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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 31
legitimates power, has therefore failed: it is again power - i.e.,
operability, effectivity, saleability, being known, etc. — that legitimates
truth. The Late Modern — postmodern — state of our civilisation bears
a striking resemblance in this as well to that of the Early Modern period:
if truth is not the final source of the legitimacy of power, then power
has to again be the final argument in the matter of truth.
And what of power itself? On what does it rely? The personality cult
of uncontrollable authorities again replaces power justified by its
supposed reasonableness. ‘Their unworldly legitimation is ensured by the
media, which “builds up” their personality and generates a religious
devotion towards them. ‘The transcendent (i.e., unchangeable by human
will) state of affairs is visualised by an electronic stage world of baroque
pomp that creates the illusion of boundlessness. The deceptive
appearance of interactivity promises a total identification with the
spectacle, but we can only reach the world of virtual beings one hundred
times as real as the spectator via extasy and self-surrender.
This too is baroque: the “true” postmodern artist, when they is not
striving to make an impression that tempts man and God in its
extremities, is bombarding the limits of what can even be said with
self-torturing consistency. Sensuality and iconoclasm, overdriven
speculation and calculated technological trickery — all the excuses and
artifices of the new avant-garde which proclaims itself as after-modern,
beyond-artistic and even post-humanist are mannerist to their core. And
does not the triumphal path of all-defeating but self-contradictory
reason relate the whole spirit of our age to the seventeenth century?
Wealth has utterly broken away from the economy, i.e., from the
production of goods. Let us finally admit that the putative connection
between the two was merely the short-lived selfish dream of the Third
Order! Today only formally speaking can one call “financial” the
transactions of pure power, which form the one source of true wealth
(and which nullify the activity of the “producers” with a stroke of the
pen): the owner of the greater fortune prevails over the lesser. Here too,
the ultima ratio regnum, of course, only surfaces if absolutely necessary,
for instance if someone is unable to rationally comprehend the
expediency of the rules of the game, which automatically and effortlessly
guarantee the impoverishment of the poor and the enrichment of the
rich. The ruling elite enforces its abstract superiority in by no means
bloodless number wars. This superiority ensures their right to the
exclusive enjoyment of the entirety of the goods of the world. Power is
the sole source of wealth: free disposal over the service, bodies and souls