Gunther Anders - The World As Phantom and As Matrix - Philosophical Considerations On Radio and Television

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The Obsolescence of Man, Volume I, Part Two, “The World as Phantom and as Matrix:
Philosophical Considerations on Radio and Television” – Günther Anders1
But since the king did not like the idea that his son, straying from the main roads, should be
wandering all over the land to obtain his own opinions of the world, he presented him with a carriage
and horses. “Now you do not need to walk”, were his words. What they meant was: “You are no longer
allowed to walk.” The e ective reality: “You can no longer walk.”
Chapter I
THE WORLD DELIVERED TO YOUR HOME
Section 1
No Means Is Only a Means.
https://libcom.org/library/chapter-1-world-delivered-your-home 1/33
23/02/23, 12:57 Chapter 1 - The world delivered to your home | libcom.org
The rst reaction to the critique to which we shall subject radio and television will sound
something like this: such a generalization is not permitted; what is of interest is exclusively
what we do with these instruments, how we use them, for what purposes we use them as
means: good or bad, human or inhuman, social or antisocial.
We have all heard this optimistic argument—if we can be permitted to use such an expression
—which is a legacy of the era of the rst industrial revolution; and in all of its lairs it still lives
on with the same unre ective super ciality.
The validity of this argument is more than doubtful. The freedom to use the technology that it
presupposes; its faith in the idea that there are parts of our world that are nothing but “means”
which can be assessed ad libitum as “noble goals” is pure illusion. The instruments themselves
comprise facta that also a ect us. And this reality, which a ects us regardless of the goal to
which we wish to harness these instruments, will not just disappear by verbally demoting them
to the status of “means”. In fact, the crude division of our life into “means” and “ends” which is
entailed by this argument, has nothing to do with reality. Our existence, replete with
technologies, cannot be broken down into discrete signs, strictly delineated, which identify
some things as “means” and others as “ends”. Such a distinction is only legitimate in individual
actions and isolated mechanical operations. It is not legitimate when we are dealing with the
“totality”, in politics or philosophy. Anyone who structures his or her life as a whole with the
help of these two categories considers it according to the model of action determined by the
end, that is, as a technical process, which is an expression of the barbarism that normally
provokes such rage, especially when it is presented in the form of the slogan, “The end justi es
the means”. The rejection of this formula displays the same laziness as its acceptance (which is
furthermore so rare), since he who rejects it also a rms, although not explicitly, the legitimacy
of the two categories. Real humanity, however, only begins when this distinction is rendered
absurd: when both the means and the ends are so infused with a cultured way of life and
ethical education that, faced with concrete fragments of life or the world, one can no longer
understand or even question whether they are “means” or “ends”; only when
The journey towards the spring

Is just as good as drinking from it.
We can, of course, use television for the purpose of participating in a religious service. But
what “a ects” or “transforms” us in this experience—whether we like it or not—just like the
religious service itself, is the fact that we do not participate, but rather consume only its image.
This picture-book e ect, however, is not only di erent from the “proclaimed” e ect, but very
much the opposite of it. What marks us and demarcates us, what conforms us and deforms us,
is not just the objects transmitted by the “media”, but the media themselves, the devices
themselves, which are not just objects with one possible use, but which determine their use by
virtue of their xed structure and function and, accordingly, also determine the style of our
actions and our lives: in short, us.
The readers to whom the following pages are addressed are, in the rst place, consumers, that
is, those who listen to radio and watch TV. Secondly, professional philosophers and the
employees of the radio and television industries. The theme of my re ections will seem strange
to the philosophers; and to the specialists, the way I address it will seem strange. Of course, I
am not addressing all consumers, but only those to whom it has occasionally occurred, during
or after a broadcast, that they were perplexed and asked themselves: “And just what was I
doing then? What am I really doing?” It is to these perplexed persons that I must o er a few
observations.
Section 2
Today’s mass consumption takes place as a sum of solo performances. Each consumer is an unpaid
domestic worker employed in the production of the mass man.
In the days before the cultural faucets of radio were installed in their homes, the Smiths and
the Millers had thronged the movie theaters in order to collectively consume, and therefore as
a mass, the commodities that had been produced for them in a stereotyped and massive way.
