Ex nihilo - Podcast English

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It confronts us with the uncanniness of how it’s taken on an almost religious-like quality—why else would the phrase curse and blessing instinctively come to mind when talking about it? To make sure the ideas I present to you are not completely out of touch, I would like to share a few video clips we’ve published on our ex nihilo Substack, created in collaboration with Dall-E and Google VEO using our in-house, proprietary Company Machine. This software is quite unusual insofar as it transliterates classic essays and transcribed conversations into visual metaphors, and because our brain—or more precisely, our language—is a veritable magic box, these produce the most daringly audacious image compositions—things that even the most fantastical mind could hardly conceive. In a curious way, a remarkable reversal can be observed here. When we talk about the power of imagination, when some extremely daring theorists of the 1990s conjured up as the visual turn, it must be said that advanced image production had long since left the visual sphere—and gone to our heads. This is noteworthy as we are witnessing the return of a medieval concept of Signs. At that time, it was believed that the closer a Sign was to God, the more valuable it was – or, as we would say today, the more abstract it was. Consequently, thought was considered the most valuable Sign, followed by the spoken word, then the image, and finally the worldly traces one leaves behind. This changed with the Renaissance, which actually brought about the visual turn that cultural theorists of the 1990s diagnosed with considerable delay – and Leonardo da Vinci reflected on the fact that music is the little sister of painting, simply because it fades away, while painting releases works of eternal value into the World. So today, while claiming we live in a visual culture may still appear to be true for large parts of the population, the intellectual and aesthetic drive that feeds this world has shifted its metamorphic form. If Hollywood’s dream factory went on strike recently, it’s because the advances in our computer culture are truly revolutionizing filmmaking. You only have to think back to one of those epic historical films of the 1950s and 1960s, where entire small towns in southern Italy were recruited as extras – and you see the difference. Today, CGI (computer-generated imagery) provides directors with a whole armada of hyper-realistic, malleable actors. And this rationality shock affects not only the extras, but also the set and stage designers, as well as the musicians, whom Bernard Hermann once invited to the recording studio in the form of an entire symphony orchestra. All this is now accomplished by someone like Hans Zimmer or by anonymous CGI artists who conjure up the most phantastical things on screen, which means that what used to be called a set is now little more than just a studio warehouse where a few actors perform in front of a green screen. Now, this threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence affects not only the immediate production process but also post-production. Today, when voices can be cloned at will, and even translation and dubbing can be done by AI with perfect lip synchronization, the radical revolution of the dream factory is a fait accompli. Now, I could launch into a dystopian tirade about the changes to our audiovisual tools—and I would be justified in doing so, insofar as the coming surges of rationality are likely to affect the entire industry. But that is not what I want to do right now. Why not? Well, simply because I am convinced that a) this is a matter of inevitability, and b) well, I personally find the aesthetic and intellectual possibilities opening up with this world both sublimely wondrous. The dilemma we face is more intellectual, if not philosophical, in nature—a humiliation that surpasses anything Sigmund Freud recorded in his Civilization and Its Discontents. As you may recall, he identified three intellectual humiliations: 1) The Copernican Revolution, which meant we could no longer feel like we were the center of the Universe; 2) Darwinian Evolutionary Biology, which called our Anthropological Supremacy into question; 3) The Subconscious self, which made it clear to individuals that they cannot even feel at home in their own thoughts, that they are no longer masters in their own house. Now, let’s keep in mind that when these upheavals happened, they only really affected a small number of people (the so-called elite, if you will), but with the Digital Revolution, we are now facing a new and much more serious situation: it impacts everyone, absolutely everyone in this World. The dilemma we face today can best be compared to what Günter Anders once aptly called Promethean Shame—which can be understood as a form of schizophrenia: I am, but I am not. If Blaise Pascal once said that all human unhappiness stems from the fact that humans cannot remain quietly in their rooms, then it’s evident that networked humans are, by definition, social creatures—or, as I would put it: dividuals who thrive on their divisibility and their urge to communicate. But because that sounds so harmless, I will tell you, who are largely familiar with the practices of our public broadcasters, a little personal story. It has to do with how, as a young man, I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to be the next Thomas Mann or a composer. In any case, I realized quite early on that the heroic history of the modern author belonged to the tempi passati. That was in the mid-1980s, and since I had been working with a musician from Tangerine Dream for many years and was deeply involved in the world of recording studios and electronic sound processing, I eventually realized that some unquestioned fundamental assumptions had exceeded their shelf life. When you have a sequencer in front of you that allows you to chase your fingers across the piano, or more precisely, the keyboard, at unprecedented speeds, you wonder why you ever bothered with scales and Czerny’s School of Velocity. Even deeper than this doubt about virtuosity was the discovery that, with sampling, the whole world had actually become a musical instrument, that even the sound of a toilet flushing could be a great aesthetic experience, not to mention that a sampled sound is actually a multitude, a multiplicity. In short: What caught my attention was nothing other than the threat of proliferation posed by digitalisation. Fast forward three or four years, when I conducted an intensive seminar at the University of the Arts together with an editor from the RBB [Berlins public Radio], where I was working, and Johannes Schmölling, the musician from Tangerine Dream, during which we prepared actors and sound engineers to work together—and because it was going to be broadcast, this wasn’t just any ordinary practice session, but the real deal. And then my colleague from the station, Wolfgang Bauernfeind, had the idea of showing the sound engineers how the professionals at the station work. But since I had worked as a director in large companies and knew that the sound engineers weren’t even willing to touch the multi-track machine in the studio – whereas the studio at the University of Fine Arts was already fully digitalised – I told him that wasn’t such a good idea. But he insisted – and so, at some point (it was around 1992), half a dozen sound engineering students entered the hallowed halls of the station, the T5. But after just fifteen minutes, barely had the professionals begun their work, the first student came up to me and whispered in my ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious? « Which was, of course, a very valid question. At any rate, a few years later, I ran into one of the sound engineers in the station hallway, who asked me if I thought someone like him would be employable in the private sector. Where does this resistance to engaging with this world come from? The answer is simple: people resist because the experiences of engaging with these new tools seriously shake and disrupt their self-image. And most people prefer the phantasms of the past to such an uncertain, unsettling future. Consequently, they talk about true authenticity, about digital detox, or, when their attempts to assert digital sovereignty fail, they proclaim the end of humanity: the Infocalypse. Why is all this so easy? Because Artificial Intelligence, like an alien, imposes itself as a foreign body – for the simple reason that we’ve never really embraced the World of Digitalisation, or at best only as consumers who press buttons. Let me tell you a little story about this. While traveling across the US in the late 1980s to interview the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, I had a lovely encounter with Joseph Weizenbaum, the great-father of all chatbots, who told me – still shaking his head – about his secretary. And because she was assigned only to him, she naturally knew that Weizenbaum was working on a chatbot named Eliza – a tribute to Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion – and she also knew that this chatbot was nothing more than a program that Weizenbaum had written using the computer language LISP. In fact, the program wasn’t particularly sophisticated, essentially little more than a paraphrasing machine. As an exemplar, if you typed in ›I feel bad,‹ the chatbot would respond, ›Oh, you feel bad?‹. What astonished Weizenbaum was that whenever he saw his secretary, she was constantly clattering away on the keyboard—so intently she didn’t even notice him coming. And because he was curious about what she was actually typing – she didn’t have that much to do for him – he stepped behind her one day and glanced at the screen. And what did he see? That his secretary was using his chatbot as a substitute psychotherapist: »I feel bad« – »Oh, you feel bad?«. This discovery intrigued him immensely—he realized that, despite his secretary’s knowledge that she was communicating with a simple program and not a human being, Freud’s mechanism of transference was at work here. While we might smile at this story, the strange part is that many of our peers indulge in similar behaviors—and that this form of transference (thinking of Ray Kurzweil, who dreams of a superintelligence) doesn’t even spare the experts in the field. This observation deepened my exploration of cultural history—an endeavor that ultimately resulted in the writing of several books. Throughout my research, I’ve kept asking myself the same question: How did this come about? What exactly is a Machine anyway? What makes people imbue machines with metaphysical, often religious significance to machines? But before we venture into the question of what we really mean by Artificial Intelligence, let me offer a very simple, albeit unusual interpretation of the computer world. What makes it so unique? As a young author, what was it that fascinated me about the World of Sounds? You could say it was this: Whatever can be electrified can also be digitalised. This means: What we call Writing is no longer just an abstract idea floating above the waters like the mind of God (or the Letters of the Alphabet), but can take on any imaginable form. This could be the geo-location data of a whale, the sound of a toilet flushing, or the swipe-away gesture of a hand that city dwellers use to reject potential partners they definitely don’t want to get in bed with. Applying this logic to the Work World, which is the only one we value, would mean that any Work that has been digitalised ends up in a Museum of Labour. Here’s another memory from the early 90s: a wonderful pianist came into the recording studio, played a piece by Schumann, and then left. But no sooner had he left the studio than the grand piano, which had stored his finger movements via MIDI sensors, played the piece again—and if we had wanted to, we could have sat down with Cubase or Pro Tools and altered his performance at will. And this raises the question: What does it mean that every piece of work that has been digitalized disappears into the Museum of Work? The answer is simple and familiar to us all. Because electricity transcends distance, the program—in other words, the mummified work process—can be transplanted and accessed from anywhere in the world: Anything, Anywhere, Anytime. Haunting us here is the dilemma of the Speed of Light. And this has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Let’s take this a step further by examining the basic formula of our digitalised Continent of the Mind more closely. It can be found in an 1854 work published by English mathematician George Boole. Although it underpins Boolean algebra and logic, and every programmer uses Booleans routinely, this formula remains a terra incognita. Try it out the next time you get the chance, and you – or, depending on who you’re programming with – will experience the surprise of a blue miracle. And you don’t even need to venture into higher spheres to do this. George Boole, who pursued the project of »removing the representative from mathematics,« asked himself a very simple question: What do zero and one, the two royal numbers of mathematics, have in common—and what sets them apart from all other numbers? If I multiply one by itself, the result is always one, and if I multiply zero by itself, the result is always zero. This distinguishes zero and one from all other numbers. Formalising this gives us the basic formula for everything digital: x=xn. If you retranslate this back into natural language, you might begin feeling vertiginous: because it means the end of the original, the end of identity, the end of authenticity. Taking this seriously and applying this formula to yourself, you would have to say: I am someone else, I am superfluous, I am a population. The extent to which this logic has already taken hold of our thinking becomes clear when we consider that every digitized object (be it a .pdf document, an audio, or a video file) is structurally superfluous. This, it seems to me, is a profound upheaval, the consequences of which we cannot yet fully foresee. Let’s take this a step further and consider Artificial Intelligence, which is really more like pseudo-intelligence. Because what we see staring back at us in the mirror is, literally, a »mediocre« version of ourselves. Let me briefly digress to The Man of the Crowd, a short story published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840. What prompted Poe to write this short story, whose motto intriguingly references the misery of human beings (Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul – the great misery of not being able to be alone), was his reading of a text published a few years earlier by computer pioneer Charles Babbage: The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. – This is the same man who founded the Royal Statistical Society and whose Analytical Engine, the precursor to the computer, rendered 10,000 French calculation slaves jobless. Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe’s hero, who watches passers-by from a London café, acts like a statistician—classifying workers, small clerks, cleaning ladies, maids, and so on. But when an older man moving in a strange, unpredictable way catches his eye, his curiosity is aroused. He gets up and begins following him. In this chase, which reads like a crime thriller, the narrator realizes that this man has lost his inner center of gravity—he is almost magically drawn to the events happening around him. This is the secret that is finally revealed after a long pursuit: this man has lost his center—and because he is off-center, he is completely absorbed in society and the world around him. This insight comes as a shock to Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator: »»This old man,« I said at length, »is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the ›Hortulus Animæ,‹ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ›er lässt sich nicht lesen.‹« [he cannot be read] When we enter text into ChatGPT or Claude.ai – or generate an image using Dalle-E, Flux, or Stable Diffusion – what comes out is our stochastic self, The Man on the Crowd. And while this may appear intelligent – and even more intelligent than what entire cohorts of undergraduate bachelor’s students put on paper – it has nothing to do with true intelligence. You get the answers, or more precisely, the patterns that machine learning, with the speed of light of processors, has been able to find and collate from its database. In other words: what we see staring back at us from the mirror is nothing other than this Man in the Crowd. Once you realize that even talking about Artificial Intelligence is a kind of self-deception, the more interesting question arises: How do we deal with this so-called intelligence? And how do we escape the dilemmas that are epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s depiction of The Man of the Crowd: the archetype and the genius of deep crime? The answer is both simple and difficult. Simple because this demon loses its power the moment you become aware of it. Difficult because, as a society, we have long since entrenched ourselves in particular forms of social schizophrenia. This is evident in how people don‛t find it strange to want to limit Internet free speech by invoking digital sovereignty inspired by Carl Schmitt‛s thinking. Calling this intellectual confusion cognitive dissonance is almost an understatement, as it seems to me far more dangerous than anything we fear accomplishing with Artificial Intelligence. Yes, creating avatars of ourselves that act as consumer influencers is possible—but this idea has been entrenched in people’s minds long before it became a technological reality. When the call center agent recites his lines from a script, then I’m no longer talking with a human being, but with an android. It’s easy to forget where certain concepts originated. Take the cyborg, for example. In the 1960s, this term was used to describe humans who could only be kept alive in hostile environments—like the vacuum of space—by cybernetic means, turning them into cybernetically enhanced organisms. Viewed in this light, all of us who are glued to our smartphones and computer screens have long since mutated into cyborgs. Is there anything wrong with that? I would say no—or if there is anything to be said, it is that being a cyborg conflicts with claims of Identity, Authenticity, and Digital Sovereignty. In conclusion, I can certainly see that digital disruption, along with the advent of machine learning and AI, represents a major paradigm shift – and the political consequences could be as profound as the arrival of the Wheelwork Automaton, which plunged the Middle Ages into a veritable crisis of faith. You see it everywhere: a kind of general unease in culture that, in order to assert itself, takes refuge in an eroticism of resentment, a Great Again that seems like postmodern Quixotism: a fight not against windmills, but against processors that, just like Don Quixote, appear to us as monsters of the past. No philosopher captured this dilemma better than Nietzsche when he wrote: »Those who fight monsters should be careful not to become monsters themselves. And if you stare long enough into an abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.