If the ethics of action was inseparable from unfolding ‘history’, the unstoppable rise of the ethics of responsibility in the twentieth century bore witness to the post-historical situation in the crystal palace. Part of this situation is a barely removable user illusion which makes individuals believe that they are responsible not only for their own direct behaviour, but also for the side effects of local acts, however distant they might be. The mode of being in the great interior favours telecausal and telepathic ways of thinking in which local actions are associated with long-distance effects. In this manner, the concept of responsibility flatters all those who want to believe that despite the unmistakable negligibility of individuals in most matters, one's own actions are of central importance at all times and in all places. At the same time, it helps countless people frustrated by the course of things to demand that those not responsible be made responsible.
Nonetheless, it would be an unjustified concession to psychologism if one viewed the omnipresent appeals to responsibility and the stream of those volunteering to accept it as mere symptoms of megalomania and the manic rejection of complexity. In truth, responsibility, as its more profound thinkers have shown, is less a moral than an ontological, or even more a relation-theoretical concept: it seeks to anchor the responsive relatedness to the real other (as well as third parties and the multitude of others) in the structure of subjectivity itself. It is concerned as much with how the ‘you’ inhibits the reach of the ‘I’ as with the inhibition of action as such through a retrospective and prospective feedback of consequences, however far away from the scene of the crime they might manifest themselves. Responsibility points to the expulsion of actors from the paradise of a time before success asked you how you had achieved it.
The ethics of responsibility1 that developed from overheated theological motifs during the last hundred years, then, serves not only the self-aggrandizement or self-constraint of potential actors, but more still the exemption of actual actors from the unintended consequences and side effects of their actions. In its most current form, it advises actors to incur only as much guilt as can be carried within the framework of functional routines. The postmodernized version of the categorical imperative reads thus: ‘Carry out only those actions which, taking into consideration all sound motives for omission in your personal view and that of your functional area, must not remain unperformed.’ Behind the mask of the principle of caution, now universally embraced, a pragmatism with a wild past is coming into its own. One can say that it has passed through the complete cycle of modern attitude shifts from hysteria to cool.
Let us look back for a moment to the spirit of action as it presented itself to the mass audience before responsibility-theoretically wearing itself out: for the young Goethe, author of Faust, part I, initial being could still simply be claimed for ‘the deed’ – together with the vice-beginning known as strength, without which deeds would remain mere announcements. The ‘Faustian’ placing of the deed at the beginning mirrors the basic Modern Age realization that a logos without energy is as unsuitable a ‘world ground’ [Weltgrund] as an energy without spirit; the true, real starting element can only be found in an intermediate quality that encompasses both strength and knowledge (or its newer guise, information). The problem of how the deed finds its executor thus no longer arises for the moderns, as they assume that they always already find themselves as an ‘informed energy’; it is only unclear how this energy is disinhibited from a hesitant status to the completion of the deed. One answer to this has been known since the Faust chapbook from the late sixteenth century: an advisory contract with the devil gives the scholar free access to the most effective means of disinhibition in his time.
Goethe was able to follow on from this state of affairs: as is well known, his Faust, whom we first encounter at the moment of the transition from theory to magic, is initially only searching for slogans and means of one-sided self-expansion. He finds support in the tempter spirit, the vice-God, who assists him in disinhibition lege artis – and not only assists him, but accompanies him as an observer like an alter ego.2 The fire of metaphysical asymmetry burns visibly in Faust, placing the animated perpetrator on one side and the raw materials and empty spaces on the other. This lays down the direction of all expansions: ‘deeds’ are the expressive actions that confirm the subject's claim to a ‘world of its own’. World-positing through ‘the deed’ would henceforth call itself the ‘work’ in the intransitive or ‘life’ in the transitive sense, and these combine to form the ‘life work’. The other – whether neuter, male or female – offers the experiential, poetic and building material for this. ‘Art’ was the medium of unilateralism for the individuals.
With the aesthetic expansionism of the bourgeois age, the dream of creating works, of originating and positing worlds of one's own, entered its popular phase – and in this situation, there was no reason not to cast an occasional glance at the sixteenth century to help pluck up the courage to reach out into the nineteenth. Certainly no one on the real stages of Goethe's time who sought success as an inventor, entrepreneur or fictional monster had to confide in the devil any more. Any recent, popular history of culture was sufficient to get in the mood for striking out – and the history of great men saw to the rest. Faith in the natural law of the one-sided offensive had reached a level of dissemination that invited the crudest of vulgarizations. Since the nineteenth century, reports of success in war, seafaring, science and art could be read by ambitious people as direct invitations to imitation. Whoever could did what was necessary to enter their name in the record book of discovery, conquest, art and crime.
