Corporate Rokoko
and the End of the Civic Project
- The making of the public sphere and political clubs. -
Discussion between Professor Jürgen Fohrmann
Dr Erhard Schüttpelz and Stephan Dillemuth
PART 3______________________________
Corporate forms of organization.
D: Again the question: How did political consciousness once constitute
itself? Which structures were created to then distribute power crystallized
in one point to a type of self-organized governmental system?
I think we are now at a point in time where this idea of a civic
democracy is no longer effective. The decision-making processes are again
and increasingly converging on a central but this time virtual point.
In my opinion, were approaching a global and new type of absolutism
which I would like to coin Corporate Rokoko. There are of
course still nation-states which the citizens once created as a structural
shell, but they are now nothing more than administrative units of the
new global power structure and they are increasingly disintegrating into
business locations competing against each other. They are economic regions
defining themselves solely via global competition. The absolute ruler,
the central position of representation that was once occupied by the king,
is now a virtual figure, namely global monetarism. Just like the various
courts, the corporations and their followings now group around this central
point.
In such a context, how can citizens or intellectuals still feel
responsible for a common agenda?
S: Exactly. What we are talking about is this central point which
is defined by the French word sujet, meaning subject and citizen.
The subject, as it developed in the 18th century and was incorporated
by the state in the 19th century, addressed the state
whether as poet, terrorist or political citizen. And now people start
realizing that the state is no longer there as a direct addressee for
all kinds of protests and demonstrations and so forth. As a result, a
certain moment, a certain form of addressing, which one had grown accustomed
to, has disappeared.
D: Therefore, one no longer feels responsible for bringing about
possible changes, one is no longer obliged to revolution.
Meanwhile, thinking about revolutionizing the Federal Republic of Germany
is of course nonsense; one would have to begin with Western Europe, and
this shell, too, is already long since covered by another shell.
F: But why is this the case? The problem seems to be that the
public, which was hitherto addressable, has now, on a global basis, turned
into an absolutely virtual entity.
The public of the 18th century principally conceives
itself as finite. Via a democratic model one can reach all subjects one
wants to reach, and these subjects can amongst themselves come to a decision
effecting action.
But when communication gets so extensive, like on the Internet,
that one can no longer see with whom one is communicating, then one can
no longer trust that this will result in an ability to act.
D: But on the other hand, one discovers that there are many small
instances of a public organizing themselves subculturally. Their communication
is highly differentiated, but difficult to understand from the outside.
F: I believe this type of globalization produces an absolute surplus
of information, an entropy of information. And when corporations are the
ones that predominantly define this field and only little can be filtered
as information, then it becomes unclear how to access this information
in the first place, because corporations usually do not function according
to public principles.
D: Couldnt one envision that some of these small public
instances which neednt be local, meaning assembled at one
place, but that communicate across the globe , could constitute
something like small, semi-autonomous units in a global state? Couldnt
small pockets of resistance or soviets or principalities
constitute themselves in opposition to the regionally-incorporated kingdoms
of corporate locations? In other words: tribes, cooperatives or clans?
Or am I already talking like a communitarian?
S: The problem will definitely consist in that none of these interest
groups can make decisions for the others, and together they wont
be able to do so either. This is true for all cultural and ideological
contexts. At the beginning of the 1960s and in the early 70s,
such groups still had the incredible feeling that by practising a certain
form of self-critique and self-determination, something could be created
for those with whom one worked together. It remains true, however, that
all power structures and all hierarchies are based on eternal repetitions
that must be performed day by day and year by year for the conditions
to be upheld. It is, therefore, all about finding the point where the
repetition no longer works and to find such a point or several
such points can take pretty long. So its better to conceive an agenda
that will function for decades, even if the agenda looks like nonsense
during certain periods of time. And several people had this staying power,
people who started off early enough, not in 1968 but in 1958.
Bohemian research institutions.
D: Let us rather return to the beginning of the 20th
century and talk about different escapist attempts or attempts at self-therapy,
Monte Veritá [42] and
the community of fruit eaters for example, or expressive dance...
