On the way to the dinner being held for conference participants at a Georgian restaurant near the Kremlin, two colleagues from Moscow who, in the final years of the Soviet Union, had managed to find another life at Oxford and in New York, gave the American a brief cultural tour. Here was Mayakovsky’s residence at the beginning of the October Revolution, there the dwelling of the young Pasternak. In front of the department store with a clock telling the time across the globe, they had stood as young boys; with the feverish patriotism of children, they heard how the first Sputnik had started its course around the planet. This event, Andreij affirms, marked the highpoint of the seven-odd decades granted to the communist republic to realize its utopias. When, asks the American, did Soviet citizens cease to believe that Marxist-Leninist promises would be fulfilled and turn to despair and defeatism?
Remarkably, the two hosts who are back at home from vacation, agree completely: it was only in the final Brezhnev years that, almost overnight—but then very rapidly—a pessimistic mood became widespread or, maybe, it was after the last party secretary to be more or less respected by Soviet society had died—during a period that, already then, was called the time of stagnation. The answer astounds the foreigner, who promptly remarks his own incomprehension. Isn’t he sure that communism had already become intolerable to the people it promised to set free when the so-called Stalinist show trials occurred in the 1930s? Doesn’t he recall the fear that seized Western adults—in 1956, when the uprising in Hungary was quashed, or in 1957, when Sputnik was launched—that the triumphant Soviet Union would dominate the globe? Hadn’t he himself—and in a rather partisan manner—celebrated the end of the Vietnam War as the triumph of socialist solidarity over his own land?
1
Another, much less dramatic stagnation has also befallen the tiny world of his professional existence, the world of the humanities. When he attended school—and still in the late 1960s, when he began university studies—works of philosophy and literature were to be examined “for their own sake.” “Immanently,” one said at the time—more in a “congenial” spirit than in terms of a method.
Then, all at once—as students in Berkeley, Paris, and Berlin started to take their somewhat stubborn displeasure at the tired world of their parents for revolutionary energy—“paradigms” conquered the most remote corners of the university establishment: structuralism, with its seemingly mathematical precision; Marxism, which augured truth and transformation; formalism, which had a Russian origin that people mistook for a Soviet pedigree; and reception theory, with its legitimately social-democratic promise. Before long, the philosophy of science initiated by Thomas S. Kuhn explained why such changes deserved to be called “paradigm shifts.” Illusions of various colorations about “social relevancy” combined with a deadly earnest belief in “scientificity.”
When apprehensions arose that the world might not, after all, dance to a score composed by humanists, there appeared, as if on cue, much gentler theories, which were less fixated on scientificity and pointed in the opposite direction. For the most part, they came from France and were therefore, under a grammatically singular rubric that imposed excessive uniformity, called French theory. Michel Foucault both startled and calmed his readers with the message that power (and many other things, too) consisted of nothing but “discursive” configurations. The deconstruction of Jacques Derrida (and Paul de Man) declared a taboo on both pronounced conceptual distinctions and refined arguments; this encouraged its adherents to comport themselves like the initiates of a new society of freemasons, even though it was not necessarily clear why standing distinctions were to be avoided. Then came the new historicism, which owed only trace elements to France, with its relaxed assurances that historiography was just another literary genre.
Before ideologically incensed scholars could formulate the question, filled with reproach, of whether Foucault, Derrida, and the new historicism had betrayed the theories and values of the classical left, a scientifically and politically programmatic atmosphere clouded the skies again: even if it was, perhaps, a humanistic mishmash of everything under the sun, cultural studies promised empirical precision and engagement in the struggle for the recognition of all kinds of identities. Academically, at any rate, there was no room for levity. In Germany cultural studies combined with a conviction of a fundamentalist stripe that the future would lie in concentrating on “media” from the perspective of engineers as critical users.
The veritable profusion of paradigms occurred in the 1980s. Since then the movement back and forth between “hard” and “soft” theories has stagnated and the serial production of paradigms has dried up. In the humanities today, many books worthy of notice—perhaps greater in number than ever before—are published. Young university colleagues seem more and more educated, students appear more industrious than ever before, and research projects are duly “assigned” to them. Small towns like Marbach am Neckar preserve the archives of authors belonging to the past and the future (the future past) alike. Everything follows its abnormally normal course, even though, today, nobody knows where the cutting edge makes its mark. The deluge of paradigms raining down in rhythmical chain reactions that once roused the older generation now rests, at home and in libraries, on the shelves of “theory,” where books that stand as far from each other as they do from life itself are grouped together.