« If I ignore all these political questions and focus instead on what could be achieved with AI today, especially in the intellectual and aesthetic realms it opens up, the scenery changes radically—just as its pitch suddenly shifts too. Maybe we’re venturing into territory that’s unfamiliar, if not downright frightening to us in its uncanniness. For my part, I wouldn’t settle for anything less than what the Renaissance did for our culture because the Realm of Signs (see above) is once again undergoing a radical revolution. Anyone who works with audiovisual objects these days could probably tell you a thing or two about this. Immersing yourself in a program like DaVinci Resolve—what an apt name!—suddenly raises questions about the effect of a sound file on color or lighting design; or you find yourself preoccupied with the aesthetics of light leaks, glitches, particle emissions, and so on. All these questions may seem as obscure to you as how my reflections on the Philosophy of the Machine led me to Alien Logic—and I don’t blame you for that, quite frankly. When my son, as a 9-year-old Waldorf school pupil, was asked what his father does, he replied charmingly: »My father writes books that nobody understands!« The point is simply this: all the convictions I have arrived at over time are not inventions of my own, but have to do with the Social Drive that affects us all. With this in mind, I thank you for your attention. Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

As the current wave of disruption, manifesting itself through various conversations about artificial intelligence swirling around us (which, from our perspective, would be better described as a »Reflective Intelligence«), builds into a cultural crescendo reminiscent of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. Indeed, when, as a kind of embarrassment of thought, even the leading figures in its epistemological field conjure up a dys-utopian race toward civilizational collapse (as with Geoffrey Hinton), it’s easy to overlook how the Computer’s intellectual roots in our Machine Culture date back to the 18th century. And because of this, reflecting back on Digitalisation's origins in the crackling rift of Writing’s electrification becomes even more essential. We’re pleased to share this brief conversation between us about reading between the lines regarding Electrification, Massification, and the shifting definition of Writing in the early chapters of Martin’s Short History of Digitalisation. Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Manchmal hält das Leben wirkliche Überraschungen bereit – und diese sind umso denkwürdiger, je weniger man im vorhinein darüber nachgedacht hat. So wie ich, als ich bei einer Tagung die Gelegenheit hatte, am ersten Yoga-Kurs meines Lebens teilzunehmen– nur um ein paar Tage später, auf dem Rückflug nach Berlin, einen Essay zu lesen, der davon erzählte, dass ein Teil der berühmten Yoga-Stellungen nicht auf die Weisheit Indiens und eine Geschichte von fünftausend Jahren zurückgehen, sondern auf das dänische Ollerup. Und unversehens ist man damit in einem Städtchen von 1.2000 Menschen gelandet, wo in den 20er Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts der dänische Erzieher Niels Bukh, ein bekennender Nationalsozialist, eine Gymnastikschule aufmachte, in der, mit deutlich homoerotischem Einschlag, junge Männer ihrem körperlichen Selbstertüchtigungsbegehren freien, nein, überaus kontrollierten Lauf lassen konnten. Und weil man im fraglichen Essay über den Satz stolpert: »Nicht Europa hatte während der Kolonialzeiten die Weisheit Indiens entdeckt, sondern: Indien hatte den Westen entdeckt«, gerät man in ein geistiges Spiegelkabinett hinein, wo Begriffe wie Orientalismus, kulturelle Appropriation udgl. keinen Sinn mehr ergeben – wo stattdessen die Neugierde dominiert, was es mit diesem sonderbaren Amalgam aus indischer Weisheit, Ollerupscher Körperbeherrschung und Nationalsozialismus auf sich hat. Abgesehen einmal davon, dass eine solch denkwürdige Mischung die intellektuelle Neugierde auf den Plan ruft, wurde diese Empfindung noch dadurch gesteigert, dass der Name des Verfassers, obgleich in einer englischsprachigen Publikation erschienen, eine deutsche, fast ikonische Prägung auswies: Carl von Siemens. Und weil er ein durchaus bekannter Reiseschriftsteller ist, tauschten wir ein paar Mails miteinander aus und verabredeten uns zu einem Gespräch. Herausgekommen ist eine anregende Unterhaltung, die nicht nur die Geschichte des Niels Bukh erzählt, sondern auch die Frage berührt, was dies mit der Biopolitik Foucaultscher Prägung zu tun haben könnte, und was das Leben der australischen Aborigines Australiens mit der Erfahrung des Techno verbindet. Carl von Siemens (* 26. Mai 1967 in Erlangen) ist ein deutscher Schriftsteller und Journalist. Nach einer Ausbildung zum Dr. publ. oec., die den jungen Mann wohl für eine Karriere im Siemens-Konzern präparieren sollte, begeisterte er sich für den Techno, bereiste die Welt und schrieb einige Reisebücher, die er selbst dem Genre der Autofiktion zurechnet. Neben Artikeln für Die Zeit, Die Welt und den Rolling Stone, schrieb er auch für das hochintellektuelle Publikum von Lettre International. Carl von Siemens hat (u.a.) veröffentlicht Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Man muss weder Prophet noch Marxist sein, um zu der Diagnose zu gelangen, dass der Kapitalismus seit geraumer Zeit schon an einer Systemkrise leidet – und diese hat nicht unwesentlich mit den Erschütterungen zu tun, die mit der Digitalisierung einhergehen. Wenn der Influencer zur Sehnsuchtsfigur wird, ja, zum Persönlichkeitsmodell, dem die jungen Menschen nacheifern, stellt sich die Frage, ob der Hintern von Kim Kardashian das Maß aller Dinge darstellt und ob die Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie, zuende gedacht, nicht auf das hinausläuft, was Nietzsche die Entwertung der Werte genannt hat. Aber weil uns dies als Trash-Faktor längst zur Alltäglichkeit geworden ist, ist klar, dass ein bloß kulturkritischer Ansatz an der Frage vorbeigehen muss, dass man sich stattdessen den strukturellen Veränderungen zuwenden muss. Genau dies ist ein Grund, sich mit Philipp Staab zu unterhalten, der sich die Frage des Digitalen Kapitalismus vorgenommen hat. Sind die Ökonomen über lange Zeit davon ausgegangen, dass der Mensch auf dem Stern der Knappheit lebt, hat Staab diesen Betrachtungswinkel umgedreht. Denn er fragt sich, wie sich die Ökonomie der Unknappheit auf die Märkte und Herrschaftsverhältnisse auswirkt. Wie lebt es sich in der Überflussgesellschaft, wenn der Preis für all die wunderbaren Annehmlichkeiten darin besteht, dass nicht mehr die Politik, sondern die Tech-Giganten darüber befinden, was Sache ist – und folglich res publica? Philipp Staab ist ein deutscher Soziologe, der am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt Universität zur Zukunft der Arbeit lehrt und forscht. Zugleich ist er Fellow des Einstein Zentrum Digitale Zukunft. Philipp Staab hat veröffentlicht Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Zweifellos markiert der 7. Oktober eine historische Wasserscheide, haben die öffentlichen Feiern des Hamas-Pogroms doch deutlich gemacht, dass das »Nie-Wieder« der deutschen Erinnerungskultur frommes Wunschdenken ist. Eines der größten Rätsel dabei ist, wie und warum ausgerechnet Universitäten, die im letzten Jahrzehnt sich alle Mühe gegeben haben, sich als safe spaces zu etablieren, zu Horten eines neuen, nicht selten militanten Antisemitismus werden konnten. Dass mein Blick hier auf Franziska Sittig gefallen ist, ist insofern nicht erstaunlich, als sie als Studentin an der Columbia University aus nächster Nähe – und mit großer Verwunderung - hat beobachten können, wie noch am Folgetag studentische Hamas-Unterstützer sich auf dem Campus zusammenrotteten, unterstützt von einigen Mitgliedern der Professorenschar selbst. Und weil sie diese Ereignisse für verschiedene Zeitungen und Magazine aufnotiert hat, haben wir uns zu einem Gespräch darüber zusammengefunden. Als Boomer lernt man durchaus Erstaunliches dabei: dass man heutzutage von Zionazis spricht und auf TikTok Videoshorts zirkulieren, die sich die Leugnung des Holocaust zur Aufgabe gemacht haben. Franziska Sittig ist Collegiate Associate am Manhattan Institute. Sie studierte in Heidelberg und an der Columbia University in New York City. Sie veröffentlichte Beiträge für die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, für die Zeit, die Jüdische Allgemeine, Focus Money, Cicero sowie das US-amerikanische City Journal. Franziska Sittig hat veröffentlicht Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Wohl kein Thema hat die Öffentlichkeit in den letzten Jahren stärker verstört als die Migration, die, im Namen der Menschlichkeit, letztlich in eine Form der inneren Zwietracht, ja, des symbolischen Bürgerkriegs eingemündet ist. Hätte schon die Kölner Silvesternacht die Anhänger der Willkommenskultur lehren können, dass man in Gestalt unzähliger Neubürger durchaus neuartige Probleme gewärtigen muss (wie den Taharrusch dschama'i beispielsweise), war die Verführung, sich dem Rausch des moral grandstanding hinzugeben, doch allzu groß. So groß jedenfalls, dass die classe politique sich kurzerhand weigerte, die selbstgeschaffenen Realitäten zur Kenntnis zu nehmen – während auf der anderen Seite das vielgescholtene „Pack“, in einer verstockten Schweigespirale befangen, sich dem Populismus ergab oder sich damit begnügte, in Leserbriefen das double speak des Einmann zu zergliedern. Die Folgen des gesellschaftlichen Schismas sind allüberall zu besichtigen: Invektiven sind zu einer politischen Währung geworden, während bürgerliche Tugenden in den Hintergrund gerückt sind. In jedem Fall muss der politische Beobachter diagnostizieren, dass der Verlust der äußeren Grenzen die innere Ausgrenzung zur Folge gehabt hat. Dass in dieser noch immer aufgeheizten Debatte mein Blick auf Frank Urbaniok gefallen ist, hat damit zu tun, dass sich hier jemand zu Wort meldet, der, aller xenophoben Neigung unverdächtig, die Entstehung des Problems aus nächster Nähe – und mit professioneller Distanz - hat verfolgen können. Denn als Psychiater, der zuallererst mit persönlichkeitsgestörten Sexualstraftätern beschäftigt war, kann man sich nicht mit der moralischen Verurteilung begnügen, sondern gilt es zuvörderst zu verstehen, was den Betreffenden zu seinem Handeln veranlasst. Dass Urbaniok, der in seiner Eigenschaft als Chefarzt des Psychiatrisch-Psychologischen Dienstes in Zürich, aber auch als Supervisor und Gutachter Tausende von Straftätern kennengelernt hat, sich der Frage der Migration zuwandte, hatte damit zu tun, dass er zunehmend mit Tätern zu tun hatte, deren Handeln eine kulturelle Prägung aufwies. Mehr noch als dies aber frappierte ihn das dröhnende Schweigen seiner Kollegenschar - dass Kriminologen und Migrationsforscher, statt unangenehme Realitäten zur Kenntnis zu nehmen, dem den Schleier des Nichtwissenwollens vorziehen konnten. Genau dies hat ihn veranlasst, ein Buch zu den Schattenseiten der Migration zu verfassen, ein Buch, in das die Erfahrungen eines langen Berufsleben eingeflossen sind. Frank Urbaniok ist ein deutsch-schweizerischer forensischer Psychiater. Er war in den Jahren 1997 bis 2018 Chefarzt des Psychiatrisch-Psychologischen Dienstes des Kantons Zürich. Zudem lehrt er an der Universität Konstanz Forensische Psychiatrie. Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Weil man hier einem großes Thema gegenübersteht, das gleichermaßen mit praktischen, ästhetischen und gesellschaftlichen Fragen zu tun hat, sind diese flüchtigen Bemerkungen nur der Auftakt zu einer Reihe weiterer Texte zum Tema Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, ich will Ihnen ein paar Gedanken zu dem sonderbaren Verhältnis darlegen, das unsere Zeitgenossen zur »Künstliche Intelligenz« unterhalten. Und das konfrontiert uns mit dem befremdlichen Umstand, dass dem eine fast religiöse Qualität innezuwohnen scheint – oder weswegen sonst taucht im der Rede darüber reflexhaft das Wortpaar »Fluch und Segen« auf? Damit das, was ich Ihnen jetzt sage, nicht vollständig abgehoben erscheint, lasse ich jetzt einfach ein paar Videoausschnitte nachfolgen, die wir auf dem ex nihilo Blog publiziert haben, im Zusammenspiel mit Dall-E und Google VEO, aber auch einer Software, die ich selber geschrieben habe. Diese Software ist insofern ziemlich ungewöhnlich, als sie klassische Essays, aber auch transkribierte Gespräche in visuelle Metaphern zurückübersetzt. Und weil unser Gehirn, genauer, weil unsere Sprache ein regelrechter Zauberkasten ist, erzeugen diese die verwegensten Bildkompositionen – Dinge, die ein noch so phantasiebegabter Mensch sich kaum einfallen ließe. Lassen Sie mich, während die Bilder an Ihnen vorüberlaufen, die Differenz in Worte fassen. Normalerweise sitzt man vor einem Prompt und sagt dem magischen Spiegel, was man zu sehen wünscht. Hier ist der Prozess ein ganz anderer. Ausgangsbasis ist ein geschriebener Text – oder ein transkribiertes Gespräch. Dann laufen mehrere Schritte ab. Die AI erstellt eine Zusammenfassung – und identifiziert darüber die Grundgedanken des Textes. Diese werden in Wortbilder übersetzt, also in Metaphern – und diese bilden die Bausteine, welche die AI dann in einen Prompt, also in eine Kompositionsanweisung übersetzt. Die Anweisungen werden gespeichert – und dann werden diese Bilder generiert. Die Ausgangsposition ist also nicht die frei flottierende Einbildungskraft, sondern ein mehr oder minder konsistenter Text – der ganz für sich alleine stehen will, ja, in seiner Entstehungsphase nicht einmal diesen Visualisierungsprozess antizipiert hat. Wenn wir den Begriff der Einbildungskraft nehmen, der ja einen unübersehbaren visuellen Einschlag besitzt, könnte man sagen, dass die visuelle Phantasie, auch wenn das Ganze am Ende in eine Form der Bildproduktion einmündet, hier gar keine Rolle spielt. Ausgangspunkt ist ein Gedankengerüst, ein Text, der versucht, den Leser in eine bestimmte Gedankenwelt hinein zu entführen. Das Kuriosum ist nun, dass diese Form der Text- und Gedankenlastigkeit gar keinen Nachteil darstellt. was ihrer Transformation in die Bilderwelt anbelangt. Ganz im Gegenteil: Wenn Walter Benjamin einmal festgehalten hat, dass ein Fotograf manche Dinge festhält, die sich ihm erst später, beim Entwickeln und Betrachten der Fotografie eröffnen – und wenn er dies ein „optisch Unbewusstes“ genannt hat –, so könnte man einen ganz analogen Vorgang hier festhalten. Denn der Autor des Textes wird, indem er erlebt, dass seine Sprachbilder eine Art Eigendynamik annehmen, mit einem „gedanklich Unbewussten“ konfrontiert - und je komplizierter und differenzierter Text ist, desto besser, vor allem überraschender sind die Resultate. Ich muss gestehen, dass mich dieser Prozess absolut fasziniert hat – umsomehr, als man sich hier in der Rolle eines Marcel Duchamp wiederfindet, der nicht mit einem Gebilde der eigenen Phantasie, sondern mit einem ready made konfrontiert ist. Man beschäftigt sich also gar nicht damit, irgendwelche Imaginationen auf den Schirm oder auf die Leinwand zu zaubern – sondern man schaut einfach bloß hin. Und aus diesem Grund besteht die entscheidende Aufgabe nicht in der Bildproduktion, sondern in der Selektion – und da ist man mit der Frage konfrontiert, warum dieses Bild die Phantasie anreizt, jenes aber nicht. Tatsächlich ermangelt es etwa drei Vierteln der resultierenden Bilder an einer solchen Qualität, sie mögen vielleicht ansprechend sein, aber sie berühren den Betrachter einfach nicht (was ja nach Baumgarten die eigentliche Aufgabe der Ästhetik ist, denn aisthesis meint ja ursprünglich berühren und wahrnehmen). Nach gut einem Jahr des Umgangs mit dieser Software muss ich gestehen, dass mich diese Form der Bildproduktion, die ja nachgerade so etwas wie eine Traumerzählung ist, weit mehr beschäftigt als alles, was man sich, wenn man denn vor einem leeren Prompt sitzt, so einfallen lässt. Denn letztlich kommt hier niemals mehr heraus, als was man sich zuvor hat einfallen lassen: garbage in, garbage out – oder wie Goethe das sehr viel eleganter gesagt hat: Man spürt die Absicht und man ist verstimmt. Wenn wir diesen Prozess auf seinen Materialwert abfragen, ist hier eine Umkehrung zu beobachten, die bemerkenswert ist. Wenn wir von Einbildungskraft sprechen, ja, wenn einige überaus verwegene Theoretiker der 90er Jahre sich einen