[7] Thoughts – By Way of Introduction

Wonder and Evil

More than 2000 years ago, the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon listed the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the seven most splendid structures of his age. All that remains from across the centuries are the Pyramids of Giza; all other wonders of the world have fallen victim to the gnawing of time, to acts of destruction and disasters. Yet, seven new world wonders have been created since then: the Great Wall of China, the rock city of Petra, the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, for example. In addition, we could note the seven world wonders of technical development, the seven wonders of nature, the seven wonders of the Modern Age or the seven steps to personal enlightenment. We humans create wonder. We are capable of doing so. At the same time, though, we experience the decay of our own achievements, and we are responsible for the destruction of others’ wonders. Even what we do not create, what we have received as a gift – nature – is so far subject to our will to modify that the consequences of the changes cannot be foreseen and are barely rectifiable later. In Christendom, the Seven Deadly Sins are listed as the reverse of good, human behaviour: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. For his part, Mahatma Gandhi labelled the dark sides of human behaviour, in a more concrete and contemporary way, with wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality, science without humanity, religion without sacrifice, politics without principle. We can all ask ourselves the question: What are our wonders today and what are our deadly sins?

Luck and Catastrophe

On the one hand, the number Seven is a gleaming lucky number if it speaks of strong will, outstanding strength, great achievements and of inexhaustible joy and happiness, and on the other hand it is a gloomy number of fate, a number of the abyss, a number of disasters if it tells of the debasements of human life, of the dark sides, yes, of the inferno in the world. The French structuralist Roland Barthes would listen up at this point and, similarly to his criticism of the famous exhibition “The Family of Man”, would make himself noticed thus: “Here, everything, visual content and visual effect along with the explanation that justifies them, is aimed at abolishing the determining weight of history. […] The myth of the human “condition” rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.” [1] He would challenge us; a progressive humanism would have to reverse this “old betrayal”, which means it would have to “incessantly tear open” nature and its laws in order, finally, to place nature itself as historical. More concretely: “Birth and death? If one withdraws the history from them, there is nothing left to say about this, comment then becomes purely tautological. […] That the child is born prosperously or in poor conditions, that it causes its mother pain or not, that it is affected by mortality or not, that it has access to this or to that form of the future, that is what exhibitions must tell us of, and not of an eternal poetry of birth.”[2]

With this argument, which is published for the first time and readable in his “Mythologies” in 1957, he puts his finger on a sore point: To speak of the seven wonders and deadly sins of the world may sound great and human, consistent and essential simultaneously, but it also sounds like eternal human poetry of the mythically entwined way of the world. The course of time purges the lived, built, hard-fought life and its concrete history of almost everything, except the remaining aesthetic stimuli, and allows us the sweet stylization of present and past. “Arcadia” is so quickly mythologized and now sounds merely like an expansive hilly ideal landscape with fragrant plants and trees; it is no longer a reminder of the two-class society of citizens and slaves and of a history full of wars and battles. This is a sore point, in many examples of photography as well.

Fleeting Reality

So how are we living today? In the realm of wonders or in the realm of the deadly sins? Possibly in a realm in between? More concretely: What is it that we are currently living, how are we living it, why are we living it, for what purpose  ̶  where are we going? We all note that we are living in a special age, a hectic, fast, energetic age on the one hand; in a present moment too, in which framework conditions, basic requirements, life pillars and therefore the conditions, qualities and values of life are changing at an unusually fast and fundamental rate. No longer from era to era, from generation to generation, but at a rhythm of ten years, five years, sometimes of one year. Paradigm shift after paradigm shift. Zygmunt Bauman, one of Europe’s renowned, influential sociologists, coined the term “fleeting modern” for this, a time of uncertainty, of insecurity, in which the everyday life of many people is flowing, hazy  ̶  fleeting, indeed  ̶  he says, because stable social forms and institutions, stable “dogmas”, therefore a clear, reliable framework of reference for everyday deeds and long-term life plans, are missing. “Living in fleeting times means dealing with uncertainty - with the increasing fluidity of electable ways of life and with the dialectic of fear and security, with the growth of social inequality and ‘becoming superfluous’, with globalization and the permanent status of the ‘fleeing refugee’.”[3] The French space-time philosopher Paul Virilio spoke formerly of the principle “Drive, drive, drive...” (Berlin: Merve Verlag 1978), of the conquering of time after the conquering of space.

