Paul Taylor
In later years, Arendt agreed that some of her catchwords were erroneous or exaggerated. Most mistaken was the famous or infamous subtitle on the cover of her book. The phrase "banality of evil" entered popular dictionaries and books of familiar quotations. In retrospect, she was sorry she had used it. It had led her into an ambush ... She ... stood accused of exculpating the murderers and offending the memory of the dead
(Elon 2006: 100).
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear
(Gramsci 1971: 276).
This chapter uses Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil in order to explore the relevance of her analysis of banality to the ideological role played by the contemporary media as a result of its systematic promotion of the banal at the expense of the substantive. Banality is shown to be an essential feature of the capitalist media system's standard operating procedure (SOP) that, pace Dwight D. Eisenhower, ultimately serves to produce a crisis of public discourse that can best be described as the Military Industrial Non-Complex. The crisis of the media in this banality-generating form paradoxically stems from the fact that there is no apparent crisis caused by a lack of substantive meaning, instead, widespread mediated banality generates examples of Gramsci's morbid symptoms in the form of two inherently passive outcomes:
Before thinking about the contours of a desirable alternative post-capitalist media scenario, it is first necessary to address these morbid symptoms that manifest themselves in the current body politic and which any post-capitalist media system would need to cure. To do this. Arendt's account of Eichmann's trial, and its subsequent reception, is examined in the light of the theoretical distinction Žižek makes between the categories of objective, subjective and symbolic violence. It is suggested that, taken together. Arendt and Žižek's analyses provide the basis from which some intellectual purchase can be gained on the otherwise profoundly destructive yet concept-retardant phenomenon of banality.
Adolf Eichmann ... medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench
(Arendt 1992 [1964]: 5).
The resultant storm broke out mainly because of Arendt's portrait of Eichmann as a diligent yet "banal" bureaucratic criminal. (The term "banality" actually appears only on the last page but is implicit throughout the entire book.) Eichmann's mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn't even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the common German term unheimlich, which, can also be translated as "uncanny"). He was like a "ghost in a spiritualist sauce." What was more, he had a cold and was sneezing inside his bulletproof glass cage
(Elon 1996: 100).
Elon described (in a subtitle of his own) Hannah Arendt' s now (in)famous phrase "The banality of evil" phrase as The Lethal Subtitle because of the furore her book caused upon publication amongst World Jewry. Now a well-worn expression an under-acknowledged consequence of this over-familiarity is the inattention it fosters towards the full political implications of banality produced by today's media on a globally industrial scale. There is a tautology-infused irony to be found in the fact that in itself, the media reception of Arendt's book about banality's evil represents an illustration of the media's evilly banal effects. Arendt's original phrasing is thus reversed in this chapter's own subtitle in order to reassess more precisely the relationship between banality and evil. "The banality of evil" implies that evil may persist despite a banal form. "The evil of banality." helps to focus upon the nature of evil that occurs because of banality. In what follows, it is argued that, notwithstanding Arendt's regret at her choice of words, any sense of error and exaggeration to be associated with the phrase stems, not from Arendt's inaccurate choice of words, but rather, a self-serving defensive response from a mass media system both ill-equipped and poorly motivated to reflect upon its own innate involvement in the highly profitable business of banality.
The paradoxical contrast between Eichmann's underwhelming, wheezy appearance and the enormity of his crimes encapsulates the crucial problem encountered when we try to understand objective processes using subjective criteria—a problem greatly heightened by the fact that the media's SOP is devoted to exacerbating this conceptual incommensurability. In keeping with McLuhan's adage, "The medium is the message," the true significance of the media's SOP lies not in the nominal content being represented but the merging of form with content. Rather than risk a banal discussion of the finer points of trite and drearily predictable media content, readers are invited to draw upon their own direct daily media experiences in order to save time for a deeper discussion of the more profound political implications of the form/content imbrication that lie behind such banality. Just a few perennial, illustrative examples of my own would include: the uncritically naturalized accommodation of viewers to an ultimately imbecilic use of images (the de rigeur presence of journalists standing outside [frequently closed] significant buildings to bolster a story's gravitas); the routine reduction of structural political issues to personalities and/or personal feelings; and. the incantatory use of sound-bites and/or clichés, for example, the way in which the political relationship between the US and the UK cannot be discussed by British journalists without the ritualistically obsessive invocation of the phrase "the special relationship."
