Читать книгу Capitalism and the Death Drive - Byung-Chul Han - Страница 6

What we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction. Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.¹ What Benjamin said of fascism is today true of capitalism.

It is on account of our destructive rage that Arthur Schnitzler compares humankind to a bacterium. From this perspective, the history of humanity is like the progress of a deadly infectious disease. Growth and destruction become one and the same:

Is it then not conceivable that, for some higher organism that we are incapable of grasping in its totality, and within which humankind finds the condition, necessity and meaning of its own existence, humankind represents an illness that tries to destroy that organism and – the further it develops – must destroy it, the same way a bacterium seeks to annihilate the human individual who has been ‘taken ill’?²

Humankind is blighted by a deadly blindness. We can only recognize the simpler levels of organization; regarding higher orders, we are as blind as bacteria. Thus, the history of humanity is an ‘eternal battle against the divine’, which is ‘necessarily annihilated by the human’.

Freud would have shared every ounce of Schnitzler’s pessimism. The human being, with his ‘cruel aggressiveness’, he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, is a ‘savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’.³ Humankind annihilates itself. Freud may occasionally speak of the capacity of reason to recognize higher orders, but ultimately the human being is dominated by drives. For Freud, the death drive is responsible for our aggressive inclinations.⁴ Only a few months after the completion of Civilization and Its Discontents, the Great Depression began. It would have provided Freud, one might think, with enough reasons to say that capitalism is that economic formation in which the savagery and aggression of the human being can best be expressed.

Given capitalism’s destructiveness, it seems plausible to connect capitalism with Freud’s death drive. In his study Capitalisme et pulsion de mort [Capitalism and death drive], the French economist Bernard Maris, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, writes: ‘The great cunning of capitalism . . . lies in the way it channels, it diverts, the forces of annihilation, the death drive, toward growth.’⁵ According to Maris, capitalism uses the death drive for its own purposes, and this ultimately proves to be fateful. Over time, its destructive forces gain the upper hand and overwhelm life.

But is Freud’s death drive really the right explanation for capitalism’s destructive trajectory? Or is capitalism propelled by an altogether different kind of death drive, one that lies outside of Freud’s theory of the drives? Freud’s death drive has a purely biological basis. At some point in time – so he speculates – the properties of life were evoked in inanimate matter by a strong force acting on it. This introduced into the previously dead matter a tension that had to be resolved, and thus living beings came to possess a drive to return to the inanimate condition. The death drive was born: ‘“The aim of all life is death”, and, looking backwards . . . “inanimate things existed before living ones”.’⁶ Against the backdrop of the death drive, all instances of life appear as mere ‘myrmidons of death’. The drives of life have no aims of their own. Even the drives of self-preservation and mastery are partial drives whose function is ‘to ensure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself’.⁷ Every ‘organism wishes to die only in its own fashion’, and thus each organism resists any external influences that ‘might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly – by a kind of short-circuit’.⁸ Life is nothing but the organism’s own being unto death. The idea of the death drive apparently held a lasting fascination for Freud. Despite some initial hesitation, he retained the idea:

The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; . . . To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way.⁹

The source of Freud’s fascination was probably the fact that the idea of the death drive can help to explain human beings’ destructive drive. Within the living being, the death drive works to bring about the being’s dissolution. Freud interprets this processual death as an active self-destruction. Initially, then, the death drive expresses itself in the form of auto-aggression. It is only the drive towards life, Eros, that ensures that the death drive is directed towards external objects:

In this way the instinct [i.e. the death drive – DS] itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding.¹⁰

Freud makes no distinction between human beings and other living beings when it comes to the death drive: the drive inhabits every living thing, as that being’s urge to return to the inanimate state. From the death drive, Freud deduces aggression, thereby making a connection between two very different impulses. An organism’s inherent tendency to resolve a tension and, ultimately, to die does not necessarily suggest a destructive inclination. If we understand the death drive as a gradual reduction in vitality, then we cannot infer from it any destructive impulse. In addition, because the death drive is common to all living beings, it cannot explain what is specific about human aggression. Humans, however, are especially aggressive and, in particular, cruel. No other living being is capable of blind destructive rage. Freud also deduces sadism from the death drive:

It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.¹¹

The death drive inherent in every living being, the urge to return to the inanimate state, does not explain the decidedly narcissistic enjoyment that the ego takes in sadistic violence. In order to account for sadism, there must be an altogether different kind of destructive drive.

According to Maris, the driving force of capitalism is a death drive that serves the purposes of growth. But this does not tell us what brings about the irrational compulsion of growth itself: the compulsion that makes capitalism so destructive. What is it that forces capitalism blindly to pursue accumulation? At this point, death enters the frame. Capitalism rests on a negation of death. Capital is accumulated as a defence against death, against absolute loss. Death is what accounts for the compulsion of production and growth. Maris scarcely pays attention to death. Even Freud does not address death as such. The idea of the death drive, as a death wish, conceals the fear of death. Tellingly, Freud does not take into account the fact that every living being resists death. He remarks, somewhat oddly, that the idea of the death drive means ‘[w]e have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle’.¹² It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Freud’s idea of a death drive ultimately represents an unconscious strategy for repressing the fact of death.¹³

The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power [Macht] – of invulnerability and immortality. The narcissistic enjoyment human beings take in sadistic violence is based on just this increase in power. Killing protects against death. By killing, you arrest death. An increase in killing power means a reduction in death. The nuclear arms race also mirrors this capitalist economy of violence. Accumulating killing capacity is imagined as a way of accumulating a survival capacity.