F: ...green communes that already existed back then, or the garden
cities...
S: ...but what is most important, and this applies all the way
up to the AAO [43] or the psycho set-ups of the
late 70s, is that it was performed as a type of research. There
are the records of Kommune I [44] intent on establishing what
is actually happening with us now?. That was clearly a form of self-analysis,
a very individual or strange kind of investigation perhaps, but these
were principally research institutions. This has absolutely nothing to
do with sensitivity groups only wanting to tune themselves to a certain
groove. The whole beatnik thing of the 60s was characterized by
a kind of research. And what belongs to research is that one does not
yet know what the outcome is. The really paralyzing thing about whatever
type of discourse is when one always already knows what it will lead to.
Or when one knows what the outcome will be for a couple of weeks and then
again for another few weeks, and so on. That is just as paralyzing. Its
then better to leave things to chance, and chance also plays a role in
the 17th century in motivating actions, in the Picaro.
F: Starting with the 18th century, the subject is no
longer dominated by rank, but the subject seeks its own intersections
with other spheres itself. That would be the one side, and I additionally
see a counter-movement in these interest groups attempting, at least on
a symbolic level, to create an all-encompassing context in life via clothing,
behavior etc. These two movements appear to run parallel without being
thematized as a conflict. On the one hand, the impossibility to allow
oneself to be subjected to the totality of the given circumstances, because
there are still so many other important things, and on the other hand,
the attempts pointing to the globality of life-world contexts via design
and attire.
This of course is tightly connected to the change in communication
relationships in our society. Communication in our field is indeed so
differentiated that there are no longer any major books, because there
is no longer a common context of communication making these books appear
as major books. This, I must point out, is not meant as cultural pessimism!
S: The organizational forms of art and science, however, do seem
to still function. But what about political events, how are they organized?
F: As a common political context after 1945 there was only the
project of the student movement. Later, this movement raveled out to thousands
of different political interests. They could partially be bundled again,
but no longer within the framework of the idea of a common communication
context.
The only major point of reference which played a role in all political
discourses was the Shoah, the holocaust. As the negative image of a gigantic
catastrophe it describes a limit for our post-war society, and that can
clearly be used as a moral argument and amalgamate certain political discourses.
d-dffrttd utopias.
D: I would now like to return to the question of condensation
points. What is evidently important is the fact that they exist at all
and that certain social developments and problems condense there, that
they can break open, be organized and given complete expression. The artists
of the decadence first became aware of the encrusted situation at the
end of the 19th century and translated this into an aesthetic
concept. Afterwards, there were several attempts at an experience of awakening
and self-therapy. These experiments, research projects and seminars within
a certain Bohemian class and taking place at self-created institutions
were then, however, covered up and suppressed by the two world wars. National
Socialism certainly drew a lot of that chaotic energy into its pathological
order.
S: In the first half of the century, there were especially in
Russia and Germany certainly utopian moments in the discussion of modernity
in which various elements were able to converge. That then exploded again,
and today such a situation no longer exists; in the second half of the
century it can only be celebrated.
D: The Third Reich was also laid out as a big utopia.
F: There was a high degree of technical differentiation, but simultaneously
this attempt at creating absolute social de-differentiation. The entire
culture of clubs and associations was almost completely synchronized during
the Third Reich and replaced by a strict organizational structure. This
affective economy ought to be examined in regard to its homology, its
structural similarity... What does it mean from an emotional point of
view for me to become a member of a club? Why do I do this, and what did
the fascist ideology attempt to replace it with? The Nazis didnt
invent very much in this regard, moreover, they forced everything else
around into line and eliminated all differences. Everything is choric,
German classes have also become choric. Everyone must stand up to speak
and all recite together. And this destroyed the political culture in Germany
with a lasting effect and for a very long time.