2
It seems like a grotesque coincidence that the humanities and state socialism lapsed into pools of stagnation at the same time. However, one can picture a common source of energy that fed them for decades and has now run dry. This source may have been “historical consciousness.” This “social construction of time”—this chronotope—emerged in the early nineteenth century and, as the institutional precondition for human behavior and actions, held such enormous consequences that it was simply confused with “time” and “history” until philosophically ambitious historians—especially Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck—began to historicize it too.
If one grants, as I mentioned in the introduction, that, around 1800 (or, to adopt a somewhat more flexible periodization, in the years between 1780 and 1830, which Koselleck dubbed the saddle period), intellectual and scholarly life took on the habit of practicing self-observation while observing the world,1 one can understand how the impression arose that, for every object of the world—and in keeping with the perspectives of multiple observers—there must exist a potential infinity of “representations” or “interpretations.” Such perspectivism transformed into an epistemological horror vacui, that is, into a fear, when faced with the irrepressible multiplicity of representations and interpretations, that there was perhaps nothing in the world wholly self-identical and stable.
A solution to this problem—or, more precisely, a response that had a sufficiently powerful effect to make the problem fall into oblivion—involved exchanging the principle of apprehending the world as if in a mirror (a scheme in which there exists one—and only one—representation/interpretation per object) for narrative ways to understand it. This occurred in the philosophy of history (including—even especially—its popular varieties) and evolutionary schemes à la Darwin. Such realignment offers a solution to the problem of per-spectivism because narrative discourses make it possible to synthesize multiple representations as identical objects by arranging them in sequence and making them appear, as moments of transformation, to be the inevitable effects of time. Thus, for example, to answer the question “What is Prussia?” it became necessary to tell the history of Prussia. It followed the same logic that evolutionary speculation was soon thought to provide the best answers to questions concerning the essence of mankind.
This experience of the world and the things that constitute it as movement, as a history within histories—as well as the desire to experience the world in this way—provided the source of energy that, in the early nineteenth century, charged the “theoretical curiosity” already awakened in the Renaissance with unprecedented political, economic, and cultural dynamism, yielding an intoxicating drive for innovation. Foucault called it the historisation des êtres. Out of the confluence there arose, before long, a new image of the past—the picture of history that we call historicism. At its center stood a conception of self-referentiality that had become more complex—of “man” as an intellectual being and a principle of movement. Now, as Koselleck pointedly remarked, humanity was seen in time, constantly leaving behind pasts as “spheres of experience” and striding forward into ever new futures shaped by open “horizons of possibilities.” Between these futures and those pasts, the present manifested itself as a “mere moment of transition”; experienced in this way, it offered the Cartesian subject, concentrated solely on functions of consciousness, its historical habitat. The role of this subject was to align experiences from the past with conditions of the present and the future and to select, from the possibilities the future afforded, projects for a transformed world that were always new. Such is the operation of Handeln described by the first sociologists in the nineteenth century—which some philosophers consider the core of human existence to this very day.
At their historical high points, both socialism and capitalism shared historical consciousness as the chronotope of progress and, for this reason, as a common foundation and energy reserve for motivation. Today, to be sure, there is reason to believe that the chronotope of progress already imploded decades ago, even if our discourses, for purposes of communication and self-understanding, still perpetuate it. In the early 1980s—that is, when a feeling of stagnation began to become widespread among Soviet citizens while, elsewhere, the humanities were sailing on the penultimate wave of euphoric innovation—Jean-François Lyotard published La condition postmoderne and directed the critical attention of countless Western intellectuals to the grand récits as “totalizing” discourses. Thereby, a foundational premise of historical consciousness after 1800—in which it found the answer to the problem of perspectivism, and behind which it had marched triumphantly through epistemology and the everyday—imploded. The assumption collapsed that for every object in the world there exists only one narrative representation. All at once, it became clear that an infinite potential of possible histories about Prussia could be activated, just as there existed an infinite array of histories about the development of Homo sapiens.
