Wolfgang Schirmacher

Art(ificial) Perception: Nietzsche and Culture after Nihilism
Wolfgang Schirmacher.
Toronto, 1999.

Nietzsche is a philosopher full of surprises. Didn't we just make him the father of nihilism and give him an honored place in the history of philosophy? But then we encounter this "gay scientist" in a future beyond postmodernity, alive and active in a culture after nihilism. There can be no doubt, Nietzsche lives to the fullest the cyclical recurrence he proposes, with no regard for linear time, be it progress or decadence. Nietzsche's philosophy of culture for a tragic-Dionysian age refers to a "transvaluation of all values" as an "act of highest self-reflection of humankind."¹ Resisting fears of catastrophe and doomsayers Nietzsche persists in the view that an "enormous quantum of humaneness"² has already been achieved. His post-nihilistic experimental philosophy relies upon the will to power, the capacity for self-potentiation as dynamic style of the human individual. Active nihilism has so expanded and heightened our hermeneutic potential that our point of view, once valid in its singularity, has been broken up into an infinite diversity of perspectives. The unexpected constellations of these perspectives, their chance interplay which gives rise to temporary ideas and images, require a new art of perception. Traditional intuition and orientative concepts prove ineffective as soon as they become caught in the whirlpool of an open system whose powerful maelstrom engulfs prevailing perceptions. "Once we have words for something, we have gone beyond it;" reads a maxim from the Twilight of the Idols³, descriptive and self-assured. This having "gone beyond" sets the keynote of an artificial perception.

1. Living Culture: Anthropomorphic World and Artificiality of Truth

Nietzsche envisions a culture which is lived artistically and reveals itself in "great works." A contrived culture, one merely thought up and imposed upon life, described by Nietzsche as the "collaboration between state, merchants, the instructed but needy of style, and the learned,"⁴ is to be rejected as "unproductive."⁵ "Culture is only a layer of veneer, thin as the skin of an apple stretched across a raging chaos,"⁶ observes Nietzsche, and he affirms this condition (unlike the critics of civilization who almost unanimously decry it). "Life must become more dangerous."⁷ The battle-cry of a lived culture, and its model, is Dionysus. This god has "interrupted thinking," as Levinas would say. An artist of life, Dionysus lives life's extremes: in the sense of an ethics beyond the morality of good and evil, respecting the Other in himself as well. The art of perception is vital to a lived culture, a culture oriented not according to concepts, but which seeks, in an unbiased manner, to discern how the world exists as world and whether life is lived as fulfillment.

Two of Nietzsche's subversive insights are fundamental to this attempt and are revealed to us through our bodies. Firstly, all perception is as active as it is experiential and brings forth an anthropomorphic world. A key passage reads: We created this whole world, our one real concern, in which our needs desires joys hopes colors lines imagination prayers curses are rooted — we humans created this entire world — and then forgot we did, so that afterwards we even invented a creator of it all, or anguished over the problem of its origins. Just as language is the primordial poem of a people, so too is the entire world. We see and feel the primordial poetry of all humankind, and even the animals had begun creating poetry. And we inherit that, all at once, as if it were reality itself. Autumn 1881 ⁸

Secondly, every truth is artificial, a "transformation of the world so we may be able to endure it," a transformation for which the human individual assumes responsibility. Nietzsche emphasizes the "identity in the natures of the conqueror, legislator, artis.t"⁹ The definition of truth as lie remains negatively dependent upon tradition: only as artificial-artistic perception does truth become a "productive" lie and a genuine expression of our "will to power." We read a quality into the world, our emotive powers create the mood of life: The farmer looks upon his fields with emotions that bestow them with value, the same is true of the artist with his colors, primitive man brings his fear, we bring our certainty to bear, it is a subtle symbolizing and comparing, continuous and unconscious. We see the landscape with an eye versed in all our morality and culture and custom. And we look at other people in the same manner: each person is something different for you and for me: relationships and visions, herein lies what makes us different from one another. Autumn 1880 ¹⁰

In this passage, Nietzsche also touches upon the other side of artificial truth, the distortion and destruction of the world through anthropocentrism, through the diehard self-delusion of the human species in considering itself the goal of creation. The Christian god, with his long shadow, his morality so hostile to life, was a powerful and effective mask of this anthropocentrism. But the mask has now been dropped and anthropocentrism shows itself active in our age as modern technology and anti-ecological humanism.

