My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  A story ended there, but it was not a story of evil. The time from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of World War II was a period when the fundamental building blocks of our human existence and organizational structures were in flux, not to say disintegrating, and the unprecedented radicality of those fifty years, which gave rise to the last two great utopian movements, Nazism and Communism, can only be understood on the basis that the societal order suddenly, because of a massive buildup of pressure arising in industrialism’s changes – in time, extremely compressed while in volume expansive, no longer could be taken for granted, it began to crack and appeared increasingly arbitrary, governed by rules imposed from without, in a civilizational system at odds with its people, from which they, or many of them, felt utterly alienated. Those who experienced this strove toward a new foundation, a new society, and since this was not self-evident the way democracy and liberalism are self-evident to us, they endeavored to find it in what presented itself as such in the realm of the human, in other words the absolute. The core, the essence, the authentic.

  Our society and culture, which not only surround me on all sides as I sit here in a room inside an apartment in the city of Malmö in southern Sweden, listening to Iron & Wine in the early morning, alone, with Linda and the children vacationing in Corsica, but also pervade me completely, as they pervade my language and pervade my thoughts, shaping my instincts and ideas, setting my boundaries as to what may or may not be done and thought, in short, all that which comprises my particular self, and which also connects me to all other selves, were founded in two crises of massive upheaval, two periods of extremely compressed structural transformations within our human existence, the first occurring with the advent of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, the second with the advent of industrialism in the mid-nineteenth century, which sent the world spiraling into fifty years of chaos culminating in the fall of Hitler’s Germany in 1945. The human world exists not as an abstract, but in the sum of individual human beings, and it was there, in every single one of them, that the transition from the religious to the secularized occurred from the sixteenth century onward, which is to say in the self, in the I’s understanding of itself in relation to the it, the we, and the they.

  In the fourteenth century it was impossible for any person to dissect a human corpse in order to see what it looked like inside, the way the internal organs functioned and were ordered. This was so not because it was forbidden in the sense of being punishable by law, what made it impossible was not the fear of reprisal but the fact that it was quite simply unthinkable. In the fifteenth century Leonardo was dissecting corpses and meticulously drawing what he saw, by then it was possible, albeit only to a certain extent; he cut up his bodies in the night, in secret, alone with the dead, but for him the boundary could be exceeded. Today dissecting corpses has not only become institutionalized, it comprises one of the most important foundations of our medical science, and is an absolutely uncontroversial practice.

  This is the case because the idea of what we are has changed, and with it the idea of what we can and must do. That change is not instrumental, although the practices that come with it are that too; as Latour writes, there is no such thing as science, only scientists, fragile and small in themselves, shuffling about in laboratories in their slippers, with their freezers and microscopes, their test tubes and computers, drinking coffee with their colleagues, going home after work and wondering whether to barbecue or if the clouds above the hills mean it’s going to rain. That this is so means “science” is something that cannot be localized without violating that singularity, but which at the same time obviously exists, as the sum of activities performed by scientists.

  Here, in the transition between the one and the all, resides the problem of our time. On the one hand, we live in a society in which a whole set of evaluations in one way or another deemed threatening to the status quo and associated with violence, revolution, and utopia are treated as taboo in the sense that they may only occur in contexts of ritual, moored only figuratively in reality; on the other hand, we live in a society that is changing in ways we cannot consider to be anything but revolutionary, along lines of flight that are directly connected with those taboos, which then are of such form and nature as to preclude that connection. We can talk about the one thing, but only as something outside ourselves, inside a closed system; the other, happening in our midst, is hard for us to see, since the correspondence between those events and our understanding of ourselves is so great, and the door of the external perspective closed.