S: As far as the avant-garde is concerned, after 1945 one must
say that all the early organizational forms of the first half of the 20th
century could now no longer function. They could perhaps be parodied and
thus prolonged, something that Situationism for example did, but to renew
the likes of the Bauhaus via Ulm [45] or Gruppe 47 [46] that didnt work. There were still organizations,
but the organizational forms were already shattered. What was viable were
loose, Bohemian forms of organization; they could still assert themselves,
but as part of a modernity broken within itself.
D: On the other hand, political concepts that were developed prior
to the world war or in the 19th century were then applied to
the Third World and there again tested in revolutionary movements, by
the Sandinistas, Zapatistas, Che Guevara, the PLO or the Civil Rights
Movement in the USA. In Germany, I view the last attempt at change in
the student movement and the RAF [47] .
F: Yes, I would regard the student movement and the RAF as the
last movement that made the attempt to bring together politics in a way
that created a unified communication context. That is certainly true.
But with the RAF it no longer worked in this way. Reading their texts
again, one does not discern an interest in communication but only in action.
And because this was no longer questioned, the machine just ran loose,
it all became very mechanical.
S: But it still stands there as a totally one-sided address to
the state.
F: The state actually became the only communication partner for
the RAF.
D: What the RAF couldnt achieve: now the state is abolishing
itself.
F: Thats why there are no political parties anymore. It
is no longer clear how to deal with ideological and party fronts because
there are no longer any. For this reason all political activity has become
indistinguishable, and thats why its so difficult to develop
a political concept. In this situation the parties then sit down and try
to invent concepts that can be used as arguments against another concept,
e.g. one invented by the opposition. This is rhetoric and it is sold as
designer rhetoric.
D: Politics basically imitates the rhetoric of the corporations.
The design of the promises always has priority and must be new, because
the products cant satisfy ones desire.
F: The ubiquity of design nowadays perhaps constitutes a universal
coherence. But still one could ask why no intellectual group or class
attempts to raise its voice against this rhetoric of design.
D: Because theyre busy bemoaning the loss of the welfare
state. This is the way monarchists must have felt after the heads were
already chopped off.
But I think the ornaments of power have changed, and we are already
in a different structure with another aesthetics without actually wanting
or being able to perceive it.
F: That might be true, but its not very comforting.
Ornaments of power.
D: During the baroque and rococo era, the form of a crooked shell,
the rocaille represented the aesthetics of absolutism for more than 200
years. Which ornament has power given itself since then?
F: We could write a few essays on this. The aesthetics of power
is always bound to the representability of power, i.e. an emblem, a body
or a state is required that can be represented as having been given power.
The body of the king is a physical carrier, a carrier of the message of
power, it is a medium.
Up to the National Socialists, ornamentation of power is readable.
The Nazis were the ones who tried to quite consciously introduce it, like
in the Rieffenstahl [48]
films. But after the war, it is already a parody and at the time even
perceived as a parody, e.g. Ludwig Erhardt [49] and the Wirtschaftswunder [50] . Heinrich Lübke [51] speaks for Germany, that was indeed the involuntary Wilhelm
Busch [52] of this development.
S: Or Polke [53] ,
the Polke-in-himself which he later showed us.
F: And then there was certainly still the politics of big gestures
which in fact already performed the inversion of power. A gesture of humility,
like Willy Brandts [54]
going down on his knees, does not exist any more today. There is
no longer a representation of a political power connected to the state
nor a representation of a big gesture... I have no idea how something
like that should work.
D: Today, the corporations are not the signs of power, instead
signs represent the power of the corporations. Which signs are preferred
and what do they look like?
F: Any good advertising is of course funny. That at any rate is
quite strange. Perhaps power has been shifted to the ubiquity of the joke.
One could certainly ask what led to the fantastic career the joke suddenly
made.
Doesnt it have to do with the absolute availability of all
objects, as the insignia of all power?
S: That is sort of an answer: the ornamentation of power represented
today would first of all pass over to advertising...
D: Advertising is not only an expression but also the affirmation
of the given conditions, and because advertising can not and does not
want to change existing economic circumstances and power structures, it
is in a true sense conservative. The more progressive it seems to be the
more conservative it is. In addition, it expands to all areas of the public
due to the increasing privatization. Advertising in magazines, on billboards
or on TV is only the oldest form in which it shows itself.
