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You know the picture. From beneath the proud brow of genius the eagle eyes of the prophet gaze fearlessly into the future; the resolute jaw, like the ruined facade of some classical temple, magnificently festooned with vines, set heroically against the tragedy of the human condition. This is the face that launched ten thousand Penguin Modern Classics.
The trouble is it's a lie or, at least, like everything else about Nietzsche, a misrepresentation. For starters it wasn't taken from a photograph, but from an etching which was itself a heavy romanticisation job of a sketch. And then it's not a likeness of a fearless, strident prophet at all, but of a terrified, bedridden wreck who for the last twelve years of his life sought refuge from the world in catatonia; a pathetic travesty of a human being, nursed by the mother and sister who, prizing the commodity once more in their possession , would painstakingly cultivate the Nietzsche myth which would arouse a thousand flaccid Philosophy departments. The face that launched ten thousand Penguin Modern Classics can be found today in any number of Secure Psychiatric Wards.
But Nietzsche is very cool and it seems a pity to spoil the party. In fact it's been one hell of a party and it's still going strong-the party, the Twentieth Century. We may have entered chronologically into the Third Millennium, but we're still partying in a so Second Millennium way.
For all our talk of technological take-offs, of mentality quantum leaps, of revolutions in understanding, our approach to everything remains essentially one of deconstruction. Ever since Rene Descartes emerged from the wood stove and exclaimed "I think, therefore I am", Western civilisation has been engaged in a process of systematic doubt which has culminated in the conclusion that there is no "I" and there is no thinking. Human is no longer the sum total of its actions, or even the cluster of its neuroses, but the playful construct of designer icons - "I shop, therefore I am". We have suffered an ontological meltdown.
Nietzsche and Nietzscheans are pretty hot on irony. They have to be; that's all they've got left. I can embrace submission, humiliation, exploitation, marginalisation, infantilisation, annihilation, just so long as I do so ironically. I may be an out-and-out tosser, a complete write-off as a human being, but I'm with a whole load of other tossers and we're right up for it-whatever it may be - so that's all right then.
Of course the funny - the ironic - thing is that whereas Nietzsche would have wanted us all to turn into Achilles, we've turned into Nick Hornby instead. But that's OK, just so long as we keep an ironic handle on it.
But it's not OK. Irony - in the Postmodern sense - is a double irony which, like Hegel's cunning of reason, operates behind the backs of the players. In the first stage, the players deceive themselves into thinking that they've got a handle on their victimhood by being ironic about it; but the second stage of perspective reveals this false irony, as hermetic self-deception, to be the ultimate form of victimhood. It is what the old revolutionaries called false consciousness, a process whereby the punter finds his own humiliation entertaining and pays for the privilege of being a spectator, deriving a sense of solidarity from other victims around him. The ancient Romans may have been a bunch of real sickos, but at least they came to watch somebody else being torn to pieces in the arena. One of the most over-hyped philosophical works is the 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius; it is a volume stuffed with sanctimonious horse shit. But his opening remark is right-on. I don't give a monkey's, he says, for the Blues or the Greens (the colours of the chariot teams in the Coliseum). Being Emperor, he was above the wrath of the PC Police; and, being Emperor, he knew the whole thing to be a scam. Isn't about time that we all became Emperors? Now, that's better - that's more like the real Nietzsche coming out.
For Nietzsche would have been appalled by what we've come to, even if it is all down to him. If there was thing he probably execrated above everything else, it was the curiously (for Nietzsche) oxymoronic "Mass Culture". Utter incredulity is the only response to the prospect of Nietzsche - ironic or otherwise - chilling out on the couch to "Corrie". It might be a great travesty to see Nietzsche as the inspiration behind the Blond Beast spearheading the Blitzkrieg of the SS Panzer Divisions but, quite honestly, that's more up his street. And that's because he was a very [underlined] naughty boy.
No; Nietzsche, despite or because of his unconvincing bouts of euphoria, was never a particularly happy Bunny Rabbit, but being stuck on a couch chilling out would have left him an extra specially unimpressed Bunny Rabbit, although that's precisely where he ended up as it happens.
So how do we, the ones left, get off the couch, how do we change things?
Well, for starters, you need a Perspective, which is a thing which tells you where you are and where everything and everybody else is. It's not for keeps, you must understand. It's like a map. A map doesn't pretend to tell how things will always be, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how they are at this moment and, most importantly, it gives you some sort of general idea - which goes beyond the immediate now - of how they stand in relation to one another. Over ten thousand years a landscape may be transformed, its contours distorted out of all immediate recognition by climatic and geological metamorphoses; and yet it is still the same place - we, like the birds, instantly know whether or not we have been there before.
But, according to Nietzsche, that's precisely what we can never have. People in academic circles sometimes refer knowingly to the "Copernican turn", which refers to a time, in the sixteenth century, when, through recognising the Sun to be the centre of our solar system, we started to map out the Universe. Correspondingly, you might also refer to "the Nietzschean turn", which alludes to the point sometime in the Twentieth Century, when we started binning all the maps. The funny thing is that today, when anyone from a disoriented Duke of Edinburgh Award Contestant to Bin Laden can benefit from the wonders of the Global Positioning Service, which can pinpoint a Dirty Bomb or a Marmite sandwich to within a ten-metre grid anywhere on the Planet, nobody really knows where they are anymore. And thanks to Nietzsche, we can't even tell whether we've been here before, because, for Nietzsche, History is nothing more than an infinite series of interpretations - although that's not even right because it suggests that there is or was something there in the first place to be interpreted. Post-Nietzsche language is never the same again and our lives become irretrievably intransitive. This may seem like the same spider, in the same cave, but it's all in our heads. Trouble is we can never get out of our heads.
It's not just that none of us know where we are any longer; none of us know where anything is any longer, or even if anything is. Any attempt to get a handle on anything is confounded by the ever-slippery spin. By insisting upon the relativity of everything, the Deconstructionists have cut the ground from under our feet. The Nietzschean legacy bequeaths us not the Superman, but Alastair Campbell. And within this sordid little world each Discourse, each Wittgensteinian Language Game, however transparently preposterous, is equally valid. Philosophy has conducted us not into the Temple of Wisdom, but into the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
Why has all this been allowed to happen? How have we allowed truth,
meaning, beauty, and justice to be flushed down the bog? Isn't it about
time that somebody did a Deconstructionist job on Deconstructionism? What
is the agenda behind it?
The answer is twofold-economic and psychological.
The Grail Legend relates how Parsifal embarked upon a quest to find the Castle of the Holy Grail. When, after many ordeals, many wrong turnings, and countless bitter disappointments, he eventually stumbled upon it, he discovered that his quest, far from being over, was only just beginning. Apparently his job was to restore the land of the Grail from the present Wasteland into its former glory. He could do this by asking a question-but there was only one right question. Understandably confounded, Parsifal was lost for words, whereupon the Grail Castle dissolved before his eyes like a dream. A voice told him to return only when he had got the right question, and he would rediscover the Grail Castle.
After more interminable wanderings and ordeals, Parsifal once more found himself before the Grail Castle, and this time he had his question.
"Whom does the Grail serve?" he demanded and the Grail and Castle were returned to their former glory and the Wasteland bloomed again.
Whom does Deconstruction serve? Who benefits from a consensus which says that there are no reference points, no values, and so no possibility of effective critique; which says that everything is all right and that human beings are merely playful shopping machines? As Frederic Jameson has observed, it is funny that the emergence of a capitalism sans frontieres has coincided with a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth.
But far from being, as Nietszche would have viewed it, a sign of the utter collapse of western civilisation, this is a cause for celebration. We have all become frolicsome gondolas of designer labels. And woe betide anyone who says any different. Within Postmodernity consumer happiness is compulsory and its recantation a capital offence. The dark side of life - and death - is met with blank denial.
Deconstructionism is the Global Capitalist philosophy par excellence. Values are deconstructed as are industries, communities, cultures, human beings, and the environment.
This is the principal economic agenda behind Deconstructionism but there is also a subsidiary economic agenda which in turn leads us to the psychological agenda, and so back to the Nietzsche of "The Gay Science".
"Radical Handbags" is a phrase that can be said to characterise western philosophical debate over the last one hundred years. "Handbags" because it is a parochial, even incestuous debate of no real significance to anyone other than the immediate protagonists; and because the display of apparently radical motifs is more in the nature of fashion accessory than meaningful critique.
Marx characterised Capitalism as being fundamentally about the means of production. Now that these have been outsourced from the West to slave labour compounds in the "developing world", Western Capitalism has reconfigured itself. Firstly, the individual - in the West - is longer defined as producer, but as consumer; and secondly, whilst it is true that material production has been exported, a new form of production has taken its place- the production of reality. In the West, real power is now located not in the Industrialist class , nor even in the entrepreneurial class, but increasingly in the media class.
This has come about through the discovery of a hitherto untapped natural resource, the exploiters of which are guaranteed untold riches - and power. This discovery is comparable, in its potentially explosive potential, to the discovery of gold and silver in the New World in the sixteenth century. This resource is human consciousness.
Unfortunately the price of this exploitation is the depletion and ultimately destruction of human consciousness. For we have already entered (to reappropriate Louis Althusser's phrase) that "epistemological break" which will result in the irretrievable regression of humanity into infantilisation and fantasy - precisely those things which Nietzsche accused traditional philosophy of engendering and precisely the fate which he himself was to suffer. All this is being bulldozed through in the name of modernity, of reform, of liberalisation. And it is being rubber-stamped, in the name of "difference", by academic philosophers.
Those philosophers are permitted to wield their radical handbags not only because they pose no threat to global capitalism but also because they endorse it through the myth of pluralism. In a world in which we are herded into the homogeniser, philosophy reassures us of our "difference". In a world which cries out for a global, holistic understanding - in economics, in social justice, in the environment - philosophers warn us against such "totalitarian discourses" which, we are told, can only lead to the gulag and to the gas chamber. In a world in which we cry out for truth, philosophers laugh at us and say there is no such thing. We ask what is real and again they laugh, saying nothing is real. Philosophy has left the West, like the late Roman Empire, hollow inside and so strangely vulnerable to being toppled by a determined bolt from the blue.
In performing this proselytising of deconstruction, academic philosophers, with one or two honourable exceptions, have acted as the intellectual commissars of the new ruling class, the media class which controls the means of production of reality. By creating a religion out of "difference", "diversity", and "otherness" they prepared the people for the atomisation of global capitalism and also undermined the theoretical foundations of any possible opposition by ensuring that it would be fragmented and incoherent. Not to mention some sixty years of "Leftist" or "Neo-Marxist" analysis which eroded the credibility of the Communist project and replaced it with radical chic, radical handbags. And they have taken the basic questions of life and scrambled them into an unspeakable gobbledygook indecipherable to all but a select priesthood. A culture which chastises all with the mantra "accessibility" is responsible for a level of complexity and mystification which makes Alchemy and the Kabala look like Noddy and Big Ears.
In return for their services to the commodification of the human race, academic philosophers - as foreseen by Gramsci in his distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals - have become comfortably embedded within the system. As lifestyle radicals they have the best of all possible worlds. From time to time they can get off on some fashionable cause, preferably one in some exotic place which does not involve any contact with the embarrassing rump of the British Working Class. They can experiment with the cuisine and perhaps make it their next vacation destination.
But there is still that yearning to be on the edge. "Live dangerously!" exhorted Nietzsche, "Build your cities on the slopes of volcanoes" which hardly sounds like life in the average philosophy department and something above and beyond the frisson of nouvelle cuisine.
Foucault, Sartre, and pals used to lionise a serial armed robber. Every time he was up in court they would hold little demos, squealing with excitement that their comrade was a victim of class oppression. Bewildered and exasperated beyond measure that his new friends should not content themselves with pulling off the biggest heist of the Twentieth Century-French Philosophy - and the international celebrity this entailed, he blurted out to reporters: "Look - just tell these bourgeois tossers to get a life!" Perhaps he shouldn't have been so hard on them - they were, after all, just naughty boys.
There is another picture, this time a photo. It shows Nietzsche and Paul Ree -who was the major influence upon Nietzsche's "ironic" phase - tethered to the shafts of a cart. In the cart stands a young woman who is cracking a whip over the two men. Here are two naughty boys getting their just desserts.
The young woman is Lou Salome who was to become an epic starfucker. In turn she was to intrigue, bewilder, and torment Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud. She may not have gone down in history like her masters, but you can't help but feel that the last laugh is with Lou.
c. David Brooks 2005.
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