  In practice this means we live in a society which on the one hand has made the utopian and the revolutionary impossible, and which moreover resists any real change to its system on the basis that it is as good as it can get, certainly better by far than the alternatives, all of which degenerated into systems of escalating inhumanity and ended in disaster, but which on the other hand renews itself so swiftly and with such radicality as to be essentially revolutionary, leading directly toward the utopian, construed as the next place. That passage occurs as if in secret, because it is fundamentally undemocratic, for although it affects every one of us, the decisions made along the way are made by the individual. The individual is neither a utopian, nor a revolutionary, nor an antidemocrat, but a devoted democrat and citizen of society, and if there is any trace of revolt in him or her, any suggestion of an urge toward societal change, it is directed toward the distribution of wealth, which at any time is either more or less fair. Together and in this way we venture into still new areas, some so new to us as to require new legislation, not to prohibit or exclude such advances, but to include them in the existing order. We have cloned animals, we have mapped the human genome and are able to modify its genes, we have transplanted hearts and lungs, we have created children outside the womb, and we have even created new species, creatures without origin with properties we alone have decided.

  To us these appear to be minor matters in that the industry that has brought them about is made up of small units in which the rest of society is uninvolved, but also because after Nazism and the genocide of the Jews we have suspended the validity of the grand scale, consistently avoiding points at which several values converge into a single trope, such as the idea of the genius, the idea of the sublime, the idea of the divine, the idea of the chosen people, in a construal of the world that leaves no room for a concept such as veneration, this sounding too hollow, or, even more hollow, veneration for the human; this is rhetoric, we consider, it refers to something bigger than us, a trope that with Nazism showed itself to be destructive.

  The consequence of this is that there is no longer anything bigger than ourselves, no longer anything to die for, and therefore no longer anything at which to stop in veneration. But to clone an animal, to manipulate human DNA, to create a new creature, is no minor matter. To split the atom is no minor matter. It is to exceed a boundary never before exceeded, it is to intervene in the very constituents of life, though we are ignorant of its origins and have always through all time considered it to be a gift and a mystery, something inviolable. That mystery is not solved by our manipulations, but its boundary is violated. The inviolability of individual life is the very foundation on which we build our society. What does it mean to violate an individual life? It means to kill it, to abuse it, to steal from it, to rape it, to torture it, to victimize it. To act against it in a manner contrary to its own wishes. That boundary is something we protect by means of the bonds that tie together the social world, and if those bonds are broken and the boundary exceeded, we impose sanctions.

  But who protects the inviolability of human life when understood not in terms of the individual, but in terms of the collective life, the all? Previously it was religion and the laws of religion. But what about now, with religion gone? The state? The state is an instrumental entity, a more or less pragmatic steering mechanism of the community, whose success is largely measured in terms of gross national product and rates of un
employment, and because science is instrumental too, and its pushing back of the boundaries profitable, there is little motivation for the state to legislate to the effect that life be held sacred and that its boundaries remain unviolated.

  We have gone beyond the absolute, for it led us to unprecedented atrocities, but without the absolute everything is relative, a matter of good or poor argument, negotiable, within the domain of reason. Reason is to us the same as profitability. What happens to that which is outside reason? In a world governed by profitability, lack of profitability has no bearing, and the absolute is that which is not exchangeable, neither in money nor in arguments. The absolute is neither reasoned nor unreasoned, it is what exists outside categories. The absolute may be reached only by the emotions. The absolute belongs to religion, mythology, and the irrational. The absolute is what propels someone to die for a cause greater than himself, faith in the absolute was once the foundation of law. The absolute is death, emptiness, nothingness, darkness. The absolute is the background against which life is lived.

  The absolute is eternity. The relative is day-to-day existence. These are the two fundamental tropes of our lives. We hold the absolute at bay, firstly by leveling down the bigness of our existence, that which has to do with the very boundaries of life and materiality, to the commonplace, addressing the issues that concern us all, the great collective, mankind, only in the quotidian; secondly by ritualizing the absolute in an unreal world of images: death is to us not the physical death of the body, but the figurative death, as it occurs in images, in the same way as violence is not physical violence, but figurative violence. Heroism is no longer a possibility, there being no arena for it, those arenas have all been shut down, for the heroic belongs to the bigness we do what we can to shun, yet in the world of images, which any one of us may enter at any time, the heroic lives on: entire worlds and societies have emerged in Internet gaming, where anyone can pick up a machine gun and venture out into the world to shoot the enemy for a few hours. Practically all the films we watch are about exactly this: heroism, violence, death. And the people we watch carry out these heroic deeds in our name, in our place, are all physically beautiful or charismatic, or both. Indeed, that world, growing and expanding with every year that passes, celebrates all the worlds we otherwise reject. Outer beauty, charisma, heroism, violence, and death are not relative, they belong to the pure, the unambivalent, the simple. Our need for this, to see the magnification of our existence and what borders the absolute, is insatiable.

