Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 1: Nietzsche as Myth and Mythmaker The first lecture will

be an introduction to Nietzsche that I have called Myth and Mythmaker . I d like to say a little bit about his life because there is really not too much to say about it. It will only take a few minutes, I think, to summarise. He had a really unexciting life, and so we need to distinguish right away two things. One is what I like to call The Nietzsche Effect , and I am a child of the sixties, so I am very familiar with the socalled Nietzsche Effect , and that s the effect that Nietzsche has on adolescent young males who read him for the first time [crowd laughter] and begin to name their cars Ubermensch wagons, ah, and begin to quote Nietzsche in order to date women who dress in black, as I am dressed today, and the Nietzsche fascination. That characterises one s first encounter and certainly it characterised my first encounter with Nietzsche as well. We need to distinguish the Nietzsche Effect and also the effect of his texts from his life radically because his life is in my opinion, you know, from what I know about it extremely boring. Someone asked me before the class ah, Well, was Nietzsche gay? Well, you know, he wrote a book called The Gay Science but he didn t publish it, you know, in San Francisco in anything, and it s not about gays. Nietzsche probably only had one sexual encounter in his life, it s likely that that encounter that he contracted syphilis in that encounter, so this is hardly the subject for a mini series. I mean, this won t make it to Dallas. He was a brilliant young man who got a job teaching at a German university at a very, very young age. In fact, if you know the German university system, a remarkably young age. But because of migraine headaches and problems with faculty meetings things that I am very familiar with he quit and travelled and wrote books. So in a certain important sense, the books that I will be talking about the texts that I will be discussing are his life, and ah, so questions about his biographical history, I ll give you just and outline, because Nietzsche in an important sense is the last thinker of the 19th Century, and also in another important sense that I will be arguing, I hope, throughout the course; one of the most important figures for our present moment. Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Germany. Of course I only talk about Germans, I guess this is established policy now, right? To concentrate all our policy on Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. He was from one of those three; he was from Germany. He had a rather famous but brief friendship with the composer Wagner. That s the most exciting thing, so I am not going to say much about it, but he had a famous friend. He wrote a lot of books that we will talk about. He was raised by his mother; his father was a minister a rather sickly person as he was throughout his life. So if any of you have had some brief acquaintance with Nietzsche and the doctrine of the affirmation of life, and all the hyperbole about health and the superman that appears in his text, it would be a shocking contrast to meet the real Nietzsche at one of the little resort towns where he used to hang out and find this dapper, rather quiet European man who was extremely ineffectual, this wouldn t be your view of Superman, for sure. Anyway, the Nietzsche we know in the texts isn t dead yet Nietzsche as writer but Nietzsche died in 1900 on the nose, which is nice if you are a historian and you like to periodise, he died at the end of the 19th Century, but as some of you may also know, Nietzsche went mad ten years before that, much to the delight of various commentators, Christian commentators and others who argue that anyone who took some of the extreme positions and series of positions, if one wants to attribute them to Nietzsche ah, about God, the argument is that, you know, you ll go mad or you ll change your mind in a foxhole or whatever. So his madness has been a consolation to many and certainly it was a consolation to his sister who made the most obscene uses of him afterwards. The familiar picture we have of Nietzsche as a person is if you look at this Portable Nietzsche, I suggest to everyone as the first encounter you should have, it was sort of designed for that. You may have seen other books in this series, the Portable so and so and so and so and so and so well this actually is an excellent little text, but look at the sort of sketched in picture of Nietzsche with the big moustache well, this is the way his sister would have him wear his hair and dress him. During his life he had very short hair very dapper his sister had him grow this sort of prophet like beard and dressed him in a cloak and then would bring people in to show them her famous brother. This is very Germanic, it s just strange Here is Nietzsche , you know beard cloak [crowd laughter]. So again, I am not going to say very much about his life because his life was a pathetic ruin. His texts on the other hand have not suffered the same fate that he did as an embodied suffering human being. To approach the text of Nietzsche is difficult and this format adds one additional paradox to the paradoxes with which we are about to begin. There are at least two sets of paradoxes that concern Nietzsche as myth and mythmaker. The first of those paradoxes are within his writings, for example and we will cover these as the courses go on Nietzsche will suggest that morality has an immoral origin, that rationality has an irrational origin, that truth has its origin in fiction, and so on. So those are the paradoxes that we will deal with within the text of Nietzsche. Those are paradoxes that any interpretation of Nietzsche would have to address. Any interpretation of his work would have to address those and my task of doing a course on Nietzsche would be difficult enough if I just had to address those. Those are tough. The second sets of paradoxes make it even more of a problem, and that s the paradox generated by what might be called generated by his writing instead of the paradoxes within it. The paradox generated by his writing; by his pluralism of styles. He wrote in fragments, aphorisms, jokes, all kinds of metaphoric tropes, he also wrote treatises, and in fact in a plurality of different styles. Many of them, the most famous and most discussed ones are these either short parables or aphorisms which are hyperbolic, exciting, brilliant, and as I say have received a lot of attention. But the paradox generated by his writing is that the clear sense emerges from Nietzsche s project that it is, and this will be a central issue. Now I am not saying we are going to settle this in here for goodness sake, I don t know if it s settleable. But a central issue of his writing will be the socalled impossibility of interpreting, and many of the issues we are going to discuss will concern interpretation. So, please don t think that interpretation here is a special philosophical term. I want to try to bring home to you the practical importance of interpretation, and then I will return to the paradox. We interpret all the time. I mean whether you know we don t interpret in a specialised scholarly sense, but we interpret all the time. When we look in the mirror, when we dress in the morning and you may notice that we are similarly dressed. I mean you know, an anthropologist would notice that we share much more in common in our dress than differences. There are many background conditions and interpretive conditions that go into dressing, presenting one s persona, and so on. There are many background conditions and interpretations that go into an act as simple as stopping at a red light. We don t call all these interpretations up and explicitly discuss them, but there was a time when you didn t know to stop at red lights. There is an entire set of traffic regulations, mutually adhered to, which embody all kinds of legal interpretations. And that s the background within even a simple act like that would be performed.

Interpretation in a more obvious sense takes place in the political realm all the time. So if you followed the Clarence Thomas hearings and I have promised in the lectures not to go off on my political digressions, so I will try to keep this one brief. But if followed the Judge Thomas hearings, you will notice that questions of interpretation arose again and again in a quite practical context. By that I mean something hung on both what he interpreted he had said in the past and on how he would interpret in the future. So, interpretation is very important. This can also be made clear historically. Although we don t make a big deal out of interpreting the Bible anymore we adopt a kind of live and let live attitude, based upon our real smudgy belief in God now; that USA Today belief, you know. They ask on USA Today How many Americans believe in God, and 98% say Well yes , in the normal American factoid way of believing it s just you re asked if you do, you don t want to be embarrassed Yeah sure, you know . There was a time in the history of western civilisation when people burned because they read a book with the wrong interpretation. I want you to see that interpretation a lot depends on interpretation. Because they interpreted the Bible the Biblical text wrong, whole groups of people might burn. So there are stakes to interpretation. So as we discuss this throughout the course, please don t think this is some airy, stupid, academic dispute. In fact I would argue that the last ten years of political life have been about the attempt to kill the very desire to interpret. In a certain way there has been a certain social trajectory which the text of Nietzsche addresses, that involve accepting surfaces and to kill the urge to interpret in anything but the most superficial way. And that will be part of the social and political aspect of the argument I will develop, okay. Now, no thinker and I am going to avoid calling Nietzsche a philosopher. The reason is I know a lot of professional philosophers and I don t want to sully Nietzsche s memory in this way [crowd laughter]. Ah, Nietzsche the writer we will call him; a kind of writer is importantly engaged in interpretation that will lead us not only into these contemporary issues, and into theoretical issues; but he won t stay with just theoretical issues, they will be profoundly, importantly practical issues. Okay, well now back to the second paradox. Nietzsche s work suggests that, in a certain sense, it may be impossible to find what many people think they find when they interpret; namely the right interpretation . One of Nietzsche s primary targets is the notion that there is such a thing as the right interpretation , in general. See that s what makes it a theoretical point. However, the paradox now is obvious, right? Because the paradox generated by his writings if that thesis suggested by his writings were correct then the ideal way to present Nietzsche would not be to present an interpretation of Nietzsche; but to do what he suggests in other places in his work, which is to develop a creative, brilliant performance of one s own. That sort of created oneself in a new way and if one used Nietzsche s name it wouldn t matter whether one well, it might matter, if it made the performance better in what way one used it. But that s a very peculiar way to look at a book. In other words, a series of texts that suggest that there is an impossibility in getting it right. And it s not what we standardly I think most of us standardly do when we interpret. I don t know how many of you are familiar with things like Southern Baptist conventions. I don t attend them, but they take interpretation very seriously, and when they debate it, someone s is right; generally the person that just offered it, arguing with someone else. I mean, the underlying idea is that an interpretation can be the right one. Especially in regard to texts like the Bible. This is a deep belief that also runs throughout universities, and has generated a current debate at the universities over the losses of standards and objectivity. Because according to, for example, Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind , and according to Buckley, and many other Conservatives now labelled Neo . Most of them have gotten older, and as they get older they are now they are called Neo [crowd laughter] I will drop that, I will call them Paleo [crowd laughter] conservatives. Paleo-Conservatives find in Nietzsche a very troubling figure because of this effect generated by his writings; that interpretations are multiple, contestable, and might finally be judged by which end up being the most interesting. On the other hand they might be some interpretations might be in place simply because they are backed by the most power. A point we will get to in a later lecture; that many interpretations are in place not because they are rational or argumentatively supported, but simply because they are backed by the most power. Well, once this spectre has been raised about interpretation in general, then it looks like we have attained sort of an insight. If we do and we are going to follow the text of Nietzsche for which I am just preparing us now if we do, it seems to make the university a very, you know, odd place because then when the philosophy professor puts his Plato notes on the board, or her Plato notes on the board, the student has no reason to think that s any more interesting than their own notes based on their own readings. Apart from the institutional power of the person presenting, apart from that. Well this is the notion, of course, that has outraged Bloom, because this destroys standards . Well, whose standards? Well of course, people like him; academics, their standards. It reminds me of the scene in Full Metal Jacket, where the drill instructor says It s okay to believe in God when you are in the Marine Corps your heart can belong to Jesus when you are in the Marine Corps we play our games, they play their little games you know, God plays his little games He loves marines That s not the actual line, I can t you know He loves Marines, we keep his Heaven filled with souls, so he lets us play our little game Well Academics are kind of like that drill instructor, and if it turned out that they didn t have some special this is in the Humanities in particular but the argument might even hold across many areas of Science. But I hope you follow the point; if Academics didn t hold a certain key to interpretation that their students needed to decipher and pay money in order to learn to decipher, they wouldn t have anything to do for a living. You follow me? They wouldn t have anything to do for a living. And I don t want to make that sound crude, but on the other hand I don t want to lie. It is crucially important in the political economy of the university to try to deny Nietzsche s insight for this reason, if it is one. We will argue that. Because if it is one, it s paradoxical because it would mean that what I am now saying and the lessons I am drawing from this insight, which is that interpretation may prove to be undecidable, or impossible, or whatever. If that is an insight, the challenge it poses is that people would have to begin their lectures by saying things like this I am paid a lot of money, and have tenured at a very famous place; you will now take notes. Instead of beginning with This is my methodology carefully developed over years of study . In other words, one would begin to see then what Nietzsche suggests in text after text, which is that the origins of such a methodologies are in relations of power. That the methodological method, however sophisticated, will in some sense instantiate those institutional powers. Traced to their origins they will themselves prove to rest upon undecidable and interpretable material, and not upon the fact themselves. So it will be a consequence of the effect of Nietzsche s text to make us at least question whether we can come up with the right interpretation of a text, of a situation, of a person, I mean interpretation again to try to make it concrete and not some academic matter interpretation is very important. For example, you have fallen in love for the first time and things have been going great. One night you are out and the person looks and frowns for a few minutes, and a whole train of interpretations may start off that are humanly important. This is not, you know, Grad School, this is

stuff you want to know about What is this frowning business? It s been going great, I don t know the frowning So interpretation is a rich human matter and not a theoretical one. Okay, now let me get back to my starting points. The first one will have to deal with the text generated by Nietzsche specific positions and the work within his writings and we will do that. The second is the paradox generated by his writings the paradox what I will call paradox of interpretation one that I have not spelled out his case for, but I will as we go along. Now we come to the third and for me most interesting paradox which arises from my own situation here, lecturing on Nietzsche in a new medium at the trajectory of a culture that Nietzsche saw as one that was leading to what he referred to as Nihilism , The last man , the death of a certain form of being human. And to present that to present the first set of paradoxes, and to try to give you a sense for the paradox generated by his work, and then thirdly to do it from this position, and in this context, and in this culture presents for me a third and deeper personal subjective paradox. Because on the one hand, I don t want to leave the text of Nietzsche as the possession some esoteric possession of snooty elites. I am not happy with that. On the other hand, I don t want it to lose its striking power, by being somehow trivialised in the process of presenting it. Which puts me in a third position, and I guess that given the second one it also generates another problem, which is why I am here doing this instead of one of you, so I have to give and answer to that right away, and I ll start with a blunt one. And that s that I have probably read more of this than you have. That would be the answer you would get from your mechanic when fixing a carburettor Well, I have read the carburettor book, I have fixed these things and you go I ve never fixed it , and you go Okay, you try to fix it this time . So there is one analogy and if you have read more, you can come up here now. Its okay, I mean I won t be offended whatever, we will have to leave that joke out, we ll cut that one. Anyway, another kind of example might be this. Doing Nietzsche might be something like housework that has to be done over and over again. Not trying to denigrate the unwaged labour under capital performed by women. That s how I describe housework. Unwaged labour, valorising capital, done by women unwaged. I don t want to put housework down, because I think it should be waged at the very least, it should have a wage. But in any case, it may be that interpreting Nietzsche will have to be something like housework, work to be done over and over again by whole series of people who read and reread Nietzsche. In other words, I won t be up here trying to claim the authority of Nietzsche for anything. I will be making a kind of use of him. That won t release me from the full paradox as you will see as we begin to look through his work. In fact, we ll just have to deal with a lot of paradoxes as we look through his work. And for people who enjoy neat and tidy lecture courses that have a lot of demonstrative arguments with conclusions that are necessary, this is really the wrong morning or afternoon for you to have shown up. Because that will not be what Nietzsche offers. What Nietzsche offers is a lot less, if you are a professional philosopher today, by that I mean a lot less meaning there are a lot less arguments that can be symbolised and then put into one of our journals which are read by eleven people, who if they were all killed on the same bus, no-one then would ever know about the journal again. Eleven people read some of these things, or twelve, if you are popular. In any case, those are the three sets of paradoxes; paradoxes within the text, paradox generated by the reading of Nietzsche, and then the third, the paradox that belongs to anyone who attempts to present Nietzsche s text. Okay, now that s an introduction to what I will do. Now, the first topic and it s listed in the lecture is myth. And one of the things Nietzsche is, among many things and now that I say Nietzsche is , Nietzsche as proper name refers not to this pathetic little man, you know, and his terrible little life, but to the text of Nietzsche, okay. Remember that I have made that distinction, and I will try to explain that one too as I go along. But ah, one of the things that we need to look at as we go through that is that myths will be one of the topics of the text of Nietzsche that s very important. And it won t be that Nietzsche discusses myth in detail although frequently he does discuss myth or that he uses myth in his writings, which he not only does, but in the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra , he creates one of his own; quite beautiful, quite brilliant. I am sure some of you have heard, at least you know; there is a famous piece of music based on it. And you are probably familiar with the prelude to it which opens 2001: A Space Odyssey; sort of Ubermensch, overman prelude. Anyway, myth is not only used by him, he doesn t only create one, but the topic of the relationship between myth and what some other philosophers have called modernity , modern life I am tempted sometimes simply just to call it capitalism, and usually will modern life. To try to make that come alive you need to think about films like Charlie Chaplin s Modern Times , you know, a kind of pastural life you know, pastural; farming and stuff then all of a sudden real fast machines that s one way visualise modernity. Another way is in the text of Kafka; these lines of bureaucrats, faceless little Joseph K s wandering towards an impossible justice; that s another way of imagining it. A way to theorise it is to read thousands of pages of Max Weber, bore you to death. Boring, but it will help you theorise it. So, modernity is connected importantly connected with the Enlightenment, and we will have to discuss Nietzsche as in a very important sense involved in what I have referred to as The dialectic of Enlightenment . He will be involved in both a critique of the Enlightenment, a criticism of it, but then of course he will also make use of its insights at the same time. And the critique of Enlightenment that Nietzsche originates accounts for the title of the overall lecture series, which is The post-modern condition , because if in any sense at all we are either in or headed toward a situation after modern life or post-modern, a term that some of you are familiar with then certainly an important figure will be Nietzsche, both for the myths he constructed about such a life, and for the myth I just constructed that he may have had a role in constructing such a life, which is probably a myth as well. Okay, ah, now. The importance of Nietzsche. Now we are going to do a little standard academic treatment here. Ah, the importance of Nietzsche. One of the reasons I selected this course is because it s always good to discuss a thinker who is discussed in Time Magazine and becomes the topic of routine polemics on Buckley and elsewhere. That s important because that s a part of out objective culture. It s a topic for a conversation, and that makes your remarks more understandable and gives the real social purpose to doing it. So Nietzsche s importance is, as I said, in a sense obvious. Nietzsche is the main target in Bloom s book; the study of Nietzsche along with I think looking at Woody Allen films. Let me try to locate the fall of Western universities in Bloom, okay. If Mr Bloom is in the crowd I am sorry, but anyway Nietzsche German philosophers, but mainly Nietzsche Woody Allen films, and the dark music from Africa that started influencing American music. Sort of we don t want to call anyone a racist, but that sounded funny to me, when I read it in The Closing of the American Mind , this Dark music of Africa , you know, what could he be talking about? You know. Well, we all know that Mick Jagger looks like a photo negative of Little Richard, but I wondered what he was talking about [crowd laughter].

In any case, the Neo-Conservative attack the Paleo-Conservative attack on Nietzsche makes him an interesting topic of debate in one sense. The current debates over interpretation in areas of law, politics and elsewhere make him an interesting figure to discuss. And then there is this issue of Nietzsche s return, which I would like to make historically contextual for you. I discussed being a product of the sixties, my first encounter with him, and many young people encountered him at the time, and it was exhilarating because as we read through these texts, we will see that Nietzsche s always valorising youth, creativity, life affirming activity, always valuing misinterpretation, polemically, hyperbolically, you know, inciting people to laugh at authority and so on. And so there was a great exhilarating effect of Nietzsche in the sixties, which I think sort of washed out in the seventies early mid late eighties, the way most things did. Kind of settled into a Thirtysomething whining. I mean I don t know the people who make that show, I am sorry, but I mean, I watched it a few times and it was just [makes pained whining noises] [crowd laughter]. It s just you know suicide, please anything but this, you know. Andy Hoffman, whatever, anything but this whining, pathetic, pale shadow of a human life. But a younger generation comes along and we have what s called Nietzsche s Return , and this began in the late eighties, and the return to Nietzsche at first was quasi nostalgic, and then it became humorous. And I also want to bring some of that in, because there are many humorous I mean it would be absolutely out of the spirit of Nietzsche not to do this. There are many humorous uses for the text of Nietzsche. There was an issue of Semiotexte magazine, which I really enjoy. I don t know how many of you have ever even seen Semiotexte, but it s a bizarre little out of the way journal that publishes all kinds of strange esoterica on the edge of academic discourse. Bizarre conspiracy theories, strange political theories and they did an issue on Nietzsche that began with a box that checked off Style of interpreting Nietzsche . The first one was Shameless opportunist , you know, the second one was Joker who has never read Nietzsche , third was Serious but confused academic , and you just checked off your box and mailed in the result of the survey to Semiotexte after having read some of the articles on The New Nietzsche . And actually the thing that was most in the spirit of Nietzsche in the whole issue was that box. Because Nietzsche has a tremendous, and I mean one of the reasons that one can stand Nietzsche at his darkest moments in his text, one reason that one can tolerate looking some of Nietzsche in the face and being able to stand it, is because of these moments of incredible hilarity. I mean just absolutely hilarious. I am going to try to generate some of those as we read through here, because Nietzsche does I think as we proceed, we will see that Nietzsche isn t a place to go for consolation. You know, this is not a place one would go for consolation, you wouldn t pick it up like one of these feel good pop psychology books that I find in the airports all the time. For every group imaginable, you know. Unbelievable culture. You know, books for depressed housewives, ages 25 to 31. I mean, I didn t know you needed a book. You have got eight talk shows, why do you need a book? [crowd laughter] Books for depressed husbands, ages 27 through 40, and so on. Just everything depressed Nietzsche Well Nietzsche s text are not a place to go for consolation along any of those dimensions. In fact one of the things that will be importantly denied in my account it may just be mine but in my account of Nietzsche will be the very impossibility of anything like a psychology as anything more than just one more narrative about yourself that you decide to adopt. I mean, you could do that, right? I mean, in fact, it s disheartening today how frequently you meet someone a few years later Oh no, I am off the Valium now, and I am in Reverend Moon s church, and I am off the Valium I mean, who knows. Today, what Nietzsche saw as an incredible project, which was to invent oneself now is a marketable thing. I mean at the mall, you can go The Gap and invent a persona, read a few of the right magazines that go along with the clothes you buy at The Gap and so on. Self creation in an intensified market economy is something that Nietzsche would have had to deal with had he unfortunately lived longer, but he claimed to have lived out of season and I will claim that his view is relevant to our own times. Now, let me return for a moment to this interpretation business, and then a few quotes from Nietzsche. I think we should use a little Nietzsche to spice up the opening. Ah, we have talked about these three sets of problems; three paradoxes, including my paradox in trying to present this, both by doing justice to the wit, the interpretation developing my own strong interpretation and doing it under a changed mode of communication, which is extremely important to Nietzsche. He is a writer; a writerly writer. He has been referred to as someone who wanted to play Plato to his own Socrates. Let me explain that remark briefly. And this may help introduce you to Nietzsche a little bit. Playing Plato to your own Socrates means this: Socrates didn t write anything, some of you may know that. Socrates didn t write, Plato wrote about him. So it was though Socrates sort of lived this character that comes down to us in the constructed form of Plato s narrative, about which it has always seemed to me to be totally uninteresting to ask Was that really what he was like? For God s sakes we don t even normally want to know that, really! If you have seen a great Billy the Kid movie, and there have been so many that a few of them have had to be good, right? And you see a really good Billy the Kid movie; it s not fun to go Was Billy really like that? Who cares, you know, I mean, because that one was interesting and fascinating. So Plato s Socrates is such a fascinating character I am not sure what Socrates was really like. There are reasons, I think, and Nietzsche makes some of them clear, why in principle I couldn t be sure about that. Part of our fascination with time machines might be with interpretation actually. Maybe our fascination with time machines, you know, like Back to the Future , back to the past and now, Bill and Ted s Excellent Adventures three times. Ah, well I like some of those, but I am digressing a bit, forgive me here. Bill and Ted s latest Bogus Adventure is a parody of Ingmar Bergman s The Seventh Seal , they go to hell and play Twister and Battleship with the Devil, instead of Chess. That would be a symptom of a post-modern culture. See, modernist humans would be worried about death. It will reverberate in their being, and because there won t be a field of meaning to answer it the problems of life and death we will get the problem called Nihilism. But when you cross a certain threshold point, a threshold point where people s real issue is Am I alive now? and that question seems radically undecidable, then you get cultural artefacts like Bill and Ted s Excellent Adventure where the best response seems to be a giddy, silly ecstasy at the very inability to have a self. And I can t say that I don t share some of the fun of it, for our younger generation of quasi-cyborgs that will be raised in this post-modern culture. They will be unrecognisable, perhaps within a few generations. Everyone says Oh, well that s impossible . Well, let me try to generate this historical change that Nietzsche was one of the first to foresee and to discuss. And which I will discuss throughout this course under the heading of Nihilism , and that will be the social and experiential side of the problems of interpretation, although they are also experiential, to me. And that s the problem of Nihilism is the problem of finding meaning in a world that is no longer God centred.

