Friday, Jul 25, 2008
The career of the great German cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a case study in the virtues of intellectual inconsistency.
Jan 27, 1999 | German poet and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger has been likened to Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Rorty and Marshall McLuhan, which I suppose is a nice way of saying that while it would certainly be improving for one to read him, you should not kid yourself that the poor man will ever be nearly as well-known as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Rorty or Marshall McLuhan. And why is German poet and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger not better known in this country? For starters, he's a German poet and cultural critic. Three strikes: He's 1) a non-North American who 2) works in an uncommercial artistic genre and 3) a hard-to-categorize nonfiction one. But there is probably a deeper reason: Enzensberger, who for decades has been writing engaging, playful, learned essays on politics, media, art, fashion, mathematics and history, is a promiscuous intellect in the best sense. That is, he is a man without a schtick.
Enzensberger spent the Cold War in Europe, the United States and Cuba, observing each culture with fascination and skepticism. (He writes with puzzlement about discovering the language of American promotion whereby even the greasiest diner could unironically claim "world-famous meatballs" -- which could only seem odd to a non-American, for whom "world" is not a strictly metaphorical term.) Above all he wrote political essays unsparing of both capitalists and communists in a period that valued ideologues. Poets make poor ideologues, because you can't count on them for consistency: Political entanglements have frustrated the ambitions of writers like Jorge Luis Borges, and even those who have tried to be good soldiers and surrender the means of artistic production for higher political imperatives have ended unhappily. Ezra Pound took that route to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital; even that dutiful poet of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, ended up performing a fatal self-criticism in 1930, saving Stalin the trouble.
But if this century's monolithic political systems rewarded intellectual rigidity, it's nothing compared with the single-mindedness demanded by today's only world superpower: the global attention market. Where the monoliths demanded loyalty to their principles, the intellectual celebrity system demands only loyalty to your schtick. The market needs a hook. The market needs a handle. The market, even for the university-lecture crowd, needs you to volunteer to be the left-leaning natural-history guy or the Italian semiotics guy. It needs you to select, and stick to, a neatly summarizable public identity and set of issues, preferably brief enough to fit, with your name and telephone number, on a Rolodex card. In "Zig Zag," Enzensberger rejects this, saying that the writer who tries to label his work "will have pinned himself down. He will no longer be a free agent. He will have to stick to his guns, even if he finds that he has no more use for them." For Enzensberger, inconsistency, unpredictability, is not just a symptom of intellectual curiosity but virtually a moral cause. The 20 essays collected in "Zig Zag," written from 1962 to 1997, are divided into three sections, the first and shortest of which makes up a sort of manifesto of inconsistency. In "Second Thoughts on Consistency," Enzensberger casts the 20th century as one long, horrific series of committed individuals sticking to well-thought-out programs with disastrous results -- sold through slogans like "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem."
He traces this either/or, our-program-or-theirs type of thinking to the Enlightenment opposition of the ancients and the moderns. Ever since then, he writes, we have looked at history as an endless series of dialectical choices. "Everyone could imagine that he faced a simple choice. He had only to pick one of the two sides -- the ancien régime or the Revolution, the old Adam or the New Man, Right or Left, and then he would be equipped with something he could call a worldview or firm position." In this environment, vacillation can be a kind of heroism: Khruschev and his generals, for instance, saved us from incineration by "throwing overboard the most sacrosanct principles of Marxism-Leninism" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Consistency," he writes memorably, "will turn any good cause into a bad one."
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