Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt

There he sits, enthroned, the secret sovereign, shielded from the world, in complete invisibility. If the screen were to turn around and start filming him, you’d see him: the remote control in his hand, loosely palmed, flickering in his gaze. He'd be slouching around on the couch, picking his nose, his hand on his sex. You’d see how he stuffs the world into himself with his voracious eyes, the opening and closing mouth. You’d see his facial expressions, fascinated or glazed; his chewing tools opening and closing like the gills of a great fish; a physiognomy dulling and brightening in spurts. You’d see him amused and exhilarated by the fuss made by his court jesters before him – the throngs of belly dancers, pleasure boys, fireworks, his doubles, court henchmen – his puppets. Perhaps this would be the most remarkable thing about his image: his shifts in mood, his irascibility, his abrupt lust, the way his glazed gaze takes on different hues. Or sometimes, not even that. For there would be, as a sign of such a mood change, no facial expression at all, only the twitching of the finger…

If we took away the king's entourage, his appearance, and his distractions, there would be left a man full of misery (Pascal). And perhaps the dilemma of our king – squatting there alone in his shadow cabinet with his flicker box – is that he has nothing left but distraction, simultaneous with an inability to somehow summarize this distractedness. When wielding his scepter, remote control in hand, he has phantastical power, but this power does not find its focus, remaining chimerical, owing to the instrument of his rule. And because this king has not what it takes to be a philosopher, he isn’t concerned over the question about the functioning of the thing in his hand, let alone descending into the abysses of questions on legitimacy or metaphysics – the subtle consideration, for example, of actually whether this flickering box shouldn’t be understood as a domestic altar with its operation as a kind of cultic performance. Chip is chip, he says to himself, as one hand presses the triggering button while the other stuff chips into his mouth, a couch potato gifted with a monstrous digestive apparatus. It may be that this canned food isn’t particularly nutritious – but it has the inestimable advantage of allowing the world to be swallowed in bite-sized form; that no foreign body, nothing unforeseen, intrudes on this Royal Alienation of the World. And this fills him with a deep, satisfying calm. And at times: with an even deeper melancholy. How nice it’d be to mingle with the people, join in the intrigues, cabals, and the hustle and bustle – if only it weren't so exhausting. And so dangerous, who knows? Insofar it is only bot-appropriateness that the outside world hastens to him, in dosed form, life on a knife’s edge.

Naturally, he feels a bit nauseously sickened when blood flows and chainsaws start cutting human bodies up – but then, he longs for at least the consumptive ability to eat this unfiltered, dirty, barbaric fare with his eyes.

So he zaps through his realm, always looking for some pyrotechnical refinement, something new and unprecedented. It may be this doesn’t exactly fit together with classical patronage – but it’s in the genre of special effects this king shows his greatest side; namely, he never tires of supporting the most bizarre phantasms and experiments – that is, as long as it serves his addiction to distraction. A connoisseur of effects, of all imaginable forms of play, only one thing seemingly abhorrent to him: that which remains invisible. That is, what cannot be easily dispersed and dispensed with (at the push of a button). Like viruses, for example, or the no less dark forces of economics haunting his realm with stubborn regularity, here lie the authentic sources of insurrection: that there should be a perpetrator without face or address...

This king, whom no one has crowned, who is nameless and invisible, is the object of an all-encompassing bustle — and his purveyors to the court outdo each other in suggesting all kinds of unheard-of, truly royal delights to him. But since they, too, are separated from him by a glass screen, they don't know where his heart is beating. And so it's perhaps precisely the measure of his intangibility providing the key of the never-ending offers to the legions of interpreters and psychographers, who extrapolate the wave of his finger, the electrical surface tension on his skin, to trends and tendencies. So intense is the struggle for his attention that strategies devised for blowing the right slogan into his ear turn into downright phantasies of rape. After all, it’s a matter of penetrating deeply into his incognito, of possessing him – and in such a way that the rape isn't recognizable, as such, but contains the promise to reach his apogee of pleasures.