That did not mean for Nietzsche, any more than it did for Marx or Weber or the other people who gave accounts of modern life, that there would no longer be a lot of religious people, you follow me? And it didn t mean that there still wouldn t be churches and believers and that there wouldn t be holy wars and so on. It meant that an overarching cosmological story into which you could fit, that provided a background of meaning and a place for you would be radically missing, and in its place there would be market relations. In which what you were would amount to what you do for a living. So all that a lot of you know about me I do have a few of my ex students in here but all that a lot of you know about me is that I do university stuff for a living. And that isn t a remark about my predilections, which is something I will talk about before this is over, my predilections. It s a remark about my profession, but it s more than that under these social conditions, it is an absolutely ontological remark about what I am. When people at a dinner party say What do you do? That is not a trivial remark; it s a story about your culture. What do you do , the answer is What you are . Now, I know people resist this, and I enjoy the resistance. You know, at dinner parties, you go Well, I am a writer , almost a joke if you at a dinner party in New York; I am an artist , I am a performance artist , I am a writer , you know. And you say Well, what do you do? , and they go Well, I drive a cab , I wait tables but I am really you know my third novel, I am working on . Yeah, you know. This is a culture full of market relations where the construction of meaning becomes the burden of a newly constructed category; the individual. The bourgeois individual. The individual of modern life. The individual competitor on a market in a market. No longer a member of like, the community of God in the broad sense, you know, of the feudal period. But someone who must construct the meaning of their lives in singularity. Let me say that instead of alone. You know, sort of in singular with their own resources, and that is a task that Max Weber thought would overburden them. It is a task that Nietzsche thought almost impossible, but one he undertook, as I said earlier, by trying to become Plato to his own Socrates. In other words, not to actually live an interesting life like Socrates, but to write one as though he had lived it. A kind of deferred relation, but still, to make meaning out of his own life in a context, and again this word Nihilism I ll I ll say a bit more about. In a context where the threat was Nihilism. A culture where there was no fabric from which to construct meaning. Now, Nihilism, in a certain way won t be used by me to describe a philosophical position. Because to the extent it does, it s supposed to be some silly position like this: Nihilists are people who believe in nothing . Well, if that s what Nihilists were, there wouldn t be any, and that s not what we are diagnosing. We are diagnosing a Nihilistic culture, where no enduring beliefs can provide meaning for the overwhelming majority of members of that culture. That s the problem that Nietzsche identifies coming along with modern life. And also, not coming along as a mystification, but coming along as part of the insight of modern life. Comes along with Darwin in other words, being demystified about our origins. It comes along with a new view of the cosmos. Being demystified about the importance of the Earth. You know, where it is, how big it is, and in the centre of what. Being demystified concerning a whole series of things, about which earlier there were powerful, important, meaning giving myths. Part of the work of the enlightenment was this destructive work of destroying myth. That was the work carried out by the bourgeois class and its ideologues. You know, it s not bad you remember, they said you won t have a decent world to live in until the last priest is hung on the guts of the last king and stuff. Those are the mottos of the great revolutions. This is Washington DC, right? These are the great bourgeoise revolutions. We love them, and they may be in fact a world of historic destiny. Nietzsche s worry was that this kind of demystification without creating new festivals, new games, new myths would lead to a situation in which human beings willed only not to will any longer. Who wanted, sort of, only not to want any longer. And Nietzsche saw this emerging culture as one that would be inimical to human life. About which, as I said, he doesn t have a lot of consoling things to say. So I am going to read a little passage of Nietzsche, and try to stop there, to give us a frame within which Nietzsche views human beings. Now I don t think this is all that theoretic, and I don t want it to be. I want it to be something that you can grab a hold of and understand, because this is kind of a modern myth that I am about to spell out for you. In fact I may not read it, I may just gloss it. It s a modern myth that I d like to spell out for you that many of us believe. And lets see, after we have examined this myth if this is more or less comforting than the beautiful myth of redemption in say, for example, the Bible. Ah, the myth is something like this: There are billions and billions of stars. The Earth s is a tiny one. We crawl across it for a few seconds, and then we individually are gone, and billions and billions of eons of time before, and billions afterwards pass, and the earth eventually goes out like a cinder, and perhaps the whole universe collapses into itself. And after all that has happened, absolutely nothing will have been done. Now, that s a very important myth, many of us believe that one too. But against that background, it becomes difficult as we chip away at our daily little lives selling shoes, selling tyres, teaching class to try to find any damn thing that means anything. So our search through Nietzsche will not be a search for dogmatic answers to that question, but to follow his quest and ours for a form of self creation under circumstances and with a background of myth that do not make it seem likely that we will have a happy result. So the end of my first lecture is that our interpretive efforts here too, are bound to fail. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 2: Nietzsche on Truth and Lie http://rickroderick.org/202-nietzsche-on-truth-and-lie-1991/ Lecture two will attempt to answer one of the paradoxes I raised in the first lecture and this will be a specific form of it and that s a rather famous charge in philosophy. In fact this is the charge of relativism and one of the things that professional philosophers do in order to display their professional credentials is to respond to the relativist and to the sceptic. Nietzsche has been accused of being a relativist. One form of this accusation is a kind of mislabelling in my opinion it s a mislabelling of Nietzsche s view about the function of truth and lie; he opposes that to true and false. Truth and lie; the function of that within philosophical discourse, he has an account of that we are going to discuss. One of the ways that philosophers have labelled this position is perspectivism , and the reason I hate that label is like relativism , it makes someone think that someone in this case Nietzsche, or someone else might hold the absolutely ridiculous view that every view was as good as every other view. That is a complete straw person argument. No-one has ever, or does now; hold the view that every view is as good as every other view. So whenever the spectre of relativism is raised, you know, by someone for you, either in the popular press or in a university setting, the first small thing that should come to your mind is there aren t any. So the refutation in a certain sense is bound to miss at least one point; namely that you are not arguing against anyone. Now it could be the case that my audience today, or the audience that will watch the tapes, I will find someone in the United States, or across the world that will hold the view that every view is as good as every other view. But if I do, it will be very idiosyncratic, and in my experience so far ah, no.

Nietzsche is not a relativist, and I think perspectivism is also an unfortunate term to describe Nietzsche s style of thinking. Because perspectivism calls up the idea that Well, I am right from my perspective, and you are right from your perspective, and everybody is right from their perspectives, and I also don t believe that that s a view that anyone can hold or has ever held. I think, and this is the way that I will try to discuss Nietzsche s paradox in terms of relativism, is that Nietzsche was opposed to what might be called the dogmatism, not only the Western Philosophical tradition, but the Western Theoretical tradition in general; its dogmatism in this regard. Believing about its beliefs that they were good not only for them and their tribe, because after all Western Civilisation is a big word it s a strange word you know, big words and strange words, but after all it is just a very large tribe with very large armies and lots of televisions and a large historical project, but still its a tribe; big, big tribe. I think Nietzsche considered it dogmatic to hold that your beliefs or the beliefs of your tribe were binding on all. That is the way I want to present Nietzsche s perspectivism. In other words, he didn t believe that all beliefs are equally good, interesting, or whatever. In fact, I am sure he considered some of his own beliefs to be far more interesting than for example the beliefs of John Stuart Mill; who he referred to as That blockhead , or I think he found his views more interesting than the views of the English Utilitarians in general, about whom he said No human beings want to be happy. Only the British want that . So I think he thinks his views were more interesting than those. And I think where the dogmatism for Nietzsche came in was when you search for views and then develop your beliefs, and then think that they should be binding on all. This is not a criticism that you shouldn t have beliefs, or that all your beliefs are no better than anyone else s; it s just the further belief about your beliefs that everyone else should believe the same damn way. So it s a meta-belief, if you will; a belief about your beliefs. In fact I think that it s perfectly consistent to believe a wide number of things with a great deal of passion, and then believe about those beliefs that you could be wrong. I hope that s not a further paradox, I do not think that it is. It seems to me to be perfectly consistent to believe something passionately, to believe it in a very deep way and have a belief about that belief that Well, you know I could be wrong So the dogmatism that Nietzsche is after runs very deep in our theoretical traditions. I can t overestimate this, it s a dogmatism that has continued throughout what might be called the project of the west, and it s even built into the Socratic pursuit. When Socrates asks the question What is X? and what fills in the X are those famous Greek ideals; virtue, excellence, beauty, goodness, and so on. Now Nietzsche had the highest respect for Socrates, and as I just said as I said before, Nietzsche considered him to be an exemplary person; coupled with Plato s construction of him, they in a way were ideal for Nietzsche. But the dogmatic part of Socrates was that Socrates wanted for Nietzsche Socrates wanted an answer to the question What is X , like what is beauty, goodness, truth, excellence. It wouldn t be good for just Socrates, or good for the Greeks, but once discovered had to bind everyone. In other words, it wouldn t be enough just to believe it, which seems what Nietzsche calls the gay, happy theorist to be enough; to just find a belief that you can live with and believe. No, the theoretical enterprise of the West is imperialistic in a way. It s got to find a belief that others then have to believe, and that he considered dogmatic. This by the way you may notice is not in my view a relativist position at all. Because it s not inconsistent with the view that you think your beliefs precisely because they are your beliefs are superior to some other ones. In fact I take it to be banally the case that if you didn t think that, they wouldn t be your beliefs. In other words, somebody comes up to you and gives you some other ones and you go Oh hell, those are better than mine then they will be yours after you have heard them out, right? So it seems fairly natural that you believe your beliefs. The dogmatic assumption is that everyone else should believe your beliefs. And this is not relativism. There have been some modern philosophical names attached to this position called fallibilism, and yet Nietzsche is too interesting in a certain way to be called that either. In other words, I want to present Nietzsche not specifically within that philosophical context, but I do want to present him as addressing it, which he does. And anyone who has ever addressed any issue in philosophy knows that the irritating thing is how the simplest questions can turn into philosophical ones. Sometimes philosophers realise that what we do is ask a series of rhetorical questions that come up whenever people are very frustrated. In other words, we ask questions like What the hell does that mean? you know, generally in a fight a domestic fight a rhetorical question. I can t do the dishes now ; Well what the hell does that mean? Well, the philosopher takes that rhetorical question and just places it in a foreign context. Someone goes There s an object and you go Object what the hell does that mean? [crowd laughter]. In the other context, the remark had a home and a meaning; so it means the person s pissed, I guess or upset, okay. In this other context though, What does it mean? doesn t seem to have any purchase. About those, sort of, metaphysical beliefs, Nietzsche was no metaphysician. In fact, he thought that was, in a way, a very pompous thing to be. Trying to answer those kinds of questions in a way binding for all. I call that a kind of imperialism; and I didn t use that political term without thinking about it for a while. Its the kind of imperialism this dogmatic tradition against which Socrates saw himself fighting is the kind of imperialist position we might have in some of our educational institutions when we have an African-American student who speaks eloquent rap street language talk. And I am not trying to say that s all that African-Americans speak. Some of them are Neo-Conservatives that garble around as bad as others Paleo-Conservatives some as just as unfortunately stupid as their Anglo-American, or Anglo-Saxon counterparts. No, I am talking now about someone who says ain t and repeats themselves; rhymes and things. Well, in a way it s just imperialistic to think that that is somehow less profound than the Cambridge accent that discusses in detail the problem of relativism. It is not only a class and a racial device, it s just stupid. Because as William James once said The trail of the human serpent is over all . There are many forms of life, many cultures, many ways to look at things. And Nietzsche at his best expresses in his work that diversity and that complexity of the many ways to interpret, to speak. Now, imperialistic in this educational sense means that we want you to leave our institutions of higher learning talking like we talk and writing like we write. And we divide through the issue of whether you think at all, because all the evidence we have for that is what you have said and what you have written. You may be not thinking at all, or thinking very bizarre thoughts, or you may be on some hallucinogenic drug, who knows what s inside. But if you leave there writing like we write, talking like we talk in short obeying relations of power then you are educated. And certainly Nietzsche saw this as conformity, and not connected with truth. So before I tell you what Nietzsche doesn t give a positive theory of truth I ll give you two things quickly. One is the standard philosophical refutation of relativism. I ll give you that quickly. Because there is not much point taking a long time to deliver a banality. The second thing I ll give you quickly is the current, I guess most widely accepted theory of truth in philosophy, which again because it s a banality I won t take long in presenting because it s just uninteresting.

The refutation of relativism, which is taken to be the view that as I said that any view is as good as any other. Which could be restated as Any proposition and/or statement is as true as any other , right? Views can be turned into statements; I believe that X . All those as true as any others. Well, here s the philosophical refutation of that view, which I have already said no-one holds. Socrates in fact comes up with this refutation. Namely lets take the view that all views all statements are as true as any others; therefore you have a statement like this. Let s say you take the strong relativist way of stating that, which is There is no truth . That s the strong relativist way to state it if there were any relativists There is no truth . And then the philosopher asks Well, if there is no truth binding for all ; No truth , for a philosopher, since that amounts to the same thing for most mainstream positions. There is no truth . What s odd about the statement There is no truth ? Well, we know what s odd about it. What s odd about it is there must be one. Namely that one; the sentence There is no truth must be true. This is how philosophers refute things; because if it s not true, then there is truth. So it looks as though the relativist is involved in what philosophers call a self referential paradox . Namely, the relativist can t state his or her position because in stating it they must appeal to the notion of truth, which their position attempts to undermine. That s the Socratic, and still a standard refutation of relativism. Well there is another thing, and in the dialogues this works perfectly, because Plato is writing them, so he gives Socrates his lines and the interlocutors their lines, so Socrates wins a lot of the debates that way. Which is the same reason that certain political figures that are in power now do well in a lot of press conferences. When you know both the questions and the answers, the dialogue, discussion and debate simplifies greatly, rapidly. The relativist could always say this about someone if there were such people, again, Nietzsche perhaps was supposed to be scandalously one the relativist could always say Homie don t play that . In other words, No, no, no, no, when I said there was no truth, I was just trying to irritate you, I don t play that truth game, I don t talk that way I am talking about beauty, interesting, good for life, importantly more right than you, and so on, and that would create another interesting, diverse, and fascinating conversation. I don t know how many of you have seen the movie Lianna by John Sayles, but this power to argue and get at the truth is also absolutely, I think, throughout the Western tradition, coded in a certain way and identified with males. It s not accidental that all of the so called great philosophers are male. But there is a great scene in the movie where a woman loses an argument to her husband, who is a professor. When the argument is over she says Well I don t care if I lost the argument, if what you said is true, you are still wrong . And if you in the scene, she s right! He was still wrong whether he knew how to argue better or not, you see. So there s something that Nietzsche there s a kind of dogmatism in here that Nietzsche wants to root out the origins of. A kind of dogmatism, sort of, control over the instruments of what will count as true and false. What will count as true and false; it s very important to get at. Now, the banal theory that I promised you that philosophers now hold about the truth is Tarski s theory of truth. It s the redundancy theory of truth. When I state it, I expect some laughter, because this is a great product of the modern philosophical imagination. Snow is white; if and only if snow is white snow is white, if and only if snow is white That s the heart of Tasrki s theory; it s the redundancy theory, namely, the thing is the case if and only if it is the case. Well what s odd about that theory of truth you may notice is that it s not really a theory of truth at all now, is it. It s sort of a deflationary remark about how we use the word true . And we do use it in ordinary contexts that way. For example, if I ask someone to hand me a coke and they hand me a salt shaker, that confuses me. If I say That s the coke , and it s a lizard, they ll say That s not true , by which they ll mean It s not a coke, it s a lizard , you know. But this incredible theoretical breakthrough should be not incredible at all, but totally deflationary and remind us that truth in the more mundane sense is just what all of you thought it was; it s what is the case. That view of truth is not exactly what Nietzsche is attacking either, because it is so deflationary that it s almost in the spirit of Nietzsche, if you will, almost. Because it s a deflationary theory, its not some grand theory about how our sentences hook up with the world, or how our great Western texts; Milton, Shakespeare hook up with our deeper selves and humanise us so that we all vote Republican. It s not that either. It s not that either, see. It s a mundane use of the word true So I think it is very unsatisfactory to view Nietzsche as being either a relativist or a perspectivist. What he s interested in are those relations of force and power that would cause a species like ours to develop distinctions like true/false, and then to observe as he does throughout several works how a discourse of true/false is deployed. How it is used; what it makes possible, and what it makes impossible. And so for me those are much more interesting questions; How does the discourse of true/false deploy . Nietzsche, the closest that he ever delivers to a serious theory of truth, I am about to read you. And I think this is, again, hyperbole, but he s on the right track as opposed to some other remarks one might make about truth. This is a famous quote of Nietzsche s, so I ll give it to you. It s from an essay called On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense . As we get to later lectures you ll find out that Nietzsche is going to develop not only criticisms and genealogies something I will have to explain genealogies of how we use words like true , false , truth , lie ; but of how we use words that are in some sense closer to us like good and bad , or good and evil , okay. But in this essay Nietzsche says the following What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people. Truths are illusions bout which one has forgotten that that is what they are, metaphors that are worn out and have lost their sensuous power. They are like coins that have lost their pictures faces and which now matter only as metal, no longer as coins . That s taken to be one of Nietzsche s outrageous statements about truth, that its metaphoric, it s a sum of human relations, deployed in many fields of force, in short; mutually agreed upon fictions, which after long use seem obligatory to a people. And this I take it to be one of Nietzsche s stronger remarks about truth. And I think that we can make that clear with the history of our own country. There are certain things that after long use that have become obligatory for us to believe are true. I have heard, and I have heard it ad nauseam, and until ah, well, ad nauseam. Let me say it in my West Texas way; until I want to puke, I have heard it. That the United States is a democracy. Because after long use, after herd like obedience to this word, we have come to believe it. The most dangerous thing, in some ways, that threatens our democracy is the belief of the overwhelming majority of our citizens that perhaps in some sense we do have one. If we questioned deeply what a democracy is, you know, a government in which the power really does come from a people or whatever. If we question these worn out metaphors, and looked behind in other words, try to look for their origins in power and who deploys them, it might become interesting to see that this is an illusion about which we have long since forgotten that it is one.

The power of Nietzsche s genealogy is to look at how important words to us; like truth, good, evil, and in the case I just used, democracy. Not in order to destroy these words forever, or to destroy their deployment, but in order to point out how they become worn out after long use. And certainly, compared to the vibrancy of the word democracy, you know, its earlier as he said earlier when the word was used in the dawning of the bourgeois revolutions, when it was used with such sensuous power, with such effect, you know, with little town meetings and public spheres, people fighting things out vigorous like that at least as we idealise it, perhaps that was an illusion too. But compared to that, our current democracy does seem to borrow the metaphor to be like a coin without a face. A metaphor that is worn out and lost its power. Now many of you are going to go Oh it hasn t lost its power, oh hell, everybody is becoming a democracy, the whole world is Which may just simply mean, in Nietzsche s terms, that Nihilism, that threat that I mentioned before that comes along with modern life, along with the spread of the commodity and work as the relation that all humans will be subjected to, it may just simply mean that that will win. That that will win. And if it s called democracy, it will just be a herd like lie, something we say to one another so that we don t stand out at dinner parties. I mean you don t want to stand out Well I don t live in a democracy, I don t think , and you start giving reasons you stand out! It makes you feel uncomfortable. So this is part of Nietzsche s take here, is that truths become comfortable through long use. So, through long use it becomes comfortable to say You know, we are a democracy Of course Shakespeare is a great writer and by the way, Shakespeare is a great writer, I think. I haven t been picking on Shakespeare I have been, but I like him. I didn t think I d live to see a culture where Mel Gibson would be Hamlet [crowd laughter], but I did. I mean you all did. Most of us probably went. I went to see it. Very amusing, very amusing. In any case, let me dispatch with this charge of relativism. Nietzsche does have a view of truth, and how it is deployed. He takes our traditions, the Western ones, to be dogmatic on the issue. In fact to return after the little sidetrack down democracy which was really supposed to be a clue for some things I want to discuss later to discuss the way in which this has been a masculine use of truth. One of Nietzsche s famous Nietzsche is known for all his sexist let me just say this right up front. Nietzsche is known for tonnes of sexist aphorisms. I mean it s an interesting phenomenon that so many women theorists brilliant ones that I know love and read Nietzsche, in spite of the face that his text is filled with the most virulent sexism. I mean, Morton Downey wouldn t say this stuff. I don t know if any of you even remember him, but things like When you go to women, always take a stick , I mean even Morton didn t say that. Nietzsche did. But again, Nietzsche and I am not trying to get him off the hook for that. I think Nietzsche may have been making explicit some things that are implicit in theoretical settings, like the university as well as in every day life. But in any case, Nietzsche had a very intriguing questions for philosophers. What if truth turned out to be a woman, what then? In other words Plato, my friend; Kierkegaard, my friend; what if instead of rational argument, that truth were more like gossip in that small fabric of conversation which has held the world together forever? You know. What if it turned out to be that subtle, complex weaving of narratives and stories and myths, and what we sometimes refer to as Old wives tales ; ninety percent of which turn out to be very interestingly right, if you have noticed. Generally, you know Oh, it s an old wives tale that if you ve got a bad cold that a shot of whiskey and lemon juice will help Well great that it s an old wives tale, it just shows how smart old wives were, right? [crowd laughter] Because it will help. Well Nietzsche s challenging question in philosophy is What if truth turned out to be a woman? The underlying thematic being this. What if it s not what you guys think it is? A lecture where you outline five propositions and then argue for them. And make points. Win arguments. See, all these sort of battlefield metaphors Deploy your arguments , Attack their position , Win your point , what if truth didn t turn out to be anything like that at all; Nietzsche asks rhetorically. Of course, the best parts of Nietzsche are rhetorical poetic in my view. I will look at a systematic argument of his later, but I am not doing that now. Just trying to kid people who are a little too serious about the word true . Maybe not too serious, I am quite serious about it myself; the problem is I am not serious about a theory like Snow is white, if and only if snow is white . The reason I am not so serious about that is because I already knew it, and so did all of you before you got here. Obviously that doesn t do anything interesting. So the perspectivism of Nietzsche the so called perspectivism is more a reminder to us to guard against the dogmas of our own tradition. And the dogma here that I have examined is this one about belief; that our ways our here means our tribes ways of perceiving are our own. While they are our own, and we may very much cherish and believe in them, maybe we have cherished and believed in them long after we should have abandoned them, but that s another issue. Our cherished beliefs can be believed without the dogmatic and extra belief that everyone else ought to believe the same damn way that I do. And this is a hard lecture to deliver, because it s difficult when especially when you are talking to undergraduate students at a university, because when they write in their notes this, they go Well, why should I believe what you just said? That only unsettles professors who are easily unsettled, because you really want students to ask that question about what you are doing. I mean, it is a very uncritical way to begin a course by just saying Well hell, you ought to be interested in this, just because you grew up in this tradition and you know you should So if you get a course in Dante, Shakespeare, Elliot or whatever, you just start off doing Elliot, Dante or Shakespeare, its just a dogmatic assumption that Hell, every intelligent person ought to know this . Why? Why Well that unargued for assumption would have to be investigated, you d have to ask and raise the issue of what makes this text important. Why is this important? So when I began that little invitation to follow me for a few lectures on Nietzsche, that s what I was trying to do; was to argue that it has some popular importance, and not to argue by giving you a demonstrative argument with premises and a conclusion, but to try in the spirit of Nietzsche it would be more like inviting someone to dance, rather than it would be like convincing someone that your conclusion is true. For me that s the metaphor for approaching the text of Nietzsche. Nietzsche in a way invites you to a new human dance; he doesn t hit you over the head with a new four premise argument with a conclusion. In fact, he wants to remind us that that style of proceeding itself belongs deeply to a certain culture; localisable, certainly localisable. Even if it were the whole planet, it would still be just one tiny little planet in one tiny little solar system in one tiny little piece of time and so on. So what haughty animals we must think we are that we know what the truth is. Nietzsche once said about the New Testament that the most profound sentence in it was when Pilate goes What is truth? He says it negates a lot of mythology in the New Testament. Not mad at Pilate, Pilate raises a fundamental you know What is truth? Is the Christ the truth? I don t know, I m not sure . There is a little Pilate in everyone, a little bit of that. Nietzsche is brilliant at bringing out these moments. Okay, now let me connect the issue and I hope that I can do this briefly let me connect the issue with truth and falsity, about which I don t want to say much more, because someone will stop me in a minute and say Is what you just said true? . See, then I ll be back in the paradox again,

right. And of course I won t be, because I ll say Ah yeah, I think so, I hope so, I hope its interesting anyhow If you want to talk about that for long, then homie will stop playing because he s done philosophy a long time and I know how that goes. You know, I know how you are going to challenge me, and I know how I am going to answer, so I am not going to play that way, we ll talk about something else more interesting and better for the species than that debate. So let me try to connect up now my remarks about Nietzsche s so-called perspectivism, his so-called relativism, both of which I have rejected as ways of approaching it, and discuss what I do think is an important insight of Nietzsche s, and that s his denial that facts can determine our interpretations. In fact Nietzsche suggests over and over again, and this is a very similar claim to the one we have just discussed. Just as we discussed that truth and lie are somehow constructed rather than found. In other words, truths are constructed, not found like nuggets of gold in nature. In the same way, we don t decide between competing interpretations on the basis of bare facts, for Nietzsche either. It s a very important point. The bare facts cannot make us decide between two interpretations. Let me try to give a quasi scientific example, and then I ll try to make Nietzsche s position clear in another way. The quasi scientific example is this. Ah, many of you are familiar with the cultural dispute between evolutionary biologists and creationists. Those are two radically different theories about the origin of the human species. I think we all agree to that, right? Two radically different theories about the origin of the human species. Now how in the name of God could you settle that one with the facts? Because those theories, as it were, are interpretations that construct what you will count as a fact. What gets to count as a fact is going to have to count as a fact within the framework of that theory. So for example, and this cuts both ways, I am not in here to bash creationists, I don t even think there is such a thing as Creation Science . It s oxy-moronic to me, but I am not going to pursue that. I just want to use this example for a moment. What possible counter evidence could convince a creationist that the world wasn t God s creation? Could you find some special uncreated thing and hand it to them? And go This is uncreated. See, it s a fact, your theory is wrong No, because whatever you find, if its a dinosaur track, and they want to argue that, you know, God created everything just like it is, here s this dinosaur track and they have got no other explanation I have even heard people say that the devil put them there to fool us. You see, because facts can t overthrow a view like that. You follow me? Because the interpretation sets the context for what is going to count as a fact. Now I am not going to get the evolutionary biologists off the hook here either. Because if they run across a duck billed platypus, and you ve got all these evolutionary trees and stories, and this damn thing, you know, it doesn t walk like a duck and quack like a duck, it quacks like a duck, has a tail like a beaver, and it swims like a fish, lays eggs like a flies and all this crap, and they just go Well, here s its branch That s the same thing, don t you see! The theory has got to put it somewhere, it goes there. But that s just the same thing as the creationists with the thing, you know, the theory the interpretation is going to construct what will count as a fact within that interpretation. Now this is not the strong argument that there are no facts. Again, if you argue this point with many philosophers, they are going to say Well you don t believe in facts No I don t believe in bare facts. Things we bump into in the world without any notion whatsoever what they are at all and decide what we ought to think. There aren t any such things. The reason there aren t is because we are socialised into communities, we learn to speak languages, and along with that process comes many semi-articulated theories we have already developed by the time we are six. You d have to be almost a child to be close to the realm of bare facts. See what I mean? It would not show that you were developed, mature or intelligent. It would just show that you were so stupid, or not that children are stupid; actually they are young, pretty and all that stuff. I have got a lot of them, they are also irritating. Anyway that wouldn t show that there are bare facts, if you think they are bare facts, it just shows how poverty stricken your imagination is in the number of theories you hold about the world. Because if you hold a reasonable number of them, and all of us do whether we can articulate them or not. In fact, you know, one of the most insidious forms of interpretations are the ones about which we have forgotten to paraphrase Nietzsche that they are interpretations, and now think that that s just the way it is. But no, facts come to us and they do come to us through the nets of interpretation. Through the nets of interpretation. And facts do not overthrow interpretation directly. Enough facts within your interpretation can wear it out in a certain way. In other words, certain interpretations can sort of outlive their usefulness for life, for the species. Can become unfortunate ways to continue to interpret. This process however is not itself rationally discussable. By that I mean there is no scientific account of that. It just happens. I mean, it just happened that there was an Egyptian religion that was around for what? Two or three thousand years? Today no-one believes it. Christianity has been around a long time, and in a thousand years no-one may believe it. Because like with individual human lives, with planets, with nations, with religions, with gods, with whole universes, they just wear out and go away. And as the poet Yeats once said Human beings are in love, and they are in love with what vanishes Which I think is a beautiful sentiment for Nietzsche, to be in love with what vanishes. In any case, on all three points Nietzsche has many interesting things to say. I don t want to just read them sero tantum(sp?), I want to reconstruct and gloss them for you. Many interesting things to say. On the construction of truth as fictions and I don t want you to take that in a strong sense; just made up, no truths as the products of communities, things that it was good for life that we believed, in short. Interpretations as our topic of discussion, rather than the facts which are constructed by them. I also, during this lecture, wanted to lay to rest some of your doubts about well This relativism, or perspectivism, or any view is as good as any other view and if you believe this, once you start building universities that instead of Shakespeare and Milton you ll have articles like Jane Austen the masturbating girl , it s always quoted in the press as an example of one of these new feminist deconstructive, you know deconstructionist, feminist, relativist, Marxist, neo wild things that s going around at all the universities corrupting all your children. Aren t you scared? Hell, aren t you scared? I wouldn t be. But the challenge to traditional interpretations is itself a tradition built into our tradition. To be absolutely ruthlessly critical is a tradition built into our tradition. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 3: Nietzsche as Master of Suspicion and Immoralist http://rickroderick.org/203-nietzsche-as-master-of-suspicion-and-immoralist-1991/ Lecture three will be on a topic I richly enjoy, because I have in a way made suggestive remarks about Nietzsche, but I hope they have also been substantive at least in this regard. I understand that there is much debate on these contentious positions concerning the rather untruthful origins of truth; by that I mean its origin within the human community. Ah, and the contentious contention that relativism and so-called perspectivism are not threats, but rather challenges to our creative and interpretative imaginations and powers. Also I have tried to make the brief but substantive case that facts do not occur independent of their interpretations; that facts are implicated in interpretations.

