Died Rich Sen People of Power

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Diedrich Diederichsen

People ofIntensity,People ofPower: TheNietzscheEconomy

1. Classical Music vs. Free JazzWhen an adult in Berlin or Vienna wants to spendan evening with company, there are two basicoptions: one can have a cozy dinner with friendsat a restaurant or someones apartment, or onecan go out. The second option may not be aradical step into the unknown, as there arefamiliar signposts, but nevertheless, when we goout, we switch into an entirely different mode of

experience.Now going out can mean all sorts ofthings: an art opening followed by dinner withthe artist or artists and a visit to a club, or acertain constellation of bars and clubs where weare sure to meet acquaintances. Or we go to aspecific club straight away, one that offerseverything in a single package. But really, thedistances we cover, the outside world fading inand out of the theater of our increasinglyinebriated perceptions, the glistening pavement,diffuse light, car doors slamming, unexpected

music in the cab: these are all part of it, thewhole program.The first variant, dinner with friends, is notnecessarily any shorter or more sober. This sortof night among friends can be no less long andno less boozy. Here, however, we get intoxicatednot in order to enable ourselves to react moresmoothly to new stimuli, but so we can bear thesocial density and concentration. Friends oftenshow up in couples, and when they dont, thereare many long-term friendships boasting ofaccumulated intimacy not too different from themonogamous relationships that become thedominant model as we get older. This means thatmany possible constellations of arguments,agreements and disagreements of taste,antagonisms and harmonies of temperamentand mentality, have already been played out, andmay well have reached a stage at which they nolonger ruffle any feathers. Still, these eveningsdemand our attention. We are curious to discernminute new details in well-rehearsed scripts.To do so is a perfectly rewarding labor, onewe are often fond of, but it is also taxing,requiring a focused mind. Those who prefer notto engage in it, who are not really interested intheir friends, will quickly grow bored and provokea scene or a fight but this is not a big problem,nor does it really disrupt an evening that isotherwise business as usual. Meeting friends isprecision work, and all sorts of events, evenunusual ones, are permissible, as long as theyare truly interesting, providing intellectualstimulus. Such a meeting calls for a reviewsession with a best friend, partner, or significantother , as the Americans say. If we could put theminto writing, these review sessions would read

like reviews of classical music recordings: in ahyper-precise specialists language, the

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participants frame observations in ways thatonly absolute connoisseurs could appreciate.The night out is different. Here, casualsensation is always preferable to preciseobservation. A permanent state of distraction isdesired. In conversation, our eyes permanentlywander just past our interlocutor. Do I know theperson back there, or would I only like to knowhim, or isnt he actually kind of butt-ugly? Even in

the rare event of a truly detailed conversationtaken seriously, the aim is to stage an intimatecolloquy for the public, a form of ostentation, notthe colloquy itself. That promises are made iswhat matters most, not that they are fulfilled.Everything breathes potentiality: Brechts Somuch might yet happen rules the night.

Dorothy Iannone, I Begin To Feel Love , 1970, collage, acrylic on canvas

190 x 150 cm.

And of course this pleasant feeling that somuch might happen is sustained in the long runonly by the things that do occasionally actuallyhappen: the decisive events, beautiful ordisastrous either one being preferable to thedelicate work of the night in. Yet the sense thatsomething must actually happen changes itsmeaning over the course of a lifetime of nightsout. When we are young, the drama of going outis defined by the climactic event: sex, drugs, or

sex. Later on, going out becomes an end in itself;any overly targeted attempt at picking someone

up would disrupt its magnificent potentiality. Thepromise we sense, and the risk we feel, is moreimportant than really having something to fear orto hope for. We need to realize, and commit to,only as much as is absolutely necessary formaintaining this diffuse mood. The importantthing is to enter into brief and dense contact withas many people as possible, people who are asdifferent and distant from one another as

possible; realizing in each instance a maximumdegree of commitment for a brief moment andthis moment had better be as brief as possible tokeep the number of encounters high. In this waywe playfully learn what the Nietzsche economywill call networking .1We keep the number of encounters high,while perceiving each one as less binding,entailing less commitment, because thisstrategy maintains the sense of freedom andpotential whose fundamental message is that weare all interconnected with each other, or at least