F: This advertisement can itself no longer produce heroic gestures
but only ironic ones. It is the simultaneity of joking and being serious,
namely serious in regard to having to sell and joking in regard to presentation,
which only has to be funny. So it really doesnt matter what it is
that must be presented. An uncanny availability of all objects that are
to be presented in a humorous discourse. That is at least an attempt to
answer the question.
S: Would that be a continuation of ornamentation?
F: Yes, but ex negativo.
D: Is that baroque? Everything is available and translated into
an ornament, into certain ironic and stereotype manifestations. Communication
at court is also characterized by this: esprit triumphing over the objects
and topics talked about.
F: Yes, perhaps this is an inversion of the baroque. The idea
in the baroque period would be that everything which exists, all items,
can be translated into images. Everything is combinable, although baroque
semantics was not organized in such a humorous way.
D: But allegorically. And the allegorical figures, just like the
ironic ones in advertisement, illustrated and stabilized the existing
conditions.
F: There is also usually no relation between product name and
company. With modern corporations, the relationship between signifier
and signified has totally drifted apart. The product is concatenated in
a completely different way. The reason being that the concatenation structure
within product advertising targets something totally different than designating
a point of reference which could be associated with the corporation.
A new sovereignty?
D: During the course of this conversation, we repeatedly had to
operate with contradictions and pairs of opposites: secrecy vs. intended
public, differentiation vs. de-differentiation etc.... The entire
fragility of the civic project seems to result from its latent schizophrenia
and the double binds as a consequence of the problematic demarcation between
the self and the other.
Individual identity is constructed differently in systems and
religions that revolve around a central point or god. There, contradictions
occur on a higher level and the subjects humbly submit to the system.
A new ideology or form of government therefore demands
a new concept of subject.
F: Yes, that is also Luhmanns thesis: As soon as systems
become more complex, the subjects are also expected to become more complex.
Its as simple as that.
S: Does he mean individual subjects as well?
F: People ought to improve. And this can be achieved on the one
hand by increasing aggregation, which is a quantitative argument, and
on the other by having a bigger choice, a qualitative argument. This would
establish a high degree of participation in totally different system references
and global contexts.
It is his big hope that this improvement will occur. And that
is exactly the success story of modern subjectivity: namely to leave ones
class and choose for oneself which parts of reality one wants to include
in ones life. Free choice is often not possible, but at least a
tentative choice can be made and ones own life built up in a modular
way, like using a construction kit.
D: But that is still along the lines of the development of a civic
concept of subject. However, at the point at which we started the conversation,
a bigger break occurred. Is it at all conceivable that a new ideology
or religion could do away with this additive, multiple-choice concept
of subject?
F: The entire subject concept seems to be a communication problem.
I can keep on differentiating, but then again I require sufficiently de-differentiated
circumstances that allow for communication to commence in the first place.
Increasing differentiation does not allow for a more general mode of communication,
only for a very specialized type of communication without feedback loops.
Suddenly, I no longer have even two fields in common with another subject.
And this is exactly what leads to de-differentiation, the gateway
for promises: to say that based on one ground, life can be reformed, be
it Christianity or Europe, mysticism or sects, it doesnt matter
its all the same stuff.
I see a wavelike movement between differentiation and de-differentiation,
back and forth.
D: Even if one realizes that sovereignty is not possible because
one is always part of some system or another, the concern in my opinion
is still always the attempt to establish and maintain sovereignty. A new
self-conscious way of dealing with political and economic constraints
and ideologies, against global Corporate Rokoko . Everything else would
be helplessness, actually obsequiousness in belief.
S: Because alone one does not have the ability to assert oneself
sufficiently, ones own network must not be given up. One must try
to expand it without making it break apart, which is in itself a paradoxical
endeavor.
This is an inherent problem, as the network ought to expand, and
up to a certain point this does succeed, but exactly this then leads to
the old network disintegrating.