When the premise of historical consciousness fell, the historicizing view of human movement through time shifted, I believe, to the (sometimes uncomfortable) terrain of temporal stasis and simultaneity. By no means, in the early twenty-first century, does the future present itself as a horizon of open possibilities for action (Handeln). Instead, the future is drawing near—those familiar with the Middle Ages know temporal structures of this kind—with threatening scenarios that cannot be calculated in detail: take, for example, “global warming,” nuclear catastrophe, or the potential consequences of overpopulation. Faced with the prospect of such scenarios becoming a reality, we seek to gain a delay, at best; but we hardly believe anymore that disaster can be averted once and for all. At the same time, the border between the past and the present seems to have become porous. German intellectuals, in particular, are of fond of celebrating this displacement as a turn to a nebulous “something better,” which they call Memoria-Kultur. However, the problematic consequences of pasts flooding the present cannot be foreseen. Maybe, as Niklas Luhmann once remarked, it really isn’t necessary to declare every factory chimney in eastern Westphalia a national monument to be preserved at any cost. At any rate, between those threatening futures and a present that leaves increasingly fewer traces, there has arisen—out of the one “barely perceptible short moment” that Baudelaire described in Peintre de la vie moderne—an ever expanding presence of simultaneities.2 In this present it is impossible to forget anything, yet at the same time—because we are inclined to turn our backs on the future for reasons that, although reasonable, are not necessarily good—we no longer know in what direction we should progress.
This expanding present, where experiences accumulate until they become a burden, no longer offers a dwelling to the Cartesian subject, that is, to the self-reference of modern tradition. Perhaps this explains why, since the end of the twentieth century, new conceptions of self-reference (such as the “reappropriation of the body” or the “rational reenchantment of the world”) have been discussed with growing intensity.3 The new present is, above all, a present whose relationship to the future turns belief in progress and the ambitious projects it entails into a stagnant mood of something deeper than depression. It is possible to oppose, to the impression that this new chronotope is now in place, “objective” statistics of continuity and even renewal, but numbers and empirical values are not the real issue. Rather, it is a matter of time as a “form of experience,” as Edmund Husserl defined it: a social construction of time, which determines how we turn changes we perceive in our environment into a relationship we entertain with our selves and our actions. I will not ask for the “reasons” behind this—presumed—change of chronotope, just as I haven’t sought the “reasons” and epistemological conditions for the emergence of historical thinking in the early nineteenth century. The contexts in which questions of this kind assume their full significance are too complex—without an extensive discussion of details, at any rate—to permit answers that are not tautological.
3
A development that has only recently come into view might confirm the impression that the chronotope of historical consciousness collapsed after an epoch of continuous paradigm shift. On the one hand, as an academic and institutional structure, the humanities are some two hundred years old; most of the disciplines that today compose them go back to the age of romanticism. At the same time, they preserve an impulse and form of self-understanding that already existed among the philologists at the museum of Alexandria. This legacy involves saving (mainly textual) documents from material erosion and oblivion—the desire to collect works against dispersal in space, whether in the recesses of a library or in the archives of a discipline.
The obsolescence of both functions appears imminent in light of electronic communications technology, which has introduced a vision of the future where all the documents that humanity has at its disposal, whether textual or nontextual, can be produced on the screen of any laptop.4 Should this situation occur—and only juridical instances will provide a serious obstacle—the innovative energy of the humanities will hardly be curtailed, even if they lose one of the central tasks that have sustained them until now (as well as the potential for legitimation it affords). Yet electronic technology’s power to collect and preserve will intensify a problem that was already announced when the historicizing paradigm imploded. This problem involves the difficulty of selecting objects for sustained attention on the basis of prognostications about the future under increased conditions of complexity. From the time of ancient oratory until recently, copia—the possession of an extensive vocabulary—was a chief virtue. Today the computer has made knowledge accessible at levels of previously unimaginable scope and density—at the same time, however, its use raises a question: What is this knowledge good for?
4
A new kind of intellectual has emerged. Thanks to the skilled mastery of electronic technologies—but also through a patient reading of the classics—s/he thinks s/he knows where the answer to every question can be found. S/he is a kinsman of the scholar that General Stumm von Bordwehr sought in vain at the “world-famous court library” of Vienna in Musil’s Man Without Qualities. Responding to the general’s request for a “summary of all great thoughts of humanity,” the court librarian offered disheartening words. “Herr General, you would like to know how I know every book? I can only tell you it’s because of this: I don’t read any of them!”
Like Musil’s librarian, our computers know every book. They surpass him, however, because they have “read” all the books, “remembered” their contents, and stand at the disposal of competent users who know the right questions to ask. This fact explains why, at humanities colloquia, younger participants impress their predecessors with the depth of their knowledge of detailed issues and often produce real textual discoveries. For all that, however, the will to synthesize materials, the courage to make an argument that changes critical perspectives, and even the pleasure to be found in speculation have clearly receded.