In this third lecture, I am going to try to do the following. I am going to try to highlight one of Nietzsche s most systematic arguments, and here we will see Nietzsche again involved in a kind of paradox. He will be trying to show us the immoral origins of morality. In the same way that I briefly but less systematically indicated; he tried to show us the untruthful origins of truth. So in this section I will be discussing Nietzsche as a phrase that Paul Ricoeur used about Nietzsche was that he was a Master of suspicion . So I would like to contrast at least one aspect of what has been called Nietzsche s style ; which I will discuss briefly before I get into the substantive arguments. One aspect of Nietzsche s style that Ricoeur s phrase Master of suspicion captures brilliantly is that many of Nietzsche s various arrays of considerations are not intended to be demonstrative, or to have you necessarily adopt his position. In fact one sometimes feels in that odd position talking about Nietzsche that you may recall from a movie like The Life of Brian , where people think that Brian is the messiah, and Brian screams out it s a Monty Python movie he screams out to the crowd Don t do everything that I do, don t do everything I say and the crowd goes We won t do everything you do, we won t say everything you say [crowd laughter]. And this is a bizarre feature of that paradox that we discussed in the beginning with Nietzsche. Its part of what I call The Nietzsche effect . So rather than view him in that way, it s nice to look at him as a master of suspicion. Rather than doubt or scepticism, some of what I am about to present now of Nietzsche after a brief discussion of his style is Nietzsche as master of suspicion and immoralist. And what he wants us to do is to, as it were; suspect along with him the origins of our morality. This will not necessarily call on us to abandon any specific moral position, but rather to look at its origin critically in order to suspect it. And suspicion is not necessarily a bad thing; either concerning theories, governments, or relationships with other human beings. Suspicion can be quite healthy. It after all is an attitude extremely appropriate to a truly enquiring mind, you know. As opposed to merely jotting down the familiar canons of knowledge. Suspicion is a quite powerful exercise, so Nietzsche is in that sense a master of suspicion. When I get around to that part of Nietzsche, I will be discussing and I will get around to it briefly after we are talking about his style, or styles again for a moment. I want to return to that just for a moment, because it is very important. After that though, after that brief thing, then I will discuss On the Genealogy of Morals . That is perhaps Nietzsche s most systematic work, and in this book On the Genealogy of Morals , he proceeds with a genealogical method which I will contrast with a properly historical one, and then we will look at some of the fruits of this method. For example; this method, in this case, will be applied to the origins of our morality, both in Ancient Greece and through the Christian tradition. And we will look at those origins of our morality, and as I say, the suspicion that Nietzsche will want to raise in On the Genealogy of Morals is that our general moral fabric has itself a rather immoral origin. This won t be quite as simple as it sounds, I ll work through that in a moment. But I can t resist a few remarks about Nietzsche s playful style, and here I want to mention some of the New Nietzsche , Nietzsche s return and these dangerous characters that lurk around the university now; deconstructing canons, letting women write about masturbation, having AfricanAmericans hold courses in their own culture, and these outrageous things like that. So I think, you know, we ll talk a bit about Nietzsche s style, or styles. There is a famous discussion, and you d have to know a little about German philology and scholarship to really appreciate this. When German scholars do the complete text of someone s work, they don t leave much to chance. They dig through a lot of writing. They get the complete works. So there s a rather famous scrap of Nietzsche s writing that I can t help but discuss briefly, that will do two things. It will remind us a little bit about Nietzsche s tricky style, because without his tricky style or styles or ways of presenting, perhaps this issue I am about to talk about wouldn t have come up. And it s also another way to remind us about the undecideability, perhaps by undecideability, I mean of interpretation I mean how it is impossible to find a way above the plain of interpreting communities, in which to judge interpretation as it were, a God s eye view of it. I am denying that we have such a view of what philosophers have sometimes called the viewpoint from the standpoint of eternity , or what I prefer to call the view from nowhere , since there ain t no there there. There ain t no there there; there s no viewpoint like that. Well, among Derrida s I mean ah what a slip some people will appreciate that among the fragments of Nietzsche s work, they found a slip of paper and on it was written the following brilliant, perhaps brilliant aphorism. It might have been Nietzsche s most brilliant aphorism; it says I have forgotten my umbrella . So the issue arose, should this be included in the complete text of Nietzsche. Is this an aphorism that should be numbered and put in The Will to Power for example, or left as an unnumbered aphorism? In general it raises the issue of how should it be interpreted. Is it part of the complete text of Nietzsche? Well, if the complete text of Nietzsche means, in the straightforward sense as some buffoons think everything he wrote, then of course it should. But if a text is this special canonical thing that captures the truly lasting and enduring legacy of Nietzsche, then one might want an argument why I forgot my umbrella should be included, right? I mean, you d expect to have such an argument. Well, this problem wouldn t come up with a normal writer. I mean, otherwise it would be just Oh well, it s a fragment, throw it away just a fragment. But because Nietzsche writes in fragments, aphorisms, and various styles, you have got to pause for a moment before throwing away I have forgotten my umbrella . Now how would one go about solving this puzzle about whether to interpret the slip I have forgotten my umbrella as part of Nietzsche s text or not part of his complete works how would one bring his works to completion in that way. Well a famous argument here is in Spurs: Nietzsche s Styles , a book by Derrida, where believe it or not he writes a small book on this one fragment. [crowd laughter] Now, the interesting thing about Derrida s joke is this: by writing a whole book on this fragment, he has surreptitiously, sneakily, included within the text and the overlapping history of interpretations of Nietzsche this otherwise undecidable fragment, which has now become a fragment of his text, which is now part of the history, you see, of the interpreting of the text of Nietzsche, so there s a little joke behind the joke. It s a very clever book in many ways. But I want to get around to what I take to be its point, and it also should support what I made last time in too contentious a way namely that there are interpretations, its not that there are no facts, but interpretations set the range within which facts can be appealed to, as well as truths and canons. In fact you may have to interpret the whole history of your civilisation before deciding what should be a canonical text. In any case, the issue that Derrida wants to raise there and I will raise briefly before I get onto Nietzsche and the genealogy. Derrida wants to raise in the spirit of Nietzsche the question of the undecideability of interpretation. The central point that he makes is this What is style in writing? We talk about a writer s style, well its something like this; the writer finding his or her own voice unique way, as it were, of writing. It very odd because they must be selecting a voice from among that finite ensemble of possible narrative voices in a culture. Even when, as a brilliant writer

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might; such as Nietzsche or James Joyce, they extend the bounds of those possibilities. Not narrow them back to Shakespeare; extend the bounds of possibility. So Nietzsche is one of those writers that did extend the bounds of possible writing. Style is a creation, as you see, of this kind of singularity. Nietzsche s styles, which should be in plural actually, because there are many. Nietzsche s styles open the problem of interpretation in a radical way because, as Derrida argues; if there is style, there must be more than one. If there is interpretation, there must be more than one. This point is systematic and theoretic. Style is only style to the extent that we can distinguish and differentiate it from another style. Interpretations are interpretations only to the extent that we can distinguish and differentiate them from other interpretations. So the very idea that there might be; only one way to write the truth, only one interpretation, one last and final canon, one last book is a nonsensical idea. Good books don t lead to the end of writing; they produce volumes of writing. Plato s writings didn t end writing. For God s sakes they write about Plato every year, they write twenty-five more dissertations. Good books create more writing, more conflict, more canon confusion; not less. So that s a point I want to make to reinforce the very important idea that what we are dealing with here are interpretations; and that it is in the conflict, not the confluence of interpretations that we can see, as it were, the life of a culture and of a people. Whether they are what Nietzsche calls decadent ; in other words on their way out that s a nice way to gloss what he means by decadent on their way out Before I give some of Nietzsche s quasi positive mythology, life affirming as I have been using it means on your in and up. Life denying; decadent and on your way out, okay. That s West Texas gloss, but it will have to do until we get onto the more positive theoretical work. Okay now this is a systematic argument and I don t think that I can finish it within the compass of this lecture; I may have to return to it. But I wanted to start with that one last note to pin down that point on interpretation; the point being this, there can t be a single one, or there is no interpretation, and there can t be a single style or there is no style. I mean, if a computer wrote everything there wouldn t be a concept of style. It s all just computerese , there s no style; it s computerese . There s got to be more than one to be style. There is no interpretation if there is just one. There s got to be more than one. So this is his systematic point. Okay now we are onto thank God some of you are going to say finally onto one of Nietzsche s texts where he does make a systematic argument recognisable to philosophers. That means he takes a theme, he pursues it through a series of essays, he sticks with it, he stays fairly serious about it, because it s a fairly serious subject. What he wants to trace is the origin of our moral values. This is not a discourse in ethics; it is a genealogy of the entire range of Western ethical discourse. So this isn t a utilitarian theory or an Aristotelian theory, communitarian theory, Kantian theory, the ontological theory; none of those. It s an exercise in, as it were, going into their genealogy; their origin, in order to see what are the conditions for the possibility of all those theories and evaluations. It s a different project. It s not that all those other projects are worthless or whatever, Nietzsche s after something different. And what will come out of The Genealogy of Morals , which we are on now, or beginning to start. What will come out of it won t be a moral theory, but a suspicion about moral theories. Just a suspicion about them. Okay now let me tell you what I think that The Genealogy of Morals ; what is its method? And I think for a change with Nietzsche, we can actually discuss method for a moment, because we have now a precedent for discussing Nietzsche and the genealogy. A very well known French thinker; Foucault, has raised genealogy to an extremely high methodological level in a series of brilliant studies such as Discipline and Punish , the history of madness, and in many other studies. So let me try to identify along with Foucault some of the elements that are genealogical as a method and oppose them to a more historical approach. One would think a historical approach is what you would want if you were looking for origins. Well let me try to separate the two briefly. I ll start by trying to give a brief account of what a genealogy is. A genealogy attempts to uncover the formation of an entire discursive practice. So in that sense it is not within that discursive practice as about it. In other words it wants to uncover the conditions for the possibility of that discursive practice. Let me try to give an example here without using Nietzsche s right now. One might take the following interest in certain medieval texts; like the Maleficarum, which explains the conditions under which male prelates get to burn women, which they did by the thousands in the medieval period. Well one might not want to know whether the women really were witches or not to me that would be an outrageous kind of question to me. I lived after that time, see. But I might want to know this. What were the conditions for the possibility of forming a discourse within which people even thought they could have a true/false good and evil distinction about women being witches, and making the male organ fly around the room, and decapitating prelates in the dark, and mating with animals? Who in the name of the world could have possibly thought they had the conditions for that kind of discourse, as one that at the time was viewed as rational? I shouldn t say at the time , since the Maleficarum is a text upon which has been praised in many circles, and not too long ago, as a basis for certain legal texts that we read today in law school. Anyway. That s another little thing you might suspect. The question here is What are the conditions? ; not Are these sentences true or false? because in a certain way, this is not a historical question. It s not like one wants to interpret them sympathetically and historically to understand them. One might not want to do that because you see them filled with too much blood and barbarism to stand to do it. It it might make you too sick. But you might want to know a deeper question; What are the conditions that formed the discourse? and I don t want to make it sound real textual and sort of Duke or whatever a deconstructive literary these are not just discursive practices, right? Witch burning isn t just a bunch of talk and writing. It s burning humans. Foucault was always willing to distinguish between the discursive practice which was purely discursive, and the practice itself which would be actually burning women. And I think that s a distinction as long as you maintain it in a commonsensical way worth maintaining. Sort of like the distinction between chair and electric chair . It s a distinction. Not all distinctions are bad; I can live with that one. I want to distinguish chair from electric chair , text about witch burning from witch burning. Okay. Well, so one of the things that genealogy wants to do is uncover the formation of a certain kind of practice. What it wants to do too is to attempt what might be called a reversal of perspective. Now, in the way that Foucault uses it; which I even prefer to Nietzsche s, to be honest. Foucault uses it in the spirit and here I am going to quote Whitman Foucault uses the genealogical method to do this. Foucault, like Whitman, doesn t come to sing songs for accepted victors only; but for slain and despised persons . Nice quote from Whitman, I like that quote In any case, Foucault s genealogies want to reverse perspective, and allow us to see or attempt to see from the standpoint of those upon whom the practice was inflicted. What the practice might have looked like; and to reverse it, as it were. It s like a gestalt switch, it s not supposed to be a

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mystical thing, it s a method. It s like when you are writing a history of the working class, and all you are reading are bourgeois historians, you might decide Oh hell, I ve read Studs Terkel, I think I ll pick up a book where some actual workers talk . A historian friend of mine, Larry Goodwyn told a story about the first book he wrote on the Populist movement. And he realised that all the other books so far, that he read in History on the Populist movement in the United States didn t have one damn farmer in any of them. He thought that was odd; he said I think I ll write a history about farmers that has some farmers in it. Ridiculous thing to expect, like having a democracy without citizens in any case we expect a lot of ridiculous things now. Genealogy has a reversal of perspective built into it. Now this distinguishes the genealogical method this third point, besides reversal the third point distinguishes it from both Marxist in the orthodox sense which no-one, I guess, is worried about now history; and from other kinds of history writing, is that we don t look for a singular subject in the manner of great histories; you know, history made by great men, that tradition. On the other hand we don t look for collective subjects either; namely identifiable and specifiable groups with agendas. Instead what we look for in a genealogy is for the deeper relations of what is sometimes called micrological power or force to force . Small, very hard to trace relations of forces to one another. And this relational perspective is very important for writing this kind of history. Much easier in fact to characterise after reading one than to do so abstractly like I am now. You don t look in other words for the subjects of the history, but for how various conflicts and forces and real antagonisms played themselves out. And it the course of that, in fact of course certain subjects will emerge; collective and single anyway The fourth point, and this one of course comes from Nietzsche and Foucault accepts it too, and it will be made use of in the genealogy and it will return to an earlier point of mine. Is that one must see the truth of such accounts or the accuracy of their interpretations as a kind of choice one has made. In other words, you don t just accidentally write a book called Illiberal Education . You have to make a choice, and then pick out the anecdotes you want to make your point. I mean after all, don t historians do that anyway? Genealogists want to do it self consciously; with more reflection, in other words. I mean, I have got to say that about some histories about which I am very familiar, and friendly. E. P. Thompson s history of the working class is not really interested in much that goes on in the drawing rooms. Because he s made a choice; he has decided on a certain approach. Once he has decided on the interpretation, my earlier point about facts returns. That means it s not the case there are no facts. It s just that the frame and the interpretation is going to decide for you pretty much what they are. You know, it s going to help you decide what counts as one. You know, there aren t any anecdotes in D Souza s book Illiberal Education about the overwhelming success of programs that relate to the fates and affairs of women and minorities. And I don t take that to be accidental; I think he made a choice. He didn t want any of the good stories in it, but the bad ones. That was a product of a kind of choice. The genealogist in writing the genealogy of a certain practice makes a choice. In other words, takes a perspective. And one of the things I like about the method is this; that I like to know that there is a perspective there up front so that I don t have to wait for the hidden agenda to slap me in the face later. It s what might be called The problem of interrogating court justices . One would like to know in advance so one won t be surprised later what their perspective is. One becomes profoundly dissatisfied if you are told they have no perspective [crowd laughter]. It s the same dissatisfaction one feels when one hears a white male saying I am not a racist . It s a self refuting remark. One you wouldn t feel compelled to make unless I m not gay I m not a racist wouldn t that relax you if you were and African-American; to hear that? Oh, don t worry about me [crowd laughter]. Not very relaxing. All of this is to set up genealogy and the process and project of suspicion. Well in The Genealogy of Morals , and now we are into the argument, and I don t think that I can finish it in one lecture, but we will start Nietzsche s argument in The Genealogy of Morals . Sorry about that. Nietzsche wants to trace the origin of our values; in other words, What are the values of these Western values? . I mean, this isn t an ethical theory; he wants to know the value of our values. Now the question here, and I will have to address it much later, is Well, what do you mean by value? And I have said rather vague things like Value for life , and I ll have to fill that in later with an account of Nietzsche s own myths and other things, and I will try to do that later. But for now I am after purely negative gain. In other words, now I just want to shoot my targets. Later I will build some clay pigeons of my own; right now I am just shootin targets, okay? This is the negative part of the argument. Nietzsche wants to trace What is the origin of our values? ; the value of our values. Evaluation, interpretation, will are everywhere. You know, we value things all over the place; and differentially. And there are classic theories about ethical evaluations that surround no matter how complex some of these get based around issues of good and evil. And that s one of the ways that Nietzsche draws the opposition within the west; the opposition between good and evil. I hope not too esoteric, since if you don t have that one down by the time you are about six, Horror movies don t make sense. You ve got to have that step, sort of a rough cultural idea; you know he wants to know what lies behind these evaluations. The procedure that he follows in this text is to make use of certain kinds certain modes, forms and kinds of psychological reasoning, certain modes, forms and kinds of historical investigation, and importantly, he wants to look at the texts, the crucial ones that have helped to structure our understanding of whole bodies of discursive practices and the ways in which these evaluations have come to be made. The schema, as it were, of the book is as follows. We are going to look at the general question of the value of our values by looking at our morality. Our morality, we are going to look at in its true and original home in religion. You know, we are not going to take for granted that morality grew out of the enlightenment in a set of procedural legal rules, but that morality grew out of the fertile embodied substantial rich soil of religions. By religions, I mean important things people believed about their purposes; whether they lived, died, and so on, and where they would go afterwards. You know, the kind of ticked off questions that Job asked God. Why did you mess with me? and What s going to happen if I die? you know, the devil had really mucked with me and I want to know why. As you know, God s answer to Job is kind of rough; it s Shut up. I am big, I am mean, get offa here. I can do worse. [crowd laughter]. If you have seen the movie Hellraiser, you know it s true too, right? These are horrible movies; don t go see all these movies. Hellraiser is a terrible movie. Specifically Nietzsche wants to go to a religion which he takes to be crucially important in the moral development of the West and I think that so does William Buckley, he and Nietzsche agree; Christianity. So Christianity will be one of our focuses. I want to say about Nietzsche s suspicion of Christianity that I don t buy the entire suspicion. I have a distinction that I want to make, and it s a little bit critical of Nietzsche. For me, I like to make political distinctions; I prefer them to theoretical ones. For me, I want to distinguish two kinds of Christianity, and I am not talking about Catholic and Protestant. Although James Joyce thought those were interesting to distinguish.

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Does anyone remember what Joyce said when he ceased being a Catholic and some British reporter asked him Well, have you lost your faith, sir? What s the problem here? Now that you have stopped being a Catholic, are you going to become a Protestant? , to which Joyce responded I have lost my faith, not my reason [crowd laughter] Which for you Catholics out there, I think that s a great remark I have lost my faith, not my reason . In any case, I like to distinguish in Christianity between two kinds of religion. One represented by Billy Graham, and the other by Marting Luther King ah, a name I suppose I can use the proper name, you know, properly; it s not slanderous to either one. But I like to distinguish between people who lead their people out of bondage and then people who are busy playing golf with the Pharaoh. It s a rough distinction between religious people; that some forms of religion have more of an interest in golf games with the Pharaoh, others seem to have more interest in leading their people out of bondage. That s a distinction Nietzsche doesn t pay much attention to; I would like to. But for now, let s just get polemical, broad and look at Christianity in Nietzsche s way; as a form of life, and look at it in relation to first for Nietzsche there is Greek life, and it represents a certain thing to him. Nietzsche was trained as a classicist, and in spite of his acute intellect, I have to argue that he always remained a little too in love with the Greeks. A little bit. Nietzsche was trained that way, always a little bit too enamoured of them, although he was one of the people that helped to demystify many aspects of their life. He wants to look at the schema of values of the Greeks and how they became Christian values, which Nietzsche argues later become decadent and life threatening and lead to a third kind of evaluation, which is really, as it were, the dead end that he sees civilisation headed towards. And this is that threat I mentioned earlier of Nihilism . That threat I mentioned earlier; the threat of Nihilism. Not as a personal belief, but as something that could be the fate of a culture. Now I ought to tell you that there are some contemporary theorists that believe this is all already over that our culture and this is why I have given the title of the course Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition some postmodern theorists have written in collections called What to do after the end of the world They write essays on what do we do now that the world is over. Now that there aren t any humans left, what do we do with our word processors now? [crowd laughter] Sort of a new question; theoretical. Well to find out why people write weird things like that it s good to go to Nietzsche and trace the development of these values and of moralities from the Greeks through the Christian religion and on to this situation of Nihilism that Nietzsche will discuss. Well, ah, one of the ways that I like to do this is to try to warn you right away that if you read The Genealogy of Morals and I hope you do, all of you; it s a good book, you should read it, it s fun. You don t have to read it. There are lots of good books, but if you do read it watch out for a sort of invidious binary in the text; masters and slaves, master morality and slave morality. The reason you should watch out for this invidious binary is that for Nietzsche these are metaphors that tell you something about the origins of these value systems and ultimately you will find out that for Nietzsche, neither is satisfying. In other words they are not positions he would adopt now; they are part of how out cultures move. He will identify the Greek ideals with master moralities and the Christian ideals with slave moralities. Hardly surprising now, is it? Because even if you see a Chuck Heston movie about early Christianity, you notice what you could hardly help but notice, that the origins of Christianity are among the classes of the despised, the oppressed and the slaves. Hard to miss! Jesus isn t hanging out at The Qantas Club! He hangs around with hookers and cheats and frauds, charlatans, all of the time. Only time he ever bumps into religious people it just pisses him off. Kicks over their tables, makes fun of them in their Synagogue. I mean that s a fair reading of the New Testament, it s not outrageous; just read the damn book. Again, through long canonical use, you can lose the ability to read. Nietzsche said one bad thing about Christianity is that it can make you forget how to read. It would be great to read the New Testament and pretend you never heard anything about Jesus. It would be a lot of fun. Because you might find a totally unrecognisable character. You know, he had one close woman friend and she was a hooker. That s not interesting to you? It is to me. It wasn t the wife of the current vice president, it was a prostitute. And I am not up here to stone him because I did agree with perhaps one of his profound remarks Jesus In the New Testament, and that s If you are without sin you can cast the first stone and that generally would stop a lot of stoning. [crowd laughter]. I think. It s not a sermon, but just a piece of advice. Well, Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals contrasts the master morality of Greece with the slave morality of Christianity and then follows it through to its next phase. One of the reasons he could do this so brilliantly I think is because of his background as a philologist. Nietzsche s background was a philologist, okay. Since we are pressed for time. Nietzsche s background as a philologist warned him that certain words that were important in evaluation underwent very interesting semantic shifts between the Greek period and the Christian period. So for example, the Greek word for Excellence , or arete , which as close as we can come to saying it in West Texas the Greek word for Excellence comes to be translated in the Christian Medieval period as something different, and then by the time we get to the King James bible and this is important. I want to just skip to the King James version, because now we get for Excellence something like trying to think of the exact the exact word here the movement is from excellence to virtue yeah, piety; sometimes as narrow as piety. Virtue; piety. Well let me try to give you a sense for the difference that Nietzsche wants to drive here. An Excellent Greek, on the model of the master set of values that the Greeks held, was someone like Odysseus, a great example from Ceto, a nice example of an excellent Greek. He was excellent because he was in a sense that today we wouldn t understand at all because of the division of labour he was well rounded. Odysseus could tell a lie well; which is a virtue. To know when to lie and to whom and about what was a virtue for the Greeks. It s a powerfully smart one. For example if a God questions you about if you have messed around with something, it s very nice to fool him. Odysseus could build a boat, drive a furrow straight, sing a song, you know, fight in a battle, throw a discus, and many other things. There was a lot to it. Very well rounded, interesting. Noble values. In short these noble values were what Nietzsche called active powers that, as it were, would see what they wanted to act upon and then act upon it. And those were for him noble values. He calls them master morality; however they are naive. He points that out later and I ll get around to that when I try to explain Now I want to make the quick move from that ideal; that Greek ideal of excellence, which is well roundedness in many areas. Well if you think of that, then you think of something like virtue ; don t you see that the semantic terrain is almost reversed? Because certainly in the Victorian period, to mean to be virtuous meant to deny one after another all those aspects of your active powers, which were celebrated in this earlier use of the word. Namely I won t do that, it s a sin. I am virtuous I won t do that, it s a sin. I am virtuous I won t do that, it s a sin. I am virtuous , I won t overeat , Sex phew out of the question ; No , Just say no Just say no [crowd laughter].

