Regarding world-formation through capital-mediated processes, we can note that the present state of affairs has confirmed Dostoyevsky's anticipations about the moods of being in glass palaces. Whatever happens today within the domain of spending power takes place in the framework of a generalized ‘indoor’ reality. Wherever one happens to be, one now has to imagine the glass roof above the scene. Even exceptional events cannot escape this fact; the Twin Towers collapsed within the glass palace, and the Berlin Love Parades were palace amusements in a spacious Jeu de Paume, meaningfully guarded by a gilded angel that anachronistically reports a German victory in the West – the date must be so far back that even the ever-vigilant forces of political correctness forgot to demand the demolition of the triumphal column.
The capitalist world palace – the ultra-late Marxists Negri and Hardt recently re-measured it under the name ‘empire’, albeit leaving its outer boundary deliberately unmarked, presumably to invoke more effectively the chimera of an organic alliance between the outer and inner opposition – is not a coherent architectural structure; it does not resemble a residential building, but rather a comfort installation with the character of a hothouse, or a rhizome of pretentious enclaves and cushioned capsules that form a single artificial continent. Its complexity develops almost exclusively in the horizontal, as it constitutes a structure with neither height nor depth – hence the old metaphors of foundation and superstructure no longer apply. Nor can one speak any more of an ‘underground’ beneath this flat Babel; we have arrived at a world without moles.1 It would also be a misinterpretation, as already shown, to demand that the palace contain ‘mankind’ in its full numbers. The great comfort structure will certainly continue to integrate numerous new citizens over a long period by promoting the inhabitants of the semi-periphery to full members, but it will also reject former dwellers and threaten many of the spatially included with social exclusion, that is to say banishment from the preferred interior locations of the comfort context. Semi-periphery is present wherever ‘societies’ still contain a broad sector of conventionally agrarian-economic and artisanal conditions – most dramatically in China, where the epochal gulf between the agro-imperial regime (which still encompasses almost 900 million people) and the modus vivendi of industrial nations (which already includes over 400 million) grows deeper by the day.2 The situation is similar in semi-modern countries such as India and Turkey, where relatively affluent urban regions of a Western-consumerist orientation coexist with rural majorities comprising late medieval poverty populations. (One of several reasons why it would be an incalculable adventure for the European Union to admit the semi-peripheral country of Turkey to the crystal palace in Brussels.)
Though designed as an indoor universe, the great hothouse does not require a solid shell – in this sense, even the original Crystal Palace is a partially obsolete symbol. Only in exceptional cases do its boundaries manifest themselves in hard material, as with the border fence between Mexico and the USA or the ‘security fence’ between Israel and the West Bank. The comfort installation builds its most effective walls in the form of discriminations – walls of access to monetary fortunes that separate the haves and the have-nots, walls that are erected through the extremely asymmetrical distribution of chances in life and occupational options. On the inside, the commune of spending power possessors enact their daydream of comprehensive immunity with a consistently high and increasing comfort level, while on the outside, the more or less forgotten minorities attempt to survive amid their traditions, illusions and improvisations. One can reasonably say that the concept of apartheid, after its abolition in South Africa, was generalized to apply to the whole of capitalism by breaking away from its racist formulation and changing into an economic-cultural state that is difficult to grasp. In this state, it has largely managed to avoid scandalization.3 The modus operandi of universal apartheid involves making poverty invisible in zones of affluence on the one hand, and the segregation of the affluent in the no-hope zones on the other.
The fact that, by the most generous calculations, the crystal palace contains almost a third of the species Homo sapiens at the start of the twenty-first century, though probably only a quarter or even less in reality, is partly explained by the systemic impossibility of materially organizing the integration of all members of the human race into a homogeneous welfare system under the current technological, energy-political and ecological conditions. The semantic and charge-free construction of humanity as a collective of carriers of human rights cannot, for insurmountable structural reasons, be converted into the operative and expensive construction of humanity as a collective of possessors of spending power and comfort chances. Herein lies the malaise of globalized ‘critique’, which exports all over the world the standards for assessing misery, but not the means to overcome it. Against this background, the Internet – like television before it – can be characterized as a tragic instrument: as a medium of easy and global-democratic communications, it supports the illusory conclusion that material and exclusive goods must be equally open to universalization.
