Out of Context

"Sometimes, a child's laughter frightens me." - F. Hölderlin

1. 
Life's course has come to an end. Before you've even had a chance to 
manifest yourself, a resumé, full of impressive positions, is required. 
Love-engagement-marriage has been replaced by a patchwork of afflictions, 
such as coming out, crisis, relapse, and a second or third childhood. One 
no longer gets down to promoting one's career: It simply takes too long, 
and who knows what things will be like five years from now. With 
linearity broken, the accumulated past no longer offers a foothold. The 
best thing to do is to take courage and make a new start. Feel free to 
forget or deny your personal biography. The betrayal of friends, party, 
creed, family, and business is a litmus test to prove your ability to 
keep up with the rest. Professed loyalties have turned out to be nothing 
but a décor in which to watch time go by. The past is merely today's 
overture; it does not interfere with the current future. Looking back 
now, past commitments turn out empty and meaningless. Been there, done 
that, time to move on. What on earth have I got left to say to those 
people? 

All change is no more than a dietary variation in an unchangeable 
existence. There isn't any experience left waiting to be articulated. On 
close examination, people experience nothing whatsoever anymore. 
Biographies constitute a tactical standstill, a drama without movement. 
Life, above all, is a matter of inner experience. We bathe in a profusion 
of interpretations, whether to do with suppressed lives, automobile makes 
and holiday destinations, or domestic problems. The last anchors to cling 
to are the collective childhood experiences, enlarged to mythic 
proportions: the pop concerts, parties, summer camps, military service, a 
strike or a riot, a soccer championship, campsites, and favorite pubs 
back then. These scant experiences of life make up the ground material 
for one's debut presentation. The 25-year-old bestseller author already 
looks back on a libertine life, feeling free to deny our fettered 
existence like another Proust. A loop is created, from the past which 
meant nothing to a future that will have nothing to offer. Existence 
without context is condemned to the present, the available and the 
possible. No breakout, no despair, not a dream.

Success is not a triumph but a necessity; otherwise, what story would one 
have to tell? There's no mistaking it: You are only rewarded for the 
risks you are prepared to take. Once out of context, actions become 
indefinable. Any will power or ambition that is brought to bear is 
arbitrary. There are no external, urgent necessities to justify choices 
of profession, hobbies, or partners; no force or coercion to render life 
evident. Thus, everything must come from within. There, all is barren, 
empty and cold. Thus, actions take on the character of a flight forward: 
a submission to fate, sought anywhere one can, without ever finding a 
thing. The result is the diversified extremism of workaholics, Doctors 
Without Borders, the Guinness Book of World Records, raves, 
mountaineering and bungee jumping. Backlash effects consist of 
disablement, senior workouts, walker shopping, insomnia, chronic fatigue, 
agoraphobia and incontinence - including the accompanying therapy 
package.

2. 
Now that the neo-Liberal ministers of the 1980's (the Thatchers, Reagans, 
Friedmans and Hayeks) have stepped down, the congregation has dispersed, 
left to its own devices. Before, a primary motivation consisted of 
resentment of the megalomaniac welfare state, the proliferation of social 
legislation and the communists disguised as civil servants. Encouraged by 
the revival of Cold War thinking, one imagined oneself to be engaged in a 
liberation struggle against line after line of bureaucratic 
fortifications. The leveling of these overgrown moats around the 
institutionalized working classes induced a state of euphoria in the 
higher-educated middle classes, aided by the whining media, the nagging 
"new social movements," and perestroika in distant Russia. Neo-Liberalism 
found so much response because socialism had lost its vitality, while the 
ruling Social Democrats were already thinking along similar lines.

The collapse of the structure of social achievements, justified demands, 
seasoned executives, political parties and their yuppies was not brought 
about through effective power coalitions among the opposition. The bottom 
dropped out from under the ideologically righteous because the executives 
of the welfare state had lost their religious confidence. There was more 
talk about neo-Liberalism than there were actual gestures towards the new 
Liberals. The message was eagerly heard out because, essentially, Liberal 
thought appealed to a guilty conscience which had reached maturity. The 
officials were fed up with the promises and effects of their 
interventions in the social sands. Policies collapsed under the weight of 
their own measurability. A whole new sphere was discovered, 
incomprehensible and uncontrollable, beyond regulation, forms and policy 
documents. A no man's land was sensed to exist. Entire populations got 
projected into an involuntary parking gear, encapsulated by regulations 
and arrangements. Who could have defended their predicament? This had 
nothing to do anymore with the intended emancipation of the working 
class, which had itself long ago turned into something else. Not only had 
it lost its recognizable contours, but its expression as well, including 
its spokespersons.