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So, Nietzsche s point was that this transformation; from a master to a slave morality was life denying, not life affirming; life denying. And it was life denying in this first, quite ordinary sense. Namely that the active powers that human beings wanted to realise become inwardised ; turned against themselves and become a series of Just say no s to various aspects of the things that make us human. Things that are ignored by theorists, academics, philosophers, literary critics and others. Topics we ought to discuss. Like how good is our food? How warm is our house? How much fun do we have having sex? We don t talk about that much and yet that s the fabric that makes a life that flourishes. Not whether Shakespeare is in the canon or not or whether Mel Gibson plays him or not, but whether we are healthy and well and feel good and like Odysseus can do many things and enjoy a whole bunch of them. That was at least this is the movement that Nietzsche wants to trace. Now these life denying values of Christianity; he s not simple minded on this. His criticism of Christianity is not simple minded. So I want to end this lecture on the genealogy and then pick the genealogy up in the next lecture again with the following remark. Nietzsche didn t think that the movement to what he sees as the slave morality of Christianity and its life denying aspects is entirely negative because it made the human race more subtle, more devious, more mendacious. Oddly enough, until Christianity came along, human beings, according to Nietzsche, weren t nearly tricky enough, weren t nearly clever enough, mendacious enough, creative enough. No, the Greeks who just, you know Well I lied to a god, I did this I did that No, Christianity goes I love you in this very strange way we are going to examine later. But not until it comes into the world as Nietzsche sees it that human beings actually become these sort of subtle mendacious tricky people with deep subjective problems, strange consciences and guilt with all its many wonders is born into the world. And we ll discuss that next time when we return to The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 4: The Death of God http://rickroderick.org/204-nietzsche-the-death-of-god-1991/ In this lecture I want to pick up on my discussion of On the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche and return our argument concerning the value of our values, the origins of our ethical judgements and so on, and look at the question of as I stated in the opening lecture the paradoxical situation that our morality may, oddly enough, have an immoral origin. And so this is the argument to which we will return. One of the points I didn t make about the genealogical method in the last lecture, I want to make now and it s very important. When we look genealogically at The Greeks as a type, or Christianity; Nietzsche uses a kind of typology where we don t look for who speaks in a document, but for as it were, what motivates the speaker behind the document. So the hermeneutic question of Who is the speaker and is he honest? isn t really what Nietzsche wants, but to see what kind of type would say something like that. See, the standard philosophical approach to a text would be to look at the propositions and then to determine if the argument is valid, sound if the speaker is sincere and so on. Nietzsche, rather than looking at that, looks at the question: What kind of person would make an argument like that? What type of person would evaluate like that? rather than to look at the evaluation. That s another way to look at genealogy. You know, rather than to look directly at an evaluation, you look at the kind, characteristic or type that would make it. So when I make a remark about master morality ; it s about a certain type that speaks in these various evaluatory words. Or about Christian morality; it s about the type, or What human types speaks in these texts? , okay. And again, that s part of the suspicion of the method; of what it causes us to suspect. Well we get onto some rather strong claims; the account of as I say of Greek ideals , is that they are active, noble; you notice these various valorising terms, but they are also somewhat childlike and naive. These are terms that imply that there should be more of a mendacious spirit in human beings; more malice wouldn t be bad here. In fact, throughout the text of Nietzsche, there is something like and I don t want to trivialise it but there is something like what Mick Jagger calls Sympathy for the Devil ; that all really dialectical and intelligent human beings will have to have a sense for evil and some sympathy for the devil, or they will be a little stifled and boring. And I think that s not wrong; just a little sympathy for the devil won t hurt. In any case, let me look at a famous argument In the first type that we have looked at the Greek type we will give it a name and call it the active type , or the master morality , and here we have what I have called active force which prevails over reactive forces. And reactive forces here would be things that stand in the way of the will realising what it wants. Well that s not much of a problem from that position in Greek society where myths and by the way we are in the realm of myth here. These types are after all not really sociological accounts, but in a certain sense mythic accounts if you put enough weight on myth , and I want to put a heavy weight on that term. Anyway, this is the active type. One of the faculties that the active type is noted for is the ability to forget. And this is again part of Nietzsche s ongoing polemic with what might be called mere historicism people who just wander idly through the relics of the past in search of a cultural treasure or whatever. In other words, for Nietzsche, the active person is willing to forget, and he contrasts that with memory, which you need in Christianity in order for the redemption story, for example, to make sense. You need to remember the sufferings of the martyrs remember memory plays an entirely different role for the master morality; the way Nietzsche puts it they are strong enough to forget . So if insulted and you hit the master in the face, he hits you back and that way he honours you and then he forgets it, see. Because first of all, if he turns the other cheek he shames you by saying well you are not, you know, good enough to even fight with me. Rather, you hit him, he hits you back and then you both forget it. It s the West Texas version of master morality [crowd laughter]. He hits you, you hit him, and then you have treated each other with dignity, and then you forget it. But you don t turn the other cheek and then remember it; mendaciously remember it Oh yes, you have hit me now, but later There is the secret that will come in with Christianity; the but later . Now, I want to start this with a typology and then to read a brief portion of the genealogy where Nietzsche thinks he has uncovered, as it were, a text that s at the very heart of Christian morality for Nietzsche in this typological sense. The Christian type, Nietzsche says, is reactive; calls it a slave morality , and in this type of morality, reactive forces prevail over the active ones. And here you want things, but there is, as it were, principles and rules that stand between your will and fulfilling the will or the desire. And the extremes that we know throughout history that this has achieved are unbelievable, but their achievement has always had some perverse opposite character. And I will try to use just one example here, and that s the monk who is going to think about the pleasures of the flesh no more. So the monk sleeps naked under a cloth that s rough and as he denies that part of being human of being a biological animal as he denies it does his body become less or more eroticised I wonder? After years of sleeping under this rough blanket naked and denying the flesh; oddly enough, what comes in precisely is a new sublime and elevated form of the erotic. Everything is eroticised about the blanket and the body of the monk. No longer this straightforward sort of Greek physical act, but now an entire eroticised body.

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I mean, try to explain that the Victorian era produces novels like Wuthering Heights , I mean, the point is this: you know, the denial of that power, in reactive power, doesn t mean that people really just say no and things become de-eroticised. No! Christianity perversely eroticises the world in a brand new way. And you know, in Wuthering Heights, the moment that you sinned was the moment that Nietzsche thought was interesting about Christianity; was that to break through and to sin gave a whole new dimension for him to human interest. It made the human being an interesting species; sin did. Before that, we looked a lot like primates you know, and afterwards it becomes this act filled with meaning across a whole terrain; subtle glances of course all this may be gone now, right? It s just you meet in the mall, the same old thing as the Greeks maybe, who the hell knows more or less. But you know, in the Victorian era, you can imagine that a glance, a touch, a glove you know. You read Kierkegaard on the diary of a seducer, and even though its all of the book is about him just thinking about it, and not even mentioning anything the least bit pornographic, its just My God, you can t get that involved over one look, can you? and yes you can. But perversely, it was this morality that, as it were, pushed those active release of those normal human powers into this reactive mode, so that they were devious in roundabout ways; they did not de-eroticise humans, but eroticised us in a new way. And then of course made us have at it, and then to take the lies inward in a form of guilt; where oddly enough the weak revenged themselves upon the strong again, in terminology this way you want something, but you are really not up to getting it, so in the Greek scheme, you just don t get it because and for the simple reason that you weren t up for it; you couldn t handle it, you couldn t do it. Now the Christian will take that same inability and turn it against the active type and use it as a reproach. The things they can t do their limitations become virtues; now they are virtuous because their limitations, their faults, their inabilities to get the things they want, now are valued highly. Whereas the active type, who previously was valued highly, who goes ahead and acts out is considered immoral, and even worse, turns the punishment inward in the form of guilt, because the morality is general. So he goes I did what I wanted oh I feel awful about it! , and Nietzsche finds that mendacious and perverse. I did what I wanted to do, god I feel terrible! , I did what I was inclined to do, oh I feel awful! See, for the Greeks, the way Nietzsche presents it, that s unthinkable. You can t imagine Odysseus later going Oh god, I blinded a god, I feel terrible! No! I blinded his eye! Knocked it out! Wow! Let me tell you a story about it! But no, that would be too straightforward for what happens after Christianity, where reactive powers make the world a more subtle place; more erotic, and in fact open up whole new fields of interpretation. In fact, it s interesting to note that the first thing that the Devil does in the Bible is to teach Eve to interpret. God has given a rather straightforward command. Milton makes a lot out of this: God says Don t eat anything This is a myth, you all know this is a myth, so chill out: Don t eat anything off that tree Well, what does the serpent say? He says Well, maybe God s testing you. Maybe God really wants you to eat it to prove that you are a worthy creature So Eve starts thinking Well [maybe] that s it after all then let me think and interpret this And so it is with the Devil that interpretation is born within the inside of the text itself; the Devil says interpret think interpret don t just listen to that of course that could mean more than one thing! Well of course, so could everything else. Anyway Now, the Christian morality then. When Nietzsche says it turns itself against life; there s one level in which I want you to understand where I think it s pretty obvious; sort of flat footed critique. At least the kind of Christianity I was brought up around the Baptist church and I don t think it s not consonate with most varieties. Things like thinking critically, having a whole hell of a lot of fun, enjoying sex a whole bunch, taking certain substances, getting real drunk, letting yourself be a free spirit, being free of malice and the envy of other people and stuff aren t cultivated very much by Christianity; all the things that Nietzsche associated with the other morality. Now admittedly the Greek way of doing this is too straightforward, too childlike; certainly not nearly as interesting as things will be later, in his view or in mine either. Now, Nietzsche makes here and I am going to read, I think, a famous passage. And a justly famous passage. Perhaps in this passage we see his most negative moment of the critique of Christianity and so we ll look at that, and its in and then I ll read it briefly and its in the first essay in The Genealogy of Morals, in case you decide to read the book, in Section 15 and I ll read I haven t read to you much but this passage is so beautiful in Nietzsche I can t pass it up and well I have talked about his style so much, and this is a great example of it. So I ll read you this, then toward the end of the talk today I ll do one other little piece. Okay. Nietzsche here is discussing Christian values of faith, love and hope, and I ll start with his rhetorical question. What, do I hear a riot? They call things the last judgement ? They call things their kingdom ? The kingdom of God ? Meanwhile, however, you know Until then they live in faith, in hope, in love. In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what? You see how this genealogy of suspicion is going to start to work now? He is going to examine that In love of what? These weak people; someday or other they too intend to be strong. There is no doubt in that, because some day their kingdom too shall come. They term it the kingdom of God of course, because after all one is so very humble in all things. To experience that one needs to live a long time, beyond death. Indeed one needs eternal life, so as to be eternally justified in the kingdom of God for this earthly life in faith, in love, in hope. But how justified? Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder very few people but Nietzsche would say Dante committed a crude blunder, let me just tell you that right now Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when with a terror inspiring ingenuity he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription I too was created by eternal love . At any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian paradise the inscription I too was created by eternal hate ; provided a truth may be place above the gateway to a lie. So what is it that constitutes the bliss of the Christian paradise? We might even guess a genealogist isn t going to guess, they are going to look for a text. We might guess, but Nietzsche says they have an authority to tell them about it. And Nietzsche doesn t pick out, ah, Jimmy Swaggart or some second rate figure in Christianity, he picks a text in Thomas Aquinas. And you know, arguably, I think Thomas Aquinas knew something about Christianity; that s my view. I don t think Nietzsche picked someone out of the mainstream of the tradition, I think he picked a very important figure. According to Thomas Aquinas the chief blessing in heaven will be like this. Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint, says The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful to them [crowd laughter] [long pause] [sigh] In the place of the Greek athletes we have martyrs. Surely you understand that this is drenched in more blood than the simple Greeks could ever dream of. I mean, the trick of genealogy is not to see that as an argument, but to make it raise a whole host of suspicions in your mind about people who want to be nice, be good, be kind, love, cherish you; you ve got to suspect that area of discourse. And this kind of genealogical argument and I just gave you what I take to be a powerful sample of it is supposed to make you ask this question: Isn t that kind of love a mask for a kind of hate? Isn t that kind of faith a mask for a kind of power?

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Now don t think that because we have called this slave morality , it has no power. As Nietzsche once said: Christianity a mistake? A two thousand year mistake? No, it does have power. I mean it does have power. Don t think that this is shallow critique of Christianity. This is not denying its power, for god s sakes. In its appeal to love as a kind of hatred, in its appeal to compassion as a mask for power, and in its deferred way of insisting upon having its own way. In fact, now I will return to a simpler example that Nietzsche wouldn t have appreciated. But its that after this you should at least suspect when a television preacher I don t want to be sued for libel here when a TV preacher goes I love homosexuals I am trying to do the voice too but I hate their sin . After you have read Nietzsche s Genealogy of Morals you may suspect that statement. You may just go I suspect that s not the case . I mean after all, for a lot of people being gay is what constitutes people in a certain way. Its part of their identity. You don t just go well I love them, but I hate that . It s kind of I love Michael Jordan, but I don t like basketball Well, there might be reasons for that but hard to know what they would be I don t know him myself. In any case, this hermeneutic of suspicion that Nietzsche is drawing out is that Christianity; while presenting itself as a religion of love and compassion and tenderness; is a mask of hate and fear; and another form of power. The Greek form of power was a form of power too. It presented itself as an ideal of excellence, but it was don t you see now that the metaphor more straightforward really applied. In other words Odysseus would go it s like reading Aristotle, right? It s not a big secret to anyone that Aristotle s views represent the views of the gentlemanly upper classes of Greece. That shouldn t it s no surprise because Aristotle says in The Ethics that well I don t teach ethics to people who aren t well brought up young Greek men, I mean why the hell bother well then you know who he is talking to, and that has a charming honesty one can find naively throughout Aristotle s encyclopaedic intelligence. I mean it s really charming. This on the other hand is a form of power that is subtle, important, very interesting. Now the possibility however looms in this scheme; that the triumph of these reactive forces will, as it were, overdo the job. You follow me? Its one thing to say No to certain instincts and life affirming or not but it s quite another to push that process to the edge at which life is threatened in a profound and fundamental way. To deny them beyond a certain point begins to be a danger for the species. Now people keep going Well, you sound like some damn sociobiologist . No, the way Nietzsche is using these terms: life affirming , life negating , have to do with our fate of the species in being able to recreate ourselves, and in the writing of these myths he is of course trying to recreate himself at some level; obviously. And retelling them is an effort at creating something, god knows what it will be by the time we are through, but it s an attempt to do that. Well the two things that he says and again keep that passage in mind that characterise Christianity are resentment and the term there means this double move of love/hate; the resentment of the weak of the strong, but the resentment plays itself out with the strong as well in the form of guilt. So Nietzsche has an extended analysis of resentment and guilt as being fundamental to this, as it were, substructure of Christian discourse. Now Nietzsche takes this whole argument to be very destructive of all ethical theories in the Western tradition for this obvious reason. Whether you are talking about Mill, or about Kant, clearly these theories are rooted in that tradition. Especially Kant s, I mean for God s sakes, it s just a very high German theoretic account of The Golden Rule in a certain way. I mean it s very complicated, but its essence is that his parents were good Pietists, and he by God is smart enough to justify being that, theoretically; and he is, by the way. In any case, these are the two factors Nietzsche sees working here in the reactive type: resentment and guilt, and the ideal for human living that they posit he says is not aesthetic but ascetic ideal; namely, the ideal of someone who just says No . You know, the ascetic ideal; not too much of anything Oh no, no more desert for me , No, I d rather not tonight , No, I can t do that now , what these are mechanisms or ways of making our bad conscience; our guilt, bearable. This ascetic ideal, you know, it s an ideal so we can make these things bearable to live with. You know I started earlier on making the remark that we could only deal with so much reality. Well on this topic here, we can only deal with so much of this critique until somebody wants to say Shut up ; You know, I go to church, I don t want to hear any more of that, shut your damn mouth, its ruining it for me , well, I will in a minute, but not yet. What the ascetic ideal does is it makes this bearable, but it also expresses finally a will to nothingness; to just simply not have to will anymore. This is where the spectre of Nihilism arises. And it doesn t arise so much well it arises with the origin of Christianity. It does not become, as it were for Nietzsche a problem on the agenda of the world and of our culture until what Nietzsche sees as the decadent period of Christianity . I mean, a period that I think we could understand might be we might characterise this as a sort of decadent period, and Christianity is still lagging itself out. In this decadent period what will happen is Nietzsche thinks is that we will see an expression of the Will to nothingness ; simply the refusal to will anymore. This is where Nietzsche s worry; his fear, which I have named Nihilism ; which he names Nihilism , has become a real cultural possibility. And again, I am going to refer to a film I am using films rather than referring to other texts because, as you know, in our culture films are texts, right? And very important ones. A lot more people, a lot bigger impact on the objective culture, let s face it. Take a movie like Heathers; beautiful expression of the will to nothingness played out almost like an active will. In the movie Heathers, the young rebel wants the whole high school to commit suicide together and sign a mutual note about it and it will be The Woodstock of the 80 s . I like that, that s cute. That s in the spirit of Joy Division s famous line in one of their albums referring to Nietzsche There is no turning back the last man . In other words, the last humans are already here, and there is no turning back the next step. So today for example, and now I will, in sympathy with some of my friends I know who teach in Theology I should say that their problem today formulated at a very head high level would be not the disbeliever, which was the older problem you discussed in theology departments, not the non-believer; their problem today is the non-person. In other words, to find someone for whom belief or disbelief might mean any damn thing either way. Its not that you can t find people that won t go Oh I believe, I believe , because you will. But to find someone that believes, you know, believes like Kierkegaard believed, or Saint Paul believed; you know, really believes. So the problem isn t finding some silly tricky little argument, but finding some human being somewhere to make it to. This is the Nihilism that makes Nietzsche relevant to the current situation. What Nietzsche actually sees at the end of this is what centred around God, and yet modern conditions which I have characterised as the advent of Capitalism, mass communication, what Max Weber said were called the disenchantment of the world you know disenchantment. I don t want to make that sound too strong because the enchanted world of the

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Middle Ages; you know if you got a toothache in that enchanted world it was unpleasant. So there are good things about modernity that I appreciate; like penicillin and other things. So don t get too carried away with this enchanted/disenchanted distinction of Max Weber s. Nevertheless though, Max Weber called this modern world disenchanted , and Nietzsche s trope for that and the name of this lesson is called; what a thing to call a lesson The Death of God , I mean, you know, this is one of Nietzsche s most notorious as you know parables and I am going to use it and hope that I get a chance to interpret it, to bring to an end this, sort of, this Nietzsche as a moralist point. In any case before I do that I want to make two quick points about what I have just said. Both the Greek Ideal and don t think these are very limited ideals they structure all the things we still value to the extent that we are still human and still value things the Greek ideal and then the Christian ideal from which our other theories grew stay crucially important for all other theories. By that I mean for all other ethical theories. One of the ways Nietzsche sees these and then I will get onto this passage is this way. Nietzsche talks about a reversal of values; that s from the master to the slave; or from the active to the reactive human. That s the reversal, and the reversal as I say has a double edge to it. It makes humans more mendacious, more interesting, sexier, more sinful, interesting. One more example might help there. I want to make this point clear. Augustine s Confessions I don t know how many of you have read this, but Augustine s Confessions were magnificent and I think it s a wonderful book. Augustine feels more guilt, and has more excitement over stealing a pear than any of us would feel if we stole seven million dollars! [crowd laughter] I mean, Augustine in the Confessions evokes sin in the most marvellously embodied way. Because he stole a stinking pear. We are a long way from that historically, folks. That is far distant. And my scary thing I d like to say is I am about to read this parable about the death of God, and its supposed to be shocking, and yet I feel like I am at a time and a place in culture when we are far distant from our ability to be shocked by that at all either. What Nietzsche took to be most shocking, I think today it s just grist for a certain commodity, system, certain way of advertising. Today World spirit may very well be just advertising. Nevertheless, let me give you the famous parable; Nietzsche s Death of God parable, and I ll use it to bring this kind of suspicion to an end because with The Death of God we have in Nietzsche and it s going to take a long time to explain, and I ll do that in the next lecture, we ll talk more about this parable. We could have spent eight hours interpreting just the parable. First of all, a parable called The Death of God can t be atheism, right? Because to the bourgeois atheist it makes no sense to say God died because there wasn t one, so he couldn t have died. So that doesn t make sense. The Death of God is about the drying up of a horizon of meaning, and of a whole form of human life. And about Nietzsche s both fear and exhilaration at what might come next. We still to a large extent live in the interregnum between worlds, if you will, or between paradigms. Not many people in the history of the world have faced that; lived in periods like that. So Nietzsche in that sense is also a prophetic thinker, so I ll share with you just so you can scandalise your friends, hell if nothing else Nietzsche s famous parable, and it s from The Gay Science . The one I want to share with you is the parable from The Gay Science called The Madman , naturally, and as a madman myself, sometimes a professional madman, I enjoy this passage a lot. In The Gay Science , this is 125; aphorism 125. Of course these are some of Nietzsche s fragments he is best known for because they are filled with hyperbole and wonderful invective and so well, I enjoy this one. The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours and ran to the market place please follow Nietzsche s every line because none of this is accidental, the madman lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, okay and cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God! Well you can imagine that in a mall, right? [crowd laughter] The cops are going to come and pull you out, because nothing in a mall is that serious. It s not designed to be, folks. Anyway As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just see, Nietzsche was not just a simple atheist; follow this As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then he provoked much laughter Mall again, right? God, get this skypilot out of here Did he get lost? One said. Did he lose his way like a child? Said another. Or is he hiding? now they are talking about him Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Has he emigrated? They yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glance. Whither is God? he cried; I shall tell you. We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this thing? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its centre; from its sun? Whither is it moving now? [Whither are we moving?] Away from all suns? Or are we not plunging continually? Backward, forward, sliding in all directions? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Even so close to them I am adding to the text now even as close to some of those gravediggers as we all sit today? Don t we hear their digging at all? Is not night and more night coming on all the time? Do we not smell anything as yet of God s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him Now there is a change. The mall people are a little quiet now because this is more interesting than they thought it would be, okay. That s why they were quiet. And then he goes on. And here s the point where I want to introduce my next series of talks with: How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves now? What was holiest and that the world has yet known has bled to death under our knives, and who can wipe this blood off of us? What water is there that can clean us now? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? What new myths? What new ways to live shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of our deed still far too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? Here the madman fell silent and looked again at the listeners; and they were silent and astonished. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. I have come too early; my time has not yet come , said the madman. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires even more time; deeds too require time, even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard by many This deed is still more distant from some of them than most the distant star and yet they have done it themselves It has been related further Nietzsche again that on that same day the madman entered various churches, and there he sang his Requiem to a Dead God . Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time: What after all are these churches now if not the sepulchres and the tombs of God? What are these churches now? If not the sepulchres and the tombs of God?

