On Seduction (1)

By Reinhold Urmetzer

Let us still dive deeper into the waters of a cheerful and unabashed disorientation - now and again catching a brief glimpse of an edge of truth, led by all-mighty Destiny (which we can neither recognize nor see through nor govern) - each of us with the most individual and multiplicitous goal of felicity. So let us live further in an open, portentous, and chaotic system.
It need not be difficult. Perhaps we could even enjoy this condition of imponderableness and contradiction?! At least now and again. Brief and also but rare are the days of real happiness (sigh). - I get rather poetic, and this despite the many boldfaced and foreign terms, which may require googling or not.

(On Roman Morals and Disorientation)

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Oct 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9783743945043

Book preview

1 - Ave Atque Vale

A warm welcome to my new blog, created with the help of Alexei Chibakov for edition weissenburg! Andrew Walsh has undertaken the admittedly difficult task of translating this blog into English. Many thanks to both!

On Seduction is the title of this blog, and Jean Baudrillard’s ironic motto, Don’t let yourselves be seduced! will accompany us throughout this cultural history. We’ll examine many areas of thought, we’ll jump across and through philosophies of the arts, histories of psychology, from sociology to politics. I come myself from the Frankfurt School, with Karl Otto Apel (whith whom I studied for many years in Saarbrücken), and Jürgen Habermas as my mentors.

But I also draw perhaps significant inspiration from the French philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and François Lyotard. Not the least, I am especially drawn to the lives and thoughts of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods. My exemplar from that period is Sextus Empiricus.

So now you know how to set me and this blog in context, do you not? Even though I will gladly attempt, from time to time, to spring out of whatever pigeonhole you might place me! Be ready for surprises; they’ll pop up often!

I want to start off this new form of communication— our new form of meeting, perhaps of relating to, one another—on the subject of sexuality. My new book, which I’ve been working on for half a year so far, is titled On Love and Lust. It deals with the sexuality of the future; less so that of the present or the past, from the point of view of man and woman. Rather, it also deals with relating, encountering, and whether the family as a social institution will survive, at least in our western cultural sphere.

I suspect most likely not.

But how should we—here and now, in this new medium—communicate, how should it be written? How should the whole thing proceed? Each according to how he/she wants to, or can? With or without a constructed language?

There’s also the problem of anonymity and transparency. I have nothing to hide, and we also shouldn’t have anything to hide. How do we want to keep in direct contact with one another, if nobody has a name, and we keep hidden from one another?

Hegel, in his philosophy of law, includes a treatise on the necessity of signatures (i.e., at the bottom of contracts). Without a signature, there is no subject, no me, no person: nothing but lifeless machines. Communications-machines, eventually replaced entirely by computers, which are themselves gradually learning to speak.

This brings us to another subject, that I’ll be discussing shortly: communication, mis-, and meta-communication, by means of electronic media. Perhaps I should relate this to the subject of my book: On Love and Sex marked by SMS (not marked by [BD]SM! That is nowadays probably hopelessly archaic!).

There will be several main topics/categories. General is for the continuation of my Twitter messages; better formulated, my earlier TwittLonger-Texts. Literature is provisionally concerned with my new book, perhaps also with my already-published texts. The category Journalism covers my various interviews, as well as the more illustrious of my newspaper articles (such as for the Berlin tageszeitung) and others. The last section, Poetry, contains poems from myself and others. Not the least, I also work as a composer and musician—my favorite hobbies of all!

For now, we’ll have to wait and see. I still have to learn everything, test it, try it out. Maybe I’ll end up instead staying with my TwittLonger messages, with the printed book, or my illustrious performance-presentations, of which I’ll be posting reports including reactions from the press and my contemporaries.

But this is, foremost, a beginning: our beginning.

If publishing by mouseclick works, even without the siteadmin’s help, then the tracking, which might help or hinder us in covering our tracks—or better yet: the trail, which traces us covering our tracks, or doesn’t—is already at hand.

What a terrible language and formulation! some might object: this is supposed to rally readers, like-minded collaborators, commentators to our cause? As a Saar-Frenchman (as some of our rightward-leaning neighbors have tended to describe me), I have a soft spot for French authors and their particular way of thinking. I love constructed language: the more difficult, the less comprehensible, the more complex and abstract it is, the better! The longer the sentence (with further parenthetical subordinate clauses interposed [and yet further subordinate clauses interposed in them]), with foreign terms, and the floridness of heavyweight imagery (heavyweight imagery; what’s that supposed to be?), it should be exactly that! What?

It’s sufficient, with certain texts like those of Serres, Derrida, or Baudrillard, to read just half a page—that’s enough! That leads further: to new ideas, new questions, new ways of thinking, which are presently ever more atrophied. If language atrophies, so does thought. Humankind atrophies. Thus the French philosophers set against this creeping impotence, even idiocy and ignorance, their linguistic over-complexity; who would provoke us, even shock us and jolt us out of our somnolence: that we might remain human, become human once again, and not atrophy into machines, or into some sort of machine-like existence (without resorting to speaking of degeneration). Reductionism will be a major topic for us!

And here I come to one of my other favorite topics: technocracy, by which people find themselves imprisoned and helpless things within an Internet of Things™, who wish themselves molded, controlled, and manipulated by whomever. I don’t use the term technocracy in Boulevard’s sense, but rather how its discoverers—i.e., Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School—would use it.

That is certainly something other than respectable purpose-oriented rationalism, that Protestant-Prussian and easily-understood reasonableness so often found in this country. But that’s enough to say,