For this reason, it’s much easier that his orifices are the object of the most urgent concern, indeed of an almost permanent incantation: nothing is depicted so frequently as his opening, ravenous, all-devouring mouth. Easily, his orifices are the objects of most urgent concern, even of an almost permanent conjuration: nothing is shown so often as his opening, gluttonous, all-devouring mouth. It's in order to evacuate this desire's unredeemability from thinking that the redeemed desire is shown again and again.

Consequently, the fantasy that he could be hooked on a miracle drug, made permanently dependent on this self-fabricated substance, or, to put it more nobly, that he could become the definitive supplier to his own royal court, has the function of banishing the sovereign's unpredictability. And this is accomplished by the court suppliers, in constant competition, exchanging ideas about their strategies or in silence – whereby the pressure to succeed guarantees that the fantasy’s irredeemability itself doesn't become an issue. So only the court suppliers’ chatter guarantees a sham kind of courtly etiquette – and for only a certain duration it actually brings about. The court pretends to know in which direction the sovereign will incline his head – and yet everyone, at the slightest wave of his hand, jumps in another direction, and not without reason. For nothing more fearful than this impulse, this little twitch of the finger that hasn’t announced itself on his face.

As we know, every genealogy goes back to its most humble beginnings. Not long ago, when senders still thought of themselves as senders and receivers still thought of themselves as receivers, our royal child had a simple, civil name: Lieschen Müller. And because Lieschen Müller was the desired child of a society which, under the sign of the multitude, had brought mass murder — that is, the serialization and industrialization of death into the world, there were a good number of reasons to make little Lieschen happy in a dosed, ideology-free, child-pleasing kind of way. So there were dark springs from which the post-war period, in the sense of the popular policy of folk’s homeopathic whitewashing, fed energy into its medial measures of gratification – always following a pattern of replacing the unpalatable truth with light fare. And the ward, for its part, always attuned to reception, presented itself as exceedingly grateful. Whereby this coincidence of sender and receiver, of supply and demand, represents the incomparable Golden Age of mass consumption.

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At some point during the multiplying simplicity, something essential has changed, a metastasizing sudden change. Suddenly, it becomes visible that little Lieschen, pumped full of this popular care, has expanded into the immeasurable. She wants more of the One that, in place of her presumptive simplicity, a polymorphously perverse character structure has taken her place – a grimacing, mute, and utterly conceptless voracious. For some dark reason, popular welfare has become a kind of counter-terror. It is possible this was predictable – that the symbolic contraception necessarily gave way to a prurient affirmation of filth and trash – but still, this isn’t entirely true. It is not the dreaded symbol that’s brought about this transformation, but the grotesque overbidding of the permissible, the sheer gluttony, and the readiness for total reception. If the ward is now guardian and exercises his regiment of terror, he moves on permitted terrain. It is only the how it has come to this that is the question. In retrospect, it seems its perversion went hand in hand with the moment when the ward felt unobserved in the shadow cabinet and began to play around with the remote control.

Let's say it straight out: What has been nurtured here is a monster. An inconceivable entity that defies all control and predictability. And even if we have not been able to see it for a long time, or perhaps have not wanted to see it, this monster is a political power. The question is where does this power come from – and in what form does it articulate itself? Because this power is mute. And because it considers nothing worthy of demonstration except itself, but itself just as little, it doesn’t need to go out into the streets. In this sense, the talk of the silent majority also misses the monster’s reality since there is always only one person sitting there, nibbling and watching – then suddenly acts, with this little thing in his hand, with the pressure of a finger that creates a telematic, electric echo in the sensorium of the collective.