with those present. In encounters that entailcommitment whatever that means I must actas a responsible and self-aware I; in the densebut noncommittal encounters that make up ahyperactive social and sometimes sexual promiscuity, I can shed my self-awareness andstep outside myself. It is only when I am ecstatic,outside of myself, that I can be with everyone,that I can I float in a sense of potential. Anetworker must always be ecstatic, mustmaintain a slightly exaggerated enthusiasm,must get high on the potential of so manycontacts that can never be realized or translatedinto actual collaboration, using this high in turnto leap to the next encounter.Coming home after an evening of this type it is usually very late or already the next morning we dont need to review anything, there is noneed to go over our friends texts withphilological precision; it is enough to takepleasure in the birds singing outside ourwindows so early and already so chipper! signifying a world that is great and wide open,and the word we use to describe the past six oreight hours is: intense . Now that was a prettyintense night. The resident of a metropolis likeVienna or Berlin leaving home at six in themorning will meet all these smiling faces,satisfied goers-out sometimes even a newlyformed couple, but most are alone floatinghomeward, buoyed by the wealth of potentialthey have just inhaled. Anything is possible,they think before falling asleep.We may dispute what the word intensitymeans. We might argue, for instance, that thefocused self-examination of a circle of friends,the refined micro-debates over micro-problems

or the molecular shifts in articulating grand andtenacious problems that mar familiar vitae that

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is to say, all that we experience when meetingfriends could also be called intense; whereasthe openness and potentiality of a night out failto fit the term. If I nonetheless call theexperience of a night out intense, it is for tworeasons. One is a matter of musical aesthetics:both types of experience can be compared tocertain aesthetic experiences. The dinner withfriends corresponds to the focused attention to a

piece of classical music that has long beenfamiliar or at least potentially familiar. The pointis not what the next note will be, but rather howit arrives how, within a set of elements definedwith regard to instrumentation, timbre, sound,and so forth, everything is decided by subtleshifts and small movements. The key term herewould be focus .The night out, by contrast, corresponds tothe aesthetic experience offered by free jazz andcertain excessive styles of rock or electronic popmusic: what matters is density proffered with a

grand gesture, backed not necessarily by musicalsubstance but, more often, by its social content.Physical exertion to the point of exhaustiontends to trigger euphoria or aggression: elevatedregisters of emotion, in every possible directionon the scale. Writers and critics who havefollowed the phenomenon, but also themusicians themselves, have always spoken ofintensity in this context, down to a very technicaluse of the term in describing music: And then heplayed an intense solo on the tenor sax that isto say, he used certain overblowing techniques,the solo had a certain minimum duration, and soforth.The second reason for my suggestion ofusing the opposing notions of focus and intensityto designate these two ways of spending anevening is the role intensity played in the self-conception of hedonistic countercultures duringthe 1970s and 1980s years I would describe asformative in the development of a phenomenonwe see emerging today: the revaluation of thiswasteful way of life as a form of work that is notmerely productive, but a model of productivity.An important landmark in this process is anessay by Jean-Franois Lyotard that, although hepresented it as a lecture as early as 1972, wasfirst published in the German-speaking world byMerve publishers in a 1978 collection of Lyotardsessays that bore the indicative titleIntensitten intensities. 2

2. Intensity vs. IntentionLyotards essay represents, as it were, theintermediary between what I would like to call onthe one hand the Nietzsche economy and, on theother, the culture of intensity built by the hippies

and, to a certain degree, by the punks as well, aswell as by techno culture later on, and ultimately

by the new type of metropolitan hedonist nolonger distinguished by any particularsubcultural identity. The concept of intensityallowed the so-called generation of 68 topreserve a part of its life, of its first decade after1968, up through its political defeat. Intensitydescribed a devotion to unreserved investmentinto the potential of grand moments momentsthat were also a medium of collectivity that

might be salvaged and maintained even if thebetter world the movement foresaw could neverbe realized in this life. And it is clear thatintensity was inscribed in peoples biographiesand aspirations as a concept that ran decidedlycounter to the dreary everyday organizationalchores of those who had chosen to becomeinvested in politics.

Jacques Andr Boiffard, Bouche , 1929, Runion des MusesNationaux de France.