One might be tempted to perceive in this situation a certain coherent style: the con uence of
2
mass production2 and mass consumption; but one would be mistaken. Nothing more
completely contradicts the intentions of mass production than a situation of consumption in
which some or even large numbers of consumers simultaneously enjoy the same individual
specimen (or a single reproduction of such a product) of a commodity. For the interest of
those who direct the mass production is indi erent to the fact that this consumption should
represent as a whole a “real community experience” or only the sum of many individual
experiences. What is of interest to them is not the standardized masses as such, but the masses
fragmented into a certain number, as large as possible, of buyers; not the opportunity for
everyone to consume the same thing, but the fact that each person should buy the same thing
to meet the same need (whose implantation was obtained in the same manner). In countless
industries this ideal has been completely or almost completely achieved. To me it seems
debatable whether the motion picture industry can attain this goal in an optimal manner
because, as a continuation of the theatrical tradition, it still serves its commodity as a spectacle
for many people at the same time. This undoubtedly represents an archaic residue. It is not
surprising that the radio and television industries, despite the motion picture industry’s
enormous scale of development, can compete with the movies: both industries have the added
good luck that they sell as a commodity, in addition to the commodities that are meant for
consumption, also the apparatus necessary for that consumption; and, unlike the cinema, they
can be sold to almost every consumer. Nor is it surprising that almost everyone takes
advantage of this opportunity, since this commodity, unlike the motion picture, can be
delivered to the homes of the consumers by means of the radios and televisions. So it did not
take long for the Smiths and Millers, who used to spend their evenings in the movie theaters,
to instead stay at home to “receive” radio comedies or news of the world. The natural situation
of the movies—the consumption of the mass commodity by a mass of people—no longer
prevails here, something that naturally does not entail any reduction in the scale of mass
production; instead, mass production for mass-men—and the production of mass-men
themselves—is increasing every day without interruption. Millions of listeners are served the
same food for their ears; every one of them was treated, by way of this en masse product, as a
mass-man, as an “inde nite article”; each one was thus xed in this quality, that is, his lack of
quality. It just turned out that, for the mass production of radios and televisions, the collective
consumer was rendered super uous. The Smiths and the Millers therefore consume the mass
products en famille or even alone; the more isolated the consumer, the more productive: thus
we witness the rise of the type of mass-hermit; and, now, there are millions of examples of this
type—each one separated from the others, but nonetheless the same as them—who are seated
in their homes like hermits, but not to renounce the world, but in order not to miss even a
crumb of the world in e gie for the love of God.
Everyone knows that the industry has abandoned its postulate of centralization, which was the
indisputable model some thirty years ago, most often for strategic reasons, in favor of the
principle of “dispersion”. It is not contradictory that this principle of dispersion should be valid
today for the production of the mass-man. And I say, for his production, despite the fact that
we have so far spoken only of dispersed consumption. But this leap from consumption to
production is justi ed here because both coincide in a certain way, since (in a non-
materialistic sense) man “is what he eats”: mass-men are produced because they consume mass
products; this implies at the same time that the consumer of mass-produced commodities,
through his consumption, becomes a collaborator in the production of the mass-man (that is,
he becomes a collaborator in the process of transforming himself into a mass-man). Thus,
consumption and production coincide here. If consumption “is dispersed”, so too is the
production of the mass-man. And this takes place wherever consumption takes place: in the
presence of every radio and every television. In a certain way, each individual is employed and
occupied as a domestic worker. It is true, of course, that he is a domestic worker of a very
unusual type, because of the nature of his work: his self-transformation into a mass-man
through his consumption of mass-produced commodities, that is, through his leisure. Whereas
the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure himself of a minimum of
consumer goods and leisure, today’s domestic worker consumes a maximum number of leisure
products in order to collaborate in the production of the mass-man. The process is completely
paradoxical insofar as the domestic worker, instead of being paid for this collaboration, must
even pay for it himself; especially for the means of production (the radio or television and, in
many countries, even for the broadcasts), by the use of which he allows himself to be
transformed into the mass-man. He therefore pays to sell himself; even his lack of freedom—
which lack he has helped to bring about—he must obtain by buying it, since it, too, has been
transformed into a commodity.