Commercialization and Digitization

The history of humanity is full of times of upheavals, of acceleration, of in­security, of radical revolution as well. The invention of book printing, for example, influenced the way of the world in such a manner  ̶  from henceforth, knowledge was shareable, communicable and no longer reserved for an elite of chiefly intellectually thinkers  ̶  that we can simply not imagine the Enlightenment without this technological step. Yet since the middle, end of the 20th century, the once western-capitalistic, now globally encompassing-capitalistic part of the world seems to be driven by a monstrous dynamism. In everyday life we barely even manage to breathe, sometimes; we suffer from the feeling of constantly missing something, and are, depending on age, barely able now to analyse and comprehend the serious changes in the framework conditions. Art, literature and philosophy set aside their great force, their opportunities for utopia some time ago and are occupied almost exclusively with the diagnosis, the analysis, with the symbolization of the changes in economic, societal, and media-communicative phenomena.

A range of propulsive forces has unleashed this maelstrom, this dynamism. I want to single out three striking torsional forces: loss of faith and authority subsequent to the world wars; commercialization; and digitization. 

After the incomprehensible horror of the Second World War it was impossible to carry on pretending that nothing had happened, impossible to putter about with the same resources as previously  ̶  even if society, its institutions, even the lethargy in the people tried with all their force to return to normality as fast as possible, to re-install and to re-establish themselves and the associated ideals in their old form. The First and Second World War combined had thrown the individual too far back on his own resources. Belief in the State, in institutions, the Church, and the various moral and legal instances experienced a violent shake-up, Freud’s Super-Ego a deep disturbance. The two wars combined drove thinking, the experiencing of world and life away from superordinate, “absolute” authorities towards the search for the individual’s own, personal existence. Concepts such as people, nation, fatherland are currently dissolving in their elevated singular. Trust in the European structures, in the pillars of existence had fallen apart. Man was obliged to redesign himself: an opportunity and a source of panic, a freedom and an obligation simultaneously. “Man is none other than what he makes of himself”, [4] Jean-Paul Sartre philosophically fittingly wrote at the time in Is Existentialism a Form of Humanism? on the loss of authority and meaning after a catastrophe.

The way people deal with things is an effective gauge of the state of mind, the values, that are currently prevailing. The world of things, of objects created and acquired by human hand, was always somewhat ambivalent to humans. For a long time a knife had to suffice, as long as the knife did its duty. In the 20th century, especially in the final quarter, our behaviour towards things changed fundamentally. Mass production democratized the possession of objects, made them affordable for many, at the cost that they are no longer apt, no longer unique items; rather, they obtain their aura via the gleam of novelty. Mass production was imbued with positivity from the start: With new clear functional objects, purged of the histo­ri­cizing forms and representative contents of the bourgeois 19th century, our world, our relationship to the world, is to be changed. The rapid growth of the economy, of prosperity, of the individual’s purchase power after the Second World War caused the cycle of production and consumption to swell, to become simultaneously bigger, wider, weightier and faster. Surprisingly quickly, the culture of need changed into a culture of consumption, into the familiar blend of consumerist frenzy and consumerist compulsion: We are permitted, and we are forced, to consume. 

A second reference to “The Family of Man”: This exhibition powerfully reflected a “human­istic need” after the Second World War. Edward Steichen, its curator, wanted to show a large human family which becomes reconciled and in which everyone is equal: “We two”, reads a text beneath the picture of a couple, “form a multitude.” The exhibition became the world’s biggest, longest-shown photography exhibition, because it perfectly fitted in with the post-war ideology of the USA. Sponsored by Coca Cola overheads, accompanied by booklets published monthly by Coca Cola, supported and massively promoted by the USIA, the United States Information Agency, the exhibition became the ambassador of the USA worldview. The USIA paid for five copies, so that the exhibition could be put on simultaneously at five locations in the world. The universally good was exhibited detached from the biggest wars, detached from industrial labour ­conditions as a sun-shiny promotional world. For a number of authors, this enforced conformity  ̶  we are all the same, we are the others  ̶  in this democratization of human existence prepared the ground for the second half of the 20th century. The first half was still existential; the second half, commercial. And this world needed a uniform group of consumers, encompassing the world as far as possible, free of values, dogmas that would hinder consumption. 

