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by Hans-Dieter Gelfert

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Adam and Eve in Paradise, Gemäldegalerie Berlin (Image: public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

Love and Evil are the driving forces of most, if not all, plots of dramatic and fictional literature. For a binary opposite of Evil one would expect the Good instead of Love – but Goodness, as every reader knows from experience, does not yield much aesthetic gratification. Aesthetics is concerned with the pleasure and displeasure of sensuous perception, which depends on the rise and fall of our level of arousal; expectancy and gratification, therefore, are the two basic sources of psychic pleasure. It is easy to see that goodness, no matter how much and in what shape, will not arouse much expectancy, because there is little point in desiring with our senses what our conscience forces us to demand, and any gratification it yields when it actually happens is only a confirmation of our trust in the moral order of the world. With evil, things are different. Whether we desire it against our conscience, or genuinely fear its imminence, it will arouse us to a high level, and when it actually happens the gratification will be either perverse pleasure or a cathartic upheaval of our moral beliefs. In both cases, in a fictional context, we are able to enjoy evil, either openly, in defiance of morality, or secretly, knowing that we are on safe ground. Therefore, the evildoer and the moral sufferer, the dragon and its slayer, the devil and the martyr are inexhaustible sources of aesthetic pleasure, provided they stay in the realm of fiction and make us only gather our moral forces without compelling us to give the signal for attack.

Having said that much, one can only wonder why the aesthetics of evil has attracted so little attention from literary scholars. Peter André Alt, professor of German literature at the Free University of Berlin, whose president he became in 2009, is not the first to break this ground, but he is the one who did so most thoroughly, by harvesting from widely dispersed fields of scholarship and shaping his material into a compendium of breath-taking erudition. 160 of the 712 pages of his book are taken up by notes and a bibliography of intimidating scope and completeness. The main part of the book is divided in seven chapters, the titles of which give an idea of the range and philosophical depth of his study. Chapter One echoes Nietzsche’s book on the birth of tragedy in its title “Prelude in myth: The origin of evil from the spirit of literary fiction”. In this chapter, Alt starts from Genesis and moves on to discuss the biblical sources of Lucifer’s and Adam’s fall and the theological debate about evil from Augustine to Kierkegaard.

Chapter Two is entitled “Enlightenment and psychology: New arts of the devil”. It is here that Alt comes into his own, since the first half of the chapter deals with German authors such as Georg Friedrich Meier, Jean Paul, Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, while the second half gives a lucid discussion of Freud and Jung in the context of the early history of psychoanalysis. Chapter Three, “The Shift towards introspection: Evil as seen from the inside”, begins with ‘black poetics’ in Schlegel and Rosencrantz, goes on to the ‘archaeology of the evil soul’ in Schiller and Jean Paul, dedicates over 20 pages to Kleist’s “muddled circumstances and soiled concepts” and ends with a discussion of Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Stefan George und Thomas Mann under the heading “From imagination to de-differentiation”.

9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center, New York City. (Image remixed and released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter Four bears the title “Repetition as the literary manifestion of evil”. In this chapter, what is commonly associated with black romanticism comes most prominently to the fore. The subtitles give an idea of the subject matter: “The myth of hell and the phantasma of eternal punishment (Blake, Barlach, Sartre, Mann)”, “The rhythm of the orgy (de Sade, Mirbeau, Suesskind)”, “Satanic masses (Huysman)” and “Monotony and aestheticism (Sacher-Masoch, Wilde)”. A second structural feature of evil is added in Chapter Five under the title “The aesthetic pleasure of transgression: Extreme figures and deviating behaviour”. Here, too, the subtitles provide a guideline through the chapter: “Androids and vampyres (Shelly, Bram Stoker)”, “Crime in the spirit of the perverse (Poe, Stevenson)”, “Criminological case-studies (Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, Gross)”, “The poetry of madness (Przbyszewski, Heym, Benn)” and “An invented sex (Wedekind, Weininger, Ewers)”. In Chapter Six, “Snapshots of excess: On conjuring up the monstrous”, Alt zooms in on the very centre of transgression. The chapter begins with “The killing of God as a rhetorical feast (Nietzsche)”, then goes on to the concept of ‘Holy pornography’ by Bataille, Genet and Foucault, turns to Kafka and the little known German writer Robert Mueller (who seems to deserve a rediscovery) and ends with “Narrated war experiments of violence (Ernst Juenger, Malaparte)”. The final Chapter Seven, at last, raises the question the reader would have asked right at the beginning: “Moral implications of immoral literature”. Here, the theoretical discussion of the views of Baudrillard, Wolfgang Iser, Karl Heinz Bohrer and Niklas Luhmann frames a detailed analysis of two contemporary novels: Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillants and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

Dennis Oppenheim: 'Device to Root Out Evil', sculpture, Vancouver, Canada. (Image released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License; source: Wikimedia Commons)