visual turn zurechtgelegt haben, so ist zu sagen, dass die avancierte Bildproduktion längst die visuelle Sphäre verlassen hat – und uns zu Kopf gestiegen ist. Das ist deswegen bemerkenswert, weil wir hier der Rückkehr eines mittelalterlichen Zeichenbegriffes beiwohnen können. Denn damals war man der Meinung, dass ein Zeichen umso wertvoller sei, je näher es bei Gott ist – oder wie man heute sagen würde: je abstrakter es ist. Folglich galt der Gedanke als das wertvollste Zeichen, dann kam das gesprochene, dann das geschriebene Wort, erst dann das Bild und zuguterletzt die Spur, die man in der Welt hinterlässt. Das ändert sich mit der Renaissance, die nun tatsächlich jenen visual turn bewirkt hat, den die Kulturwissenschaftler der 90er mit großer Verspätung diagnostiziert haben – und da denkt Leonardo da Vinci darüber nach, dass die Musik die kleine Schwester der Malerei darstelle, einfach deswegen, weil sie verklingt, während die Malerei Werke von Ewigkeitswert in die Welt entlässt. Wenn wir heutzutage also behaupten, wir lebten in einer visuellen Kultur, dann mag das für große Bevölkerungsteile so aussehen – aber das gedankliche und ästhetische Triebwerk, das diese Welt speist, hat seine Gestalt gewandelt. Wenn die Traumfabrik Hollywoods sich vor kurzem in einen Streik hineinbegeben hat, so deswegen, weil die Fortschritte unserer Computerkultur wahrhaft grundstürzend sind. Man muss sich nur an einen der großen Historienschinken der 50 und 60er Jahre erinnern – wo ganze süditalienische Kleinstädte als Statisten rekrutiert wurden –, um sich den Unterschied vor Augen zu tagen. Denn heute stellt die CGI (d.h. die Computer Generated Imagery) dem Regisseur eine ganz Armada hyperrealistischer, gefügiger Akteure bereit. Und dieser Rationalitätsschock betrifft nicht nur die Statisten, sondern im gleichen Maße auch die Kulissen- und Bühnenbildner, ebenso wie die Musiker, die ein Bernard Hermann noch, in Gestalt eines ganzen Symphonierorchesters, ins Tonstudio gebeten hat. All dies wird nun von Leuten wie Hans Zimmer bewerkstelligt, oder von namenlosen CGI-Künstlern, welche die aberwitzigsten Dinge auf den Schirm zaubern. Womit das, was man ehedem ein Set genannt hat, nicht viel mehr ist als eine Halle, wo ein paar Schauspieler vor einem Greenscreen agieren. Nun betrifft die Rationalisierungsdrohung der künstlichen Intelligenz nicht nur die unmittelbare Aufnahmesituation, sondern auch die Postproduktion. Wenn man heutzutage nach Belieben Stimmen clonen kann, ja, wenn selbst Übersetzung und Synchronisation lippensynchron von einer AI bewerkstelligt werden können, so ist die grundstürzende Revolution der Traumfabrik fait accompli. Ich könnte nun, was die Veränderung unseres audiovisuellen Instrumentariums anbelangt, eine dystopische Suada anstimmen – und diese wäre insofern berechtigt, als die uns bevorstehenden Rationalitätsschübe wohl den ganzen Industriezweig in Mitleidenschaft ziehen. Aber genau das möchte ich nicht tun. Warum nicht? Nun – einfach deswegen, weil ich der Überzeugung bin, dass man es a) hier mit einer Unausweichlichkeit zu tun hat, und b) weil ich die ästhetischen und gedanklichen Möglichkeit, die sich mit dieser Welt auftun, persönlich ganz großartig finde. Das Dilemma, dem wir gegenüberstehen, ist vielmehr geistiger, wenn nicht philosophischer Natur, eine Demütigung, die all das übertrifft, was Sigmund Freud in seinem Unbehagen in der Kultur festgehalten hat. Denn da hat er, wie Sie vielleicht erinnern, drei geistige Demütigungen festgehalten: 1. die kopernikanische Wende, welche bewirkt hat, dass man sich nicht mehr als Zentrum der Welt fühlen kann, 2. die Darwinsche Evolutionsbiologie, die den anthropologischen Suprematismus fragwürdig gemacht hat, 3. das Unbewusste selbst, das dem Einzelnen klar macht, dass er nicht einmal im eigenen Denken heimisch sein kann, dass er nicht mehr Herr ist im eigenen Haus. Nun - halten wir uns vor Augen, dass diese Erschütterungen, als die auftraten, nur eine kleine Zahl von Menschen wirklich affiziert haben (die sogenannte Elite, wenn Sie so wollen), so haben wir es bei der digitalen Revolution mit einer sehr viel gravierenderen Situation zu tun: denn sie zieht jeden, aber auch wirklich jeden Menschen auf dieser Welt in Mitleidenschaft. Das Dilemma, dem wir heute gegenüberstehen, lässt sich mit am ehesten mit dem vergleichen, was Günter Anders einmal treffend die prometheische Scham genannt hat – und was man als eine Form der Schizophrenie auffassen kann: Ich bin’s, aber ich bin’s nicht gewesen. Wenn Blaise Pascal einmal gesagt hat, das ganze Unglück des Menschen rühre daher, dass der Mensch nicht ruhig in seinem Zimmer bleiben könne, so ist evident, dass der vernetzte Mensch per se ein Sozius, ein Gesellschaftstier ist – oder wie ich das formulieren würde: ein Dividuum, das sich an seiner Teilbarkeit und an seinem Mitteilungsdrang erhält. Aber weil das so harmlos klingt, werde ich Ihnen, die doch zu großen Teilen mit den Usancen unserer öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender vertraut sind, eine kleine, persönliche Geschichte erzählen. Die hat damit zu tun, dass ich als junger Mann mich nicht so recht entscheiden konnte, ob ich der nächste Thomas Mann oder ein Komponist werden würde. In jedem Falle habe ich doch, ziemlich früh, begreifen müssen, dass die Heroengeschichte des modernen Autors den tempi passati angehört. Das war Mitte der Achtziger - und weil ich zu dieser Zeit, in der langjährigen Zusammenarbeit mit einem Musiker von Tangerine Dream, tief in die Welt des Tonstudios und der elektronischen Klangbearbeitung eingestiegen war, begriff ich irgendwann, dass bestimmte, unhinterfragte Grundgedanken ihre Haltbarkeitszeit überschritten hatten. Wenn Sie einen Sequencer vor sich haben, mit dem Sie ihr Fingerspiel auf dem Klavier, genauer: dem Keyboard, in unerhörte Geschwindigkeitsbereiche hinaufjagen können, dann fragen Sie sich schon, warum Sie sich mit Tonleitern und Czernys Schule der Geläufigkeit herumgeplagt haben. Tiefer noch als dieser Zweifel am Virtuosentum war die Entdeckung, dass mit dem Sample eigentlich die ganze Welt zu einem Musikinstrument geworden war, ja, dass auch das Rauschen einer Toilettenspülung eine großartige ästhetische Erfahrung sein kann, ganz abgesehen davon, dass ein gesampeltes Geräusch tatsächlich ein Multitude ist, eine Vielheit. Kurzum: Was mich erwischt hat, war nichts anderes als die Proliferationsdrohung der Digitalisierung. Zeitsprung: Drei, vier Jahre später habe ich mit gemeinsam mit einem Wolfgang Bauernfeind, einem Redakteur vom rbb, und Johannes Schmölling, dem Musiker von Tangerine Dream, ein Intensiv-Seminar an der Universität der Künste abgehalten, bei dem wir Schauspieler und Tonmeister auf die gemeinsame Arbeit eingestimmt haben – und weil das gesendet werden sollte, war das nicht bloß eine beliebige Übung, sondern: der Ernstfall. Und da kam mein Kollege vom Sender auf die Idee, dass man den Tonmeistern doch ein mal vorführen solle, wie so die Profis im Sender arbeiten. Aber da ich selbst als Regisseur in großen Häuser gearbeitet hatte und wusste, dass die Tonmeister nicht einmal bereit waren, die Mehrspurmaschine im Studio anzufassen – wohingehend das Studio in der HdK schon voll digitalisiert war -, sagte ich ihm, das sei keine so kluge Idee. Aber er bestand darauf – und so betraten irgendwann (das war um 92 herum) ein halbes Dutzend Tonmeisterstudenten die heiligen Hallen des Senders, das T5. Aber schon nach fünfzehn Minuten, kaum dass die Profis ihr Werk begonnen hatten, kam der erste Student schon zu mir – und flüsterte mir ins Ohr: Sag mal, Martin, meinen die das ernst? Und tatsächlich war das, wie sich herausstellen sollte, eine höchst berechtigte Frage. In jedem Fall kam der Tonmeister, den ich ein paar Jahre später auf dem Flur des Senders traf, auf mich zu und fragte, ob ich glaube, dass man dort draußen noch jemand seines Schlages brauche könne. Woher nur rührt der Widerstand, sich auf diese Welt einzulassen? Die Antwort ist simpel: Man wehrt sich dagegen, weil die Erfahrungen, die man macht, wenn man sich auf das neuartige Instrumentarium einlässt, das eigene Selbstbild gravierend erschüttern. Und einer solch ungewissen, irritierenden Zukunft ziehen die meisten Menschen die Gespenster der Vergangenheit vor. Folglich reden sie von wahrer Authentizität, von digital detox, oder proklamieren, wenn der Versuch scheitert, die digitale Souveränität zur Geltung zu bringen, die letzten Tage der Menschheit: die Infokalypse. All das fällt deswegen so leicht, weil sich die Künstliche Intelligenz, wie ein Alien, als Fremdkörper geradezu aufdrängt – aus dem einfachen Grund, weil man sich auf die Welt der Digitalisierung nie wirklich eingelassen hat, oder bestenfalls als eine Art Konsument, der irgendwelche Buttons drückt. Lassen Sie mich abermals eine kleine Geschichte dazu erzählen. Ich bin Ende der Achtziger Jahre in die USA gefahren und habe die ganzen Pioniere der künstlichen Intelligenz interviewt. Da gab es eine reizende Begegnung mit dem Urvater aller Chatbots, Joseph Weizenbaum, der mir – noch immer kopfschüttelnd – von seiner Sekretärin erzählte. Und weil die Dame allein für ihn zuständig war, wusste sie natürlich, dass Weizenbaum an einem Chatbot mit dem Namen Eliza arbeitete – was eine Reverenz an die Eliza Doolittle aus George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion-Stück war -, und sie wusste auch, dass dieser Chatbot nichts anderes war als ein Programm, das Weizenbaum mit der Computersprache LISP verfasst hatte. Tatsächlich war das Programm nicht sonderlich sophisticated, eigentlich kaum mehr als eine Paraphrasenmaschine. Wenn man da beispielsweise eintippte: »Mir geht es schlecht«, war die Antwort des Chatbots: »Ach, dir geht es schlecht?« Was nun Weizenbaums Erstaunen erregte, war, dass, wann immer er seine Sekretärin zu Gesicht bekam, sie immerfort auf der Tastatur herumklapperte – so intensiv, dass sie sein Kommen gar nicht bemerkte. Und weil er sich darüber verwunderte, was sie da eigentlich tippte – denn so viel hatte sie bei ihm gar nicht zu tun -, trat er eines Tages hinter sie und warf auf einen Blick auf den Schirm. Und was sah er da? Dass seine Sekretärin seinen Chatbot als eine Ersatz-Psychotherapeuten benutzte: »Mir geht es schlecht« - »Ach, dir geht es schlecht?«. Diese Entdeckung hat ihn unglaublich beschäftigt – begriff er doch, dass hier, ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass seine Sekretärin wusste, nicht mit einem Menschen, sondern mit einem simplen Programm zu kommunizieren, hier jener Mechanismus am Werk ist, den Freud die Übertragung nennt. Mögen wir diese Geschichte belächeln, so ist das Sonderbare, dass ein Großteil unserer Zeitgenossen einem vergleichbaren Verhalten frönt - und dass diese Form der Übertragung (siehe Ray Kurtzweil, der da von einer Superintelligenz träumt) nicht einmal die Spezialisten des Fachs ausnimmt. Das hat mich in eine lange kulturgeschichtliche Unternehmung hineingeführt – die sich gleich in mehren Büchern niedergeschlagen hat. Und dabei stand immer die Frage im Mittelpunkt: Wie kommt es dazu? Was überhaupt ist eine Maschine? Was bringt Menschen dazu, sie auf metaphysische, nicht selten religiöse Art aufzuladen? Lassen Sie mich, bevor uns zu der Frage versteigen, was wir uns überhaupt unter Künstlicher Intelligenz vorstellen können, eine sehr schlichte, gleichwohl ungewöhnliche Deutung der Computerwelt anbieten. Was ist das Besondere daran? Was hat mich, als junger Autor, an der Welt der Geräusche begeistert? Man könnte sagen: Was immer elektrifiziert werden kann, kann auch digitalisiert werden. Das bedeutet: Das, was wir Schrift nennen, ist nicht mehr ein Abstraktum, das wie der Geist Gottes (oder die Buchstaben des Alphabets) über den Wassern schwebt, sondern es kann jede erdenkliche Form annehmen. Das können die Positionsdaten eines Wals sein, das Geräusch einer Toilettenspülung oder die Wisch-und-Weg-Handbewegung, mit der paarungswillige Großstädter diejenigen aussortieren, die sie definitiv nicht kennenlernen wollen. Beziehen wir diese Logik auf die Welt der Arbeit, die doch die einzige ist, der wir Wert zumessen, ließe sich sagen, dass jede Arbeit, die einmal digitalisiert worden ist, ins Museum der Arbeit eingeht. Auch hier eine Erinnerung aus den frühen 90ern: Da kam ein wunderbarer Pianist ins Tonstudio, spielte ein Schumann-Stück und ging. Aber kaum dass er das Studio verlassen, gab der Flügel, der seine Fingerbewegungen via Midi-Sensoren gepeichert hatte, dieses Stück wieder – und wenn uns danach gewesen wäre, hätten wir uns an Cubase oder Protools setzen und sein Spiel nach Belieben verändern können. Und dies wirft die Frage auf: Was bedeutet es, dass jede Arbeit, die einmal digitalisiert worden ist, im Museum der Arbeit verschwindet? Die Antwort ist einfach und uns allen bekannt. Weil die Elektrizität die Entfernung der Welt hinter sich lässt, kann das Programm, also der musealisierte Arbeitsvorgang, an einen x-beliebigen Ort dieser Welt transplantiert und von dort aufgerufen werden: anything, anywhere, anytime. Was uns damit heimsucht, ist das Dilemma der Lichtgeschwindigkeit. Und dies hat erst einmal nicht das Geringste mit einer künstlichen Intelligenz zu schaffen. Lassen Sie uns hier noch einen Schritt weitergehen, genauer, lassen Sie uns die Grundformel unseres digitalen Geisteskontinents in den Blick nehmen. Die findet sich in einem Werk, das der englische Mathematiker George Boole im Jahr 1854 veröffentlicht hat. Obwohl das die Boole’sche Algebra und Logik antreibt und jeder Programmierer wie selbstverständlich seine Booleans benutzt, ist diese Formel noch immer eine terra incognita. Probieren Sie’s bei der nächsten Gelegenheit aus, da werden Sie – oder, je nachdem, ihr programmierendes Gegenüber - Ihr blaues Wunder erleben. Dabei müssen Sie sich nicht einmal in die höheren Sphären hineinbegeben. Denn George Boole, der das Projekt verfolgte, den »Repräsentanten aus der Mathematik zu entfernen«, stellt sich eine sehr simple Frage: Was haben die Null und die Eins, die beiden Königszahlen der Mathematik gemeinsam – und was unterscheidet sie von allen anderen Zahlen? Wenn ich eine Eins mit sich selbst multipliziere, kommt immer Eins heraus, und wenn ich eine Null mit sich selbst multipliziere, ist das Ergebnis immer Null. Das unterscheidet die Null und die Eins von allen anderen Zahlen. Wenn wir das formalisieren, kommt die Grundformel alles Digitalen heraus: x= xn. Wenn Sie das in eine natürliche Sprache zurückübersetzen, geraten Sie geradezu in einen Schwindel hinein: Denn das bedeutet das Ende des Originals, das Ende der Identität, das Ende der Authentizität. Nimmt man das ernst und bezieht diese Formel auf sich selbst, müsste man sagen: Ich bin ein anderer, ich bin überflüssig, ich bin eine Population. - Inwieweit diese Logik sich schon unseres Denkens bemächtigt hat, wird klar, wenn wir uns vor Augen halten, dass jedes digitalisierte Objekt (sei’s ein*.pdf-Dokument, ein Audio oder ein Video-File) strukturell überflüssig ist. Dies, so scheint mir, ist eine tiefe Erschütterung, deren Folgen wir noch gar nicht wirklich absehen können. Lassen Sie uns an dieser Stelle noch einen Schritt weitergehen und die künstliche Intelligenz in den Blick nehmen, die ja tatsächlich soetwas wie eine Pseudo-Intelligenz ist. Denn was uns aus dem Spiegel da entgegenblickt, ist eine, im Wortsinne, „mittelmäßige“ Version unserer selbst. Lassen Sie mich dazu auf eine kleine Erzählung zurückkommen, die Edgar Allen Poe im Jahr 1840 veröffentlicht hat, Der Mann in der Menge. Was Poe zu dieser Kurzgeschichte veranlasst hat, dessen Motto interessanterweise den Bezug zum Elend des Menschen herstellt (Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul – das große Elend, nicht allein sein zu können) war die Lektüre eines Textes, den der Computerpionier Charles Babbage ein paar Jahre zuvor veröffentlicht hatte: The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. – Das ist derselbe Mann, auf den auch die Gründung der Royal Statistical Society zurückgeht – und dessen Analytical Engine, die Vorform eines Computers, 10.000 französischen Rechensklaven das Handwerk legte. In der Tat verhält sich Edgar Allen Poes Held, der in einem Londoner Café die Passanten vorübergehen sieht, wie ein Statistiker – denn er klassifiziert die Arbeiter, die kleinen Angestellten, die Putzfrauen, die Hausmädchen usw. Dann aber erregt ein älterer Mann seine Neugierde, der sich auf merkwürdige, unvorhersagbare Weise bewegt. Und er steht auf und beginnt ihm nachzugehen. Im Laufe dieser Verfolgungsjagd, die geschildert ist wie ein Krimi, begreift der Erzähler, dass dieser Mann sein inneres Bewegungszentrum verloren hat – dass er einzig, und zwar wie magisch, angezogen wird von den Geschehnissen ringsum. Das ist das Geheimnis, das sich nach einer langen Verfolgungsjagd endlich erschließt: Dieser Mann hat sein Zentrum verloren – und er geht, weil er dezentriert ist, ganz im Gesellschaftlichen auf, in der Welt ringsum. Und diese Einsicht wiederum trifft Edgar Allen Poes Erzähler wie ein Schock: »Dieser alte Mann«, sagte ich schließlich, »ist das Urbild und der Dämon des Triebes zum Verbrechen. Er kann nicht allein sein. Er ist der Mann der Menge. Es wäre vergeblich, ihm zu folgen, denn ich werde weder ihn noch sein Tun tiefer durchschauen. Das schlechteste Herz der Welt ist ein umfangreicheres Buch als der Hortulus Animae - und vielleicht ist es nur eine der großen Gnadengaben Gottes, dies: Es läßt sich nicht lesen.