In the belief they were paying tribute to the new conditions, people have become accustomed to speaking of a media democracy. Admittedly, this is far too inaccurate – after all, it suggests that the political, transferred into the mediatized space, still has mediating authorities, a shared canon, and social agreements. But the presence of the monster is mute and conceptless. When, nevertheless, it towers as a dark shadow over the actors (who are not called the glass ones by chance), it as in the French Revolution, when debates took place in the National Assembly, while outside, on the site de Grêve, the silhouette of the guillotine rose: the real hero of the Revolution.

The remote control is a telematic guillotine. If any voice in the telematic monster's realm raises its head – any timid, unfinished thought whose entertainment value is questionable (or even worse: which has an incomprehensibility that's as abhorrent to the monster as the turbulence of the stock exchange), the finger on the trigger executes its judgment.

Not really consciously, but with the equanimity, the impetuosity of an overstrained sovereign. Seen in this light, the revolution, the time of the terreur, has by no means ceased; it's merely symbolized itself in the form of the remote control. A small switch – and somewhere, in one of the distant provinces of his empire, at the untidy desk of an editor who has turned into a symbolic lictor, the decision is made. A paper, a project, some voice pronouncing the verdict: not fit for the majority. Off with its head.

No instance of mercy to raise its objection. Where would it even come from? Because the monster has never been part of the political stage, at best, its object, its mute, conceptless mouth. Nor would a party of permanent revolution be an asset in this sense, for it’d be compelled to turn the face of this revolution outward. And yet the monster's power stems from its facelessness, its invisible, massive, utterly undeniable voracious presence.

There, where the monster emerges like a great, silent sea monster from the deepest depths of the sea and gapes, political speech loses its meaning. For where every word runs the risk of being cut off — a hysterical tone, an agitation that seemingly anticipates drowning, suffocation, takes possession of all communication, as if by itself. Words like bubbles are the last signs of life bursting onto the surface. It may be that people still bear witness to each other's meanings of words, that the spaceship far from the world still forms a large air bubble, where "politics" and "mission" may be elixirs of life – but the lightness of speech betrays that the speakers are running out of air, that it can no longer be about the political, but at best about its evacuation.

Curiously, the politicians have the appearance of what the gawking monster might dream of becoming. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to try to reveal his physiognomy from those streamlined, electro-aerodynamic figures — because the political representatives are only able to correspond to the monster in his maudlin, nostalgic moments at best, that is: in what you might call his Sunday best. The monster as a clean-cut man would be only half of the truth, the half which conceals the dark, grubby side: in other words, it's not worth the escamotage, even if the project of "representation" itself is at stake. There's something profoundly uncanny about the very lack of contradiction with which the world bows to the dictates of his finger, with which it can be made to disappear — without argument or even leaving a sign.

Before this uncanniness, reality as such seems derealized, a mere shadow realm, a simulation. As the monster's shadow realm itself takes on unreal, ghostly features, the act of domination also becomes questionable.

Hence, the abstract manipulator, who in the nervous pressure of his finger is the serial perpetrator par excellence, but has no feeling for how and in what way he affects reality — only longing nevertheless for nothing more than pure violence, the act that testifies to him what he no longer feels. But because the executioner himself is faceless and has been replaced by a brightly polished Machine, all that remains is the image of an act, an image that for this reason (to mask its surrogate character) betrays atavistic traits: the knife that penetrates the victim's body, again and again, and again.

No, it's wrong to say that the monster sits at the trigger because it doesn't possess any consciousness of this its power. The finger at the trigger, which erases its representatives, presses reflexively, hedonistically, out of sheer ennui. No strategy, no plan, nothing holds these acts together. Yes, it's doubtful at all whether he who rules there in the darkness of his shadow cabinet and spells out the flickering images of the world into a new reality will reach an awareness of his power.

And yet, it's there. Just like the execution techniques distributing the deadly electric shock over several button presses and making possible a so-to-speak deed without a name –– without perpetrator (an act in which a blind yet deadly sovereignty articulates itself), the monster is composed of the tiniest little finger movements, the concert of the grinding jaw noise, sighing slightly when shifting weight, grasping en masse at its genitals — and, when it gets up halfway through the soccer game when it goes to the bathroom and urinates, the surging streams of water flowing through the waterworks testify to the fact that this monster is one.

