/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3641196]

>Anonymity has, in our time, a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized; it has almost epigrammatic significance. Not only do people write anonymously, they write anonymously in their own name, indeed speak anonymously. Just as an author puts his whole soul into his style, so a person essentially puts his personality into his speech, though this must be understood with the limiting exception pointed out by Claudius in a similar situation when he said that when you charm a book the spirit emerges – unless there is no spirit there. Nowadays it is possible actually to be speaking with people, and to be forced to admit that what they say is exceedingly sensible, and yet the conversation leaves the impression that one has been speaking with an anonym. The same person can say the most contradictory things, can coolly utter something that, coming from him, is the most bitter satire upon his own life. The remark itself is very sensible, would go over very well at a stockholders’ meeting as part of a discussion fabricating some resolution – much as, in an actual factory, paper is made out of rags. But the sum-total of all these many remarks does not amount to personal human discourse such as can be carried on by even the most simpleminded man able to talk of very little but who nevertheless does speak.

[Anonymous No.3641199]

>[...] The remarks become so objective, their range so all-encompassing, that in the end it is altogether incidental who says it, which in terms of speaking humanly corresponds exactly to acting for the sake of principle. And just as the public is a pure abstraction, so in the end will it be with human speech – there will no longer be someone speaking but an objective reflection will gradually impart an atmospheric something, an abstract sound that will render human speech redundant, just as machines make workers redundant. In Germany there are even manuals for lovers, so it will probably end with lovers sitting and speaking anonymously to each other. There are manuals on everything, and being educated will in general soon consist in being word-perfect in a greater or smaller compilation of observations from such manuals, excellence being measured by one’s skill in picking out the particular one, just as the compositor picks out letters.

[Anonymous No.3641204]

what does that even mean

[Anonymous No.3641207]

>The life of the passionless person is not a principle that reveals itself and unfolds; on the contrary, his inner life is something quick, continually on the move and chasing after something to do ‘for the sake of principle’. Principle in this sense becomes an unnatural something or other, an abstraction just like the public. And although the public is a something so monstrous that even all nations assembled at one time, and even all souls in eternity, are not so numerous as the public, yet everyone including the drunken sailor has a public – and that is also how it is with principle. It is some monstrous something or other from which even the most insignificant person can tease out a most insignificant action and think himself immensely important. A harmless nobody suddenly becomes a hero ‘for the sake of principle’, and the effect of the situation is basically just as comical as if a man – or everyone, if it became the fashion – were to go about wearing a cap with a sixty-foot peak. If a man ‘for the sake of principle’ were to have a little button sewn on the breast pocket of his coat, that trivial and perfectly reasonable precaution would suddenly acquire tremendous importance – not improbably, a society would be founded on the strength of it.

[Anonymous No.3641211]

>Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection . . . Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others' money. . . . These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.

[Anonymous No.3641212]

Yet he published his books under another name.

[Anonymous No.3641218]

>Someone should try an experiment with himself: he should forget everything he knows about the times and its relativity amplified by its familiarity, and then come into this age as if he were from another planet, and read some book, or some article in the newspaper: he will have this impression: "Something is going to happen tonight, or else something happened last night!"

>A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it.

[Anonymous No.3641220]

>>3641212
Various other names, even.

[Anonymous No.3641223]

The public is an idea, which would never have occurred to people in ancient times, for the people themselves en masse in corpora took steps in any active situation, and bore responsibility for each individual among them, and each individual had to personally, without fail, present himself and submit his decision immediately to approval or disapproval. When first a clever society makes concrete reality into nothing, then the Media creates that abstraction, "the public," which is filled with unreal individuals, who are never united nor can they ever unite simultaneously in a single situation or organization, yet still stick together as a whole. The public is a body, more numerous than the people which compose it, but this body can never be shown, indeed it can never have only a single representation, because it is an abstraction. Yet this public becomes larger, the more the times become passionless and reflective and destroy concrete reality; this whole, the public, soon embraces everything . . .

The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. . . .

[Anonymous No.3641224]

The Media is an abstraction (because a newspaper is not concrete and only in an abstract sense can be considered an individual), which in association with the passionlessness and reflection of the times creates that abstract phantom, the public, which is the actual leveler. . . . More and more individuals will, because of their indolent bloodlessness, aspire to become nothing, in order to become the public, this abstract whole, which forms in this ridiculous manner: the public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties. This lazy mass, which understands nothing and does nothing, this public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about. . . . The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the Media. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. This biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and takes all sort of vulgar liberties with his leg--until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. That is how the public levels.