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Well, there s the famous Death of God parable, for what its worth, or not worth. It takes a lot of interpreting, but it s a very, very for me excitingly interesting, challenging, powerful and serious moment. Philosophers are very seldom ever really serious. You can tell that from Socrates, and sometimes the best part about them is that they are not too serious. But that s a very serious moment for Nietzsche. And it s also a moment that I think that I d like to bring down to earth just a bit, because this is still a deed quite distant from us, and it may take quite a bit of work to pull it closer. But it s really hard not to catch a sense for that. Coming from the university I come from, where we have one of the world s great cathedrals: Duke Chapel, and we have a beautiful stained glass painting of various saints, martyrs, apostles, Christ, but most important, and I want to return to Nietzsche s first line about the market place. Our madman went to the marketplace to tell the news, because it s in the marketplace where the news in the new era of the world in the New World Order; it s the marketplace where the news needed to be spread, okay? In any case in Duke Chapel; it s a beautiful chapel, I mean it s the best imitation you can get this side of Europe [crowd laughter]. Built in the thirties I think right? 20 s, 30 s, something like that in this chapel you wander through, and for a moment your sense of reverence is almost there, you almost can remember some of those feelings when you were very young and you thought just maybe that was right, or whatever. But you wander off the edge of the chapel, and usually it s very cool in there and they are playing Bach and it s just a nice place to go, I mean I have to admit it. But as you wander off, then there are the barons of tobacco; all of the barons of tobacco; the Washington Duke family, all buried in stay not cardinals, not saints, not martyrs, no Thomas Aquinas, no Saint Thomas More; but George Washington Duke and his family, the buyers and sellers of America s first international commodity: tobacco. The fortune upon which that church is erected, and to which it is dedicated. What is that magnificent church now but the tomb and the sepulchre of God? This always seemed to me a striking example, from a local perspective. I mean you d need to visit the chapel if you come to Duke, and you are welcome to do so. I will bring up a few things from the Genealogy again, but by the time we have reached this moment of The Death of God, we already have a strange change in the discourse of Nietzsche s text. Because now the challenge will be for me to present what I have only so far indicated. And it s indicated in the parable. What new games, new festivals, can human beings insofar there is any life that remains what can be invented, now? To make up for what has already been destroyed. And that s the challenge we ll have in the next classes; is to see first what does Nietzsche offer us by way of any new myths like that, and more importantly, what myths could we construct ourselves; what games, what holy festivals, what interesting books, fascinating arguments, and new ways to live? Other than the pathetic tragic, stupid, banal array of ordinary, everyday, bourgeois stinking life. Surely we can do better than that. Surely. So that s the project that we will head out on, you know. Because we don t want to end with the thought that always seems to me ghastly and especially after reading Nietzsche it s that to imagine someone looking at your tombstone years from now, and it says: Bill O Reilly , gives the dates its always comforting, I visit graveyards, I like it Sold tyres [crowd laughter]. Now I don t know if you sell tyres, and I know people driven to that and worse, but still, that would be Great salesman. Wonderful friend. Nice chum . To experience that horror, just that horror, may require some effort from us but I want us to experience it so that we might think of some new games, some new ways to live. [applause] Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 5: The Eternal Recurrence http://rickroderick.org/205-nietzsche-the-eternal-recurrence-1991/ This lecture is on a very troubling thesis of Nietzsche s; The Eternal Recurrence. Before I discuss Nietzsche s idea of The Eternal Recurrence I want to do a little bit of what I promised that I would do last time when I recounted the parable of The Death of God, and that s to interpret it a little bit more. One of the nice things about parables and I am going to compare that parable to some other parables one of the nice things about parables is that in a certain sense if one is to read them at all; engage in reading them at all, parables demand; require interpretation. They quite literally can t mean what they say, quite literally. And if you notice in many traditions, the attempt to communicate through a parable is the attempt to communicate a truth that, as it were, could not possibly be communicated in another, sort of, more linear form without, as it were, the aid of a story. You may for example notice that Christ in the New Testament uses parables far more often than he uses demonstrative arguments, far more often than he presents position papers, far more often than he testifies before congress, far more often than he gives news conferences. And perhaps it s because the tradition of the parable is one in which the listener is forced to tap into their own autonomy and their own self creation in order to engage the parable at all. So something similar is true, and I think of the parables that and parable as you recall I have droned on and on about Nietzsche s many styles but the parable again is a style that Nietzsche uses to convey a kind of truth; a kind of new way of looking at things without, as it were, the direct communication which I think that he rightly believes views like his cannot receive. And it s not as though and this is why I have been so reluctant throughout to present Nietzsche as a philosopher. I have been equally reluctant I hope you have noticed to present him as a literary figure, which seems to me if I said being presented as a mere philosopher was degrading to be presented as a mere literary figure , especially in a culture like ours today, you know, considering the people who go on book tours, it would be even more degrading. So I don t want to view Nietzsche s text as merely philosophical, or merely literary, but to try to view Nietzsche s text as in some way exemplary and special. And the way that I indicated that early on and I will mention it again now, as I said, in a certain way and I did use this example from philosophy Nietzsche wanted to impossibly play Plato to his own Socrates. To invent himself as such a character that would stand out above the other texts within which his were produced, and this act of self creation also occurs in literary figures, or the attempt is made, and I can think of two examples; Proust and James Joyce, where the attempt is made, certainly, to take the stuff of one s own life and to recreate it in a mythical space that is much larger, as it were, than what someone might call the pathetic embodied ruins of any singular life. Because at one level, all our lives end in a dirty little tragedy in some corner anyway. In some sense. So this in a way is an attempt to write in such a way as to live beyond oneself in an act of self creation, and I think Joyce and Proust are fair comparisons in some regards to Nietzsche in this way. Okay I ended as I said, I was going to say a little more about the Death of God parable, so let me say something first; very flat-footed and ordinary about it. There is a sociological dimension to the Death of God parable. And by that I mean that the Death of God for Nietzsche is a trope, or a metaphor that signals some perhaps still on its way you noticed? If you listened to the parable carefully perhaps still on its way event. One that

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has still it s already happened, but it s still on its way in the sense that it is yet to become understood in all its dimensions; in its fullness. In the same way one might say that a very bright child is a project on the way to something but it s still not fully developed and all the ramifications of what that child will eventually be have not become apparent. So in something like that way, you could begin with the sociological observation that something profound has shifted. Somewhere in the 18th in transformations from say the 14th to the 18th and 19th centuries and Nietzsche being as I say paradigmatically the philosopher of the 20th century, even though he died in 1900, so this event will be the sociological remark is this; Nietzsche certainly isn t the only one to register a profound shift. I have already mentioned Max Weber s account of the disenchantment of the world, and of how the world is becoming secularised, and I think that we don t want to overplay this because we all know that the embodied and impassioned pull of religion is still very important throughout the world. Obviously it becomes important in many places in the world. Weber s point was that religion, when it became one compartment of life. And the best way to understand that in modern society is there are five days when you work, and there is a day where you play, there s a day where you have to do jury duty, a day when you have to vote, and then a day to go to church; and our lives become, as it were, fragmented and compartmentalised into these spheres. As that happened which Weber saw as a process of secularisation as religion became, as it were, shrunken to this one day a week observance, okay. This is sort of regardless of individuals. You could feel like you are doing it every day but it s awfully hard, as I think a rather minor rock n'roll star said It s awfully hard to be a saint in the city ; it s very difficult to be a Christian under those cultural and social conditions. Better than Bruce Springsteen s Saint in the City is Martin Scorsese s brilliant film Mean Streets , where one of the characters has for a hero Saint Francis of Assisi, but what does he do? Well, he runs a little numbers, hangs out with a few minor hoods and tries to get by in the city. And Scorsese wants to highlight for us this process by which this otherwise exemplary character cannot realise himself under those conditions. So sociologically something has changed that has you know, there is something in society, and about society has changed in such fundamental ways that the conditions required for God to live and thrive you know, whatever as I say, if you are just a flat out atheist, this is not going to be helpful because it won t make any sense, but then I find people who are just flat out atheists to be boring. I mean, it s a boring view about anything, I am sorry. It just bores me. So the sociological remark is something really profound has changed in the world; Weber called it the disenchantment of the world , and even though its old fashioned to mention his name now in the New World Order Marx also noticed a profound change from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. And he talked about the way that all fast frozen relations in feudalism, all these fixed systems of thought and enquiry and there were systems of thought and enquiry and world views in the medieval period were being rapidly torn asunder by the new forces of production, and the new developments and technologies under capitalism, which Marx praises in the Manifesto as being in that regard progressive. He says all those ancient feudal ties of blood and all these ancient feudal relations, they had to be mercilessly ripped apart, and then Marx points out correctly; they were mercilessly ripped apart. So in fact the whole tradition of sociology is born from the attempt to understand the transition that was widely felt, not just by intellectuals, but people in their ordinary lives that had occurred between one massive way of producing and organising life and another. One final example of the transition and I am going to take this one from science; is the production of I saw this in a history of astronomy class once the production of a new star map in which for the first time it had retained those round circles, and things we associate with medieval maps; you know, Earth; the Earth was still in the middle and then there were these things that surround it in perfect circles. It had retained all that, and the stars were dotted out in the heavens, but it had no border. In other words now, you know, you look up in the sky and it wasn t just pinholes of light, it had as it were gone beyond that. More stars than that. In fact undecidable in the sense that [too many] to count now, so I am leaving the border off my damn map. This is I am not going to be burned by the church because here is the map, it s just like they want it, but I am not going to put a frame around it; it can t be enframed. And so this change, and I have just tried to invoke it there, but in sociology it s clear that whatever political position you might take regarding this change to what I will call modernity , or modern life is marked in Nietzsche s text at least in part by the parable of The Death of God. By the death of a world in which people could draw meaning from that myth and sets of myths surrounding the holy; surrounding God. Well I tried to leave us last time, you know, in a sense upset, you know, about that and in a position where the search to try to find meaning could have some meaning. And it s now incumbent upon me to try to present something that Nietzsche is very reluctant to present, and that s some positive answer to What should you do for the search for meaning? Well, one of the reasons that he is reluctant to give a didactic positive answer to that question Well, okay, I agree with you Nietzsche, things have changed, God is dead, and we don t know where we are headed, the sky looks like its getting darker but I want to know the answer to this classic question, raised by Saint Paul, Tolstoy and Lenin, namely; What is to be done? . And believe me, I don t consider that a trivial question, and those three people I just named were not trivial human beings; it s a very important question. What is to be done? Well Nietzsche, as I say, being the sort of indirect fellow he was, what he calls a decadent , someone born, as it were, between two worlds between two worlds in the same way perhaps as Socrates, Christ, and others were decadents, in that sense, born between two different worlds. As a decadent he s not going to develop any kind of didactic answer to the question What is to be done? , so it s in that context that I would like to address his myth , if you will, or his thesis of The Eternal Recurrence, which is how he presents himself frequently. For example in a text we will discuss later; Nietzsche s Zarathustra; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he is presented once in that text as the teacher of The Eternal Recurrence , or The Eternal Return . There has always been a kind of scholarly question that philosophers ask and other people who are interested in the reconstruction of his texts and so on, about whether this is a thesis he holds to the way we hold to a cosmological thesis. You know, about will this really happen? kind of question. Well the Eternal Recurrence is for me nothing like that for Nietzsche; it s not a theory about the cosmos. I mean, it s not an astronomical theory; it s not a theory about karma, or about the great wheel of becoming returning back again. I view this myth I am about to, sort of, gloss and explain the challenge of I view it as a challenge to self creation. It is, as it were, a question that Nietzsche poses to you in order to spur on your varying, and I hope various projects of self creation. The basic idea of The Eternal Recurrence is this. Nietzsche wants you to ask yourself this about your own life. What if it were the case that everything that occurred would necessarily occur after a certain span of time again. Let s say in about just to give the myth a little, sort of, pop feel, a little USA Today feeling, let s say at about the year 3000, they round it off, you know, 6000 BC, 3000 AD people who think this talk of

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Christianity isn t important today; you might look at a calendar sometime. Anyway, that 9000 year period, let s say that then the show starts again, and it replays itself not as some of us would wish, with all these new and interesting variants, but everything happens again just as it happened before. In other words, its almost the opposite of that Steven Spielberg nostalgia in Back to the Future when we can go to, you know, the future or the past and change and alter our lives and so on, and do the things we should have done; Peggy Sue got married, there are tonnes of objects in our culture that promise us that we can go back and do things differently, that we can go forward and fix things that are going to happen and so on. Nietzsche asks a horrifying question. Are you leading the kind of life that once its complete, once you are dead, that you would be willing to lead over again and over again and over again and over again, infinitely? Are you leading the life that you could stand to lead again and again and again and again and again? And Nietzsche considers this a horrifying question and an absolutely striking challenge. This is not an ethical theory, you know, it s not a thought experiment in a certain way like some ethical theories present where you go Well let me see, would I do that again, that certain act? No. Are you leading the kind of life, are you the type of person, are you creating, as it were, the persona, the character that you want to play in a drama that will occur over and over and over and over again without any change. And that is for Nietzsche a challenging question to our you know ideas of our own self creation. Because the spectre I wanted to leave you with last time is a spectre familiar in bourgeois society, and it accounts for a lot of job switching, and it accounts for a lot of these misdirections, you know, where you go Well I drive a cab, but I am a writer , like I said last time, you know. The person who dies at 80 Well, I sold tyres well , and so on. The question Nietzsche asks is Do you want to sell them well infinitely , and it doesn t matter whether you were a worker like that or Donald Trump. Do you want to live that glitzy dumb life again and again and again and again and again? So the myth, as it were, The Eternal Recurrence is a challenge to your self creation; to live a life so interestingly, so beautifully, so perfectly lived that you would be willing to say Yes as Nietzsche says to fate. To say I love fate , I love the place where it s put me, I love even my vices , you know, this isn t about going back and fixing that up, no I love even my vices enough to want to repeat the performance that I did this time again and again and again. And of course you can t avoid the, sort of, theatrical nature of this challenge, because it s like the challenge to write about yourself, or to make of yourself a character; like Hamlet. By the way, let me clear up something in an earlier lecture. I loved Mel Gibson s Hamlet, and as a film okay, to clear this point up as a filmed version of Hamlet, it is head and shoulders above the other filmed versions. Because instead of filming a stage play where everyone acts like this you know, how you do in theatre, where you have to emote. In cinema you have action and people have to talk normally and sometimes quietly. Well as a filmed version, Mel Gibson s Hamlet actually is better, in my opinion. But the point about Hamlet is this: Hamlet is an exemplary character because people feel compelled to do what? To act the character again and again and again and again and again. And they are going to be acting it again and again when we have Laserdiscs, and God knows who will play it next. I mean, you know, the next Kyle MacLachlan may play a Hamlet for a version directed by David Lynch [crowd laughter] Where Ophelia is just a tiny little person who comes from a land where the birds sing a pretty song [crowd laughter]. See, we don t know who will play it next, but we know this; that that exemplary character has been played again and again and again, and Nietzsche asks us to ask about our own lives; are we living them in such a way that and by the way, you know, Hamlet does have a few faults. I mean if you have noticed in the play, he has more than one, I think. But he is very interesting. In any case, Nietzsche s question is Is your life of that kind that you would be willing to repeat it over and over again . This question Nietzsche finds horrifying in part because the world has changed in such a way, and among its changes are the every day and I should I have got to mention this tension between Nietzsche and what I call last time the everyday boring, crappy world of the bourgeoisie; we are bought and sold on the marketplace every day. I mean that s where the madman goes, is to the marketplace, to give his news. You had better go to the marketplace to give your news or you won t get heard, right? In any case, in that sort of boring workaday world; at its best boring Dickens tells us what it is at its worst but at its best boring. Under those conditions can you find a way conceivably to live that you would be willing to do again and again and again? And as I said, I think Nietzsche has more in mind here than changing jobs. You don t go Well Nietzsche s right, my God, I have just been in insurance too long [crowd laughter]. It s like that Monty Python sketch, the guy wants to become a lion tamer; he s an accountant. Of course Monty Python; they consider accounting to be an illness, right? [crowd laughter] I mean you go to therapists and doctors to be cured of being an accountant. And so in one skit, this guy says Well I think I ll be a lion tamer ; problem is he doesn t know what a lion is, and so John Cleese shows him a picture of a lion and he says Oh God no! , and he says Well maybe you should take it a step at a time and go into banking next [crowd laughter] Nietzsche s challenge is more than just changing jobs from accounting to banking, to even being the captain of a little skiff for a year say, on your savings or whatever. It s to live a life that is in some sense and I hate to use the word art , because that trivialises it. But in a way to live a life that s like a work of art; like Hamlet in a sense, that you d be willing to play that part again. Yeah I did well enough I want to play it again . And that includes all the things that Nietzsche knows about the pain of life, which I hope I have tried to make clear through some of the examples I have used. Including those moments. Would you be willing to play the part again and again. So the way I have always seen The Eternal Recurrence is not as an ethical theory so much as a challenge to fashion; a life for you that s worth living. Now to understand this you need to see that Nietzsche is using a myth here of The Eternal Recurrence precisely because he s done what I have earlier argued that he does. He has rejected the dogmatic tradition of philosophy where you attempt to answer the question I attempted to answer in my first series of lectures and failed namely, What is the best kind of life for human beings? Nietzsche thinks there is no general answer to that question, but he thinks it s a supremely important question. By general answer , that means there is not one answer that I can find and then I give you the argument and all of you go That s right, that s the best one, we ll all do it . No. This challenge takes place in a different narrative and with a different kind of challenge, and in a way it puts the burden upon the reader the interpreter, as it were to ask the question Well, could I love fate that much? Wherever it s put me and whatever it s put before me, I d be willing to play this drama of self creation that I have already either attempted or escaped from over and over and over again. Now I think that it is a powerful challenge. The more we think about it, the sort of more horrifying it becomes.

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I mean, in a way this is why modernists and by modernists , now I am referring to both texts written by so-called modern writers and modernist cinema , people such as Woody Allen are so freaked out by death, I mean, it s both a perplexing and frightening thing to die. But it s also a kind of nice thing because now the hypochondria is finally over and it s been proven you were right. I mean, Woody both is afraid of death, but then in a way it will justify him because he has been a hypochondriac, you know, all his life and he takes Aspirin and he talks about death in his books about death, and he sees all these Ingmar Bergman movies about death and death death death But part of that is the very fascination with it because when it finally comes then you won t be around to see it Well you thought I was a hypochondriac, I died, and I said I would Well, hardly surprising, but at least you stand justified before that belief. So there s a fascination with that, and then bourgeois culture in general. Sartre once said that if you were going to tell a dying person one thing that would make them happy and I think this is why we build not why there are many reasons why and a lot of them have got to do with valorising capital but one reason why nuclear weapons and the spectre of an apocalypse was so attractive, utopian and fascinating and I mean all that seriously this is a joke because, look, Hollywood made thousands of movies about apocalypses and people Oh, The Missiles of October I want to see that documentary again they almost blew the world up And the giddiness of apocalypse and all these movies is sort of based on a point by Sartre. If you could tell a dying person one thing that would make them happy, it s that everybody else is dying too right now as you die. When you die, you are all going to die together; you are going to have at least that one communal experience under capitalism of all going out at once. And you d go Well, geez, I gotta die, but old Bob down at the office, haha he s not ready [crowd laughter] He s going too, you know [crowd laughter]. So ah, Nietzsche though Nietzsche s challenge is in a way scarier because death won t even stop this; this process of self creation, for Nietzsche. See because you ll just if you do something really badly and die and people forget about it, that won t help because you ll have to do it again and again and again and again and again. Now again, Nietzsche doesn t hold this as a view about the cosmology of the world or that things actually will occur again and again, but if one views you might ask yourself this question: If I viewed my life as a part as a persona and I was trying to create myself in a more conscious way than I am Because in a certain sense we are all trying to create and recreate ourselves all the time. I think that s why lots of people now stay in graduate school until well past their mid life [crowd laughter] So that you can continue and be creating yourself and. you know: Oh well, I am taking anthropology this month and this month I am going to do astronomy . Well this is to give you a patina; a pathetic patina of self creation. It s beneath contempt, but anyway that s another story. Ergh, I am really in a good mood, I don t know why this is all sounding so nasty here; it s supposed to be challenging and life affirming and fun. In any case I don t think that there is I think that the question Nietzsche wants you to ask is this. Engaged in my own self creation, could I do this? And then my point was going to be that we are in fact engaged in acts of self creation with varying degrees of consciousness that that s what we are doing. Nietzsche had the misfortune of being supremely, acutely, perhaps pathologically aware and I mean certainly pathologically aware, in my opinion. I think all the great theorists, philosophers and literary people or practically all of them were delusional in one or another important sense of that word. It s okay. God, what a boring species we would be without people who are delusional; nuts, if you will. It would be really boring. But ah, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his own self creation, and of course that s what comes out in these very hyperbolic styles, in the aphorisms, and when Nietzsche calls himself, you know In one book he gives the title The Whole of the Man and the book has titles like I mean has chapter titles like Why am I so clever? Why do I never make mistakes? You know he responds to himself by saying I have never bothered with questions there are none it s beyond question that I never make mistakes and am very clever . So Nietzsche is acutely, almost insanely aware of his own self creation. A process as I say that we all undergo but under conditions where we are not nearly so aware as Nietzsche was. Ernest Jones, the biographer of Freud and I am not sure this is a compliment about Nietzsche, but Ernest Jones, Freud s biographer once said of Nietzsche says, well Jones did Jones said that Freud said so we don t know if its true or not Jones said that Freud said about Nietzsche that he knew more about himself than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live as someone addicted to self reflection about their own self creation. So it was Freud s judgement that he knew more about himself than anyone who ever lived or was ever likely to live. So what sets the eternal challenge I mean The Eternal Return as a challenge is not just to do the same things you have done, but to be consciously aware the way a creator is of their creation: about yourself, see? With no God to be the creator of you as fallible, finite, and you know, you can always and what an excuse you know, I mean, you actually hear it in the death house sometimes as the last, you know, remark trying to sway the judge: Don t execute me God made me this way, what the heck It s a nice excuse because if you are familiar enough with the Odysseys there is some truth to it of course. If God knew everything; he knew about Charlie Manson long before Charlie Manson did, yet he went ahead and let Charlie do some awful things. If you don t know about that serial killer I know about a lot of them I can t get into certain serial killers in giving lectures in Washington D.C. because to name some of them is libellous no, anyway, that s Let s leave that where it is. In any case, ah, sorry, you can hold for a moment while I get myself together no, I am kidding [laughs] In any case, this challenge to create oneself is a magnificent one and it bears as I say a striking resemblance to artistic creation, however the level of self consciousness involved is perhaps even greater, because when you create a fictional character like Hamlet the artist can, as it were, distance themself from that creation to a certain extent and always has the alibi of saying like actresses and actors do Well, I just created that part . Jodie Foster talking about playing a prostitute when she was twelve Well I just created that part . Well, I bet she did she probably knew how but in any case, an artist can always distance themselves from their work, but if you are Nietzsche s very special kind of artist and your work is yourself your own subjectivity then the split and the distance is much more intimate and narrow, and the creation is your own self creation, then the challenge is extremely risky because if you write a character in a novel or in a play and you don t like the character you can edit it. But if you write a character for yourself in an ongoing way you can t just simply edit it out because it is you your subjectivity that is at issue. So for these and a host of other reasons I think that Nietzsche s challenge concerning The Eternal Recurrence is a fascinating one. Another motto that grows out of this notion of The Eternal Recurrence is Nietzsche s motto that he was in love with fate loved fate the love of fate. Because for Nietzsche there is something all so fateful about where you find yourself you know, I mean, Nietzsche believed that you find yourself, as a matter of fact, growing up in certain communities with certain linguistic possibilities, historical possibilities, social possibilities and so on; about which you have no choice. You know, Heidegger s sort of sort of ergh, yucky way of saying this is that you are thrown into the world .

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Another way to put the same point is, if you have ever seen this game Class Struggle ; a Marxist dice game, you begin by rolling the genetic dice, okay. The high roll If you roll high you get first of all the order in which you get to rolls helps to tell you something. You begin rolling with the whitest male rolling first, then on down to the darker males, then you go down and the last person to roll will be the darkest female in the room and as you roll the genetic dice; they tell you which class you are born into. And so the throw of the dice and you may go Oh that s just silly No! I mean it s the throwing of the genetic dice does put you in certain positions and conditions of life to begin with that you did not choose. And for Nietzsche that s a threat and an opportunity both the flipside of that crisis is an opportunity and that s that whatever you condition, this kind of act of self creation can be undertaken and in fact sometimes spectacularly so when you are thrown into the worst conditions, and I can t help but bring up now my favourite politician in the United States today, and so I can do it this time in a flattering example, and I am sure many of you don t like this politician, a local politician, and that s Jesse Jackson. I think that in many ways Jesse Jackson is an exemplary human being, and in this strong sense, that coming from where he came, to engage in that act of self creation which the media now goes Oh well, you know, he puts on a mask, he plays a part . Well, how long have they been around here? You know? Ho long have they been around the United States? Is that supposed to surprise anybody? No. It s that it s the quality of the performance its how intimately it s knitted in with self and against which obstacles that s given it its drama. And of course, the current sort of derision about the self creation of Jackson that ongoing process the derision about it now doesn t surprise me historically because I was around when Martin Luther King was derided, made fun of. Of course the moment that he was dead then the myth could be closed off, he was safely blanched out into the general culture where now he becomes a figure for McDonalds advertising, and the picture of Martin Luther King, you know, at one time a sort of communist, dangerous, bizarre, scary civil rights leader it s hard to even go back there in history after all this work of social amnesia that s been performed upon us. But now that he s blanched out, safe, secure, in short dead, then the general culture can tell new myths about him, but I can guarantee you this. If and this would be, for me, tragic If anything ever happened to Jesse Jackson, it would be a few years, but then the next thing you know we would have pictures of him he would be whiter than when he was alive this is for me a humorous note. I noted as the years went on how Martin Luther King got whiter and whiter. After his death, I mean. The pictures of him and this is actually noticeable became whiter and whiter. I saw him speak once when I was young and he was an African American you know, very dark; black, you know. And as the photographs of him over the years you know, the ones used by McDonalds there is just a hit of skin tone well, anyway, this long digression is only to give you one of my heroes of self creation today, someone I really admire who is engaged in a phenomenal, not only self creation, but recreation. And through a whole bunch of mistakes, as you know, and accidents and misfortunes and stupidities in order to recreate himself again at another level. And for better or worse, you know, my own feeling, looking at it from the outside, because I don t have his subjectivity, but looking at it from the outside hell, who knows, it might and up being a life worth living twice. The Eternal Return threatens challenges us with the notion to live a life worth living over and over again, not twice. I mean that s the best example I could find today, and that s a life that might be worth living twice. Thinking about the great majority that toil anonymously day in and day out, it s hard to imagine a life worth living even the first time, not to mention twice. So the Eternal Return in Nietzsche; The Eternal Recurrence of everything is supposed to be frightening. Also it is supposed to be a positive moment in Nietzsche. It is a positive challenge to engage consciously and self reflectively in something you do anyway, which is in the constant act of rebuilding your persona; your self. This is not and Nietzsche is far too complex to believe that this is the advice to stop wearing masks and be who you really are. Well, you know, if you check the philology, the philological history of the word persona , you ll see that that s not interesting. And I ll make a comparison here with David Hume the British philosopher, the empiricist. When Hume Goes in search of the self empirically, and he knows as an empiricist that he has to find the I , the self , the subject empirically, he has us do an experiment. We are to look for it, and find ourself in this inner space of our mind; where is the I , the self. And Hume performs this experiment in A Treatise of Human Nature, and there isn t one. You don t know what colour your self is, what weight it is, and so on not your bodily self, but your self that thing that continues through all the changes in your body and hair colour and weight, height, and so on. And Hume, with the rigour that belongs to his thinking goes It s a fiction There is no self, no I , no substantial individual beneath all the surfaces. We ve looked for it, it s not there, it s a custom, a fiction, a habit. It s just habitually, you know, the way we behaved with one another. We have driver s licenses and lawyers to take care of continuity [crowd laughter]. There isn t such a thing; it s a convention, a habit, and so on. Well so that people wear masks is not only interesting, its interesting because beneath the masks there isn t something called the self , so that makes one become concerned in Nietzsche s way that the various masks, shapes and forms that one does wear and choose in order to become what one is to use Nietzsche s phrase In order to become what one is is not to become an authentic self, but to become the best and most interesting self that you can create. And in that sense it does not belong to the dogmatic tradition of philosophy, because God knows what variety of selves would be created if people had the opportunity and the vision and the will and imagination to create themselves in this radically self conscious way that Nietzsche challenges us to do in his myth of The Eternal Return [applause]. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 6: The Will to Power http://rickroderick.org/206-nietzsche-the-will-to-power-1991/ I d like to wrap up my remarks about self creation, self invention, and the challenge of The Eternal Recurrence by saying that we need to remember that this has to do that this has to do with what I mentioned later in the lecture: the love of fate. Loving the place you have found yourself in history. And sometimes that s a difficult thing to do, and for me that s a quite personal remark that has to do with my own self invention. To try to love the place I have found myself in history, like many other people now is I find that difficult. Nietzsche on the other hand thought it might be difficult, but it was a challenge that we should attempt to meet. In this next set of remarks I d like to address The Will to Power, and of course that gives me a chance to address something that I probably should have talked about in the opening lecture because in a set of lectures on Nietzsche in which we want to reach an audience a very wide audience we need to dispel some of the myths about Nietzsche s text and concerning Nietzsche, and one of the most prevalent and certainly it s a widespread myth, you can find it in many places is the myth of well I want to first say it s a myth and then to argue the danger and risk in Nietzsche s text that because I use myth in a strong sense that allows it to be possible.