In the abovementioned essay, Lyotardexplicitly links his idea of intensity to concepts inNietzsche as well as to the tradition of theartistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century.Lyotard, like other French writers of hisgeneration, wants to inscribe the Nietzscheanoverman in a radical identity politics that would

continue to fight the battle of 68. As he says:

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These are the people of intensification,the masters of today: outsiders,experimental painters, pop artists, hippiesand yippies, parasites, the insane, inmates.An hour of their lives contains moreintensity (and less intention) than athousand words from a professionalphilosopher. 3

And thus he introduces a second term that canstand as the opposite of intensity: intention .Indeed, the idea of the evening among friendscan be described as one in which the intentionsof planning subjects are in every respect highlyimportant. Set entirely in the world of intentions,for instance, is the full agenda, the date set aftera great deal of coordination, the date we keepmeaning to set but fail to; compare, on the otherhand, the euphoria with which a date is set in therush of networking. Another element related tointentionality is a subtext that is always on our

minds when we meet old friends: our effort toproduce a well-rounded biography. How muchcontrol does a subject have over his or her life? Iscontrol even desirable? Is it nice when someoneaccomplishes a goal he or she spoke of as ateenager, as we who have known him or her for along time can clearly recall? The entirehermeneutics of friendship that is so him ! is built on the question of how we relate the self-descriptions we have heard for decades topeoples actual practice. Have we perhapsmisread one another? Should we reproach thefriend for being unfaithful to him- or herself? Anddo we even think that the concept of beingfaithful to oneself is a good idea?But what did Lyotard mean when he spokeof Nietzschean intensity? Or what did weunderstand him to mean? Well, on the one hand,intensity was a hackneyed term, a hippie word;when Intensitten came out in German in 1978, Iwas an adolescent who had sympathized withpunk, but had begun to grow disenchanted withit. I thought that the idea of intensity was a formof self-betrayal. On the other hand, perhaps itwas not the concept that was wrong, but whatthe hippies had made of it. Intention wascertainly a game we didnt want to play, with allits miserable numbers: responsibility,calculation, categorical imperative. We wanted tobe further to the left, true, but not moral leftists.But the distinctive feature of Lyotards truemasters and people of intensification seemed tobe: if there was any sign that they mightrepresent nothing but a return of the authoritieswhom our anti-authoritarian older brothers hadoverthrown (and hence no potential allies, solong as we wanted to remain leftists), they

countered it by being clearly recognizable asoutsiders experimental painters, pop artists,

yippies, inmates. Even Gilles Deeluze, as a greatadmirer of Nietzsche and the schizos, cautionedthat by affirming (with Nietzsche) theunreliability of the lumpenproletariat and theasocial, the revolutionaries might turn out tohave fallen for a political unreliability as well(one that would give them a nasty surprise,entirely beyond their intellectual horizon);meanwhile, we were still thankful for having

escaped family, Protestantism, the authorities anyone who was asocial was to us a liberatedpersonality. 4A few years ago, a very popular oralhistory of this period appeared in print. The titleof Jrgen Teipels book, Verschwende Deine Jugend (Waste Your Youth), refers to an earlysong by the band DAF. 5 From todays perspective,the zeal for wastefulness, ignited also by thewritings of Georges Bataille, is the most salientfeature of the era for good reason: wastefulnessis not a cause anyone would champion anymore.

But the book also suggests that those youthfulwasters who didnt die in the process were ableto invest their wasted youth in a very productivemidlife. At the time, by contrast, it seemedunfathomable for this wastefulness to be unableto flout any calculation or economy in theconduct of life (in the interest of grand momentsof potential and infinity), but neither could weimagine, in our wildest dreams, that this verywastefulness might perhaps be none other thanthe loss of the ability to defend our owninterests, that wasting might perhaps simplymean relinquishing such things as rights, or astrategic position developed over time. But thenit isnt all that simple, either.What is certain is that wastefulness standson the same side as intensity, and both of themstand in opposition to intention and focus. Wecould construct a matrix composed of fourelements that would give rise to all sorts ofphilosophical speculation focus would play onerole as intensitys counterpart, another as that ofwastefulness; intensity might act one way inopposition to intention, another when set againstfocus.If we hold on to this distribution of pairs ofopposites, however, something else emerges: onthe one side we find the description of work, atleast in the conventional sense; on the otherside, that of leisure. Intensity and wastefulness,at least at first glance, obey extra-economic, ifnot counter-economic, principles. Someone whois wasteful neither saves nor invests; he or shedoes not speculate, does not even submit to theritual calculation of the potlatch and its indirectbenefits. Wastefulness is the opposite ofhusbandry. Intensity enjoys potential and

irresponsibility: whatever happens, we do notput it in the biographical piggybank of

