For Marcel Proust.-The son of well-to-do parents who, whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profes- sion, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time th those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, and that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. Such suspicions, though betraying a deep- seated resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real resistances lie elsewhere The occupation with things of the mind of labour, departments and restricted entry. The man of indepen dent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For his he is punished. He is not a 'professional, is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labour which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence per- means of abolishing mind s. The departmentalization of mind is a mits no such idiosyn where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates the division of labour- if only by taking pleasure in his work-makes himself vulnerable by its standards in ways insepar- able from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellec- tuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge
same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of Grassy seat. -Our relationship to parents is beginning to undergo another. With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, sad, shadowy transformation. Through their economic impotence not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the they have lost their awesomeness. Once we rebelled against their insistence on the reality principle, the sobriety forever prone to ened, perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyses become wrath against those less ready to renounce. But today we the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the which h- insufferably more grown-up than its parents ever were Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love aving renounced before any conflict, draws from this its grimly authoritarian, unshakeable power. Perhaps people have at all with the waning of its physical strength, while their own genera es, times felt the Fish in water -Since the all-embracing distributive machinery of ready seemed threatened by the young: in an antagonistic society highly-concentrated industry has superseded the sphere of circu- the relation between generations too is one of competition, behind lation, the latter has begun a strange post-existence. As the pro- which stands naked power. But today it is beginning to regress to a fessions of the middle-man lose their economic basis, the private tate versed, not in the Oedipus complex, but in parricide. One of lives of countless people are becoming those of agents and go e Nazis symbolic outrages is the killing of the very old. Such a between the condemned, marred only by the fear that we, powerless mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact. All these ourselves, might now be unable to care for them as well as they nervous people, from the unemployed to the public figure liable at cared for us when they possessed something. The violence done to any moment to incur the wrath of those whose investment he them makes us forget the violence they did. Even their rationaliz- ations, the once- hated lies with which they sought to justify their arts and dodges, by tradesmen's qualities, can they ingratiate then. represents, believe that only by empathy, assiduity, serviceable particular interest as a general one, reveal in them an inkling of the selves with the executive they imagine omnipresent, and soon there truth, an urge to resolve a confict whose existence their children, is no relationship that is not seen as a ' connection', no impulse not proof against all uncertainty, cheerfully deny. Even the outdated. first censored as to whether it deviates from the acceptable. The inconsistent, self-doubting ideas of the older generation are more concept of connections, a category of mediation and circulation, than the slick never flourished best in the sphere of circulation proper, the market, neurotic oddities and deformities of our elders stand for characte but in closed and monopolistic hierarchies. Now that the whole of for something humanly achieved, in comparison to pathic health, society is becoming hierarchical, these murky connections are infantilism raised to the norm. One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing ones parents because they represented the world, one was proliferating wherever there used still to be an appearance of free- dom. The irrationality of the system is expressed scarcely less clearly in the parasitic psychology of the individual than in his worse. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes geois division between professional and private life still existed seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the division whose passing one almost now regrets-anyone whe I. Allusion to the lines of a well-known German song: Der liebste Platt den Pursued practical aims in the private sphere was eyed mistrustfully ich auf Erden hab, /das ist die Rasenbank am Elerngrab (The dearest spot I as an uncouth interloper. Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and have on earth/is the grassy seat by my parents' grave) mproper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior
motive. Not to be 'after'something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counter best. After so long a life one quite loses the capacity who has done what harm to whom. In the abstract claims. Countless people are making, from the aftermath of the niversal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes the good mixers liked by all, the just, humanely excusing all mean guard presents himself as victim of injustice: if only ing man, what life is like. But those conspicuous ness and scrupulously proscribing any non-standardized impulses life by an exceptional kindness are usually drawing advances on as sentimental. Indispensable for their knowledge of all the channels not malign does not live serenely but wit and plug-holes of power, they divine its most secret judgements nd live by adroitly propagating them. They are found in all peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance. Lacking appropriate political camps, even where the rejection of the system is taken for objects, his love can scarcely express itself except by hatred for the inappropriate, in which admittedly he comes to resemble what he granted, and has thereby produced a slack and subtle conformism hates. The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as of its own. Often they win sympathy by a certain good-naturedness, a kindly involvement in other people's lives: selflessness as specu- they are stems from his hatred of what they might be furbished the old tradesman's mentality with the day before yesterdays psychological discoveries. They are capable of every thing, even love, yet always faithlessly. They deceive, not by How nice of you, Doctor. ' -There is nothing innocuous left. The instinct,but on principle, valuing even themselves as a profit little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the begrudged to anyone else. To intellect they are bound both by responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant affinity and hatred: they are a temptation for the thoughtful, but silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical also their worst enemies. For it is they who insidiously attack opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is and despoil the last retreats of resistance, the hours still exempt seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent How lovely! from the demands of machinery. Their belated individualism becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and poisons what little is left of the individual there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent Final serenity.- A newspaper obituary for a businessman once The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to the toasts contained the words:"The breadth of his conscience vied with the ot conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses kindness of his heart. The blunder committed by the bereaved in The chance conversation in the train when to avoid the elevated language reserved for such purposes, the inadvertent consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate admission that the kind-hearted deceased had lacked a conscience urder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against com expedites the funeral procession by the shortest route to the land ucation, and to utter it in the wrong place and in of truth. If a man of advanced years is praised for his exceptional ment is enough to undermine its truth. Every visit to serenity, his life can be assumed to comprise a succession of in- he, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse famies. He has rid himself of the habit of getting excited. Breadth itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world of conscience is passed off as magnanimity, all-forgiving because all-too-understanding. The quid pro quo between ones own guilt and that of others, is resolved in favour of whoever has come off Part One)