Arendt's use of the word unheimlich (uncanny) to describe Eichmann is significant. Freud's explanation of the term describes the close association of the phrase with its opposite root-meaning:
we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light
(Freud 1919).
Thus, the uncanny is troubling not because it is shocking and unexpected, but precisely the opposite—we see something we have always known but from a disturbingly new perspective. The uncanny nature of the Holocaust stems from the fact that this most egregious episode in humankind's cruelty involved such a mind-numbing number of victims not primarily because of the blood lust of the sort of killers witnessed in other historical genocides, but rather, because personifications of calmness like Eichmann were able to oversee, with exemplary levels of bureaucratic efficiency, processes that were highly "reasonable" in so far as one is able to forget the specific tasks to which those processes were applied. The Holocaust's horror frequently acts as a sort of Medusa's face that paralyzes consideration of the the almost surreal magnitude of mass murder. The extreme obscenity of the Holocaust as a particular event tends to blind us to its status as the ultimate warning of more general, universalizable dangers. Arendt 's recognition of Eichmann's essential banality forces us to consider the specific role played by general processes and the remoteness from reality and morality that they are able to engender.
For Zygmunt Bauman, we should resist the all too understandable temptation to quarantine off considered analysis of the Holocaust's roots in everyday life because of its atypically horrific nature. Dwelling solely upon its inhuman aspects risks overlooking the otherwise important, traceable links that exist to some of the deepest cultural norms of modernity:
These pictures ... represent only ail extreme manifestation of a tendency which may be discovered in all bureaucracies, however benign and innocuous the tasks in which they are currently engaged. I suggest that the discussion of the dehumanizing tendency, rather than being focused on its most sensational and vile, but fortunately uncommon, manifestations, ought to concentrate on the more universal, and for this reason potentially more dangerous, manifestations
(Bauman 1989: 102).
For some, the mere use of the Holocaust for wider illustrative purposes is deeply problematic. However, this chapter is motivated by the belief that there is an intellectual duty to. as Arendt puts it, avoid "interpreting history by commonplaces" (Arendt 1994: viii [emphasis added]), but that this includes the duty to recognize and interpret the role of the commonplace in history. An unnoteworthy, bespectacled figure in the centre of one of the most uncommon events in history. Eichmann's uncanny effect upon Arendt came from his embodiment of the thoughtless disassociation from reality that is a recognizably integral part of wider modem technological society and. in particular, a media system devoted to a naturalized institutionalization of thoughtlessness.
"[Eichmann] is actually stupid," [Arendt] wrote Jaspers, after listening to one of Eichmann's exhortations "but then, somehow, he is not" (Er ist eigentlich dumm aber auch irgendwie nicht)... Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil
(Elon 2006: 96 and 97).
... for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." ... It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period ... That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent ill man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it ...
(Arendt [1963]1992: 287).
The above excerpts point to a crucial feature of the contemporary experience of banality: the simultaneous appearance of stupidity alongside a distinctly non-stupid ability to frustrate thought. A practical illustration of this reason-defying process in action is provided by the reception of Arendt's book itself. Her attempt even just to portray (not even explain) the paradox of simultaneous banality and horror was lost in manufactured controversy as critics wilfully failed to see the difference between a diligent attempt to understand and a reprehensible desire to exculpate. Despite Arendt's insistence that she spoke "on the strictly factual level," her profoundly serious discussion of the relationship between evil and banality was subjected to a series of misrepresentations, selective emphases and distortions ("spin") that now function as essential features of the media's basic grammar. Such manipulations are. of course, eminently possible in such non-mass media discourse as one-to-one face-to-face and written communication, but. within the mass media system those manipulations are much less conscious and unreflective because they are inherently contained within its forms. True openness to Arendt's discussion of banality raises a series of uncomfortable questions relating to the media's role in the systematic promulgation of sheer thoughtlessness—the systematic nature of w hich, is indeed by no means identical with stupidity.
To provide at least the beginnings of the explanation and theory of banality's ideological function that Arendt sought we turn to Žižek's conceptualization of violence:
This is what we commonsensically understand by the notion of violence and is defined by Žižek as that which is "performed by a clearly identifiable agent" (Žižek 2008:1). In other words, subjective violence does not refer to any notion of an excessively personal interpretation of what constitutes violence, it is violence that can easily be attributed to an individual source.
