Do not knock. -Technology is making gestures precise and brutal porting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitati qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender. For tenderness between people is nothing other than aware- deliberation,civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it wer ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, limped by those embroiled in purposes; a legacy of old privileges to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to by bourgeois reason finally abolishes this promise too. If time is snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad oney, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such manners parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight- of the house which receives them. The new human type cannot be forward. Every sheath interposed between men in their transactions properly understood without awareness of what he is c is felt as a disturbance to the functioning of the apparatus, in which exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most they are not only objectively incorporated but with which they secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there proudly identify themselves. That, instead of raising their hats, are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to they greet each other with the halls of familiar indifference, that, instead of letters, they send each other inter-office communications doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? And which without address or signature, are random symptoms of a sickness driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe of contact. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The of distance between people. For only as long as they abstain from movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, importuning one another with giving and taking, discussion and hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least mplementation, control and function, is there space enough be- to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, tween them for the delicate connecting filigree of external forms in which alone the internal can crystallize, Reactionaries like the ontact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, followers of Jung have noticed something of this. It is, we read either in freedom of conduct or ina autonomy of things, which would in one of G. R. Heyer's Eranos essays distinguishing habit of survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the people not yet fully formed by civilization, that a topic may not be moment of action directly approached, indeed, for some time not even mentioned rather the conversation must move towards its real object as if by tself, in spirals, 1 Instead of this, the straight line is now regarded as the shortest distance between two r-cole, as if they were points. Just as nowadays house-walls are cast in one piece, so mortar truwwelpeter.-When Hume, confronting his worldly com- between people is replaced by the pressure holding them together patriots,sought to defend epistemological contemplation,the'pure Anything different is simply no longer understood, but appears, if ot as a Viennese speciality with a head-waiterly tinge, then as rever argument: Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. '1 That was itself pragmatic, ntences about the health of one's wife that prelude the business and yet it contains implicitly and negatively the whole truth about discussion over lunch. the utilitarian order has taken over and the spirit of practicality. The practical orders of life, while pur imilated even its opposite. The taboo on talking shop and the nability to talk to each other are in reality the same thing. Because 1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chicago 963,Pp,6-7 everything is bustness, the latter is unmentionable like rope in a Gustav-Richard Heyer(1890-1967): psychologist disciple of Jung
hanged man's home Behind the pseudo-democratic dismantling of ceremony,of old-fashioned courtesy, of the useless conversation aused by ordinary presents this pure fungibility represents the suspected, not even unjustly, of being idle gossip, behind the seem- more human alternative, because it at least allows the receiver to ing clarification and transparency of human relations that no longer admit anything undefined, naked brutality is ushered in. The direct give himself a present, which is admittedly in absolute contradiction statement without divagation, hesitations or reflections, that gives Beside the greater abundance of goods within reach even of the the other the facts full in the face, already has the form and timbre poor, the decline of present-giving might seem immaterial. reflec- of the command issued under Fascism by the dumb to the sil tion on it sentimental. However, even if amidst superfluity the gift Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideolo were superflous-and this is a lie, privately as much as socially, for ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology there is no-one today for whom imagination could notdiscover for treating people what would delight him utterly -people who no longer gave would still be in need of giving. In them wither the irreplaceable faculties which cannot flourish in the isolated cell of pure inwardness, but only in live contact with the warmth of things. A chill descends on all they do, the kind word that remains unspoken, the consideration Articles may not be exchanged.-We are forgetting how to give unexercised. This chill finally recoils on those from whom it eman- presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something non- ates. Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation sensical and implausible about it; here and there even children eye that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through con- the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them sequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and reeves soap. arity,administered beneficence, the planned plastering-over of society's visible sores. In its organ- ized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short through treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degener- Baby with the bath-water. -Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most long-established and central is that of the lie: that ated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of man which does and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining not exist; that it conceals the material conditions upon which all the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence. This is the out of one,'s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At the best notion of culture as ideology, which appears at first sight common they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few to both the bourgeois doctrine of violence and its adversary, both invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption thy. g degrees worse. The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing lationabout lies, has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology not know what to give because one really does not want to. This This can be seen on the private level. Inexorably the thought of merchandise is unrelated like its buyers. It was a drug in the market money and all its attendant conflicts extends into the most tender from the first day. Likewise, the right to exchange the article, which tic, the most sublime spiritual relationships, With the logic of signifies to the recipient: take this, it's all yours, do what you like coherence and the pathos of truth,cultural criticism could therefore with it; if you don't want it, that's all the same to me, get something demand that relationships be entirely reduced to their material else instead. Moreover, by comparison with the embarrassment ngin, ruthlessly and openly formed according to the interests of participants, For meaning, as we know, is not independent
of genesis, and it is easy to discern, in everything that cloaks or mediates the material, the trace of insincerity, sentimentality, indeed le who belong together ought neither to keep silent about precisely a concealed and doubly poisonous interest. But to act Peop material interests, nor to sink to their level, but to assimilate radically in accordance with this principle would be to extirpat them by reflection into their relationships and so surpass them. with the false, all that was true also, all that, however strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chi anticipation of a nobler condition, and so to bring about directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering indirect Plurale tantum. -If society, as a contemporary theory teaches, is In the cultural critics after Nietzsche this reversal of position has really one of rackets, then its most faithful model is the precise always been obvious: Spengler endorsed it enthusiastically. But Marxists are not proof against it either. Cured of the Social-Dem tracing the absolutely particular interests of each individual. the cratic belief in cultural progress and confronted with growing bar. barism, they are under constant temptation to advocate the latter died, and it is by no means far-fetched to consider the organiz in the interests of the objective tendency,, and, in an act of des- ation of divergent drives under the primacy of an ego answering peration, to await salvation from their mortal enemy who, as the the reality principle as, from the first, an internalized robber band antithesis, is supposed in blind and mysterious fashion to hel with leader, followers, ceremonies, oaths of allegiance, betrayals, conflicts of rests, intrigues and all its othe purtenance prepare the good end. Apart from this, emphasis on the materia element, as against the spirit as a lie, gives rise to a kind of dubious need only observe outbursts in which the individual asserts himself affinity with that political economy which is subjected to an energetically against his environment, for instance rage.The manent criticism, comparable with the complicity between police and underworld. Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory giving his unconscious the order to pull no punches, his eyes shin- and practice demanded, we have become all too practical. Fear of ing with the satisfaction of speaking for the many that he himself is. the impotence of theory supplies a pretext for bowing to the al- The more someone has espoused the cause of his own aggression, ocess, and so fully admitting the the more perfectly he represents the repressive principle of society. ty production of theory. Traits of malice are not alien even to authentic Marxist In this sense more than in any other, perhaps, the proposition is true that the most individual is the most general. business mentality and sober critical judgement, between vulgar materialism and the other kind, so that it is at times difficult properly to distinguish subject and object -To identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the former is really becoming Tough baby. -There is a certain gesture of virility, be it one's own totally absorbed by the latter, and eagerly invites such identi or someone elses, that calls for suspicion. It expresses independence, sureness of the power to command, the tacit complicity of all males today it has been democratized, and film heroes show the most such refusal is illusory as long as the existent exists. Since, however, Insignificant bank clerk how it is done. Its archetype is the hand ree and honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the same time me dinner-jacketed figure returning late to his bachelor fat, to speak for truth: in face of the lie of the commodity world, even itching on the indirect lighting and mixing himself a whisky and the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective. That culture so far soda: the carefully recorded hissing of the mineral water says what has failed is no justification for furthering its failure, by strewing th the arrogant mouth keeps to itself: that he despises anything that store of good flour on the spilt beer like the girl in the fairy-tale. y in the plura
