IF WE ARE TO GAIN a deeper understanding of contemporary thinking and a thorough grasp of informationalism’s historical roots, we need to carry out an archaeological investigation of the collective subconscious, which in turn demands that the focus be shifted away from traditional history writing’s fixation on particular points in time and on particular individuals to a more general, ideas-based perspective of a relevant period of history. A suitable limited period for our analysis is the recently concluded twentieth century, particularly because it largely coincides with the period in socio-economic and information-technological history known as late capitalism.
There are two main reasons for differentiating a late capitalist era from a preceding period of high capitalism. Firstly, social and cultural implications inherent in the printing process, the all-pervasive information technology, right from the start only began to be developed fully during the late capitalist period. This allowed critical thinking to conceive of a worldview as a product of current circumstances and thereby even, in extension, to conceive of an end to the whole paradigm. The self-evident aspect of the current worldview was no longer self-evident. Secondly, late capitalism was characterised by the growth of the electronic mass media, which strongly reinforced rather than broke down the power structures which primarily rested upon the printing press. The electronics amplified the mass media and therefore increased the potency of one-way communication. The printed media – books, daily papers and magazines – had made relatively high demands of their audience. Literacy was a precondition for being able to receive any information at all. With the advent of radio and television, the entrance requirements were reduced to the ability to use a switch, and as a result centralistic power could quite literally reach everyone. This also happened at the same time as those being addressed were given less opportunity than ever to answer back.
During their introductory phase the electronic mass media thereby contributed considerably to the reinforcement of the nation state and its institutions. Broadcasts took place in national languages, within the nation’s borders, and the audience consisted of the nation’s citizens. Community was strengthened by the fact that everyone was watching and listening to the same thing. With the advent of satellite technology in the middle of the twentieth century, the situation was dramatically altered. Now people in every corner of the world began to consume the same sporting events, the same political events, the same military conflicts, at the same time, all with the same advertisements for the same consumer goods. As a result, a condition of hypercapitalism was able to spread rapidly across the whole world. Certain memes could benefit from extremely favourable circumstances, and the lifestyles and thought patterns of the dominant economies effectively colonised the areas which had earlier, during high capitalism, been politically and militarily subordinate. With that, a first step on the road to the global state had been taken.
The beliefs and values which early informationalism made its own formed part of late capitalism’s consciousness of crisis, where they had lain for a long time causing friction and being generally uncomfortable. The origins of the netocratic elite can be traced as far back as the glory days of high capitalism, during the second half of the nineteenth century, to a collection of extremely controversial and literally anachronistic ideas. The most important if these was Friedrich Nietzsche’s destructive critique of the basic assumptions of rationalism and humanism. According to Nietzsche, truth is not always a timeless gift bestowed by some god or derived from nature, but is always produced by mankind itself in order to fulfil certain functions under certain circumstances. This meant that, firstly, the truth is relative and changeable, and secondly, it is entirely dependent upon current power relationships. The truth is thus nothing we can seek, because instead it seeks us in order to demand submission. The purpose and consequence of ascribing transcendental qualities to the truth are to place it out of the reach of critical examination, and thus to make it appear as eternal and ‘natural’.
Nietzsche’s transrational metatruth, which states that the truth is a temporally bound product of a particular social order, is the only truth which retains its credibility throughout history. All other elevated values disappear with the society that was responsible for their elevation. Anyone who tries to defend the ‘eternal’ truths of rationalism and humanism after Nietzsche is defending nothing more than his or her own special social interests in the eternal struggle over definitions. There is, quite simply, nothing to stand up for, and never had been. With this, Nietzsche also destroyed all notions of a philosophy or a philosopher whose ideas might be thought to be independent of their age and material circumstances.
This realisation permeates eternalism; eternalist philosophers necessarily speak the language of the up-and-coming power, not because of any ambitious desire to get their head in the trough, but because there is no alternative, apart from self-deception, if you want to conduct any relevant work in philosophy. You either appear conservative within the frame decided by the outgoing regime, which means that what you produce will soon be outdated, or you produce philosophical concepts which pave the way for the coming regime. Eternalism is, and also sees itself as, a new phase in the civilisation process; it is simply not meaningful to take up a position outside the developing paradigm. Eternalistic philosophy is the affirmative centre of affirmative nihilism, to which we shall return later in the this chapter.
Nietzsche’s unmasking of the origins of morality will have dramatic consequences once it becomes widespread. Since official truth is the basis of the hierarchy of values around which society is constructed, every system of morals is by definition both a product and a defence of the governing power structure and its interests. All the ideology which is used as packaging material is intended to cover up the functions and simple origins of the sacred truths. This is history: the story of how the governing value-hierarchy of the time is made legitimate through the creation of an attractive family tree. Consequently the flip-side of history is the story of nihilism and how it has been forestalled over the centuries. It is in the interests of every powerful elite to preserve the status quo and present all fundamental change as infernal and, above all, ‘unnatural’. It is a question of suppressing at all costs the idea that we humans and our changing social forms are worthless outside our own imagination.