Naturally the global capitalist interior, commonly termed ‘the West’ or ‘the Westernized sphere’, also possesses architectural structures developed with varying degrees of artistry: it rises above the earth as a web of comfort corridors that, at strategically and culturally vital junctions, are expanded into dense oases for work and consumption – normally in the form of the open metropolis and uniform suburbia, but increasingly often as rural residences, holiday enclaves, e-villages and gated communities. For half a century, an unprecedented form of mass mobility has been gushing over these corridors and junctions. In the Great Installation, dwelling and travelling have entered a symbiotic relationship – as reflected in the discourses on the return of nomadism and the currentness of the Jewish legacy.4 Numerous holiday hosts, singers and masseurs offer their services as travelling companions in the liquefied life. If tourism today constitutes the pinnacle of the capitalist way of life – and the most profitable business sector worldwide, aside from the oil industry that makes everything else possible – this is because the largest part of all travel movements can take place in the calmed space. To go away, one no longer needs to go outside. Aeroplane crashes and shipwrecks, wherever they might occur, are practically always incidents within the installation, and are accordingly reported as local news for users of the global media. Journeys outside the Great Installation, on the other hand, are rightfully considered risk tourism, which increasingly often makes travellers from Western countries – as police and diplomatic records show – de facto accomplices of a kidnapping industry dressed up as civilization critique.
Demographically, as stated above, the capitalist interior encompasses barely a third of the earth's present population of seven billion, and geographically hardly a tenth of the total mainland area. The marine world does not need to be taken into account, as all the world's cruise ships and inhabitable yachts together only cover one millionth of the total water surface. Only the new Queen Mary 2, one of Cunard's newest luxury ocean liners, which set off on its maiden voyage to New York in January 2004, with 2,600 passengers on board, perhaps deserves a special mention: as a floating crystal palace, it proves that postmodernized capitalism does not lack any talent for showmanship. This challenging large vessel is the only convincing Gesamtkunstwerk of the early twenty-first century – even surpassing Stockhausen's seven-day opera cycle Licht, completed in 2002 – in that it encapsulates the current state of affairs with integral symbolic power.
Anyone who says ‘globalization’, then, is speaking of a dynamized and comfort-animated artificial continent in the ocean of poverty, even if the dominant affirmative rhetoric likes to pretend that the world system is all-inclusive by its nature. The opposite is true, for conclusive ecological and systemic reasons. Exclusivity is inherent in the crystal palace project as such. Any self-pampering endosphere built on stabilized luxury and chronic overabundance is an artificial construct that challenges probability. Its continued existence assumes a durable and, at first, more or less ignorable outside – not least the earth's atmosphere, which is used by almost all actors as a global disposal site. Nonetheless, it is certain that the reaction of the externalized dimensions can only be deferred, not permanently disabled. Accordingly, the phrase ‘globalized world’ applies exclusively to the dynamic installation that serves as a ‘lifeworld’ shell for the faction of humanity with spending power. Inside it, ever new heights of stabilized improbability are scaled, as if the competition between consumption-intensive minorities and entropy could continue endlessly.
It is thus no coincidence that the debate on globalization is conducted almost entirely in the form of soliloquies by the zones of affluence; the majority of other regions in the world barely know the word, generally speaking, and certainly not the matter to which it refers – except in its detrimental side effects. The vast proportions of the installation do, at least, inspire a certain cosmopolitan romanticism, whose most characteristic media include the in-flight magazines of the major airlines, to say nothing of other products of the international men's press. Cosmopolitanism, it can be said, is the provincialism of the pampered. The globetrotting mentality has also been described as ‘parochialism on its travels’. It lends the capitalist world interior its flair for openness towards anything that money can buy.
‘World interior’ [Weltinnenraum] is a term that Rilke coined in the late summer of 1914, in the context of a life-philosophically and Neoplatonically tinged poetic reflection on space and participation. It is not for nothing that the poem ‘Es winkt zu Fühlung aus fast allen Dingen’ [Almost All Things Beckon Us to Feeling] is one of the most well-known of his œuvre, containing the following lines:
Through all beings extends the one space:
world interior space. Silently the birds fly
through us. O, I who want to grow,
I look out and the tree grows in me.
I care, and the house stands in me.
As this is not the place for a poem interpretation, I shall content myself with pointing out that the compound Weltinnenraum was evidently perfect to describe a mode of world-experience typical of primary narcissism. Where this form of atmosphere becomes explicit, the actual environment and its imaginary continuation are poured out from the experiences of warmth and suppositions of meaning in an agile, high-spirited and de-differentiated psyche. It has the proto-magical ability to transform anything it touches into ensouled cohabitants of its universe. In this mode of experience the horizon is encountered not as a boundary and transition to the outside, but rather a frame to hold the inner world. The emanation of the soul can grow into an oceanic feeling of coherence, a feeling that could plausibly be interpreted as a repetition of the foetal sensation in an external scene. (The phrase ‘oceanic feeling’ was brought into circulation roughly a decade after Rilke's ‘world interior’.5) Let us note that the poet gave the preposition ‘in’ the unusual function of affirming the ego as an integral vessel or universal place – in direct contrast to Heidegger's analysis of being-in from Being and Time (1927), where the ‘in’ is used to express the position of ek-sistence, the state of being held out into the open. The opposition could be indicated by the terms ‘enstasy’ and ‘ecstasy’.