Wherever the monster's gestures are reflected in the demographic Machines, wherever the collective's cry symbolizes itself — it recomposes itself, it forms that unity to which its representatives and courtiers respond. In a certain sense, these highly abstract Machines are the only equal mirror of this homo artificialis. For they represent his laws: how this human eats, how this human pisses, when this human gets up and goes to bed again, and what this human sees and hears. Whereby the senses of this artificial man transform themselves into an economy, thus: a politics of the senses.

The law of the monster, its legislature, is the lust, is that which psychoanalysts call libido (and which, depending on the discipline, can, in turn, assume other labels, like marketing or fashion). Admittedly, this pleasure depends on the apparatus that provides it: the remote control. The remote control, which assumes the function of the executive in the realm of the senses, is the indispensable prosthesis of domination as a medium of transmission. However, for its part, it's only the final, tangible embodiment of a complex, telematic social structure of all that has been called, in grandiose abbreviation, the television or the media or the network. If this executive power in latency has always worked with the receiver's energy, it only takes form in the shape of the zapper. Because only the remote control gives the ability, which is the highest concentration of power: to command the duration of speaking, to be able to cut off the subject's word — this experience, the delirium of this powerfulness, causes that fundamental transformation where the receiver ultimately emerges as the sender.

Here lies the coup d'etat of the private, except it goes far beyond what’s still considered private in this context. Because the privatization is total, and that's why the talk of the public, as well as of the recipient, is equally misleading. The monster rules in the seclusion of its shadow cabinet, separated from its peers, and yet continues to be, via remote control, the total manipulator of events. The rule, if you will, inverts itself; it withdraws into itself — into those corners of the psyche that are no longer known to anyone, least of all perhaps to the monster himself. But in another respect, the monster's reign is not absolute. And it's the remote control itself (the executive), which in turn, exercises no small power— after all, it brings its own laws into play. For example, it significantly increases nervousness while decreasing attention span and perceptual duration. When the guillotine, representing the first serial machine, or if you like: the gateway of modernity, reached the ministries in revolutionary France, it not only became obvious the executioners of the ancien régime had lived under a concealed unemployment, but it also became apparent that the Machine (standing there senselessly in the marketplace of a provincial spot) wished to be operated. So victims were fed to the Machine to such an extent that the very people who initiated this event were also gripped by horror — and then diligently continued to guillotine so as not to be devoured by the apparatus that had become voracious. According to this dialectic, the remote control also demands to be served. If it, for its part, displays an inevitable gluttony, this is that it begins to eat up the images – and puts the interruption in their place. And it is precisely here, in the intensity of this cut, the fantasy of the last and final image, that the monster recognizes itself: the human condition of modernity.

If the monster identifies with anything, it is not the images but its power to interrupt and erase the image at any time. The act of identification does not run through the image (which has found its highest expression in the world's image) but through the cut: through the removal of the world.

You may, led by the monstrous executor's metaphoric metabolism into moral shallows, take refuge in the ethics of images or questions of attitude. However, to meet this conflict on the level of morality — be it on the level of individual morality or its communitarian ‘the-world-as-it-should-be’ variety, misses the nature of the matter. The monster doesn't reveal itself as this or that individual being, but it’s the remainder if one subtracts every unique particularity from it. If you like, it is the mass being in which all participate together (and what we could call for this reason the dividual).

Now, if before this prospectus there's talk of a legislative and an executive branch of the monster, these are by no means mere analogies, but it's an attempt to get a glimpse of the real potently powerful forces.

If we call the Monster the market (which is one of its manifestations), it becomes apparent that this power has long since become a reality. Since, in this instance (which, to the extent of its constantly growing potency, is displaying increasingly paradoxical and irrational signs), part of the political stage has already been evacuated — or rather — the discourses circulating there are to be understood only as symptoms of those problems which the market, that is the Monster, has caused for them...

