The Berlin Wall is no Longer an Object.

Linda Persson Liam Sprod

now | then | soon© 2012

The attempted destruction of the Berlin Wall following the collapse of communism in 1989 has finally been completed by the ideology of the forces that now seek to preserve it. After the end of history the wall has been fully integrated into the spectacle of late capitalism, and as such has become nothing more that another image in the progression, exchange and mediation of spectacular images. In line with the logic of the spectacle each image contains the totality of the spectacle within itself. Thus the particular objectness of the Wall is subsumed by the objectivity of the ideology of late capital.

It was the fall of the Wall that prompted Francis Fukuyama to declare the end of history as the triumph of capitalism. However, Guy Debord presciently foresaw this occurrence some twenty years before the events of November 9 1989 played out in Berlin. Rather than the end of history, Debord called this post-historical condition the integrated spectacle and while it was also a triumph of capitalism in his eyes this was undoubtedly a bad thing. In 1967’s Society of the Spectacle Debord famously stated that: “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.”1 Updating Marx’s conception of commodity based capitalism with one constructed from representation. The advantage that spectacular capitalism has over commodity capitalism is that as a society mediated through images it has incorporated ideology into the reality of itself and thus it can present itself as complete, total and totalizing all in one go. The unity and totality of the spectacle is one of its major strengths as it has the power to incorporate any subversion within itself. Despite this totality, Debord also identified two different types of spectacular society: The concentrated spectacle of what he calls “bureaucratic capitalism”2 – the state monopoly capitalism of the Soviet Union and GDR, and the diffuse spectacle “associated with commodity abundance, with the undistributed development of modern capitalism.”3 However, by the time he wrote Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he 1 G. Debord, K. Knabb (trans.), Society of the Spectacle. (London: Rebel Press, ). p. 7.2 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle. p. 31.3 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle. p. 32.

already noted that:

a third form [of the spectacle] has been established, through the rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.4

This global domination, which takes and complements elements from both the diffuse and concentrated spectacles, but ultimately is the triumph of the diffuse, capitalist form, not only precedes Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, it also provides the most direct and succinct description of the prevailing conditions of modern or postmodern capitalism. Of course this relationship between description and reality is the key and most powerful element of spectacular society. In the Comments Debord writes:

the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this - that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. … The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.5

The ‘spectacle’ does not just describe the cultural or even economic or political (if there even is a difference) conditions of society. It defines the reality itself precisely within its 4 G. Debord, M. Imrie (trans.), Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. (London: Verso, 1990). p. 8.5 G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. p. 9.

own power as definition.

It is under this logic of the spectacle that the particular objectness of the Berlin wall has been integrated into the totalising absolute objectivity of the post-historical integrated spectacle. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the two words for ‘object’ in German: Objekt and gegenstand. Martin Heidegger sets out the difference between the two perfectly when he writes: “Strictly speaking, one should not speak of “Object” [“Objekt”], because for absolute knowledge there can be no objects [es keine Gegen-stände geben].”6 The object as gegenstand is defined in terms of that which it stands against, whether it be against the subject, other objects or the world. That particular object only appears in its opposition and differentiation from what is stands against. Inversely, there can be no such object as Objekt, as the totality of absolute objective knowledge does not allow any divisions within which one thing can stand against another. For Heidegger this is an important metaphysical distinction, which he puts to work within his phenomenological method and his destruction of the history of metaphysics. But here, let us use

6 M. Heidegger, R. Taft (trans.), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 4th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). p. 21.

this distinction to examine Fukuyama and Debord’s conflicting ends of history, and the status of the Berlin Wall within this ideological paroxysm.

It is by considering the logic of the integrated spectacle as a totalizing absolute knowledge that the object of the Berlin Wall disappears. At one time the Wall literally stood against capitalism - the anti-fascist barrier as it was called on the Eastern side - it appeared as ur-object in terms of gegenstand, against the very logic of totalization itself. The ultimate object against the relentless march towards the end of history, it made all objects possible, it excised itself from logic, cut a gash across the city. It needed the white space of the killing ground (and here all the metaphors of death-that-is-no-longer-possible extend), to make every space between objects possible.