« Wenn wir einen Text in ChatCPT oder in Claude eingeben – oder wenn wir ein Bild über Dalle-E, Flux oder Stable Diffusion erzeugen, ist das, was herauskommt, unser stochastisches Selbst, der Mann in der Menge. Das mag intelligent scheinen – und sogar intelligenter sein, als das, was ganze Kohorten von Bachelor-Studenten zu Papier bringen –, aber es hat mit wahrer Intelligenz nichts zu tun. Man bekommt die Antworten, genauer, die Muster geliefert, welche das Machine Learning, mit der Lichtgeschwindigkeit der Prozessoren begabt, im Fundus hat ausfindig machen können. Man könnte sagen: Was uns da aus dem Spiegel entgegen schaut, ist der Mann in der Menge. Wenn man sich klar macht, dass bereits die Rede von der Künstlichen Intelligenz eine Art Selbsttäuschung ist, stellt sich die sehr viel interessantere Frage: wie geht man mit dieser Intelligenz um? Und wie entkommt man jenen Dilemmata, die für das stehen mögen, was Edgar Allen Poe im Mann in der Menge dingfest gemacht hat: das Urbild und den Dämon des Triebes zum Verbrechen. Die Antwort ist einfach und schwierig zugleich. Einfach, weil dieser Dämon in dem Augenblick, da man sich seiner bewusst wird, seine Macht verliert. Schwierig, weil wir uns als Gesellschaft längst in bestimmte Schizophrenien eingehaust haben. Und da finden es Menschen keineswegs sonderbar, mit der Berufung auf eine digitale Souveränität (und gespeist vom Denken eines Carl Schmitt) die freie Rede im Internet beschneiden zu wollen. Diese geistige Verwirrung, die kognitive Dissonanz zu nennen beinahe eine Untertreibung ist, scheint mir weit gefährlicher als all das, was wir mit den Mitteln der Künstlichen Intelligenz bewerkstelligen können. Ja, es wird möglich sein, dass wir in Zukunft Avatare von uns selbst erstellen können, die beim Konsumenten den Anschein eines wirklichen Menschen erwecken – aber dies hat sich lange zuvor schon, lange, bevor dies zu einer technischen Realität wurde, im Denken der Menschen eingebürgert. Wenn der Anrufer aus dem Call-Center, seinem Lehrbuch folgend, seine Sätze herunter spult, dann habe ich es nicht mehr mit einem menschlichen Gegenüber, sondern mit einem Androiden zu tun. Man vergisst ja leicht, wo bestimmte Konzepte ihren Anfang genommen haben. Nehmen wir den Cyborg. Damit hat man in den sechziger Jahren den Menschen bezeichnet, der in lebensfeindlicher Umwelt – also im Vakuum des Weltraums – nur mit kybernetischen Mitteln am Leben gehalten werden kann, also den cybernetically augmented organism. So besehen sind wir alle, die wir an unseren Smartphones und Computerbildschirmen hängen, längst zu Cyborgs mutiert. Gibt es daran etwas auszusetzen? Ich würde sagen: Nein – oder wenn da etwas zu bemerken ist, dann das, dass ein solches Cyborg-Sein sich mit Behauptungen von Identität, Authentizität und digitaler Souveränität nicht verträgt. Um zum Ende zu kommen. Ich sehe durchaus, dass die digitale Disruption, der Einbruch von Machine Learning und KI, eine Art Paradigmenwechsel darstellt – und die politischen Folgen können so dramatisch sein wie der Einbruch des Räderwerkautomaten, der das Mittelalter in eine wahre Glaubenskrise gestürzt hat. Man sieht’s ja allerorten: eine Art allgemeines Unbehagen in der Kultur, das sich, um sich gleichwohl behaupten zu können, in eine Erotik des Ressentiments hineinflüchtet, ein Great Again, das wie ein postmoderner Don-Quixotismus anmutet: ein Kampf nicht gegen die Windmühlen, sondern die Prozessoren, die uns, gerade so wie Don Quixote, erscheinen wie die Monster der Vergangenheit. Wie kein anderer Philosoph hat wohl Nietzsche dieses Dilemma erfasst, als er schrieb: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein. Wenn ich von all diesen politischen Fragen absehe und mich stattdessen auf das fokussiere, was sich mit den Mitteln der KI heute bewerkstelligen ließe, vor allem, welche geistigen und ästhetischen Räume sich hier auftun, verändert sich die Szenerie, aber auch die Tonlage schlagartig. Mag sein, dass wir damit in ein Terrain vorstoßen, dass Ihnen fremdartig, wenn nicht gar unheimlich ist. Meinerseits würde ich nichts Geringeres ansetzen als das, was die Renaissance für unsere Kultur bewirkt hat. Denn der Raum der Zeichen (siehe oben) durchläuft eine radikale Revolution. Eigentlich könnte jeder, der sich heutzutage mit der Manipulation audiovisueller Objekte beschäftigt, ein Lied davon singen. Wenn Sie sich in ein Programm wie DaVinci-Resolve vertiefen – was für ein passender Name!-, haben sie plötzlich mit der Frage zu schaffen, welche Wirkung eine Klangdatei auf die Farb- oder Lichtgestaltung hat, oder sie beschäftigen sich mit der Ästhetik des LightLeaks, des Glitches und der Partikelemissionen usw. All diese Fragen mögen Ihnen so abseitig erscheinen, wie der Umstand, dass ich meinem Nachdenken über die Philosophie der Maschine zu einer Alien Logic gelangt bin – und ich will’s Ihnen offengestanden gar nicht verargen. Als mein Sohn, als 9-jähriger Waldorfschüler gefragt wurde, was sein Vater so macht, hat er hinreißenderweise geantwortet: »Mein Vater schreibt Bücher, die niemand versteht!« Der Punkt ist bloß: All die Überzeugungen, zu denen ich im Laufe der Zeit gelangt bin, sind keine Erfindungen meinerseits, sondern haben mit dem Gesellschaftstriebwerk zu schaffen, das uns alle betrifft. In diesem Sinn danke ich Ihnen für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Auf eine sonderbare Weise hat sich in den letzten Jahren eine fast Orwellsche Sprachpolitik eingebürgert, bei der sich einige Zeitgenossen, wie eine Art informeller Sprachpolizei, dazu ermächtigt fühlen, die Verlautbarungen ihrer Zeitgenossen zu klassifizieren. Mag man sich in der Überzeugung, dass die Welt nichts weiter ist als ein Sprechakt, ja dass selbst das Schweigen einen Gewaltakt darstellen kann (»silence is violence«), auf höchst zweifelhaftem philosophischen Fundament bewegen, hat die Sprach-Regulierungswut unterdessen auch Verwaltungen und Konzerne erfasst. Ja, im Gefolge der Hate-Speech-Hysterie kommt es nicht selten vor, dass die Verwendung eines »falschen« Wortes auch juristische Konsequenzen hat. Matthias Heine, der als Wissenschaftler an der Neubearbeitung des Deutschen Wörterbuchs mitgewirkt hat, hat sich dem Phänomen des Sprachumbaus, den er als gesamtgesellschaftliche Katastrophe begreift, in gleich mehreren Büchern genähert. Stellen diese zugleich einen Streifzug durch unsere Kulturgeschichte dar, der von Martin Luthers spätmittelalterlicher Legasthenie (14 Schreibweisen des Wortes »Wittenberg«) bis hin zu den Sprachinterventionen der Tagesschau reicht, wird darüber sichtbar, wie exzeptionell die derzeitigen Eingriffe in unsere Sprache sind. Wenn selbst ein Josef Stalin auf die Forderung seiner Parteigenossen, die russische Sprache von feudalen Überresten zu säubern, entgegnete, dass die Sprache seit jeher ein Volkseigentum darstelle, eine solche Forderung mithin unsinnig sei, begreift man, dass man es mit einem revolutionären Furor zu tun hat, der an Radikalität noch manche Verstiegenheit der Vergangenheit in den Schatten stellt. Schon aus diesem Grund war die Unterhaltung mit Matthias Heine überaus lehrreich – hat das Gespräch Perspektiven eröffnet, welche den großen Sprachumbau der Gegenwart in ein neues, durchaus überraschendes Licht tauchen. Matthias Heine, der zunächst als freier Journalist für die Welt, die FAZ und den Cicero schrieb, ist seit 2010 als Feuilletonredakteur bei der Welt tätig. Matthias Heine hat (u.a.) veröffentlicht: Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Following our presentation of the »Labyrinth of Signs,« parts I and II, we now provide a deeply reflective yet light-hearted post-mortem discussion between us to help you understand what it means to be literate. Martin’s concept of Psychotope becomes more understandable as our conversation progresses; it becomes clear how essential the Alphabet is in enabling us to be literate in our thinking, writing, and discourses, revealing that we are essentially working with an outsourced, historical unconscious in how it shapes us through its use. This is evident from the fact that the origin of Symbolic Logic remains a gaping blank space in Philosophy—even more so: it’s hidden within the conspicuousness of its absence. Something I’ve come to know as the Burckhardtian leitmotif of »The Philosopher’s Shame.« It’s also no coincidence that »Geist der Maschine« features a chapter on how Sigmund Freud developed his concept of the unconscious, which we’ve also translated into English and will be posting soon. For now, it suffices to say that this chapter explains how and why Freud excluded the 19th century’s material culture (meaning its Logic of an Electrified/Telegraphic Society), which fulfilled his metaphysical needs, while simultaneously introducing something like a black box unconscious of the Unconscious into the World as its Psychotope. Hopkins Stanley Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Es gibt nur wenige Zeitgenossen, die sich mit den historisch-untergründigen Geistesströmungen beschäftigen, welche uns in die gegenwärtigen Kalamitäten hineingeführt haben – eine Welt, in welcher der Krieg zu einem Mittel der Politik geworden ist, der starke Mann zu einer Sehnsuchtsfigur – und autoritäre Gedankenfiguren eine bizarre Wiederauferstehung erleben. Mag sein, dass der Grund, der Gerd Koenen zur Anamnese unserer Gegenwart gebracht hat, mit der persönlichen Erfahrung der Kulturrevolution verwoben ist. Als Mitglied des SDS und des Kommunistischen Bundes Westdeutschlands, dessen Kommunistische Volkszeitung er als Redakteur betreute, befand er sich gleichsam im Zentrum des Geschehens - und konnte nach seinem Ausstieg aus der Bewegung, wie kaum ein anderer, die Geschichte der 68er Revolte nachzeichnen. In dieser Erzählung wird deutlich, wie die Traumpfade der Weltrevolution in einen geistigen Tunnel hineingeführt haben, in dem die Phantasmen der Stadtindianer in die Gewalttaten der RAF eingemündet sind. Als Historiker, der mit einer Psychoanalytikerin aus dem ehemaligen Ostblock verheiratet ist, darüber hinaus vielfältige Kontakte zur Solidarność und zu ausgebürgerten Dissidenten unterhielt (wie etwa Lew Kopelew), führte ihn die Problematik des real-existierenden Kommunismus zu der Frage, wie die politische Ökonomie eines Karl Marx in eine totalitäre Staats- und Gesellschaftsform umschlagen konnte. Weil aus dieser langen Beschäftigung mit der Frage des Kommunismus ein intensives Verhältnis zu Russland entstand, ist Koenen zum Chronisten auch jenes Wandels geworden, der uns heute in Gestalt des bellizistischen Putin-Russlands gegenübersteht. Und genau hier setzt unsere Unterhaltung an, die eine große geschichtliche tour de force geworden ist – und sich mit jenen gedanklichen Hohlräumen beschäftigt, die uns noch heute umtreiben. Dies mag der Frage gelten, ob der Marsch durch die Institutionen zu ihrer sukzessiven Aushöhlung geführt hat – und ob diese Form der politischen Evakuierung zum Erstarken antidemokratischer, ja, bellizistischer Grundhaltungen geführt hat, aber ebenso steht die Politik des Ressentiments und des gegenwärtigen Nihilismus auf dem Tablett. Gerd Koenen, 1944 geboren, war in jungen Jahren Mitglied des SDS und der KBW, nach seinem Austritt aus der Bewegung Redakteur des Pflasterstrands. Ihm verdankt sich eine wunderbare Chronik dieser Zeit: Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977. In der Folge hat er sich als Historiker in mehreren Büchern mit der Geschichte des utopischen Denkens und des Kommunismus beschäftigt – wobei zunächst das deutsche Verhältnis zu Russland, dann Russland selbst in den Vordergrund getreten ist. Von Gerd Koenen sind (u.a.) erschienen Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The title’s rhetorical question is a tautology. After all, it's evident that when we dream, our bedroom transforms into a space that’s magically filled with all kinds of creatures. In this sense, the engaging little experiment showcased in our short video simply translates our dreamwork into daylight. If we must insist that artificial intelligence is not the creation of some alien, hostile force, it’s because this misconception has long become endemic. When commentators go so far as to view AI as a singularity, a trans-humanist super-intelligence—or worse, a new biological species—they are operating under a profound misunderstanding. This misunderstanding mainly arises because the History of Digitization has remained a blank page thus far. This is why we will present our readers with chapters detailing the events that have shaped the style and spirit of this history over the next few weeks. Our failure to confront this history and its implications for so long may explain the discomfort many of us feel as we contemplate the consequences of this revolution in our lives. Reflecting on the progress made in recent years, driven by projects like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama, it's clear that our working world—indeed, the capitalist value system itself—is facing the crisis Nietzsche described as the devaluation of values. However, in our case, we are dealing with an economic rather than a moral logic of devaluation. Instead of seeking comfort in doomsday rhetoric, it makes much more sense to dare to look in the mirror. While you may encounter your own nightmares, on the other hand, you’re also confronting a dream machine—one that can produce the most wondrous results. Eigentlich läuft die rhetorische Frage des Titels auf eine Tautologie hinaus. Denn es ist evident, dass, wenn wir träumen, unser Schlafzimmer der Ort ist, der, ganz von selbst, von allen erdenklichen Wesen animiert ist. In diesem Sinn ist auch das kleine, höchst unterhaltsame Experiment, dass sich in diesem kleinen Video niedergeschlagen hat, nichts anderes als eine in die Tageshelle übersetzte Traumarbeit. Wenn man gleichwohl darauf beharren muss, dass die Gebilde der Künstlichen Intelligenz nicht auf eine fremde, feindliche Macht zurückgehen, so weil dieses Missverständnis längst endemisch geworden ist. Wenn sich Kommentatoren dazu versteigen, in der KI eine Singularity, eine transhumanistische Superintelligenz – oder ärger noch: eine neuartige biologische Spezies zu erblicken, hat man es mit einem tiefen Missverständnis zu tun. Dieses Missverständnis rührt nicht zuletzt daher, dass die Geschichte der Digitalisierung bis heute eine Leerstelle geblieben ist – weswegen wir in den nächsten Wochen unseren Lesern die Kapitel präsentieren werden, die in dieser Geschichte stil- und geistprägend sind. Dass man sich dieser Geschichte – und ihren Implikationen - so lange nicht gestellt hat, mag das Unbehagen erklären, das die meisten Zeitgenossen heimsucht, wenn sie darüber nachdenken, welche Folgen diese Revolution für ihr eigenes Leben haben mag. Schaut man sich die Fortschritte an, die sich in den letzten Jahren (forciert durch Projekte wie OpenAI, Claude oder Gemini oder Ollama) Bahn gebrochen haben, ist evident, dass unsere Arbeitswelt, ja, das kapitalistische Wertesystem hier vor jener Bewährungskrise steht, die Nietzsche als Entwertung der Werte gefasst hat, nur dass man es in diesem Falle nicht mit einer moralischen, sondern einer durchaus ökonomischen Entwertungslogik zu tun hat. Anstatt hier Trost in einem Weltuntergangsvokabular zu suchen, ist es sehr viel sinnvoller, den Blick in den Spiegel zu wagen. Mag sein, dass man hier den eigenen Alpträumen begegnen, anderseits hat man es mit einer Traummaschine zu tun – die ganz wunderbare Ergebnisse zeitigen kann. Related Content / Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Who comes up with something like that? (Carmela Soprano) It's been a good two years since we entered the world of AI-generated images, and during this time, tools like DALL-E and Leonardo.ai have become familiar companions in image production. And during this period, we’ve been exploring the artistic capabilities of our own Company Machine, the in-house metaphor machine we developed, which can translate texts and conversations into truly surprising images from scratch. This is why we were very curious to test the much-hyped Google VEO software, using images from our Company Machine that are pretty unusual themselves. Here is a little demonstration of what you can count on in the future. Count on? No, that's the wrong word. It might be more appropriate to speak of the anticipation of a magic mirror that translates what it receives into gestures—amounting to nothing less than the complete unleashing of the Imagination’s power. The following is the result of a compilation of a fun day Hopkins, Martin, and I spent together trying to teach this ex nihilo Image World to walk. Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Es passiert nicht allzu häufig, dass jemand, der eigentlich in der höheren Mathematik zuhause ist (und sich dort mit reellen sphärischen Räumen, Liu-Gruppen und Fragen der Spektralanalyse beschäftigt), sich in die Niederungen unseres Bildungssystems hinein verirrt, mehr noch, dass er den Schulunterricht darauf befragt, ob er das, was zu leisten er vorgibt, tatsächlich abliefert. Dass Bernhard Krötz sich diesem Exerzitium unterzogen hat, mag damit zu tun haben, dass ihn die Corona-Krise, als Vater eines heranwachsenden Sohnes, in die häusliche Lehre hinein nötigte. In jedem Fall bespricht Krötz seit dem Jahr 2021 auf seinem YouTube-Kanal den real existierenden Mathematikunterricht. Und weil seinen Videos ein großer Zuspruch beschieden ist, erreichten ihn die Berichte von verzweifelten Eltern und Schülern, die einen nicht-enden-wollenden Strom von Anschauungsmaterial darüber lieferten, wie eine Mathematik ohne Mathematik – und eine Physik ohne Physik – tatsächlich aussehen kann. Wenn Georg Picht in den 60er Jahren eine Bildungskatastrophe ausgerufen hat, fragt sich, welch passendes Wort sich für den heutigen Niedergang finden ließe. Klar ist lediglich: Dieser Qualitätsabstieg hat wenig mit dem grandiosen Selbstbild der Bildungsrepublik Deutschland zu tun. Sonderbarer ist, dass ein Land, das in Ermangelung der entsprechenden Bodenschätze vor allem auf die intellektuellen Leistungen des eigenen Nachwuchses angewiesen ist, hier so schlagend versagt; und dies ist umso erstaunlicher, als das Versagen begleitet wird von einem Chor unermüdlicher Bildungsreformer. Und weil dies eine Frage ist, der ich selbst seit langer Zeit nachhänge, bin ich auf Bernhard Krötz gestoßen, der mit großer Genauigkeit die Sinnwidrigkeiten der schulischen Praxis zergliedert. Versucht man ein Muster herauszupräparieren, könnte man sagen, dass sich hier, dem schönen Bonmot gemäß, nach dem der Weg zur Hölle mit guten Vorsätzen gepflastert ist, hehre Absichten an die Stelle einer wirksamen Pädagogik gesetzt haben. Wenn sich diese bei genauerem Hinschauen als Schildbürgerstreiche höherer Ordnung entpuppen, stellt sich die Frage, was man leisten muss, um die eigene Torheit nicht zur Kenntnis zu nehmen - was eine andere Betrachtungsweise darauf ist, was sich heutzutage als Aktivismus gebärdet. Sicher ist nur: Wo Wörter Realitäten ersetzen, ist der Weg zur ideologischen Verblendung nicht fern. Und weil diese Entwicklung auf den Zauber des digitalen Zeitalters trifft, mögen die Verantwortlichen auch fürderhin davon träumen, dass man, nach dem Modell des Nürnberger Trichters, den Schülern mit dem Erwerb von iPads das Weltwissen einträufeln kann – und es vor allem darauf ankommt, sie mit einer zeitgemäßen Moralität auszurüsten. Wie wenig diese „weiße Pädagogik“ wirklich mit einer überlegenen Moral zu tun hat, hat Bernhard Krötz am eigenen Leib erfahren müssen. Unversehens nämlich sah er sich, einer flapsigen, nicht weiter ernstgemeinten Bemerkung wegen, den wüstesten Beschimpfungen selbsternannter Tugendwächter ausgesetzt. Aber weil ihn dies nicht im Geringsten hat erlahmen lassen, haben wir uns zu einem anregenden Gespräch zusammenfinden können. Bernhard Krötz lehrt Mathematik an der Hochschule Paderborn. Für seine wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten wurde er mit dem ERC Advanced Grant des European Research Councils ausgezeichnet, dem höchsten europäischen Forschungspreis. Auf seinem YouTube Kanal seziert er mit beißendem Humor die Schildbürgerstreiche, welche sich die Mathematik- und Physikdidaktiker so einfallen lassen. Bernhard Krötz - Homepage Bernard Krötz - YouTube-Kanal Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The following text is part one of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999. Martin Burckhardt In the Labyrinth of the Signs I The Gods are from the Field of the Real (Jacques Lacan) Dazzled by the Blinding What is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks burning into your eyes, expanding into rings, into a glaring brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of growing tension. Tears gather under the retina, like a burn blister that will eventually burst under the mere pressure of a blink. And with the watery vitreous humor, my eyesight will also drain away. I imagine this loss: almost a relief, no more burning, just this liquid running down my cheek and leaving a taste in the corner of my mouth. But I can still see: pulsating, bullet-like flashing points. Are they specks of sunlight or already the first holes in my eye? It doesn’t matter, who knows? Basically, I'm no longer sure whether the radiation comes from outside or rather from the depths of my skull, a volcanic magma that wells up and, at the moment of discharge, causes my gaze to explode and fly off in all directions—as if, at the moment of dazzlement, I could see with a thousand eyes, like an insect. A piercingly bright pain, but this pain is accompanied by an equally clear thought, the amazement that here, where the light shines brightest, the path leads into the darkness of Myth. Black. Nothing else. A calm black that stretches into infinity. And yet, this blink of an Eye [Augenblick] isn't accompanied by total darkness. Maybe it's because of the little noises making it feel like this blackness keeps changing color. Incidentally, it isn’t entirely dark to me either, but as if a residual radiation emanates from things, an almost imperceptible inner light. It takes time to get used to it. No, that's wrong, because you don't need time anymore. With your eyesight, time also runs out into timelessness. Everything returns to itself, like a kind of rhythm, so that it doesn't matter which tense I choose: I was, I am, or I will be. At the beginning, one sentence kept incessantly wandering through my mind: Fame is the Sun of the Dead—now I know it refers to that moment when there can only be light and shadow. In fact, this last and ultimate flashing blink describes the point at which the objective becomes one with the apocalyptic. There is the Bomb's blinding flash, casting a final, merciless glance at the World and simultaneously burning the body that its radiation has reduced to nothing into the ground as a shadow. Nunc stans. No, here the shadows aren't burned in, much less anything else that can be grasped. As my eyes (or what remains of them) adjust to the diffuse residual light, I notice that a black sun is shining here too—or are there several? But perhaps the word ›Sun‹ is wrong, because these luminous bodies are more like Cyclops' eyes. Like spotlights, they roam through the darkness, creating multiple exposures, image overlays, and blurred streaks of movement. Perhaps it’s this very presence-of-mind gaze that leads us to the Myth’s essence: that the individual body becomes invisible as an individual, composed of those silhouettes that the Cyclops' headlights, as its »pursuers«, cast onto the walls. Perhaps the Myth can be thought of as a layer of film, as a never-ending gaze in which large, intergenerational periods of time are inscribed. It would be misleading for the Myth to be interpreted as a face, or even as an individual being. If a name appears, it stands as a choir leader who embodies a long genealogy, a face assembled from many faces like that of a wanted poster. As in the receptive surface of the film, it’s only what’s inscribed in the Myth that corresponds to the substrate's receptivity (the exposure time): la longue durée. Just as the first photographs took hours until reality had burned itself into the image, and how a pedestrian could walk through the scene without leaving the faintest trace of his presence, so too can Myth be understood as a surface that remains unconcerned with passers-by and ephemera, anecdotes and episodes. When, on the other hand, something becomes visible in the picture, IT is because it is a condensation and crystallization of time. This explains how the one-and-the-same figure can appear multiple times, in different roles and stages of life. Like a long-exposure photograph, the Myth absorbs time, juxtaposes the sequential, and thus equates the different levels of history. The images may be dark, blurred, and shaky, but what is conveyed is pure architecture. There’s nothing random or arbitrary about them; rather, everything shares the same torpidity and heaviness inherent in our buildings and institutions. As an edifice of thought [Bauwerk des Denkens], Myth has always been Mytho-Logos. It may seem as if the idea of a single Myth is erroneous, since so many myths vary depending on the place, region, and time. However, this diversity isn’t surprising; rather, it is a necessary characteristic of a culture that, equipped only with rudimentary writing techniques, listens to its Sagas. In the absence of a fixed, canonizing writing, history constantly reinvents itself. More precisely: it always finds itself anew, because it is not about the individual addition, but the general, the supra-personal. In this sense, myths, regardless of their apparent fluidity, are based on that enduring reality as something much denser than paper, much denser than the style and inventiveness of the individual author. Insofar, myths should be approached with the same respect afforded to all those things and institutions proving their own viability by themselves – which, even if we do not know their individual authors, allows us to speak of a self-evidence: an immediate insightfulness. Nevertheless, a methodological difficulty arises here. While the myths may have once possessed exactly this form of self-evidence, this no longer applies to us; we no longer understand them straight away. Instead, the myths lead us into areas entirely alien to our self-understanding and interpretation of the World. For myths are stories without history; they refer to events that are not dated and to people who are not tangible as persons. Entering the world of myths can create a feeling of sinking into a maelstrom, as you can constantly remind yourself of the invalidity of your mind’s inner coordinate system. Myth isn't realized in definition, but in its variation; it doesn't adhere to the logic of space, time, and causality, and as it has no Author, it represents a Text in our sense of the word. If we attempt to apply any of these concepts to myths, they fall apart – you are seized by the disconcerting feeling of being and remaining an illiterate [Analphabet] of the Myth. The impression of illegibility isn’t accidental. It points to its connection with Writing, or better, to the relationship of exclusion prevailing between Myth and Writing. The World of Myth precedes alphabetic writing. Only with alphabetic writing does the inexorable Logic of Signs emerge on the page, which definitively codifies the World and, in doing so, inextricably links cause and effect, text and author. Writing puts an end to Myth. The identifiable Author replaces the unrecognizable inventor of the myth; a story replaces the collectively thrown-together web of symbols and images with all its details of Who? Where? When? The Word replaces the evoked, conjured-up word made definite. If Writing eliminates Myth from the World, this raises the suspicion about Writing itself, as the crystallization form par excellence (the monument of all things, as Aeschylus says,) has a mythical dimension, that Logos has absorbed the function of Myth and thus rendered it superfluous. But what does Myth tell the person who one day opens his eyes and no longer believes himself to be subject to the Laws of Myth, but to the Light of Pure Reason? The Moment of Forgetting Guided by the idea of gradual progress, people have sought to interpret the Greek alphabet as a stage in the history of Writing, as the perfection of a movement of thought arising with the first characters: a movement toward abstraction. One argument supporting this interpretation is that, as Herodotus reports, the Greeks themselves didn't regard their alphabetical letters as an indigenous invention, but as something borrowed. They were called phoinikoi, meaning: the Phoenicians – thus referring to their Semitic origin. Such an evolutionary interpretation, however, overlooks the fundamental flaw inherent in the Greek alphabet. It was only on Greek soil that letters transformed into what we now call the Alphabet: that Symbolic Machine in which the Signs circulate, as if for themselves and without reference to any entity, as they run in the circles of the Sign. No letter has any attachment to reality anymore. Where the Signs are stretched onto the Typewheel [Typenrad] of Signs, the phantasm of a pure, otherworldly, metaphysical Sign emerges in its circularity. When it's said that the specific Greek contribution to the Alphabet lay in the perfection of the vowel system, it completely overlooks how radical this fundamental transformation was. Because this process goes hand in hand with the body’s expulsion, the Semitic alphabet, serving as the Greek alphabet’s model, has one or more meanings for each letter. Aleph is the Semitic Sign for the Bull. However, as you might think in the Saussurean tradition, this meaning is not arbitrarily attributed to the Sign. Instead, it is precisely the opposite: like in pictographic writing, the Sign serves as the placeholder for a body. You can see the Bull’s two horns when you turn the Sign upside down. The Bull is the figure of the divine, and if the gods love to appear in its form, it’s because it symbolizes maximum procreative power. Aleph-Alpha-Phallus – the letters themselves allow us to read the letter Alpha as a phallic symbol. And yet, even in Sign’s ideographic form, enabling us to recognize the Bull's head, there is a fundamental ambivalence. Looking at the letter, you can see the yoke in the crossbar, the instrumental device that transformed the Bull into an ox, putting it into human service. The Sign Alpha thus reveals not only the presence of a god, but also the usurper’s gesture of seeking to wrest the secret of all fertility from the gods. The Greek Alpha marks the ending of that first revolution of the Sign. It is a revolution in the literal sense of the word, a rotation, because the Sign of the Bull, once turned, becomes the Sign of the Plow, the instrument that transformed nomadic peoples into farmers settling in one place. This progressive abstraction also includes the Bull Sign's refinement as it evolves from totem animal to instrument of agriculture until it becomes a symbol of love (which then soon turns out to be what we call the symbolic yoke of marriage). In fact, this line, which leads from pictograms to ideograms, from the body to the idea, describes the path characteristic of all pre-alphabetic sign systems. In this process, abbreviation prevails, with pictograms becoming increasingly stylized and simplified. However, (and this must be emphasized) the starting point is always the object being designated. Even there, where the first syllabaries emerge, the syllabic signs, which are recoded pictograms, still refer to this original image [Ur-Bild] that gave them their name; the direction of movement is thus conceived as leading from the Body to the Sign (in the sense of representationalism). This line isn't only reversed in the Greek world to the extent that the Sign is considered primordial and the body as a shadow being; rather, it can also be said that a barrier is erected between the Sign and the Body, completely obscuring the connection between the Body and the Sign. If I can no longer see what a child can see, namely that the inverted A represents a bull's head, then this serves as proof of this barrier. However, it is precisely at this barrier where the phantasm of the pure and arbitrary Sign emerges: a Sign that is not an image, but autological, tautological: itself. Europa The Alphabet arrived in Europe in two ways. This statement is both true and false. It's false because it assumes that Europe is a geographical place, as if this continent had already carried this name since ancient times. Yet, having said that, Europe is a construct emerging from the migration of symbols, and is less a geographical entity than a symbolic one. It is not the tectonics of the land masses, but the texture of writing that emerges in this name. In this sense, the connection between the Alphabet and Europe isn’t accidental but a reciprocal event. But where does the migration of symbols, which culminates in the Alphabet, begin? As already mentioned, the Greeks refer to the alphabetical symbols as phoinikoi, highlighting their Phoenician origin or, more generally, the Semitic world of Asia Minor as the birthplace of the Alphabet. Europe itself is named after a Phoenician king's daughter who was abducted by a bull and carried across the sea—westward, where the Bull revealed his true form as the god Zeus. If the name Europa has an etymology, it traces back to the Semitic ereb, erebos, which means dark, suggesting that the movement into the West and darkness is already prefigured here. One might assume that the god who appears on the Phoenician seashores as a beautiful white bull abducts Europa to the land that has since borne her name. However, Zeus carries her to Crete, a land that wasn’t considered part of Europe in ancient times. Europa—and this is the story’s paradox—does not arrive in Europe. It's precisely this circumstance that is so remarkable, as it brings into play that other linked path, indeed, that is intertwined with the fate of Europe. In fact, the history of the Alphabet’s story is of two siblings who appear together in Myth for only the blink of an eye: the moment they're torn apart. Their paths then diverge. Nevertheless, both paths are strangely intertwined; not merely parallel, but constantly intersecting, mixing, and mirroring each other. Thus, the abduction of the young princess Europa by Zeus is only part of the story. The abduction of Europa results in a mission to bring her home again—a mission entrusted to her brother, Kadmos. Europa and Kadmos are children of Agenor, which means the first man or leader of men. The siblings are named Phonix, Kilix, Cadmos, and Europa. Phonix and Kilix refer to Asian regions and peoples of Phoenicia and Calicia. It is therefore plausible that son Cadmos, the only son without land, is sent by his father to bring back the kidnapped Europa. Thus, Cadmos sets off, accompanied by a cow armed with the Oracle's prophecy. He crosses the Bosporus, finally arriving in Boeotia via Samothrace, where he founds the first Polis: Thebes. However, Cadmus isn't only the city's founder but also a heroic bringer of Writing – the guy who brought the Alphabet to Greece, and thus: to Europe. The Greek alphabet marks Sign Revolution’s crowning glory. It goes hand in hand with an upheaval of the divine order. Karl Kerényi wrote that the Myth of the Gods merges into the Heroes Myth in the palace of Cadmus. If deities set out from Asia Minor, they arrive in Greece as heroes. While Cadmus represents this journey's heroic side, the abducted Europa's story illustrates the female perspective. Of course, the mythological Europa never arrives in Europe—which further places her among all the women left behind, of which mythology is full. If what we call Europe is the search for the vanished, lost Europa—a search that has turned away from its original goal and been transferred to other objects of longing – then we’re dealing with a process most accurately described by the term transference. This term, which has both psychoanalytical and technical connotations (and thus a fundamental ambiguity), is used in its simplest sense: as a transfer from one place to another. Europa is carried by Zeus to Crete, while Cadmus crosses the Bosporus, the ford that will separate »barbarian« Asia from Europe. The result of this journey is a sharp difference, a division between origin and destination, but also a division within the figures themselves (embodied in Europa, who, to become Europe, must disappear as a figure). If we translate transfer back into Greek, we encounter the word Metaphora, which means metaphor. As we know, metaphorical, figurative speech relies on shifting and condensing the original meaning into a higher meaning. However, the original meaning must be suppressed for this transition to a higher level to succeed. It’s precisely this rupture that characterizes the series of transfers/omissions recounted in Myth: from the Sign of the Bull to pure letters, from the village to the Polis, from the gods to the Heroes, from Myth to Logos, and from the figure to the metaphor. Once torn apart, the siblings will never see each other again. Cadmus Like all heroes, Cadmus is a figure devoid of psychology. Although he occasionally appears in Greek tragedy, such as in Euripides' The Bacchae, it makes more sense to think of him as the archetypal cattle herder: a lonely wanderer who sets off westward toward the evening sky. Occasionally, there's mention of a small, armed band of companions, a brother, and even his mother. However, you always hear about the cattle he is bringing with him, so the ford he crosses is called Bosporus, the Ox Ford, and the land he finally reaches is Boeotia, the land of cattle. If the Cadmus epic deserved an atmosphere, it would be that of a Hollywood western: wilderness, land grabbing, and cattle rustlers. Yet this herdsman possesses secret knowledge, a dark energy driving him forward. In Delphi, he consults the oracle and is instructed to seek out Pelagon, a Shepherd born to die; buy a cow from him that bears the Sign of the Full Moon on its flanks; and settle where this cow digs its horns into the ground »A clear sign I will tell thee, thou shalt know it;Where first that horned beast that dwells in the fieldShall kneel her down upon the grassy groundThere make thou sacrifice to dark-leaved EarthClean and holily. Thine offering made,Found on the hill a town of spacious streets,First sending Ares’ dreadful guard to death.