Everything that was successful to a certain extent after 1945
was based on temporary alliances. There was no officially organized group
that asserted itself to any significant degree. Thats a problem
we must clearly see for the future as well. One cannot rely on the fact
that a group organized as a label will remain especially stable as a subject.
The same problem existed with the Early Romantics in Germany around 1800,
that everything is only a temporary alliance.
D: Condensation points would therefore constitute an especially
intense communication situation which is, however, only temporary because
it disintegrates, must disintegrate. Still, the question is how that then
continues. Does it influence the surrounding de-differentiated conditions
of communication, does it serve as an example or guideline? Did it ultimately
have an impact?
F: Sovereignty is really only an ideology. It consists in the
hope that the group can decide on its stability itself, or that associations
can be freely chosen and one can act freely within these networks. But
that doesnt work.
D: But a type of behavior is conceivable that doesnt give
a damn about the aims of the respective system. Sovereignty of the people
200 years ago meant: removing the head from the central body.
S: One can chop it off like a head of cabbage.
F: It can be put that way, but those are the antiquated remains
of a pre-modern society. The utopia of monetarism is that the sovereign
subjects show their sovereignty by saying, I enjoy being a subject
which thinks in monetary terms.
And thats exactly what this designer rhetoric and aesthetics is
selling us: I love to smoke.
That is the formula for modern subjectivity.
S: So if one thinks there should be a type of asceticism ... those
models already existed.
D: Asceticism is only a mirror-image of
I love to smoke. A new sovereignty within Corporate
Rokoko would have to be different.
F: I love and hate to smoke,
these are my final words, lets leave it there!
____________
FOOTNOTES:
> [42] Monte Veritá was between 1915 and 1925 an international
commune near Ascona. A test site for all kinds of escapist tendencies:
dadaists, expressionists, expressive dance, anthroposophy, psychiatry,
eurhythmics, amongst them Werefkin, Wigman, Jung, Steiner.
> [43] AAO (AKTIONS-ANALYTISCHE ORGANISATION) In the
first half of the 1970s, a commune was founded in Vienna around the
at the time almost 50-year-old artist Otto Mühl with free sexuality
and communal property. The aim was to fight the nuclear
family and sexually-crippling couple relationships.
Revulsion, hatred, depression and incestuous desires were to be lived
out and overcome on the path to creating a new human being,
father and mother therapeutically murdered and raped.
By the end of 1976, about 25 such communes existed
in Germany, France, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland and Austria with
close to 500 members from the leftist, alternative milieu.
Private property was turned into communal property.
Freedom to chose a profession and education was abolished starting in
1984. All members of the city communes had to work in commune-owned
firms (selling life and health insurance policies). From 1983 on, no
new members were recruited, the number of members was to be maintained
in a natural way via the production of children.
In 1991, Otto Mühl was arrested and sentenced to several
years in prison for, among other things, sexually abusing youths
and rape.
A former leading member of the commune declared: We
who at the beginning protested against the authoritarian father-society
ended up with a fascistoid educational ideal. We thought we were a revolutionary
living and working community with communal property and free sexuality,
but it was in fact an experiment with authority and the principle of
obedience.
> [44] Kommune I, the first seriously funny and spontaneous,
free-living and free-loving late-1960s social experiment in Germany
(West Berlin) which became immediately the center of media attention.
Many of Kommune I's members were prominent student leaders in the nearby
Free University, including Fritz Teufel and ex-situationist Dieter Kunzelmann,
others were life-style advocates like the model and actress Uschi Obermeier
and Rainer Langhans.
Kommune I became prominent for advocating and carrying
out humorous praxis. In allegiance to Marxist theory, where
theory was the discussion of how to best bring about the
revolution, praxis was direct action attempting to bring
about the revolution, an idea which prompted many leftist Germans to
support the early actions of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. For aspiring terrorists,
the primacy of praxis was absolute.
After Kommune I fell apart many of its members participated
in the low-level terrorism of the West Berlin Tupamaros, and several
went on to form the urban terrorist group called Movement 2 June.