  But since the two systems, relativized reality and absolutized pseudo-reality, are mutually exclusive and can exist only separately, the question is what happens if they are measured against each other, if a person not simply applies the yardstick of the absolute to relative reality, but moreover acts on that basis. This is what happened in Norway this summer, when a man only a few years younger than me went out to an island and began indiscriminately shooting and killing young people. He acted like a figure in a computer game, but the act of heroism he thought he was performing, and the carnage he brought about, did not belong to the world of images, was not abstract and without consequence, did not occur in some other place, detached from the time and place of his physical body; it was real, tangible, absolute. Every shot he fired lodged in human flesh, every eye that closed was a real eye belonging to a human being with a real life. Only remoteness can make such an act possible, since in remoteness consequence ceases to exist, and the question we must ask ourselves is not what kind of political opinions this person held, nor if he was mad, but more simply how such remoteness could ever arise in our culture. Did he feel a yearning for reality, for an end to relativity, for the consequences of the absolute? We must assume he did. Do I feel such a yearning? Yes, I do. My basic feeling is that of the world disappearing, that our lives are being filled with images of the world, and that these images are inserting themselves between us and the world, making the world around us lighter and lighter and less and less binding. We are trying to detach ourselves from everything that ties us to physical reality; from the bloodless, vacuum-packed steaks in the refrigerated counters of our supermarkets, the industrially produced meat of cooped-up animals, to society’s concealment of physical death and illness, from the cosmetically rectified uniformity of female faces to the endless flow of news images that pass through us every day and which together, in sum, erase all differences and establish a kind of universal sameness, not only because everything is conveyed in the same language, but also because what thereby is so incessantly conveyed inexorably, albeit gradually, recreates what is conveyed in its own image. The symbol of this trend is money, which converts everything into monetary value, which is to say numbers. Everything we have is mass-produced, everything is the same, and our entire world, which is commercial in nature, is based on that serial system. The values in our sky of images are Nazi values, though everyone says differently. Beautiful bodies, beautiful faces, healthy bodies, healthy faces, perfect bodies, perfect faces, heroic people, heroic deaths, the same images prevalent during Nazism, the only difference between theirs and ours being that we refrain from letting them loose on reality, but keep them there, in the domain of the unbinding, and say it is not the value of the image that counts, but the value of the human, which is different. Yet the gap between them is so vast, and the rush of the authentic, which here is fictitious, so compelling, that someone sooner or later is bound to bring the sky down to earth and let it apply here. The perpetrator of the Utøya massacre did so, unbound by any relationship to reality, to the physical bodies he killed, but bound to the image of reality, in which no real consequence exists. In the days following that horrific event a story came out about a boy who had swiveled to face the killer, who in turn had looked into his eyes and told him he was unable to shoot him. And he did not. He shot everyone else he could, with this one exception. Why? Because he saw his eyes, and in doing so his actions became binding. A similar story, reported by Liljegren, exists from Hitler’s life. In his time as Reich chancellor, Hitler became attached to a child, a blue-eyed little girl by the name of Bernhardine Nienau, whom he invited out of a crowd and treated to strawberries and whipped cream. So taken was he by the child and the conversation they had together that he told her she could come and see him whenever she wanted. They exchanged letters after this first meeting, but investigations initiated by Martin Bormann found the girl’s grandmother to be Jewish. Hitler was annoyed, Liljegren writes, and commented, “There are some people who have a positive genius for spoiling all my little pleasures.” However, they continued to correspond until 1938, and Bernhardine visited him on several occasions at the Berghof, again according to Liljegren. All this says nothing about Hitler’s evil or goodness, and nothing about the ferocity of his hatred for the Jews, but rather a lot about its anatomy: Hitler was consumed by hatred and had been ever since he was growing up, and he had established a world for himself in which it was important to maintain remoteness from others, a world without family, close friends, and romantic attachments, an irreparable system in which all that was inside him found outer manifestation, including his hatred, which following Germany’s defeat in World War I he directed toward the Jews and everything they stood for in his system. There, in that system, his