That this radical present-relatedness also creates pressure and anxiety is already announced in the titles of some diagnoses of the contemporary era, for example Tyranny of the Moment (2001) or Present Shock (2014).2 But what else should we expect, after the end of history? What role remains for the present, if we no longer believe that it owes the past a better future? No longer part of any historical-philosophical current of history, it floats on air until it is only bearable if we are in motion: from event to event. Without a deeper link to the rest of time, though, every event is always simultaneously not enough and much too much.
The problem is not that in the twenty-first century the moment in time, unlike those experienced by Faust or the Romantics, is no longer an intense experience of the self. The problem is that it no longer even allows the self a moment of intense enjoyment. Life experiences entail an obligation to actually experience them. They demand of us a presence that Faust possessed during every moment that he did not ask to linger. We, on the other hand, think we have done our part if we bring home a souvenir from the museum shop and a video from the rock concert. This has become so bad that meanwhile musicians publicly complain to their fanatically videoing fans: “Could you stop filming me? Because I’m really here in real life, you can enjoy it in real life rather than through your camera.”3
We are at some particular place only because we don’t happen to be someplace else, and we often ask ourselves whether we shouldn’t be moving on. We are no longer Faust II, but neither are we Faust I—that was the wild 1960s, when the thing to do was break the fetters of bourgeois existence and we still assumed we owed this to the world. Generation X already feels relieved of this mandate. As the character Troy Dyer puts it in the 1994 cult film Reality Bites: “I am not under any orders to make the world a better place.” Since then we rush breathlessly from one urgency to the next and never actually feel good anywhere. We know this as soon as the world around us accidentally falls silent, for a change. The salvation that now no longer releases us lies in new media and social networks.
The smartphone, as they say, is the cigarette of the twenty-first century. This comparison is even more apt if the cigarette is considered not as a luxury item, but as a stopgap—a refuge and means of self-protection whenever we are confronted with an uncomfortable, pressing present. The decisive difference is not so much the dissimilar nature of the object, or its different consequences for our health, as the different social aspect of the flight. While smoking out of embarrassment isolates a person in the here and now, communication with the social network, in the there and now, leads to a kind of group cuddling of sharing and liking. People don’t retreat helplessly into their own cloud of smoke; they feel that they are active members of a community to which they can delegate the moment they just experienced the same way others delegate their moments. Through the act of communicating, each person helps the next one disguise her momentary fear as the power to do something.
There is a twofold avoidance of perceiving the moment in time: we flee it as we take it in, and we usually never return to it. Photographic busyness is not a betrayal of the present in the interest of the future, as it was in the past. There are no more slide shows in a circle of relatives, no more solitary, late-night recollections over a glass of wine and a table littered with photographs. Who has time to have a second look at all the photos it once seemed so important to create? Subsequent viewing has ceded its rights to sharing-in-place. The social network is always looking on; it sees for us, while we, for our part, are rifling through the sharings of others, waiting for the first likes.
What to many people looks like a narcissistic need for communication is basically a cry for help to our network friends, who should liberate us from the present moment that, to judge by the photos, is making us so happy. Are the many snapshots on our social networks proof that we are winning the wager after all? Neither Mephistopheles nor the Lord above would support this view.
Faust cannot linger because he has so much he wants to do. He must still invent money at the kings’ court, spirit Helen away from antiquity, invent artificial man, and win land from the sea. Faust is the “egomaniacal, experience-devouring imperial self.” He leaves the moment permanently behind him, because he is moving with the wave of the future. We, on the other hand, are the “narcissistic, infantile, empty self.” We are not being driven forward, nor inward, but only somewhere else. The “psychological man” that superseded the “imperial self” in the 1970s has been replaced by the phatic one with the same objective: “mental health.”4
What we are doing, when we hold fast to every moment and simultaneously betray it, is leaping out of time into the communication network of cyberspace. In this way, we who live without past and future also transcend the present. Wherever we may happen to be, in the social space of the digital media we feel safe and secure. There, every app is familiar, every contact a favorite, every threat can potentially be clicked away.
The smartphone is more than a cigarette. It is a protective shield against the rest of the world. Whenever we are fleeing from a moment in time, we flee there. For virtual space is lovely enough to linger in—even more lovely than the moment to which Faust swore he would never yield. The wager, some people say, has long since been lost. We have long since been put in chains, and have long since lost our souls. For digital media, the same people claim, are not the services Mephistopheles provides before we win or lose the wager; they are already his realm.