— So shall thy name be known of men to comeThy consort be a goddess, blessed Kadmos.« Cadmus follows the oracle’s prophecy. The cow kneels and digs its horns into the ground. Cadmus sacrifices it and sends his companions to fetch water. However, no one returns because a terrible dragon resides near the spring’s cave. The companions fall victim to the dragon. Finally, it comes to a Showdown, the great Dragon Fight. The hero enters the battle almost unarmed. He overpowers the dragon with his sword or by throwing stones. He then sows the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which heavily armed warriors emerge. Cadmus throws a stone into the crowd of warriors to protect himself from them, whereupon they turn on each other. Only five remain: Udaios, the ground man; Chthonios, the earth man; Pelor, the giant; Hyperenor, the superhuman; and Echion, the snake man. They are also called Spartoi, the sown ones. Harold Innis, the Canadian philosopher and teacher of Marshall McLuhan, analyzed this myth early on as the Alphabet's central myth, a kind of civil war of Signs in which the remaining warriors play the role of the vowels. Indeed, from this perspective, there are several reasons to study the myth of Cadmus, who is explicitly regarded as the bringer of the Alphabet. However, this leads us into a field of inquiry going far beyond the mere notation scheme—one that renders the sign legible instead as a symbolic reproductive apparatus. Not only does the Aleph Sign, which refers to the ox in the yoke, emphasize the correspondence between these two orders of fertility, Sign and Field, but also a series of fantasies pointing in this direction. When the Greeks refer to the early form of writing, in which the text alternates from left to right, as boustrophedon, meaning »the way an ox pulls a plow,« this is more than a metaphor: it reflects the Aleph’s logic. And the Oracle's prophecy that Cadmus should settle where the cow lowers its horned head also anticipates the reversal of signs – the Bull's head, the head standing upright. There is another dimension to which the myth points, and it will be discussed further under the heading of telluric sacredness: While Cadmus had only natural stone at his disposal, the characters who emerge from the earth are armed with iron weapons. The battle gives rise to what could be called the TYPE—and this will distinguish Greek culture, with its armies of hoplites, from the ›barbarian‹ cultures. The dragon's power, described in the oracle as the guardian of the god of war, and which falls victim to Cadmus' throwing of stone, is not entirely eliminated, but continues in the highly disciplined soldiers acting as a military alliance. However, this detail is part of a whole chain of transpositions foreshadowed in the Cadmus myth: from cattle breeding to the Polis, from the Shepherd born to die to the soldier, from stone to iron, from the hero to the collective – and from the dragon, guardian of the god of war, to the army. All these transpositions herald fundamental shifts. In summary, it can be said that the principle of Acrocracy, the towering, dark singularity, is replaced by new magical circles, which, like the Alphabet, consist of several elements. The original power is no longer visible as such but has entered into the concerted action of the elements. This, however, doesn’t mean a weakening, but rather a potentiation. If Cadmus was able to engage in a duel with the dragon as an individual, he can only defend himself against the superior forces of the armed fighters by throwing a stone at them, casting them into a state of disarray – an elemental confusion, if you will – from which the new powerful synthetic whole emerges. When Cadmus later marries Harmonia (whom the myth calls a different Europa), this takes place amid the jubilation and great sympathy of the gods, who shower the couple with wedding gifts. This isn’t a coincidence, for this union articulates the apotheosis and beginning of Greek antiquity: the Marriage of Systemic Thinking. Ovid, who colorfully embellishes Cadmus' battle with the dragon, has a voice come out of nowhere: »Son of Agenor, why are you gazing at the dragon you’ve slain?You too will become a dragon for men to gaze upon!« This oracle's prophecy (like every oracle's prophecy) comes true. Cadmus and Harmonia are transformed into snakes—thereby endowed with divine power. Before being struck by the verdict of the Fall, the serpent was considered a sacred creature. When the pharaohs wore the sacred Cobra around their heads, when snakes were kept in pits and regarded as the Oracle’s protectors, it was because they were believed to possess a deeper knowledge of the reincarnation laws. In this sense, the transformation into a snake or dragon is both an apotheosis and a transfiguration of the knowledge originally reserved for the snake alone. Now, the story of Cadmus and Harmonia has a counterpart in their bridegroom’s dragon fight, the god Apollo. For Apollo also slays the dragon Python, thereby gaining possession of the Oracle. Another dragon-shaped adversary of Apollo bears the name Delphyne. This Delphyne, in turn, gives its name to the Oracle's site at Delphi—the place Cadmus visited on his way to the land of cattle. The name Delphyne reveals the essence of his quest, as Delphyne is an ancient name for the womb. And when Cadmus and Harmonia are deified in serpent form and carried off to the island of the blessed, it’s because they have replaced the mystery of birth with the Code of Nature. Perhaps this is the deepest reason why Europa – and with her all the mother goddesses of Asia Minor's World – will never arrive in Europe. Crete What is this island where Europa arrives? Crete: island of bulls and sacred snakes, childhood home of the Greek gods, a world of legends filled with miraculous figures, giants, and mythical creatures, all displaying unprecedented, memorable grandeur—just as in childhood stories. Crete is the home of early thinking that has not yet been alphabetized. Consequently, the way Greek authors write about Crete reveals the sentimental mellifluousness that clings to memories of preschool days. Sentimentality is sentimental precisely because it no longer believes in lost paradises, encountering them only in hypothetical form: a reality that would evaporate into nothingness if confronted in real life. Thus, the dashing formulas of disenchantment characterizing the School of Athens are not contradictions of sentimental affection, but rather its necessary counterpart. Whatever the outcome, it boils down to a denial of childhood, because all Cretans lie. This is a profound statement, not only regarding Cretans, but also the logical apparatus that produces it as a theorem. This marks a split between Mythos and Logos, a razor-sharp dividing line cutting through what cannot be separated. As the birthplace of Zeus, which shows the god in diapers, Crete reminds us of the shame of being born, of the fact that we have not created ourselves nor our own World of gods Consequently, in Greek thought, Crete represents not only the mystery of the primordial beginning but also a veritable taboo zone: the noli me tangere of the a priori, that form of not wanting to know which makes a specific form of knowledge possible in the first place. So what is Crete's significance as the birthplace of the god? While it has been noted on various occasions that Greek culture reflects a tendency toward monotheism in Zeus, Crete narrates the emergence of this god, specifically during the time when he was not yet king of the gods and the highest of the Olympians. Perhaps this story's motto and embarrassment is that even giants once began as small. If Zeus is a creature, this implies that there was a time before, when his glory didn’t yet shine – and thus there may also be an after, the moment of his dethronement. This threat is linked to the birth cave of Zeus, leading us back to religious realms where the mother goddesses existed before any adult male deities. Indeed, Crete was idealized as the home of the Great Mother Goddess. Of course, the rule of this goddess is already strangely broken. The birth of Zeus itself describes a peculiarity: Rhea must kneel on the ground on Mount Ida, overcome by labor pains. But before she gives birth, the mountain convulses and births out small, metallic beings who assist her in the delivery: the Curetes. The word itself has a double meaning: the Curetes are the Cretans themselves (in Latin, Crete is called curetis), and there is also a connection to the word kouros, which means both »boy« and »core.« The Cretans who sprang from the earth, who are undoubtedly related to the fighters springing from the earth in the legend of Cadmus, have a metallic core. They immediately begin to dance with weapons, swords, and shields. However, they aren’t merely servant ghosts (like the seven dwarfs in Snow White) but priests who tell of the goddess's mysteries. Here, a curious difference emerges. Why does the Great Mother require the Curetes’ assistance? Does she herself not represent Mother Earth? And what kind of Earth would it be from which the metal dwarves spring? In fact, the myth tells us about the replacement of two orders that are religious in nature, but it also relates to the laws of reproduction. In connection with the mastery of the ores, Eliade spoke of telluric sacredness, pointing out that the metallurgical process is essentially understood as one of symbolic birth. The craftsman takes the place of Mother Earth, with firing being understood as a synthetically induced maturation process—an artificial birth in which the metal embryo is prematurely removed from the womb and brought to maturity by firing. This assumes, conversely, that metals mature internally like the embryo in the womb—an idea that still lived on in the alchemical doctrine that every metal is a precursor of gold, which must inevitably find its final form in gold. If the telluric sacredness represents an analogy to traditional fertility cults, then the »birthing« of the metallic form, as an act brought about exclusively by human hands, stands in clear competition with that event requiring natural forces. It isn’t necessary to look far to visualize the rift—in today's terms, the metallurgical process would be in vitro fertilization. And what's more, because the metallurgist doesn't return a removed embryo to the earth mother but grows it in an artificial environment, this process could be seen as a form of artificial reproduction. It’s precisely this interpretation that provides the key to the birth scene on Mount Ida. The mountain gives birth to its creatures without needing the Great Mother. Instead, when the Curetes intervene in the birthing process as midwives, the relationship shifts clearly in the direction of artificial reproduction. In another version of the myth, the Curetes are referred to as dactyls (literally: fingers or toes), bearing names that can be translated as anvil, hammer, and knife. Whatever the Curetes are – forges, sorcerers, warriors, or priests—it’s evident that the mysteries and secret teachings they recount all pay homage to a cult inadequately grasped by our traditional understanding of fertility. Against this background, the term telluric (although extremely useful as a concept) is ill-chosen, for tellus, terra mater, is the earth mother herself. In this context, it would be much more precise to speak of a Promethean cult, a self-made religion that no longer feeds on the mystery of birth and rebirth, but on the retort. In this religion of the retort, culture begins to celebrate itself. If Crete is regarded as the place of the Mother Goddess, the island is also the site of her gradual disappearance. Iron Man The Curetes represent a new type, the type Hesiod calls the Bronze Race, of whom he aptly says, »They did not eat grain, but their spirit was made of steel.« This race finds its most perfect expression in the figure of a bronze giant, a coastal guard who walks around the island three times a day, driving away intruders with stones. His name is Talos. While outwardly this Iron Man appears as a terrifying figure, inwardly he is the guardian of the Law. In Plato's interpretation, he's the one who goes around carrying bronze tablets inscribed with the laws and ensuring compliance with them, which earns him the nickname »Bronze«. Therefore, Talos would be the wandering letter, the arm upholding and ensuring compliance with their law. Certainly: the contradiction between the two forms of religion, between agriculture and ore, also characterizes him. On one hand, it's said that he had a human form, while on the other, he had the form of a bull. Indeed, this is reflected in a fissure inscribed into his being, a line marking his vulnerable spot: a long vein running from his head to his feet with a concealed access portal on his ankle. When the Argonauts land in Crete, the sorceress Medea succeeds in extracting his secret. She then opens his port, and the god’s blood, the Giant’s sekretum flows out – along with the Minoan Culture’s mental secretions being hysterically carried by their ships as Europa seeks the Europe she never finds. This only happened when the Minoan culture was conquered and occupied by the mainland Greeks in the 14th century BC. As Talo's image suggests, in reality, the Minoan empire's downfall was more akin to a departure, in the sense that ships set sail. Only it is no longer the ironclad ships of the Cretans, but those of the Mycenaean conquerors, with which the secret of Minoan culture finds a home throughout Mediterranean culture. However, in the middle of the second millennium, Crete still remains impregnable. The watchman automaton Talos does his duty. Cyclopean walls protect the Minoan empire named after the legendary King Minos, while a cultural schism smolders within it: a rift between the Great Mother Goddess and Zeus, between the Bull and the Bronze Guardian. The Lost Form But what’s Crete’s secret? Where does the Minoan culture's superiority expressed in the Bronze Giant's form originate? The name Talos itself reveals the secret. Talos means Sun in the Cretan language, and the Cretan Zeus is called Zeus Tallios – an indication that Minos' automaton (which some attribute to divine origin) can be interpreted as a god’s representative. From here, a line runs to the Greek metallon, which originally meant the pit and tunnel, and only later referred to what was found in it. In the form of Talos, the heavenly fire has descended. What’s more, the sun has been immortalized in the bronze tablets, as it becomes the foundation of the law, the heavenly scripture that Plato calls Logos. Additionally, because this artifice [Kunst] is intimately connected with the Greek pantheon, Talos is also the guardian who preserves its secret. Now, the Crete of the 2nd millennium is not only home to Zeus' birth cave; it also has a metallurgical achievement elevating it above its surrounding cultures: bronze casting with lost forms. While bronze smelting is primarily based on mastering fire, bronze casting with lost forms represents a skill far exceeding the beginnings of bronze technology. Its ingenuity lies in producing a cavity that, as a hollow receptacle, can contain and accommodate the final shape of the bronze casting without melting. Instead of a hammered hand-worked object, a finished form emerges that has completely passed through the fire and cast from a single mold – which, drawing a parallel to the birthing process, actually evokes the fantasy of a second nature as we are not only dealing with in vitro fertilization but with a growth process taking place autonomously. But what is the