Žižek subdivides objective violence into two parts:
Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence
(ibid.: 2).
In our society of the spectacle, the invisibility of objective violence makes it media-unfriendly. Typically cursory attempts by TV News to provide historical context to its items are dominated by metronomically metonymic images. Complex cultural histories become inseparable in our mediated mind's eye with reductively familiar pictures—bombed-out downtown Beirut emaciated African babies. Uzi-toting Israeli soldiers and keffiyeh-wearing Palestinian stone throwers. The media propagates a fundamental form of mediated violence through the way in which its explicit spectacles supplant sustained consideration of their primary causes—past and present. For example, the mundane day-to-day violence of life under France or Russia's pre-revolutionary Ancien/Tsarist Regimes is typically overlooked in documentaries in which the objective political causes of violence are supplanted by sustained fascination with subjective experiences of postrevolutionary Terror. The same can be said of the process of exclusion regarding the background level of global state-sponsored terror necessary for the continuation of "normal" international politics by other means—the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." In the latter case, the repetition of the banal creates the necessary conditions of thoughtlessness for war to be declared upon an abstract noun.
At her time of writing in 1963, Arendt described the 'permissive nature of a culture premised upon exposure and repetitious exhibition as values in themselves (cultural tendencies that have only increased since) and how, even in a trial devoted to some of history's most heinous crimes, this:
... permits the prosecutor to give press conferences and interviews for television during the trial (the American program, sponsored by the Glickman Corporation, is constantly interrupted—business as usual—by real-estate advertising), ... it permits frequent side glances into the audience, and the theatrics characteristic of a more than ordinary vanity, which finally achieves its triumph in the White House with a compliment on "a job well done" by the President of the United States
(Arendt [1963] 1992: 5).
Judging the ideological effects of the mass media has thus evolved from the yardstick of covert exploitation (the false consciousness of the proletariat) to this much more inchoate ideological ghost "in a spiritualist sauce"—a heavily mediated form of political thoughtlessness in which even the question of achieving scant justice for millions of racially-profiled victims is vulnerable to the ubiquitous and pervasive influence of sound-bites, advertising, and cheap theatrics.
The thing is, Schindler's List is about success, the Holocaust was about failure
(Stanley Kubrick).
I don't like the red coat; it gave me a queasy feeling the first time I saw Schindler's List. And I know that it was in the profound nature of Hollywood that the concentration camp story could only be told in a big, mainstream picture if someone found a story that had at least a touch of the upbeat. That was Oskar
Schindler (Thomson 2013).
In their above observations about the movie Schindler's List, both Kubrick and Thomson highlight the Symbolic violence typical of Hollywood's output. The film industry is designed to obfuscate the distinction to be made between subjective and objective forms of violence. The tritely optimistic nature of its output even extends to films about the Holocaust and demonstrate an innate need to privilege rare subjective sources of hope (Schindler) amidst the pervasively objective facts of continent-wide genocide. This is a general problem that persists within the media's SOP—the mismatch encountered when attempting to engage with themes of objective causality in a media system totally infused by subjective values. In Lacanian terms, the subject of the enunciation resists being separated out from the enunciated subject. It should be recognized that outside the purview of the media, rational consideration of objective processes are still not easily divorced from their grounding in subjective factors. Thus, in addition to Arendt's ill-received juxtaposition of evil and banality, Martin Heidegger's analysis of the essentially shared underlying nature of otherwise disparate objective processes (with radically different purposes and outcomes) and the censure it has generated also demonstrates the difficulty with which commentators struggle to disassociate subjective and objective considerations.
In subjective terms, Heidegger's initial membership of the Nazi party and preternaturally stubborn post-war refusal to apologize, create an obvious inducement to be biased towards any comments related to the Holocaust which he did in this much cited example:
Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same tiling as the blockading and starving of countries, the same tiling as the production of hydrogen bombs
(Heidegger 1949: 27 in Mitchell 2012).