These processes are investigated in detail and explained pedagogically by Nietzsche and his successor Martin Heidegger, but the idea of history as the story of nihilism was already posited by G W F Hegel. Because mankind has, throughout history, both individually and collectively, lived more or less comfortably within the discrepancy between the fundamental truth which says that all truths are only based on the agreements about power relationships between different people, and the official truth which says that the truth is sanctioned by the highest metaphysical instance, then there has to be a large, dark space in thought where suppressed truths lie hidden. Most of us walk past this dark space every day without ever noticing it, but its absence is so noticeable that it constitutes a sort of negative presence, whose dark shadow falls across everyday life.
It is this dark space beneath the horizon of consciousness that Sigmund Freud calls the subconscious. Freud, however, is not content to state that mankind is distracted by a sort of eternal leakage from the subconscious, but goes a step further, saying that basic human frustration and dissatisfaction has its origins in this very discrepancy between the conscious and the subconscious. According to the rationalist view of mankind, as Freud points out, the big problem is negotiating an agreement between, on the one hand, social morality (the truth) and, on the other, thoughts and actions (the individual); this is naturally wholly in line with the interests of the ruling elite, and wholly in line with what every elite in every age has preached. Every kind of breach of governing moral ideas is perceived to cause existential angst, whereas harmony and happiness are assumed to be the rewards for successful adaptation of thought and deed to the prescriptions of social morality. If all citizens only had the sense to realise what was good for them, every individual would be able to achieve maximum inner peace, and all social problems would disappear.
Freud realised that this model was unsustainable. Instead, he localises pathological disturbances to the jarring disharmony between the conscious view of the world and the subconscious. This means firstly that the probable consequence of slavishly following the official truth is an increase in discomfort, and secondly that this discomfort is universal, and therefore extremely normal. The most problematic type of psychopathology is therefore not disharmony, but rather the absence of symptoms of disharmony. Mankind has meandered through history unaware of all of this, and has therefore been forced to accept the authorities’ claims that all forms of discomfort are the result of the individual’s disobedience towards those same authorities. Freud claims that the cure lies in making the subconscious conscious. The dark space must be opened up, what is suppressed must be set free. With this in mind he established psychoanalysis with the highest scientific ambitions. The ideas of psychoanalysis in turn form the basis of eternalistic philosophy, which is concerned with the dark spaces of public life, and the knowledge which is currently suppressed from language and public communication. This archaeological dig in the collective subconscious is called, consequently, socioanalysis.
The task of exposing the central role played by nihilism in the history of the collective subject is, according to Nietzsche himself, both thankless and unavoidable; it also forces him to become the spokesman for what he calls the ‘will to power’, in other words: the desire to transform nihilism into fuel for the motor driving human creativity and identity production. As a result Nietzsche is the first person to affirm nihilism; he accepts and ennobles it, instead of trying to hide or condemn it as a deterministic power driving mankind towards its doom. Nietzsche replaces the wishful thinking of rationalism and utopianism with a consistently thought-out and cool candour of previously unseen sort. Transrationalism wipes out rationalism once the logical conclusion about the limitations of rationalism has been reached.
As a result of Nietzsche’s inverted project of enlightenment, nihilism was dragged out of the collective subconscious, and spread fear everywhere. The developing American film industry transformed nihilism into a sort of picturesque cabaret entertainment, but in Europe the revelation had considerably more dramatic consequences. In the trenches of European battlefields, an entire generation went to its death for distinctly murky reasons; Freud launched the death wish as one of the two fundamental antagonistic instincts of the psyche. It is an inescapable fact that every living thing is longing for death, as Freud bitterly states.
By combining the theories of Nietzsche and Freud we can see that nihilism is the death wish of the collective subject. However, it assumes different forms in different societies and at different times. Nihilism undergoes three distinct phases. They last different lengths of time under different circumstances, but they are all necessary and always follow one another in the same order. Nihilism is built into every stage of the civilisation process, but is only made conscious in a society dominated by an interactive information technology. With the arrival of informationalism and the coming of globalisation it will finally, with a few displacements, apply to the whole world.
The first phase is naïve nihilism, which is characterised by the fact that nihilism is primarily operative in the collective subconscious. It is still unconscious of its own existence and its influence on an entire world of thoughts and actions. During this phase the message relaying the death of God arrives, but the news of this death is generally understood as meaning that the only god is no longer necessary as the ultimate cause of mankind and its universe in a philosophical explanatory model which is in harmony with the very latest knowledge. The devastating effect which the death of God will have on the production of value in society is, however, something which no-one yet understands. This is why naïve nihilism is naïve.
Naïve nihilism lies at the heart of humanism, modernism and modern utopias. God no longer inhabits the subconscious, but the conscious, as an internalised aspect of the ego. This God, whom the naïve nihilist constantly addresses, is in actual fact the superego, and this confusion allows him to imagine that everyone else is equipped with an identical superego of their own, and exactly the same range of values that he has. This makes his own values appear to be universal and inspired by common sense. If only this common sense – in other words, his own values – could govern unchecked, everything would turn out alright. The question that the naïve nihilist constantly asks is: ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’. But behind the friendly smile there is always a rigid Jacobin.