The summary of the contents gives the reader an idea of what Alt has to offer, but it also reveals what he fails to deliver. In theological, philosophical and psychoanalytical terms he has a firm grasp of his subject, even more so, of course, when it comes to the phenomenology of evil in art, since this is what his study is about. One cannot blame a book on the aesthetics of evil for excluding the ethical aspects, but ignoring the social dimension is a different matter. Evil is something the evildoer does to a victim. This is a social relation and, therefore, must be dealt with as a material aspect of evil irrespective of its ethical evaluation. The other conspicuous gap in Alt’s book – in fact, the missing link in his chain of argument – is the total absence of that period in European literature where evil for the first time literally took to the stage, i. e. Elizabethan and, more precisely, Jacobean drama. From Marlowe through Shakespeare to Webster, Tourneur and all the other writers of ‘sex and crime’ plays in the Jacobean age, evil became such a central driving force that one can hardly understand why Alt mentions Marlowe and Shakespeare only in passing and leaves the others unnoticed. From Adam’s Fall to the end of the Middle Ages, evil had been a question of sin, which presupposed a hierarchical relation between God and the devil. But with the early rise of a middle-class society in England the medieval hierarchy underwent a slow and steady process of horizontalization, which transformed the theological concept of sin into the social concept of crime. Henceforth, evil was no longer something the pious man looked down upon deep in hell, but something he was confronted with at eye-level. The Elisabethan and Jacobean age was the first literary period in which the villain achieved the status of a hero, though a negative one. (If further proof is needed for the eye-level view of evil in a ‘horizontalized’ society, think of the United States, a society that likes to think of itself as having overcome traditional hierarchies, yet which at the same time is the most obsessed with evil).

The omission of the Jacobean drama is the gravest flaw of Alt’s book. This flaw, however, does not come unexpected in a book whose ‘Introduction’ begins with a quotation from Hegel. Alt’s method resembles more that of medieval scholasticism than that of scientific scholarship. Instead of referring to observations grounded in empirical data, he defers to authority figures such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Foucault, Baudrillard and Luhmann. This will leave readers with a more bottom-up approach to literature irritated and frustrated. On the one hand, one cannot help admiring Alt’s erudition, his power of penetration and the often lucid analyses of literary works, on the other hand one waits in vain for answers to questions so obvious that one can hardly understand why they are not raised. First: How is the fictional experience of evil transformed into aesthetic pleasure? Second: Under what social conditions is the public most likely disposed to crave for such pleasure? and Third: Where is the dividing line between the aesthetic and the ethical that must not be transgressed? Only this last question is addressed by Alt, but it comes like an afterthought and not as a target aimed at from the beginning.

Although Alt starts from the myth of Adam and Eve and works his way up to the very real horrors of Auschwitz and beyond, the whole book lacks a sense of the gravity of social history. Furthermore, it shares with much of German literary scholarship an undeniable touch of national – or, to be more precise, Continental – parochialism. No one in his right mind would underrate the impact of the French Revolution nor that of Kant and Hegel on the intellectual tradition of Europe, but these names and events stand for the climax of a development that had begun much earlier – to a large extent in England. Alt, like most of his German colleagues, tends to give Schlegel more credit as an innovator than he deserves. Although he does not explicitly date the “Shift towards introspection” (Chapter Three) around 1800, he at the very least makes his readers think so. But the founding fathers of introspection and the psychological interest in literature were the English puritans of the 17th century. They triggered what, via Shaftesbury, Richardson, the sentimentalists and the Gothic novelists, eventually made its way to Germany. Readers well-versed in fact-free Theory may feel elated by Alt’s brilliant command of what is en vogue in contemporary German and French literary debate, but those who crave for empirical insight will feel somewhat disappointed – and may well conclude that a writer of such acumen should have produced more solid enlightenment and fewer sparkling lights.

Peter-André Alt: Ästhetik des Bösen
C.H. Beck, Munich 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-3406605031
Hardcover, 714 pages, EUR 34.00 

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin until 2000, and was described by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as ‘one of the most prolific and most widely read Anglicists in Germany’. His most recent book, a major new biography of Charles Dickens, is published this month by C.H. Beck (Munich).

by Francisco Klauser

Peter Sloterdijk’s sociopolitical essay Rage and Time tells a compelling cultural history of the mediations, exploitations, and translations of rage through (and into) the great religious and political ‘cosmologies’ of Western civilisation. Rage and Time is a powerfully written book about the sociopolitical ordering, coding, and accumulation of rage; a book which, in sum, acknowledges and investigates the role of rage as one of the driving forces of human history.

Comparable with Sloterdijk’s earlier work – amongst which Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) and the 2,500-page long Sphären (‘Spheres’) trilogy (1998; 1999; 2004) are but the most acclaimed examples – Rage and Time captivates through its multifaceted and at once strident and joyful style of writing. Divided into four main sections, the book not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the constitutive role of affects in world politics – which is still dramatically underexplored by political theorists, despite important recent work, for example by Chantal Mouffe – but also provides a solid historical contextualisation of the most recent violent eruptions of anger, from 9/11 to the 2005 French riots.

Hand-coloured etchings, "Vessels of Wrath", from Francis Barrett's "The Magus" (1801). (Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons; public domain.)

“Of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, sing Goddess…”: Sloterdijk starts his ambitious world history of ‘rage and time’ with the opening line of Homer’s Iliad, the first words of the European tradition. For Sloterdijk, Homer’s epic poetry not only highlights that in Europe literally everything began with rage, but also exemplifies the antique roots of the critical question – to which the sociopolitical and religious ‘cosmologies’ are constantly responding – of how to relate collectively to the affect of rage. Sloterdijk’s reading of the Greek heroic epos, the imaginary space of gods, half-gods, and divinely chosen angry heroes, underlines that in ancient Hellenistic mythology the origins of rage and anger are neither located in the earthly world, nor attributed to individuals’ personalities. Rage is rather understood as a possessed, divine capacity, a god-favoured eruption of power. Hence the birth of the hero as a prophet, whose task is to make the message of his god-given anger an immediate reality (pp. 8-9). For Homer, to sing the praises of Achilles’ heroism also – and ultimately – means to celebrate the existence of divine forces, which are releasing society from its vegetative daze, through the mediation of the godly chosen ‘bringer of anger and revenge’.