The equivalence repeatedly asserted here with 'the same thing led to such representative criticisms as Davidson's observation that:
When one encounters Heidegger's 1949 pronouncement, one cannot but be staggered by Ms inability—call it metaphysical inability—to acknowledge the everyday fate of bodies and souls, as if the bureaucratized burning of selected human beings were not all that different from the threat to humanity posed in the organization of the food industry by the forces of technology
(Davidson 1989: 424).
Using the phrase "were not all that different. Davidson fundamentally misses Heidegger's central philosophical point by concentrating solely on Heidegger expression "the same thing as" to the exclusion of the crucial qualification contained in the immediately preceeding "in essence." It is with his use of this specific phrase that Heidegger draws attention to the fact that it is possible for activities which are vastly different in both their substantive content and the overt intentions that lie behind them to, nevertheless, still share a common underlying quality.
This is the argument succinctly conveyed in Heidegger 's statement from his The Question Concerning Technology essay, that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological"—in other words, once again emphasizing the notion of essence, there are many different forms of technological artefact, but, common across such diverse forms, there is an underlying commonality—the instrumental facilitation of an objectifying attitude towards human experience. The fact that Heidegger's reprehensible past makes him vulnerable to charges of heraldic insensitivity does not, on its own, explain away the persistence elsewhere amongst other prominent Jewish thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Bernstein of sentiments that, like Heidegger, also insist upon the wider and more generalizable significance of the uniquely industrial nature of the Holocaust. Thus in terms reminiscent of imagery present in Heidegger's work. Bauman argues:
Like even thing else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior if measured by the standards that this society has preached and institutionalized. It towers high above the past genocidal episodes in the same way as the modern industrial plant towers above the craftsman's cottage workshop, or the modem industrial farm' with its tractors, combines and pesticides, towers above the peasant farmstead with its horse, hoe and hand-weeding
(Bauman 1989:89).
Similarly, Bernstein pointed out that although:
We may find it almost impossible to image how someone could "think" (or rather, not think) in this maimer, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are "in essence the same" and where this can become "normal," "ordinary" behavior. This is the mentality that Arendt believed she was facing in Eichmann ...
(Bernstein 1996: 170).
It is understandable that in such an horrific instances as the Holocaust subjective factors cannot always be dispassionately removed from discussions of objective processes, and that there is a natural human tendency to seek to embody and anchor objective causes of violence in human subjects but it still remains true that Arendt's identification of Eichmann's striking banality raises important questions regarding the subjective embodiment of objective violence.
Arendt's comments on Eichmann's insipidness book-end her report. In her early description of the accused she points out how, "Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as 'normal'—'More normal, at any rate, that I am after having examined him,' one of them was said to have exclaimed ..." (Arendt [1963] 1992: 25) whilst in the Epilogue she states that:
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together
(Arendt [1963] 1992: 276).
Our pressing need to see in Eichmann some sort of psychosis in preference to confronting the full objective implications of his disturbing normality reflects a conflation of the subjective/objective categories of violence that present in such extreme form at Eichmann's trial, occurs much more naturally and unobtrusively as part of the media's SOP. The uncanny resonance Eichmann's terrifying normality has with our situation today can be found in to repeat once again, the similarities in essence (if not necessarily equivalent outcomes) to be found between the way in which his banality produced a barrier of thoughtlessness that protected him from reality and the ever more sophisticated forms of mediated standards and codes that currently screen our lives, both literally and figuratively.
... Ins cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence
(Arendt 1978: 04, cited in Assy 1998).
Sex is everywhere else to be found, but that's not what people want. What people deeply desire is a spectacle of banality. This spectacle of banality is today's true pornography and obscenity. It is the obscene spectacle of nullity (nullité), insignificance, and platitude. This stands as the complete opposite of the theater of cruelty. But perhaps there is still a form of cruelty, at least a virtual one, attached to such a banality. At a time when television and the media in general are less and less capable of accounting for (rendre compte) the world's (unbearable) events, they rediscover daily life. They discover existential banality as the deadliest event, as the most violent piece of information: the very location of the perfect crime. Existential banality is the perfect crime. And people are fascinated (but terrified at the same time) by this indifferent "nothing-to-say" or "nothing-to-do," by the indifference of their own lives. Contemplating the Perfect Crime—banality as the latest form of fatality—has become a genuine Olympic contest, the latest version of extreme sports
(Baudrillard, 2001).