In Bachelard's Poetics of Space, Rilke's basic stance is associated with the experience of ‘intimate immensity’. Where these sensations can be had, the surrounding space loses its foreign quality and is transformed as a whole into the ‘house of the soul’. A space which is thus made soulful can legitimately be called a ‘friend of being’.6 For the topophilic temperament, spaces of this quality epitomize containers of a life that feels equally at home in its de-restricted environment or in a cosmic skin.
‘Word interior of capital’, on the other hand, should be understood as a socio-topological term that is here applied to the interior-creating violence of contemporary traffic and communication media: it traces the horizon of all money-dependent chances of access to places, people, commodities and data – chances based without exception on the fact that the decisive form of subjectivity within the Great Installation is determined by disposal over spending power. Where spending power takes on a shape of its own, interiors and operational radii sui generis come into being: the access arcades where spending-power flâneurs of all stripes go to stroll. The early architectural intuition of having markets in halls inevitably led in the early Global Age to the idea of the world-shaped hall, on the model of the Crystal Palace; the reaching-out into the hall-shapedness of the world context as a whole is the logical consequence of this.
Under the technical firmament, Adam Smith and Rainer Maria Rilke meet. The poet of the Great Interior encounters the thinker of the global market – whether by coincidence or by secret arrangement is undecided. As I do not wish to rely unduly on the term ‘encounter’, it will suffice to hint at a near-encounter. We shall begin with an apocryphal after-dinner speech by Adam Smith in honour of the British prime minister Lord North, the ominous ‘Glasgow toast’ (also known as the ‘pin speech’), which would have been given shortly after Smith's appointment as commissioner of customs in 1778; nonetheless, the text reproduced here is nowhere to be found in the Glasgow Edition of Smith's works and letters. It is followed by a lost letter by Rilke to an unknown noblewoman whose style and content indicate that it was written in the spring of 1922; needless to say, this too is absent from editions published thus far.
I shall leave it to the reader's theoretical imagination to extend the impulse lines of both documents far enough that they intersect at a virtual point in the semantic space of maturing Old European self-observation. With the help of the password ‘no capitalism without animism’, this point should be accessible from most workplaces with up-to-date equipment.
Document I, Adam Smith:
Esteemed gentlemen, I address you, my noble patrons, Chancellor, and all of you, friends of the sciences and the fine arts, on this festive evening at the request of our host to present to those gathered here a lecture on the true causes of the wealth of nations. Ah, most honourable Lord, how could I fail to notice that I would today fall victim to your sense of humour? Could I truly be so blinded by vanity that I did not comprehend the elegant trap you set for me in giving me the task of conveying in a few minutes what has cost me decades of arduous studies? But whence, gentlemen, should I summon the courage to attempt the evasion of an ambush devised by the noblest of friendships? What are friends for if one does not permit them, on occasion, to laugh at our expense? Thus I shall take heart and provide you a fragmentary answer by subjecting myself to the exercise of turning a long art into a table anecdote. As you will understand, gentlemen, I do so more for your amusement than for your instruction, and less out of my own boldness than out of respect for the laws of hospitality.