It is from the Greek mythological relationship with rage and anger that Sloterdijk derives his own conceptualisation of rage through the figure of Thymos. Originally denominating both the Greek hero’s specific organ for the reception of god-given rage and the bodily location of his proud self, Thymos later with Plato, and following the general transformation of the Greek psyche from heroic – belligerent to more civic virtues, stands for the righteous anger of the Greek citizen as a means of defence from insults and unreasonable attacks (pp. 22-25).With the figure of Thymos set against the psycho- analytical focus on Eros, anger, for Sloterdijk, is not only a vent for frustrated desires, but also, and rather, a reactive manifestation of offended pride. Yet, and in the tradition of both Sloterdijk’s earlier (1985) novel on the birth of psychoanalysis and of his critical study of psychoanalysis in the first volume of Spheres (1998, p. 297), Sloterdijk does not per se negate the merits of psychoanalysis for an understanding of the affective realm of human existence. Rather, Sloterdijk’s critique focuses on the limitations of the libido-centrist psychoanalytical vocabulary and thinking.

In conformity with its basic erotodynamic approach, psychoanalysis brought much hatred to light, the other side of live. Psychoanalysis managed to show that hating means to be bound by similar laws as loving. Both hating and loving are projections that are subject to repetitive compulsion. Psychoanalysis remained for the most part silent when it came to that form of rage that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect, and their backlashes. (p. 14)

From this standpoint, a theory of rage, for Sloterdijk, is primarily a theory of the politico-religious mediations of the processes of overcoming offended pride and of longing for revenge.

As we move from the ancient Hellenistic to the monotheistic Judaic world, the politico-religious coding of rage is fundamentally altered, as Sloterdijk shows in the second section of his analysis. In the Jewish faith, the angry hero becomes the metaphysical, wrathful God. Rage is thus conceived as the exclusive privilege of God, the very condition of his absolute sovereignty and power, which is directed in punitive form against his own people or against his chosen people’s enemies. As Sloterdijk subsequently shows, this cosmology of wrath of the Old Testament undergoes another set of structural changes in the medieval rage-conception of Catholic teaching, based on the double process of the earthly demonisation and of the metaphysical suspension of rage.

Had Europeans not heard about pride – or likewise rage – from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? (p. 17)

Based on the Christian axiomatic association of rage and eternity, God thus becomes the location of a transcendent repository of suspended human rage-savings and frozen plans of revenge.

What is important to note in this context of the Christian depictions of the Inferno is that the increasing institutionalization of hell during the long millennium between Augustine and Michelangelo allowed the theme of the transcendent archive of rage to be perfected. (p. 97)

In this light, and relating to the theorisation of human affects more generally, Sloterdijk’s analysis of ‘rage and time’ points towards the need to consider the world of affects not only in its fleeting and intimate, but also in its relational, resource-like, dimension, as the object of specific rage-administrating projects. Hence the possible reading of Rage and Time as a theory of the accumulation of affect.

This problematisation of anger and resentment as the objects of politico-religious accumulation and regulation is further developed in the third section of Rage and Time, relating to another ‘thymiotic’ revolution in Occidental civilisation with the emergence of the communist ‘World Bank of Rage’. Unlike the Christian referential of a metaphysical archive of rage, Sloterdijk shows that the communist ‘rage economy’ offers an earthly rooted programme for the canalisation and sociopolitical actualisation of individual rage-investments. The communist code of rage thus implies another project for the suspension and delegation of anger (to the earthly instance of the professional revolutionary) as a means to concentrate and maximise the power of individually deposed rage-investments, linked with the promise of substantial interest payments in the form of a better, newly created society. In Marx and Engel’s words, “all history is the history of making wrath productive”.

As the counterpoint to the communist doctrine of a party-led collectivisation of rage, Sloterdijk discusses the bourgeois-biased individualisation and romanticising of rage, exemplified by Alexander Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, as yet another exemplary ‘instruction manual’ of how to deal with rage. This individualist-capitalist approach to rage is further explored in the last section of Rage and Time, referring to the contemporary world of mass culture and consumerism, which is interpreted by Sloterdijk as a general transformation of rage-dynamic into greed-dynamic and lust-dynamic systems. Sloterdijk argues that in the aftermath of the Western rage-projects in their red, white, and brown colours, the figures of the resolute warrior and the prolific mother are substituted by the ambitious lover and the luxury consumer.

Yet, if consumerism conceals and redirects individual, pent-up rage towards new civic duties of enjoyment and desire, it also creates an explosive ‘multiegoistic situation’, which is deeply shaped by rather unarticulated and unregulated manifestations of disappointed rage communities. Pointing to the remarkable lack of political collection and administration of the thymiotic energies erupting in the 2005 French riots, the contemporary world, for Sloterdijk, is also a world of multiple decentralised movements of disoriented rage-holders. It is in a sense a postmodern world, in which no theory or project of global meaning prevails as a unitary mediator for the suspension, accumulation, management, and goal-directed increase in value of entrusted, individual rage investments. “Neither in heaven nor on Earth does anyone know what work could be done with the ‘just anger of the people’.” (p. 183) We hence rediscover one of the leitmotifs in Sloterdijk’s oeuvre, referring to the causes, modalities, and effects of the Enlightenment-induced destruction of unconditional, absolute truths in respect of both ontology and morality. For example, in Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk addresses this problematic through the notion of ‘cynicism’, as a diffuse, generalised attitude of discontent, following the loss of the great ideals and truths of older cultures. In Spheres, this theme emerges somewhat reformulated, in the opposition between the globalising spatialities of classical holistic thought and the foam-like spatialities of modernity.With Rage and Time, Sloterdijk further pursues this investigation through the discussion of the contrasting politics of anger in the past and present world.