hatred was absolute. But when something encroached upon it and entered the space between his own I and his convictions, a space which, besides whatever passageways there may have been within it that were unfamiliar to him, was quite empty, his hatred did not apply. His hatred applied to the others. In that space was the memory of his mother, for instance, and that it had remained so strong becomes plain to us in the fact that every Christmas, the time of his mother’s death, he would descend into silence and dejection, as he did in 1915 at the front, and in that space too were the Jewish doctor, Bloch, and this ten-year-old girl, therefore his kindness to both. To Bernhardine’s eyes he could maintain no remoteness, she was real, in that space together with him. The yearning for reality, for the authentic, and for nature is not da
ngerous. The dangerous force of Nazism was the exact opposite, remoteness to the world and the regimentation of the human that all ideological thinking creates. But if our culture removes itself from physical reality by placing the image before it, and if it levels out all differences in its extreme seriality, then it must be judged in the same way as Hitler, according to what it does and not what it is. The fact is that it does not exterminate people, either literally or metaphorically, that it does not persecute people or prevent their voices from being heard, and the question is then whether this culture, when all is said and done, provides an adequate response to an insoluble problem of the modern world that relates to the one and to the all. There is a difference between a country waging war and trying to wipe out an entire people in its name, and a lone killer taking the lives of sixty-nine children. We endeavor continually to safeguard ourselves against the former, but cannot safeguard ourselves against the latter. Both are to do with violence among like kind, and both arise out of remoteness, but there the similarity ends. Remoteness is the opposite of authenticity, and it is not the yearning for authenticity that is the problem, but the remoteness that gives rise to it. The unique is what cannot be replicated, existing only in a particular place at a particular time. It is the art of the one, and the life of the one. What took place in Germany was that the one dissolved into the all, the sky of ideals descended to earth, and the image of the absolute, which is without consequence, became a point of reference for human action. The absolute, in this case construed in terms of race, biology, blood, soil, nature, death, was not only set against the relative, construed in terms of the stock market, the entertainment industry, democratic parliamentarism, as occurred throughout the period leading up to World War I, but was also carried through into life itself, as action: Nazi Germany was the absolute state. It was the state its people could die for. Watching Riefenstahl’s film of the rallies in Nuremberg, its depiction of a people almost paradisiac in its unambiguousness, converged upon the same thing, immersed in the symbols, the callings from the deepest pith of human life, that which has to do with birth and death, and with homeland and belonging, one finds it splendid and unbearable at the same time, though increasingly unbearable the more one watches, at least this was how I felt when I watched it one night this spring, and I wondered for a long time where that sense of the unbearable came from, the unease that accompanied these images of the German paradise, with its torches in the darkness, the intactness of its medieval city, its cheering crowds, its sun, and its banners, whether it was something I imposed upon them, knowing how this paradise arose, what it would become and at what cost, and what happened to it, but I came to the conclusion that this was not the reason, that it came not from what was in me, the knowledge I had of what lay behind the images of those days, but from something in the images themselves, the sense being that the world they displayed was an unbearable world. Not that it was a false world, because this was obvious, its every image meticulously created from scratch for that particular occasion, it was more that this false world, one of the few pure utopias to be established in the last century, in which everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be, was unbearable in itself. What was unbearable about it lay in its undifferentiatedness. Everything affirmed one and the same thing, and when this is the case no other thing exists but that one, and without the other the one dissolves into itself and vanishes. The one without the other is nothing. The society Riefenstahl portrayed, this utopia of the one, had to establish an other in order for its own simplicity, its own undifferentiatedness, to be maintained, and this is what lies beneath those peaceful and harmonious images and fills them with such foreboding: the inevitability of war. It was not the absolute values of Nazism that led them to war, for birth and death, homeland and belonging are characteristic of all people and all peoples, it was the utopia of the one and the same. It was the fall of the name into the number, it was the fall of the differentiating into the undifferentiated.