What, gentlemen, am I holding here in my hand? Strain your eyes and take your time, for what I am showing you to explain the alpha and omega of the science of the wealth of nations is truly a pin, an object that could scarcely be more profane, domestic or humble. And yet I claim that this slim something holds the sum of economic wisdom in our time if one only looks at it correctly. Should you now suppose, perchance, that someone is seeking to amuse themselves at your expense? By no means! I will elucidate for you how this dark aphorism is to be understood. Imagine a little-developed country, with no division of labour and no lively bartering, where everyone provides entirely for themselves: in such a country, there is no need to accumulate any capital or reserves. Each man satisfies his own needs as they happen to present themselves. If he is hungry, he goes to the forest to hunt. If his robe is worn out, he clothes himself in the fur of the next big game animal he slays. If his hut is beginning to crumble, he improves it as best he can with twigs and grass from his vicinity. Need I still explain that one would search in vain for pins in such a country, to say nothing of ten thousand other useful objects? There will be no needles here – firstly, because no one would know how to use them, and secondly, because it would not occur to any of the citizens to produce such an item, except in a flight of fancy that would result in neither regular production nor trade. Things would be entirely different in a country where the large majority of people had forsworn the old ways of self-subsistence. Truly, gentlemen, there are already countries whose inhabitants have set sail almost without exception on the open sea of labour division, if you will permit me to use this thoroughly British metaphor. Is it not a tremendous adventure if the businessmen and merchants of a nation decide to manufacture only such products as see the light of day purely for the purpose of being exchanged for other values? A madness, indeed, but a reasonable madness and a daring wisdom! Countless numbers have already embraced it, for a reason that can easily be appreciated: in this one case, there is far more sense in risk than in sluggish caution. Understand me well, gentlemen: in this order of things, every single producer of goods must be prepared to make his fortune and misfortune entirely dependent on the needs of others, who, for their part, base their own fate on the needs of strangers. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
See this pin, gentlemen! We can be quite sure that its producer did not create it for his own use or solitary pleasure. Without knowing any more about the man's circumstances, I will gladly wager that his needle fed him well, and perhaps even made him an affluent citizen. And why? Because the decision to place one's own well-being on the point of a needle inevitably led to an unheard-of increase in the art of producing such needles. An untrained worker could, even if he were serious and diligent, barely produce a single usable one in a day, or a small few at best. Now that needle production constitutes an independent industry, however, the specialization of the workers has brought about a rise in production bordering on a miracle. Not only the quantity, but also the perfection of the products deserve admiration. The one worker pulls the wire, the other stretches it, a third cuts it, a fourth sharpens it, a fifth files the upper end so that the head can be attached and so on, until at the very end one worker applies his zeal solely to packaging the finished product. The manufacture of a pin involves some eighteen different steps. I myself recently visited a factory in which ten workers were able to produce 48,000 needles every day, meaning that each of them proportionally made almost 5,000 – whereas a single worker, as I have said, would barely have managed one in the same time. It is in this ingenious division of labour and its equally ingenious new composition, gentlemen, that you should henceforth seek the final causes of the wealth of nations; in this and nothing else.
Admittedly, this vastly increased production and improvement of goods for exchange is not all that is required. For the specialized manufacture of goods requires a society of astute citizens who have developed their needs in all directions. Imagine, gentlemen, a nation with ten or twenty needle factories, each of them no less productive than my previous example: this would also require a population of needle-buyers, a population that, alongside a thousand other extraordinary demands, would also voice its need to be amply equipped with these prickly objects. The necessary numbers will not be small, as you can easily reckon, for each factory produces 48,000 needles on each of more than 300 working days every year, yielding roughly 15 million altogether. If this performance is matched with the same regularity in ten or twenty similar factories, the total production can be multiplied by this factor. A civilized people, an economist would conclude, is therefore a group of humans sufficiently cultivated to consume 150 or 300 million needles every year. Do you understand now? Do you see the consequences? What a flood of other riches we must at once see passing before our eyes, for, gentlemen, where needles are required in such great numbers, mountains of cloth will also be needed, entire halls of fine silk, the most spacious offices, filled with the textile treasures of the world, and gigantic storehouses full of garments, sheets, blankets and curtains in all varieties. It is clear to any observer, after all, that all this must be fastened together, which calls for needles, threads and tens of thousands of hands to fasten and cut whatever they grasp. We immediately see a mental image of countless elegant ladies attired in magnificent robes, turning this way and that in front of their mirrors. We do not only imagine the rich women, however, for the shop girls and maidservants also play their part in these coquettish movements. And consider the ships in the ports and the wagons on the country roads that move such treasures about the world! In short, our domestic needle industry could only achieve its highest performance once all these needs had awakened and grown to exquisite heights. Finally, other countries will also have to take note of our needle factories – indeed, they must envy us for them. Numerous merchants from all over the world visit the British Isles to divert our surplus into their regions. Who would continue to be surprised, then, that the unassuming needle is becoming a source of the greatest wealth for more than a few, and a sufficiently secure source of income for many?