On the last fifteen pages of Rage and Time, Sloterdijk asserts the potential of political Islam – based on its missionary dynamism, battle-centred cosmology and demographic strength – as an alternative ‘World Bank of Rage’ in the contemporary sociopolitical context. On the one hand, Sloterdijk acknowledges the actual and future power of political Islam to reunite parts of the disappointed Muslim world; on the other hand, he questions the ability of political Islam’s creative forces to develop an alternative oppositional movement of global meaning to the current capitalist mode of existence. In this, Sloterdijk stresses the current technological, economic, and scientific shortcomings of political Islam and thus its general limits in creatively shaping the socioeconomic conditions of humanity in the 21st century. Sloterdijk’s reading of political Islam thus focuses more on its high-risk potential in the form of intensified Muslim civil wars, or further amplified conflicts with Israel, than on its oppositional role within the Western world itself.

However, whilst Sloterdijk’s analysis of communist and Judeo-Christian anger-semiotics expands on a broad body of historicocultural insights, the investigation of current mediations of anger in the Middle Eastern world and in the context of post-9/11 Western politics appears to have been somewhat slighted. Readers of Rage and Time may search in vain for a more profound analysis of the differences and parallels between the historical and the contemporary sociopolitical coding of anger and revenge, which could have resulted in a more substantial prospective examination of the upcoming sociopolitical challenges in the 21st century. In this light, Sloterdijk’s open-ended conclusive consent of a general need for a morally based “education program” and a “great politics” of “balancing acts” (page 229) remains relatively vague, resembling a well-intended, yet somehow unrealistic, wish.

The main strengths of Rage and Time certainly lie in its very rich, cultural-historical approach and in its immense suggestive power for further analytical and empirical research into the complex role of rage and anger in contemporary politics – from the current semiotics of the war on terror to the Western imaginaries of modern forms of heroism, for example. Sloterdijk’s analysis strongly confirms the critical importance and high potential of such a research agenda. From this perspective, and in addition to Sloterdijk’s exclusive focus on the various forms and mediations of rage, one of the central challenges for future analyses will be to undertake detailed and comparative investigations into the ways in which political and religious semiotics and practices are combining and mediating different human affects simultaneously. This will – for example – allow a more substantial engagement with the widely developed body of empirical research on fear and hope. Rage and Time provides the perfect starting point to address these questions and to further elaborate upon the complex relationships between the political and the intimate (affective) dimensions of social existence.

Peter Sloterdijk: Rage and Time. A Psychopolitical Investigation.
Columbia University Press, New York 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14522-0
Cloth, 256 pages, US$34.50.

Francisco Klauser is assistant professor in political geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work focuses on the relationships between space, surveillance/risk and power; he also has research interests in urban studies and socio-spatial theory.

An earlier version of this review, based on the German edition of Zorn und Zeit, was first published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 27 (No. 1/2009), a publication of Pion Ltd., who have given kind permission to reproduce part of the material in the present review of Rage and Time. Reproduction of the present version requires permission from all the copyright owners concerned. (c) 2010

by Alex Prescott-Couch

Every Friday morning, postmasters in the United States send out over a million copies of US Weekly to subscribers. Combined with the approximately 800,000 newsstand copies sold, about two million Americans pay every week to leaf through page after page of the smiles, tears, tragedies, and triumphs of the famous and photographed. Whatever the drama or celebration, the pages – awash with pictures and dotted with text – guide the reader through an emotional program of tension (“Is Brad and Angelina’s marriage on the rocks?”) and release (“Lindsey’s new look”), giving instruction of what to feel about the events of the day. Should one feel outrage or concern at Kardashian’s latest stunt? Betrayal or vindication at Brad’s suspected dalliance? The exclamation points and rhetorical questions tell the tale. 

Paparazzo statue, Laurinska street, Bratislava. (Photo: Benmil222; used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence)

One of US Weekly’s most famous features is a two-page spread of photos depicting the quotidian banalities of celebrity life. These photos are overlaid with spunky exclamations – “They cheer at baseball games!” “They walk their dogs!” –  to the effect that even these people must hail cabs, buy babywipes, eat hotdogs, and wait for restrooms. Those who might seem to roll out of bed to a red carpet and take their morning coffee on a talk show couch, even they need to attend to the biological and social requirements of everyday life. The pictures and captions both embody and invert the standard sensationalism – a pack of paparazzi have dug up the dirt, and the joke is that what’s so startling is the utter lack of spectacle. “Stars – They’re Just Like Us.”

I’m not sure that Fred Inglis would like a review of his A Short History of Celebrity to begin with US Weekly. He might think such a beginning expresses surrender to the temptation to write a “lofty malediction over the celebrity cult” (p. 13) rather than a more fair-minded, less curmudgeonly treatment that his book seeks to present. Or it might provide the mistaken impression that celebrity is a new invention of the industrial mass media, exactly the impression he wishes to dispel by tracing the concept and practice of celebrity back over two hundred and fifty years. Maybe he would simply find it too easy.

Yet, despite such objections, the image encapsulates two main themes of his vivacious history of celebrity – the way celebrity and celebrities serve to educate our feelings, and the way celebrity makes us experience certain individuals as both intimately familiar and utterly supernatural. This notion of celebrities as otherworldly intimates who reflect and construct a certain point in the “history of feeling” is the thread that ties together the sometimes meandering but usually insightful biographical vignettes that constitute his “history” of celebrity.