Today we stand in the midst of the digital world, and appear, nevertheless, to be standing only at the beginning of major upheavals. The digital is altering knowledge, production and communication from the ground upwards. Christoph Kucklick subtitles his book on Die granulare Gesellschaft (2014) with the laconically casual comment, “How the digital is dissolving our reality”.  Computers thoroughly calculate models for which humanity would otherwise have needed thousands of years; robots produ­ce without pain and overtime wages around the clock, with greater precision than humans. Knowledge acquisition and communication has relocated almost entirely to the Internet. 3D printers are revolutionizing the innovation-production-distribution context; algorithms are splitting the no­tion of equality, of equal people into highly individual, precisely granular special cases, who are “mentored” by politicians and advertisers in a communicatively meshed and singular way. Kucklick analyses how our personal behaviour, conventional forms of production, democracy and society are dissolving and are going to take on new shape.

The Internet stands in indirect, if not direct connection with the end of the Cold War. The (arms, camouflage, communication) technologies that were previously used often in military contexts, which had to be elaborately hidden during the Cold War from the opposing secret services, were now given clearance and accordingly commercialized, which then also led promptly to a giant (stock exchange‑) bubble. The massive technological arms race of the Cold War has since then been battled out on the market.

The Dissolution of "Photography"

The commercialization of the Internet and the first “masses-ready” digital cameras on the market developed at about the same time. This unforeseen, surprisingly fast develop­ment threw up a series of questions. Back then, in the Nineties, Florian Rötzer described the situation with these words: “Photography is presently suffering the fate of all analogue media whose autonomy is being abolished with their integration into the digital code. Photographs or the ­camera are now supplying only digitized data, which can be processed by the computer and therefore altered at will. The outstanding property of computer technology is the opportunity of being able to process, i.e. to calculate, everything that can be digitized, and to be able to link this data flow with output devices of all kinds. This property of the computer, which causes it to become a universal machine because it can, in principle, imitate any other machine, reaches deeply into the understanding of the real.” And he continues: “Deception is the innermost principle of technical images, their realism always a self-deceit. Digital photography supplies images which now only seem realistic, in which all types of image production can be blended with one another entirely at random, in which manipulation can be performed willy-nilly and according to taste: Photography as perfect painting of a digital Surrealism, the image a naked surface of the imagination which stands open to subjective recording. No more subjugation to the object, the given light, the existing colours.”[5]

Not only society, democracy, the understanding of equality, but also photography is dissolving. It is changing its nature, is becoming another, a picture machine which is able to simulate reality even more perfectly than before, which we more strongly comprehend from now on as part of a large media and communication system. “Humanistic photography”, which did the rounds with good, well-intentioned, deliberate faith for almost a century, appears to have played its last card, because its understanding of the world, its understanding of authorship, its deficient understanding of system were hardly any longer suited to the radically changing, complexing circumstances.

[7] Precarious Fields

(7P) deals less with wonders and deadly sins than with an intermediate realm, with (7) precarious, critical fields of today’s society, with fields in which proceedings of great import, with an impact on personal and societal life, take place: the exhibition and the book are devoted to the following fields:

- with (high-tech) production, logistics and migration, the great innovation and market forces, which change our life, but also the life of many others, with great added value for some and its counterpart, poverty, for others; 

- with violence and destruction, with personal, enacted, societal violence, and hence with a field of cruelly great evil; 

- with architecture, with the urban and with the city as investment. The building understood no longer as a house, as a home, but as a concretized, palpable investment. Architecture, though, also deployed and used as political checkmate, as strategy of war;