Now, gentlemen, the time has come to utter the full truth about the modern system of needs! The production of such excellent and numerous needles, whether in this nation or another, could never have come to pass without the maturation of a plan in the heart of the first businessman: to stake his entire future on the manufacture of this mundane item. What acumen that manufacturer showed in realizing that a major new market was promising to open up! What courage, to take up a loan with a banker on a mere intuition so that he could pay for tools and machines! What persistence, to look for suitable buildings and seek out diligent workers who would devote their days to the factory, carrying out their procedures under the instruction of the owner and his subordinates! What skill, to choose the dealers, carters and agents without whose services the needles would never go out into the world, into other workshops and into the houses of their uses! What stoic strength, to compete year after year with producers of similar goods without losing heart – indeed, while reflecting constantly on ways to improve the product! To avoid any misunderstandings: I do not intend to praise only the diligent man whose active faith in the needle can offer the whole world such a useful item, provided it is willing to pay the natural price for it. More still, I wish to glorify the secret underlying the connection between all goods available for exchange on the markets. Gentlemen, my heart's greatest desire is that I might succeed in igniting the spark of wonder in you at the daily mystery of our age: join me in marvelling at the circumstance, so simple and yet almost incomprehensible, that millions of needles make their way from the iron mines to the huts, from the huts to the factories, from the factories to the offices and trading houses, and from the trading houses to the workshops and households where they prove their use, as trivial as it may seem, in manifold ways! In a fit of lyricism, one is inclined to become superstitious and indulge in the quixotic fancy of a higher world that shared in our own, and contained a race of needle spirits that accompanied the terrestrial needles in their metamorphosis like lucky daemons. But let us shake off the temptation of poetic images and look coolly at the order of things developing on the markets of this world! Does it become less magical when viewed with scientific eyes? Certainly not, gentlemen! The more soberly we regard the facts, the higher our admiration will rise when we see that not only the needles, but tens of thousands of diverse products trace their orbits with the most amazing punctuality, as if guided to their destinations by an invisible hand.
Esteemed attendees, I fear you must pardon me this bold image I used a moment ago – indeed, you will have to exercise further lenience when I go even further and say that this invisible hand not only guides the separate forms of goods, but in fact guarantees the larger connections between the objects produced solely for exchange in the strangest and most secure fashion. ‘For heaven's sake,’ you will exclaim, gentlemen, ‘has the speaker gone mad? Is he in his right mind to speak of an invisible hand that, coming from who knows where, dares to interfere in the markets to preserve order?’ You certainly have good reason to voice this objection, gentlemen, and yet I am bound by duty to reply that the most thorough examination of the markets has brought me to the assumption, indeed the firm conviction, that there must be a higher force of balance at work in them. Perhaps an analogy will make it easier for you to understand my deep belief. Think of the impertinent suitors who once forced Penelope to weave her bridal dress,7 certain that her husband Odysseus would never return! What anger and distrust these men must have felt upon realizing that a hidden hand undid every night what had been woven during the day. We are much better off today, gentlemen, as we have the prerogative of observing how an invisible hand fabricates the very same piece of work by day and by night, a cloth that is many thousands of times greater, more intricate, and richer in threads and patterns than the bridal dress of Ithaca – and many times more useful, for, as you know, that dress was never to be worn, for Odysseus ultimately returned home. How much more amazed we should be than that crowd of brazen guests competing for the favour of a matron! Whereas her own hand undid what she herself had woven, the world market, following rules that are still opaque for us, mends behind our backs what we dissolved when we entrusted our fate to the division of labour and to trade. Penelope, the cunning weaver, had the advantage over us because she could observe her own actions in both directions. It was she herself who wove and untied. We, however, only know about one side of our dealings. We provide the separate threads and must leave it to the market, the great weaver, and its magic hand to decide whether it will tie them together or cut them off. Gentlemen, I urgently advise you to cling for all time to the belief that the market will always know more about the fabric as a whole than we, with our vision limited to individual threads, can ever hope to grasp!
You will now ask, gentlemen, what bearing all this has on the art of guiding a great body politic, and I do not intend to deny you at least the outline of an answer. In a well-ruled state where the wastefulness of the unproductive is kept in check, there will inevitably be a general state of affluence that will be tangible even in the lowest classes of society. It must result if the rulers know better than to refrain from impeding the great loom and the invisible hand operating it. A rich state is the sum of its flowering cities; but the city is a constant fair in which its environs congregate to ply trade and study innovations. Happy are those nations which are already constant fairs today! Happy the world that will one day be a single great fair, filled with the noise of dealers and buyers! In that world, the philosophers will receive a hint from the needle-manufacturers that guides their thoughts in new directions. They will one day admit that the great treasure known since the ancients as human freedom is nothing other than the reflection of moving things on the markets, whose price, if I may say so, has brought them freedom. For objects, freedom means the possibility of changing owners, while freedom for humans means that they ransom themselves from the service of feudal lords and become owners of themselves.
