<nettime> The Critique of Pure Experience: Lessons from the First, Failed Fight Against Fascism

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Today's nightmares are largely of thirties and forties origin.  Nineteen, that is.

Those two decades traumatized the planet's humans as perhaps never before, and certainly gave us the three major wars raging today.  Millions killed and brutalized in Europe and Asia, the vengeance for which still animates many societies, governments, and powers great and small.  You could say, the solution is saturated with it.

Should the rampant return of fascism surprise us, then?  What wasn't there to stop it last time seems absent this time too.  Certainly it might be absent.

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What was done last time to oppose and obstruct fascism but failed?  Well, one can do worse than to look at the Bauhaus.  They truly wanted to articulate, by science yes but more so by art, an alternative that could survive the attack.  It didn't work; they fled; some escaped and some didn't.

What was their working theory at the time WWII erupted?  Benjamin, who died trying to escape German fascism, called it "The Critique of Pure Experience" (not to be confused with, but only compared to, Avenarius, who Lenin condemned).  That's the modification, development, and evolution of Kant which Benjamin thought Europe needed to avoid the abyss.  Reason (rationality, pattern, rule, control) plus Authority (power, violence, force) alone were not sufficient to stop the slide into autocratic total war by left or right.  He saw the necessary evolution to consist of placing Experience (Erfahrung and maybe some Erlebnis too in balance) on equal footing with Law and Power.  That might defend constitutional checks and balances, rights, and peaceful politics.  Maybe.

Anni and Josef Albers wrote about experience too, very concretely, as in the painting of colored squares and the weaving of colored threads, both by hand of necessity.  "Art is not an object, but experience" -- that is, experience as such, not "AN experience" like ads for vacation homes.  (There is no "an" there.)  Being largely bereft of direct, profound, personal experience, artistic and otherwise, Anni wrote, the concomitant sense of "inferiority" in both nations and individuals left Europe with no defense against the temptation of authoritarian cruelty.

Who else?  Dewey for certain, despite his flaws, in the thirties named multiple books for this thing "experience."  Maybe Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Yeats, and Wilde all did too in their ways, after Pater.  Blake, Hume, and Hamilton had based their respective poetico-philosphic systems on the word a century and a half earlier.  But overall fascist propaganda and parades were too compelling to the dispossessed, too flashy and intoxicating for the thin and wan image of experience offered by the academies and kulturindustrie of constitutional democracy.  Fascist theater won the day, and the world burned perhaps almost to death.

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Fortunately Germany and its kindred spirits lost the shooting war at least temporarily.  Constitutions and democracy somewhat survived in some places and kept trying to find a way to fight fascism.  Did they succeed enough?  We are finding out; but arguably the work never ends and remains "eternally incomplete," to embellish Habermas who, like Martin Jay, is an expert on pre-WWII German ideas.

What about Experience today?  Have we gotten to Benjamin's unfinished hope, a Kantian framework with some stable coherence of norms but rooted not in routinization (to be avoided for its deadening, instrumentalizing, and mechanical side effects) but something more productive, a real soil for the future to take root in?  Arguably not, to the extent Big USA Tech is running the show.  Monetized cognitive incrementation does not move experience forward but downward, making it lesser, embracing drought and dearth, unthinkingly enamored of the control that chokes and kills as it subdues.

It is yet to be determined if human culture will survive and defeat tech overlordship.  Experience as a philosophical category equal to Reason and Authority in the West is still, sadly, "not even close."  Communism loves historical materialism, and dialectic, yes, but not human experience as such which is far too subjective, superficial, imaginary, and bourgeois.  Give us trucks and tanks, they say, dams and displays of unity, but none of your accursed poetry and certainly none of your voting rights, checks, or balances.  Present-Day Fascists of course don't like poets or elections either; but the irony is that even moderates, by demonizing the subjective character of experience (objectivity is what gets you tenure or a bonus after all and survives the harsh light of competitive theory), won't stick up for it either whether their own or that of others.  Looking for the Total Fix people give voting and constitutions short shrift, or even blame them for their own sluggish speech.  The 
 blind lead the blind and everyone falls into the ditch for want of a nail.  The horse is lost, and will not drink.  Panic prevails -- guess who swoops in?

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There's no way to say "here's exactly how to do what's never been done, here's who did it and why, where you can find it and copy down the recipe."  It's learning, which has been done, but of something we don't know yet which therefore hasn't.  That's why the Italian language has a single word for both experience and experiment, and why the Tao symbolizes experience past, present, and future revolving in a nonlinear moving network.  Martin Jay dubs one path out "magical nominalism," a current of reform both antique and modern which allows the other to speak in a fabric not an autocracy of voice, but admits it has not yet been tried out for real.

So weave ye your colored threads while ye may, and by that cloth of experience make a new global politics both possible and presentable enough to bridge the difficult dinner party guests of the many and the military.

Because there is no other way across.


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