Anti-Nietzsche

Malcolm Bull

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781859845745
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781683903
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Nietzsche, the philosopher seemingly opposed to everyone, has met with remarkably little opposition himself. He remains what he wanted to be- the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends. In this provocative, sometimes disturbing book, Bull argues that merely to reject Nietzsche is not to escape his lure. He seduces by appealing to our desire for victory, our creativity, our humanity. Only by 'reading like a loser' and failing to live up to his ideals can we move beyond Nietzsche to a still more radical revaluation of all values-a subhumanism that expands the boundaries of society until we are left with less than nothing in common.
Anti-Nietzsche is a subtle and subversive engagement with Nietzsche and his twentieth-century interpreters-Heidegger, Vattimo, Nancy, and Agamben. Written with economy and clarity, it shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.

1

Philistinism

At last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.

Nietzsche

Believing that philistinism was not mere vulgarity but ‘the antithesis par excellence of aesthetic behaviour’, Adorno expressed interest in studying the phenomenon as a via negativa to the aesthetic.¹ But the project remained unrealised, and although he frequently made dismissive or insulting remarks about philistines, he never bothered to investigate what, if anything, philistinism might be. In this respect, his attitude was characteristic of the discourse against philistinism that had been in circulation since the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in his unfulfilled desire to study the philistine, Adorno opened the way to a revaluation of that tradition, for upon closer examination the philistine proves to be a figure of greater historical and intellectual importance than Adorno imagined.

On the face of it, the type of study Adorno had in mind should be relatively straightforward. A glance at the newspapers suggests that we are surrounded by philistines. We live, according to the critic D. J. Taylor, ‘in a philistine age’, and have, as another commentator noted the previous day, ‘a government of philistines’.² No wonder, therefore, that controversialists like Frank Furedi have set themselves the challenge of ‘confronting twenty-first-century philistinism’.³ Yet it is not only the twenty-first century or the Conservative government that are branded as philistine. In the previous decade, the editor of Tribune was quoted as saying: ‘There’s a new philistinism in Labour’,⁴ and the Literary Review devoted an issue to a ‘Cry Against the Philistines’, a litany of protests against what Tariq Ali, one of the contributors, called the ‘commercial philistinism which has swamped this country’s culture’.⁵ According to George Walden, another contributor, ‘Philistines . . . are no longer barbarians encamped outside the Citadel of the Arts: now they sit atop it, benevolent-eyed, directing the cultural traffic.’⁶

Perhaps such protests should lead us to conclude that philistinism is something endemic to ruling classes. This was certainly the view of one contributor to the letters pages of Opera magazine, who concluded that: ‘If there is such a thing as “the English disease”, it is, I submit, Philistinism in high places.’⁷ But other readers were quick to point out that he had underestimated the extent of the problem. One responded that philistinism is an ‘affliction [that] is widespread, insidious and in outward appearance not always immediately recognizable’; philistinism is not confined to high places but is, he argued, an ‘infection [that] goes right down to the roots of English life’.⁸ Nevertheless, those with a less parochial perspective affirm that philistinism is not merely an English disease: England may be rooted in philistinism, but by all accounts its full flowering has taken place elsewhere, in what Terry Eagleton has termed that ‘extravagantly philistine country’, the United States.⁹

Like Adorno, who believed that the philistine’s ‘anti-artistic attitude verges on sickness’,¹⁰ contemporary critics of philistinism treat the phenomenon as pathological. But what exactly is the nature of the disease? To answer this question it is helpful to employ a set of distinctions developed by Michael Thompson in Rubbish Theory. According to his analysis there are three types of object—those like antiques and works of art which are considered durable and whose value is expected to increase; those that are considered transient (that is, everyday objects whose values are highest when new and subsequently decrease); and those that have no value and are treated accordingly.¹¹ Thompson’s analysis allows us to define the philistine position more precisely. The philistine should argue not that existing objects are of temporary as opposed to durable aesthetic value, or that, although they may once have been or may yet become valuable, all existing objects are valueless, but that all objects are permanently aesthetically valueless. In consequence, any object whose value is derived solely from its classification as an art-object is fit only for recycling. With this in mind, it is easy to see that certain positions that are sometimes described as philistine are not really philistine at all. For example, people who value popular culture in the same way as high culture, or who prefer popular culture to high culture, are just promoting the transient at the expense of the durable or revaluing the transient as durable.

The position of anti-art movements like Dada is less clear. Dada certainly gave expression to the philistine impulse, but although its rhetoric was vigorously anti-aesthetic, what actually happened in the creation of a ready-made was that something that had the transient aesthetic value of a machine-produced object or was even an object of no value at all was then treated as though it were a durable object of lasting aesthetic value. It is therefore misleading to suggest that the ready-made says ‘art is junk’;¹² what it says is only that ‘junk is art’. To demonstrate that art is junk, Dada would have had to work in the opposite direction. Duchamp certainly contemplated this: ‘At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and “ready-mades”, I imagined a reciprocal ready-made: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’.¹³ However, neither he nor the other Dadaists did so, and the museums of the world were never turned into laundry rooms. In consequence, although art galleries are now filled with objects that might have been taken from rubbish tips, rubbish tips remain barren of objects taken from art galleries. Treating junk as art differs from treating art as junk in just the same way that pantheism differs from atheism, or a multiculturalist respect for all moralities differs from the nihilist disregard for any morality. One is an inclusive extrapolation of value, the other its direct negation.