For a culture after nihilism everything depends upon perceiving the difference between anthropocentric and anthropomorphic in our dealings with all phenomena. Anthropocentrism bears the mark of decadence and in its "human-all-too-human" character is a radical weakening of the will to power. But the right of the human individual on the other hand to be 'human-uniquely-human' of one's own strength, and to take responsibility for one's own world as "primordial poetry" corresponds to Nietzsche's vision of "self-potentiation". This exercise of power, fitting to the human individual, culminates in an anthropomorphic "innocence of becoming" which proposes "without haste" — for which Nietzsche admired the ancient Greeks — that "the human being is something which must be overcome."¹¹ Uncritical self-perception is at the mercy of an anthropocentric impoverishment of the emotions and narrowing of our vision: Not where the eye ceases to recognize does the eye no longer see, but where thy honesty has already ceased.November 1882 — February 1883 ¹²

2. Aesthetic Reason: Artistic Culture and Pleasures of Perception

The artist, in Nietzsche's ambivalent view a passionate creator of worlds and a vampire lacking great passion¹³, synthesizes aesthetic reason instead of analyzing it (Kant: vernünfteln). The artist is the "Useless One in the most audacious sense"¹⁴ — Nietzsche's defiant description — and as such does not seek to contribute to the general development of culture and learning, but rather embodies in his person the higher form of an artistic culture. Its signature is the transformation of the life we reject into an affirmed existence, turning the world into which we are born into a desired, venturous design. Aesthetic reason is in no sense the dubious attempt to allow truth, driven out of history and practice, to winter in the reserve of art (a late modern pipe-dream), but is instead, from inception, body-oriented, coping in and with the world. Truth exists for aesthetic reason only as long as there is pleasure; and as enticement to a good life and an ethics of fulfillment, aesthetic reason actively comes into its own. The joy of perception, a "suggestion for muscles and senses,"¹⁵ is the impetus of aesthetic reason whose chief activity is "appreciation" as an ethical sense of quality. Aesthetic reason exercises the anthropomorphic "right" of the will to power "to assign values" which determine, in Nietzsche's words, "what things we accept and how we accept them."¹⁶ In Nietzsche's sense the pleasures of perception expressly include aversion as a shrewd challenge to overcoming itself, and the joy beauty gives us is intensified by the "pleasure taken in the ugly."¹⁷ The "common basis of pleasure and aversion,"¹⁸ forgotten in the everyday scheme of things, "re-emerges" in the artist. The "first truth," which according to Nietzsche is based upon aesthetics in all "naiveté," is blatantly anthropomorphic and needs no excuse for itself: "Nothing is beautiful, only the human individual is beautiful."¹⁹

3. Ethics Derived from Aesthetics.

Perceiving One's Individual World An ethics which can lay claim to being more than a shaky framework of values arises from aesthetics, from the intuition of a self-fulfilling life, realized authentically only in the pleasurable perception of one's own world. The Greek philosophers of ethics, beginning with Socrates, were seekers of happiness, explained Nietzsche, and he commented further: "It's bad enough that they had to look for it." The perception of one's individual world designs this world and at the same time endows it with its value. For all happiness is contained therein, all the individual needs for his or her enhancement of life. The much bemoaned "dissolution of ethics in aesthetics" is undoubtedly a danger, yet even the virtue of ethical "disobedience" draws its strength from an "aesthetics of resistance" (Peter Weiss), having experienced injustice in a very palpable manner. Three essential elements characterize an ethics unfolding from aesthetics within the horizon of post-nihilism: the surprising return of the monad, an aesthetic (not a cognitive) consciousness, and an expansion of our perceptive capacities once thought impossible and which suggests a new quality of "hyperperception."