In reality, the twilight of the perpetrators had already begun by Goethe's later years. The injured world had begun to make acting subjects liable to recourse; even in the most banal of all seduction stories, the ‘Gretchen’ affair, the expressive professor, confronted with the fatal outcome of his whim, did not get off without remorse. Goethe's more attentive readers could not fail to notice that Faust was not a German heroic play on the tragically great thinker-perpetrator, but rather a drama of resignation. It described in unmistakable terms how the hero is reminded of the limitations we so like to call ‘human’. It dealt with a universally pondered self-denial that enabled the wisdom form of modernity, namely self-withdrawal amid expanded ability, to gain its initial outlines. This renunciation joins the pre-hubris of the naïve mind with the post-hubris of the subject with experience of itself and the world; the second humility, having travelled around the world, returns to the first. Nothing remains of the offensive centre but the now objectless effort-making, which can only strive, but no longer succeed. Hence Faust, part II, offered the tale of an actor who pushed his expansions ahead in all directions of ambition, only to recognize at the end of his excursions and euphorias that he needed redemption through the unavailable other after all. The twilight of unilateralism's idols, the epiphany of the monstrous as responsibility in the resonant context of the world: Faust's postmodernity.3
All this can be expressed in clear process-logical terms: while ‘history’ gained momentum with the flaring up of one-sidedness, which speaks to those around it in the dialect of first strikes, expeditions and incursions, post-history had to devote itself entirely to the discovery and toleration of feedbacks. Every beginning has a magic to it, certainly, but what to do when the hour of side effects has come? Now a second phase of world-taking, as self-withdrawal, begins – dominated by the neo-Erinyes of our time. After the ancients renamed Alecto (‘the implacable’), Megaera (‘the grudging’) and Tisiphone (‘the vengeful’) as the urban Eumenides (‘the well-meaning’), it is now time to give them new names once again, in the spirit of the world system. In future they will be called Feedback, Multi-laterality and Responsibility. These are the discreet mistresses of post-historical density, always pulling strings from the nearby A to the remotest B, dragging effects back to their causes by their hair, immersed in accounting, paling over cost analyses, lost in multifactorial lists, sunk into the fathomless interplay of karma and statistics, assessing the damage done and forecasting further losses in case things go on as they have started.
Corroborated by the new state of things, the postmoderns believe in that which has no beginning: almost anywhere, they can now presuppose the existence of intricately tangled situations in which it is all but impossible to trace back who started what, with whom and with what intention. Most of them sense somehow that the isolation of one originator, assuming one could get hold of them, would only create an even knottier conflict. This does not rule out reminding proven villains of the limits now and again; nor is there any reason not to give an obstinate repeat offender in the arts a prize to honour their life's work. There no longer seems to be any real use for the position of the author, however, that great one-sided figure who molests the world with works, as everything is already fully integrated into the post-unilateral forms of action and thought, where resonance is experienced as a deeper phenomenon than authorship; one indication of this is that the more quick-witted protagonists in creative fields today present themselves either as mere artisans or as switchpoints in the intertext. Originality, like monocausality, is a concept for people from yesteryear; it deserves our smiles as richly as the pure truth which the honest of yesterday still want to speak today.
In this situation, the inhibiting factors seem equiprimordial with the ‘originary’ impulse, or, more precisely put, they precede it just as the commentary surpasses the text and the stage production tears the play to pieces – and rightly so, as every author must pay for the wilfulness of writing their work one-sidedly and without permission. It is truer than ever, furthermore, that postmodernity retroactively forbids ‘history’ for reasons that, as we now see, transcend insurance concerns about historical action.
As long as ‘history’ was able to unfold under its early conditions, it asserted the primacy of the attack wherever it could. This initially required no more than the notorious jingoist trinity – the ships, the men, the money too – as well as offensive arms, writing tools and embedded historians. What follows is a natural consequence of the premises: in relaxed situations, the vectors of action go out into the open, the energies flow into the positing space expressively and without much feedback, the world still has the quality of white paper waiting for the quill's attack, the deeds do not return to their doer – and if they do occasionally catch up with them, the closed loop is either celebrated as a jubilee or meditated upon as a tragedy. The tragic feedback and collection of the deeds in the garland of memory, however, only characterize the exceptional situations. In normal cases, however much the bourgeois use of tragedy assists the inhibition of perpetrators, the causes disappear in space like arrows without return – a constellation that is valued by avant-garde artists, innovative criminals and first climbers of unconquered summits.
In post-historically dense situations, by contrast, every impulse is intercepted by its responses, not infrequently before it has properly developed. Everything that pushes forwards, that wants to go far and to build, is mirrored long before the spade first enters the soil in protests, objections, counterproposals and farewells; anything that attempts to be a measure is overtaken by the countermeasure. Most suggestions of reform could be implemented with a twentieth of the energy that is expended for their reformulation, watering-down and postponement. Hammering a nail into a surface requires the agreement of a committee which, before it approaches the actual nail question, selects a chairperson, deputy, treasurer, secretary, gender equality officer, and external member to represent the concerns of the regional Ethics Council for Technology Assessment and Environmental Protection. Today's governments are groups of people who specialize in pretending that one can energetically advance matters in one's country within the general horizon of inhibition. Similarly, artists are usually only concerned with upholding the semblance of innovation. Unauthorized originality leads to a note in one's personal file. The people one considers criminals are de facto usually those caught in the act of committing their final wilful deed. Need it be emphasized that these conditions, even if they seem bizarre at first, are almost entirely beneficial?
In the light of such circumstances, therapy groups can be considered the real training grounds for post-history. There everyone can learn to say how they feel when someone else does and says this or that, preferably before their counterpart has made any proper utterance. Here one can learn lessons for life in the hyper-fed-back world. The great inconsideration must go abroad if it hopes to find any place with the conditions it requires in order to enjoy the ecstasies of one-sidedness. Perhaps its flight will take it all the way to Brazil, where the counterpart of the state is not society, but rather the forest. But even ‘the forest’ will soon no longer be a reference to the response-free space; before long, it will represent a problem with so many repercussions on the whole that it too will fail as a sheltering zone for the refugees of side effects.