can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to existence. We record the decline of education, and yet our prose, the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker.The measured against that of Jacob Grimm or Bachofen,'has in common evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its full with the culture industry cadences unsuspected by us. Nor do we bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Conde any longer have the same command of Latin and Greek as Wolf or Kirchhoff. a We point at the decline of civilization into illiteracy, and oneself no better, are the same To adapt to the weakness of the rselves forget the art of letter-writing, or of reading a text from oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence neede Jean Paul as it must have been read in his time. We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality to exert domination. If, in the latest phase, the condescending we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations this perfect screening of power only allows the class-relationshi that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious it denies to triumph more implacably. For the intellectual, inviolable values of good society, tactless. With the dissolution of liberalism, isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity the truly bourgeois principle, that of competition, far from being All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and par- overcome, has passed from the objectivity of the social process into ticipation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the if into anthropology. The subjugation of life to the process of sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains. isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice. It is as old a component of bourgeois ideology that each individual, in his particular interest, considers himself better than all others, as that he values the others, as the community of all customers, more highly than himself. Since the Antithesis.-He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology in the minds of intellectuals, who are at once the last enemies of the for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the rgeois a emselv frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, to think at all in face of the naked reproduction of existence, they nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within act as a privileged group; in letting matters rest there, they declare the nullity of their privilege. Private existence, in striving to re- him. The detached observer is as much entangled as the active the only advantage of the former is insight into his semble one worthy of man, betrays the latter, since any resemblance entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge before has need of independent thought. There is no way out of as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury which entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the only that business confers. This is why the very movement of ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to develop conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois. Even where it protests, the monadological principle conceals the dominant acob Grimm (1785-1863): founder of German philology as a syste- iscipline, as well as collector of German folk-tales universal. Proust,'s observation that in photographs, the grand n(1815-87): romantic historian of ancient law and father of a duke or of a middle-class Jew are so alike that we forget ous work Das Mutterrechr(1861) their difference of social rank, has a much wider application: the 2. Friedrich-August Wolf (1759-1824: classical philologist who first objectively abolish the boldt. Adolf Kirchhoff(1826-1gos): German classical scholar of the later nine- constitute the happiness, even the moral substance, of individual
unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell. or artistic work to relax their spiritual demands on themselves, to drop their standards, to indulge, in their subject-matter and expression, all kinds of habits that lucid appraisal has rejected Since there are no longer, for the intellectual, any given categories, even cultural, and bustle endangers concentration with a thousand They, the people. The circumstance that intellectuals mostly have claims, the effort of producing something in some measure worth- to do with intellectuals, should not deceive them into believing while is now so great as to be beyond almost everybody. The pres- their own kind still more base than the rest of mankind. For the sure of conformity weighing on all producers further diminishes et to know each other in the most shameful and degrading of their demands on themselves. The centre of intellectual self- situations, that of competing supplicants, and are thus virtually discipline as such is in the process of decomposition. The taboos compelled to show each other their most repulsive sides. Other that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented ex- people, particularly the simple folk whose qualities the intellectual periences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner is so fond of stressing, generally encounter him in the role of those impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong with something to sell, yet who have no fear of the customer ever that only an un estioning and unquestioned authority can h hold poaching on their preserves. The car mechanic, the barmaid, have them in check. What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the little difficulty in abstaining from effrontery: courtesy is in any case intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite mposed on them from above. If, conversely, illiterates come to intellectuals wanting letters written for them, they too may receive banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because a tolerably good impression. But the moment simple folk are layers of himself are drawn to them. Repudiation of the present forced to brawl among themselves for their portion of the social cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it product, their envy and spite surpass anything seen among literati itching in one's finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the or musical directors. In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it. This strength, is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that though manifesting itself as individual resistance, is by no means makes them so. The justified guilt-feelings of those exempt from of a merely individual nature. In the intellectual conscience possessed hysical work ought not become an excuse for the 'idiocy of rural of i it, the social moment is no less present than the moral super-ego. life. Intellectuals, who alone write about intellectuals and give Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and them their bad name in that of honesty, reinforce the lie. a great its citizens. If this conception dims -and who could still trust part of the prevalent anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, right up to Huxley, is set in motion when writers complain about the and all the detritus dumped in the individual by barbarous culture mechanisms of competition without understanding them, and so half-learning, slackness, to fall victim to them. In the activity most their own they have shut out the consciousness of tat wam asi, I Which is why they then scuttle by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellec- believe his assurance that it is one. The most striking example is that of intellectuals whose material situation has changed: no sooner have they only perfunctorily persuaded themselves of the If knaves should tempt you. - There is an amor intellectualis for eed to earn money by writing and that alone, than they turn out trash identical in all its nuances to what, with ample means, they kitchen personnel, a temptation for those engaged in theoretical had most passionately abjured. Just as once-rich emigres are often I."Thou art this: mystic pantheist formula of the Upanishads. as self-indulgently miserly on foreign soil as they always wanted