Its grey line zigzagged across the geography of the city, dividing it and the psychology of its citizens; but the division cut deeper still, into the metaphysical conditions that made both the city and its thought possible. It stood like a metaphysical monolith, its very matter making the world of objects possible and at the same time making another world. Without it the world is cast adrift into the voids of simulacra and commodity fetishism without end, without barrier, without objects. People saw the Wall and saw themselves reflected against it, a silhouette, a figure held in the rift, art was possible, history was possible, now all that remains is an image,

not even the ruinous remains themselves.

The total logic of the spectacular Objekt has now subsumed the Wall. The fall of communism means that it no longer stands against anything, capitalism has permeated the anti-fascist barrier, encircled it and consumed it. Yet curiously still it stands there. It is telling that the triumph of capitalism did not even need to surgically remove that object that once stood against it. There was a much easier way for capitalism to remove the memory of the Wall: let it be forgotten in plain view. Now that it is merely part of the Objekt of the integrated spectacle, no one will see its objectness even if standing right in front of it.

Now watch the tourists milling around the remains of the Wall, walking through the Mauer Park on Bernauer Strasse. They do not see the Wall, they only watch the images they have of it, the story of the capitalist triumph, as if there was ever any other option. Nothing else is ever possible anymore. Watch how the Wall as Objekt removes all ideology, but removes only by hiding in the open space of the total ideology of the spectacle. The telling rhetoric is that communism is the ‘other side,’

hidden ‘behind’ the Wall; but this is another side that hides behind the past, no longer present in any form, distant and emaciated. The present is the entirety of ‘this side,’ the West and capitalism are dominant, the East and communism completely other, so much so that they are indeed nothing.

Watch the progression of images as tourists take photo after photo, they pose next to the restored part of the wall, with its ‘killing ground’ preserved and sealed with two new gleaming metal walls. They always come from the Western side, which is the only face of the Wall that remains. Of course, every side is the ‘Western’ side now, the Eastern has disappeared completely, shrunk within and imploded, no longer standing against anything. How could is stand against everything undivided? The ‘information’ provided for tourists in Mauer Park only talks of this ‘other side’ in terms of the personal misery of the everyday lives of those who lived there, de-ideoligized and re-configured in terms of an inferior capitalism.

The tunnels they dug are now meaningless, they are marked by carefully laid metal slats across the lawn of the park, but they lead from no-where to no-where. Once upon a time there was another side another world was possible. The tunnels indicated the strength of the object of the wall. They passed under what it stood against, they could be reversed, and the people digging under the Wall gave it its power. To dig a tunnel now, again, would

“A thing is a hole in a thing it is not” - Robert Smithson, 1968

be meaningless, you cannot escape totality. The Wall once stood as the limit of the end of the world, beyond it stood another, a non-world, another wall, another world.

Yet now, later, within this hierarchy of objects hidden behind the total Objekt, perhaps that hiddenness itself begins to reveal the operation of this dominant regime. Staring into the totality of this absolute object is like staring into the abyss. The wall has become the zero-point limit of the world, the ideological event horizon that now consumes all objects, leaving only a gaping objectivity: the killing ground of all objects. The Wall has become a hole in a world of things that are no longer whole.

Between this logic of holes and wholes, between the Objekt and the gegenstand, the Wall in its unknowableness and total objectivity becomes the something in general = x, which, at the root of phenomenology, Kant speaks of when he says: “It is easily seen that this object must be thought only as something in general = x, since outside our knowledge we have nothing which we could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to it.”7 Through following this logic of the transcendental power of the something in general = x, it is perhaps possible to see how the ideological forces required to destroy the Berlin Wall were so powerful that they will end up destroying themselves. Although, as the Wall disappears as it is integrated into the progression of spectacular images under the discourses of the tourism of late capitalism, this disappearance also hides the more fundamental disappearance of the possibility of appearance itself, and in this perhaps lies the possibility of a salvation from the ephemerality of the image.