Inglis begins his tale in eighteenth-century London, “the first city to construct itself as a city in a form that would prove recognizable to modernity” (p. 37). Powered by the forces of incipient industrialization, London was a mix of marketplace, gossip hub, urban sewer, and bourgeois leisure garden. Importantly for Inglis, it was also the site of a transformation in the nature of public acclaim. Up into the eighteenth century, public acclaim primarily took the form of “honor” or “renown.” “Renown” was the sort of acclaim “assigned to men of high accomplishment in a handful of prominent and clearly defined roles” (p. 4). Monarchs, military heroes, and learned men – just to give three examples – were known to their societies, but their acclaim was based on great deeds and rooted in their position in the social hierarchy. But in eighteenth century London, a new sort of acclaim was emerging, the “celebrity” possessed by the actors and artists that edified and entertained the urban bourgeoisie. This fame was still mediated by the social hierarchies omnipresent in eighteenth century England – as Inglis notes (p. 44), famed actor David Garrick kneeled to his audience – but signs of a celebrity-conscious consumer society were unmistakable. The life of Lord Byron most clearly exemplifies this tendency. Bryon scandalized London society by skillfully seducing aristocrats – including his half-sister – and then brazenly writing up his escapades in the verse that made him famous. Unlike renowned literary figures of the past, Byron was not only a social position but a man, an individual so overflowing with personality that his lyrics seemed a mere spillage from his life of passionate feeling. Byron’s public acclaim was bound up not simply with the work but with the life brought to expression in the work. Thus, Byron plays a key role in what Inglis dubs a “history of the feelings” not only because he was a public promoter of the Romantic ethic of authentic sentiment but because his life illustrates the new constellation of feelings through which the public relates to the famous, “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness, swift indifference” (p. 57).

Inglis’s narrative continues in nineteenth century Paris, the center of a new political and urban imaginary. As perpetual political upheaval forged a new language of democratic self-assertion, the city space was being restructured to make way for the boulevards, public parks, and glasshouse department stores that inscribed the ethos of the World Exhibition into the environment of everyday experience. These new aspects of the city augmented the oft-discussed arcades, those “fantasy avenues of the rich open to everybody to gaze into the shop windows and dream of unfeasible extravagance” (p. 86). With such spectacles just lying around in the streets, it isn’t surprising that urban perambulation became one of the chief entertainments of the rising bourgeoisie. The creature of the flaneur embodied a new culture of going out to see and be seen, a culture in which glamour and fashionable appearance became crucial. Individual attention-seeking paralleled the economics of the urban spectacle in which shops’ profits followed the number of passers-by lured in by their storefronts. This notion that success consists in successful attention-seeking is of course one of the cornerstones of modern celebrity culture.

The story continues in the money-and-gossip-obsessed New York of the Gilded Age. With the Weltgeist drifting across the Atlantic and the Hudson overflowing with cash from real estate, railroads, oil, steel, financing, the boom of big business generally, a new moneyed magnate aristocracy emerged with its own understanding of the basis of social respectability. While old money and a good name retained a certain status (p. 116), mammoth wealth more and more took the place of blood and breeding. The aura of money – and the realization that the whims of the mighty controlled the destinies of the working poor – raised curiosity about the goings-on of the mansioned rich, and newspapers adapted to slake this curiosity by passing on inner circle gossip. The mix of admiration, envy, bitterness, and adulation that Inglis sees as the constellation of feelings mediating our relations to celebrities today was born in the gossip column and in media profiles by journalists who were both muckrakers and sycophants. The mass press was a celebrity-making machine.

These first three stages – London, Paris, New York – form the core of Inglis’s history of celebrity and orient his analysis of a smattering of topics in the twentieth century. He devotes a chapter to the way our understanding of geography changed as the leisure industry cordoned off certain parts of the world as exclusive vacation destinations, and he provides some insightful commentary on the paraphernalia of capitalist success (yachts, diamonds, vacations on the Riviera, etc.).

One of the most interesting – but also most problematic – chapters, concerns Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, “supreme celebrities” (p. 160) in the era of mass politics. Inglis emphasizes the elective affinity between the theatrics of 1930s political celebrity and literal theater performance – the elaborate pageantry, the controlled outward appearance, the mechanisms of psychological projection that bring the audience under the performer’s will. Moreover, the air of intimate familiarity yet inapprehensible mystery that defined these dictators’ public image would reappear in the perception of Hollywood stars.

Since modern celebrities and dictators are both receiving public recognition within technologically advanced societies with developed media apparatuses, it should be no surprise that there are similarities in the modes of public acclaim. Yet the relationship between the public and the prominent in consumer society and that between a dictator and his subjects in an authoritarian state are importantly different, and more careful attention to this would have improved the discussion. First, the authoritarian press is beholden to the authorities rather than devoted to uncovering their secrets. Pravda was hardly a muckraking outfit. Second, celebrities operating in the market are dependent on the whims of an adoring public, while a despot is largely immune to such caprice. Mussolini didn’t need the paparazzi to hold the attention of the public. Third, the press served to maintain the dictator’s image rather than create it on its own. Magazine profiles aren’t going to contain any surprises. These features reflect the general fact that in a consumer society the customer is king, but one would be hard-pressed to say this about the subjects of an authoritarian government.   