But even if you reject this shocking way of looking at the consumer of mass-produced
commodities as the collaborator of the production of the mass-man, it cannot be denied that in
order to create this kind of mass-man, which is today desired, no longer requires e ective mass
participation in the form of consolidated masses. Le Bon’s re ections on crowds and how they
transform man are obsolete, since the depersonalization of individuality and the
standardization of rationality are carried out at home. The stage-managing of masses that
Hitler specialized in has become super uous: if one wants to transform a man into a nobody
(and even make him proud to be a nobody), it is no longer necessary to drown him in a mass,
or to bury him in a cement construction mass-produced by masses. No depersonalization, no
loss of the ability to be a man is more e ective than the one that apparently preserves the
freedom of the personality and the rights of the individual. If the procedure of conditioning
takes place in a special way in the home of every person—in the individual home, in isolation,
in millions of isolated units—the result will be perfect. The treatment is absolutely discreet,
since it is presented as fun, the victim is not told that he must make any sacri ces and he is left
with the illusion of his privacy or, at least, of his private space. In actuality, the old expression,
“A man’s home is worth its weight in gold” is once again true, if in a completely new sense,
since it is worth its weight in gold not just to the owner of the home, who gulps down the
soup of conditioning by the ladle-full, but also for those who are the masters of the
homeowners: the caterers and suppliers who serve the diners this soup that is their daily fare.
Section 3
The radio and the television screen become transformed into a negative family table; and the family is
transformed into a miniature audience.
It will be understood that this mass consumption is not usually called by its true name. To the
contrary: it is presented as something that favors the rebirth of the family and privacy, which is
understandable, but an understandable hypocrisy: the new inventions invoke nothing but the
old ideals, which can fortuitously be presented as factors that in uence purchasing. “The
French family has discovered,” we read in Wiener Presse (December 24, 1954), “that television
is an excellent means to divert young people from costly pastimes, and to keep children at
home … and to give a new stimulus to family gatherings.” This evaluation ignores the
possibility that this kind of consumption actually entails, to the contrary, the complete
dissolution of the family; and it does so in such a manner that this dissolution preserves or
even acquires the appearance of an intimate family life. And it does in fact dissolve it, since
what dominates the home, thanks to television, is the broadcast of the outside world—real or
ctional; and it dominates the home in such an unlimited manner that it invalidates and
renders phantasmagorical the reality of the home, not only that of the four walls and the
furniture, but also of the shared family life itself. When that which is remote becomes familiar,
the familiar becomes remote or disappears. When the phantom becomes real, reality becomes a
phantom. Nowadays, the real home has been demoted to the status of a container and its
function is reduced to containing the video screen for the outside world. As a Wiener Presse
article datelined from London (October 2, 1954) says: “Social workers removed two children
from a house in the East End of London, a one-year old and a three-year old, who had been
abandoned. The only furniture in the house, in which they were playing, consisted of a few
broken chairs. But in a corner there was an expensive new television. The only food in the
cupboard consisted of a slice of bread, a pound of margarine and a bottle of condensed milk.”
The last remnants of what had once constituted the home environment, life in common and
the atmosphere of normal life, have disappeared. Without even an open confrontation having
taken place—or even being necessary—the realm of the phantom was victorious over the realm
of the home from the very moment the television made its entry into the home: it came, it was
seen, and it conquered. Immediately the walls echo, they become transparent, the glue that
holds the family together melts away, shared privacy disintegrates.
Decades ago, one could have observed that the social hallmark of the family, the massive table
in the center of the living room, around which the family gathered, had begun to lose its force
of attraction, it became obsolete and is now absent from the modern home. Now it has found
its true successor in the new gadget, the television; only now has it been replaced with a new
piece of furniture, whose social symbolism and persuasive power can measure up against the
comparable features of the family table. This does not mean, however, that the television has
become the center of the family; to the contrary, what the television set reproduces and
embodies is precisely the decentralization of the family, its ex-centricity, because it is the
negative family table. It does not provide a common center point, but rather a common avenue of
escape for the members of the family. Whereas the table was a centripetal force for the family
and it had encouraged those who sat around it to set the shuttles of mutual family interests in
motion, to share glances and conversations in order to continue weaving the fabric of family
life, the television screen is centrifugal. In fact, the family members are not seated in such a
way as to face one another; the arrangement of chairs in front of the television screen is a
chance a air and should the family members look at each other it is only by accident, just as
any speech between them (if they should ever want or be able to talk) is a result of chance.
They are no longer together, but merely placed one next to the other; they are mere spectators.