(1) Return of the Monad

Are we all invincible monads, beautifully simple substances without parts and with no need for "windows through which anything could come or go?"²⁰ Reverting to the monad of Leibniz as the basic determination of existence which understands world and self as a finite occurrence makes immediate sense to the children of the first world, these cyberpunks and nomads of the virtual world. In The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze describes the post-nihilistic turning from Heidegger's "Being-in-the-world" to the "being-for-the-world" of the monad.

The "openness," and consequent "perilousness" of existence proves to be an anthropocentric disadvantage. It is incapable of matching the concealment of truth, with its implicit care and consideration for things. The infamous "windowlessness" of the monad refers in finitude to the infinite and allows (in Deleuze's words) "the world the possibility of beginning over and again in each monad." Deleuze expresses the abandonment of intentionality as a principle of order thus: "The world must be placed in the subject in order that the subject can be for the world." ²¹ This tenet could easily be from Nietzsche: "to attain the innocence of becoming by excluding purpose."²² As Alexander Nehamas observed, eternal recurrence is not a theory about the world, but rather an understanding of self.²³ (2) Aesthetic Consciousness "Consciousness exists as far as consciousness is useful,"²⁴ decrees Nietzsche, but this is not as unambiguous as it sounds.

There is a great "usefulness" in the enigmatic for aesthetic consciousness; the irrepressible otherness of the world and of the Other sensitizes aesthetic experience in which the creativity of the artist and his or her audience meet. Wolfgang Welsch sees a "culture of the blind spot" being realized, specifically as "recognition of the overlooked, the missed, the unheard."²⁵ Specialness, fragment, curiosity, freedom from prejudice, enthusiasm, resistance, justice, to name only a few, are features of an aesthetic consciousness, qualities resulting in an unceasing re-valuation of the world yet without having a cognitive consciousness of purpose and goal of such a change. "Social mimesis" currently describes an activity of perception which neither reproduces nor creates ex nihilo, but rather makes a world and "generates" in media what comes naturally to it.²⁶ (3) Hyperperception Are there ten dimensions instead of the four to which we have become accustomed? Six additional dimensions, so that — as the Japanese author Micio Kaku proposes in his work "Hyperspace" (1994) — "everything fits in?" Art and media, in any case, have considerably intensified our capacity to perceive the differences of the world, and there's no end in sight. Skepticism and doubts of a culturally critical bent taking issue with the "loss of center" (Hans Sedlmayr) in art or concerned with the "industrialization of seeing" sharpen our eye for this Dionysian process of perceptive excess. Paul Virilio has definitely recognized a real danger when he sees a "dressage of the eye" at work in video and the digitalized image and calls on our still existing faculty of "direct perception" for help; but his proposal of an "ethics of perception" is unrealistic. Like Nietzsche's übermensch, hyperperception is an intensification of humankind and cannot be placed on the list of proscribed powers. More perception, of greater differentiation, finer complexity and participation is the best protection against the dressage of our gaze and emotions. Yet by the same token, forgetting is an intrinsic part of perception, our guard against the exaggeration of the historical sense, which would lead to the poisoning of memory. Nietzsche extols the good fortune of being able to forget and stresses that no action would be possible without forgetting. As if he knew the video addicts and information junkies of our time, he writes:

There is a level of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sense, at which living entities suffer harm and perish in the end, whether this be man, a nation, or a culture.²⁷ A hyperperception which is equally bold in its granting and forgetting of world and which makes differentiations is effective in practice. According to the traces of a self-fulfilling life it is a hyperperception at once critical and creative.

4. Culture as Art of Fulfillment:

Autopoetics of Artificial Perception Culture serves the will to power, formed and articulated in artistic activity, and is the expression of the art of life as well as of the capacity for the world. The artistic will to artificial life, analyzed by Heidegger as the "will to will," has no aim, and is tautologic in structure. Consciously anthropomorphic, this realization of willing seeks this fulfillment as fulfillment — no other, only fulfillment of itself (albeit in the identity of difference of self and otherness). Culture as art of self-fulfillment is autopoetics, its emergence and its feedback are one and the same. Autopoetics must be distinguished from Niklas Luhmann's functional communication which shifts reactions to a subjectless system and attributes it with being autopoetic. Luhmann agrees here with Humberto Maturana who defines as autopoetic the systemic qualities of self-production and self-preservation (as discussed in the physiology of sight); but neither self nor poetics retains its distinctive power in this abstract definition. In contrast, autopoetics in an emphatic sense expresses the experience of irreducible individuality intrinsic to each phenomenon and heightens the generative activity for which we ourselves are responsible, a generation concealed by emulation and performance in the concept of mimesis.