Baudrillard's s phrase "existential banality and Dovey's "the pre-digested detail of banal everyday life" (Dovey 2000: 1) describe in similarly cogent terms the excessively personalized and trivial approach, tone and content that bad enough in the realm of entertainment programmes, are now also increasingly merging with the previously distinct category of "serious" news programming creating such neologisms as factual entertainment and docu-drama. This is a practical illustration of Baudrillard's contention that, in practice, modern communications technologies actually serve to fabricate non-communication. The dominant value they sponsor is tautology—that which is transmitted is privileged by virtue of the fact that transmission is society's defining cultural feature. The result is a crassly mediated reduction of the full ambiguity and open-ended potentiality of unmediated reality—a quality Baudrillard terms seduction—that has now been replaced by the pornographic excessiveness of media representations. Ratio is the term with which Kracauer describes the industrially standardized nature of mass media capitalism when he suggests, in presciently pre-Baudrillardian terms, that: "The desolation of Ratio is complete only when it removes its mask and hurls itself into the void of random abstractions that no longer mimic higher determinations, and when it renounces seductive consonances and desires itself even as a concept" (Kracauer, 1995:180).
Contemporary Ratio has evolved so that its "random abstractions" include celebrity variations upon a reality TV theme that are almost endless—celebrities compete in contexts ranging from a jungle (I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here) to various sorts of competition, in dance (Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing With the Stars), ice-skating (Strictly Ice Dancing), circus acts (Cirque de Celebrite, Celebrity Circus), weight loss (Celebrity Fit Club) etc. etc.). The predictability of a format that appears to have fallen in love with itself becomes increasingly independent of any "higher determinations." Culturally grounded symbolic values are replaced by the ready-made commodified categories of a culture industry that effortlessly reaches beyond Adorno's darkest imaginings. Kracauer's argument that Ratio renounces "seductive consonances" is a direct forbearer of Adorno's emaphasis upon that industry's systemic, operationalized nature and reappears in Baudrillard's notion of a precession of simulacra closely akin to Kracauer's self-desiring concept:
What else does the media dream of if not raising up events by its very presence? Everyone deplores it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra: no longer divine predestination, but the precession of models, which is no less inexorable. And it is for this reason that events no longer have any meaning: not because they are insignificant in themselves but because they have been preceded by models with which their own process can only coincide
(Baudrillard 1986: 22).
More critical than McLuhan's attempt to find optimism in the media's mosaic quality, Kracauer is scathingly unambiguous about the banal cultural consequences of a media that inexorably generates its own autonomous precession of models:
The monotony of this hodgepodge is the just revenge for its inconsequentiality, which is heightened by the thoughtless way the individual sequences are combined into a mosaic ... almost all of them avoid the most urgent human concerns, dragging the exotic into daily life rather than searching for the exotic within the quotidian
(Kracauer 1995: 311).
The political implications of this hodgepodge of conceptually disparate material is that all cultural issues become subject to the same passive indifference to truth content that produces at worst a population progressively remote from the values of unmediated reality, or, at best, a population whose very inertial status becomes its only hope of assuming radical status as Baudrillard somewhat mischievously suggests with his notion of fatal strategies—the name he gives to the "radical inertia" of the media masses.
