Dark Matter

A Guide to Alexander Kluge & Oskar Negt

Richard Langston

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788735186
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Teoria critica

Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines think so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. Kluge and Negt's "gravitational thinking" balances not only the abstractions of theory with the concreteness of the aesthetic, but also their allegiances to Frankfurt School mentors with their fascination for other German, French, and Anglo-American thinkers distinctly outside the Frankfurt tradition. At the core of all their adventures in gravitational thinking is a profound sense that the catastrophic conditions of modern life are not humankind's unalterable fate. In opposition to modernity's disastrous state of affairs, Kluge and Negt regard the huge mass of dark matter throughout the universe as the lodestar for thinking together with others, for dark matter is that absolute guarantee that happier alternatives to our calamitous world are possible. As illustrated throughout Langston's study, dark matter's promise-its critical orientation out of catastrophic modernity-finds its expression, above all, in Kluge's multimedia aesthetic.

Cornerstones of
Collaborative Philosophy

1

Learning Processes, Deadly
Outcomes: For a Practical Theory
of Critical Intelligence

Knowledge, Lost in Space

The interwoven ideas unfurled before you in this book almost all find a point of reference in a little science fiction story about the end of the world. Were you to read this Cold War story, you would not be wrong to think of it as an allegory befitting of the new millennium. It goes something like this:

On January 15, 2011, Earth was destroyed in the Black War, a terrestrial battle between communist China and a supra-capitalist United States of America. Lasting little more than eight hours, the war was responsible not only for catastrophic loss of life, but planet Earth was obliterated, too. Induced by an unprecedented use of weapons of mass destruction, tidal waves enveloped Asia. Rivers and oceans boiled and evaporated almost entirely. Rifts in the Earth’s mantle opened, spewing forth fountains of magma. Brownish-green clouds full of nuclear contamination shrouded the planet, ensuring that any remaining life, human or otherwise, was extinguished. A day after the apocalyptic events on Earth, the tragedy assumed intergalactic proportions. The planet’s crust collapsed. The heavenly body home to Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years then broke into several asteroid-like bodies held together by the former planet’s gravitational field. What was once Earth became a seemingly uninhabitable ring of intergalactic rubble.

Human life was, however, not extinguished altogether. Well before the outbreak of the Black War, the West successfully colonized portions of Mars as well as planets and moons within and beyond the solar system; Western bureaucratic life—with all its governmental outposts, legal bodies and military academies, scientific and medical centers and, above all, private industries—continued to flourish in an outer space without Earth. Signs of human life on what remained of Earth vanished from view from the vantage point of these interstellar colonies, home to humankind that managed to harbor survivors of the Black War. However, burrowed in caves and bunkers reaching down sixty kilometers below the Earth’s surface, great masses of Chinese Marxists weathered the planet’s terrestrial ruination. In a few brief years, they managed to reconstitute the entire ecosystem of one chunk of Earth into a veritable paradise of public parks, irrigated gardens, and forests.

As the story goes, for over ninety years, the Chinese restitution of Earth remained a mystery to extraterrestrials, until a flotilla of Chinese space explorers, presumably in search of new sources of human labor power, came in accidental contact with their old enemies. By the year 2103, the plutocratic descendants of America’s Mars administration, in search of precious natural resources, laid waste to a string of star systems reaching all the way back to the solar system. Workers eventually resisted their virtual enslavement. Rebels mutinied. Thieves murdered and pillaged. In an effort to quell the mayhem, intergalactic corporations like the Suez Canal Company ordered the massacre of its entire workforce. In total disgust and disbelief, the heroes of the story, four surviving officers of America’s intelligence avant-garde, escaped harm by commandeering spaceships and traveling into uncharted intergalactic territory, what they christen the “Dawn Sector.”

Central in Alexander Kluge’s dystopian science fiction story from 1973 entitled Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome are the actions and commentary of one Franz Zwicki, one of the four intelligence officers lost in deep space at the story’s conclusion. Zwicki, we are told, was once an officer in the German Wehrmacht, who (along with colleagues Stefan Boltzmann, First Lieutenant von Ungern-Sternberg, and A. Dorfmann) escaped the deadly Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 by furtively traversing eastward over the Volga river’s ice flows. After internment and enslavement in China between 1943 and 1949, the four escaped to the United States of America where, thanks to their prior experience gathering sensitive information in Asia and Europe, they swiftly worked their way into the Central Intelligence Agency. By the time of the outbreak of the Black War in 2011, Zwicki advanced to the position of chief physicist in the Agency, thus ensuring him and his companions unfettered access to spaceships stationed near Frankfurt am Main (codenamed “Idaho Bunker”) with which they escaped the grim fate of terrestrial humankind. In outer space, Zwicki retained his position as intelligence expert and, thanks to modern medical science’s triumphs over human nature, continued his work well beyond his 180th birthday.