In these circumstances one can no longer speak of weaving the fabric of family life, or of a
world in which they participate or which they create together. What takes place instead is only
that the members of the family y towards a realm of unreality at the same time, all of them
together in the best cases, but never really share the experience at the point of lifto ; or else
they journey towards a world that they actually share with no one (since they do not really
participate in it themselves); or if they do share it in some manner, they only do so with all the
millions of “soloists of mass consumption”, who just like them and at the same time as them
stare at their television screens. The family has been restructured into a miniature audience, and the
living room has been transformed into a miniature movie theater and the movie theater has become the
model for the home. If there is still anything that the members of the family experience or
participate in, not alone, or even as isolated individuals alongside the other members of the
family, but truly as a shared family experience, it is only the experience of awaiting the
moment and working for the moment, when they will have nally paid o all the installments
on their televisions and will once and for all put an end to their lives in common. The
unconscious goal of their last life in common is therefore its extinction.
Section 4
Television and radio speak on our behalf; they thus transform us into minors and subordinates. 3
Television viewers, we have said, converse with each other only by accident—insofar as they
still retain the will or the ability to speak.
This is true even of people who listen to the radio. They too speak only by mistake. Their will
and their ability to speak diminish with each passing day—this does not mean that they
literally fall silent, but only that their garrulousness has assumed a purely passive form. If in
our fable we said, in the words of the king, that “Now you do not need to walk” means “Now
you cannot walk”, in this case the “Now you no longer need to talk” is transformed into “Now
you can no longer talk”. Since the television and the radio speak on our behalf, they also deprive us
of our ability to speak; they rob us of our capacity to express ourselves, of our opportunities for
speech, and of our pleasure in speaking, just as the music of the phonograph has robbed us of
the live music that we used to perform in our homes.
The pairs of lovers sauntering along the shores of the Hudson, the Thames or the Danube with
a portable radio do not talk to each other, but listen to a third person—the public, almost
always anonymous, voice of the program that they walk like a dog; or more accurately, that
walks them like a pair of dogs. Since they are only a public in miniature that follows the voice
of the broadcast, they do not walk alone, but in the company of a third person. We may not
speak, therefore, of any kind of situation of intimate conversation, which is ruled out in
advance; and any intimate contacts that might take place between the lovers are introduced
and even stimulated not by them, but by that third party, the deep or crooning voice of the
program that (for is not this the very meaning of the word, “program”) tells both lovers what
to feel and what to do depending on whether it is day or night. And since they do what they
are told to do in the presence of this third party, they do it in an acoustically indiscreet
situation. However entertaining their obedience may seem to the two lovers, it is a certainty
that they do not entertain each other; rather, both are entertained by that third party which
alone has a voice; and this voice does not entertain them only in the sense of conversing with
them, or even of just amusing them, but also in the sense of soutenir [supporting them], since as
the third party in the alliance, this voice gives them that support and aid that they cannot
mutually provide each other, since they do not know what to do with themselves. The fact that
even the actual faire amour itself is almost always conducted to the accompaniment of the radio
(and not only playing a creative swooning musical), does not need to be shamefully
dissimulated for a world that not only knows this is true, but also practices it as something
entirely normal. In fact, the radio, which is admitted or desired today in every situation, plays
the role of that torch-bearing female guide whom the ancients called upon to witness their
amorous pleasures; the di erence between the two is that today’s guide is a mechanical public
utility, that its torch must provide not just illumination, but also warmth, and must not remain
silent under any circumstances, but to the contrary must talk its head o and provide a
background of noise in the form of songs or words in order to suppress that horror vacui
which does not loosen its grip on the pair of lovers even in actu. This background noise is so
fundamentally important that it has even been adopted by the voicepondences, introduced in
1954, those recorded magnetic tapes, which people send to each other. When a lover utters
this kind of illiterate love letter, what he is doing is speaking on a pre-recorded musical
background, because for his adored addressee it is likely that “nothing more than his voice”
would be too bare a gift. What really has to be heard, somewhat like a suitor who has been
transformed into a thing, is likewise the third voice.
But the situation of lovemaking is just one example, the most blatant. In much the same way,
people keep themselves entertained in any situation, in every activity; and when, by some
oversight or carelessness, they speak to each other, behind them speaks, as the principal actor,
as the tenor, the voice of the radio and transmits to them the reassuring and comforting feeling
that it will continue to speak even after they themselves have had their say—even after they are
dead.