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subjectivity, heaping up experiences; nor does iteven need to happen at all it may well remain adream. And the responsible utilitarian subjectpermits this for a single reason only: for thepurposes of reproduction. The complex ofrecreation and the domain called, in Marxistterms, the reproduction of the commodity thatis labor, which is, of course, indirectly subject toutilitarian calculation, permits intensity during

our hours of leisure, in extreme sports or theexperience of nature or, if absolutely necessary,during a night out.Work, by contrast, especially thetraditionally more highly valued white-collarwork, classically resembles the evening amongfriends: its principle is that of focused mutualobservation, the negotiation of socialhierarchies, and the finely tuned micro-observations of the structures in which our ownworking selves must prove their worth. Only inthe working environments of white-collar works

substratum and I would argue that theboundary divides industrial labor down themiddle of day laborers and unskilled workersand in jobs under harsh conditions, on the highseas and in construction, does something similarto the intensity I described above reappear:physicality, inconstant conditions, the pleasureof potentiality in wild dreams and petty crime,the absence of husbandry, and an economy ofthe workers own biography: freedoms justanother word for nothing left to lose , etc.But the phenomenon we are interested inhere is this: a society in which intention andfocus are on top and intensity and wastefulnessare at the bottom also existing, perhaps, on theromantic margins of leisure, of bohemianism andpuberty is being reshuffled into a societywhere all these relations are reversed. And if weaccept that this is a social fact, we can describethis development in terms of a larger diagnosisof the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism,from a society of discipline to one of control, asthe victory of artistic critique as described byBoltanski and Chiapello, or in terms of the much-touted ideas of the artist as entrepreneur and ofthe creative cities in which the creative classallegedly leads a life that is as creatively intenseas it is economically productive and successful.Yet these diagnoses rarely account for howsuch transformations are framed in theexperiences of those they concern, which arealso the diagnoses these people use to makesense of these experiences. And in fact, thesediagnoses often reveal how the structuraltransformations they describe have not trulyentailed a migration of the old subversivelifestyles from the margins and the bottom of

society to its center and to the top; rather, theyoften describe cases in which intensity and

experience are at stake in name only, in whichthe values have actually been shifted only fromone place to another in order not to preservethem but to betray them, to use them as puredecoration. In other words, the familiar andslightly paranoid tropes of cooptation andassimilation are very often mobilized to provethat capitalism has not yet choked on the valuesof its opponents or antagonists. Measured

against their original meaning, as this view hasit, these resistant values themselves fall by thewayside.

Vivienne Westwood in her boutique, London, 1980s.

My point, however, is not that thesediagnoses are entirely wrong: it is probablyimpossible to draw a straight line between thestructural transformation or migration of anethical or anti-ethical, a political or biopoliticalprinciple on the one hand, and the betrayal ofsuch a principle on the other. Nor am I trying toprevent others from reading my ownobservations as further evidence for one of theoverarching diagnoses I have mentioned. Rather,my intention is to reconstruct a line that leadsfrom the attitude toward life and the self-conception of the punk and Nietzschean left to asituation in which their will to power, which hasalways already existed, and was always alreadyfelt as such, blossoms in a practice that is farremoved from their original intentions. 6

3. The Schneberg Customs OfficeFirst, the diagnosis: the focused labor of intentworkers was appreciated and rewarded as longas capitalism was primarily shaped byinstruments such as the analysis of existingmarkets, the design of production processes,and the study of complex needs including acultural understanding of how these needs couldbe aroused. The corresponding attitude was one

of discipline, of hard, precise, and focused work work that was constantly confronted with, and

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involved in the production of, a society everricher in ever more divergent cultural offerings,and whose contents usually swung back andforth between romanticism and escapism. Thetelevision series Mad Men and movies such asRevolutionary Road have recalled this era togreat acclaim: an era when executives lived withthe intrinsic conflict between two roles,producing leisure offerings while their own

practice hard work and the occasionalexcessive party, to let off some steam remained unrepresented. The focused, intentworker of this era was described, especially inthe existentialism-tinged movies of the 1960sand 1970s, as bigoted and deeply dishonest; in aBuuel film, the reward for hard work wastypically a masochistic relationship with adominatrix.It was in the early 1970s that for the firsttime ever, to my knowledge executives (in theadvertising industry, of course) hired artists for