Of the four former Nazi soldiers in space, Zwicki stands out, for in spite of his nominal status as a space pioneer and scientist (not to mention his obvious connection to the actual astrophysicist Franz Zwicky often credited with discovering dark matter), he speaks far more like a philosopher. And, of all the great questions modern philosophy asks, it is Immanuel Kant’s first of four fundamental philosophical questions—“What can I know?”—that preoccupies him most.¹ Yet Zwicki wishes not to turn to metaphysics, as Kant prescribes, but rather to what he calls still relatively early on in his saga “materialist epistemology”: “The understanding of reality … and its expression of life,” he explains to friend and scholar Eilers in 1972, “may consist of thousands of self-deceptions … but it rests upon an unconquerable longing.”² This hermeneutic of longing—the will to survive and the concomitant will to eternal life—is anchored, so he claims, in each and every person’s human body. Even though this material eludes all scientific elucidation, Zwicki retains his resolve. His colleagues are, however, doubtful of his curious materialism’s validity. Dorfmann, for example, insists that “human beings are far more intrigued metaphysicians than they commonly admit today.”³ Zwicki nevertheless follows his dismissal of these doubting Thomases by faithfully calling into question their unreflective reliance on the empire of the mind. “How do you know all this exactly?” Zwicki asks Dorfmann, dubious of his detailed account of the final hours of life on Earth.⁴ Again and again he dismisses others’ propositions as improbable, doubtful, unbelievable, uncertain, incomprehensible, and inadequate. Similarly, he regularly compromises his own assertions as well as those of others by stating simply “I can’t believe that” or “We don’t know,” flagging a contradiction, pointing out the inherent inadequacies of empirical description, calling attention to obscure details, or emphasizing the faultiness of memory.⁵ While thoroughly dismissive of matters of the mind, Zwicki’s theory of embodied knowledge, the feeling of “unconquerable longing,” and the concomitant understanding of reality and life require no proof, for they are the stuff of Zwicki’s fantastic story of survival—their uncanny ability to cheat catastrophe and human nature—that accompanies his and his colleagues into the twenty-second century.

In spite of his firm rejections of others’ idealist claims to knowledge, Zwicki’s own presumably materialist epistemology, first mentioned in the year 1972, quickly takes a backseat to seemingly more existential matters in the shadow of Earth’s demise. The flipside of human “unconquerable longing,” a metaphysical feeling about human transience, the insignificance of planet Earth in the unending universe, and the absurdity of existence—Dorfmann calls it a “vague attendant feeling”—waxes the farther away he and his three companions are from the remains of mother Earth.⁶ Zwicki retrospectively recounts from the year 2103 those grim years following the Black War of 2011 as being full of “ridged concentration on the chances for survival of the self.”⁷ Increasingly aware of their deprivation of terrestrial sensory perception due to the loss of earthly time and space, Zwicki openly wonders whether it is at all possible to retain a sense of self in space. With the place of their history and language gone, the self is both unstable and fragmented. Whereas he and his colleagues were always assigned new stable identities as clandestine operatives for the CIA, their “language, appearance, the contexts of [their] lives, future tasks,” all this had to be re-invented anew in space.⁸ And, because any and every choice they make cannot claim an earthly referent, such decisions are as meaningless as they are arbitrary. Stranded on a solar platform lost in deep space, Zwicki, sick and despairing, twists René Descartes famous maxim cogito ergo sum so as to insist on the futility of cognition in outer space. “I think, therefore I am. I think, because I can disregard the fact that I am. Precisely because I am not, I think. Therefore, I am not. But who thinks then? Certainly not me. For this reason no one thinks.”⁹ Although Zwicki’s logic is marred by jumps and inconsistencies, his twin conclusions—the self ceases to be in outer space and so, too, does thought—nevertheless suggest for a moment that in the shadow of “vague attendant feeling[s]” his materialist epistemology was nothing more than a terrestrial luxury.