And no matter how much they now have a guaranteed right to speak, they have been
completely inoculated in their hearing, and have essentially ceased to be ζῶα λόγον ἔχοντα,
just as, as eaters of bread, they have ceased to be homines fabri, since they do not give form to
their verbal nourishment, nor do they bake their own bread. For them words are no longer
something one speaks, but something one merely hears; speaking is no longer something that
one does, but something that one receives. It is clear that they therefore “have” the logos in a
completely di erent sense than is conveyed by Aristotle’s de nition; and it is just as clear that
they are thus transformed—in the etymological sense of the term—into infantile beings, that is,
into minors, those who do not speak. No matter in what cultural or political milieu this
process towards the condition of ἄνευ λόγου εἶναι [an existence without speech] takes place,
its end result is always the same: a type of man who, because he no longer speaks himself, no
longer has anything to say; and who, because he only listens—and this is more and more the
case—is a subordinate. The initial e ects of this development are manifest even today: the
languages of all advanced countries have become cruder and poorer; and there is a growing
aversion to the use of language.4 But not only this—there has also been a corresponding
impoverishment and barbarization of experience, that is, of man himself, because man’s “inner
life”, its richness and its subtlety, cannot endure without the richness and subtlety of his way of
speaking and not only because language is man’s means of expression, but also because man is
the product of his way of speaking; in short: because man is articulated as he himself articulates and is
disarticulated to the degree that he does not articulate.5
Section 5
Events come to us, not we to them.
The consumer goods by means of which such a transformation of human nature is achieved
are brought into our homes, just like gas or electricity. The deliveries are not con ned to
artistic products, such as music or radio dramas; they also include actual events, at least those
events that are selected and processed to represent “reality” or to serve as substitutes for it. A
man who wants to be “in the swim”, to know what is going on outside, must go to his home,
where the events are waiting for him, like water ready to ow from the faucet. For if he stayed
outside, in the chaos of reality, how could he pick out anything “real” of more than local
signi cance? Because, in fact, the outside world covers up the outside world. Only after we
have closed the door behind us, does the outside world become visible to us; only after we
have been transformed into windowless monads, does the universe re ect itself in us; only
when we have dedicated ourselves to the tower to such a point that, instead of being prisoners,
we become its residents, does the world appear and o er itself to us, and we are transformed
into Lynceus.6 The ridiculous promise: “Look how close the good is”, which our fathers had to
propose in response to the question, “Why go out into the world?”, will have to be revised and
stated in this way: “Look how close the distant is”, or even, “Look, the remote is only near”.
And this brings us to the heart of our subject, since the fact that events—the events themselves,
not reports about them—that football games, church services, atomic explosions, visit us at
home; the fact that the mountain comes to Mohammed, the world comes to man, and not the
reverse, is, along with the mass production of hermits and the transformation of the family into
a miniature audience, the essentially revolutionary achievement that radio and television has
brought.7
This third revolution is the real subject of our investigation, since it is almost exclusively
devoted to unique changes that are in icted on man as a being who is supplied with a world,
and to the no less unique consequences entailed by this supply of the world for the concept of
the world and for the world itself. In order to prove that what we are dealing with here are
truly philosophical questions, we shall provide a list, although not in any systematic order, of
some of the consequences that must be discussed in the course of our investigation.
1. When the world comes to us, instead of our going to it, we are no longer “in the world”, but
only its consumers, as in the Land of Cockaigne.
2. When the world comes to us only as an image, it is half-present and half-absent, in other
words, it is like a phantom.
3. When we have access to it at any time we want (we do not of course call the shots, but we
can connect to it or disconnect from it), we are possessors of a God-like power.
4. When the world speaks to us without our being able to speak to it, we are deprived of
speech, and hence condemned to be unfree.
5. When the world is clearly perceptible to us, but no more than that, i.e., not subject to our
action, then we are transformed into eavesdroppers and voyeurs.

6. When an event that occurs at a particular place is broadcast, and when it can be made to
appear at any other place as a “broadcast”, it becomes a movable, indeed, almost ubiquitous
object, and has forfeited its spatial location, its principium individuationis.
7. When the event is no longer attached to a speci c location and can be reproduced virtually
any number of times, it acquires the characteristics of an assembly-line product; and when we
pay for having it delivered to our homes, it is a commodity.
8. When the actual event is socially important only in its reproduced form, i.e., as a spectacle,
the di erence between being and appearance, between reality and image of reality, is abolished.
9. When the event in its reproduced form is socially more important than the original event,
this original must be shaped with a view to being reproduced; in other words, the event
becomes merely a master matrix, or a mold for casting its own reproductions.
10. When the dominant experience of the world thrives on such assembly-line products, the
concept “the world” is abolished insofar as it denotes that in which we live. The real world is
forfeited; the broadcasts, in other words, further an “idealistic” orientation.