Neo-Liberalism encountered an easy opponent in drifting socialism. Now 
that everyone has become allied, the political classes share a similar 
uncertainty. No one knows why they act as Christian Democrats, leftist 
Liberals, Republicans, Social Democrats, or Conservatives within this 
constellation anymore. What's left as residue are the scandals, files, 
disturbed relations, agendas and procedural mistakes. After solving the 
social question, it is now time to face the political one - something our 
highly dynamic neo-Liberalism has no answer to. Further deregulation 
would mean the elimination of the very political class to which one 
belongs. Parliamentary democracy cannot be contracted out to 
freelance/part-time temporary flex-workers sure to get the job done 
within the agreed period and budget. Management offers no refuge, because 
the managers themselves have become the objects of drastic restructuring. 
Even the concept of media democracy - with its ad campaigns, image 
control, and PR officials - is doomed, because these bunglers have to 
compete with MTV heroes, Hollywood stars, royal families and 
weatherpeople. Here, the impending constitutional crisis is no more than 
another fleeting item.

Many have suddenly pinned their hopes on the free market economy. A 
vitalistic ideal is projected onto business. One imagines energetic yet 
reassuringly uniformed employees who will get down to business without 
wasting words. People move through a flexible infrastructure, smilingly 
exchanging last-minute services. They part as satisfied customers and 
partners. Here, male and female, black and white are equals, putting 
maximum effort into correct task performance, all for the common good, 
naturally. Here, there is no more whining or arguing about irrelevancies, 
only concentration on the essential. After executing production 
performance, there is room for spiritual growth, network development, 
physical exercise and recreation within the private circle (from golf 
club to mosque). Here, the aura of advertising is still fully intact. One 
wallows in service, quality, reliability and trust, guarantees, positive 
test results and consequent share prices. Thus, we return to the stage 
which Akira Asada called "infantile capitalism." People are more than 
prepared to assume that all good springs from the economy. Far beyond the 
horizon lurk bribery, corruption, fraud, and deceit, as characteristics 
of regions so poor that even tourism scarcely finds a foothold. One 
idolizes pleasant efficiency and stylized perfection, a form of worship 
that is not interrupted by asking tricky questions.

3. 
On embracing paradigm, science became aware of its own context. 
Reflection on one's own premises was itself a product of massification. 
Lecture halls grew too big to nip all critical questions in the bud any 
longer. The academy as a disciplining institution, once designed to mold 
the elite, lost its consistency and became an amorphous, uncontrollable 
body. This process produced doctrinal opposition in the shape of 
neo-Marxists, feminists, postmodernists and ecologists, who started to 
pen down their own diktata. As a result, the university lost its 
educative character and became a copy of social programs carried out 
outside the institution. Yet these social movements were not autonomous; 
they were grafted onto a decaying and expanding university and consisted 
by and large of students themselves. In the long run, these movements too 
found legitimacy in the faded educational factories. After a delay of 
some five or ten years, the presence of media and university had grown so 
great that people imagined themselves to be a political force, whereas in 
fact, on the "outside" nothing happened at all anymore.

The university ceased to be a hazing institution, something to be endured 
in order to acquire status. Afterwards, you'd do your job, not glancing 
at another book until retirement. In your college days, you ground away 
at courses, made friends for life, met your partner, had a ball and still 
managed to graduate. Today, those student years are no longer to be seen 
as a closed period. One is forced to periodical returns to the classroom. 
At work, one must constantly compete with younger generations who 
effortlessly acquire the right specialist knowledge, under great pressure 
and ever so flexibly. Knowledge is no longer inflation-proof. It is no 
longer something that is transmitted in college, to be enhanced and 
expanded upon over the years through actual practice. Those professional 
qualities can suddenly and unpredictably become utterly worthless, no 
matter how differentiated and well-grounded they might otherwise be.