Naïve nihilism was born with Enlightenment philosophy’s cult of reason and criticism of religion. It became a highly active social and political power during the French Revolution, and reached its apex as the bourgeoisie secured its newly-won grip on power and étatism triumphed during the nineteenth century. One of the beliefs of naïve nihilism was that sound reason would henceforth be able to replace metaphysics; naïve nihilists had no perception at all of how hard they were working to fill their own worldview with masses of ideologically tinted metaphysics as a replacement for the religious thinking they had removed. In came ideas like the Cartesian subject, a romantic view of nature as the ultimate guarantee of mankind’s special position and rights, and an irrational faith in rationality. As soon as sound reason had freed itself from all forms of superstition, it would solve all of mankind’s problems. Thus would the social utopia be achieved.
History, in the form of the most grisly tragedies, reveals however the fateful superficiality in the psychology of the naïve nihilist. It didn’t turn out as he imagined, because other people didn’t think the way they ought to. His own worldview was merely his own, his universal values were merely the illusions of one confused individual. The process of disillusionment that begins once this more or less bloody failure has become a fact is difficult to manage and often gives rise to enormous bitterness. The naïve nihilist views a world which no longer seems to listen to the voice of sound reason, and which will not let itself be transformed into a rationalist utopia, with increasing scepticism.
Naïve nihilism lives on today in somewhat diluted form as étatistic liberalism, the political platform upon which the western bourgeoisie is still standing and which it is fighting to retain. Excellent examples of naïve nihilists are the leaders of nation states who have dominated the political arena during the years surrounding the turn of the millennium: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Jacques Chirac, and so on. One unmistakable sign of their naïve nihilism is their recurrent praise of rationalism and humanism. This is the core of the capitalist paradigm, this is where the bourgeoisie’s belief in its own superiority originates – from reason, which is sound by definition. Its power of attraction ought not to be underestimated; naïve nihilism not only lives on in the orthodox custodians of the liberal creed, but also in the remnants of Marxism and among the single-issue political movements which, under their humanist banners, protect the nation state from every sign of increased supranational tendencies. This latter category contains, for instance, most of the environmental movement and the so-called postcolonial activists who claim to be trying to protect the third world from exploitation by keeping poor countries outside integrated global markets.
But reason is hardly the antidote for this cult of reason. There is nothing to suggest that naïve nihilism is going to unravel thanks to shaky logic or an intensified intellectual collapse in general. Étatistic and humanist appeals are, of course, more emotional than intellectual in nature. The death blow will come instead from a thoroughly medialised existence, and from the breakthrough of interactivity on all levels. Of course, anachronistically sharp and forward-thinking observers, such as Hegel and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, saw through naïve nihilism, but it will only die as a factor of political power once informationalism and the netocracy have entered the arena.
The making-conscious of the collective subconscious and the realisation of the evident consequences of naïve nihilism will lead to a counter-reaction known as cynical nihilism. The realisation of the naïvety of naïve nihilism gave rise as early as the nineteenth century to a bitterness which would come to dominate the twentieth century’s philosophical and ideological discourses. This condition developed two different symptoms, firstly a paralysing resentment, and secondly an historical-romantic escapism. The two dominant trends in the philosophical discourse of the late twentieth century, postmodernism and cultural relativism, are typical products of cynical nihilism. Every connection between individual people and the surrounding culture is by definition disconnected. No-one can actually understand what anyone else means, language is a system of arbitrarily chosen signs whose innate relations are far more interesting than any relation they may bear to material events outside the sign system. The medium is the message, the surface is the only depth of any interest, and attention shifts from reason, now suspect, to the mirrored halls of symbolic play.
The cynical nihilist is not so much a reader of signs as a player of them. His metaphysics are calculatedly mundane and trivial. But the continual presence of irony is his great blind spot. This irony indicates that he is still clinging to the idea of a universal hierarchy of values. He speaks dismissively of rationalism and believes himself to be a devastating critic of it, but he is actually still living in the rhetoric of rationalism and its conceptual world. Never before have long-winded footnotes been quite so pervasive as in postmodern theoretical reasoning (by all means note the restful absence of footnotes from this presentation, as in Hegel and Nietzsche). Every thought, no matter how banal, must unavoidably be legitimised with a reference. Through this use of rationalism’s own formal language to criticise rationalism, the cynical nihilist is not being the anti-rationalist he thinks he is, but rather an exemplary ultra-rationalist. In his unreserved worship of the surface, in his fascination with its shiny coolness and his own ability to mirror himself in it and enjoy this surface, the cynical nihilist is practising a sterile act of self-adoration. The deceased god has been thoroughly internalised. Monotheism is replaced by multi-coloured cultural relativity, but this polytheism merely means a multitude of masks, and behind every mask lurks the same universal god.