In authentically seductive and symbolically rich forms of communication social meaning is derived from the interplay of unpredictable interactions. Unlike the pre-encoded nature of the culture industry's products, authentically empowering play is indeterminate and truly fascinating. In banal media, by contrast, open-ended and unpredictable outcomes are expunged from culture (just as Benjamin described aura being "pumped out like water from a sinking ship ) by the combined effects of the dumb narcotic fascination of the screen and the formulaic nature of the content: "Any system that is totally complicit in its own absorption such that signs no longer make sense, will exercise a remarkable power of fascination" (Baudrillard 1990:77). The ideological effect of the society of the spectacle is such that essentially empty, tautological and vacuous media content can still be fascinating—but in this absorbing rather than revealing sense. The fascination it generates is a dumb fascination much more akin to Marshall McLuhan's notion of the media's narcotic effects than Walter Benjamin's hopes of media empowerment contained within his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
For Walter Benjamin, the media's symbolic violence promised to explode open our traditionally confined ways of seeing the world: 'Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling' (Benjamin 1969 [1936]: 316). In his eyes, the camera was able to find the exotic in the quotidian, 'by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus' (ibid.). The reality of a post-Benjamin media system fascinated by its own models of reality, however, is a generalized ideological process in which meaning is simultaneously produced and reduced. In what Bauman terms our mediated era of liquid modernity, the media uses the emotional shock of subjective suffering to flood the underlying objective causes so that:
all associations of the horrid pictures of famine, as presented by the media, with the destruction of work and work-places (that is, with the global causes of local poverty) are carefully avoided. People are shown together with their hunger—but however the viewers strain their eyes, they will not see a single work-tool, plot of arable land or head of cattle in the picture—and one hears no reference to them ... certainly not in the lands where people on the screen starve, and the plight of people offered as a carnival-like, "charity fair" outlet for a pent-up moral impulse. The riches are global, the misery is local—but there is no causal link between the two; not in the spectacle of the fed and the feeding, anyway
(Bauman 1998: 74).
The paradox of tins situation is that our growing inability to see the objective woods for the subjective trees results from an ideological deception based upon excessive revelation: "It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical" (Baudrillard 1986: 13)
And if this is "banal" and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace
(Arendt [1963] 1992: 288).
It was some gentleman, or, rather, a certain type of Russian gentleman, no longer young, qui frisait la cinquantaine, as the French say, with not too much gray in his dark, rather long, and still thick hair, and with a pointed beard. He was wearing a sort of brown jacket, evidently from the best of tailors, but already shabby, made approximately three years ago and already completely out of fashion, such as no well-to-do man of society had been seen in for at least two years. His linen ... was a bit dirty and the wide scarf was quite threadbare ...
(Dostoevsky 2004 [1880]: 635).
Dostoevsky's depiction of the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov represents perhaps the most striking literary depiction of Arendt's juxtaposition of evil and banality (including even the small detail of suffering from a cold). The Devil appears to Ivan as simultaneously prosaic and hallucinatory, resonating with Arendt's conceptualization of a mundane-looking Eichmann that, nevertheless, was far from commonplace—an uncanny ghost in a spiritualist sauce:
"Not for a single moment do I take you for the real truth, Ivan cried, somehow even furiously. "You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I don't know how to destroy you, and I see I'll have to suffer through it for a while. You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me ... of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid of them. From that angle you could even be interesting to me, if I had time to bother with you ..."
(ibid.: 637).
Ivan Karamazov's conversation with the Devil resonates with the lived experience of today's capitalist reality crisis. The devil in the detail of capitalist media is precisely this one-sided Arnoldian inversion—the dream and news factories' heavily standardized production of the most banal that has been thought and said complete with the quality of cynical disavowal seen in both the above comment "not for a single moment do I take you for the real truth," and also in the Devil's reference elsewhere in his conversation with Ivan to religious hermits who "contemplate such abysses of belief and disbelief at one and the same moment" (ibid.: 645)
In response to a complaint Ivan makes, "You just pick out all my bad thoughts, and above all the stupid ones. You are stupid and banal" (ibid.: 638) [one that chimes with the central thrust of this chapter's charge against the media], the Devil rejects his original remoteness from reality due to his unearthly genesis as a fallen angel, and enthusiastically welcomes his wholesale immersion in earth's determinate realism:
Here, when I move in with people from time to time, my life gets to be somewhat real, as it were, and I like that most of all. Because, like you, I myself suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism. Here you have it all outlined, here you have the formula, here you have geometry, and with us it's all indeterminate equations!
(ibid.: 638).
Not to mention the obvious affinity Dostoevksy's Devil has with Baudnllard' s Evil Demon of Images (1986) his words have more than passing relevance to Kracauer's concept of Ratio, Baudrillard's precession of simulacra and the contemporary plethora of reality TV formats. Earlier in The Brothers Karamazov, as part of Ivan's poem "The Grand Inquisitor," the eponymous follower of the ethos of earthly realism uses the temptation of Christ in the desert to expound upon this diabolic doctrinal belief in the formulaic over the genuinely free and ambiguous:
Had you accepted that third counsel of the mighty spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill-for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men. Mankind in its entirety has always yearned to arrange things so that they must be universal
(Dostoevsky, 2004 [1880]: 257).