Gentlemen, I have now done my duty. I beg you, devote a quiet hour to the paradox with which I closed my speech. It is indeed an unfathomable paradox that the freedom which is so precious to us is contingent on submitting to the needs of strangers. For today, let us banish the ghosts of the profundity that seeks to overstep the boundaries of good sense. We shall leave it to our German colleagues to descend to the darkest depths of existence and return to the light of day with fool's gold! Let us raise our glasses to our host, the noble chancellor of England! I know well enough how meagre the aperçu which I had the awkward pleasure of presenting to you. I am well aware that with my words, I am no less indebted to science than to your patience. Be lenient with my hasty speech. Grant me the extenuating circumstances that can apply to a speaker in my situation. But if, as a Scot among English gentlemen, I should have been miserly with my words, I shall certainly not spare any of my gratitude for the honour you have bestowed upon me with your attentiveness, the beautiful daughter of conviviality and manful seriousness.
Document II, Rainer Maria Rilke:
Most esteemed Countess, you magnificently lofty spirit, how I suddenly sense so powerfully your presence, now that I have made the decision to ease my soul and leave a secret in a place that can hold it without constraining it. For, this morning, your image came to my memory as if drawn up on threads from dark light by angels. In this hour you are as close to me as a house in which, as a youth, I spent many days. I feel as if I had been allowed to walk once more through this familiar casing of life, until I am shown the exact place where the secret I have brought with me can be deposited, to remain there and live as befits it. Well may you smile, noble lady, at this presumption that makes me an intruder upon you, albeit one who comes bearing a gift on this occasion. Make use of your inalienable privilege of being above poets' secrets and the flailing intimations that follow in their wake. Yet remain well-disposed to me in the magnanimous way that is your birthright, and whose existence has magnified the air I breathe since life showed me the favour of revealing you to me.
You will recall well how, some few months ago, I sent you a festive letter – one could almost call it an epistle – a letter completed while I was yet in the heights of Muzot, in which I gave you news of the Elegies' completion. I do not doubt that you still remember the significance of the event. How mistaken I would be if our pulses did not beat together that day! Perhaps the echo of that message I sent out reverberates once more in your memory? But of course, you remember my call to my friends, stunned by gratitude: that the number was complete, the noble ten, the holy decade, whose vessel I was during years of waiting, ripening and silence.
And now, most esteemed, noble lady, I must summon the audacity to confide in you what I have called my secret. I write down the following confession with a thin, exhausted hand, with a hand that withdraws in shame, even when it gives. That I finally utter it, so that it might thereafter rest in your smile: the Elegies were not ten in number, but eleven. O heavens, now it is written!
I searched my heart in vain to find explanations for this awkward superfluity. When the verses came to me, I wrote down in a storm, like one beside himself, all that I fancied was being dictated to me by earnest angels. Yet once those feverish weeks were past, I gazed upon the work with less burning eyes, but however often I counted off the divine series, there always leapt out one more than the providential ten.
Noble lady, forgive me if this disclosure strikes at your innermost core. I can scarcely bear the thought that this shared secret might give you a heavy heart! I assure you, it is impossible that you should be caused to suffer by what you learn from me! Consoled by this thought, I now present you, and you alone, a copy of the surplus poem, the eleventh. I know no other soul in this world to which I could so confidently entrust these orphaned verses. For what are souls, what are friends, if they are not also sanctuaries for lost poems! Show these lines to no one, or only to the rare few who come close to your heart. Should it so happen that a lonely and unique spirit encounters you, one who hungers for that inner reality whose late witnesses we will have been, you will understand in an instant what is to be done, without betraying your conscience or the poem that is now your silent guest.
Think of me some violet evenings when you wander the cliffs and the pull of heaven lightens your feet, and be full of the sensation that someone is close to you more quietly than ever, namely
your
RMM.
To stand forever beneath self-built roofs is
to be the prisoner of a freedom that it past.
The starry sky, oh, we have
sent it home to a
distant God who already rues having loved us.
In his stead we built arches of pride and
caution.
Where braces were once spanned between the stars,
there now stand the frameworks of bold iron art.
Glass without secrets represent the high blue,
Hand-made walls prop up the horizon,
as if the universe would end
where the works of men reach their limits.
Now, even for humans, there are only bars,
and no world behind millions of bars.
Once, albeit outside, in the old open
that grew around us over millennia,
where no engineer had more power than a
small animal which
feels the dominance of the open whenever it
follows the nearby tracks,
outside, I say, and back then it was the pure
truth when the verse
spoke to me: through all beings extends the one space.
I found all things there sworn to
be together,
all that is swayed imperceptibly in its place in
the same breath.
And like a wind that has left the house of summer
to bring the richer autumn,
existence for one another went through the
bodies of separated things.