the specific task of interfering with business asusual. In the 1970s, Henning Brandis, a youngman with a background in the Fluxus network,was hired at advertising firm GGK Dsseldorf,where his job was to think up little assaults onthe safety and continuity of everyday companyoperations. One morning, for instance, threecreative directors found their desks nailed, legsup, to the ceiling. Everything that had been onthe desks had been glued to them and covered,Daniel Spoerristyle, with a layer of white paint.Or there would be surprising noises, abusedfurniture, adolescent pranks, pointlessassignments, and other critiques of conformistwork, ranging in intellectual quality from classclown to Joseph Beuys. Around the same time,the owner of Mrz publishers, Jrg Schrder, hadfounded the advertising agency Bismarc Media,whose employees were told to produce nothing,and, when they couldnt bear producing nothing,observe each other laboring under the pointlesscompulsion to be productive. A general managerwas appointed, whose task was to undermineany possible output. In 1984, I myself enjoyed anopportunity to spend half a year working at anagency founded by Michael Schirner that,following Bismarc Medias business model,undertook to do nothing, and had rented a formergallery for Conceptual art for this purpose. Aftera while, this agency ended up producingsomething after all, namely concepts the genius loci may have been at fault andultimately it became a perfectly normaladvertising agency. 7All these early models of a wasteful workingenvironment, however, still have a good-natured

entrepreneur holding the whole thing together.Someone who is, deep-down, a Fordist planner,

incorporating the irrationalism of disruption andwastefulness at selected moments, much like aforest official who shoots some game to managethe wildlife stock or a firefighter who sets a fireto fight a larger fire. This situation changes themoment the traditional style of entrepreneurialsubjectivity planning meets two newcompetitors: on the one hand, the casino-stylecapitalism that has served as its own form of

income, but has also come under increasingpublic scrutiny; on the other hand, the inventionof the passion to perform prominentlymanifested in Deutsche Banks motto: Leistungaus Leidenschaft which is to say, theintroduction of entrepreneurial principles intothe everyday operations of business.

George Maciunas photo for the label of Shigeko Kubotas Flux Medicine , 1966.

Several writers, including Boltanski andChiapello, have characterized this process on thelevel of values officially articulated inmanagement seminars, in corporatecommunications, and in the self-conception ofthe actors. The question is: how does it feel fromthe inside, when the magic of potential and theintoxication of highly promising noncommittalinteractions assume the form of a permanentnetworking imperative incumbent upon middlemanagement and executives as well asacademics? The point is, after all, that principlesof intoxication and wastefulness function only,precisely when they are not subject to deflectiveinterpretation, watered down by entrepreneurs,instrumentalized, devalued: when we can believein them without allowing ourselves to getscrewed.In todays working world, that belief can besustained by agreeing to an exchange(outsourcing, freelancing, and sham freelancingprovide the corresponding economic and socialform) that functions this way: I forsake any

possibility of projecting myself as a private self,independent from my work, ultimately also

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renouncing any chance at negotiation, co-determination, or living the conflict of interestbetween capital and labor, and instead projectmyself as a holistic total self that is identical tomy work. In return, I regain the intensification,the force, the power of my early years. All themiserable humiliations I suffer, as well as thesuccesses that fill me with euphoria, are pushedas far as possible into the sub-subjective realm,

the realm of psychology of emotionalexperience. I agree to talk about them in thelanguage and imagery of a widespreadnarcissism and its models and stereotypes, asevents taking place between me and myself,between I and the self, where they constantlyengender provisional objectivations of theseexperiences as they are displaced into my innerlife. The result are rituals of introduction andbar-chatter openings of Im the kind of personwho.8Within this model, the subjectivation of the

self seizes, time and again, precisely on thosevestiges of the structure that shaped them asobjective social relations just before they werefed into the illusion of omnipotence harbored bythe outsourced subject of the post-Fordisteconomy. But this model also reveals a subjectwithin the subject, a highly self-possessed andpossessing subject that can triumph in thevictories of the person who has to survive all ofthis in addition to his or her defeats. This subjectis strong, harboring no illusions, and is a masterthat constantly dissociates from its own loser-ish qualities, either kicking them when theyredown or flirting with them, tender and bored. Thesentences that start with Im the kind of personwho allow for both.And yet even the outsourced entrepreneurwhose business is his or her own self, enjoyingthe self-possession that serves as compensationfor economic defeat, has someone to look downupon: todays version of the intent and focusedworker living in a small, low-risk world wherecoworkers birthdays, other coworkersabsenteeism, the irregularities of third parties,and other incalculabilities still matter. It is aworld in which the affably precise orparanoically exaggerated incessanthermeneutics of small hierarchically organizedgroups, a lifestyle designed to privilege long-term projects and intentionality, is alive and well.And it looks pretty paltry in comparison with thecontingencies our heroes deal with all day, everyday, in the cultural, gastronomic, information-dealing, symbol-processing culture of self-employment.In Berlin, one of the sensational placeswhere especially drastic and beautiful