The cynical nihilist therefore repeats his naïve predecessor’s mistake of believing that instinct can be curbed by the intellect. He believed that his lack of prejudice and his flexibility of values are the solutions to the most difficult problems. But he is only fooling himself. Relativism can never deal with really infected conflicts with their roots in cultural traditions; neglecting to adopt a position is actually the ultimate way of adopting a position, and doing so always means abandoning the position of relativism. When, for instance, Muslim women refugees from east Africa during the 1990s continued their ritual circumcision of their daughters once they had arrived in Europe, tolerant cultural relativism was left helpless, incapable of advocating any form of intervention which would imply de facto that western values were superior to those of eastern Africa. We shall look closer at this problem later. Cynical nihilism’s pleasurable paralysis of action means it loses all credibility and is revealed as little more than a tasteless, luxuriant laziness of thought.
So the circumstances are now ripe for the next developmental phase, affirmative nihilism. This stage is a rejection of cynicism, and it arises when it becomes clear that this cynicism is linked to an enforced connection with a discredited worldview, and that cynicism can be abandoned by an act of will which is in turn connected to a new clarity of vision. Cynicism is therefore turned into its opposite, nihilism is no longer seen as a hopeless terminus of history, but as the starting point for the new production of values and a new, creative aesthetic. Humanism’s Man, the internalised god, may well be dead, but mankind lives on with new ideals before his eyes. After Man comes Nietzsche’s Superman, the netocratic ideal.
We can get a clear view of the differences between the three various stages of nihilism by comparing their relationship to the pre-nihilistic basic value: God. The naïve nihilist believes that he believes in God – or in his own ego, which was assumed to possess the same unproblematic and absolute status that God once had – but has in his subconscious already abandoned his faith in God and in absolute vales. His faith is literally only lip-service, an observance of certain comforting, traditional forms. In a more watered down form the privately religious person places a less well-defined being in God’s place, but the level of often unconscious hypocrisy is in practice the same. Half-hearted faith exists uncomfortably alongside rationalism, with constant horse-trading and compromises.
The naïve nihilist is therefore characterised by the fact that he says what he thinks sounds good, rather than anything reflecting what he really thinks. He lives in the hope that his beautiful words will beautify even himself. The naïve nihilist is unaware of the existence of the subconscious and of the many depths of his own thinking. To the naïve nihilist, his beautiful words live their own life, completely divorced from a genuinely thought-out value system and the events which could be determined by it. These phrases are the primary source for his social identity. Models only interest him in so far as they refer to tangible facts and produce measurable benefits. The naïve nihilist is, therefore, the ultimate positivist.
Historically, the naïve nihilist is an exemplary democrat and a fully-fledged member of the bourgeoisie; he is the bearer of what Hegel sarcastically calls ‘the beautiful soul’. He is an individualist, and strives for self-realisation, because that is what society and the zeitgeist offers. He prioritises the appearance of success over being happy, or rather, to be more accurate, he cannot tell one from the other. Happiness and the appearance of success are the same thing, it is all a matter of playing your role on society’s stage. According to the naïve nihilist, the entire performance is arranged according to reason, and all troublesome misunderstandings will be sorted out over time, which in practice means that all deviant opinions will be corrected.
During the introductory phase of informationalism, the naïve nihilist is still dominating public space, above all within politics and science. He proudly parades being religious in a suitably modern way – God lives for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning, but is dead for the rest of the week – and by being liberal at the same time. He prefers dialogue to dogmatism, being well-dressed to being unkempt, and he has an unfailing nose for opportunistic attitudes in opportune subjects, such as: so-called vulnerable groups in society, the third world, exploitation of children and environmental pollution. The naïve nihilist always thinks the right thing in the right context, and this thinking often vibrates with gripping sensitivity. The shedding of more and more crocodile tears is of course ideally suited for the electronic tabloid culture of late capitalism. Televised debates, with their short, sound-bite slogans, are the most advantageous frame for the naïve nihilist.
The cynical nihilist is, in contrast, quite clear about his own atheism, and is happy to heckle a faith he regards as irrational and baseless. God simply does not exist in the real world, only in people’s superstitions, and atheism makes things much simpler by sweeping aside masses of old rubbish which is just stopping mankind from seeing its situation clearly and weighing different possibilities against one another. The cynical nihilist wants to go further into a world explained by science and reason. But, on the other hand, he does not spare a thought for the void left by God in society’s hierarchies of values and power, and consequently has no concept of the deeper effects of his own atheism. This means that the cynical nihilist is actually still living on in the values of the religious faith he has rubbished, without being conscious of it. The concept of God still permeates his existence as an intangible and nameless spectre, just as active as ever.
As a result, the cynical nihilist is also the last humanist, a sort of unconscious archaeological warden. He claims that God is dead, but he refuses to confront the suddenly very cold and desolate world where God no longer forms part of the preconditions. His reaction to cold and desolation is to seek protection and warmth among like-minded people. The hope is that an increasingly noisy aggression in cynical reasoning can conceal the lack of deeper analysis. Cynical nihilism always develops into extreme relativism; each and every one of us can be saved by our faith, and the nature of that faith is nothing to do with anyone else. What the neighbours do behind their fence is of no interest to the cynical realist, who is frenetically defending himself against unasked for opinions. The cynical nihilist constructs his identity exclusively from negative definitions: he knows what he isn’t and what he doesn’t believe in. The freedom to identify with something entirely new and to construct entirely new, positive values is out of sight and out of reach. By not setting any expectations, the risk of being disappointed is avoided. With a considerable amount of schadenfreude, the cynical nihilist believes that the wisdom of avoiding difficult reflection upon the true significance of the disappearance of religious faith is made clear by the fear and anxiety demonstrated by foolish worriers. In the long run this attitude is untenable, because it rests upon what is known as a naïve negation.