The space, the one, ruled as the glorious
assembler, the most communicative god, who handed out souls
to everyone,
as gifts are scattered among the crowd at
princely weddings,
so that the poorest can take home their share.
Breathing like twins, the farmwoman's shoes stood
in front of the darkened room,
the hammer was still warm from valuable work
when it
lay in the workshop at night, no different from the sickle,
which glowed quietly
with usefulness, long after the harvest, until winter.
On every working morning, soul flowed from the
handles of the tools into
the hands of those who shared their dwelling with such quiet
household
effects, as weathered men share their beds
with the unspeakable scent of their compliant
women.
But now a fate has driven us out of the
ensouled.
Everything bought, I called out, threatens the machine.
We live in a machine,
and inner things have become the same as the outside,
as if the soul were but an exhaust fume irksomely
pouring from a loud engine.
Things curl up in themselves, buyable and cold,
like sick girls who have forgotten what love,
flowers
and seasons are.
Where once lived souls, insolence has moved in.
The ominous animals
hang, cooled-off meat, disappointed in the display cases.
These high living things, the earlier accomplices of our
existence, have ceased to look at us,
so that we now lack the witnesses that could
have sworn in silent wakefulness that we, like
them, are alive, listening so far,
so far inside.
All that lies scattered in the brightness of the hall now bears
a single price,
each object enclosed in its soullessness.
Each thing cries out to us how young and important
it is, as wanton as cheapness feigning expense.
Oh, the thing today no longer finds its
owner.
For to be buyable means: having forgotten how to belong
to the living,
and buying means lightly inviting things
home,
like guests for a single occasion whom one greets,
uses,
and never regards again.
If buying, selling, renting, letting, borrowing and lending are operations that affect all aspects of life in the Great Installation, it is inevitable that the accessibility of things through monetary mediation will produce a corresponding world feeling. First of all, one experiences an immeasurable increase in accessible objects, and last of all, the convergence of the world interior and the spending power space – with consequences for the status of the devices surrounding us on a daily basis. As soon as many previously non-purchasable things are pulled over to the buyable side, and some unavailabilities suddenly appear available and reversible, one feels forced towards the culture-critical exaggeration that all conventional values are subject to revaluation and devaluation. One should make it clear, however, that expanded commodity traffic does not automatically imply universal corruption: anyone who uses money to gain access to commodities, information and people substitutes irrevocable operations for lasting belonging.
This loosening must be comprehended and rehearsed. That ‘things’ from the world of belonging do not remain untransformed in their transition to the world of options is a fact mirrored in countless nervous reflections. One understands why it constituted one of the most disconcerting human experiences during the technological and monetary metamorphosis of the world: numerous observers of the period (including Baudelaire, whom Benjamin invoked as his chief witness) stated that things were cooling off and revealing a fake, wanton side. As if driven by their own malice, they suddenly seemed to be deliberately infiltrating humanity instead of remaining with a single organic owner. From that point on, treachery was in the air – as if things had committed some breach of fidelity by becoming commodities.
Walter Benjamin's Marx- and Baudelaire-inspired suggestion of interpreting prostitution not simply as a professional exploitation of the sexual illusion, but as a general mode of being among people and things in the money-driven world, responded sensitively to these connections – and twisted them in a manner that was itself not without illusions. By portraying money as a means of acquiring objects of desire as being in the wrong, he supported the anarchic suggestion that the best things should essentially be for free; he did not take into account that access through belonging – on which the utopian principle of zero charge is modelled – is by far the most expensive form of all. Benjaminism provides the historico-philosophical version of a fantasy among melancholy men: that, in the messianic age, whores and other deceptive surfaces might return to the mode of being of pure utility value.
If we sum up what we know about the great transition into the universe of money, it transpires how far all decisive dimensions of existence are modified by monetary mediation: we have access to places first and foremost as buyers of transport titles; we have access to data first and foremost as users of media; we have access to material goods first and foremost as owners of means of payment; and we reach people predominantly to the extent that we can afford admittance to the sites of possible encounter with them. These seem to be trivial observations; but the memory – by now a scarce one – of times in which money was not yet an all-pervasive factor proves that they are not. In pre-monetarily defined conditions, virtually all access to people and things depended on belonging to a group and its environment of things; before modernity, belonging was the price of the world. To have a world, one formerly had to let oneself be devoured by one's place. No access to people or things without possession through one's own culture (as it was later called in neutralizing fashion).