Lost Form? First, there is a model made of beeswax: the prototype. This waxy form is covered with plaster after candles have been affixed to create exit channels for the wax to flow from later. The plaster-covered form is then heated, causing the gypsum to harden while the melting wax flows out of the drain channels, leaving behind the hollow mold. Positive-Negative: The simultaneous melting and hardening is what makes the process so ingenious, as the same logic is applied in the final step. Now, the plaster-coated hollow mold is placed into a cavity in the ground, allowing for rapid cooling once the bronze is poured in, thereby ensuring a successful casting. It's easy to imagine how the artifacts produced in such a process must have appeared as wondrous objects to the more naive cultures of the time: swords and shields without any traces of the irregularities of human hands, instead exuding a formal unity and perfection unique to living beings. Impressive as the superficial shine of the swords and shields may be, the deeper knowledge behind their fabrication is that the Cretan blacksmith-priests must be credited because mastery of these techniques requires a high degree of metallurgical expertise. They had to know and regulate the melting points of metals without the aid of measuring instruments, and understand how metals behave in compounds and alloys. Through the lost form process, bronze technology emerged from the handicraft stage. Energetically, we are now dealing with a type of power plant technology [Kraftwerktechnik] that functionally reflects a highly abstract creation process. While this technical perfection is highly esteemed, its connection to the religious sphere mustn't be forgotten. If the forges of ancient times were attributed a priestly status, it is clear that those adept in this superior casting technique would have been accorded exceptional status. In fact, the categorical separation of this technology from the religious world is a division that has only existed since the Romantic era. For the world of the Cretans, knowledge of the process of lost form was a secret teaching in two senses: firstly, as knowledge of a technical practice, and secondly, as a religious cult that articulated this knowledge in an elevated, idealized form. Against this background, the story of Zeus' birth must be reconsidered. If the Bronze Guardian is the placeholder for the godhead whom the Cretans call Zeus tallios, then it arises out of a deep connection between the god coming to life here and the cult spread by the Curetes. Now, besides the story of Rhea giving birth to the divine child on Mount Ida, there are other birth narratives in which the lost form connection becomes even clearer. It is said that Zeus was born in a Cretan cave, in a hollow form, clandestinely, to escape the vengeance of his child-murdering father Cronus. In this version, the Curetes are no longer midwives but perform a noisy dance with their shields in front of the cave to drown out the telltale cries. There’s even mention of different caves: one where the birth took place and another where the Zeus child was nourished. While psychoanalytic thinking may be tempted to see these caves as maternal womb images, viewing them as transfigurations of the caves and grottoes used by Cretan metallurgists as forges for producing their products seems much more plausible. Thus, the cave serves as a temple of the lost form, and the child of Zeus (who clearly heralds a rift in the world of the gods; for why else would Kronos want to kill him?) as the first incarnation of this cult. Following this thought, a line of further connections can be made linking the caves of Zeus to the Cretan cult’s most famous place—the Labyrinth. According to Mircea Eliade, the labyrinth was also originally a cave. Now, the alleged parallel between cult and technology would be mere speculation if there weren't a myth in the mythological world of the Zeus child, in which the lost form process is described in an almost unadulterated way that would seem bizarrely incomprehensible without this reference: There live the sacred bees, the nurses of Zeus. A great fire breaks out in the cave once a year, always when the blood ferments that flowed at the god's birth. One day, four brave men enter the cave, clad in iron armor and fortified with honey from the bees, their faces whitewashed with plaster. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them. – When attempting to analyze this myth, it becomes evident that the uterine idea of the birth cave does not lead very far away. Rather, it's the story's details that are important. First, there's a layering of meanings: the annual fire breaking out in this cave plays on the circularity of ancient fertility cults, while the blood here is merely a remnant, having given way to the boiling metal. This transubstantiation conveys an essential message illustrating that Cretan culture, with its storehouses, palaces, and fortifications, no longer adheres to the mythology of blood unreservedly, but instead venerates metal as the source of wealth and general well-being. Nevertheless – and in order not to simply break with tradition, efforts are made symbolically—or rather: symballically of bringing the two levels together. Accordingly, the sekretum of Zeus is also represented as a mixture of blood and molten metal. However, following the narrative, it becomes clear where the focus of the new cult lies. All details refer to the lost form process. The sacred bees, Zeus's nurses, refer to the wax that serves as the raw material for the bronze sculptures. The four brave men with their shields (the artifacts of which Cretan culture is so proud) have whitewashed their faces with plaster, reminiscent of the plaster casings used in sculptures. The mention of fire is also unambiguous. There are two reasons why it takes courage to enter the heights: firstly, the real danger inherent in the casting technique, and secondly, it touches on the arcane secrets of Cretan culture. Insofar as viewing this world's interior is accompanied by the horror of theophany, a terror instantly disarms the warriors, leaving them at the killer bees’ mercy. At the same time, this brief glimpse reveals the secret of Cretan culture, the secret of the highest Greek godhead, whose Cretan childhood causes the Greeks a certain embarrassment. Wax, metal, fire, the falling bowls, and finally the image of the blood-stained god standing there in swaddling clothes—like one of those sculptures removed from their plaster molds but not yet cleaned. The details of this myth illustrate the miraculous technique that enabled the Cretans to create forms from a single cast for the first time. Zeus is such a figure, an ideal, complete body. With him, a new figure enters the World of Mother Goddesses, a figure that could be called HOMO-GEN in all its ambiguity: a human creation, cast from a single mold. The myth goes on to say that Zeus gave bees the color of ore out of gratitude for nourishing him. When honey becomes the food of the gods, and ambrosia is used for anointing while wax is used in mummification (as was still the case with Alexander the Great), this substance also experiences an apotheosis. With the thesis that Zeus represents the godhead of Lost Form, the question is immediately raised about what constitutes the Lost Form of Myth as an analogy of the casting process. Initially, there may be a tendency to attribute this loss to the ancient pantheon's diminished function. If the ancient fertility deities owe their existence to the circularity of growth and decay, this tributary relationship melts away to almost nothing in the case of Zeus. Zeus owes his existence not to a particular substance, but to a trick: he is an artificial god. In its form, culture encounters itself. But here lies a contradiction, indeed, this god's birth defect. The god in whom human work celebrates itself does not exactly contribute to its own exaltation. To worship him as a god, it is precisely this aspect of the synthetic that must be suppressed—all the more so because, unlike natural material, the ingenuity of the lost form no longer holds any mysteries. It’s no coincidence that the birth cave of Zeus is shrouded in an embarrassing silence—the four brave men who see him, covered in blood and swaddling clothes, are seized by panic. What they see there is not something wholly different, but rather that their godhead is a self-made cult figure. In the liquefied, creamy metal that takes on the role of blood in Zeus' birth cave, a new, ›artificial‹ form of fertility comes into play. From now on, when we refer to a logos spermatikos, we always mean this special ›blood juice‹ [Blutsaft]. The culture of Zeus is abstract, synthetic, head birth [Kopfgeburt] as a result of pure imagination. Nevertheless, Zeus tallios, the Cretan god who emerged like a statue from a lost form, still stands under the dictum of tradition. Because the old godheads cannot simply be displaced, Zeus, in accordance with the inertia of religious sentiment, takes on a different form – a form that must be more congenial to the older female fertility deities. If Amaltheia, another wet nurse, whose name again contains the honey aspect, nourishes the child of God with the horn of a bull, an inexhaustible horn of plenty, it is only right and proper that he should occasionally appear in the guise of a phallic bull. And in precisely the same way, in the guise of the Bull, he appears to Europa on the shores of the Phoenician sea—a guise he discards once he arrives in Crete. In this dual nature of the god, where the Lost Form is superimposed on the traditional bull's costume, lies the rift foreshadowed in the long, head-to-toe vein of his earthly double. Because here, two principles collide: the world of agriculture and the tamed fire, the telluric sacrality and that of the agricultural deities. In fact, for a time, molten metal still counted as a form of bull power – the equation of blood and red-hot metal holds. Accordingly, the Cretan religion can be seen as an attempt to unite the two competing orders. The highest object of worship is represented by two horns with a sun disk resting between them. As in the birth cave of Zeus, which is described as filled with surging blood but is actually an allusion to the liquefaction of metal, the fusion of blood and metal occurs repeatedly. However, this isn't about the substances themselves, but about the competing religious orders they represent, which are reconciled with each other in the overlapping of the two levels of meaning. The new alloy of blood and metal is not limited just to Crete but spreads throughout the Greek world, just as myths can be seen as forms of migrating thoughts, representing a shift of names, places, and cults. Insofar, it is not surprising that the Cadmus myth has sequels and repetitions, as in the story of Jason. Jason has to compete in a contest to marry Medea, the king's daughter. Before the hero faces the dragon, the king sends him into battle with fiery bulls: »Behold the bulls with feet of bronze! From steel nostrils, / They blow Vulcan's flames; touched by the embers, / The grass around them burns. And like full-grown oxen, they bellow, / Or as limestone burned in a limekiln hisses, / Or grows hot when sprinkled with a drop of water, / So from their chests and parched throats, / Came the rumbling-roar from flames pent up within.« Jason, the hero, equipped by his enchanting Medea with a »Promethean ointment,« can approach them: »...never feeling their fiery breath—so potent is the power of the spell — / He boldly strokes their hanging dewlaps with fearless hand, / And harnessing the yoke upon them: made them draw the heavy plow, / And cutting through the field that had felt a steel share before.« Then the battle with the dragon begins, which Jason defeats in the manner of Cadmus: ›Now he takes the dragon's teeth from the bronze helmet / And scatters them into the loosened soil. / The earth softens the powerfully enchanted seeds, / Growing into teeth and becoming new formations. / Just as in the mother's womb, a child takes shape, / Perfected within – limb and limb join together – / Not coming forth into the common air, until fully formed, / So, when the forms of men had been completed in the womb or the pregnant earth / They rose up, teeming from the fertile earth / And—even more astonishing!—each brandished weapons emerging with himself. (...) / He throws a heavy stone into the midst of his enemies, / Turning their attack away from him, onto their own ranks. / These sons of the earth took to wounding one another, / And struck down by the bands of their own kin, / They perish in civil war.‹ This short passage, in which Ovid examines a distant past, is remarkable because it intertwines all levels of the question, revealing the superimposition of two competing religious orders (figuratively summarized in the elements of blood and metal). Furthermore, this passage highlights that aspect of symbol formation which will find its enigmatic form in the pure Sign. In fact, we cannot yet speak of a symbol; instead, we are observing the various aspects in separate forms, all jumbled together. Now, sym-ballein, the throwing together, is the essential stratagem leading to the symbol as the ultimate form of condensation. All connotations of the Alpha-Phallus Sign converge here: the taming of the Bull, the replacement of the agricultural world by metallurgical, Promethean skills, and the hermaphroditic being of blood and metal (the fiery bull). The hero, armed with a Promethean ointment, the dragon seed, and the knowledge of the secret of reproduction, embodies the birth of the homogeneous and the horror of uniformity, which in turn provokes a civil war but ultimately gives rise to the community that characterizes the Greek world: the Polis. Semele It's evident that when the center of worship shifts, the sacrificial offerings must also change. When the Greeks euphemistically said that a human sacrifice had ›passed through fire,‹ it was clear that the godhead was now being paid with a different currency than before. Now it's Cadmus' fourth daughter, Semele, who falls victim to this ritual against the express wishes of the god, who must step aside due to the law of tyche, that relentless goddess who determines how things have to be. Even the highest god must bow to this absolute necessity. How does the myth of Semele go? Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, is impregnated by the god of lightning, who carries within him the energy and knowledge of Me-Tallon. Semele is the Phrygian word for the Greek Chtonia, meaning ›the underground.‹ At the same time, the word contains the seed of the Greek similis, which in Latin becomes simulacrum, meaning dream, shadow, phantom, or image of the dead. Semele, into whom semel, once and for all, the seed of Zeus has descended, is the hollow form of the god: receptivity in its entirety. Hera, the jealous wife of the gods, approaches her, »Wrapped in a golden saffron cloud, / She rides to Semele's threshold; / Nor does she dissipate her cloud /Until she’s adopted an old woman’s guise, / Streaking her temples with white hair / And furrowing her skin with wrinkles.« Hera has taken on the form of her old nurse. In this disguise, the old woman instills doubt in her about the god's paternity: »Many have already entered chaste chambers as gods.