Teufel went to prison after sending his judges to
hell, in a set of incredibly funny trials. Langhans ended up as a softheaded
guru for Munichs upper class.
> [45] A little town in the southern part of Germany.
> [46] A loose association of authors founded in 1947.
The group had no political or social program, but encouraged criticism
of political and social conditions.
> [47] Red Army Fraction, military organization
of Germanys radical Left, using strategies of guerrilla warfare
against the capitalistic hegemony of the West and its exponents. It
was born with the liberation of Andreas Baader from prison on May 14th,
1970, an action in which Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler took part.
Their struggle aims at destroying the imperialist feudal system, politically,
economically and militarily. It is being conducted in the form of international
action against the military allies of the United States-NATO and, in
particular, the Federal German Armed Forces. Within West Germany, the
struggle is being conducted against the armed forces of the state, representing
the monopoly of power by the ruling class, embodied in the police, the
Federal frontier police, and the security services. The power structure
of the multinationals, that is, state and non-state bureaucracies, political
parties, corporate unions and the media are also included. Some of the
founding members allegedly committed suicide in their cells in 1977.
The group announced its disbandment in March, 1998, after it had no
political and aesthetic support. But: despite all-out efforts of the
security forces of the COIN, the last generation of the RAF remained
undetected. Unlike any other guerilla, it had learned from its predecessors.
> [48] Leni Rieffenstahl, born in 1902 and probably
still alive. Photographer and filmmaker. Allegedly concerned with Just
Beauty she was The Third Reichs most important visual advertiser.
See advertising as art, art as advertising.
> [49] Ludwig Erhardt, 1897-1977, minister for economic
affairs and Chancellor of the German Federal Republic. Father of the
Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), he led post-war Germany into the
social market economy, a kind of Capitalism Lite which combines
the principle of competition with social protection. Here, competition
should not proceed uncontrollably, the state however ought to limit
itself in creating a frame of arrangements.
> [50] Wirtschaftswunder, miracle of economical upswing
in WEST Germany since 1948. The pride and the admiration which adhered
to the word at the beginning have faded to a more skeptical valuation
and over the years this has led to an ironic use. See Wirtschaftswunderbauch,
see Ludwig Erhardt.
> [51] Heinrich Lübke, 1894-1972, president of the
Federal Republic of Germany from 1959-69. Notorious for his clumsy appearances
and unintentional humor, funny speeches and corny jokes.
> [52] Wilhelm Busch, 1832-1908, German draftsman.
His encounter with Dutch paintings of the 17th century turned
out to be the key experience - they became models he never achieved.
He contributed his drawings to various journals. The pitiless world
he depicts is at the borderline of comic, and funnily debunks human
malice. The graphic virtuosity, however, veils pessimistic tendencies
with often lovingly detailed genre studies. As a cheerful German house
and home humorist the crucial parts of his work are played down by his
extreme popularity and the tendency to take humorous literature less
seriously than it deserves.
> [53] Polke, German painter, born in 1942, studied
at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1961 to 1967. After early works in the
style of Capitalist Realism he developed, free from any group membership,
an ironic visual language, which plays with contradictions and stereotyped
images and seems to lead to lampoon or humorous bewilderment.
> [54] Willy Brandt, original name HERBERT ERNST KARL
FRAHM. He assumed the name Willy Brandt as a refugee from Nazi Germany
in Norwegian exile. Later German statesman of renown, leader of the
German Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, or SPD) from 1964 to 1987, and chancellor of the Federal
Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974.
He concentrated on improving relations with East Germany, other Communist
nations in eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, formulating a policy
known as Ostpolitik (eastern policy). Right wing detractors
claimed that this signaled West Germany's acceptance of the permanent
loss of those eastern lands whilst some years the later the chancellor
of ponderousness, Helmut Kohl harvested the fruits of this politics
reuniting West and East Germany after Brandt had stabilized the relations
with eastern Europe.
Brandt received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 and he resigned in
May 1974 after his close aide Gunther Guillaume was unmasked as an East
German spy.
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