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I wanted to discuss just for a moment the relation of Nietzsche s work to Fascism, and the reason I want to do that is because the first, sort of, Americanised reception of Nietzsche involved the use of Nietzsche s text for propaganda purposes by various National Socialist Party hacks. Unfortunately it belongs to the nature of propaganda; even by the good guys, who counter propaganda as if we knew who the good guys were, after all the events that have occurred. I mean, this isn t going to turn out to be a defence of the Fascists or anything, it s not. I hope it doesn t turn out to be a defence of any parties. I wish them all equal luck. In the words of Nietzsche, Whatever is shaky should be pushed over . If something is shaky on a shaky foundation, his advice is to push it over. If it s not on a shaky foundation then when you push, it will stay there and it will be okay. If it s on a shaky foundation, push it over. In any case, ah, the counter-propaganda also involved Nietzsche and the British in their efforts to combat Nazi propaganda also participated in just like the Nazi s were valorising certain remarks of Nietzsche s. Then the British were at the same time demonizing those remarks and that couldn t help but effect the reception of his work in England. And since in the United States I may have earlier remarked we are so in love with British intellectuals, we know they couldn t be wrong about anything; just because of their damn accent. You use that accent and American academics begin to swoon and, you know, they go into almost orgasmic reactions to what is being said. We knew that this British reception of Nietzsche must mean that he s you know, like, the philosopher of Fascism. Well, there are elements in Nietzsche s text that open up onto the risk of a hideous new project in which against the technological world we try to reinvigorate it through blood, steel and a new human being the famous overman which I will discuss when I will discuss the text of Zarathustra that such a, sort of, clever interpretation could then be used for propaganda purposes is clear; it was. Clearly it could be used that way. I don t think that to be fair to the text of Nietzsche that this use is one that can in any sense be authorised under older, fairer standards of interpretation however I should say that those are the very standards that Nietzsche himself had attacked: older, fairer standards of interpretation. But by those hermeneutic standards of interpretation the older, fairer ones it would be fair to point out that Nietzsche always viewed himself as a good European, rather than a good German. He just laid tonnes upon tonnes of abuse upon those narrow nationalists who were good Germans and always talked about the Teutonic forests. Once Nietzsche said Well, back to the forests with them then , you know They are just boring the hell out of me, I hope they go live in a forest Sort of the way I feel about a lot of the rhetoric in the United States on the right today, sort of, Oh, it s so good go from coast to shining coast and Bangor to shining Maine, or whatever the hell you want to do. But ah, no, Nietzsche just scorned this German nationalism. It s hard to imagine that someone so sensitive that the event that finally, as it were, tripped Nietzsche off into madness another topic we will talk about in the lectures that remain the event that finally tripped him into madness was someone beating a horse with a whip. Someone that sensitive; with that sensitive a nature, in a certain way, it s hard to imagine would have done well had he lived long enough as a great propagandist for that gang of petty bourgeois thugs that took over Germany and became the Nazi Party, so I think that that was a dangerous misunderstanding of the text of Nietzsche. However and this is the admission that I think is necessary to show the risk of the text however, once you have introduced processes of radical self creation and redirection left the wide open and then argued for the strongest possible misinterpretations, you know, the ones that are the most creative and interesting and new, clearly you ve opened yourself up to possibilities of violence, death, madness, and many other things as well. Well that s the admission on the one hand, not that it needs to be admitted. We live in the 20th century, one of the most perhaps the most barbaric century in the history of the world. I mean, if there was a central fact to our century it would be murder: the killing of a people by their people. So to take before the bar this one rather literate, cosmopolitan, quiet little man who wrote these rather exciting texts as some causative factor in that much larger process, I think is overkill of a very high order. In any case, his text does open onto the danger of fascism, but as I said, that for me is not an objection because dangerous and insane risks are taken in his text in other directions as well. And that many texts have risks, many interesting texts, many interesting bodies of work have risks and many uses. The standard though americanised pop line that Nietzsche was for the Germans superman and blond beast is just simple minded. So that s not a criticism, it doesn t mean there aren t lines in his work that are like that, but its simple minded, and that should be enough to move slightly past that. It s a simple minded way to look at Nietzsche. Far too simple minded. And that s not as I say to get out of the trap that Nietzsche s text is full of risks. However, an odd thing has happened, and in the return of Nietzsche in our own time is that well at one time he was used for ideological purposes in the National Socialists and the movement of Fascism, according to Bloom and other paleo-conservatives in the current period, the return of Nietzsche in the sixties, and then what I might call his rereturn in the 80 s and 90 s has been scandalously anarchistic left wing Nietzsche, so obviously this is a text that can produce many differential political effects because the Nietzsche denounced by Bloom is the person who argues for strong multiple interpretations for recreating, you know, canons and destroying older canons of knowledge. The Nietzsche that said if things are shaky, push them over that Nietzsche. So, you know, it s hard if one wants to place simple moral blame upon a body of text to go Well Nietzsche was responsible for Fascism, and damnit now he s responsible for its opposite number, Anarchism. Why wasn t he just a damn good Liberal like John Stuart Mill? Well, he thought Mill was a blockhead. [crowd laughter] You know, Why wasn t he just a middle of the roader? you know, the current politics that seems to dominate today: a middle of the roader, mainstream. Well to quote my friend Hightower from Texas there s nothing in the middle of the road where I come from except yellow lines and squashed armadillos. [crowd laughter]. And so I am glad that Nietzsche s text isn t in the middle of the road and it does allow for multiple political uses, and some of those I want to talk about now in terms of The Will to Power. And I am going to have to return in order to do that to my discussions of genealogies. Before I do I want to leave one more note on Jesse Jackson in the lecture I am not his campaign manager it s just an interesting example, but I have been asked, you know, if he has this real courage of self creation, why doesn t he run for a real job like mayor. That would show real courage. Well my view of that and I don t know if it was Nietzsche s, and I don t care my view of that is it doesn t take real courage to be a mayor, a governor, a senator, a president, real courage to be the head of a bureaucracy, real courage to be the president of IBM, but it does take real courage as you know if you live in the Washington D.C. area to sleep under the bridges at night. It takes a lot more courage. So I am not sure that running for mayor is something that we should particularly valorise as an act of courage. I mean, in a certain way it takes far more courage to

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be a pimp than a politician, even though in many other respects the jobs are similar. [crowd laughter] Enough of that for now we ll return to that later. The Will to Power. Well first let me say that The Will to Power is the name of a text by of Nietzsche s I shouldn t say by, because The Will to Power was pieced together in a way that makes us suspect the text itself by his sister. And I have already, you know, denounced his sister somewhat for dressing him up, for marrying one of these good Germans, and for the uses she made of her brother s persona after he lost his mind. Well, she was one of the editors that helped compile these fragments; The Will to Power . Since then however, Kauffman and others have worked upon this compilation, but by now its almost useless to go back and pretend there is no such text because, as in the case of a much shorter text, namely the fragment I discussed which was I have forgotten my umbrella , which has now become a text of Nietzsche s through this radical process of interpretation. So now too is The Will to Power , a much larger and more complex text become a text of Nietzsche s, even though he never compiled it in that way or put it together in that way. The Will to Power is in fact I am not sorry that it did because The Will to Power contains a host of suggestive, fascinating and interesting views, among which is Nietzsche s famous view of power that I will be discussing. It s impossible to discuss it however without connecting it in some way to the process of genealogy that we discussed when we talked about The Genealogy of Morals . Because one of the things that genealogy was supposed to do is to show us that, as it were, what shapes discursive practices and actual human practises are certain relations of power which create the conditions for the possibility of certain sentences being written and certain practices being carried out then calls for an account of what those relations of power are like. And in The Will to Power, Nietzsche gives us an account of force , as it were, or power that is very interesting. For Nietzsche, power won t be the simple power of domination of one self over another, and the reason it can t be that linear self over another self kind of power is because as you may have guessed already for Nietzsche, as for Hume in a certain way, there is no essential self. There are only, as it were, a kind of multitude of personas that when a life is well lived will have the coherence of a character. In fact isn t that what we say about someone we know who is rather advanced in years and we want to valorise them we say Oh God, Old Bob or Aunt Sue was really a character . When you say that you have said something Nietzschean about them. They have put together those various selves in a way that makes them really a character, and that s not a bad thing to say. Well anyway, the reason that these that for Nietzsche that power cannot be simply power of one person over another; can t be that simple is because selves aren t that simple. And also because power is not just, as it were, horizontally applied in models that we might think of like the Marxist theory of exploitation or other theories of power how power isn t just applied as it were across the horizon of the social body by that I mean by that rather wild phrase I mean it s not as though power is applied merely to the external manifestations that break the rules of the current existing order. Power, as it were, is also applied vertically across the intensity and within the subjectivities of people. One way of putting this is that in some sense we internalise relations of power within ourselves that allow many of the external relations to function. Now to give a West Texas example of that is that each one of us has to have a little cop inside us little tiny policeman inside that keeps us from stealing, because there aren t enough cops on the outside to keep us from doing it. And yet there are many things we want that we don t have the money for, and under conditions where we carry out our will and valorise ourselves, we might otherwise take them. And given the rate at which people who steal things are caught, which means much less frequently than you will be caught at work trying to take a long break, you know, kind of makes it rational to want to steal certain things easier to do than getting by with laying off work for a while. Under those conditions it becomes clear that power also is in a sense an intensity within. Something that you bring against your own self project in a way that has been characterised by certain French theorists as micrological power or sets and effects of power rather than macrological power . So if I talk to you about the police, or the state, or the even in Marx s sense of the power of the marketplace, these are macrological views of power and Nietzsche provides us with a micrological view and that micrological view has to do with tiny interstices of overlapping effects; very difficult to characterise, very subtle effects of power. Almost unnoticeable, in fact, they sometimes pass not for power at all this is what a genealogical analysis is supposed to show sometimes they don t pass for relations of power at all, but rather for things like a good conscience, or a clear mind, or fair rules, or even fairness itself. Those discourses, as self evident as they seem to us today, are also structured by power. And I think that to make Nietzsche s analysis of power come alive for us now, rather than a, sort of, long account of it, I ll give a little bit more of the, sort of, theoretical complexity of it, then I ll give a real example to give the argument real bite, okay? So let me give a little more of the theoretical version of it. For Nietzsche, power is always in some sense relational. It s not as though power is a thing we can find in the world, but it is always a complex relational set of intervening and interacting effects. It s not always the best question to ask What are the causes? In some cases it might even be although it sounds oxymoronic it might be best to say quasi-metaphorically, or maybe metaphorically, that power sometimes gives off effects where we have what amounts to an absent cause. In other words, what the analysis really should look at are the effects and bracket out what might otherwise in a normal analysis might be called the cause . Instead these multiple effects, these relational effects, and to use some more terminology which isn t French; it s modern American Lit. Crit. [Literary Criticism] terminology. These overlapping economies of power; of influence, of persuasion, of control these micrological ones are not subject, as I say, to simple linear analysis in any one of the various modes that we might be used to. You know, analyses of in particular ordinary analyses of political power. Let me see if I can cash this in with what I think is a very interesting example and at least I hope it s a good example. And it should lead to the next thing I want to discuss, which is Nietzsche s view of history. I am going now to refer to Michel Foucault s brilliant work Discipline and Punish and if you haven t read it, please read it because it is a strange artefact and it would not be possible without the influence of Nietzsche and to discuss Foucault s Discipline and Punish will have us enter the terrain of the politics of reading Nietzsche, which I want to get onto now, which as I said might be a banal topic but it s one I enjoy, so what hell, I am going to talk about it some. But Michel Foucault is someone who has made great and systematic use of parts of Nietzsche: the genealogical method, and Nietzsche s sensitivity to these micrological relations of power. Now for me the best work by Foucault, as I said, is Discipline and Punish , and in that book what Foucault is interested in is to do a genealogy of the forms of punishment and how they changed if they did change and in what ways they changed between this period I have characterised as

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feudal to this period I have characterised as modern . So Foucault starts his book with older forms of discipline and punishment. In fact the first section is on The Spectacle of the Scaffold and it begins with as gory a description as one could wish of an execution in France. Huge audience bring out this guy I am just going to gloss it; don t want to read all that stuff; it ll turn this damn thing into a horror movie! Anyway, you had this huge audience for this execution, you bring out the guy, he s drawn, quartered, molten lead poured into here, horses pull on him, the crowd is in an uproar, screams tortured pull, pull, pull, finally they drag him up and a Prelate of the church comes up the man still can speak, you know, and he confesses that he has done wrong and courageously states that now he has paid his price; his honour to God. And then they burn him, you know, after using sulphur and so on. Well, you read this section in Foucault and you recoil in horror from those old feudal relations and how barbaric they were. And Foucault does his best to make it come alive for you: the conditions of possibility for those practices; the arbitrary rule of kings, you know, the necessity to give the crowd its spectacles, its festivals of atonement. It s important that the criminal declare; atone in a spectacular public way his crime. Well toward the end of this long and rather barbaric chapter in feudalism in this, sort of, feudal setting Foucault begins to mention how the spectacle of the scaffold begins to die away, under a rather strange condition of reversal. I hope this will make Nietzsche s genealogical example clearer too, as I use the Foucault example. The Spectacle of the Scaffold begins to die away, and one of the reasons Foucault suggests for this is that who turns out to be the hero of the spectacle? The legislator or prince who condemned the man? The Prelate who forgave him? Or the suffering, wounded, courageous body of the victim? Imagine the crowds and, you know, who they will eventually begin to pull for, as it were. Well, the insinuation by Foucault is that this form of exercising power across the social body begins to undermine itself through a strange reversal where the victim being slaughtered becomes, as it were, the centre, the important focal point of the ceremony and begins to win the sympathy of the crowd. And of course that s not the idea of disciplining and punishing in that period or this one. Hardly the idea, right, for the punished party to be the star of the show. Now you may say Well, we have gone back to that in a way because there s one sure way to get a miniseries; and that s to be a serial killer That s true under conditions that I will describe before the end of this lecture as post-modern, but right now we are going from feudal to modern. Under post-modern conditions things have grown so bizarre that I am not sure how I will use Nietzsche to help analyse them. But in any case I want to go from this feudal Spectacle of the Scaffold to the modern methods of discipline and punish. The horror, sort of, evoked in us by what Foucault does there is the horror simply at a past form of life and the way they punished people. Now of course what happens after that are these great prison reforms in the 18th and 19th century. Utilitarians for example, like Bentham, were very involved in prison reform and in ending this scaffold business and these public spectacles. No they wanted clean I mean, they had programs like Bush s clean new prisons, that were sort of humane, but enough of them. So Bentham and Foucault makes brilliant use of this. Bentham the great Utilitarian interestingly enough also came up with a great architectural design called a Panopticon, and it was a building where from the, sort of, the top of the building I wish I had a drawing of it here for you but from the top of the building you can kinda see everything that goes on down through it. And each one of the cells facing in on them where the prisoners are have the peculiar characteristic that you are isolated so that you cannot, you know, see the other people, but as the guards walk through in surveillance they can see you quite easily and this was very important for the device itself. This is the surveillance aspect of modern power, and this is quite micrological. To give you an ordinary example of how modern power works in that way: you may be a perfectly honest citizen and a straightforward person, but when you walk into a department store frequently you are being filmed and watched. And it s so ordinary, so micrological, so beneath the surface of your consciousness and everyday affects that you don t think about it but you are being filmed and watched and surveilled, as you walk through the mall, as you walk through a department store or as you drive through the city. You know, the sort of omnipresent helicopter, you know [laughs] It s not a paranoid delusion, you see them all the time, it s just that you forget because of their ubiquity. Power is like that, you see. Ubiquitously running here and there, it becomes easier to forget what structures our own power. Because it s easy to remember about the past how barbaric it was and sort of distance ourself from it. Well, anyway, Bentham s Panopticon was as Foucault argues a principle and not merely a building; the general principle of surveillance, and it s been crucially important for the shift to our new forms of discipline and new forms of punishment. Bentham brilliantly shows that its no mere building by arguing: oh by the way, this same design for this Panopticon building would be absolutely appropriate for schools, workhouses, and many other socially utilisable you know socially utilitarian benefits. By that I mean schools could be built this way, right? So all the students were working and you could see them and they can t see you easily and so the principal could be at the top and looking down upon the thing. Bentham thought What a wonderful device! This Panopticon, this sort of one way visual presentation of all the surveilled people. And again to return to my example, you never get to see the face do you of the person behind the one way glass in Macy s who is doing the filming of you as you walk up and down the aisle? Hell, who even notices anymore, right? You don t even notice, you know hell. I mean, shouldn t it be outrageous, you know to, sort of, this earlier generation of Americans: What the hell are you doing filming me, I don t steal, I am an honest, you know, God fearing, taxpaying American, I don t want to be on your damn films; surveilled, watched, filed, numbered. I don t want that. But the ubiquity of this kind of surveillance is just obvious. Also, you know, we have now found out that the telephone quite a strange instrument to pick up, because God knows who is listening and recording what you are saying. And now the possibility for multiple interpretations reinstitutes itself at a much higher level because you may in fact say on the phone I have forgotten my umbrella it might click off some strange computer by some strange government agency saying Ah this person is one of those weird interpreters of Nietzsche And you may only be telling your Aunt Susan that you forgot your umbrella and you are already in a huge bank of information, preinterpeted in some basement in the city where they are going over it, providing analyses to companies and agencies that provide the analyses and so on Power micrological like this very well may be beneath the level of every day life. By that I mean in every day life we may just walk past it. I mean I know I do for sure, you know, in a department store, you know sometimes I stop and wave at the little guy. And sometimes when I hear a click on the phone I stop and go Oh I am sorry you have this job of listening to all these boring You know, have you ever commiserated with the surveiller? You just go I am so sorry, you don t have anything to do but to listen and open my mail and listen to all these phone calls. If you ever get lonely, please call and lets talk [crowd laughter] This is a nice strategy to adopt, but anyway.

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So the power of Foucault s argument is that is supposed to be to show that what has happened is not that we have gone from one thing that appears to us to our sensitive liberal utilitarian instincts as barbaric to something less barbaric, but to a new mode of discipline and punishment and surveillance which is itself an incredible effect of the expansion of power not of its contraction across many areas of life across many areas of life. The, sort of, Spectacle of the Scaffold is over, but we still execute people. We just do it behind wall after wall of secrecy, you know wall after wall of secrecy. They are still executed, but it just happens in a space where we in principle can t look. Now I know that people have run for, say, the Governor of Texas and argued that we should put these things on TV, you know: Hell, if we can execute em, show it on TV , and ah, you know, it didn t work out as an idea and he lost the election. I think if he had sold it to the networks first and then tried it as a political idea [crowd laughter] he would have had something, but he didn t try that. Well the serious point being made here by Foucault is not that that old barbaric power of the past has been broken and liberal democracy has won everywhere No it s that power has shifted, it has expanded in its intensity and precisely by becoming even more hidden, micrological, everyday in a certain way seeping in every day it has become, as it were, sort of, totalising; territorialising if you like more and more of our lives, in subtle but profound ways. So I guess that I wanted to use that example in particular because now we begin to wonder about even Foucault s analysis; if it isn t a bit old fashioned and we are not in yet another space. Because Foucault is still to my mind at least somewhere on the borderline between a modern account of power and one that I would characterise as post-modern ; or after the modern. And it s going to be difficult for me to characterise that in spite of the title of these lectures which is Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition . Because no-one yet knows what the post-modern condition is because it is not a condition we are in yet, it is a trajectory. As Nietzsche said of The Death of God It is perhaps an event on its way . I wanted to use Foucault s example ah, the example of Foucault however to try to show you what genealogies do; how they reverse our perception. So in the case of the feudal period they show us the reversal that occurs on the scaffold, when all of a sudden the person you are tearing apart becomes the hero. And that s if not surprising, sort of, you know, when you see through their courage and stamina they become the hero of the spectacle, the spectacle begins to disappear, we don t that guy can t be the hero you know. Well similarly, the stories we tell ourselves about our institutions now, our, sort of, institutions under modern liberal democratic societies democratic societies the stories we tell ourselves; that they are based on legitimacy, consensus, and so on. And Foucault warns us that that may be the discourse within which we discuss, but what makes that discourse possible are the micrological powers of discipline, punishment and surveillance that undergird that liberal discourse. And again, as in the case where Nietzsche quotes Saint Thomas, one could hardly quote a better source than Bentham who was a social engineer and reformer in the tradition of, you know, many others we have encountered since and you know, this panopticon device to show that the reversed look at this discourse of democracy and so on shows that beneath it are these micrological effects of power. And I would like to say about them that they are differential and highly complex. I mean, I don t know if the Foucault example is enough, one might have to do more still to make this come alive. Let me see if I can find another way to do this. Well let s take for example a situation where it seems as though the only force that s being recognised is the force of the better argument. Namely, a university setting. That s one I am familiar with, so we ll take that as an example. Argument within that setting seems to proceed free of power. Knowledge seems to be used in a way that is interest free. That s the ideal of research, in a way; interest free knowledge. Knowledge free of the effects of power. If Nietzsche is right about power; wherever there is knowledge, it will be an effect of power. That will not mean it s not knowledge, folks! In other words, understanding that knowledge is an effect of certain power won t mean that it isn t what? Really knowledge yes it will be but it will be to see, as it were, the other side. It will be a reversal; it will be to see that that knowledge effect is itself an effect of certain relations of power. Now, in our case of the university, the institutional powers are quite subtle. In other words, it s very rare that especially at a university, and this is more common in high school where you can simply take unruly students and throw them out into the streets. In university you don t get that opportunity quite so often; that s really just an opportunity to take a student you don t like and say Get the hell out of here, don t come back But there are other ways, and they may seem childish, but sometimes power is childish. Another way to discipline; one of my favourite, is grading [crowd laughter], and it starts very early in our lives. Our first system is highly complex and structured. If you want an account of structuralism, this is an interesting one. In kindergarten, the way we, sort of, discipline our kids they do their rose and it s really red and they stay in the lines they get a happy face, you know. If he gets a little out of the lines, they just, sort of straight face. If they really just draw all over the thing and chaotic Nietzschean wildness: they get a sad face. They don t turn in the work at all; they don t get a face: no face. And I noticed as you go throughout school that this same topography of discipline continues. In elite universities we still go A , and the fact that we substituted a happy face for that letter doesn t mean the message is different. In other words, they have been socialisation; power has already instructed that that A is a happy face. And you get an A, and you see a happy face: A ; happy face. B , and guess what you get? C and if you for God s sakes, in an elite university if you flunk somebody, you won t see their face. You may get a letter from their attorney, but you won t see their face [crowd laughter], okay. My point here is that the structural disciplinary way that that s done believe me if you are grading in the humanities, the difference between a brilliant paper on Plato and one that s completely insane is not an easy distinction. If you think it is, you don t teach that. I mean I admit that in maths courses, you know, there we can let a, sort of, traditional view to hold sway for a moment, but when you are grading a paper on Plato for God s sakes or Shakespeare or Proust, it s hard to know the difference between brilliant insight and a piece of garbled lunacy [crowd laughter] And this is exactly to return to my political moment this is exactly the problem we have when we listen to many of our current official leaders speak. We don t know whether this is really a piece of powerful political rhetoric or a garbled line from a David Lynch film. [crowd laughter]. You know, sometimes I expect to see one of the currently elected high executive officials just to walk around going in the land they come from, the birds sing a pretty song, and stuff like that weird David Lynch hell, we don t know, it might even be an act of political genius for at least one person I have in mind here to do something like that. You know, to free him of his image or whatever.