If philistinism is the absolute negation of the aesthetic, and is differentiated from the promiscuous pan-aestheticism of Dada and the temporalised aesthetics of popular culture, it becomes easier to see precisely what type of territory the philistines should occupy. Philistines are not just opposed to art for art’s sake but have no time for the arts whatsoever. They never distinguish between a good tune and an awful one; they pass through areas of outstanding natural beauty without noticing; they are indifferent to their furniture; they never spot a masterpiece in a junk shop, or complain about the ‘rubbish’ in modern art galleries. For them, it is all rubbish. Indeed, the idea that other people might discern aesthetic differences between objects and evaluate them accordingly would seem intrinsically absurd. They might therefore also flout the expectation that they should behave differently in the presence of these aesthetically valued objects. They would drop litter in beauty spots, lean nonchalantly against the paintings in the National Gallery, demolish their listed homes, talk loudly to their neighbours during concerts.

There are, of course, many people who occasionally exhibit philistine behaviour, but they are rarely ideologically motivated, and when one investigates the ideological position the philistines supposedly occupy it proves surprisingly empty. Philistinism, for all its supposed ubiquity, is frustratingly elusive. Dictionaries of theology contain entries on atheism, and dictionaries of politics provide information about anarchism, but dictionaries of aesthetics contain no entries on philistinism.¹⁴ There are no books on its principles,¹⁵ no courses available at universities, and no Societies for the Promotion of Philistinism working with the public; there are not even any branches of Philistines Anonymous for those in recovery from the disease. If confronted, supposed philistines invariably argue that they are not actually philistines at all, just people opposed to the waste of public money, or some other social evil. They are, they say, not opposed to art per se, but simply to art that is offensive, or wasteful, or unrepresentative of the general population.

Is Philistinism Possible?

Any attempt to study philistinism must first take account of the curious fact that a constant stream of abuse is directed against philistinism without there being any self-identified philistines to whom these denunciations refer. How is this to be explained? The apparent absence of philistines from the cultural landscape might lead one to suppose that philistinism is not just a rare phenomenon but an imaginary one, and some would argue that if philistines are people who look upon all cultural products as valueless, they cannot exist. The argument for the imperative of value (used by Steven Connor), or the principle of generalised positivity (formulated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith), goes like this: to deny the value of everything is, if that denial is to carry any conviction, necessarily to value the denial itself. Therefore, as Smith argues in her critique of Bataille’s notion of absolute expenditure, ‘no valorization of anything, even of “loss” itself, can escape the idea of some sort of positivity—that is gain, benefit or advantage—in relation to some economy’.¹⁶ In which case, the total renunciation of value is impossible, for all that is happening is that one set of values is being exchanged for another.

Applied to philistinism, this argument suggests that insofar as ‘challenges to the structures of artistic value and value in general will themselves constitute forms of value, they will be promptly restored to the fields of exchange and transaction which they had attempted to transcend’.¹⁷ Smith and Connor conceive of the discourse of value on the model of Derridean différance, as an economy of ‘recurrent tautologies, circularities and infinite regresses’ in which the negative is always eventually transmuted into the positive, and the most that negation can effect is ‘the widening of the circuit which rounds negativity home to the positive eventualities of value’.¹⁸ But although there are certainly instances in which what appears to be philistinism is not a renunciation of the aesthetic but an aesthetic of renunciation, there are also other possibilities. The aesthetic is only one among many forms of value, and philistinism only one of the ways of renunciation. It is quite conceivable that the denial of the aesthetic may be motivated not so much by an aesthetic of negation as by some nonaesthetic value. The renunciation of the aesthetic may be a moral, religious, or political imperative, just as the negation of these other spheres may have an aesthetic motivation: one could be, on aesthetic grounds alone, a nihilist, an atheist, or an anarchist. Such transfers from one type of value to another may not transcend evaluation altogether, but nor are they necessarily part of an inescapable circle from which no values are ever lost. So, even if one accepts the logic of the argument, the principle of general positivity, as it is misleadingly termed, demonstrates not the ubiquity of value but only its ineradicability. As such, it amounts to no more than a ‘principle of general wetness’ which states that in order to be described as such even the driest environment must have spots that are relatively moist. The existence of traces of value in the wastes of the negative does not imply that positivity is either predominant or constant. Not only...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Philistinism
• 2 Anti-Nietzsche
• 3 Negative Ecologies
• 4 Subhumanism
• 5 Excommunication
• 6 Counter-Interest
• 7 The Great Beast
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index