The Devil appears to Ivan in the form of such an inoffensively banal and unchallenging character because he acts as the embodiment of the Grand Inquisitor's rejection of freedom and its cost:
There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all... but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice?
(ibid.: 254-5).
Although bathed in biblical terms and imagery, Dostoevsky's startlingly vivid portrayal of the ideologically committed Grand Inquisitor and a discombobulatingly affable Lucifer, serves to convey, avant la lêttre, the nub of the ideological problem created by the systematic generation of banality. With Ivan's poetic license, Dostoevsky expresses the otherwise inchoately experienced effects of banality—the implacable enervation of the truth that occurs when the indeterminate, the unusual, the enigmatic, and the indefinite are expunged from life. Dostoevksy's fictional characters convey what a range of modern critical theorists have disparaged in such previously cited terms as the society of the spectacle, the culture industry, and the seduction-free realm of simulacra—the realm of the grandly uninquisitive.
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil
(Arendt [1963] 1992: 252).
As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, even though it is an implicit theme that runs throughout her entire account of Eichmann's trial, apart from its presence in the book's sub-title, Arendt's famous phrase occurs as part of the description of Eichmann last words on the scaffold only on the book's final page. The breadth and depth of the phrase's subsequent resonance, despite its scant occurrence, speaks volumes for the adeptness with which it captures an uncanny remoteness from reality and moral disassociation that Eichmann personified but which, in essence, is now ubiquitously institutionalized within today's heavily mediated and bureaucratized world. The importance of the words that immediately precede "banality" is also seldom noticed but 'word-and-thought-denying' goes straight to the ideological effect of the media's banal essence. The media-facilitated fixation upon the phrase "banality of evil," in isolation from the denial of thinking that Arendt clearly identifies as the vector through which evil is enabled, is in itself an example of the key point that this chapter, reversing Arendt's phrase, makes about the evil effects of banal thought. The superficially benign realms of media news and entertainment may seem totally divorced from the actions of a mass murderer, but to repeat for a final time, in essence, they too partake of the "grotesque silliness" of Eichmann's last words.
We may think that incidents such as the News International phone-hacking scandal of July 2011 (and the on-going aftermath of the subsequent Leveson enquiry), the Watergate scandal, and the death of Princess Diana allow us the chance to question fundamentally the nature of thought-denying banality, but it is more likely that they represent an instance of impotent acting out, an impotence equivalent to Ivan's throwing of a glass of water at a Devil who responds with "Ah, mais c'est bête enfin" ("Ah, but how stupid, really!").1 The more journalists self-flagellate, the more it becomes obvious that their mea culpas merely represent displacement activity designed to obstruct rather than enable any genuine change to a capitalist system of discourse in which news and entertainment values are frequently indistinguishable. Just as we are reassured that things will never be the same, we know that the status quo has never been more entrenched. Since one cannot reason the public out of something it didn't reason itself into—radical political discourse needs to recalibrate itself to deal more successfully with the deceptively banal forms of contemporary ideology that are perversely so misleadingly effective because of their very triteness. This chapter has modestly proposed that before attempting to produce detailed plans for what a post-capitalist mediascape might look and sound like, we need to come to full terms with the importance of the banal nature of the barriers that stand in the way.
Arendt' s notion that, "Justice ... demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight" (Arendt [1963] 1992: 5) bodes ill for a society now almost completely predicated upon the glare of the limelight. A post-capitalist mass media would recognize the political ramifications of this and thereby seek to avoid the current ideological consequences of a situation in which even events as historically and morally significant as Eichmaim's trial are still liable to be trivialized. When like Ivan, we feel reduced to throwing a glass at an evil demon of capitalist images experienced as a paradoxically real figment of our worst and most stupid imaginations, and when we struggle to envisage a feasible media forum for social justice, we should know that at least our frustration is not stupid, hopefully, there is some small consolation to be found in Herbert Marcuse's observation that: "the unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization" (Marcuse 1991 [1964]: 4).
1 "Ah, but how stupid, really! - the full quotation is "Ah, mais c'est bête enfin" ... He remembers Luther's inkstand! He considers me a dream and he throws glasses at a dream! (Dostoevsky 2004: 649).
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