Among scholars, synthesis, theses, and learned conjecture have fallen into disrepute, even when it is clear that they are not binding or empirically demonstrable. Perhaps the excesses of the most significant intellectual authorities of the present are merely tolerated by their successors—nothing more. When those who will soon retire were beginning their careers—at the great hour of structuralism, linguistics, and Noam Chomsky—it was common to hear (as if a threat were being issued) that soon a “grammar” would be written for a given cultural phenomenon. Such grammars were intended to occupy a point where an intuitive grasp of essences merged with innovation. Nothing could be further from the minds of young scholars today than this kind of intellectual ambition—a fact that isn’t necessarily a symptom of academic decadence.
5
The rise of the chronotope of the broad present, I have suggested, led to the loss of the historically specific frame of development for the classical Cartesian subject. Symptoms confirming this thesis were found through the now commonplace philosophical and pseudo-philosophical efforts to reinstall, in the superannuated conception of the subject, components of existence such as the body, space, presence, and the senses. The dimension of Handeln—that is, the possibility of permanently transforming (and thereby renewing) the world—would be much less important for a subject whose self-reference included the body as it did before modernity, for such subjectivity was inhibited (or at least severely restricted) in its ability to think about the future in terms of scenarios to be changed through conscious action—a set of presuppositions to which we are accustomed today that we still make without a second thought.
Instead, I would further speculate, it would be necessary to foreground a tendency that strikes us as archaic: to find in the world—as it occurs to us spatially and temporally in recurring cycles of habit and custom—the “right” places for the human body and mind, that is, to inscribe one’s being into the material world physically and spiritually.5 Doing so would be a form of the being-in-the-world that Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time. Institutions that enable self-inscription of this kind are called rituals. The definition implies a question: has a functional change in culture, which has transformed it into the sphere of ritual, led to the new status of knowledge and the modes in which it is now produced? A functional change of this kind would place culture in strong opposition to the classical assertion that art—precisely because of its “autonomy” and distance from the everyday world—acts as a permanent agent of irritation, provocation, and change in society.
6
Recently—in the city of General Stumm von Bordwehr, at that—the American recently had a conversation with a philosopher, and he was reminded that culture is a sphere of ritual. They had met for dinner on the terrace of a restaurant in the Viennese “museum district.” The museum district lies not far, as one heads out from the city center, from the Hofburg. Remarkably, it can compete with the Hofburg in size and stands surrounded by museums (of course), theaters, concert halls, institutions for promoting artistic endeavors, as well as buildings that house their copies in academic form.
There, on a proverbially warm early summer evening, among the ambitious (and, in some cases, truly beautiful) buildings, there strolled hundreds—or perhaps even thousands—of young people as well as retired couples striving for youth and, naturally, people of prime working age seeking diversion. They sat on stone benches, immersed in friendly conversations that sometimes seemed to take a passionate turn, waited in line for tickets, or simply took pleasure in the sandwich or bag of chips they had brought along. On this day, which was no more special than any other, the financially robust Austrian government had a right to quote, with self-satisfaction, the observation made in Goethe’s Faust. Here, in the museum district, lay its “people’s true heaven,” for great and small alike could display and experience their humanity. (“Here is the people’s paradise, / And great and small shout joyously: / Here I am human, may enjoy humanity.”)
The Viennese philosopher alone seemed unsatisfied—grumpy, even. An extended stay in New York not too long ago, he reported, had been a great disappointment. He had encountered nothing of cultural value there: the opera was conventional, the dramas staged in a commercial fashion, and the performance of the orchestra sloppy. He had returned with a sense of certainty, which was altogether edifying for his national pride, that Vienna was the cultural capital of the world. In the middle of the museum district, sitting before his goulash, the American didn’t feel like offering a patriotic rebuttal or agreeing in wholehearted self-criticism. “Cultural capital of the world” was aiming a little high, he commented sympathetically, but “world capital of event culture” might be a more fitting honorific for contemporary Vienna.