« Doubt, this hollow form of reality in which what was real flows out, becoming a phantasmatic cavity – a cavity constantly producing new suspicions and possibilities—this doubt of demanding certainty. The god is to give her a token of his love, and he promises her this token, whatever it may be. And Semele, in search of the god's true identity, demands he reveal himself as he truly is, which becomes her downfall. The unhappy god struggles to tame his fire, wrapping himself in steam and clouds, rain and lightning, yet despite this, he appears to her as he is: as a bolt of lightning that burns Semele to death. The god can only save the son Semele carries in her womb, so he's sewn into his father's loins with a golden clasp. Zeus gives birth to him, who has a bull's head like himself: Dionysus. For this reason, he's also called the twice-born. Mellis (the honey) Se-Mellis. Similis. Semele. (Se)meltan. Melting. The hardening of the god coincides with the melting of the woman. Semele leaves behind the hollow form, the doubt, the empty, burnt-out royal palace. And with the vine, that substance that will populate the reality principle with the power of imagination’s [Einbildungskraft] shadow beings, along with intoxication and delusion. Hysterologos Something new emerges from the technique of the lost form. The hollow form becomes productive. Whereas cultures previously had to act on the body itself to create an artifact, now bodies emerge bearing no trace of the human hand: hybrid beings, alloys, totalities. The exclusion of the human hand signifies the step into abstraction. Molten bronze poured into a hollow mold is a kind of plastic. The idea of perfect plasticity resides in the magmafication of the molten state: a flexible, malleable, and supple body. Conversely, this infinite plasticity corresponds to the body’s complete annihilation during the melting process. A strange dialectic emerges here. By melting down the natural body’s form along with its unevenness and bulkiness, all conceivable forms, FORM as such, become visible for the first time. While the wax positive still represents an analog of the body, the process of abstraction takes a decisive step further in the case of melting down and refilling. The fact that here the creative human hand no longer has any possibility of intervention describes only the external side of this process; however, we must bear in mind the extent to which metallurgical knowledge is assumed to grasp all the sharpness of this leap of abstraction. Against the background of these intellectual and abstract skills, it becomes clear that this melting process can only be understood as a mental process. With this step into abstraction, the view shifts from physicality (or, as one might say, the mother substance) to those cavities preceding the body. In this sense, Dionysus, twice born, is an image of this process. The child of his mother, who melts away (like wax) under the energy of lightning, and the child of his father, into whose thigh he is sewn (like bronze poured into a hardened plaster mold). The body emerging from this hollow form is a strange hybrid creature. While it appears perfect, despite its appearance, it is no longer the archetype [Urbild], but rather a copy—and indeed a double copy. It may be a steel Ironman, yet inside, it’s as fluid as Talos – a Protean creature that is only invulnerable in appearance [Erscheinung]. The Technique of Lost Form inscribes a division into the thing: the division between being and appearance. Strictly speaking, the things emerging from this process are already appearances: they embody the forms that preceded them—Wax and Air. Insofar, it is no coincidence that Semele, whose expressed desire made Zeus the idea’s father, gives birth to simulacra. Just as the hollow form gives birth to possibilities, doubt gives birth to illusions. Moving along these lines, Euripides recounts in The Bacchae a version of the myth circulated by Semele's sisters about her death. They claim that Semele only pretended to be impregnated by the god on the advice of Cadmus, which was the reason why the god killed her. Like Semele, her son Dionysus, »born of lightning,« is a master of appearances—and at the same time his mother's avenger. When Pentheus, the son of one of those envious sisters, dares to deny the presence of the god in keeping with family tradition, Dionysus mocks him by appearing in human guise and conjuring up a bull out of thin air. — The deluded Pentheus, whom Dionysus has persuaded to go to the Maenads in the guise of a woman, suddenly believes he sees two suns and a double Thebes – and finally Dionysus himself appears to him, as his father had appeared, in the form of a bull. Perhaps there’s no stronger image for the totality of illusion than this: the appearance of a second sun. Where it’s impossible to decide what reality is and what delusion is, doubt encompasses the whole world—thereby marking something like a counter-world formula. Just as the Lost Form’s production process shifts the creation of form into the invisible, the reality of Dionysus shifts into the intangible. But only here, and not in his concrete manifestation, can the presence of God be felt. Pentheus, the godless rationalist who takes the form of the god for the god himself, who believes he can capture the god with a ribbon, is punished for his trust in appearances with the multiplication of appearances. And at the moment when doubt about the world seizes him, his fate is sealed: he is to be dismembered himself. He is torn to pieces by his own mother and her maenads. The idea of appearance makes sense only in front of the hollow form. The bronze sculpture is the realization of something absent, the phenotype of a genotype that is lost in the process itself. Latin speaks of ars fingendi, equating casting with counterfeiting or faking. This is where the realm of Dionysus begins, who is the god of theater and, for a long time, dressed in the costumes of the great tragic figures—the only hero on stage (Nietzsche). Dionysus has been too readily proclaimed a reincarnation of earlier fertility deities. In fact, he belongs to the Technologos—only that, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t want to be turned into statues and statutes. Dionysus embodies the sacred fire, that immense, all-consuming force hidden in the hollow of the process of the Lost Form. When Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy with precise instinct, »Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation,« this suffering leads to where the potency of Cretan culture has its highest expression. In one Orphic myth, the infant Dionysus is attacked by the Curetes; in another version, by the Titans. With their faces painted with plaster (!), they approach the playing child, dismember him, and throw him into a boiling cauldron. The dismembered and overcooked body is finally transformed, restored by the gods, into a vine, into pure mind. If it is said that Zeus brought about fulfillment, but it was Dionysus who made fulfillment complete, then it is clear his contribution lies in a realm that cannot be grasped through physical abundance or pure positivity. It's more like a formlessness that Dionysus embodies: as an enthusiast who excites the Bacchantes, who clouds their minds and blurs the line between the sexes, between madness and reality. — But it would be wrong to see this god as the opposite of reason. He is more like that part of the process hidden from view. This affiliation with the Technologos explains Dionysus's special relationship with Hephaestus, that limping, dwarfed monstrosity whom his own mother hurled down to earth. If Hephaistos trusts only Dionysus, it is because this god, in whom the sacred fire and the mutability of form pulsate, embodies the mind of his craft like no other among the gods. And if, conversely, the god of wine is responsible for elevating the god of blacksmiths, this is further proof of their deep kinship. Intoxicated by wine, the metalworker ascends to heaven. However, a self-made god whose mysteries owe their existence solely to human artistry presents a problem, for the day inevitably comes when he is revealed as a creation of human hands. Xenophanes initiates this process by suggesting that the gods could only be the shapeless creations of humans. From that point onward, only what isn’t anthropomorphic can be considered god: »One God is greatest among gods and men, / neither in body nor in understanding equal to mortal men.« Here, where the twilight of the Olympian gods begins, reality, or rather the formlessness of Dionysus, comes into play: that a god can only be invisible. Whatever form this great nothingness may take, whether it leans toward the god of philosophers or follows the path of monotheism or Christian crucifixion, it is always great, absent eternities making themselves felt. In fact, without wanting to reduce this story to a mere technical aspect, it's possible to discern the birth of this idea in the Lost Form’s melting process: magmafication. Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

At a time when productivity theater, task masking, and sham production have become commonplace, it is clear that we’re facing a profound crisis of work, indeed, of everything considered valuable in our society. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the principle of performance itself has come under criticism. This crisis has drawn our attention to Daniel Markovits, whose work explores whether the widely revered meritocracy is actually a trap. Consider that the term meritocracy was coined just over sixty years ago, suggesting that this could mark the beginning of the gradual erosion of its meaning. Because the Ivy League university system, whose tuition fees increase each year—so much so that it's questionable whether many students could ever repay them with their ›hands,‹ or more accurately, with their minds—favors only those who have access to the necessary financial resources, while excluding those born into less comfortable circumstances. As a result, it is becoming increasingly clear that we’re currently dealing with an incestuous ruling class in which our elite universities exhibit the characteristics of a closed society primarily focused on self-reproduction. Nevertheless, it seems that this pale cast of thought is affecting the students and graduates of these elite institutions. Why else would it be seen as good form to portray oneself as demonstratively overworked compared to those in lower castes? This brings us back to where we began: the question of whether all this might be a significant productivity charade against our discontent with Modernity. Daniel Markovits (born August 4, 1969) is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Private Law. His book The Meritocracy Trap was named one of the best books of 2019 by The Times. Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Vor einem guten halben Jahrhundert sind Hannah Arendts »Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft« erschienen – und auch wenn dieses Werk, als Resultat eines langen geistigen Winterschlafs, etwas in Vergessenheit geraten ist, bietet es doch die psychologisch präziseste Beschreibung dessen, was man als die totalitäre Versuchung der Moderne begreifen kann. Und wenn die Politikwissenschaftler den Totalitarismus allein unter dem Rubrum des totalen Staates verbucht haben, machen heutige, eher dezentral agierende Organisationen klar, dass der Totalitarismus eine Wiederauferstehung erlebt hat, im neuen, überraschenden Gewand. Und dies wiederum ist ein Grund, sich mit Jens Hacke zu unterhalten, der zu der Wiederauflage von Hannah Arendt großem Werk ein langes Nachwort beigesteuert, das selbst die Länge eines kleinen Buches hat. Und weil auf diese Weise die Gedankenwelt der Hannah Arendt revitalisiert wird, lässt sich ein neuer, frischer Blick auf einen Klassiker werden – ein Jahrhundertwerk, das in seiner Bedeutung bis heute noch nicht vollständig erfasst worden ist. Jens Hacke lehrt, dessen Habilitationsschrift sich mit der Ideengeschichte der Weimarer Republik beschäftigt hat und dessen wissenschaftliche Arbeit mit mehreren Preisen ausgezeichnet wurde, lehrt als Politikwissenschaftler an der Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Von Jens Hacke sind erschienen Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Wenn Foucault, der in den 70er Jahren noch als randständiger Intellektueller galt, unterdes zum meistzitierten Denker der Welt geworden ist, so ist dies umso merkwürdiger, als Foucault zu den großen Rätselgestalten der Philosophie gehört. Und weil man es zudem mit einem sonderbaren Formwandler zu tun hat, der eine Reihe von bemerkenswerten Selbstverwandlungen hingelegt hat, ist die Beschäftigung mit seinem Werk überaus lohnend – und Grund genug, sich mit Philipp Sarasin zu unterhalten, der im deutschsprachigen Raum wohl der beste Foucault-Kenner ist und ihm gleich mehrere Bücher gewidmet hat. Sarasin seinerseits gehört der Gattung jener furchtlosen Historiker an, welche, in der Postmoderne beheimatet, die Geschichte nicht als Bühne der großen Männer auffasst, sondern als eine komplizierte Textur, in der höchst reizbare Maschinen am Werk sind. Und so bekommt man es nicht nur mit einem verwissenschaftlichten Körper zu tun, sondern mit der Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren – ja, einer eigentlich phantasmatischen Welt. Gänzlich ungewöhnlich aber ist Sarasins Buch 1977. Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart, in der Sarasin den Disruptionen und Diskursverschiebungen der Gegenwart nachspürt – was ihn zur RAF, zum Centre Pompidou und zur Formierung der Identitätspolitik führt. Und natürlich hat auch hier Michel Foucault seinen Auftritt: als Denker, der sich von den Fantasien der Studentenrevolte verabschiedet und sich stattdessen, in einer sonderbaren Volte, dem Zen und der Frage der Freiheit zuwendet – was zu der Frage führt, wie sich die iranische Revolution und der Neoliberalismus unter einen Hut bringen lassen. Philipp Sarasin hat bis zu seiner Emeritierung Neuere Allgemeine Geschichte am Historischen Seminar der Universität Zürich gelehrt. Er ist Mitherausgeber des Online-Magazins Geschichte der Gegenwart. Von Philipp Sarasin sind erschienen (u.a.) Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

It may be that the world around us is transforming into a vast puzzle, even a Mystery Play. This situation also extends to our professional environment, prompting organizational sociologists to observe a particularly unsettling phenomenon: the silent exodus of the workforce, characterized by a state of inner resignation where employees merely do the minimum while their minds have long since disengaged from producing quality work. Now, Generation Z, a cohort that can no longer imagine a World without the Internet, has surprised organizational sociologists with a behavior that exhibits highly performative traits and has spawned influencers such as the Anti Work Girlboss and a reigning TikTok hype. What is it all about? The underlying question is relatively straightforward. It asks how one can perform a kind of productivity theater for one's employer or coworkers, in which everyone pretends to engage in highly difficult and complicated tasks. The answer is simple: you stare intently at the screen, make audible grunting noises, wander through the company corridors with your laptop open, or engage in loud conversations at the water cooler or coffee machine. In reality, however, it's all about masking your own inactivity – and using quick shortcuts to hide the fact that you're using your working hours to update your dating profile or live feed. Cam Caldwell, with whom we discussed all these questions, has spent his entire professional career exploring the issue of effective leadership after honing his management skills in a managerial role. In this context, he has also examined the phenomenon of quiet quitting and its various manifestations. Cam Caldwell earned his PhD in Human Resources and Organizational Behavior from Washington State University, where he was a Thomas S. Foley Graduate Fellow. Prior to earning his PhD, he accumulated over twenty years of experience as a Human Resource Director, City Manager, and Management Consultant. He has authored more than 20 books on management topics. Cam Caldwell has published Related content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If identities in the Digital Utopia can be defined with the click of a mouse, it isn’t surprising when people want to make their lives as colorful as possible. After all: Who wants to be »a boring Normie?« as Eliza Mondegreen puts it in the simplest possible terms; consequently, those who wish to overcome their deep sense of emptiness proceed like computer gamers eager to endow their Avatars with superpowers. With this in mind, it’s easy to understand how the Trans debate (a marginal phenomenon only two decades ago) has seductively seized the public’s consciousness and taken on such political explosiveness. However, this raises the question of if the need for transcendence and the dissolution of selfhood boundaries can be met by administering hormone blockers to pubescent adolescents and promising them that a physical gender swap – or more precisely, a surgical modification of the body – can make all their problems disappear into thin air. And, as someone intensively involved with gender issues for several years, this is precisely where the question Eliza Mondegreen poses begins. While initially studying the fundamental reality of Gender and Identity Dysphoria, she suspected there was a question of psychical countra-banding here that was strikingly similar to that found in cult-like phenomena. Just like the cultist, who feels newly reborn after a divine encounter, so do those adolescents embarking on a gender-changing journey. They adopt a new name, become active in their new fellowship of believers, oppose apostates while proselytizing, and proudly do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the rest of an unbelieving world. Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer (for Unherd, Freethinker, among others) and photographer. She runs the widely read substack blog gender:hacked. She is currently working on a book about gender medicine, which will be published by Polity. Link to gender:hacked Eliza Mondegreen’s articles in Unherd Freethinker Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

It's common knowledge that capitalism has been in a deep crisis of values since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, while the question of where it comes from and how it affects our existing institutions is much more complicated. Talking to Philip Pilkington about this is worthwhile if only because it combines the perspective of a sober observer looking back on a career in investment banking with the acumen of a macroeconomist who can counter his profession's intellectual aberrations based on Philosophy. And because he's also familiar with contemporary thinkers, our conversation dealing with questions of energy, the political class's level of education, and the looming deindustrialization wander easily through entirely different areas. And while you are considering economic »bads,« it may happen that Jacques Lacan pops up, as does Kant’s definition of marriage (›...as a juridical consequence of the obligation that is formed by two persons entering into a sexual union solely on the basis of a reciprocal possession of each other’s private parts‹) and his tacit affinity to the Marquis de Sade. And so, despite the subject's darkness, the conversation is one of great hilarity—and the question can be resolved why the consultation with an OnlyFans model contributes to the GDP growth while, at the same time, conjugal coitus remains a quantité negligeable. Philip Pilkington is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs where he focuses on macroeconomic and geoeconomic issues. Before joining the institute Philip worked in investment management as a macroeconomic strategist. Philip is the founder of the Multipolarity podcast. He regularly writes for the New York Post as well as other outlets, like The Telegraph, The Spectator, UnHerd, American Affairs, and First Things. He can be found on his Substack Philip Pilkington. Philip Pilkinton has published Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe