G.M. Tamás E-Book

G.M. Tamás

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 62

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

 In seinem Essay untersucht G. M. Tamás (*1948), ungarischer Philosoph sowie ehemaliger und gegenwärtiger Dissident, den Charakter »unschuldiger Macht«. Macht ist per se zerstörerisch, und ihr Effekt lässt sich an verschiedenen Arten von Ruinen ablesen, darunter romantische Ruinen, Kriegsruinen und solche, die in der zeitgenössischen Kunst geschaffen werden. Die unschuldige Macht zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass sie, wie das Kapital, unpersönlich und konzeptuell, ist; sie ist eine Ansammlung von Konzepten, deren »Legitimität« auf »Wissen« basiert. Ihre Anerkennung als herrschende Ordnung ist mit unserer Art zu wissen verbunden. Widerstand gegen die unschuldige Macht ist vor diesem Hintergrund weder legal noch intelligent. Wenn es mögliche Formen der Opposition und Rebellion gegen ihre Auswirkungen, die in Knechtschaft und Erniedrigung oder willkürlich zugemutetem Elend bestehen können, gibt, so werden diese ipso facto unzumutbar gemacht.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº013: G. M. Tamás

Innocent Power / Die unschuldige Macht

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Agent, Member of Core Group, Head of Department / Agentin, Mitglied der Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Philomena Mariani

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Sam Frank, Cordelia Marten

Translation / Übersetzung: Barbara Hess

Graphic Design and E-Book Implementation / Grafische Gestaltung und E-Book-Produktion: Leftloft

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Stefanie Langner

© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; G. M. Tamás

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Fridericianum, September 1941 (detail / Detail), Photohaus C. Eberth, Waldkappel; Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel; p. / S. 2: © 2011 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn;

bpk/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/László Moholy-Nagy

documenta und Museum Fridericianum

Veranstaltungs-GmbH

Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.documenta.de

Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-3042-6 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-3-7757-2862-1 (Print)

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal

Cultural Foundation

We cannot be held responsible for external links; the content of external links is the full responsibility of the operators of these sites. / Für externe Links können wir keine Haftung übernehmen. Die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich von deren Betreiber zu verantworten.

László Moholy-Nagy, 7 A.M. (New Year’s Morning /

Neujahrsmorgen), ca. 1930

G. M. Tamás

Innocent Power / Die unschuldige Macht

G. M. Tamás

Innocent Power

In order to understand power, we should first consider its effects. Power, as we all know, destroys and subjugates. Let us, then, view the consequences of its destructive work.

There are five kinds of ruins.

There are romantic ruins, old castles and fortresses, temples and churches. They were destroyed by the passage of time, by becoming useless and irrelevant. These vast edifices whence the gods have fled are witness to the vacuity of aristocratic warrior virtue, royal glory, ecclesiastical authority, chivalry and gallantry as well as chastity, (self-imposed) poverty and obedience. The ancient junk now devoid of aura, halo and charisma is collected in museums, its context smashed: altarpieces mounted on walls, watched by schoolboys admiring the rump of Mary Magdalen. Romantic ruins are the first instances of non-beautiful beauty. They are meant to exemplify the passing of an epoch supposed to have been somehow ‘meaningful’, fragmented by the mundane, this-worldly, philistine prose of the latecomers, the bourgeois.There are fields of ruins, human settlements laid waste by natural catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, showing up the fragility of human design, its vulnerability to anonymous forces without malice, indifferent to the human predicament, disproportionately larger than anything that the deliberately planned human cosmos can possibly muster. Those human dwellings wiped out by impassible nature will illustrate the futility of human will and the inborn weakness of the species.War ruins testify to ultimate evil: willed, strategically thought-out destruction of non-combatant populations – Guernica, Warsaw, Nanking, Dresden, Hiroshima – and of their habitat shows incineration and pulverisation by conscious choice, the crushing and uprooting of the good and of the wicked without distinction, operated by the supremely powerful. It is a cautionary tale of violent pedagogy: this is what is going to happen to the recalcitrant or to anyone content to remain on the wrong side, its wrongness to be determined by superior force. This is not even a punishment meted out for resistance or rebellion; it is merely a sanction for being a ‘part’ of the enemy, with or without intent. It is the ultimate justification of nationalism: citizens of the slaughtered nation-state are finally reunited in the burning cemetery of a carpet-bombed country. According to this last judgement, they do indeed belong together.There are human settlements gutted and wrecked by industrial and political ‘development’. Huge factories, shipyards, railway depots, coal mines decaying, rotting away, crumbling; once busy harbours now full of ghostly, skeletal boats; abandoned workers’ townships with their overgrown vegetable gardens, boarded-up pubs, flattened trade union halls and neighbourhood cinemas; hillside villages of which only the mossy churchyards remain; once colourful high streets with no shops, leading nowhere, populated by stray dogs – they are all devoured by the invisible flame of capital accumulation. Industrialisation exterminated the countryside, de-industrialisation unmade the towns. The subalterns’ preference for their peculiar life-forms, even if shaped by oppression, but lived-in, suffused by memories of opposition and shared fate, does not matter one bit. It is becoming impossible even to be a proletarian. These ruins are a warning: ‘You think it’s bad to be exploited? Well, try to be non-existent!’Finally, there are the ruins created by contemporary art. It would appear that these ruins have come into being mostly in the absence of (and against) power, at least in some cases. But this would be the case only if they were only depictions of ruins, not ruins themselves. But if this were true, we should doubt the honesty and authenticity of the newly – again – radicalised, political art. Many works in this recent tradition are combining documentary force with self-destructive doubt concerning the veracity, credibility and cognitive transparence of the chosen media, defending themselves against spectacular commodification by injecting large doses of the random. The aleatory or stochastic element – a desperate remedy to preserve spontaneity and to defy reified organisation – cannot avert the following conundrum: power (in this case, late capitalism) destroys even when it makes objects to be built. It builds with the clear understanding that it is within its power to annihilate. Political art – a new, often rather extreme version of critical avant-garde – can destroy something only with the clear understanding that it is not allowed to build anything. Construction is within the purview of that which is able to use it for its own purposes, usually alien to the idea of construction, so construction is already destructive. This cannot be achieved by art as such, only after it becomes part of the business cycle. So recent political art tries to pre-empt (it is an age-old stratagem to avoid co-optation) attempts to make it symbolic, thus it would strenuously avoid to depict or to present (darstellen) ruins, instead it would venture to produce them or to become them.

Another word on ruins. It is well known that ruins were a passion of the romantic age which has, moreover, erected artificial, ready-made ruins in artificially dishevelled and ‘natural’ English gardens. This has something to do with the freshly discovered ‘sense of history’ and taste for history (as opposed to metaphysics). The specific genre of the romantic age was the fragment, the genre of Novalis’ and the Schlegel brothers’ masterpieces. The fragment, the essay, the aphorism, the letter, the diary, the mock-manifesto, the sketchy and programmatic ‘theses’: these are the characteristic forms of cutting-edge modernity from Montaigne and Pascal to the romantic essays of Hazlitt and Lamb to the high modernism of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin (not forgetting Ernst Bloch’s Spuren and Erbschaft dieser Zeit and Adorno’s Minima Moralia