It is quite obvious that what we have here are philosophical problems. All the points set forth
above will be discussed during the course of our investigation. Up to the last point: the
surprising utilization of the expression “idealistic”, which must therefore be explained
immediately.
Already, in Point 1, we proposed that, for us, as consumers of radio and television, the world is
no longer present as outside world, in which we are, but as our world. In fact, the world has
changed places in a peculiar way: it is certainly not to be found, as the vulgar formulas of
idealism state, “in our consciousness” or “in our brain”; however, because of the fact that it has
in e ect been moved from the outside to the inside and, instead of being found outside, it has
made its abode in my house as an image that must be consumed, as a mere eidos, this
translocation is similar in the most surprising manner to classical idealism. Now, the world has
become mine, it is my representation, it has been transformed into a “representation for me”
(if we understand the term, “representation” in a dual sense: not only in the sense of
Schopenhauer, but in that of the theater). The idealist element consists in this “for me”, since
“idealist”, in the broadest sense of the word, is any attitude that transforms the world into
something that is mine, ours, into something at our disposal, in short: into a possessive: therefore,
into my “representation” or into my (Fichtean) “product of positing”. If the term “idealist” is
surprising, this is because the “being mine” is in general only asserted speculatively, while here
it describes a situation in which the metamorphosis of the world into something that is at my
disposal has technically taken place in a real way. It is evident that already the mere assertion
proceeds from a disproportionate pretension to freedom, since in it the world is claimed as
property. Hegel used the expression “idealism” in this broader sense without any qualms, in his
Philosophy of Right, to denominate as “idealist” the predatory animal insofar as it appropriates,
annexes and imagines the world in the form of prey or plunder, that is, it makes use of it as
“its own”. Fichte was an idealist, because he considered the world to be something “posited” by
him, as the product of the activity of his ego, and therefore as his own product. What all
idealists have in common in the broadest sense is the assumption that the world is here, it
exists, for man, whether as a gift, or as freely created, so that man himself does not belong to
the world, he does not represent a part of the world; he is instead the polar opposite of the
world. The interpretation of this gift, of this datum as “sensory data” is only one variety of
idealism among many others, and certainly not one of the most important.8
If it is true of all the variations of idealism that they transform the world into a possessive:
into a domain that is ruled (Genesis), into an image of perception (sensualism), into a
consumer good (Hegel’s predatory animal), into a product of “positing” or “production”
(Fichte), into property (Stirner), in our case the expression can in fact be utilized with a good
conscience, since here all the possible nuances of the possessive are united.
If television and radio open windows to the world, at the same time they transform the
consumers of the world into “idealists”.
This claim will naturally sound strange and contradictory after having spoken of the triumph
of the outside world over the inner world. It sounds strange to me, too. The fact that both
assertions can be held at once seems to indicate an antinomy in the man-world relation. At
rst sight, this antinomy is insoluble. If it is at all possible, our investigation must go further,
since it began by way of contradiction and does not presuppose, in toto, anything but the
attempt to explain this contradictory situation.
Section 6
Because the world is brought into our homes, we do not have to explore it: as a result, we do not
acquire experience.9
In a world that comes to man, man has no need to go to the world in order to explore or
experience it; that which was once called experience has become super uous.
Up until recently, expressions such as “to go into the world” or “to experience” have denoted
important anthropological concepts. Since man is a being relatively little endowed with
instincts, he has been compelled to experience and know the world a posteriori in order to nd
his place in it; only in this way could he reach his goal and become “experienced”. Life used to
consist of a voyage of exploration; that is why the great Erziehungsromane (“educational
novels”) dealt with the ways man—although always in the world—had to travel in order to get
to know the world. Today, because the world comes to him—as an image—he need not bother
to explore it; such explorations and experiences are super uous, and since all super uous
functions become atrophied, he can no longer engage in explorations and become
experienced.10 It is indeed evident that the type of “experienced man” is becoming increasingly
rare, and that age and experience tend to be regarded as less and less valuable. Like pedestrians
who have taken to ying we no longer need roads; in consequence, our knowledge of the ways
of the world, which we formerly used to explore, and which made us experienced, is declining.
Simultaneously with this, the world itself becomes a pathless wilderness. Whereas formerly we
“stored up” for us like a commodity put aside for future use; we do not have to go to the
events, the events are paraded before us.
