Enlightment trash, Part two

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Enlightment trash, Part two

The Vernunft is the "meta-language" of enlightment - to speak in the terms of 
Lyotard and the poststructuralists.
Marxists would call it the "social synthesis", the categories and "principles 
of analysis" which build up the social cohesion.

A provocative question - on the first view: what has Holocaust/Shoah to do 
with enlightment or better the enlightment trash? Isn't Nazism and all its 
consequences just the opposite of it, a consequence of irrationalism?

The French-Greek philosopher and psychoanalyst Castoriadis who wrote a long 
time for the French magazine "Socialisme ou barbarie" and now and then for 
"Les temps modernes" (his opus magnum is: "Gesellschaft als imaginaere 
Institution", Frankfurt 1990, "Society as an imaginary institution") 
distinguishes in "Society as an imaginary institution" betweeen "social 
imagination" and "individual imagination". Individual imagination in deed 
belongs to the realm/sphere of psychoanalysis, but "social imagination" is 
for Castoriadis not the same as the "collective unconscious" of C. G. Jung. 
Social imagination does not handle with archetypes but with the constant flow 
of social "pictures" and "images", "the stream of the social unconscious". 
This fluid stream can be fixed by social institutions, and this act of fixing 
Castoriadis calls the production of the "social imagined", so to speak the 
products or "ready-mades" of social imagination.

The individual imagination must be embedded in the process of social 
imagination, otherwise the individual risks to become psychotic or getting 
another mental disease. Social innovation can be established if the 
individual imagination or a group imagination is able to become a general 
social imagination which most of the members of a society share, or a 
representative part of the social/cultural/economic elites. Sometimes social 
innovation must be established against the majority/the elites, and these 
proceedings are normally called "revolution". So - very briefly - the theory 
of social imagination by Cornelius Castoriadis.

Somewhere Castoriadis says that reason (raison) can derived from social 
madness (folie) not vice versa. The unity of "madness" and "reason" is 
conditio humama, independent from all social formations or/and conditions; a 
very unusual statement by a marxist. But this is the only way you can 
understand the unity of rationality and (social) madness, of modern society 
and barbarism in the 20th century.

Now, is there a real "pluralization" of holocausts? What is the difference 
between pogroms and the Shoah, between Stalinism and Nazism, between 
Auschwitz and Pol Pot? 
Without any doubt, the Shoah was an industrialized genocide, and this exactly 
the difference to other genocides. The social phantasms about a "jewish world 
conspiracy" were no contradiction to the advanced social and organizational 
techniques the Nazis used for their crimes. In contrast to other opinions, I 
believe that Nazism was no "archaic" or atavistic relapse, but a mixture of 
the most advanced social technologies of that era and very special "German" 
fantasies (which Goldhagen describes in his "Willing executioners" correctly 
but with a false theoretical background, a kind of "history of mentality" - 
the French historians of the Annales-school are much better in that).

If the singularity of the Shoah is a very special combination of social 
fantasies and industrialized mass murder, the Stalinist Gulag system is a 
consequence of universal paranoia. In contrast to Nazism where you exactly 
could know if you were an enemy or not (it was - so to speak - the 
"advantage" of Nazism), during the Stalinist regime you never knew if you 
were a "friend" or not, a "comrade" or a "class enemy". This often changed 
from one day to another. I give you an example for this. In the midst of the 
nineties, I met in a town in East Germany near the Polish border a 
Russian-jewish journalist whose name is Boris Schumatsky. Boris lived in 
these times half a year in Moscow, half in Berlin and wrote articles for 
German and Suisse newspapers and features for Deutschlandradio Berlin, among 
other things about the Russian-Czechenyan conflict. In Goerlitz which was the 
name of the East-German town he gave a lecture about the "Homo sovieticus", 
an analysis of the Russian society in Foucaultian categories. The thesis of 
his lecture was that the whole Soviet system based on the principles of the 
Red Army, even in the social microcosm, f. e. in families or company groups. 
Everybody was a soldier and a potential spy, betrayal could be everywhere at 
any time. You couldn't trust anyone, not your father, not your mother, not 
your children. In this climate of universal suspicion, in the last instance, 
you couldn't trust yourself, and this was the basis of 70 years Bolschevism 
in the Soviet Union, Boris explained.

In 1999, Boris published a book in German "Sylvester bei Stalin" ("Sylvester 
at Stalin's") in which he wrote a kind of family chronicle. In this 
"genealogy" he wanted to reconstruct the structure of stalinism on the basis 
of the fate of his forefathers.
I was very astonished as I read that Boris' great-grandfather whose name was 
also Boris Schumatsky was a famous member of the Bolschevist elite after the 
October Revolution. First Boris Schumatsky sen. was the leader of the Red 
Army in Siberia and helped the communist insurgents in Mongolia. In the 
twenties he became the Soviet ambassador in Teheran, in the thirties leader 
of the Soviet film production: two fotos shows him together with Charly 
Chaplin (B. S. sen. had some influence to the storyboard of "Modern times") 
and with Stalin - during the famous "congress of filmmakers" 1935 in Moscow 
he is standing directly beside him. B. S. sen. couldn't like Eisenstein - he 
was to "avantgardistic" for him. And Stalin and B. S. sen. were rivals from 
the very beginning because B. S. sen. did everything to minimize Stalin's 
influence as long as Lenin lived. 
On sylvester 1937/38 B. S. sen. received a phone call. Stalin invited him to 
the sylvester party in the Kreml. B. S. sen. refused the invitation politely, 
he said to Stalin he wanted to be together with his family. A few weeks 
later, Boris Schumatsky sen. was arrested and never seen again. His 
great-grandson assumes that he was shot in a Siberian Gulag camp 1941 shortly 
before the German invasion.

Story and Hi-Story (thanks to Michael Jackson and his little boyz). Let's say 
this is a modern story but what is post-modern? Some say that in "Post-modern 
times" (who's writing the storyboard for this?) there's No Language Beyond 
Language. The meta-language disappeared. But where it is hiding? Or is it the 
sleep of reason?
Or the real background for all this (the revenge of modernism): there's No 
Capital Beyond Capital? 
Next time, same place. And then more about the "social capital" of Pierre 
Bourdieu.

Have a nice time. 

 
Kurt-Werner Pörtner