But when political images are essentially irrational and invisible symptomatic power formations, it's necessary to ask where the actual space of the political lies. Here, not only does the political dilemma of the supposed indistinguishability of position and opposition gain a new reading, but it also reveals a further problem. If the monster holds the real power — that is, if it presides over the space of the political, then this space does not emerge in a positive form. The characteristic of the Monster is that it hides as it shuns the light of day, that its face doesn’t blend into the physiognomy of the political.

Nevertheless, it is misleading to gaze directly into the present too much – it would perhaps be more appropriate to come to grips with it by examining its physicality through an inverted telescope. Because the political's loss of face began long before that, perhaps in the eyes of the dead king whom the French revolutionaries carried to the grave – where, significantly, they laid his cut-off head where his privates (potency) lie. But that wasn't enough: instead of closing his eyes, they let his dead, wide-open eyes stare out of his open grave. This king's death undoubtedly coincides with the death of the representative – and thus: the end of the language of domination, which, in turn, owes all its power to the logic of the central-perspective image.

The remote control puts an end to this order. Because it announces the collapse of temporality, the interruption — the logic of the cut. Before the finger's pressure, the images' legislative period purrs together to synchronize the monster's reaction time. With this, a death threat and a show trial are instigated simultaneously. For the reality on display is constantly under the compulsion to rehabilitate itself in advance –– before it becomes twisted, the word is cut off in its mouth and before a short trial is given to it. And even if this short process has nothing dripping and soaked with blood, it is no less effective. The symbolic death may not immediately coincide with the real death but precedes it. That which drops out of the medial space is as if it simply wasn't there.

Now indeed, there is progress between the guillotine and its symbolic continuation: the remote control –– but of what kind? If the guillotine was already an essential humanitarian invention (with the undesirable side effect of the serial gluttony of the Machine), then the law of motion of the Machine consists in that the distance between the deed and its impact has grown in the measure of its perfection – that in place of simple handicraft, a work-sharing societal Machine as a kind of Invisible Hand has taken its place: the Network. In this sense, it isn't a mere technical detail that the networks that have spread under the sign of electricity have become larger and larger, that they have grown beyond the king's head, his kingdom and institutions, and finally beyond physical reality itself. Thus, if the social Machine based on the division of labor has a driving power, it lies in the progressive transcendence of any distance, in the distance of the world and its removal.

If this process went hand in hand for a while with the forming and continuously accelerating social machines – then it's now apparent the monster is rupturing the system boundaries, that it's punching holes in the established corporate bodies. Because a growing gap is opening up between our monster's space of movement, its "shadow cabinet," and the so-called political actors’ field of action. Because the monster can leave the social network in real-time and log in elsewhere, the liability of the traditional networks is dwindling – the latter are becoming visible as increasingly insecure, questionable Cantonists working against each other: as limited liability companies ultimately.

Understandably, the Internet – as a transnational tissue – has attracted all kinds of fantastical orderings, and there's even been simmering talk of a new Leviathan. Now Hobbes famously conceived his homo artificialis as a Wheelwork automaton – and by way of analogy and delimitation, it could be said a contemporary Leviathan must be understood as a neural Machine, a social human processor. But this very juxtaposition ultimately testifies to how short-sighted this historical parallel is. Because at the time when Hobbes conceived of his state machine, the national monarchies of Europe had already practiced the wheel-like mechanized en-structuration of their thoughts for centuries — which didn't prevent them in the least from continuously undermining this rationality — and, where it seemed opportune, to bring the morality of the Middle Ages into play. The same schizoid-splitting applies to our monster. Because even alone in its shadow cabinet, it moves through the fields of the transnational, the transsexual, and the trans-political like a duck takes to water, all in the same breath – and where it would have to pay the price for this freedom – it behaves in exceedingly conventional ways; it expects that the traditional laws will continue to apply. If this division is valid, it is because the monster does not emerge as such when it steps out into the social sphere. Instead, as if to camouflage its monstrosity, it presents itself as a whining, just a little too fat victim, little Lieschen, abused by dad & mom, likewise by all authorities. Because not the monster, but merely a victim steps out into the public (with which the step out actually represents a step back – and the so-called public reveals itself as a sphere of regression), those powers (which nevertheless constitute its own reflection) can appear as evil, devouring demons.