does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream, particularl women,which is why they, precisely, find him irresistible. Fo him the ideal form of human relations is the club, that arena of a is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and un- aturalizable. Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and respect founded on scrupulous unscrupulousness. The pleasures of measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reifica- such men, or rather of their models, which are seldom equalled in reality, for people are even now better than their culture, all have actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection about them a latent violence. This violence seems a threat directed against others, of whom such a one, sprawling in his easy chair, ha long ceased to have need. In fact it is past violence against hi ①6 on, life is dragged along on the triumphal automobile of the united statisticians, and even t th as pride in bearing it, is raised dire tly, untransformed, as a stereo past is no longer safe from the present, whose remembrance of it nch glass of whisk ensigns it a second time to oblivion of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is regis- tered as pleasure. He-men are thus, in their own constitution, what film-plots usually present them to be, masochists. At the root of their sadism is a lie, and only as liars do they truly become sadists, English spoken.-In my childhood, some elderly English ladies with agents of repression. This lie, however, is nothing other than form of heterosexuality. In Oxford two sorts of student are d whom my parents kept up re a he ye in the language of the donors: tinguished, the tough guys and the intellectuals: the latter through whether I could read it none of them paused to reflect. The peculiar this contrast alone, are almost automatically equated with the inaccessibility of the books, with their glaring pictures, titles and feminate. There is much reason to believe that the ruling stratum, gnettes,and their indecipherable text, filled me with the belief on its way to dictatorship, becomes polarized towards thes that in general objects of this kind were not books at all, but extremes. Such disintegration is the secret of its integration,the advertisements, perhaps for machines like those my uncle produced oy of being united in the lack of joy. In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims tries and to understand English, this awareness has not been dis- in order not to admit that they are like them. Totalitarianism and pelled but strengthened. There is a song by Brahms, to a poem by homosexuality belong together. In its downfall the subject negates Heyse, with the lines: 0 Herreleid, du Ewigkeit/Selbander nur everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the Seligkeit. In the most widely used American edition this is rendered strong man and the compliant youth merge in an order which as: O misery, eternity!/ But two in one were ecstasy. The archaic, asserts unalloyed the male principle of domination. In making all passionate nouns of the original have been turned into catchwords without exception, even supposed subjects, its objects, this prin- for a hit song, designed to boost it. Illuminated in the neon-light ple becomes totally switched on by these words, culture displays its character as adver- 1. Paul Heyse(1830-1914): poet and novella-writer patronized by the 25 arian m To them shall no thoughts be turned.-The past life of emigres is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it
On parle francais. How intimately sex and language are int twined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign lar Dwarf fruit.-It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the em- When de Sade is read in the original no dictionary is needed most recondite expressions for the indecent, knowledge of which In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and no school, no parental home, no literary experience transmits, are the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to understood instinctively, just as in childhood the most tangential paint a vegetable and it was already a dream. utterances and observations concerning the sexual crystallize into true representation. It is as if the imprisoned passions, called by In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they pur- their name in these expressions, burst through the ramparts of veyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell blind language as through those of their own repression, and forced their way irresistibly into the innermost cell of meaning, which b> Beauty of the American landscape: that even the smallest of its ts is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country. In the recollection of emigration each German venison roast tastes as if it had been felled with the charmed bullets of the frei. Paysage.- The shortcoming of the American landscape is not so In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. much, as romantic illusion would have i, the absence of historical We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand. This applies warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him not only to the lack of arable land the uncultivated woods often no from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the ligher than scrub, but above all to the roads. These are always in- song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has serted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth power over him no longer. and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are us in waking hours from newspaper headlines. expressionless. Just as they know no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges as a transition to the vegetation, no trails leading off into the valley, so they are without the mild, .. The mythical messenger of doom relives in radio. Important vents announced peremptorily are always disasters. In English soothing, un-angular quality of things that have felt the touch of solemn means both ceremonious and menacing. The power of hands or their immediate implements. It is as if no-one had ever society behind the speaker turns of its own accord against the passed their hand over the landscape's hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catas- the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past % In Hegel self-consciousness was the truth of the certainty of one's in the words of the Phenomenology, thenative realm of truth 1. Opera by the German romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber (18an)