- with the abstraction “money” and the concretion “greed”, the field which, in the past 20 years, has also developed into the playground of extreme transgressions, of extreme criminality, mostly highly selfish for personal enrichment, for distancing from the others;

- with knowledge, order and power; the personal search for knowledge, orientation in the world versus the production of knowledge in society and the con­centration of power associated with this; 

- with celebration of the Ego, of narcissism and its flip side, the fractures of the Self, the loss of the person. A field of human qualities which are currently, in an unaccustomed way, developing in only one direction: towards optimization of one’s own Ego, towards the aggrandized view of oneself;

- with communication and control. An intensively debated topic these days, which affects us all, even Mrs. Merkel. Control from outside and control from inside, through the detailed recording of our behaviour, as though we were a case. A case for psychiatry, for criminalistics? No, for the time being only a case for frenzied consumerism. 

(7) precarious fields, exhibited at (7) different locations, in Ludwigshafen at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum and at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, in Mannheim at Zephyr, at Port25 and at Kunsthalle Mann­heim, in Heidleberg at Sammlung Prinzhorn and at Kunstverein Heidelberg. In some cases, thoroughly tuned to the localities or to the urban situation.

Photography and System

In ZEIT of 3 June 2015, under the dossier tile “Tomorrow Perhaps - The Limits of Human Nature”, this, somewhat curtailed and pushed together, was found:  “Dead whales would be good. These could be described, photographed, there would be pictures. The hardship of a whale can be described easily, the hardship of a system not so much. Here there are only low clouds, a few islands and water. Acidic water. It goes unnoticed; carbon dioxide is invisible.” In 1988 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 43/53, which said: “Protection of global climate for the present and future generations of mankind.” Since 1992, when representatives of nearly all states undertook in Rio de Janeiro “to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level which rules out future man-made disruptions of the climate”,[6] CO2 emissions have risen by 60 percent. In the attached interview Andreas Ernst, professor of environmental psychology at the University of Kassel, commented on the issue of people’s problem-solving ability: “The individual gets through life more easily when he always thinks everything will be all right. For society as whole, though, this positive view is disadvantageous, because problems are often not recognized as such. In addition: We are so structured that individual problems which concern us now, at this moment, are more important to us. So, a childcare centre strike or trouble with work colleagues is more urgent than climate change.”[7]

In this connection it becomes a little more obvious how little eternal human poetry on the mythically entwined way of the world can say on the subject of precarious, critical fields of the world. Artists with photographic and videographic works, who range around in the respective fields with great intensity, visual force and a feel for the systems of the realities that we create, were therefore invited to the exhibition. And they supply no fast answers, but in compensation for this they supply a dense visual net of information, questions and confrontations. The exhibition’s strict numbering system offers us the illusion of permanence, of “everything’s all right” in a world in which much is in the process of flowing, of sliding away. So far we have been spectators, staring at the hole, paralysed, and full of hope of an American Ending, of a miracle, a wonder. Will, this time, the Principle of Hope, once formulated by Ludwigshafen-born philosopher Ernst Bloch in his American exile, come to bear again? Will a clever invention help us out of the mess? 

 
[1] Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1964, p. 17 f.
[2] Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1964, p. 17 f. 
[3] Zygmunt Bauman, Flüchtige Zeiten. Leben in der Ungewissheit, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2008 [citation on the binding]
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Der Existentialismus ist ein Humanismus”, in: ibid., Philosophische Schriften, Vol. 1, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1994, p. 117–155, here p. 120 f.
[5] Florian Rötzer, “Betrifft: Fotografie”, in: Hubertus von Amelunxen (ed.), Fotografie nach der Fotografie, Dresden/Basel: Verlag der Kunst 1995, p. 13–25, here p. 21
[6] cited after: Andreas Ernst, “Menschheitsprobleme: Unser Gehirn ist nicht mitgewachsen”, Interview by Wolfgang Uchatius, in: DIE ZEIT, No. 23, 2015 of 3 June 2015
[7] Ibid.