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In any case, what I am after here is a topography, a very subtle form of power, because it looks as though my power to give that grade is my power. But what happens if I decide I am not going to play that game any more, and I am just going to give all my students A s that complete the work, and otherwise F . I am not going to do this gradation, this topography any more. I can t. I tested that one empirically; they won t let me do it. No, you have to have a spread. Now here is the interesting part about power today: they don t tell you what the spread is exactly. Because micrologically, they are disappointed that you haven t been, as it were, already conditioned to know that. So they are sort of disappointed in you that you didn t realise all along that you needed that spread. Just like if you opened a Macy s that you happened to be the manager of and didn t get that camera installed. Your supervisor would go Well I thought you knew we always use cameras You know, you are a pretty nice fella, but we always use them We don t want to interfere with our customers, no But we always use these cameras, it s for the good of the rest of the customers, because if there is a lot of shoplifting, the prices will go up Of course, that would be an act of God, no human will actually raise them. That s economics; no humans do it. They are sort of the only acts left of a dying God; economic acts. But anyway, these forms of power that Nietzsche sets our sights on in the book The Will to Power shows power in quite a different light than normal political theory because these are situations within which power and knowledge and principle are intermingled. For example, when I earlier said there was you know, paradoxically Nietzsche argues there is an immoral origin to morality paradoxically there is rational knowledge itself has its origins in relations of power which themselves in my view cannot be rationally defended. That is, their origin does not mean that what they produce again, to make this point again so you don t take a simple minded mistake out of here that doesn t mean it isn t real knowledge. The universities and many other things; research institutes and all produce real knowledge; what we today call knowledge anyway. I call it information I ll return to that later I don t want to call it knowledge, I want to call it information. But the conditions under which they are produced are these subtle conditions of power. Grading is one example. Grading is just one example; it s one of my favourites though because its one of the times in life when you see what an incredible effect you can have by making a happy face. You could make someone happy by just I mean someone is bound to say Of course you do, because those grades depend upon what they do later in life in their jobs Well that just feeds back into my earlier argument: of course, because the rest of your whole stinking life you are going to be looking for a happy face from someone, you know. Eight years in the law firm and you are looking at all the old lawyers that forgot all the law they knew twenty years ago, and you are waiting for one of those S.O.B s or whatever to give you another happy face. Well the challenge of Nietzsche the sort of left Nietzsche that I want to evoke is to at least be aware of these intersties of power. To at least be aware of them, and be willing to challenge their boundaries, because it is not a pretty life to always be in search of a happy face, and it is not for your own good. For God s sakes, remember when your father my father used to spank me and the first thing he would tell me is the same thing they would tell me at school I am going to do this for your own good And I always wanted to say Well damnit, why don t you spank yourself then, because you could spare me the favour. If its for good, do it to you, I love you dad, and if its for good, do it to yourself because we want you to have the good [crowd laughter] Don t do it for my own good, don t do me any favours here , Oh well we don t think you ll work out with our firm; it s for your own good Oh well thanks anyway, but I ll sacrifice for you [crowd laughter] you know Modern power presents itself as what I would like to call and I mean this especially where its least obvious we know what modern power has looked like in the East Bloc and in the Soviet Union and it was no surprise to anyone they were totalitarian. What I would like for us to recognise is that we are totalitarians as well. It s a horrible but until we see it we won t have a chance to be really radically democratic, ever. I mean, okay, a little biblical scholarship here Easy to find the mote in your brother s eye, difficult to see to one in your own very difficult. So this account of power reminds us that the totalitarian is not the other , sometimes we meet the enemy and it s us. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 7: Nietzsche as Artist http://rickroderick.org/207-nietzsche-as-artist-1991/ In this lecture I d like to discuss Nietzsche as artist, and also I don t know if it s on what we might call the course syllabus, but Nietzsche and his political uses, and the two are deeply interconnected. I have said that I don t want to treat Nietzsche as a mere literary figure, and when I say Nietzsche as Artist , I have in mind this strong project of self creation, which is to make one s own life a work of art. A very difficult thing is to sculpt oneself; it s much easier to sculpt in stone than to sculpt in that invisible mysterious material of the self. So Nietzsche as artist is a complex figure; and Nietzsche as that complex figure has had complex and multiple uses within social and political discourse and I suggested one last time, when I discussed the work of Foucault and also I tried to indicate how Nietzsche s view of power as micrological as in a sense horizontal, cutting deeply into what used to be referred to as subjectivity but which today would be referred to more accurately as the terrain of advertising. That account I tried to make clear last time, and I wanted one last example there before moving on, and I think that this one may have some political edge to it as well, and it has to do with the description whether we accept in a certain way the descriptions that are offered to us by a culture that I have now begun or I will now begin to characterise as post-modern; or at least as a trajectory towards a culture that is postmodern. I mean a pure postmodern culture is for me a strange and bizarre and unthinkable thing because it would have completely effaced subjects. So the subject of subjectivity would have dropped out, as well as the subject of things like Nietzsche would have dropped out as anything other than as , say, the labels for beer advertisements or whatever. So we don t have a pure postmodern culture in any respect now, we have one between modernism and postmodernism. We are in what Gramsci called An interregnum about which he used as a word to describe periods in history where things are changing rapidly and people don t know what s going on exactly. And I think that s the kind of period we are in now. And about interregnums, Gramsci said in them many morbid symptoms appear, and so it may be that Nietzsche here could help us as a symptomotologist of some of our more modern, sort of, morbid symptoms. One of them that I d like to mention has to do with psychoanalysis and therapy, since it s well known that Nietzsche has been praised as a great forerunner of psychoanalysis. The original project of psychoanalysis according to Freud was that the Id; or the It , unconscious, unreflected parts of ourselves become reflected parts become the I ; the ego. That was Freud s project for psychoanalysis. Well since Freud, I think we can understand that we are in what is now a mass culture which is thoroughly commodified. The role of that culture is what might be characterised and has been characterised by the

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Frankfurt School as psychoanalysis in reverse. Namely that the parts of us that are reflected self consciously creating become unconscious. Just, sort of, psychoanalysis in reverse gear. That the moments of lucidity and clarity we thought we had about ourselves are now to be filled in with stories that we pick up largely from the mass culture. Therapy now belongs for me at least to that terrain, and I have in mind all the various programs, projects, self help books, 12 step plans, 10 step plans, fad diets, happy books, how to find your true self books, and so on. And I d like to compare Nietzsche here with another theorist about whom I have a very high regard, and that s Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard s account of the self is in interesting ways like Nietzsche s, although more desperate in some respects. He may even be a more radical thinker. We may have to do a course on Kierkegaard eventually. But for Kierkegaard and I think this might be true for Nietzsche as well, given his view of the self the search for an authentic self is doomed, in a sense, to fail. Because the self is these correlation of selves and narratives and stories that, as it were, have to have a, sort of, origin from the creating aspect of you, rather than to be simply picked up as narratives from the mass culture. So if you finished a twelve step plan devised by one of the Lumpen intelligentsia, and by the time you reach the end of it you go Oh now I finally know who I am , you are deep, deep doo-doo, because what you have precisely lost according to someone like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard is yourself to the extent that it was even a constructed and interesting self. There is a simple Kierkegaardian reason why these pop therapies will not work. They cannot cure despair, because the self is a relation that relates itself to its own self in despair. The self to the extent that it is at all is a despairing relation, a deferred despairing relation. Now, Nietzsche puts a happy twist on that, it s a deferred well, not happy, he s not happy about anything he puts a twist on it that the self is a risky relation to itself. But my God, you can t be cured of what it is you are, and the person doing the curing isn t cured of it. I mean, you don t get cured of what it is that constitutes, because if you got cured of that it would simply mean you don t have that any longer. The threat of a postmodern culture is not to have that deferring relation despairing relation at all, but simply some bland banal smile at the end of a ten point program and a nice three minute anecdote for Phil Donahue or Sally Jessy Raphael. A culture that picks its meanings up in that way is beneath contempt, and beneath the level of civilisation, I might add. Sorry, in my view it is. It s beneath contempt. You cannot be cured of that despairing relation which constitutes what subjectivity is without being cured of something far more important, namely that very project risky, dangerous, tricky project of subjectivity. So if you are out there looking for ten, twelve point plans, diets that will make you happy, exercise until you drop and cannot think, whatever. Whatever various things the culture is offering in that regard, remember that its the very object of this mass commodified culture is psychoanalysis in reverse; to give you some other story about your self than the stories you are developing. Now, that if you think you are mad, see, that may not be much comfort. You know, I am mad, I need help, I am insane, happy Well, sorry. Actually madness becomes at this point, I think in a culture like ours maybe we should return to a, sort of, feudal view of madness. In the feudal period the mad were looked upon as having brilliant insights of wisdom, because they would say things that were outside the bounds of normal talk. And their sayings as you may know, and this was true even in Greece their sayings were frequently considered to be profound and absolutely worth your attention. And it wasn t until Freud that we again began to pay attention to these mad ramblings and interpret them as though they might contain something worth understanding. Something worth understanding. So there are far worse things than being mad, and one of them to be in a culture that is mad and to consider yourself sane. That s worse. To be involved in a consensual hallucination of normalcy is much worse than being mad. So maybe I would like to valorise madness in this way. I mean, in the plays of Shakespeare, which I will now briefly discuss, because I didn t mean to imply ever that I didn t enjoy them. Has anyone ever noticed how frequently Shakespeare makes use of the fool, to deliver the wisdom? Dialectically and brilliantly Shakespeare will have the fool, sort of, skip onto the stage and deliver the wisdom. Even in Hamlet, the gravedigger who plays the fool in Hamlet is dead see, Hamlet is a dark play Yorick is the king s jester; he s dead already, but the gravedigger does a nice stand in for him in the scene. He delivers some of the real wisdom of the play. Throughout Shakespeare we have these fools, madmen, jugglers, jesters, clowns, delivering the real wisdom of the play. And it s perverse to see a culture that then takes some of this Shakespearean wisdom, you know whatever from the canon and sort of perverts it. I mean, I remember studying Shakespeare, and they gave me this quote to remember from Polonius, you know To thine own self be true this could be the first line of every twelve step plan or therapy: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man . Of course, in the context of the play, you realise that Polonius is a bureaucrat, a politician, a windbag, a blowhard, shallow, stupid in his wisdom, is as I said earlier just exactly the banality of a common mind, but yet at grade school we teach this. See how smart Shakespeare was? He was smart enough to show that that wasn t wisdom that kind of commonplace crap wasn t wisdom he was that smart, and more. Well anyway, Nietzsche in search of other self descriptions, and in search of new myths to replace the dying old ones, myths that we could, as it were, participate in and perhaps enjoy and enhance lives, rather than, you know, in the case of many of these therapeutic approaches, put and end to the struggle of subjectivity by putting an end to our own subjectivity. One of the fascinating, I mean absolutely uninterpretable books of Nietzsche s that I intend to discuss briefly is Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which is about four or five things at once, at least, as a text. One is a rather extended and humorous parody of the bible; the New Testament. Sorry, I mean, it s a rather, you know, The Sermon on the Mount is parodied by having Zarathustra the religious seer and sage give his sermon on the mount to a group of cows [crowd laughter]. I mean, making the point, I guess, that certain kinds of wisdom aren t appropriate for certain kinds of audiences, whatever, I don t know. But in any case, Zarathustra constitutes this rather beautiful parody in that way, on the other hand it is beautifully written and it is an exemplification of what Nietzsche calls The Gay Science . Rather than talking about The Gay Science, Zarathustra is a text that is supposed to enact it, as it were. Sort of enact The Gay Science and say: well, in the act of self creation, freed beings, these so-called Ubermensches; which I hate that word, because of all the associations Superman, you know. Well, anyway, these free beings new creative beings will write texts like this one Zarathustra exciting, interesting. Well at one level it s that too, it s a sort of self indulgent text, and it s certainly one that I enjoyed more and I don t mind admitting this that I enjoyed more when I read it when I was eighteen than when I re-read it years later. It has a certain adolescent fascination for it for us. It has a certain kind of adolescent fascination. That s true of a lot of the text of Nietzsche and I don t want to put that down. The reason I don t is because one of the fascinating things about these multiple kinds of text by Nietzsche is that adolescent fascination effect that it has for youth and creativity and interest.

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T.S. Eliot, in a famous critical piece on Hamlet said that Hamlet was a failed play, because Shakespeare tried to express in drama these overblown adolescent sentiments that could not be, you know, correctly placed within the form of art. Well that s true, but hardly reduces the interest to us of the Hamlet character. It hardly is a critique of his dialogue with himself that he s an adolescent, I mean, for me it s not, and if it s a flawed play, we wish to God more flawed plays were written that were that interestingly flawed. So I think Eliot was a bit of a prig about this as he was about most things. In any case, the dance of Zarathustra is not a ten point plan, it s not self help, and you won t find your authentic self reading Zarathustra. You are supposed to (A) have a good time reading it, (B) get a laugh out of it, and (C) be challenged by it to try to see if you can remember enough of your own adolescence, perhaps, to either scribble something down or do something a little wild. Several and multiple effects can come out of reading this text. Many and multiple effects can come out of reading it. I mentioned that one parody scene where Zarathustra s wisdom his famous sermon on the mount is given to a group of cows. There is another particularly humorous part that I like. It s in the opening when as in many religious myths, which Zarathustra purports to both be one and a criticism of one, and a joke about them; all three Zarathustra like many religious myths begins with the prophet, the seer, the person of wisdom, separated, sort of, like Jesus in the desert, then he comes back and begins his mission. Buddha under the tree; long time sitting, gets up, starts his mission. Well, Zarathustra starts; Zarathustra is all alone except for his eagle and his snake. I don t know what they mean, they are just characters in the thing, could mean a lot of things he s got a snake around his neck, his eagle He goes down and the first person he meets as he goes to share his idea of The Death of God and the birth of these new festivals in this wonderful poetic book the first person he meets is an old hermit in the woods. And the old hermit and he discuss religion and gods and things, and he asks Zarathustra to give his gift to everyone and so on and Zarathustra goes No, I can t give you a gift, in fact if I keep talking to you, I will probably take something from you , and then he leaves. Then he thinks to himself about the old man and he goes Could it be this old man hasn t heard of The Death of God? And you are going Geez, that s a hell of a way for a myth to start , you know. And you know, the old man in the forest stays there, I guess, throughout the rest of Zarathustra and he goes into the marketplace and begins to, you know, say the kind of weird, hyperbolic, bizarre things with which Zarathustra is filled. I ll share a few of those with you. I don t want to do a detailed reading of it, it s too complicated, it s too intricate, and so I ll just give you a little taste for it and hope that you will read it at some point. As I say though, the best point to read it many of us have passed, and that s in terms of enjoyment, reading it when you are seventeen or eighteen and just Wow! you know, really like it, enjoy it and get off to it; that fascination effect I ll call it. But ah, one of the scenes I like a lot is when he encounters a Buddha-like figure in it, and you expect, sort of, a vicious polemic against Buddhism, and you don t get one at all. Zarathustra leaves and says That old man is very wise talking about a figure who was a trope or a metaphor for the Buddha within Zarathustra. He says That old man is very wise. If I were into sleep this is the way he understood Buddhism: If I were into sleep , which is how he understands the annihilation of the self and nirvana and stuff: No-one teaches sleep better than that old man [crowd laughter] And if I were into it see if I were a person into sleep, and being into sleepiness, nobody is a better teacher of that than him And that s the famous book I have already referred to where he ends by saying Blessed in fact are the sleepy, for they shall soon drop off . It s a nice one of my favourite Nietzsche quotes: Blessed are the sleepy for they shall soon drop off . Well, to return to the postmodern terrain, Buddhism as we now know, along with many other religions are antiquated in the face of a telecommunicational network which has more than replaced all the functions of traditional religion. More than replaced it, subjectively and objectively, and in Plato s cave, we don t need to see the shadows on the wall because the shadows are on our television, and we have televisions. It is a stupid strategy to think that you can turn them off. All that can happen is that they can turn you off. You can t turn them off. I ll try to explain that remark, because many people around universities love to brag I don t watch TV [crowd laughter]. Well damn [crowd laughter]. Well damn that s historically crazy and unconscious. Don t you realise that that s something like saying after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, and then later the availability of cheap printed material, to go snottily around saying Well I only read things hand written in Latin, I don t read these books off the printing presses [crowd laughter] These paperbacks? To hell with them! They re the devil s things [crowd laughter] I don t read those paperbacks . Well, that s how I feel about intellectuals Oh, I don t watch TV As if you could escape an entire world whose culture is being shaped by this and the subjectivities of millions of what will be culture and objective spirit, shaped by these instruments and new forces. As if one could escape it by turning a switch. That s why I say you can t turn off TV. It can turn you off, but you can t turn it off. You can t make it disappear, but it can make you disappear. I mean, it s just not that relation. Nietzsche of course, when he talked about Nihilism and the last man had no idea that nihilism would be technologically achievable and that it would not upset people as much as he thought [crowd laughter]. That the death of human subjectivity, that the end of projects that are our own and the turn towards projects invented, packaged for us sometimes by machines and not even by human advertisers or whatever, but just simply packaged by machine along demographic programs written up by other machines that that would become the new array of things that are supposed to give us meaning is, as it were, beyond nihilism. You know, this is not a culture that believes in nothing, this is a culture that is rooted in the will to nothingness , in Nietzsche s sense, and at the same time is, in a certain sense, giddy about it. I mean there is a certain giddiness to it that I don t want to deny. You know, a sort of giddy feeling that well, you know, if you took undergraduate philosophy and you read Descartes, you thought Oh maybe an evil demon is fooling me all the time , and you just thought about it in introduction to philosophy class as a thought experiment that you might be wrong, and you were going to regain your reason. But now the greater scepticism has arisen that this whole telecommunicational world is one giant consensual hallucination within which you as a singularity: Bill, Bob, Susan, Anne, and so on simply cannot find your way about at all. It s not an evil demon anymore that you just thought up; you look at the fabric of social reality and become sceptical about your everyday life, and whether it has any meaning at all. And this is not some empty scepticism you know, merely philosophical scepticism it is quite general. Believe me, talk to your friends, you know, I mean talk to people at gas stations for God s sakes Geez, I just don t know what s going on anymore, it s so weird The most standard phenomenological or descriptive remark about the current social terrain, to which I do believe Nietzsche pointed the way in his remarks, is Haven t things gotten weird Which isn t an analysis, but certainly points the way towards one, you know: Things have gotten strange

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You know, I can explain why people take crack now instead of LSD. I can explain it using this view that things have gotten weird and that we have a postmodern trajectory. LSD is superfluous in the nineties. Reality itself is so twisted that it s a waste of time. Why would anyone take acid in this culture, to try to twist your mind? Hell, just watch TV for a few months, you don t need that. You don t need acid, it s just silly. It s just silly, it s a redundant drug, it s unnecessary in a culture like this one. It s a redundant drug. Now, crack on the other hand has a certain rationality to it; from both the perspective of the rulers and the ruled. For one thing, from the perspective of the rulers, the opium of the people, it turns out, is much better when it s real opium. So the opium of the people now is opium, and that s very copasetic for people who want to do crowd control. Its nice that the potentially rebellious crowds are stoned out of their minds, and crack does that, it doesn t give you this happy I don t want to work if I don t want to stoned, it just out, okay, and that s good for the rulers. On the side of the ruled the desperate crack, unlike LSD doesn t enhance or freakify anything, it just sort of nails your head out of things for a while. Sort of jacks you out of this consensual hallucination. It s vicious and it s an ugly drug, and this is no argument I am trying to explain how drugs I mean, this is an important Nietzschean point, because Nietzsche thinks that intoxication I am trying to make it fit, I think it does fit intoxication has always been an important part of cultures; certainly American culture. As many of you know, I am a smoker, and that was our first, you know, big commodity in the new world. This isn t the first New World Order we have had. There have been other New World Orders before this one. Well anyway, Zarathustra how does it relate to intoxication? Well, Zarathustra is supposed to be an intoxicating dance with the creation of new meaning. The threat faced now that I am trying to raise concerns the entire text of Nietzsche, and the entire text of theorists; literary and otherwise, who still dream what perhaps now and I am not saying for sure, because this is this kind of theory can only be based on speculation, phenomenological description, and suspicion, and the little bits and pieces you pick up in your culture as you try to understand yourself. It is almost obvious that no coherent social theory could explain a situation like this one. You know, it just seems I think that just seems obvious. I don t know, other people may see it another way, but I don t. The prospects that Zarathustra and this is what I am raising now the prospects that Zarathustra could become a mini series and I know who to cast; William Hurt would be great as Zarathustra. The reason is that William Hurt always plays the sort of intelligent types, you know. So William Hurt would be great as Zarathustra. He even resembles the young Nietzsche in a vague kind of way, so especially if he died his hair and made him look shorter, which probably wouldn t be a problem. Anyway, the very fact we live in an objective culture where one might make a miniseries Zarathustra and then have tonnes of Zarathustrians afterwards that dressed like Zarathustra, and adopted those values is already a sign that nihilism itself is, in a certain way, not a strong enough name for the threat faced by human subjectivity and lived experience what remains of it in the terrain of our culture. So I guess now I have moved, sort of, beyond trying to describe this beautiful poetic text that I would ask you to read and enjoy, and onto another terrain, a terrain that is far different. Far different. This won t come as a shock to younger people because the search for meaning that I have been discussing is almost a joke of nostalgia among these people. I will refer one more time to the movie Heathers. There is a sort of 1960 s type teacher in that movie who says Oh lets all hold hands and sing together well, all the other teachers and students go ergh ergh. See, for them that s no good anymore. Love, friendship, understanding, common bond, it s all now been deferred into encounter groups, you know. It s a long way from Wuthering Heights to Love Story by Erich Segal. It s a tremendous historical distance, and yet it happens by degrees, so we don t really notice. It s the way maybe this is the way people have always lost their own self projects by degrees. You wake up one morning and you notice that the journey you were on, you are not on any more, and somehow by degrees you have become something alien to yourself. I think this is a quite general experience of our culture; that by degrees, and almost imperceptibly we become alien to ourselves. And that this is experienced by some of us older types, described by paleo-conservatives as refuge of the sixties it s described us a, sort of, loss of lived experience but by some of the younger, giddier type theorists of the postmodern; it s described as a kind of liberation. In other words, don t worry about alienation and ecstasy, those things are over. Ecstasy is now the name of a designer drug for yuppies, and I don t want to hear about alienation because it is alienating to hear about it. We know that it s the case, but it s alienating for you to tell us about it. So, it puts you it puts the critic in an unusual position in a society like that because the critics of our society themselves of course ordinarily commodified critics. I think that the best example of that might be shows like the old Morton Downey show where you get a kind of populist redneck kinda criticism, which is every bit as elevated as The McLaughlin Group, and certainly you listen just as much. The McLaughlin Group won t sue you for describing their show because they just go crucifixion of Jesus, right or wrong? wrong, wrong, wrong, maybe [crowd laughter] you know. The right answer is: right! [crowd laughter] That is public discourse. Now notice about it this: while it is public, in the sense of publicity, it s unilateral; it s quick, its fast, its factoid, it is totalitarian, of course. It is duckspeak. You can t think that quickly, you ve got to duckspeak. This is why the breakup of the Soviet bloc creates great confusion, because we have been taught that duckspeak so long that now we don t know exactly what to talk anymore. It s hard to go Those communists we never thought about that in the first place; just duckspeak. Now that it s all breaking up, new topics for duckspeak are hard to find, and I guess one of them would be, you know, the Middle East soldier, you know, Those people are different than we are . By the way that is a moment of the Communitarian in a postmodern landscape. It s when you create a pseudo community by opposing it to another pseudo community. I ll give you an example. Saddam Hussein, as many people in the Arab world knew, wasn t exactly a good Muslim [laughs] [crowd laughter], but we had to construct a certain kind of, sort of, muslamic threat that would be palpable to people in our own cities and stuff out of this person, to create a kind of pseudo communitarian consensus on the other side: Well, you know, I don t like war in general, but we have to stop naked aggression as opposed, I guess, to clothed aggression. I have always, you know, looked at it the other way. Naked aggression seemed preferable to me than well dressed three piece suited aggression, but I am a bit primitive about that, I suppose. In any case, what the postmodern condition is about is the drying up of lived experience, and I ll give you an argument I don t think I agree with, but it will set the stage. And it s I wanted this argument to be kind of fun, in the sense in which Zarathustra is fun. Don t take it that seriously, in other words. It s just one of these postmodern French theorists: Baudrillard, and it was his account of the war in Iraq. And I wanted I am not giving it to you as mine, but as a gift. Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn t give you this gift, because I might take something from you no, that s a joke I am just joking.

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Baudrillard was giving the following account of the war in Iraq, he said ah It was in an interview in a German magazine, and remember this is one of the postmodern theorists I am talking about, not agreeing with. I am saying that in my view there is a trajectory towards this condition. In the view of many of these people we have already reached this condition of postmodern society , which I will specify in detail later and connect to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche was one person who forecast the advent of a human-less, subject-less condition. Well anyway, Baudrillard s account of the war was the interview was called The Enemy Has Disappeared . And Baudrillard said that the reason the war had been constructed in Iraq as a constructed televisual event was that if anything was left in the world what was real, lived experience, it would be war. So that if this virtual society of a consensual hallucination could stage a phoney war with phoney experiences and have people respond to it phonily, the real war wouldn t be against the Iraqis, but against reality; in order to kill the last remaining remnants of the real. That this society had already commodified reality to such an extent that they were down to the last few little niches of reality. And on the global stage war looked like one, so it would be important to kill reality itself. And this is not to deny that Iraqis got killed and some of our citizens, but it s about the larger aims of the war; was to kill reality itself. To make reality virtual reality and not real reality, a term that I now nostalgically use to refer to my own experiences and experiences of other human beings. When I even talk that way I feel kind of nostalgic about it. But Baudrillard s argument went Well look, you know, where did we see the event? We saw it on television, and you know, who is this Hussein? I mean, didn t hear about him before, haven t heard much about him since, who is it? well, now they are picking it back up again, a little, sorry. Who is this fella, and what is this? Is this a real you know, his point was deep and important: that from the moment that it started, it was a CNN event that had its own, as it were, support built into it of which the opposition was itself a part. The opposition to the war itself became a support of the war in the very necessity to pick up the icons the general, bland and stupid icons without which you cannot appear. So it immediately caught you up, and I remember the wrapt attention that we all had on the war which was a magnificent mini series in that sense. CNN was an addiction, and the scuds at night were absolutely as virtual, as exciting as the rockets they shoot up at Epcott Centre; those phoney firework things. And you are going Yeah well I really saw those scud pieces hit Well I didn t, I saw them on TV. And I am not being sceptical and saying that the scuds didn t hit. I am saying that the experience of that for us was virtual. So I thought well Baudrillard this is not what I am saying, this is Baudrillard s argument and he says it turns out they won, because they proved war like everything else can be not a real experience at all, it can become a virtual non reality; a non-real war, an unreal war. Well, on one level of course I want to agree with Baudrillard, because I don t call something a war where you start it and the other side immediately retreats any more than I want to call something a boxing match, when one guy takes a dive and the other guy keeps hitting him while he is on the canvas. If you take a dive, the match is over, count ten, out, you win, that s fine. But it doesn t continue to be a boxing match because you are hitting the person on the canvas. It s stopped being a boxing match then. It s become a spectacle, and one cannot overestimate the value of that as a spectacle because it still dominates public discourse in the image of some of our leaders who have woefully neglected other things which are presented to us as our problems. If we could have anything other than a visual representation of those; a televisual one. In short, according to Baudrillard s argument, this saturated information network is pornographic . Now what do I mean by that? It is pornographic in this sense: it is the excess of the visual, you know, excessively visual. Now this experience may be differential for women, but for guys, they are forced to go to stag movies when you are being socialised to be a young man, and if you don t go they call you funny names. The first thing you notice about stag movies is that they are just excessively visual, after about two minutes I say that s enough of that, I don t want to see any more, it wasn t that pretty, get it off. This is an obscene culture in that sense. I really mean that. It is pornographically visual, obsessive, and so on. So Baudrillard s argument was that the war had disappeared in the images of the war; the experience of the war had disappeared in the accounts of it. And I thought Well, surely that isn t true this is me now, I am back, that s Baudrillard s story anyhow I thought surely that isn t true for the people who were over there, which is of course a good commonsense thing to say. So I talked to one of the guards at my university who had served over there, and was now back being a traffic guard. It turned out that all she had seen as on CNN too. She had been in a camp for the whole war, stacking various uniforms and things, and she said that no she couldn t really tell me much about it. She asked me if I had watched CNN; I said Yes . She said Well did you hear the briefings? I went Yes . She said Well, that s what I know about it, basically . So I thought Well I have got to get better information than that, because now I am getting scared that Baudrillard is right, there wasn t one over there wasn t a war So I got to talk to a student friend of mine s brother who was a pilot. He went Yeah, the gun sights we used were just like the ones you know, I can t mention a brand name or whatever, but one of those like asteroid games Yeah he said, The planes, there was a great giddy feeling I said Well did you see any Iraqis, any land, any people? He said No, no, no , he says, these planes you wouldn t believe the rush , and he began to describe to me the experience of the virtual reality of flying a plane very fast and shooting little dots of light through a target like in a video or an arcade except at a much higher rate of speed. And at that point I began to stop doing these empirical tests on Baudrillard s theory and now I ll just leave it as a thesis for you. If anything was left that was real, it might have been war, and it may be the case now that even war is not real. And that s a horrifying remark coming from someone who was raised by someone like my father for whom the Second World War was a if not the pivotal event in his life. And perhaps some of our postmodern dissatisfaction anticipated by bizarre theorists like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, perhaps to the extent there is dissatisfaction with it perhaps some of that dissatisfaction is rooted in the desire to feel an experience again. To live a real experience again. Something that really occurred, that wasn t already packaged, explained, pre-packaged, agreed upon, then given to you as your opinion without a possibility of doing anything but assenting. And you may go Oh no, they give us choice! Well, we all know what the array is and how infinite it is. It s like choosing green beans at the grocery store. How many kinds do they have? Say you want canned green beans. I am a throw back, I like canned green beans. I don t like those ones you put in a little plastic pouch, I want the canned ones. And I get a choice. There are like twenty kinds. I have tried a lot of them. I open them and they are all just really bad green beans. They are green and they are beans, and they are this long, they have the same amount of water. And I have chosen, that s true I have chosen, and I want that freedom to choose, and I will fight and die for that freedom to choose the green bean of my choice. But what I don t have is the choice to select that autonomous radical project that Nietzsche put at the centre of his writing and at the centre of his attempt at self creation. That s the choice I don t have.