The oft-quoted remark that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’, from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, is a classic example of naïve negation. The statement presupposes a certain opinion of what ‘something new’ could possibly be, and in it there cannot be a new combination of old components, which is why the only time there might have been something truly new was at the moment of creation. Nothing can ever be new in this strict definition, everything is just varying compositions of already existing factors. But because of this the entire suggestion becomes pointless, because it is these same varying compositions which are the interesting thing about history, and in the relevant sense all sorts of new things under the sun are constantly appearing. To deny this is to adopt a point of departure which is absurd, it is only a case of finding an adequate definition of what ‘something new’ is.
The fundamental atheism of cynical nihilism is a naïve negation of exactly the same kind. What the cynical nihilist claims to deny is the existence of something that is an inescapable reality in the only relevant sense, namely the concept of God which continues to play an extremely active role in the value hierarchy of society – quite apart from anything science might have to say about the actual physical existence of God – and which cannot be replaced by doubt alone, but must be replaced by some new positive value. The cynical nihilist is therefore forced to carry on living with the worldview whose fundamental precondition he claims to doubt. But this denial is always transient, and it is more a matter of finding an adequate definition of the new value which is going to assume the identity-creating function of the concept of God. But in order for this to happen, the cynical phase of nihilism must come to an end and be replaced by the affirmative phase.
The sceptical attitude finally ebbs away in the cul-de-sac where mobilism alone rules, without its dialectical opposite, eternalism, which is its necessary complement. Shut into this cul-de-sac, absolute mobilism develops either into cultural relativism or a romantic longing for an imagined natural state, unsullied by civilisation. Fundamentally, both of these attitudes are expressions of chronic impotence. A sceptic is constantly critical, never creative, never pragmatic. He is the eternal backseat driver, always ready with a contradictory point of view, but incapable of contributing anything which makes the actual driving any easier.
It is cynicism itself which reveals the cynical nihilist and his dependence upon something whose existence he denies. For the atheist, God is a necessity without which his own attitude would be an absurdity, a real phenomenon whose existence it is interesting to debate; God must remain as something which either exists or does not exist, otherwise cynical nihilism itself cannot survive. The energetically denied God has, in the eyes of the atheist, not yet been transformed into a thoroughly logical product of certain power relationships under certain material circumstances, a component which fills a socially cohesive function in a necessary hierarchy of values. Why should the cynic need to be cynical if this is the case? He would realise that this abandoned function must be filled by something else, and progress from non-belief to beyond-belief.
Abandoning cynicism is the conscious act of will which defines affirmative nihilism, for whom the question of God’s existence is no longer at all problematical. God was ultimately a concept in society’s hierarchy of values under certain historical conditions. The concept of God filled a certain and necessary function, but now conditions have changed, and under current circumstances scepticism is no longer a relevant position. The affirmative nihilist realises the necessity of replacing this and other exhausted concepts with new values which are valid and functional under these new circumstances. But why the delay? Why this time-lag in the creation of concepts and values? If Nietzsche noticed the difference at the end of the nineteenth century, and if Heidegger formalised the distinction only a few decades later, why has it taken until the beginning of the twenty-first century and the growth of an informationalist dominant class for affirmative nihilism to leave its first historical traces?
One initial explanation is obvious: you cannot just conjure forth values you happen to be enamoured of, for whatever reason, just as little as you can develop biological mutations for which circumstances are unsuited, and then expect them to survive and breed successfully just because that is what you want to happen. So it is not a matter of any stringency of philosophical reasoning, but of the conditions which are determined by material and technological circumstances. Consequently, the netocracy could not simply take command of history, that isn’t how it works: instead, a new power elite is the result of a new media technology rewarding certain qualities while other forms of talent which have been successful in the past are no longer favoured to the same extent. The netocracy is thus the result of the interactive communication technology which began to develop during the 1970s, and affirmative nihilism is part of the netocratic ideology which has been developed since then. Nietzsche and Heidegger were refiners of concepts with no access to a suitable ecology, philosophers way before or, rather, outside their time.
A number of interesting explanations can be added to this. Firstly, there is a general historical sluggishness, consisting of drawn-out power struggles: what were originally positive forces become reactive counter-forces, an outgoing paradigm retains a considerable mass for a long time, and naturally its dominant elite defend their positions and privileges with all available means. Secondly the collective subconscious is subjected at regular intervals to traumatic shocks which attack thought in the form of self-applied censorship of various sorts. During the 1990s these shocks rained down more intensely than ever before, and thanks to the mass media they became known and commented upon to a remarkable degree. This meant that the century which had seen more comprehensive technological development than any before it was at the same time characterised by a stagnation of ideas which gave rise to the description ‘the little Middle Ages’. Mankind was frightening itself to such an extent that it had stopped thinking creatively and innovatively.
