Was Nietzsche's real God Henry Ford ?
David Bentley Hart think so, in The Beauty of the Infinite he writes,
One wonders, really, whether this is not the narrative that the Nietzschean element in the postmodern most truly subserves. The market is not so much a vertical as a horizontal totality, a plane upon which everything can be arranged in a hierarchy of abstract equivalence, aleatory instances of desire or apathy; it is a totality that contains everything in a state of barren and indifferent plurality. It invites and preserves a vertical hierarchy of wealth and poverty, of course, but without reference to a stable ontological or "analogical" syntax: the realm of the real is at the level of horizontal transactions, from which social and economic positionings arise and into which they can just as easily sink again. It is the totality, in short, not of Apollo but of Dionysus (Apollo's other face). It may well be that in some sense what Nietzsche foresaw, what he pre- pared for (why God "died" for him), was modernity's postindustrial market.
The myth of affirmation without negation, or of no negation except as part of a prior affirmation, the insistence upon evaluation and transvaluation (upon value) and upon the primordiality of the will, and so many other aspects of the Nietzschean narrative stand in curious compatibility with the mythos of the market.
For all his solicitude for noble values, Nietzsche may prove, in retrospect, to have been the greatest of bourgeois philosophers:
the active and creative force of will he praised may be really a mythic aggrandizement of entrepreneurial ingenuity and initiative; talk of the will to power, however abstracted and universalized, may reflect only a metaphysical inflation of that concept of voluntaristic punctiliarity that defines the "subject" to which the market is hospitable; the notion of a contentless and spontaneous activity that must create values describes, in a somewhat impressionistic vein, the monadic consumer of the free market and the venture capitalist; to speak of the innocence of all becoming, the absence of good and evil from being, and a general preference for the distinction between good and bad as a purely evaluative judgment is perhaps to speak of the guiltless desire of the consumer, the relativity of want, and that perpetual transvaluation that is so elegantly and poignantly expressed on every price tag, every declaration of a commodity's abstract value; a force that goes always to the limit of what it can do is perhaps at one with modern capitalism's myth of limitless growth and unbounded trade.
Nietzsche, however much he detested bourgeois values, perhaps knew not which god he served (as a Marxist might say, his ideology was the product of material forces he did not recognize).
Seen in this light, it is clear why the figure of Christ presents such an intractiible problem in The Anti-Christ: he is unmarketable, he produces nothing that can be brought into history's true arena (the strife of the market), his practices do not obey market functions; he is, simply enough, a bad consumer and entrepreneur, concerned with feeding the poor and comforting the sickly, living like a mendicant, advocating the unconditional forgiveness of debts, treating money like Caesar's uncontested property (with an irresponsible air of indifference), and promiscuously producing and distributing good things like bread, fishes, and new wine outside the cycle of commodification and exchange.
One wonders, really, whether this is not the narrative that the Nietzschean element in the postmodern most truly subserves. The market is not so much a vertical as a horizontal totality, a plane upon which everything can be arranged in a hierarchy of abstract equivalence, aleatory instances of desire or apathy; it is a totality that contains everything in a state of barren and indifferent plurality. It invites and preserves a vertical hierarchy of wealth and poverty, of course, but without reference to a stable ontological or "analogical" syntax: the realm of the real is at the level of horizontal transactions, from which social and economic positionings arise and into which they can just as easily sink again. It is the totality, in short, not of Apollo but of Dionysus (Apollo's other face). It may well be that in some sense what Nietzsche foresaw, what he pre- pared for (why God "died" for him), was modernity's postindustrial market.
The myth of affirmation without negation, or of no negation except as part of a prior affirmation, the insistence upon evaluation and transvaluation (upon value) and upon the primordiality of the will, and so many other aspects of the Nietzschean narrative stand in curious compatibility with the mythos of the market.
For all his solicitude for noble values, Nietzsche may prove, in retrospect, to have been the greatest of bourgeois philosophers:
the active and creative force of will he praised may be really a mythic aggrandizement of entrepreneurial ingenuity and initiative; talk of the will to power, however abstracted and universalized, may reflect only a metaphysical inflation of that concept of voluntaristic punctiliarity that defines the "subject" to which the market is hospitable; the notion of a contentless and spontaneous activity that must create values describes, in a somewhat impressionistic vein, the monadic consumer of the free market and the venture capitalist; to speak of the innocence of all becoming, the absence of good and evil from being, and a general preference for the distinction between good and bad as a purely evaluative judgment is perhaps to speak of the guiltless desire of the consumer, the relativity of want, and that perpetual transvaluation that is so elegantly and poignantly expressed on every price tag, every declaration of a commodity's abstract value; a force that goes always to the limit of what it can do is perhaps at one with modern capitalism's myth of limitless growth and unbounded trade.
Nietzsche, however much he detested bourgeois values, perhaps knew not which god he served (as a Marxist might say, his ideology was the product of material forces he did not recognize).
TheAnti-Christ may well be the text that best marks the line of division between church and market as a line of enmity (another reason theology may be beholden to Nietzsche). None of the rhetorical ornaments of Christ's life - none of its shadow and light, pathos and joy - can be fitted to the pagan aes- thetic of endlessly expansive power and Dionysus's heedless dance.
Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysus, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy.
Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysus, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy.
But perhaps another veil remains to be lifted, and the god may be invited to step forth again, in his still more essential identity: Henry Ford. After all, Ford's most concise and oracular pronouncement - "History is bunk!" - might be read as an exquisite condensation of the theme of the second of the Unzeitgemiifte Betrachtungen...
And there could scarcely be a more vibrant image of univocity's perpetual beat of repetition - of eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same - than the assembly line: difference here is certainly not analogical, but merely univocal, and the affirmation of one instance is an affirmation of the whole. It is, moreover, well documented that Ford was a devotee of square dancing, which is clearly akin to (perhaps descended from) the dithyrambic choreia of the bacchantes; Ford was a god who danced.
Radical hermeneutics, certainly, has all the marks of a necessary, "superstructural" hygiene of the market, a final speculative transition from the concrete figures - the particular optics - of certain premodern traditions, inexplicably lingering on in the public space, to the open, Heracleitean spectacle of the market's endless fluidity.
And this is why it serves especially well (though at a removed and ideological level) to help clear the ground for the market: it obeys the logic of an age and a regime in which the agora has been disseminated throughout the polis, giving shape to all real public identity.
...talk of the "flux" and the "abyss" is itself a metaphysics, surely: to name the flux is also to profess an understanding of the "logic" (the logos) of the aleatory, to name chaos as the metaphysical substance - the truth - that, once grasped by thought, excludes other and opposed truths, and exposes them as fictions.
And one should call this metaphysics by its proper name: Dionysian metaphysics, metaphysics in its primordial constitution - which is to say, market metaphysics.
The market, after all, which is the ground of the real in modernity, the ungrounded foundation where social reality occurs, makes room only for values that can be transvalued, that can be translated into the abstract valuations of univocal exchange.
A desire that expands to the limits of which it is capable: not an analogical desire for God or the other, but a desire for nothing as such, producing in order to desire more. Here one sees the necessary, if not always immediately apparent, synonymy of consumerism and nihilism: in our "society of the spectacle" (to use Guy Debord's phrase), the open field where arbitrary choices may be made among indifferently desirable objects must be cleared and then secured against the disruptions of the Good; this society must presume, and subtly advocate, the nonexistence of any higher "value" than choice, any truth that might order desire toward a higher end; desire may posit, seize, want, not want - but it must not obey.
Thus endless transvaluation is the law of the market, and its secret faith is in the impossibility of anything beyond this law; and as this law and this faith mark the triumph of the nothing, their "moral" logic is simply that of the absolute liberty of the will.
And this is why it serves especially well (though at a removed and ideological level) to help clear the ground for the market: it obeys the logic of an age and a regime in which the agora has been disseminated throughout the polis, giving shape to all real public identity.
...talk of the "flux" and the "abyss" is itself a metaphysics, surely: to name the flux is also to profess an understanding of the "logic" (the logos) of the aleatory, to name chaos as the metaphysical substance - the truth - that, once grasped by thought, excludes other and opposed truths, and exposes them as fictions.
And one should call this metaphysics by its proper name: Dionysian metaphysics, metaphysics in its primordial constitution - which is to say, market metaphysics.
The market, after all, which is the ground of the real in modernity, the ungrounded foundation where social reality occurs, makes room only for values that can be transvalued, that can be translated into the abstract valuations of univocal exchange.
A desire that expands to the limits of which it is capable: not an analogical desire for God or the other, but a desire for nothing as such, producing in order to desire more. Here one sees the necessary, if not always immediately apparent, synonymy of consumerism and nihilism: in our "society of the spectacle" (to use Guy Debord's phrase), the open field where arbitrary choices may be made among indifferently desirable objects must be cleared and then secured against the disruptions of the Good; this society must presume, and subtly advocate, the nonexistence of any higher "value" than choice, any truth that might order desire toward a higher end; desire may posit, seize, want, not want - but it must not obey.
Thus endless transvaluation is the law of the market, and its secret faith is in the impossibility of anything beyond this law; and as this law and this faith mark the triumph of the nothing, their "moral" logic is simply that of the absolute liberty of the will.
More to the point, while it [this type of hermeneutics] can provide no critique that cannot be absorbed by the market (which is undeconstructible, in that it simply is the world it describes, it is the values it promotes, it creates the reality it proclaims), a radical hermeneutics can and does serve the ideological ends of the market, precisely because it aids in breaking down the inassimilable extravagances of precapitalist and presocialist traditions, and resists and ironizes the claims they make regarding truth or the good.
To put the matter more simply, "radical" hermeneutics looks suspiciously like a species of liminal semeiosis, which aids in bearing persons over (in various states of privation) into the diversified identitylessness of the market; it wears the aspect of a passive soupc;:on perhaps, but even so plays its part in the violence of this necessary transformation, this invention of the abstract self, the unnarrated consumer. This hermeneutics, this great narrative of the death of metaphysics that is by extension an elegy pronounced over every story of truth, merely serves the market, as the latter forces back the pressures of other tradi- tions to the margins of reality, causing identities to evaporate, to be burned off in a newly fashioned space of private meaning.
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