By inventing the concept of "paradigm," an entire generation of committed 
intellectuals had dug its own grave. So high were the expectations 
regarding the paradigmatic change one found oneself in, that it was 
forgotten that this particular changing of the guard was by no means to 
be the last. From a rare reversal within the scientific ground model, the 
paradigmatic change turned out to be a permanent fluctuation from one 
standard to another. This instability structurally undermines the social 
position of all those who are directly related to the manufacture of 
knowledge. The labor relations of this industry are characterized by the 
deployment of temporary workers, freelance specialists, traveling 
visionaries, and wonder children uprooted before their prime. People grow 
old too fast, because no one stays young forever. All of this is not 
without reaction. Everything that offers reliability, security, certainty 
and coherence is clung onto and advertised as the latest discovery: 
Ortega y Gasset, the catechism, Saabs, marriage, Heidegger, a strict 
upbringing, buying a house, neckties and women's suits, zinc buckets, 
reading a good book. The return to tradition should by no means be 
interpreted as a collective experience; rather, it is an expression of 
the personal and its attempt to withdraw from politics. Similarly, the 
shift to the right is not a movement or struggle, but an expression of an 
individual form of protectionism. This artificial reliability is neutral 
and pale. It strives to keep all novelties, with their colorful aspect, 
at bay, out of resentment of all radical expression. It smothers all 
commitment to be oneself in a lacquer of antique finish.

4. 
Once the structuralists had carried out their demolition work, comfort 
was taken in Foucault's good old history of institutions. With 
Baudrillard, moreover, things lost their scene altogether and started to 
drift. In an environment of polished simulacra, one could be 
sympathetically enthusiastic about every new idea that managed to put the 
old behind it. All breakthrough thinking and farewell philosophies still 
referred to a shared heritage: the Marxism one used to advocate, Freud in 
paperback, Darwin as a compulsory high school subject, World War II and 
its manuals and TV serials, Camus and De Beauvoir, the second Vatican 
council, jazz and the Beatles, Martin Luther King and Godard. Thus, they 
acknowledged a continuity people thought they were doing away with. The 
notion of the death of God can only appeal to the faithful. That is why 
postmodernism is a kind of aftercare; Lyotard comforts those who know 
they must go on alone.

Semiology, dynamics of science, systematology, mediology and 
poststructuralism each pretend to be a new science of fundamentals. They 
are lectured disciplines that offer psychological security, a jargon that 
sounds reliable, and an alley into the future. They absorb the unrest 
which accompanies the state of permanent change. But that which presents 
itself as metatheory is, in fact, the theory of orientation; that is, the 
successor to the theology of ethics. It presents regulations of action, 
directives for task forces. Heavy theory has thus been devalued to the 
level of marketing and management. Stunned by daily practice, it has 
reduced itself to its own passionate promotion. Its use lies chiefly in 
the fact that it's never at a loss for words to guide the disoriented. 
The urge to give useful advice culminates in the manufacture of progress 
reports, final conclusions, brainstorm weekends, and study conferences 
which are never unwarranted, too demanding, or controversial. The aim, 
after all, is the vortex of ideas that give a new direction to the 
available forces. A world without painful memories, incongruities or 
unanswerable questions.

The dismantled social sciences concentrate on the massage and 
magnetization of humours. They keep a tail on despair. There is no longer 
a question of interaction. Theory no longer turns itself against 
phenomena; nor does it declare solidarity with its object. There is not 
even the slightest trace left of sarcastic irony or heartfelt cynicism. 
Theory swims with every tide and exceeds its demonstrated craving for 
profundity by suggesting themes, finding temporary connections, pointing 
at analogies, referring to historic precedents, and briefly digressing to 
customs and traditions. Indefinable unrest is temporarily filled with 
fleeting moments of charisma. From the involution of problems to the 
flawless orchestration of good ambiance. Since the great party poopers - 
Stirner, Nietzsche, Cioran - wrote their programs within the limits of 
the ego, these have currently become isolated within the aesthetics of 
attitude and identity. The present challenge is to trace and eliminate 
contextless "lite" theory.
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