Perceiving as the activity of this culture after nihilism is artificial and perceives in works only what we — the artificial beings by nature — value. Nietzsche asks himself the question: "What does it mean 'to perceive'?", and answers: "To take something to be true: is to say yes to something."²⁸ Self and world cannot be played against one another, they belong together, inseparably, as reciprocal perceptive action, as Nietzsche knew: "The animal knows nothing of itself, nor does it know anything of the world."²⁹ There can be no authoritative measure in autopoetics surpassing that which created the authority to begin with. But this does not make us self-legislators in Kant's sense and in that of the Enlightenment, this would only be the case if we had to yield to a (universal) law of consequence. Even the self-imposed rule becomes obsolete for me at the same moment it has made its contribution to my art of living. As Nietzsche tells us: "The creator must always be a destroyer…, only the appreciation of value itself… cannot destroy itself."³⁰ But how can the individual possibly discover whether his or her life fulfills itself — without criteria and without assured methods? Together with Nietzsche we should respond to a postmodern cynicism which calls upon us to vegetate, homeless in our own world, and to renounce identity once and for all with an affirmative: THIS life is not for me! I WANT a different one! Whether life fulfills itself cannot be discovered with the aid of a eudaemonistic ethics and its self-examination, nor even through general inquiry. The existential interest in the lie diagnosed by Nietzsche concerns most intimately self-delusion. Everything which reaches our consciousness and is interpreted by it is subject to this tendency to deceive oneself in the futile interest of survival, to blandish what is bad, to ruin what was perfectly good. Happiness as well as suffering are noticeable and for this basic reason cannot be helpful in allowing a self-fulfilling life to become evident.

HOW both happiness and suffering are realized in my life must be imperceptible, yet can perhaps be perceived. An imperceptible perception alone can fulfill our artificiality, one related to silence, this most powerful motive of language. Constant in its absence, imperceptibility could hold out as fulfillment and even lend the chaotic and seemingly failed life a touch of lightness. Three non-characteristics of this autopoetics of an artificial perception can be discerned from Nietzsche's perspective. Unobtrusive, they are more concealments than distinctions: the movement toward uniqueness which need not be expressly justified; an openness toward the Other which results unawares from an "ethics derived from aesthetics;" and finally, the imperceptibility of fulfillment itself which has recovered from anthropocentrism.

(1) Movement toward Uniqueness Nietzsche is an "Anti-Darwin,"³¹ and he thinks little of the idea of a "higher race." The movement toward the übermensch is one of the possibilities of the human race, its self-potentiation in the individual. As the richest and most complex form (as the most sublime and frailest machine), we realize the non-definable in our self-definition for as long as the human has existed and will exist.³² So no new race of "overhumans" (übermenschen) is to be expected, instead, the übermensch will co-exist with pre-modern, modern, and postmodern human beings, dominating no one, and being dominated by no one. "All knowledge is limitless as creative activity. There should be an explanation of the world to correspond to each human being, one which belongs to him completely, to him as to a first movement."³³ In writing this, Nietzsche could very well have said: this is the case — don't bother yourselves about it any further. Singularity is nothing special for our eternal recurrence. Not even two pianos are identical, complained John Cage with a sly twinkle.

(2) Openness toward the Twofold Other Singularity is a matter of the body, emphasized Lyotard. Art and ethics are subject to the Other — in a twofold style. In ethics the individual responds to the summons of a voice to which you owe sincerity in actions and justice in judgment. In aesthetics, in art and literature the unsignifiable matter itself "commands." Not breaking up this twofold Other into discursive techniques, but rather perceiving it in a manner as open as it is painful, allows us self- fulfillment in the other. "The matter ignores you, seeks nothing from you, not even your will," says Lyotard, and it opens itself to the singular precisely in this indifference: The matter, the stuff our inner nature is made of, "is like an animal in your body."³⁴ A non-verbal language of images, as Peter Greenaway calls for and achieves,³⁵ listens to the animal.