The last chapters bring the narrative into the present. Inglis discusses the era of great film stars with great sympathy, and does an admirable job articulating both the cultural importance and personal magnetism of icons like John Wayne, Cary Grant, and especially Marilyn Monroe. Despite the backdoor dealings and blatant criminality of Hollywood filmmaking in those days, such stars were able to represent “the best part of the national character narrative in which the audience believed” (p. 190) and “the impossible version of the best selves audiences could hardly be in everyday life” (p. 206). They showed an audience a way of looking, acting, and feeling. Inglis possesses notably less patience for the current denizens of the fashion world and reality TV. Unfortunately, Inglis’s inner curmudgeon here seems to get the better of him.  He writes, for instance, of fashion models:

“Having no accomplishments to display, no action to render as artistry, pitifully lacking such personal resources as reflective intelligence and meaningful experience, they are quick to take offense, and, living between public adulation on the catwalk and in the restaurant, and the hot, endless tedium of the dressing room, it cannot be a surprise how many turn to the deathly, uncreative recreations of passing sex and playful cocaine” (p. 245).

There is fairer treatment to be had.

Inglis’s discussions of particular figures in these last chapters are often individually insightful, but the chapters don’t possess the unity of previous sections. While he is a perceptive observer of popular culture and his general erudition is impressive, Inglis’s method of stitching together biographical sketches becomes less illuminating the closer we get to the present where much of this biographical detail is familiar. In these last chapters, we get a patchwork of fascinating details and commentary but not enough conceptual tools to systematically comprehend the historical changes behind the biographies.  

Moreover, some of shortcomings of the end indicate problems profound and present from the start. The narrative that Inglis provides is so readable and his prose so full of verve that problems with the basic analytical categories and argumentative strategy can be easily covered over. The most obvious of these is the term of “celebrity” itself. First, are we talking about a person, a concept, a social role, or something else? One might think that distinguishing these doesn’t make a difference, since they are all interconnected: particular persons are celebrities in virtue of occupying a certain role in the social matrix, and applying the concept of “celebrity” to a person can have the effect of promoting or stabilizing this role (e.g. being classified as a celebrity leads one to be featured in celebrity magazines, which maintains one’s position as a celebrity). However, it’s important to differentiate person, concept, and role because the effects of each are distinct. It’s one thing to say that particular individuals, or a class of individuals, molded our feelings, actions, and ideals in a particular way. For instance, perhaps stars of the classical Hollywood cinema made us long to be debonair democrats, as Inglis says. It is quite another thing entirely to say that the concept of celebrity (or Hollywood starlet) affected feeling. Yet this is what Inglis seems to be getting at when he remarks that understanding the concept is important because it “serves to pick out those lives and ways of life which shaped themselves into the significant constellations of the past and provided quite a lot of people with stars to steer by” (p. 3). I take the idea here to be that the concept organizes people’s understanding and experience of success, and this way of understanding success has particular consequences. Similarly, it is important to distinguish the effects of the concept from the effects of the social role the concept picks out. For instance, a potential consequence of being universally acclaimed for one’s wealth and glamour may be to develop a certain dependence on the attention of others. It would be a very different thesis to claim that the need for continual attention a consequence of conceptualizing one’s position as a person who is universally admired. In the first case, the admiration of others is what is creating your need for attention, while in the second case, it is your conception of yourself as a celebrity that creates the need.

I mention these distinctions not to be pedantic but because I believe their elision explains the book’s strange combination of ease and obscurity. What makes the text both readable and confusing is that while much of the narrative focuses on the reception of particular individual celebrities, one of the main purposes of the book is to examine the consequences of the concept of celebrity and social role it picks out. If Inglis wants to understand “what celebrity does to people” (p. 16), then examining “historical examples, of individual life stories which neither constitute a sample nor provide epitomes” (p. 3) can muddle the issue.

Another pair of concepts that I believe could use some sharpening is the contrast between “renown” and “celebrity” that structures the text’s historical narrative. It isn’t clear how helpful this conceptual pairing is. First, each term groups together a rather heterogeneous array of features regarding the basis and object of public acclaim as well as the feelings of the admiring and the admired. Yet it isn’t clear whether these features are closely connected enough to form an ideal type that is useful for analysis. For instance, many current celebrities – the Prince of Monaco – receive acclaim on the basis of the social prominence of their offices and the public deeds that that their social position make possible. The fact that their prominence is attached to great public deeds performed from privileged positions of the social hierarchy (and those deeds reinforce the honor of the office) does not prevent them participating in “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness” (p. 57). Of course, we’re dealing with ideal types here, but the point is that the types Inglis picks out don’t seem to possess any sort of internal logic.

Given that the features of acclaim Inglis groups together often pull apart, the reader (or at least, this reader) had the feeling that the narrative of the book would have been clearer and the discussion of particular figures more illuminating with the addition of a few more distinctions. For example, when Inglis discusses Seamus Heaney (!) as the epitome of new celebrity, one feels something has gone awry. Heaney is of course well known in the literary world, but does the social role he occupies and the type of attention he commands bear even a family resemblance to that of Paris Hilton, let alone The Situation? There are some obvious distinctions – e.g. between those who are famous for their work and those famous for their social life – that would have helped the reader get a clearer sense of the historical and cultural topography. Adding some categories and making some distinctions would better enable us to explain our ambivalent feelings about the cult of celebrity. Inglis often expresses this ambivalence, and provides examples of why we should be ambivalent, but there is a slightly more general level of analysis that would be helpful. Without a more general discussion of different sorts of celebrity, Inglis’s attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff might seem appear to rely more on predilection than principle.