manifestations of the confrontation betweenthese two worlds are staged daily, there is a

customs office in a no-go area near a highwayinterchange in the south of Schneberg. You areordered to show up there when you have receiveda shipment from abroad whose value thecustoms officers were unable to determine,either because they were unfamiliar with thecontents of the parcel (having already opened it)or because the shipment was not accompaniedby an invoice. The people ordered to come here

are not only those who, like myself, have scoredrecords on eBay; most are self-employedovermen dealing, in the owner-operated dumpsthey call stores, with things like bodybuildingmedications, American vitamin formulas, strangeluxury watches, designer hi-fi components, Asianfood products, plant porn, and other junk junkthat, through one customs loophole or another,makes for good business once theyve identifiedtheir internet-based sub-sub-clientele. Thisprocessing facility for unidentifiable goods iswhere one finds people up to their ears in micro-

cultural awareness, scrutiny of the economy,self-marketing, and adventurism.An approximately knee-high counterseparates such people from an open area wherethe customs officers officiate. These are, to thelast man, lovingly preserved museum piecesfrom Social-Democratic times, looking liketelevision kiddie-show hosts from the early yearsof public broadcasting: coarse fabrics, no sensefor color combinations, fairly out of shape, theirmovements slow and without haste. Asophisticated division of labor governs thesemovements, an elaborate scheme in which theclients they serve, who usually have to stand inline, must be seen by three different authoritiesbefore they can take their merchandise home.They are pedantic and very polite, working inaccordance with highly complicated rules thatalso seem to determine the interactions betweenthem and their desks, laden with documents andobjects and covered with funny stickers. Beforethem stand the self-fulfilling selves, gussied upand unshaven, repeatedly stepping out to take acall, impatient, their fierce eyes roaming over thedrama of a bureaucracy in demise a scene fromthe museum of the public welfare state asthough it were directed by Christoph Marthalerand set-designed by Anna Viebrock. Outside, thewinds of hazard are roaring, a hazard they acceptwith forced euphoria, feeding it, doped up andamped up, into a constantly efficient andceaselessly active economic person, while on theinside the officers shuffle back and forth, thelast people to distinguish between private lifeand work.Yet there is an upper echelon, too, one thatthe members of the Nietzsche economy, the

masters of intensification, look up to and it isnot populated only by successful people. Rather,

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it consists of those who, without lying tothemselves, without having to will the Itriumphant and the humiliated I into a single soulin order to experience their triumph and power,have been able to wholly transform their oldwaste-your-youth leftist Nietzscheanism into apragmatic Nietzscheanism of efficiency. That isto say, those who had no difficulty combining theNietzschean enmity against the state Deleuze

had praised it was probably in reality never aleftist enmity, but perhaps people had been ableto do something leftist with it and the vitalistenmity against bureaucrats, to translate theresult into an entrepreneurial attitude; thosewho, rather than dreaming their will to powerinto their freelancer identities, have indeedacquired actual power.Since novels such as American Psychoappeared, this type has circulated, at first as afictional pathological monster, now as a reality,and most recently also in popular culture as a

stock object at which to direct the general hatredof casino capitalism. If we look at the actions ofthis type in the way we ought to in a Nietzscheaneconomy, that is to say, in an extramoral sense,his life, propelled by checks that might bounce atany moment, is not uninteresting. It is indeedthis stuff that produces the truly great subjects,the ones that the contemporary arts repeatedlydream of, between Hannibal Lecter and MatthewBarney, between Jason Rhoades and JonathanMeese a theater of unfounded assertions,insane through and through, that has made itinto the efficient heart of a well-organizedeconomic routine. The dominant figure in thissame routine, however, represents the other typedescribed above, the omnipresent freelancerwho doesnt worry about tomorrow because hecant afford to anyway, the overman driven not bythe grandeur of excess but by naked want.Several ideological constructs have beenbrought to the market promising to bridge thegap between these two models. The magazinebrand eins is full of first-person biographicalnarratives from active economic agents whopackage the move from intention and focustowards intensity and ecstatic involvementoutside of themselves. The so-called digitalboh me, as invented by Holm Friebe and SaschaLobo, uses the term bohemian to dress upprecisely the type I just called a Nietzschean.This brings a couple more people on board whoprefer to describe the intensification of lifethrough self-realizing work in slightly less brutalterms; it also leaves open the possibility of animplementation based on more than just will andvitality by using a technological paradigm shiftas a solid foundation for calculation. The true