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I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that will take every command I give it except the one that I want the most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do anything else I say. I type in food , and out comes food. I type in I want to give this talk in Washington , comes out. Type this in, comes out But the one command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go boom! , and all the little transistors just to go. I think some of that archaic anarchism may lurk out there somewhere, I hope, that as I enter, you know, now in this really strong paradox, because without a postmodern culture there would be no televised lectures on Nietzsche. I hope that as I enter that spiral of information that I can plant here and there tiny little moments of that kind of rebellion which are planted throughout the text of Zarathustra in the forms of jokes, arguments that are both suspicious and suspecting and moments of transgression and fun. And I hope that I ll be able to do that in the last hour when I will wander even further away from Nietzsche, but that is in the spirit of Nietzsche because he always valorised wanderers, nomads, vagabonds, jokesters and tricksters, and I intend to valorise them as well, so I hope you are ready for the concluding lecture on Nietzsche s Progeny . That lecture of course has got to be some kind of joke, he had no children, so what would his progeny be? Well I hope this indication of what I mean by The Post-Modern Condition will give you an idea about the icy, glacial terrain in which these progeny are slouching toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born [applause]. Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition (1991) Lecture 8: Nietzsche s Progeny http://rickroderick.org/208-nietzsches-progeny-1991/ The last lecture on Nietzsche is quite a challenge since one of Nietzsche s arguments are there are no lasts . There are no last interpretations, there are no last desperate moments, in fact it s a little remark about history that I might begin this so-called last lecture with. It s that the spirit of danger and catastrophe we may feel ourselves in today is in a sense profoundly ahistorical. I have a feeling that in a certain way perhaps every moment of history has seemed at least to some of its participants to be a profound moment of danger, and certainly if one looks back over the trail of history it s much easier to see its barbaric ruin than its rational progress. In any case, I am going to try in this last lecture which will not, as I systematically indicated, be a last lecture or last interpretation to evoke again that postmodern space to which the text of Nietzsche leads us and try to move us a bit beyond that by discussing Nietzsche s progeny. Now Nietzsche s progeny, as I said, is already for me a joke, because Nietzsche had no legitimate children. He s had many illegitimate theoretical children, and in fact I think that in a certain way, if Nietzsche s text is in any sense a success and by that I mean given its paradoxical nature it was written to fail, but in certain interesting ways I think that if it s a success in any other stranger sense, it is in the multiple and bizarre progeny which have taken the text up, used it, misused it, abused it, twisted it, turned it in a thousand different interesting ways. And if I have succeeded in suggesting a few of those, I ll be more than happy to have so perverted something that was perverse to begin with. In any case, I would like to close with or return to our postmodern scene, and try to make a little clearer what I mean by that with something more than indirection. I have already indicated one of the things that marks off the post-modern, or the postmodern situation from what might be called a modern situation is the televisual telecommunicational network and the saturation of modes of information, surveillance and control at a level and intensity where the quantity of them qualitatively changes the nature of our experience. That s as brief a way as I could describe the trajectory; that the very quantity of information, the very quantity of the images and their global scope you know, I mean Bonanza all over the world, television ubiquitous and so on that their very quantitative enhancement has changed our situation in dramatic ways. And to give this very broad point away quickly, let me say this. If for example and this is to leave Nietzsche for a moment and discuss not one of his progeny, surely, although a certain bizarre reading of a kind of anarchistic Marx is the progeny of Nietzsche. That s odd since Marx wrote first, but nevertheless, why should parenthood be that linear kind of thing child, I don t know, anyway nevertheless One of the ways I like to characterise this broadly will be to discuss a certain, sort of, overview Marx might take on the situation. One way to think of the nineteenth century is to think of the massive forces of production; like steam, power, the factory railways and all of those massive new forces of production in the nineteenth century, among which one helped to create the very class to which I belong the intelligentsia namely, the invention of mass ways of disseminating books which create the possibility of mass markets of readers, and the possibility then to develop an expert culture of readers to talk to the other readers. See, there are conditions for the possibility of all of us being who we are and doing what we do, and sometimes they are as bloody and as ordinary as economics. In this case I am though trying to make the point that in the nineteenth century these massive new forces of production; one of their primary things that they were directed at was replacing manual labour with mechanical labour. This is obvious; an obvious point. One of the big stories of the nineteenth century was the extent to which the new technologies developed by capital replaced in massive quantities in massive amounts manual labour with the labour of machines. It would have been unthinkable the technological accomplishments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be unthinkable without that large transference. So in a certain way to look at that transference in the nineteenth century Nietzsche s century I have argued he was ahead of his time and ahead of himself, in fact maybe that s why he talked about the wanderer and his shadow , because he thought that in a certain way he had come in an untimely way. Well maybe anything this interesting may be untimely, I don t know. In any case, if we look at the nineteenth century that way as that being at least one of the big stories then certainly one of the big stories of the mid to late twentieth century would be the incredible increase in the switch from technologies which concentrate on increasing the intensity and the power of manual labour to those which tend to replace mental, intellectual labour. By that I mean not just computers, but the whole array of devices intended to replace for lack of a better word human experience; subjective human experience. Television is an instrument of production, in my opinion, designed whether it was with this in mind or not functioning in any case to replace, largely, subjective human experience. Computers designed sometimes for the direct technical function of replacing intellectual experience. In other words things like adding, multiplying, dividing, subtracting really difficult now to get a child in the second or third grade to bother to learn to do that, and for obvious reasons. They have three keys they know how to punch, why should they do that with their minds? Why waste that labour? Well I am not saying that in a cynical way because it s like asking after you have built a steam engine why you should take a toothpick and knock over a mountain instead of using a steam drill. You know, I am not saying our children are wrong, maybe they should say Well geez, you know, you invented all this stuff to replace intellectual labour and now you are asking me to do that? Give me a break It would be like asking you in the early nineteenth century to knock over a mountain and forget those new steam drills.

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This replacement however of, as it were, the other part of the human equation if you think of the human equation as being something about humans as embodied, and then humans as intelligent and subjective and rational, then we will see that, as it were, the advance of society has tended to replace both the human attributes that belong to mechanical skills manual skills as well as intellectual skills. One of the reasons we value sports so much now is that the replacement of the labouring body required for the development of our society can be vicariously enjoyed when we see Michael Jordan dunk, and we remember, quasi-nostalgically the beauty and the pleasures of the body, although of course now deferred into an image. Because the secret of the postmodern society is that everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation or an image. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation or an image, so that we, as it were, enjoy the vicarious pleasure of a flying body, we hear the jingle Be like Michael, Be like Michael . We participate vicariously in the beauty of the body, but this time as an image as an image. This is a different I am arguing a different trajectory for culture. That people that come after this time will be different subjectivities; if we still want to use that word, it will be debatable it will be debatable. Nietzsche still lived and wrote in a time when the problem of theology was the believer, or the non-believer; how to respond to the non-believer. The problems in theology and philosophy today when they are posed at their highest levels are not the problems of believers and nonbelievers, but of humans and the non-human. You see, until you have a certain subjective framework, the issue of belief doesn t even arise. The issue arises about Are the people to whom we address ourselves still human? And then it will be interesting again to discuss gods, their powers, magic, mystery, murder and the rain and so on, once we have determined the deeper question about whether a society that first replaces, sort of, physical labour and then later begins to replace mental labour, as it progresses does not efface the human entirely. I have argued that it already has begun to move in a way into a representation, or into an image. Well this possibility is the possibility of what I would like to call in the spirit of Nietzsche nihilism technologically realised. That s scarier than Nietzsche s nihilism as a form of belief, which would bring an end to this atmosphere within which the world was still mendacious and magical; this would be the technological realisation of nihilism. Let me try to make that clear to you by explaining something I think we all know as a familiar example. There are great apocalypse stories, you know, like in The Bible has a pretty good apocalypse story, right? I mean, Boom , Revelation, and certain preachers really like to do that one and it is it s exciting and there are riders and thunder, and you know The fact that apocalypse was technologically achievable, and that we could set up all the technical necessities for it is now very old news, isn t it? Am I wrong about that? Or isn t the fact that we have technologically achieved the ability to construct a real apocalypse I am not now talking about a biblical myth, but an apocalypse on a high order. I mean we now that the Soviet Union is breaking up, and that particular myth is fading into other myths and other stories and other narratives, this possibility may not seem as real, but it s important to see that people born into a culture in which apocalypse is now a technological possibility that will be carried out by faceless people in little silos and guys carrying little briefcases, punching little buttons is an incredible distance from these intricately constructed myths in the Old Testament I mean, in the New Testament. It s a different kind of apocalypse because this one is a technological achievement. Similarly, I am arguing that Nietzsche s nihilism was still a matter of the drying up of a certain kind of subjectivity and belief formation and Nietzsche s hope was the creation of new ones: subjectivities; new, radical, autonomous subjectivities. And again, because he doesn t belong to the dogmatic tradition in philosophy not necessarily, or not at all perhaps subjectivities like his own. But a possibility that I think Nietzsche himself did not face was that nihilism the belief in nothing, the will to nothingness, the end of subjectivity; of human powers would itself become technologically realisable. So I hope that my example of the development of weapons of so-called mass destruction, which from our postmodern perspective I have argued already seems giddy and utopian, and now we look back on that and we see those old atomic war movies, and I have watched the audiences and they just love the blow-up scenes. No kidding, you know Wow! Look at that! The trees are flying off! and already that s a nostalgic moment. It was perhaps our last chance to realise a decent end to our species, one that would have been worthy of it. Now we may just trod endlessly, solving one little technical adjustment after another to the finely tuned ecomachines that we used to call our bodies. Someone asked me earlier perhaps it was on a break or something someone asked me What about the ecology movement? We live in an environment where its most famous spokesman is the McDonalds Corporation. I mean the possibilities for radical subjectivities arising under these conditions become exceedingly bizarre. Now, you go Well, this is too much, I mean, this is too postmodern, I am lost now, this is I can t Well, believe me that again, the development in the late twentieth century and the trajectory of it shouldn t be underestimated. It really shouldn t, and I don t want it to be necessarily. In fact it cannot because of other necessary conditions be a moment of despair, since that is long over with. The example I gave of that was we all know that existentialism what we used to think Nietzsche was, right? An existentialist? Kierkegaard was an existentialist very shallow way to understand them, and that s been over a long time. Now if you want an existentialist as I said earlier you ll see Bill and Ted s Bogus Adventure, you know, playing twister with death. That moment s over a long time ago. I even had a professor who said the only reason it ever was so big is that a lot of professors found it to be a very convenient way to meet people, and so on [crowd laughter], saying I have been so worried about dying So have I , and then you strike up a conversation [crowd laughter]. Like one of Woody Allen s movies, you know, the joke was Can we go out on Saturday night? and No, I am committing suicide on Friday Woody Allen says Well, what about Thursday then? [crowd laughter] Well, clearly the technologies that are coming and I ll mention a few of them virtual reality suits. You ll go well Oh, now he s flipped, virtual reality suits No, they were actually developed for a quite sensible reason. They were developed for long space flights back in the days when NASA thought they were going to go on long space flights. Now we understand that there is no need to, because we can go to Epcot Centre and experience one, so we don t need it for the consuming public, because we can already experience a long space flight at Epcot Centre. Just like we don t need to go to Switzerland anymore. We can go to Busch Gardens where the Swiss food is even more Swiss, you can buy a Swiss clock, and we can avoid all the problems connected with travel and experience Switzerland! You know, the thing is, I am not even joking, because when you go to Switzerland there will be the same stuff, and McDonalds will be there too, the television will be on the same channels, the Holiday Inn will be open and the room will look just like the one does here, and so on. This postmodern space is not a dream of theorists; it is becoming our culture and way of life. I am just describing it; I don t even know how to denounce it. This is not a criticism. Some parts of it make me feel giddy and kind of excited, because virtual reality suits if we let our imaginations go for a moment could have endless fascinating possibilities, right? Right, sure. I mean you could [do], you know, lots of things that human

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powers couldn t accomplish, right? In the nineteenth century, lots of things that couldn t be accomplished by human power were accomplished by steam power and so on. Well maybe our imaginations are limited in that the machines we build now will be able to on the spur of the moment to accomplish incredible things in that way. But anyway, the virtual reality suits I ll talk about them just for a minute, and then we ll move onto something else were created so that on a long space flight our space traveller wouldn t become disoriented in space, but would be able to put on this suit and thus feel earth bound for a while to reorient himself or herself on their space flight. Well now the virtual reality suit is being they are working on marketable versions, and that means ones that are cost effective, which means we are still living in relations of capital, because that means somebody wants to make a dollar. Which is okay, so do I, so do you; there is no reason in [not] recognising a necessity. No matter how cruel the necessity is, you gotta recognise it sometimes. In any case, the virtual reality suits will be marketed and they offer this interesting technological possibility. You have always wanted to go out with Mel Gibson, or ah let me make sure I don t commit a gender crime, so I ll get everyone in Mel Gibson or Kathleen Turner, or any combination of men, women, animals, and/or whatever necessary in order to avoid committing a sexist crime, gender crime. Whatever combination you imagine, since under these conditions of virtual reality, whatever transgressive gender you have, you will be able to live it out perfectly in a perfectly commodified way with a virtual reality suit anyway. Well, if you want to go out with Kathleen Turner, you just plug in and press the Body Heat module, and the next thing you know, you are right in the screenplay, William Hurt s out, you re in, she walks in the door and its all great. Now that s a product we will want to buy. Many of us, it s a product we will want to buy. The problem with this advancing culture is that that is buying just like in an earlier period of capital when you bought the wage-labour of someone to work for you, now what we are buying are instruments and equipments that do the experiencing for us. That was a part of my critique of all these instant therapies, is to buy a life story for yourself immediately that can be swallowed painlessly, you know. And when you buy a virtual reality suit, or what I call virtual reality eyes, which is television, if we look at virtual reality, it provides you a pre-packaged experience; one that is already coded for you. In other words, designed with your mind in mind. Now if you want a another way to check out this new emerging terrain this nihilism realised what you might call Nietzsche s nightmare squared, okay. If you want to look at this, you might look at what advertisements go with what normal channel TV programming. So for example, if you have The Cosby Show, you ll have advertising for upscale African-American families mixed with the younger yuppie audience that it draws. Thirtysomething, which is now off, mercifully if I can say that without getting sued because I am sorry, I watched it, but I got the whining the whining got to me. Sorry, yeah, just whining. But in any case, the advertisements followed the story very closely. You know, you d have a little moment with one of the characters would sort of wistfully stop whinging, and look around, and the next thing there will be an ad for an Infiniti car. Sort of answers that need to overcome the wistful desire, Well, I am wistful, and I have whined, but if I was in my Infiniti An Infiniti an automobile. Well that s not just a way to get around now, is it? You see, commodities are no longer just things of use. They have become part of what we are, and we need to recognise it. I mean that s one of the lessons that I am trying to drive home here today, is that if there will be battles over this new terrain, and on it many of them will be fought on the terrain itself; television, radio, magazines, as I have called it, the obscenity of the saturated communicational culture. Saturated with information, obscenely oversaturated information up to your neck, beyond your elbows. Now of course I could be wrong about all this. Let me just stop and say that for a moment. This postmodern trajectory I think hasn t arrived hasn t yet fully realised itself and I could be wrong about the direction in which we are moving, and perhaps Nietzsche s nightmare won t come true. I don t know. I know that none of us is beyond surprising. So I am not a dogmatist, really I am not. None of us are beyond surprising. For that, we are just not capable of so perfect an irony. And yet none of us are capable of refusing to subject our occasional surprises to further analysis. And for that we are not nearly simple enough. So I could be wrong could be wrong. And whether I am or not, though this is the nice part about an argument like this whether I am or not, time will tell. Except that here if it tells one thing it won t have mattered, as you may have guessed, since I won t have told it to anyone, because if I am right, my argument has the peculiar characteristic that it will not have mattered. It will only have mattered if what I said turns out to be wrong in ways that my argument has effected. Now I want to return back off from that current moment the trajectory of the postmodern back to Nietzsche for a second. Since we are trying to end Nietzsche, and yet I see how impossible that is now. Perhaps we won t be through with the reading of Nietzsche, perhaps even once the world has been fully turned into replicants you know just skinjobs, replicants, robotics, cybernetics maybe then they will have a certain class of them programmed to interpret Nietzsche in ways yet unthinkable, right? Who knows, but certainly why not? I mean, now I want to defend my general, kind of, descriptive procedure here briefly. On of the things that philosophers do as part of an anxiety complex is to try to prove they weren t wrong, so I am going to do that very briefly. And I am going to do it here by aligning myself with Nietzsche for at least a moment again, pulling back from the horror I don t know if its horror, some postmodern theorists view it as ecstasy. At a certain level of pain and strangeness it s difficult to distinguish the two anyway. That may be a remark only about my personal pathologies, I am not sure. But in any case, Bertrand Russell once said, and I don t remember where, but it was an irritation over philosophers who cannot be refuted according to the normal rules of truth and falsity and the empirical verification of their propositions and so on. It was a very irritating thing to him, he named among others Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and so on, and he thought that they were connected in some deep sense to the growth of unreason in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Which from my view of history is to get things backwards. I have always thought that this strange paleo-conservative desire to blame intellectuals for things is odd. We talk about the Enlightenment, you know, loosely in universities as though four pedants could make an age of the world. You notice I haven t given an analysis of the Enlightenment but of modernity, of modernisation, of the advance of capital, because four pedants don t make an age. And two or three weird philosophers don t give birth to a century of unreason. You know, Nietzsche didn t, you know, from his drawing room give birth to a century of cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or five pedants do not have that much power, and never have. That s just a sort of bugbear. They didn t unleash unreason on the world Jesus how crazy can some people get. I mean, even in the postmodern world you shouldn t be that crazy, to say that three or four pedants invented this stuff. And don t think that when I talk about the postmodern condition that three or four pedants invented that description. I mean, what makes these descriptions necessary is what goes on all around us in our daily lives as we begin to feel distant from ourselves in bizarre ways.

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Nevertheless, Russell said well look, this unreasonable approach he thought was connected to Hume s I have mentioned Hume before to Hume s destruction of empiricism. What he meant [was] Hume destroying the self and various other rational accounts. Russell thought the horrible consequence that followed from the multiplicity of interpretations, the many ways in which we can deploy the word truth , the shifting context in which we can interpret, the many narratives that we can tell. He thought the horrible consequence that followed from that was unreason . And by the way, I do like Russell in many respects don t get me wrong especially Russell as a person, much more interesting than Nietzsche as a person. Certainly had better politics as a person. But on this point I disagree with Russell. Russell says look If there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity I mean he gets this extreme with it; Russell doesn t usually talk that extremely If there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity, reason and unreason, truth and falsity, then the lunatic who believes he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the grounds that he is in the minority. This is a desperate point of view, and it must be hoped that in some way we can escape it That s all Russell has to say about that point of view in his History of Western Philosophy, that s all he has to say about it. Because acute man that he is and logician, he knows there is no reasonable and logical way to establish the authority of reason over unreason, to distinguish sanity from insanity. So it looks like what we are left with is what a culture comes up with to decide. That frightened Russell, and I have to admit that I have a bit of Russell s nostalgia. It would be nice if we could rely on something more than, you know, a majority feeling a certain way. Unfortunately the negative force of my argument is this; is that those attempts have failed and been discredited utterly, as a result of our own culture and its development. We cannot with reason defend the distinction between reason and unreason, and that puts me in a strange position right now, defending my analysis to the extent that I want to defend it. I will at least defend this much of what Russell says about it. It is a desperate point of view because it does put you in the position of saying to those who disagree with you that Well, geez, I don t think we are poached eggs and someone one of you perhaps afterwards says to me I really am a poached egg, I am so glad you mentioned Russell mentioning poached eggs because I have always felt like a poached egg And you expect me to have a great argument, I may just say Well, I don t feel like a poached egg, and we ll take a brief survey around here and see how many other poached eggs there are , but imagine my embarrassment now to return to the postmodern condition if I am in a mall and I begin to feel like I am in a loony bin. Perhaps I am not alone in feeling this way. I am in a mall and I get what I call mall fever , where I just begin to look at the shoppers and shopping frenzy and all the glass and the swirling and the twirling things, and I get mall fever and I have to get out and I begin to feel like I am a crazy man, and yet I have no ground on which to stand being in the minority in that feeling at that moment, because that passes for sanity. What could be more sane than to spend some leisure time as opposed to free time, something we don t have any more of: free time leisure time in the mall? I mean, that s sane. Why do I get mall fever? I must be crazy. Well, I mean, I can t defend myself any more than the person with reasons, I can defend myself in other ways, but I can t with reason any more than Russell can defend the distinction between insanity and sanity, madness, unreason, with other reasons. Of course that should have been obvious, and it would have been, without perhaps some of the bad lessons that I have worked against in this course on Nietzsche, drawn from the dogmatic tradition of philosophy which I really think have been a mistake. Namely that if reason is to be anything, it had better be my damn reasons you agree with: my reason; in this case, Western reason. Nothing could be harder, after this postmodern fable if you want to consider it yet another fable, that s fine with me nothing could be harder than to distinguish that fable that fable from its non-fable aspects; its real aspects. I mean, that s like asking the question in our culture about anything, whether it really occurred or not. And it can be something that s happened to you. After you think about it a while and have seen a few movies and the best way you can remember it is through its similarity with the TV and movies you have seen. My conversation here has reflected how many movie and TV examples I have used. If that becomes the way in which you process your experience, issues like truth versus reason I mean reason versus madness, truth versus falsity will simply fall away. They will fall away because the anchor for those issues raised by Nietzsche was that very tension between what might be reasonable and what might be mad. What might be a truth that might be life affirming for us, and what might be a lie that would not be good for us. Those distinctions would fall away. So I don t know how to put a happy twist on this story. In fact I feel much in the position that William Gibson does in his magnificent novel Neuromancer . I recommend it all to you. Gibson s novel you know, how many novels begin with sentences describing the sky and the landscape. There are so many. It s a standard novelistic beginning. Gibson begins his novel Neuromancer with the following sentence, and I consider it the best first sentence in 20th century American literature. I hate to use the word literature about this stuff. Neuromancer being a work of what I call near future fiction . A work that projects, as does the movie Blade Runner, the near future of possible social development based on very close analysis of current trends. In any case, the first sentence of the novel goes like this: The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel . Marvellous. Sets the tone for an incredible book. Short. Tough. Interesting. Brilliant. That sentence frames for me a description of the postmodern trajectory and to distance that sentence and there is a massive distance you could distance it from the sentences of Zarathustra, from The Gay Science. You could distance it from the first sentences of novels such as Call me Ishmael Moby Dick. That s a pretty well known first sentence in a novel. Call me Ishmael . Referring all the way backward to a biblical text, and all the way forward to a new adventure. A new American adventure. In living a life that would allow for difference and community, it would allow for freedom, and the recognition of necessity. That project ends, in my view or at least the dawning of the end, in Gibson. In that wonderful first sentence. The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel . The fights that remain the living antagonisms and our possibilities to construct ourselves in anything like free and autonomous ways will have to be fought across that barren, strange landscape that unthinkable cultural future of deferred and indifferent pseudo experience. And across that terrain, the struggles for even moments of authentic lived experience authentic in quotes who knows of lived experience to feel something for god s sakes anything will be the locus of struggle one would hope. Here I will call to your mind a scene from Blade Runner, where before the replicant dies (Roy Batty), he slams his hand on a nail (and many of you may not know this), but when Batty does that in the film, it s a reference to an action that Sartre has a character perform in Roads to Freedom . In Roads to Freedom , the Sartre character slams his hand onto a nail to prove that he is free. Because he chose to do it. It hurt like hell, but he chose it. I put my hand on that nail, and that shows I am free, because just as a calculus of deterministic pleasure I would never have done it. It s a philosophical demonstration a painful and stupid one in my opinion but by the time we get to Blade Runner, the replicant slams his hand onto a

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nail just to feel anything. Just to feel anything. So don t worry about the communists or the capitalists. Fight to live and feel anything. Thankyou I have enjoyed it very much. Thankyou.

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