Despite these worries, A Short History of Celebrity is an excellent book. The prose is fabulous, and Inglis is brimming with insight and humor.  Moreover, one can’t help being drawn into tales of the rich and fabulous. However we may flatter ourselves, the stars are just not like us.

Fred Inglis: A Short History of Celebrity
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3439-6
Hardcover, 322 pages, US$29.95

Alex Prescott-Couch is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. He lived in Berlin from 2005 to 2008.

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

Sonja Neef, a lecturer in European media and culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, devotes her study ‘Imprint and Trace’ to the topic of ‘Handwriting in the Age of its Technical Reproduction’. In much the same way that Walter Benjamin, to whom the subtitle obviously alludes, did not object to photography as such, but only to the photographic reproduction of original works of art, so Sonja Neef does not lament the disappearance of handwriting. Whether the practice of handwriting will indeed ever disappear completely is, of course, an open question. If today’s continued presence of, say, vinyl albums – hastily written off as outmoded by many a commentator only a few years ago – is anything to go by, then there would seem to be little reason to be pessimistic about the future of handwriting. (After all, he who writes by hand may be said to demonstrate character, in that he writes against the tide of the zeitgeist.) On the contrary, what Neef sets out to show is that our current standardised typographies and digital substitute worlds remain indebted to handwriting as their ancestral predecessor. Cultural techniques may be everchanging, but they remain latently ever-present. Even the latest flat-screen technology is not left untouched by the history of handwriting. Neef makes it clear that traces of handwriting are to be found everywhere. What is important is ‘to contemplate the Manual within the Digital: the fingerprint on the touchscreen, the stylus on the writing pad of a tablet PC; in short, to consider handwriting from [the perspective of the] screen’ (p. 29).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Neef’s observations are informed by the conceptual vocabulary of such figures as Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, and consequently the study as a whole accentuates the cultural-philosophical more than media-theoretic aspects. To be sure, dogmatic adherence to any particular methodology – what Paul Feyerabend used to call ‘Methodenzwang’ – is not something one accuse the author of. What one might wish to criticise is the overambitious scope of the historical trajectory, which the author sets out to chart: Neef’s observations concerning the development, the significance, and the destiny of the technique(s) of handwriting go all the way back to the evolutionary origins of hand-like extremities “from fish to homo sapiens”, and span the whole breadth of cultural evolution, from human prehistory to the ancient world, the medieval period, the modern age and digital postmodernity. Thus, the author takes her readers on a tour de force from hieroglyphics to screen-savers, from cuneiforms to corrective fluid.

Neef, however, sees no difficulty in going back in history – or, for that matter, in extrapolating into the future. Her goal is to subvert the seemingly clear-cut distinction between the techniques of handwriting and the printing press: ‘My thesis is that there is no final dichotomy […] between, on the one hand, printing as a mechanical, technical, or digital way of writing and, on the other hand, handwriting as an individual, unique, and singular trace; instead, the two principles of “imprint” and “trace” are always already intertwined, both historically as well as systematically’ (p. 25). In other words, whatever the future may bring, handwriting survives safe and sound.

The individual chapters of the book span a wide range of topics and are refreshingly brief; in general, Neef writes succinctly and avoids long-winded sentences. As a result, her writing tends to be more intelligible than that of her theoretical role models. Nevertheless, it seems that writing in an accessible manner continues to be a professional risk within German-language academia. At the level of terminology, Neef pays heed to the expectations of her academic peers: The average reader will likely need a dictionary in order to make sense of such learned chapter headings and phrases as ‘Manus ex machina’, ‘Exergum’, ‘Dactylography’, ‘Currere’, ‘Ceci tuera cela’, ‘Infra-mince’, and the good old ‘Paralipomena’ (especially given that classics scholars are presumably not the main target group of the book).

Texts in the humanities, especially when they are (as in this case) reworked versions of an earlier PhD or Habilitation thesis, are often meant to demonstrate the author’s originality and independence. However, there is such a thing as too much originality – as Walter Benjamin found out the hard way when his Habilitation was at first rejected by the University of Frankfurt. Perhaps in order to avoid such a painful experience, Neef also dutifully goes over much secondary material. What emerges from this is a thoughtful and plausible assortment of important thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, various anthropologists), who pondered the significance of hands and hand-writing. In outlining their views, Neef often develops her own theoretical positions, forges new connections, and delineates her argument from the views of others. As a result, the reader is spared the déja-vu experience of thinking that somewhere, somehow, one has read all this before.

Neef’s intellectual tour de force from antiquity to the present comes to a stop already half-way through the book. The remaining chapters are for the most part revised versions of previously published papers on such varied topics as graffiti, Anne Frank’s diary, and tattooing. While these chapters are nicely illustrated with photos and graphic images, thus inviting the reader to browse among them, they do not, as a whole, fit very well with the first half of the book. Towards the end, the book reads more like a collection of essays. All in all, however, Neef’s book not only conveys valuable insights into the cultural-philosophical significance of the ‘old’ medium of handwriting, but also whets the reader’s appetite to dig out that old fountain pen again – irrespective of whether one intends to draw precise block letters on a page or indulge in the magnificent swirls of ornate calligraphy.

Sonja Neef: Abdruck und Spur. Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2008
ISBN-13: 978-3865990372
Softcover, 360 pages, EUR 24.90

Frank Berzbach teaches psychology and social sciences at the Ecosign Academy of Design, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (FH Köln).

It has been some time since the phenomenon of rave disappeared from the perception of the general public. Nowadays, when one speaks of the ‘techno movement’, one typically does so in the past tense. The images of Berlin’s ‘Love Parade’ are but faint memories, documenting how a carnivalesque subculture has been absorbed by the mainstream of a ‘fun-driven society’ (Spaßgesellschaft). That great musical current of the 1990s, it seems, has turned into a mere trickle.