After the shift towards monetarily determined conditions, access came about far more readily through acts of self-purchase and by following offers or open addresses. Today one expects the successful to be capable of putting their allegiances in the background. The subject of ‘belonging’ is primarily brought up when individuals and groups feel excluded from financial advantages, and therefore seek recourse to an advantage of identity that can be had for free – being German, being Basque, being Serbian, or similar plumes that can be worn at no cost. Belonging, Zugehörigkeit, appartenance – words like these have good chances of becoming the losers' catchwords of the twenty-first century. Needless to say, it is not least this that makes them some of the most interesting terms of the future.
The psychosocial hallmark of successful groups in the world interior of capital lies in the adjustment from allegiances to options. This reform in the ontological status of things and people finds its cognitive expression in constructivism. One must constantly show one's awareness that whatever is presented as found is inevitably made. For any given thing or semblance of nature, brief instruction is sufficient to reveal its ‘construction’, ‘invention’ and ‘politics’. This dismantling of the ‘natural’ has inescapable consequences for human self-relationships – which is why fixed identities do not receive a favourable prognosis in the constructivist climate. Only losers still require fixed natures. This does not, however, mean that we can stop saying where we come from and how we situate ourselves within a larger framework.8
One can now understand why the way of life that weakens allegiances and reinforces options leads to a psychopolitical rearrangement of clientele in the comfort spheres of the Western and Westernized world – extending to the post-monotheistic remodelling of religious sentiment. Let it be noted: the Christianity of today is part-time monotheism, and the same applies to Judaism and Islam – even though these stagnating religions, which are forced to fall back on self-regulation and the cultivation of traditions, also have pronounced fundamentalist elements whose spokesmen, usually professional believers, like to pretend that God still has a use for the whole human being. In truth, money has long since proved itself as an operatively successful alternative to God. This affects the overall context of things today more than a Creator of Heaven and Earth ever could.
The most important metamorphosis of the modern psyche concerns the approval of egotism, which had been subject to an unshakeable ban during the entire age of lack and its holistic compensations. It was Nietzsche, the prophet of world-breaking, who gave the decisive response to this with his neo-Cynical doctrine of the revaluation of all values. The revaluation applies primarily to the self-referentiality of human nature, the ‘curvature into oneself’ which had to be condemned as a betrayal of the Lord, the collective and the order of things during the era of agro-imperial morality and metaphysics. Since the citizens of modern, prosperous states began to understand themselves as voters and free money-users rather than minions, the duty to participate in the ‘whole’ of altruism for the sake of the Lord and divine norms has shifted towards an openness to commodities and public issues – with the inevitable side effect that a tendency to take oneself seriously as customers, opinion-owners and carriers of personal qualities has spread among the ‘subjects’. This was registered first by the moral-critical authors from the eighteenth century onwards who discovered amour-propre and vanity fair as topics for endless commentary. The rich phenomenology of egotism in all social strata prepared for its moral neutralization. The analytical content of this literature led into Nietzsche's Gay Science, while its human-shaping surpluses contributed to demands for the Übermensch, whose modern equivalent is the cosmopolitan consumer.
In addition, what spirals out of control in the capitalist world interior is the inclination towards an end use devoid of ulterior motives; in the first uproar a hundred years ago, this had been termed ‘nihilism’. The name expresses the observation that consumption and disrespect are adjacent phenomena. And indeed, the consumerist metamorphosis of the ‘subject’ did create an awareness of the right to destroy the objects of consumption. The model for the revaluation of all values is the organic metabolism. In so far as all that is the case is defined by its absorption through the consumer, waste becomes the universal ‘result of life in all classes’ – in the words of Rameau's nephew, the forefather of neo-Cynicism. In this framework, revaluation always amounts to devaluation.
The same trend releases vague pantheistic and polytheistic forms of experience, as the global system favours persons without overly fixed qualities – and how could it be otherwise, when the task of the individual in the capital universe is to become involved in ever more numerous commodity offers, ever more diverse role play, ever more invasive advertising and ever more arbitrary art environments. The life of the market erodes convictions, monisms and forms of rugged primalness, replacing them with the awareness that possible choices and side exits are available at all times. The consequence is that the persons become paler and the objects more colourful; but it is the colourless who are called upon to choose between the colourfulnesses. To be sovereign is to decide the colour of the season. The discourse on the ‘flexibilized human being’ laments these facts, while that on the ‘new age’ and ‘net age’ beamingly acknowledges them. Tomorrow's ideal possessor of spending power would be the anti-Bartleby: the person whose training with long lists of options had taught them to respond to most suggestions with a ‘Why not?’9 They would be the habilitated consumer. They could, to adapt the words of another of Melville's figures quoted above, declare: ‘The global market was my Yale College and my Harvard.’