The twentieth century was largely devoted to the philosophical, ideological and artistic revision of the collective trauma which arose when nihilism came to the surface of western culture and made its intentions known at the turn of the last century. How could people deal with this newly uncovered, terrible emptiness? Under these tumultuous circumstances, Darwin’s natural selection, Nietzsche’s will to power and Freud’s libido were all largely misunderstood as concepts. More or less intentional misinterpretations served different propaganda purposes. On the one hand it is clear that Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud were thinkers who were literally epoch-making in the final stages of high capitalism and the opening years of late capitalism. On the other hand, all the vulgar interpretations of their ideas have built up to form an almost insurmountable pollution problem for anyone wanting to orientate themselves in the period’s world of ideas and to develop their philosophy further.
Marxists, fascists, existentialists, feminists, neo-liberals and postmodernists: these and countless others can be convicted of serious and repeated pollution of the public arena. The lazy lack of demands required by the cynical nihilist encouraged orgies of self-pity and navel-gazing. Beyond that, there were four important problems hampering thought: the trauma of totalitarianism, the collapse of capitalist normativity, the division of the academic world, as well as last but not least, the built-in infantilism and populism of the electronic mass media. Together, these amount to an explanation why late capitalist thinking was to a large extent a vain exercise in resentment.
The collective consciousness was to a large extent split at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there was a widespread idea within the liberally minded bourgeoisie that the realisation of capitalism’s utopian dreams was imminent. Reason ruled in the form of well-developed nation states, democracy triumphed in the form of increasingly extended voting rights, markets expanded, welfare grew, science produced one sensational discovery after the other. On the other hand, the Victorian world harboured a strong and widespread fear that these improved living standards would result in lethargy and debilitation; there were constant discoveries of new signs that the human race and western society was rapidly becoming emasculated. Everything under the sun, from traditions to marriage, from the sport of rowing to masculinity, was thought to be in deep crisis. In this tense climate, the outbreak of the First World War was greeted with jubilation from almost every group in every nation; the absence of critical voices is explained quite simply by the fact that everyone thought they had something to gain in the trenches. The optimists thought they were preparing new ground for future advances, the pessimists thought the war offered a necessary purging of a decadent civilisation.
In actual fact, it was extremely difficult to discern any winners at all when the smoke had cleared. The only exception in this context was possibly the USA, whose position was strengthened at the expense of the old colonial powers. But otherwise the war, with the new military and media technologies it encouraged, paved the way for a new, industrial form of totalitarianism. As a result of the war Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the new nation states of eastern Europe became fascist dictatorships. Russia was hurled into a bloody civil war which ended with a definitive victory for the Communists. The liberal democracies which two decades before had seemed to be on the threshold of the culmination of history, and which believed themselves to be exemplary, were in a difficult position. Totalitarianism was not just a threatening alternative, it even seemed in several respects to be superior to the bourgeois democratic nation state.
One factor in favour of totalitarianism was its extremely well-developed ability to foster a powerful demonology, which created a platform for the massively efficient production of social identity. Germany, governed by a messianic dictator, was a Nazi one-party state built around a Rousseauian notion of the historical supremacy of the Germanic race. Russia, also governed by a messianic dictator, was a Communist one-party state built around a Rousseauian notion of the Russian people’s special qualities. Hitler turned politics into aesthetics, Stalin turned aesthetics into politics; their two doctrines seemed to be each other’s opposite, and the two regimes used one another as the lead player in their respective demonologies. The conflict between them sucked up all the ideological oxygen of the European continent, where politics quickly polarised. You were either for one and against the other, or vice versa. There was no room for a third alternative, and bourgeois democracy looked impotent and exhausted. Both totalitarian regimes benefited in this way from their mutual antagonism, their common interest in this confirmed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The same demonological complex lived on after the end of the Second World War and fall of Nazism, when the East painted the West as fascists, and the West nurtured a permanent terror of Communism.
The strong attraction of utopianism influenced by Rousseau made it synonymous in many people’s eyes with radicalism, whereas bourgeois demonology was connected with complacency and stagnation. This even applied within the bourgeois democracies themselves, which were undermined as a result. Utopianism suffered a severe blow with the fall of Communism, when totalitarianism’s systematic cruelty and economic collapse were revealed, which in turn led to a dramatic realignment of the intellectual climate. Totalitarianism showed itself to be in many respects even worse than its opponents’ propaganda had claimed: its repression was even more brutal, its economic collapse far more pathetic. The silencing of internal criticism clearly did not lead to advantageous non-zero-sum games of any sort.
After that the old Left was transformed overnight from Communism to Social Democracy, which admittedly was its only chance of survival, but it meant that the romantic, revolutionary aura lost its attraction. The old radicals could no longer pretend that they stood outside the shabby and unromantic establishment. The philosophy which had not yet recovered from the Auschwitz-trauma of the late 1940s was hit by yet another body blow in the form of a gulag-trauma. Intellectual discourse imploded, all energy was used up in various sorts of denial and defence of having adopted a position on the wrong side. The utopias were admittedly compromised, but utopianism itself must be saved at any cost. The only philosophical alternative on offer seemed to be a stringent professionalisation, through which thinking abdicated the public stage and shut itself away in the dustiest corners of universities to conduct mathematical logical concept analysis. Nothing could be of less concern to the governing power structure.
The response of continental philosophy to the Auschwitz-trauma is called existentialism, a moral code based upon a vulgarisation of the phenomenology of Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, so full of aggressive decrees that Immanuel Kant’s efforts within this petit-bourgeois genre pale in comparison. Auschwitz led to a demand for good and evil to be reinstated as absolute values, which led to Nietzsche and Heidegger either being misinterpreted or relegated to the poison cabinet. Auschwitz became the symbol of evil, a singularity, an historically unique event, instead of yet another genocide using the methods and technology available at the time. This ideology of the victorious powers was raised to the status of an axiom, and the Nuremberg trials were thereby transformed from a judicial process conducted by the victorious powers against the war’s losers into a purely moral affair. Good made its reckoning with evil, and critical thinking did not get involved.
Moralism retained its paralysing grip on thinking throughout the whole century in every significant area. Not even the breakthrough of Foucault and Deleuze in the 1960s with a devastating Nietzschean critique of the existentialist agenda was more than a temporary reverse for moralism, because the gulag-trauma soon appeared as an angel of salvation. As a result, it was once again time to start up the existentialist carousel. It was time for yet another renaissance for individual opinions and self-pity. Every tendency towards criticism could be regarded as suspect, every critic could be sent to the confessional; in order to participate in the conversation you had to be able to demonstrate loyalty to the wreck of Rousseau’s utopianism. Yet again, critical thinking had lost the fight.
The second major problem hampering thinking during the 1990s was the collapse of capitalist normativity. During high capitalism, marriage had replaced salvation as the emotional core of western society. The height of happiness and the confirmation of social status was no longer devoting oneself to God, but doing your supreme citizenly duty as a pillar of the nuclear family which formed the cornerstone of society. Women’s role was to be seen and chosen by responsible men, and thereafter to play the supporting and servile female role which was an indispensable part of the project. Romantic fanaticism forced out its religious counterpart. All of society’s production of ideology, all of the mass media machinery, sang the praises of the nuclear family, the familial patriarch and romantic fanaticism. Strict censorship and self-censorship kept the range of entertainment on offer within acceptable bounds.
But these bounds were broken by capitalism’s inherent contradictions in the form of its increasing atomisation of society in order to maximise consumption and its increasingly noticeable focus upon the individual: the more households there are, the higher consumption will be. Stability could not be reconciled with productivity. And the situation of women had changed dramatically with the Second World War. Women had been forced out to work and had thus become accustomed to a considerable amount of economic autonomy. In line with increases in welfare and educational standards in the industrialised nations, the birth-rate fell at a corresponding rate. The decline of the manufacturing sector and the rise of the service sector has benefited women at the expense of men, and the traditional male role as breadwinner and head of the family was further weakened. With the wholesale breakthrough of interactivity, even the patriarchal structure itself was undermined; power became more a question of argument and dialogic consequence than of a predetermined position in a hierarchy. The classical patriarch simply no longer appeared credible.
In the climate of the time, the historical subjugation of women became an effective instrument of power: as a so-called vulnerable group, significant favours could be gained in the form of quotas and other special treatment. The rage of feminism against the patriarchal order assured women as a collective a prominent position in the public arena. The women’s movement soon gained a number of imitators, first and foremost the gay movement, which proclaimed the cause of equal rights for homosexuals in a world suffused by the heterosexual norm. These pugnacious movements soon gained a foothold in the universities, and as a result even academic discourse was transformed into an arena for a free-for-all of the special interest groups which already dominated the media landscape and political debate.
However, this constituted another devastating attack on critical thinking. Every attempt at reason in the form of systems and larger structures was branded as oppressive by definition, and rejected out of hand. The consequence was a sort of absurd competition in relativism, and total triviality was the cost of no-one feeling insulted or offended. Every minority trumpeted its own special qualities and declared loudly how badly off it was. Everyone had been violated, everyone sued everyone else, demanded apologies and compensation for real or imaginary past wrongs. States and companies which did not want to appear insensitive gave way. Only when it became quite clear that neither a feminist nor any other minority perspective was capable of an analysis of the global transformation constituted by the interactive revolution, was it possible to discern a pathway out of this minority hegemony.
The third problem hampering creative thought through the 1990s was the division of the academic world. Political power was, at least formally, responsible to its citizens at regular intervals, and economic power was constantly at risk on the open market, which created a certain amount of transparency and competition in which the very worst forms of laziness and incompetence were done away with. Even if freedom of choice and influence were both limited in practice, at least there was a form of continuous quality control of a fairly basic model. But where the academic world was concerned, the third corner of the capitalist tripolar power structure, there was not a single sign of any regulatory instance. As a result, there was a complete lack of the necessary incentive to maintain acceptable quality of activity.
The universities willingly gave way to external pressures for faster through-flow, low costs and high marks for everyone, particularly to those belonging to some sort of minority. Where internal tensions were concerned, complaisance was the dominant strategy. When the developing plurarchy caused conflicts within the different academic disciplines during the late 1900s, and when it was no longer possible to maintain full control over the theoretical constructions, these disciplines were chopped up into an endless number of sub-departments rather than having the conflicts between them brought out into the open, which might have led to the maintenance of at least a minimal level of competition, and higher standards. For reasons of comfort, it was decided to nurture and amplify symbolic but illusory conflicts, and to keep quiet about genuine theoretical oppositions. When no-one could see any personal benefit in criticising or competing with the system, criticism dried up entirely.
The consequence was a harmless, insipid multitude, an acute inflation of prefixes, an increasingly desperate excavation of increasingly peripheral niches. As more and more advanced research moved to private laboratories, and more and more qualified intellectual discussion moved to closed networks and think-tanks tied to particular business interests, a rapidly escalating crisis of confidence set in. For the developing netocracy, the academic system seems to be primarily a form of preservation, where the averagely intelligent and discerning are offered occupational therapy so that they do not cause trouble out in the world of real work, or disturb political stability. Degrees and diplomas are therefore rapidly losing their sociometric value, and the knowledge which the universities and colleges have in their possession is gradually becoming more easily attained at ever decreasing cost. As a result quality is sinking still further, because young people possessing the type of talent which is really in demand are staying away in ever greater numbers.
The fourth and final example in our reckoning of the problems hampering critical thinking in late capitalism is the electronic mass media. The medium is, as Marshall McLuhan asserted in the 1960s, to a great extent also the message. This means that the dominant mass media have fundamentally altered our mental environment; that the forms for media consumption are of greater interest that the actual content in one instance or the other, and that the media has its own internal agenda which is entirely independent of either its owner’s or its broadcaster’s own intentions. The form of communication influences our thought-processes and our acquisition of knowledge, some ideas allow themselves to be expressed and transferred more easily than others in a new media landscape, and, as a result, the frame around what and how we think is adjusted. Totalitarianism is, for instance, intimately connected with effective one-way communication, propaganda is irreconcilable with large-scale interactivity. Both the Nazi apparatus of oppression in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, and the genocide in Rwanda during the 1990s are therefore difficult to imagine without the radio as the dominant mass medium in these societies at the time in question.
Television was the medium which achieved almost seismic change during the second half of the twentieth century. When, for instance, politicians moved onto television, political discourse changed and its innate preconditions altered radically. Cosmetics became a more important subject than ideology to the media-oriented politician, as Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Political debate became, as a result of the form of the television medium, more a question of who was wearing a nice tie, or who seemed pleasant, than a matter of attitudes to certain matters of policy. This depended upon the fact that policy matters proved to be too complicated for television, other factors stole the majority of the attention even during an extremely serious presentation. It was not a question of whether the producer was serious or not, it was all to do with the form of the medium. Since the message had to be adapted to the medium, in reality it became something entirely different, often something which had shown itself to work before in that medium. Politics became, like journalism and everything else which took place in a culture where television functioned as the metamedium – in other words: the medium which set the daily agenda and defined which information had the right impact – merely another type of more or less successful television entertainment.
In a cultural climate where television was the sun around which everything else revolved, the conditions for critical and creative thinking were not ideal, since a talent for complex reasoning on several levels was simply not rewarded as much as it had been during the heyday of the printing press. Other things, such as nice neck-ties, were more important. The explosion of mass interactivity brought with it fundamental changes, changes that it is difficult to gain an overview of and piece together. The need for analysis and a broad understanding is becoming acute, not least because it is possible to discern an increasingly general weariness with superficial visual media. The widespread use of word-processors has also entailed something of a renaissance for text, at the same time as this new text naturally exists in an entirely new context and therefore carries entirely new implications. Besides this, the competition for attentionality is becoming increasingly fierce. The future scenario is noticeably stratified: the netocratic elite will create favourable conditions for the sort of critical thinking which it finds enjoyable and useful, whereas the range of simpler entertainment for the consumtariat underclass will both grow and diversify.
The netocratic elite’s interests and legitimacy are closely related to affirmative nihilism. New values, constructed around the global empire, must form the basis of a new society in a global arena. Eternalism’s radical pragmatism is replacing both cynical nihilism and every notion of natural entitlements. Since affirmative nihilism is flexible in structure, it does not necessarily need to be scrapped with the next technological revolution, but can be equipped in a relatively painless way with new signatures, and can jettison exhausted values in favour of new, functional ones. With the advent of informationalism, mankind is for the first time in history constructing a value hierarchy in complete consciousness of the actual preconditions of the creation of value. This is the epoch-making aspect of eternalism’s radical pragmatism. The table is set for a new period of enlightenment, and informationalism’s ethically inclined netocrats are ready to take power from capitalism’s bourgeois moralists.