(3) Imperceptibility of Fulfillment Missing a note, fading away, overcoming, blurring, letting be are imperceptible perceptions in which the art as well as the artificiality of our culture work together at their most intense level and generate an "innocence of becoming." With the eternal recurrence of the same, "justice," in principle impossible as positive law, is released into pre-consciousness. First living, then building, and finally thinking — the fulfilling cycle of our dwelling on earth has a hidden beat, and its only trace, disappearing as soon as perceived, is an "imperceptible smile."³⁶

5. Übermensch in the Post-Technological World:

A Preview The birth of the übermensch in the post-technological age is an occurrence which causes as little sensation as the death of God. "The Madman" of Nietzsche's The Gay Science ³⁷ is merely a braggart who hasn't understood that everything revolutionary happens when our backs are turned and fortunately is no news to us. You — only better; you — only worse: the manifold pleasures in the game of übermensch laugh at both optimism and pessimism. A "levelling of humankind" is not Nietzsche's scheme; his "movement" is on the contrary the intensification of all opposites and gaps, the elimination of sameness, "overpowering creativity."³⁸ Culture is what can be lived to the full by an individual, self-evidently and easily in self-fulfillment. Nietzsche's "last reflection" is the call to culture, still valid today: In a word, a very good word, after the old God has been done away with I am prepared to rule the world…

Early January 1889³⁹

Notes

¹. Friedrich Nietzsche, Weisheit für übermorgen — Unterstreichungen aus dem Nachlaß (1869-1889). Ed.Heinz Friedrich. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1994, p. 310 (All translations W.S.).

². op.cit., 302.

³. F.Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize With a Hammer. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, chapter "Expeditions of an Untimely Man", section 26.

⁴. Nietzsche, Weisheit für übermorgen, p. 58.

⁵. op.cit., 65.

⁶. op.cit., 163.

⁷. op.cit., 103.

⁸. op.cit., 134.

⁹. op.cit., 181.

¹⁰. op.cit., 119.

¹¹. Twilight of the Idols, section 26.

¹². Weisheit für übermorgen, p.153.

¹³. cf. op.cit., 262.

¹⁴. op.cit., 37.

¹⁵. op.cit., 290.

¹⁶. op.cit., 206.

¹⁷. op.cit., 288.

¹⁸. op.cit., 207.

¹⁹. Twilight of the Idols, section 20.

²⁰. G.W.Leibniz: The Monadology. Trans. Robert Latta. Electronically Enhanced Text: World Library, 1991, section 7.

²¹. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold — Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.26.

²². Weisheit für übermorgen, p.154.

²³. Cf. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

²⁴. Weisheit für übermorgen, p.234.

²⁵. Wolfgang Welsch, ästh/ethik. Ethik der ästhetik. Ed.C.Wulf, D.Kamper, H.U.Gumbrecht. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994, p.19 (Trans.W.S.)

²⁶. Cf. Wolfgang Schirmacher, Homo generator — Media and Postmodern Technology. Culture on the Brink. Ed. G.Bender / T.Druckreye. Seattle: Bay Press, 1993.

²⁷. F.Nietzsche, On The Use and Disadvantage of History. Untimely Meditations. Trans. D.Breazeale / R.J.Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, section 1.

²⁸. Weisheit für übermorgen, p.217.

²⁹. op.cit., 152.

³⁰. op.cit., 152.

³¹. op.cit., 295.

³². op.cit., 297.

³³. op.cit., 152.

³⁴. Jean-François Lyotard, Das zweifach Andere. Bildstörung — Gedanken zu einer Ethik der Wahrnehmung.. Ed. and trans. Jean-Pierre Dubust. Leipzig: Reclam, 1994, p.14-18.

³⁵. Cf. Peter Greenaway, The Stairs: Genova, the Location. London: 1994.

³⁶. Weisheit für übermorgen, p.168.

³⁷. F.Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, section 125.

³⁸. Weisheit für übermorgen, p.153.

³⁹. op.cit., 312.