Tobias Rapp, in his book Lost and Sound, objects to this scenario of decline and attempts to show that, despite its reduced ‘surface visibility’, the culture of techno music in Berlin is alive and well. After the end of the hype, about ten years ago, the techno scene – this is one of Rapp’s central theses – withdrew from everyday culture and went underground, where it went through a period of renewal. One might think that Rapp is dealing with a niche phenomenon, which would be at best of local interest. But the author – who recently moved from being editor of pop culture at the Berlin daily Tageszeitung to a position at news-weekly Der Spiegel – argues convincingly that the clubs of Germany’s capital have shaped how German culture as a whole is perceived at an international level.

View of the 'Berghain'. (Photo: Bart van Poll; Creative Commons License BY-SA 2.0)

Tobias Rapp combines subjective first-person reports from Berlin’s nightlife with other passages that are written in a sober, more analytic mode. At both levels, he describes the astonishing attraction that Berlin has been exerting on DJs, producers, and weekend ‘Easyjet ravers’. Rapp estimates the number of techno tourists, who arrive each weekend on budget flights headed for one of Berlin’s airports, to be (‘not implausibly’) around 10,000. As a main cause for this boom, Rapp identifies not only the emergence of budget air travel, but also the oversupply of real estate in the German capital. Thanks to low commercial rents, a relatively egalitarian clubbing scene has emerged, which – ‘unlike in other major cities’ – does not target the celebrity and luxury segment of the market.

One can read Rapp’s study from different perspectives. As a book about Berlin, it may not provide touristic advice on the city’s hottest night spots, but it provides a well-researched survey of the clubs along the river Spree. To be sure, the author sometimes writes with the passion of a true aficionado, but for the most part he manages to keep a professional distance between him and his topic. Nonetheless, he hardly hides his satisfaction when he recounts, for example, the observation of a female club-goer, who describes ‘Techno in Berlin’ as ‘just like Reggae in Kingston’.

Rapp did not intend to write a music book that would describe the evolution of house, techno, and related genres of electronic music (although his recommendations of recordings, given in the appendix to the book, provide an excellent starting point). Rather, his interest is more in cultural-sociological findings: such as the ‘commune model’ that is being practiced at ‘Bar 25’ (‘Hippie de luxe’), or the only partial visibility of the clubs. Thus, at the ‘Berghain’, the leading club in its segment, a strict ‘no photos’ policy is in place, which not only gives the place an aura of exclusivity but also allows for an element of egalitarianism: what counts is ‘the celebration of a collective subject without celebrities’.

That Rapp’s concern is with general conclusions, not merely with Berlin-specific observations, is especially noticeable in his discussion of online communities. He describes in detail how ‘an authentic local subculture … becomes the topic of discussion in global networks’. This provides a good insight into the structure of a wider public of pop culture, which constitutes itself via the internet with its global reach. For example, in a relevant internet discussion group, Rapp encounters one 17-year old from Toronto who has never been to Europe, but knows everything about the current preferences of the DJs at ‘Berghain’, the place of his longing. One of the interesting aspects of the book is how it makes tangible – via the example of Berlin’s club culture –  the much discussed notion of ‘glocalisation’.

Lost and Sound is not a political book in the narrow sense. However, Rapp’s reference to the asymmetrical perception of techno culture – ‘hardly any in Germany, a lot of attention abroad’ – is nonetheless relevant to cultural policy-makers. With respect to the role of local politics and economic development, Rapp argues that the current boom of medium-sized clubs and venues was only possible against the backdrop of the failure of wholesale urban redevelopment policies in the 1990s. In a detailed and sophisticated manner, he describes how popular criticism led to a referendum against the large-scale redevelopment plans that had been drawn up for the bank of the river Spree. The fact that the controversy about the MediaSpree plans culminated in the slogan ‘place for clubbing or location for investors?’ may well be due to the specific conditions in Berlin. However, looking beyond the political sensitivities within the German capital, this case study may well contain general insights into the relation between, on the one hand, alternative culture with its hedonistic outlook and, on the other hand, institutionalised politics.

Not least from a creative industries perspective, the book is a worthwhile addition to the literature. Rapp describes the change in significance of record labels, which, in times of a crisis-like decline in record sales, have become an integral part of strategies of self-marketing, by DJs who team up with producers (and vice versa). He also explains how it is that certain record shop are able to maintain their economic and cultural function, even in times of crisis, because they cater to a specialised audience. Part of Rapp’s study is also concerned with the interdependence between club culture, fashion, tourism, and technology: for example, DJ software from Berlin is now being exported to the U.S. for use during church services. 

Regarding the clubs themselves, the author arrives at an upbeat conclusion: ‘With a bit of good will and some idealization one could say: the house and techno scene in Berlin has retained the good aspects of independent culture – economic independence, artistic integrity, and an unwillingness to compromise – while simply having done away with the bad aspects: simplistic anti-capitalism, glorification of self-exploitation, and lack of professionalism.’ In times of a global economic crisis, that is not a bad result.

Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound. Berlin, Techno und der Easyjetset.
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2009.
ISBN-13: 9783518460443
Softcover, 268 pages, EUR 8.50

Norbert Niclauss works on music and cultural policy at the German Federal Government’s Commission for Culture and the Media (BKM), Berlin.

The German version of this article first appeared in Berliner Republik, No. 2/2009; translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books.