People want Ulrich to do something. But I’m concerned with the meaning of the action. Today these are confused with each other. Of course Bolshevism, for example, has to occur; but (a) not through books, (b) books have other tasks.
—Robert Musil, notes for a preface to The Man Without Qualities
We do not want our subjugation to market demands to be presented as free journalism, or the art of meeting deadlines to be confused with the art of presenting people with the truth. We do not want editorial democracy to grind like sand in the gears, and we want the columnists’ freedom to be recognised for what it is: a prestige and profit factor, a fraud for the readers, self-deception, a personality cult. You have to be a columnist to be allowed to describe the freedom of the columnist as the other side of the editor’s lack of freedom. To prevent theory from turning into practice, we pay for the luxury of columnists: powerless individuals, outsiders, stars.
—Ulrike Meinhof, ‘Columnism’
Every time Ulrich spoke this way, reasoning politely, Schmeisser could not contain himself and exploded anew. “Everything you’re saying springs from the moral corruption of bourgeois society!” he would then proclaim, or something similar, for there was nothing he hated more than that form of goodness opposed to reason which is found in amiability; indeed, all form, even that of beauty, was for him an object of suspicion. For this reason he never accepted even one of Ulrich’s invitations, but at most let himself be treated to tea and cigarettes, as if in Russian novels. Ulrich loved to provoke him, although these conversations were completely meaningless. Since the year of liberation in ‘48 and the founding of the German Empire, events that only a minority now personally remembered, politics probably seemed to the majority of educated people more an atavism than an important subject. There was next to no sign that behind these external processes that plodded along out of habit, intellectual processes were already preparing for that deformation, for that propensity for decline, and for the suicidal willingness arising from self-loathing, which undermine a state of affairs and apparently always form the passive precondition to periods of violent political change. Thus his whole life long Ulrich, too, had been accustomed to expect that politics would bring about not what needed to happen but at best what ought to have happened long since. The image it presented to him was mostly that of criminal neglect. The social question too, which formed the whole of Schmeisser’s universe, appeared to him not as a question but merely as an omitted answer, though he could list a hundred other such “questions” on which the mental files had been closed and which, as one might say, were waiting in vain for manipulative treatment in the Office of Dispatch.
—Musil, The Man Without Qualities
There is surely no need here to say much about the catalogue of decline which is the daily fare of the news media in every Western country. The advanced capitalist economies have been in a deep and prolonged recession, while the collapse of Communism has exposed the fissures and contradictions within the capitalist world which had been papered over and disguised by the Cold War. The stronger European economies are experiencing what for them are new forms of long-term structural unemployment, and the unification of Germany has dramatically aggravated the weaknesses that were already beginning to appear before in Europe’s most successful economy. Japan has begun to suffer the ills to which its economic ‘miracle’ has long seemed immune (never mind the burdensome conditions of life and work that have always sustained it). Meanwhile, we are assured that in the US and elsewhere the recalcitrant recession has at last been reversed; but economists have been even more than usually selective in their reading of economic ‘indicators’ in order to demonstrate a ‘turn-around’ in the economy while setting aside the evidence that mass unemployment or underemployment, poverty, homelessness, racism and violent crime seem to be permanent fixtures in the world’s richest countries. The somewhat lower rates of unemployment in the US have been achieved at the cost of growth in low-wage jobs and a large class of working poor. Nor has the Western world’s growing ecological consciousness been able to make any significant inroads in capitalism’s structural imperative to degrade the environment.
—Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism
…one of the major weaknesses of American thought, resulting from its history and its ideology, is that it has no long-term vision. This thought is embedded in the immediate, about which it collects an alarmingly large quantity of data.
—Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus
If a man be in any vague latent doubt about the intrinsic correctness and excellence of his general life-theory and practical course of life; then, if that man chance to light on any other man, or any little treatise, or sermon, which unintendingly, as it were, yet very palpably illustrates to him the intrinsic incorrectness and non-excellence of both the theory and the practice of his life; then that man will — more or less unconsciously — try hard to hold himself back from the self-admitted comprehension of a matter which thus condemns him. For in this case, to comprehend, is himself to condemn himself, which is always highly inconvenient and uncomfortable to a man. Again. If a man be told a thing wholly new, then — during the time of its first announcement to him — it is entirely impossible for him to comprehend it. For — absurd as it may seem — men are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended before (though but in the embryo, as it were). Things new it is impossible to make them comprehend, by merely talking to them about it. True, sometimes they pretend to comprehend; in their own hearts they really believe they do comprehend; outwardly look as though they did comprehend; wag their bushy tails comprehendingly; but for all that, they do not comprehend. Possibly, they may afterward come, of themselves, to inhale this new idea from the circumambient air, and so come to comprehend it; but not otherwise at all.
—Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities
For the circle, the ring of people, the school, or the widespread success that emanates from anyone involved in an intellectual activity is negligible compared to the plenitude of sects whose souls are nourished on eating cherries, on the theater of the great outdoors, on musical gymnastics, on Eubiotics, or any one of a thousand other oddities. It is impossible to say how many such Romes there are, each of which has its own Pope, whose name the uninitiated have never heard, whose followers, however, look to him for the salvation of mankind. All of Germany is teeming with such spiritual brotherhoods: and from this great Germany, in which famous scientists can live only by their teaching and select poets at best by marketing journalistic bagatelles, from this same Germany, innumerable lunatics are swarmed with the means and participants for the development of their whims, for the printing of their books and for the founding of their periodicals. For that reason, before bad times recently set in in Germany, more than a thousand magazines were founded annually and more than thirty thousand books appeared, and this was deemed the sign of a towering intellectual achievement.
It is unfortunately to be assumed with infinitely greater certainty that this will rather turn out to have been a sign, not recognized early enough, of the spread of a dangerous group-mania. Infected by this mania, thousands of little groups peddle their own set notion of life, so that it ought not to surprise us if soon a genuine paranoiac will hardly still be able to resist competing with the amateurs.
—Musil, ‘Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers’
In these great times which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard times as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words; in these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions; in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me — none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.
—Karl Kraus