When one says ethics is booming, this hits our monster's reality in many ways. Since it has a business cycle, it is also marketable and can be consumed. While Kant could still claim: In the realm of ends, everything either has a price or it has a dignity (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), this distinction of morals becomes obsolete here; it's instead subjected to a general business morality — that branch, which political economy has always declared itself responsible for. Admittedly, it is naive to approach the monster with conventional ideas of exchange value and use value. If the Monster's public manifestation teaches us anything, the traditional political economy's concept of value must be expanded to include the value of abuse. Because with the pretension of having been abused, the monster can pretend to itself and others that it is called Little Lieschen and needs the welfare of the people. If the value of abuse is the equivalent of social identity – the abuse value for the monster watching in the shadow cabinet is articulated in an ongoing show trial, expressing the actual desire: that participation in abuse can be the greatest pleasure. Indeed, there is little lost in what the monster may think it is (never has a monster thought of itself as a monster). The monster's voracious eyes lust after objects of abuse, and the finger resting on the remote control's button acts whenever something comes within firing range (or not). If you imagine what the monster desires are that innocent lamb who claims to be Lieschen Müller, the scenario is complete. For it turns out that lust goes hand in hand with self-feeding – and it's precisely here that abuse value's driving potency lies. In this sense, as the schizoid present, the monster embodies a political danger – a danger all the more urgent because the grotesque figure of the couch potato is so unworthy of discussion that if dragged onto the political stage, it can only fall prey to ridicule. But here lies the whole problem. For it's not improbable that there will no longer be a political stage — or that this stage is only symptomatic of the media space, one of those amusements that our polymorphously perverse royal child enjoys until, disgruntled or bored, it zaps away even the last representative of this Punch and Judy game. And then, it gets pitch black...

Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt

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Zäsuren / Césures / Incisions was a short-lived, early experimental E-Journal full of various post-modern notions of narrative considered cutting edge at the time; the reader is referred to the first issue’s editorial for a flavor of its intentionality.

Martin’s essay can be found on page 34 of Zäsuren / Césures / Incisions’ first issue. Reading the editorial, it’s obvious the editors, unlike Martin, weren’t prescient about the implications of the coming Click Economy within the confines of a fully networked Social Drive, particularly the political metabolic consequences and potential for phantasmic resurrections of Schmittian thinking in the forms of our current Energy and Climate crisis.

Buckhardt, M. – Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999.

Burckhardt, M. – Die Scham der Philosophen, Berlin 2006.

Burckhardt, M. – “68. Die Geschichte einer Kulturrevolution, Berlin, 2009.

The concept of self-identity means nothing other than the ego constantly remaking and reshaping itself - or, in the Hegelian sense, "annulling" itself; since the purpose of this process, as Novalis conceives it as the ideal man of art, lies not in individuality but, on the contrary, in the dividuality of that substance which we call the self. So, paradoxically, the birth of the modern individual goes hand in hand with the insight into its divisiveness: a notion of Novalis’ genius. See Burckhardt, M. – Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, Frankfurt/M, 1994, p. 237. 237)

The order of the mirror (meaning: the symbolic space where projection’s laws prevail) is infinite: an unattainable ideal. When the integrity of beauty fails, we're dealing with a dissociation of this order. The alleged individual is revealed as a dividend and experiences how the self disassembles into its individual parts. See Burckhardt, M. – Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M, 1999, pp. 329-330.