economic Nietzschean, however, needs none ofthat unlike thirty years ago, he doesnt want to

be part of any movement: he just wants to movemoney into his own pockets.Even back then, Jacob Taubes, back then abrillant and dazzling lead character of those whowould later find their way via leftistNietzscheanism into the all-nighter of capitalistadventure doped up on euphoria, expressed askeptical view of this development. Taubes, ascholar of religion and philosopher who was the

founding editor of Suhrkamps Theorie series,was always open to an intellectual adventure. Yetin an interview in an early issue of the magazineTumult , he cautioned against the Nietzscheboys that suddenly popped up all over placeswhere a very rigid left had prevailed: the otherside of the critique of power, as it were, was anew will to power and it would ultimately findits way to power as well. 9Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson.An earlier version of this essay (in the original German)appeared in Sighard Neckel, ed., Kapitalistischer Realismus:Von der Kunstaktion zur Gesellschaftskritik (Frankfurt amMain: Campus, 2010).

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Diedrich Diederichsen was editor oftwo musicmagazines in the 1980s ( Sounds , Hamburg; Spex ,Cologne) and taught at several academies in the 1990sin Germany, Austria, and the U.S. in the fields of arthistory, musicology, theater studies, and culturalstudies. He was Professor for Cultural Theory at MerzAcademy, Stuttgart from 1998 to 2006, and is currentlyProfessor of Theory, Practice, and Communication ofContemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art inVienna.Recent Publications include Utopia of Sound ,Vienna 2010 (co-edited with Constanze Ruhm); Rock,

Paper, Scissor Pop-Music/Fine Arts , Graz 2009 (co-edited with Peter Pakesch); On Surplus Value (of Art ,Rotterdam/New York 2008; Eigenblutdoping , Cologne2008; Kritik des Auges , Hamburg 2008; Argument Son ,Dijon 2007; Personas en loop , Buenos Aires 2006;Musikzimmer , Cologne 2005.

1This essay is not aboutNietzschean philology. In thefollowing, the name Nietzscheis used to refer to a specificreception of Nietzsches work inFrance during the 1970s, andthen in Germany during the1980s, and to the ways thisreading helped shape anatmosphere and attitude towardlife that paved the way for theaspirations and life-definingdecisions of people who are now

middle-aged and have jobs.2Jean-Francois Lyotard,Intensitten (West Berlin: Merve,1978).

3Jean-Franois Lyotard,Bemerkungen ber dieWiederkehr des Kapitals, inIntensitten , 32. As quoted inJean-Franois Lyotard, Noteson the Return and Capital, inNietzsches Return, ed. Sylv reLotringer, special issue,Semiotext(e) 3, no. 1 (1977): 44.

4See Gilles Deleuze and ClaireParnet, Many Politics, inDialogues II , trans. HughTomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press 2007), 12447.

5Jrgen Teipel, VerschwendeDeine Jugend (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp 2000).

6For more on these types, see JanRehmann, Postmoderner Linksnietzscheanismus: Deleuze& Foucault; Eine Dekonstruktion(Hamburg: Argument, 2004);especially instructive for theissues discussed here are pp.132136, where Rehmanndescribes Foucaults strategy ofmobilizing Nietzsche to outdothe Paris radical left in terms ofits willingness to fight and itsradicalism but, as it were, onits own territory: the radicalrejection of the status quo.

7See Michael Schirner, Werbungist Kunst (Munich: Klinkhardt &Biermann, 1988).

8See Diedrich Diederichsen,Schnheitschirurgie am

gewachsenen Schnabel: DerGenu an der Selbstrezeption inder Floskel: Ich bin ein Mensch,der..., Zeitschrift fr sthetikund AllgemeineKunstwissenschaft 52, no. 2(2007).

9Jacob Taubes in conversationwith Wolfert von Rahden andNorbert Kapferer, Elite oderAvantgarde, Tumult 3 (1982):6476.

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