The archaic economy of violence is exhibited in the spiralling violence of the blood feud. In archaic societies, every death is interpreted as the effect of a violent cause. Thus, even a ‘natural’ death may lead to revenge. The violence that led to the death is met with counter-violence. Every death weakens the group. Thus, the group must kill in turn in order to restore its feeling of power. Blood revenge is not an act of retribution, not a punishment. It is not a case of a perpetrator being held to account. Punishment is a rationalization of revenge; it stops revenge from escalating. Unlike punishment, blood revenge is undirected. That is the very reason it is so devastating. Sometimes, a group determined to avenge a death will kill individuals who were not involved in the death at all. Achilles took revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus by killing, and ordering killing, randomly. Not only enemies but also vast numbers of animals were slaughtered.

The etymology of ‘money’ points towards a connection with sacrifice and cultural rites. Money was originally the medium of exchange used for buying sacrificial animals. Those with a lot of money acquired a divine power to kill: ‘Looked at from the perspective of its roots in sacrificial cults, money is as it were frozen sacrificial blood. To throw money around, to let it flow and watch it flow, produces an effect similar to the flow of blood in fights or on sacrificial altars.’¹⁴ The hoarded money gives its owner the status of a predator. It immunizes him against death. At the level of depth psychology, this archaic belief continues to operate in the idea that accumulated killing capacity, and accumulated capital assets, will ward off death. Capital’s logic of accumulation corresponds exactly to the archaic economy of violence. Capital behaves like a modern version of mana. Mana is the name of that powerful, mysterious substance that one acquires through the act of killing. One accumulates it in order to create a feeling of power and invulnerability:

The warrior was thought to embody the mana of all those whom he had killed . . . The mana of the warrior’s spear was likewise increased with each death he inflicted. . . .; with a view to absorbing directly his mana, he ate some of his flesh; and to bind the presence of the empowering influence in battle . . . he wore as a part of his war dress some physical relic of his vanquished foe – a bone, a dried hand, sometimes a whole skull.¹⁵

The accumulation of capital produces the same affect as the accumulation of mana. Growing capital means growing power. More capital means less death. Capital is accumulated in order to escape death. Capital may also be seen as frozen time; infinite amounts of capital create the illusion of an infinite amount of time. Time is money: confronted with a time-limited life, we accumulate time-as-capital.

Adalbert von Chamisso’s novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte [The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl] can be read as an allegory of the capitalist economy. Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil in return for a bottomless bag of gold (that is, infinite capital). The pact with the devil turns out to be a pact with capitalism. Infinite capital makes the shadow – which stands for the body and death – disappear. But Schlemihl soon realizes that a life without a shadow is impossible. He walks the earth as the undead. The moral is: death is a part of life. The story thus ends with this admonition: ‘But you, my friend, if you want to live among mankind, learn to revere first your shadow, and then your money.’¹⁶

Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.

In capitalist societies, the dead and the dying are less and less visible. But death cannot simply be made to disappear. If, for instance, factories no longer exist, then work takes place everywhere. If mental asylums disappear, then madness has become normal. It is the same with death. If the dead are not visible, a rigor mortis has extended over all of life. Life freezes into survival: ‘In survival, death is repressed; life itself . . . would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.’¹⁷

The separation of life and death that is constitutive of the capitalist economy creates an undead life, death-in-life. Capitalism generates a paradoxical death drive; it deprives life of life.¹⁸ A life without death, which is what capitalism strives to achieve, is what is truly deadly. Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality. Only life that incorporates death is truly alive. The mania for health is the biopolitical manifestation of capital itself.

Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis – an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself. Dataism and artificial intelligence reify thinking. Thinking becomes calculating. Living memories are replaced with machine memories. Only the dead remember everything. Server farms are places of death. We bury ourselves alive in order to survive. In the hope of survival, we accumulate dead value, capital. The living world is being destroyed by dead capital. This is the death drive of capital. Capitalism is ruled by a necrophilia that turns living beings into lifeless things. A fateful dialectic of survival turns the living into the dead: the undead. Erich Fromm writes the following about a world ruled by necrophilia:

The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. . . . He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot. The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons,’ a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines.¹⁹

Undead, death-free life is reified, mechanical life. Thus, the goal of immortality can only be achieved at the expense of life.