What saves the apparent viability of Zwicki’s original theory of knowledge or reality and life, as well as the comrades from carrying out their suicidal thoughts, is their pleasure found in surveying the planets orbiting around a red gassy star they egotistically christen “Franz Zwicki.” Light years away from crisis and catastrophe, they discover from their space platform a sylvan planet. Using leftover chemical weapons, they

“carve” the image of the “Hymn of the Dawn Sector” into the forests. Boltzmann and Zwicki’s blasted-out forest clearings were between six and eight kilometers wide. This sign of intelligent life would stand out to any intelligent beings flying by and entice them into landing. The owners called the forested planet “Dorfmann” and its moon “von Ungern-Sternberg.” … If Zwicki looks out … he can read “The Dawn,” a sign of intelligent life that delights him.¹⁰

The sign of intelligent life Zwicki sees through his telescope is what we might think of as a bombastic example of land art: the first page of a French translation of Franz Schubert’s song “Memnon” (written with poet Johann Mayrhofer in 1817) burnt into the darkness of the planet’s surface (fig. 1.1). This double sign—a sign of the astronauts’ stubborn will to keep on living as well as a complex sign system of art from a lost world—is what apparently transforms Zwicki’s despair into hope, hope that others would eventually reach their solar system and “allow themselves to be milked dry” working under the direction of the four space pioneers.¹¹ It would seem then that, in spite of the increasingly hopeless dematerialization of the self engendered by exile in space, Zwicki’s materialist epistemology finds its clearest manifestation in the creation of signs of not just life, but intelligent human life. Intelligent life is, however, a euphemism of sorts, for the terror Zwicki et al. escaped is precisely what they wish to lure with their sign. The deadly outcome in the title of Kluge’s story is therewith deferred into an untold yet presumably certain disastrous future beyond the frame of the narrative.

Figure 1.1. A “sign of intelligent life”: a negative of Adorno’s manuscript of Franz Schubert’s song from 1817, “Memnon,” D. 541, Op. 6, No. 1 (Kluge, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, p. 106). © Alexander Kluge.

Allegories of Intelligence

Scholarly readers have approached Kluge’s story far less in terms of science fiction’s propensity for inciting “cognitive estrangement” than allegory’s invitation to “exegetical activity.”¹² Indeed, there is plenty of fodder to read Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome when we think of allegory as a conventional relationship between an “illustrative image” and a corresponding “abstract meaning.”¹³ To date, the story has fostered insightful readings about text-relevant themes like self-destruction, capitalism, futurity, and even the Frankfurt School, for example.¹⁴ Sticking closer to the telos of the story’s title—learning processes and their outcomes—let us instead continue our journey in outer space by first burrowing downward with Walter Benjamin into the baroque allegory as Benjamin saw it, namely as a literary form intent on unlocking a “realm of hidden knowledge.”¹⁵ Only when we begin to see Kluge’s allusions to and departures from this baroque form’s techniques for disclosing the catastrophic consequences of modern knowledge can we begin to link up his and Negt’s investment in learning processes as a special kind of cognitive estrangement. A culmination, in part, of earlier essays intent on refuting the “scientistic prejudices” of Kant’s epistemology, Benjamin’s 1928 habilitation The Origin of the German Tragic Drama wrestles at its outset with the problem of profane knowledge and the constitution of modern experience.¹⁶ As explicated in its “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” the system-seeking philosophies and the method-obsessed sciences of the nineteenth century exemplified for Benjamin the acme of profane knowledge resulting from man’s fall from grace. Whereas the essential unity of man’s prelapsarian existence anchored in divine truth (Wahrheit) knew nothing of knowledge (Erkenntnis), let alone words or communication, the original sin—eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge—delivered man into a creaturely world—a world of natural history—where the unity of word and thing crumbled. Profane knowledge is thus an inherently fragmented knowledge, phenomenal in nature and reliant on the limited reach and arbitrary biases of empirical perception. Atomized into “various disciplines,” profane knowledge, Benjamin adds, is a function of disparate methodologies devised to buttress the illusions of “systematic completeness” and the presumed prowess of transcendental subjects who take “possession” of knowledge.¹⁷

Against this backdrop, Benjamin casts his account of baroque allegorical Trauerspiel as a disruptive literary form of the seventeenth century beholden neither to the pretensions of profane knowledge nor its illusions of wholeness. Distinguished by its penchant for amassing “heap[s] of ruins”—earthly things ripped out of their profane contexts—early modern allegorical literature invites the phil...