Where there is so much freedom for everybody, it may be asked how, then, the ups and downs of wanting and not wanting are regulated. Where the market rules, it is managed by interests. These express themselves in the media; they either proclaim or are silent about what is wanted, or what is not. (The media functionaries of the East now admit dismissing through silence to be their principle, which they remorsefully do not wish to implement any more. Comment in November.) What is wanted is described here. More important at this point is how they react to that which is not wanted. If freedom rules, equality for all and, to a certain degree, a social issue of general accessibility and advancement of the arts is proclaimed, if certain privileges of quality are abolished, how then are the public relations of the market and acceptance of art ordered so that the art which one wishes to sell is, insofar as it is still art, not impaired? The mechanism of democratic censorship is complicated, since there are no censors in the form of state officials, and no comprehensible rules. One often hears of the consensus of all democrats, where all are united, like the churchmen of the Middle Ages against the devil. However, the devil and hell were represented, even beautifully. There were burnings, excommunications, yet here we spoke of censorship. Today, free of that, how the torture wrought by the rules of the game of their democracy proceeds. For men are inclined to have opinions, to want to implement them, to copy them, to organize this power — and this increases the less they themselves create, and invent, but are nevertheless encouraged in Enlightenment schools to make more and more, to write, to manage or to administer. For a start, democratic censorship is different from the earlier censorship in that it is not conscious of itself, indeed, thinks that it does not exist, and that everything is free as never before.
In the case of the unconscious, a trick or deliberate infamy, whose, in whose interest?
First, the mechanism, and how it functions. Art, once it was liberated from the old hierarchies and privileges, thus offered free space ever since Goethe’s death86 — which people greeted happily on the part of Young Germany,87 as they called themselves, who were also Heine’s enemy,88 and therefore also of poetry, art being then free for politicization according to judgments based on people’s attitudes, according to who helps our interests, meaning the poor, in the sense of hovel-dwellers, as they pretended, “our” people and ideas, according to who “is OK” or not, as one says today. These people were few, but as functionaries of public opinion, for they possessed the power of the newspapers that they published, this minority colonized the minds of men, of the democratic majority, with the instruments of opinion. Thus, once again, the rule of the few over the majority. Anyone who went along with them got power, an audience, and anyone who did not was out of the game. That holds true right up to the indisposed occasional protest voters, but just as there are yes-men even in democracy, so there are also “collaborators,” and they are very influential. That is the mechanism. The method is open battle or killing by silence. And, even when a work of art is presented to the public which contravenes the ruling aesthetics, it is retained without consequence, by avoiding any discussion of its difference, or through a total coordination, or a united front of silence.
All self-proclaimed principles of diversity of opinion, of joy in experimenting, of information at least, are immediately revealed when the consensus on which they live is in danger, for example that of the prevailing aesthetics that has existed since 1945. And thus it is they themselves who mutually sustain it, whether through the installation of equality, or through whispering or mutual journalistic observations, which push the careers forward. It is in them, because only in this way is the system maintained which knits them together. It holds and sustains, until when?
It used to be a few over all; today over all the errant men, led into error, men who have had their happiness wrongly defined to them. For anyone can go along with it, conform privately as a reader, viewer, or consumer and has free access to the caste of the opinion-washers, but anyone who does not is out of the game. Fear of isolation and pressure threaten. But who dares to do that outside of a cloister and hermit culture, and this silence is only a model of the essential lie of democracy, from the bottom up. For men are really still full of the nights of bombing, the grief of escape in the misery and distress of their losses, which did not begin only in 1945, and which wait to be appealed to, deep within, experienced by father and grandmother silently, and daily covered up.
Only art would be in the position to tear the masks from these lies, and it should be as a charge, which is the most feared. Yet obedience to public opinion marches on. One often asks oneself why something occurs without anyone saying something. And it occurs in the mind of someone who wants something, or just thinks. One does something to serve one’s superior, the rulers, the public, and on the side of the victor is ranged not only the minority: he must be powerful, and he wants to have something, he wants everybody to do and provide something. Thus does the leader act, and so do the bosses and so the nameless systems that do not need a leader anymore. The unuttered will, the guilt that cannot be borne, which hounds everyone. Questions without answer. Irresponsible society. The lie of irresponsibility is that which everybody bears and which binds everything together in the silence of mutual smiles.
Sometimes the images that freedom allows offer a warning. From afar, in the evenings, on TV, we have the news from distant China. Anyone who stands out is caught, led through the streets, placard around his neck, is forced to his knees with bound hands, and shot in the head, and life goes on. People’s liberation army. In the name of the people. People who go shopping, businesses, if not this one, then others are heard: intimidations, enticements, far away, which can happen to anyone, watching without seeing, and one knows that everybody stood even a short while ago on the same street, on the same square, an entire people who now shoot, is shot, takes a look, goes shopping, sells, who are really thinking of something entirely different, in every house, quite close by, to eat and drink at our home. We have it better, the pluralism of freedom, consensus, woe to one who does not go along with it.
Keeping silent as the last, the only rescue from business, and being silent as the life desired in this world, the deformed. But the death too of art and all that it once wanted. Endgame, last lap of the wait.