This returns to Heidegger’s commentary on the distinctions between objects and their very possibility and the ordering of this domain in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. He writes:

The X is a “Something” of which in general we can know nothing at all. But it is not therefore not knowable , because as a being this X lies hidden “behind” a layer of appearances. Rather it is not knowable because it simply cannot

7 I. Kant, N. Kemp Smith (trans.), Critique of Pure Reason. (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1929). p. 134. (A 104).

become a possible object of knowing, i.e., the possession of a knowledge of beings. It can never become such because it is a Nothing. Nothing means: not a being, but nevertheless “Something.” It “serves only as correlatum,” i.e., according to its essence it is pure horizon.8

The Berlin Wall is no longer a being, it has been reduced to Nothing, and yet to properly see this Nothing is to make it all the more powerful. It is true that it can no longer be seen, but that is because it can no longer be an object of sensible intuition. Instead the Wall has retreated into this Nothingness, encroached upon from all sides, every side a Western side, by the totality of everything. A totality of objectivity [Objekt] that leaves no space in between, a no-space that becomes a gap, an asymptotic conjunction, like the two curves of the chiasmic x, reaching towards each other, always closer but never touching, that space between them is the something in general = x.

Against the Wall the world can be created anew. As Heidegger later writes: “Createdness revealed itself as strife being fixed in place in the figure by means of the rift.”9 The Wall is the rift, the something that is nothing, that allows the figure to appear. The ideological strife of the Cold War may have disappeared, taking the Wall with it, but into that void has stepped a new world, 8 M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. p. 83.9 M. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in, M. Heidegger, D. F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings. (London: Routledge Classics, 2011). p. 123.

a new figure, a new logic to stand against. The Wall is now everywhere and nowhere, it is a tear in the space of the world, the abyssal rift that holds it all possible, it is the condensed matter of the time that remains after the end of history, spewing forth the world and undermining its totality always, everywhere, now forever.

The Berlin Wall is the asymptotic inverse of the society of the spectacle. Both are totalities, but whereas the spectacle is a totality of Objekt the Wall is the totality of the rift, only visible in the figure as gegenstand. The phrase ‘the Berlin Wall is no longer an object’ thus speaks of both the ideological destruction of the Wall and the saving power of the strife it has become. Not as an ideological strife between capitalism and communism, the triumph of the spectacle has done away with this opposition, but as a strife that stands against the very possibility of ideology itself. The spectacle is the affirmation of its own revealedness that permeates everywhere. It is everything visible and the pronouncement that all that is is nothing more than what is visible. As Debord puts it: “It is a world view that has actually been materialised, a view of the world that has become objective.”10 However, hidden within this objective worldview is the seed of its own destruction through the possibility of its own impossibility. If the integrated spectacle is everything and everywhere, then the Berlin Wall has become the Nothing that is nowhere, always necessarily hidden within that which is in plain view. This resists the logic of the spectacle, for as much as it tries to force this Nothingness into view, it can never be revealed; and, by forcing everything into view this spectacular logic also inversely makes apparent that which cannot be seen. Through all of its attempts to reveal the total objectivity of its logic, and to apply this logic to what was once a symbol of resistance; all that the spectacular manifestation of the Berlin Wall reveals is the rift at the heart of its own impossibility to be subsumed by this logic.

Thus the Wall is the paradoxical incorporation of the objects and objectivity of late capitalism par excellence. The totalising triumph of the absolute logic of the spectacle may have destroyed the particular

10 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle. p. 7.

objectness of the Wall, but in doing so it also opened the abyss at the heart of all objects and the impossibility of the possibility of objects in general. This reversal reincorporates the Wall as the ground of all objects and thus it stands against the objectivity of the spectacle, once again a barrier against the encroaching logic of the West, but this time through the Nothingness as the root of that logic, and as such it cannot merely be torn down all over again. Its annihilation unleashed the power of its own Nothingness, against all objects and beyond all objectivity and ideology.

Between Berlin and Stockholm, 2012.

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