The capitalist system represses life, and it can only be ended by death. Baudrillard turns the death drive against Freud, radicalizing the concept such that it comes to denote a revolt against death: ‘In a system that orders you to live and to capitalize life, the death drive is the only alternative.’²⁰ By risking death, the revolt of death cracks open the death-negating capitalist system and exposes it to the symbolic exchange with death. For Baudrillard, the symbolic is that sphere in which life and death are not yet divided from each other. The symbolic is opposed to the imaginary of deathless life. The revolt of death means that the capitalist system is shattered by the symbolic: ‘Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for the system remains. . . . The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide.’²¹

The protagonists of Baudrillard’s death revolt are suicidal characters of every kind. He even attributes a kind of subversive potential to terrorism. But a suicide bomber opposes the death-negating system with his real death. His violent end cannot open up the system to symbolic exchange with death. Terrorism is not a counter-image to the capitalist system; it is a phenomenon that is symptomatic of that system. The brutality and emotional coldness of the suicide bomber reflect the brutality and coldness of capitalist society. The attacker has the same psychogram as members of the general population. His suicide is a form of self-production, imagined as the ultimate selfie. The pulling of the trigger that detonates the bomb is akin to the push of the camera’s button. The suicide bomber knows that, immediately after the attack, his photograph will circulate in the media, and he will then receive the attention he had previously missed out on. A suicide bomber is a narcissist with an explosive belt. Thus, terrorism can be understood as the ultimate form of authenticity.

The revolt of death cannot unhinge the capitalist system. What is needed is another form of life, one that rescinds the division between life and death and reconnects the two. Every political revolution must be preceded by a revolution of consciousness, one that gives death back to life. The revolution must create an awareness of the fact that life is only truly alive when there is an exchange with death. It must demonstrate that the rejection of death destroys all living presence: ‘The war against death takes the form of a preoccupation with the past and the future, and the present tense, the tense of life, is lost.’²²

Death, understood as the biological end of life, is not the only, or only true, form of death. Death can also be understood as a continuous process in which one gradually loses oneself, one’s identity, over the course of a lifetime. In this way, death may begin before death. The identity of a subject is a significantly more complex matter than is suggested by the stable name. A subject always keeps diverging from itself. The modern idea of death is based on biological functioning. Death is a matter of a body eventually ceasing to function.

Bataille understands death as an intense form of life. Death gives life intensity. It is an exuberance, excess, extravagance, indulgence, expenditure. Death provokes a rapture that is crucial in erotic experience: ‘If love exists at all it is, like death, a swift movement of loss within us.’²³ Bataille opens his treatise Eroticism by stating: ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.’²⁴ While Freud opposed Eros to the death drive, Bataille invokes the proximity of death to Eros. If the impulse to live is intensified to the highest degree, it approaches the impulse to die, although, unlike Freud’s death drive, Bataille views the latter impulse as itself an expression of life. The exchange between life and death takes place in the medium of eroticism. As exuberance and expenditure, death represents the principle of an anti-economy. Death has a subversive effect on the capitalist system: ‘In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.’²⁵ Eroticism is an adventure of continuity. It breaks with the discontinuity of the isolated individual – the basis of the economy. Eroticism gives the self its death. Death is a losing-oneself-in-the-other that puts an end to narcissism.

The organization of capitalism depends on the desires and wishes that are reflected in consumption and production. Passion and intensity are replaced with comfortable feelings and consequence-free excitement. Everything is levelled out to fit the formula of consumption and enjoyment. Any negativity, such as pain, is removed in favour of the positivity of desire satisfaction. Death is the negativity par excellence. The compulsion of production abolishes negativity. Love is also accommodated to the capitalist process; it withers, becoming mere sexual desire. The other becomes just a sexual object for the narcissistic subject to use to satisfy its desire. Once the other is deprived of otherness, it can only be consumed.

By negating death, capitalism follows in the footsteps of metaphysics. Capitalism expresses a materialist metaphysics that strives for infinite capital. Plato already dreamt of a city without the dead. His ideal state rigorously discriminates against the dead. Any arable land, it says in Laws, should be free of graves. Graves have to be placed so as not to inconvenience the living. The dead may only be kept in the house for a maximum of three days, and only for as long as is necessary to rule out cases of suspended animation. Plato does not allow the living any symbolic exchange with death. Death is to be repressed, and the dead are a reminder of death. They are thus treated like waste that must be disposed of swiftly. But life that avoids death as if it were a pollution will suffocate in its own excrement.

Adorno opposes death-negating metaphysics with a form of thought that ‘takes up in itself the undiminished, the nonsublimated awareness of death’.²⁶ Our repressed knowledge of death must be made conscious in all its severity. Human consciousness is mortal consciousness. Adorno knew that life that negates death as something purely destructive must itself develop destructive traits, that health is an ideology of capital – an illness, even. The hysteria of survival at all costs disfigures life. Adorno opposes the ugly cancerous growth of undead life with beauty that is innervated by the negativity of death:

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, insolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.²⁷

Liveliness is friendliness. That life is friendly that is able to die.

Despite his ambivalent relationship with death, Freud is perfectly aware of the necessity of reconciling life with death. The unconscious repression of death must give way to the conscious acceptance of death:

Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which it is due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step – a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again.²⁸

To affirm life means also to affirm death. Life that negates death negates itself. Only a form of life that returns death to life will liberate us from the paradox of undead life: we are too alive to die, and too dead to live.