Only when he heard himself speak did it occur to him how much the museum district was a site of ecstatic event culture—whereby the phrase ecstatic event culture sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, inasmuch the “events” of the present tend to avoid the sudden overwhelming rush that defines ecstasy. At any rate, the central form of event culture, he thought, in a further association, is, of course, the curator. Finally, he understood why the verb curate had enjoyed such a rapid ascent in the cultural sections of German-language newspapers for the past few years. After all, the curator is an embodiment—quite possibly the very incarnation—of the new intellectual: a producer of culture who knows, first and foremost, where to find what kind of knowledge—and, in his specific profession, where to find what cultural objects. Additionally, he has the ability to stage this knowledge and these objects in space, so that parties who visit the exhibitions he curates can find their place in culture in a wholly literal sense: they move, with attention and sometimes even reverence, through the array of things displayed. The curator isn’t concerned with innovation—dynamism like that tends to make him nervous—but with reviving the experiential qualities stored in objects acquired over the centuries.
The programs of the theaters and opera houses in Vienna and other cultural capitals of the West have long since assumed this function. The number of new dramas, operas, and compositions that are staged is kept to a minimum—just enough to refute the potential criticism that productive contemporary artists are being denied the support they deserve according to the social-democratic conception of justice. At the center of all exalted event cultures stand more and more perfect productions of the classics. Here—besides formal accomplishment that deserves true admiration—provocative and, to be sure, iconoclastic ideas are not at all important (as was the case in the Regietheater of the recent past); instead, it is a matter of presenting refined nuances in permanent variation. The last “production” of Rosenkavalier can only be truly appreciated by someone who has had enough time to attend all the stagings that preceded it. Nuances within a world in which the same returns—such is the formula of the serial events comprising our culture.
7
The formulaic return of nuance also loosens the received hierarchies of quality and cultural niveau. The celestial tones of compositions by Johann Strauss, the king of the waltz, and the champagne world of operetta await rediscovery alongside lesser-known operas by Richard Strauss. As if to provide an allegory for this kind of democratic leveling, the area between the Hofburg and the museum district was reserved for spectators in the 2008 World Cup. Whoever, in the manner of Adorno or even out of genuine political conviction, voiced criticism of this kind of arrangement looked hopelessly out-of-date or—and this is much worse in the world of the European Union—shamelessly elitist. This is the case because art has never had as many upright admirers as it does in the twenty-first century—parties who cannot be numbered in the ranks of the Bildungsbürgertum or the “cultural aristocracy.”
Today, Bildung occurs as a lifelong process of self-formation. It is never too late to “get on board,” since its program values propaedeutic discourses and exercises much more than did the old model, when education was osmotically absorbed, so to speak, with traditional “good manners.” The matter calls to mind the form of temporality that Helmut Schmidt, the erstwhile chancellor, joked about when he suggested that the end of education would soon coincide with retirement; at the same time, it recalls the mode of temporal existence suffused with the ethos of nonbinding relationships one finds in the notion of “partners for different stages of life.” Yet whatever spiteful turn taken by commentaries in which we, the intellectuals of yesterday, engage the new, dominant reality, that is, the artistic formation of event culture, easily surpasses even the most audacious dreams of the German idealists of the early nineteenth century—a fact that renders idle many, if not all, our prejudices and objections.
Perhaps the process of permanent artistic formation—training for event culture—is even in the process of negating the “autonomy of art” that philosophical idealists once formulated. Ironically, this also would mean the fulfillment of a central utopia animating the historical avant-garde. I would not maintain that the “autonomy of art,” which is alternately viewed as sublime and lamented as a limitation, has vanished into the dialectic because, now, local and multinational “sponsors” are thoroughly concerned—if not compelled by the demands of image—to make themselves popular by promoting culture. To take offense at this phenomenon—indeed, merely remarking anything special about it—would sound like cultural criticism of the most outmoded variety.
My observation that the Aufhebung of aesthetic autonomy has perhaps occurred refers to the fact that the discontinuity between the manifold modes of aesthetic experience and the everyday of economy and politics has possibly disappeared. In earlier times art and aesthetic experience were united in a world outside the everyday, where they offered an alternative—sometimes a heavenly one—to the prose of life. In the vehicle-free centers of new cities, museums and concert halls are built by increasingly prominent architects; between them, events shoot forth into the broad present. Government buildings and central bank offices are in the process of retreating into the anonymity of the urban periphery; they are no longer evaluated in terms of function or even security, but rather—as is the case, for example, in the newly inaugurated American embassy in Berlin—in terms of the new aesthetics of city planning. This seems like a spatial expression of the rarely mentioned fact that—in Europe, at any rate—participation in culture is in the process of pushing traditional forms of work away from the center of taxpayers’ lives. Perhaps stagnation is not too high a price for such massive existential and social progress.