Such a portrait of our contemporaries may at rst sight appear distorted. For it has become
customary to look upon the automobile and the airplane as symbols of modern man, homo
viator, a being whose essence is travel (Gabriel Marcel). What is in question is precisely the
correctness of this de nition. For modern man does not attach value to his travelling because
of any interest in the regions he visits, actually or vicariously; he does not travel to become
experienced but to still his hunger for omnipresence and for rapid change as such. Moreover,
the speed of his movement deprives him of the opportunity for experience (to the extent that
speed itself has now become the sole and ultimate experience)—not to mention the fact that
the number of objects worthy of being experienced and capable of adding to his experience is
continually decreased by his successful e orts to make the world uniform, and that even today
he feels at home, in need of no experience, wherever he may land. An advertising poster of a
well-known airline, utterly confusing provincialism and globalism, appeals to its customers
with these words: “When you use our services, you are everywhere at home.” Everywhere at
home: there is indeed good reason to assume that today any trip (even though the man who
takes it may sleep comfortably in his electrically heated cabin while ying over the North Pole)
is felt to be an antiquated, uncomfortable and inadequate method of achieving omnipresence.
Modern man still resorts to this method precisely because, despite all his e orts, he has not yet
succeeded in having everything delivered to his home—something that he has come to regard
as his inherent right.
The consumer of millions of separate radio and television broadcasts, lying down on his sofa,
rules the world in e gie from his home: he connects with it, he allows it to pass before his
eyes, he disconnects from it; this master of the multitude of images is by no means any less
typical for us than the aviator and the motorist; nor is the latter, when he is driving through
the countryside with his radio playing, since he, too, procures the satisfaction and the
consolation of knowing that not only does he have to leave in search of the world, but the
world also has to come to him and the world (which is now subjected to the penalty of
running after him and with him), really only turns for the exclusive purpose of entertaining
him.11
“The world turns for him”. “Entertains him.” “Just like at home.”
These expressions point to a mode of existence, a relation to the world that is so
extraordinarily perverse that even Descartes’ mauvais genie trompeur (“malicious demon”)
would be incapable of devising a comparable deception. Such a mode of existence may be
described as “idealistic” in two ways:
1. Despite the fact that we really live in an alienated world,12 the world is presented to us in such a
manner that it seems to exist for us, as though it were our own and like ourselves.
2. We “take” (i.e., regard and accept) it as such, although we stay at home in our living rooms;
that is, despite the fact that we do not actually “take” it (like the predatory animal or the
conqueror), nor do we actually make it our own; in any case, not we, the ordinary consumers
of radio and television. Instead, we “take” it because it is served to us in the form of images. In
this way we transform ourselves into master of the phantoms of the world, but our mastery
takes the form of voyeurism.
We have already addressed the rst point. The next chapter will be devoted to the second
point.
Section 7
The world brought into our homes is banalized.13
This is not the place to discuss the origin, the etiology or the symptomology of alienation. The
literature on this subject is enormous, and we must take this phenomenon for granted.14 The
deception in question here consists, as we have said, in the fact that we, despite living as we do
in an estranged world [verfremdete Welt], as consumers of lms, radio and television—but not
only as such—seem to be on friendly terms with everything and everybody: people, places,
situations, events, even the most surprising, or precisely the most surprising, ones. On March
7, 1955, a hydrogen bomb with the friendly name of Grandpa was detonated. This
phenomenon of pseudo-familiarization, which for reasons that we shall explain in the next
section does not have a name, we call “banalization of the world”: “banalization”, not
“insinuation”, because what is taking place here does not consist in our abandonment to the
strange or the bizarre, but in the fact that we are supplied with strange people, things, events
and situations as if they were totally familiar; that is, it consists in the creation of a banalized
situation.15
Some illustrations (we shall take two examples of estrangement at random): while our use of
something and our production of things are two di erent things (since what we use is always
ready at hand, while the nature of what we produce in collaboration with others, to the
contrary, is unintelligible to us or alien to our lives); while our next-door neighbors, whom we
pass by every day for years, usually do not know us and the distance between us and them
remains unbridged for years on end, lm stars, girls whom we never meet personally but
whom we have seen countless times and whose spiritual and physical characteristics are known
to us more completely than those of our co-workers, appear to us in the guise of old friends, as
chums. We are automatically on a footing of intimacy with them; we refer to them by their rst
names, as Rita or Myrna. What is delivered to us has become immediate and a ects us directly
along with it: the abyss has been eliminated. The importance that is attributed to this
elimination of the abyss is shown by 3D motion pictures, whose invention and introduction
arose not only from an interest in technical improvements or merely from the competitive
struggle (against television), but from the desire to confer upon the absence of distance
between the transmission and the receiver a maximum degree of sensory and spatial credibility.
If it were technically possible—and who can predict what is still in store for us, considering the
current dizzying rate of artistic progress?—they will also make us happy with “tele-tactile
e ects”, by means of which we will be able to palpably feel the blow of the boxer’s left-hook in
our jaws. Only in that way will a real closeness be achieved. Although even today the 3D
motion picture promises: You are with them, they are with you.
To bring about such a state of a airs, to enable the program consumer to treat the world as
something familiar, the televised image must address him as an old chum. In fact, every
broadcast has this chummy quality. When I tune into the President, he suddenly sits next to me
at the replace, chatting with me, although he may be thousands of miles away. (I am only
marginally aware of the fact that this intimacy exists in millions of copies.) When the female
announcer appears on the screen, she speaks to me in a tone of complete frankness, as though
I were her bosom friend. (That she is also the bosom friend of all men is again only a marginal
realization.) When the radio family begins to share their concerns with me, I become their
con dant, as if I were their neighbor, family doctor or parish priest. (It does not matter that
everyone becomes their con dants or the fact that they are there in order to make us their
con dants or that we should become the family of neighbors.) All of them come to me as
intimate or indiscreet visitors; all of them nd me in a pre-banalized situation. Not one of these
people who are transported into my house retains even an atom of unfamiliarity. And this is
true not only of persons, but of everything else, of the world as a whole. The magical power of
banalization is so irresistible, the range of its capacity for metamorphosis is so extensive that
nothing can resist it: things, places, events or situations, everything is transformed so that it
comes to us with a friendly smile on its face, with a vulgar tatwamasi on its lips. This has
reached the point where, nally, we are not just on intimate terms with movie stars but also
with the stars of the rmament, and we speak of good old Cassiopeia just as we would speak of
Rita or Myrna. And this is not meant as a joke. The fact that laymen and scientists regard it as
possible and even probable that the inhabitants of other planets who allegedly operate the
ying saucers have, like us and precisely in our time, nothing better to do than to undertake
interplanetary voyages, proves that we look upon everything in the universe as “one of our
sort”. This is a sign of anthropomorphism compared to which the anthropomorphism of the
so-called primitive cultures seems timid. For the purveyors of the banalized universe, the
formula of identity of Plotinus and Goethe, “If the eye were not sun-like”, is replaced by the
commercial slogan, “If the sun were not eye-like”, since if it were not so then nature could not
be sold and, with it, a virtual commodity would be lost. We are thus systematically transformed
into pals of the globe and the universe, certainly only into pals, since it is clear that one cannot
say that modern man, conditioned in this manner, has a feeling of authentic fraternity, of
pantheism, of love of the most distant peoples or, much less, the “sense of the one”.
What we have said of things and persons distant in space, also applies to things and persons
distant in time, of the past: it, too, becomes one of our pals. And I am not talking about
historical lms, in which such treatment is the rule. But even in a serious, vividly written
American academic book, Socrates is described as quite a guy—in other words he is put in a
category that brings the distant great man seemingly close to the reader; for, needless to say,
the reader too is quite a guy. This label gives the reader the unconsciously gratifying feeling
that Socrates, if he had not happened to live in that remote past, would be essentially like us,
would not have anything to say that is essentially di erent from what we have to say, and in no
case could claim greater authority than we do. More than one person thinks, without any basis
whatsoever, that, should he be transported back to the time of Socrates—which must not be taken all
that seriously—he would not be one of the lesser lights of ancient Greece. For someone who thinks
in this way, Socrates is inferior to us or, in any event, is no better: the idea that Socrates could
have been any better than him is ruled out as much by his faith in progress as by his mistrust
of privileges of any kind. Others perceive (as their reaction to historical lms and similar
productions proves) historical gures almost as comical, that is, as hillbillies in the realm of time,
as creatures who did not grow up in the capital city, in the Now, and that, for that reason, they
act like village idiots of history or superstitious backwoodsmen. Every electrical invention
made since their time is looked upon as an eloquent proof of their inferiority. Finally, to many
of our contemporaries historical gures appear as non-conformists, as suspiciously queer
fellows, for it is obvious that they regard themselves as something quite special—namely, unlike
every decent man who chooses to live in the present, they prefer to take up residence in a
cavern of the past. But whether a great man of the past is regarded as quite a guy or a
provincial hick, these categories denote proximity and are therefore variations of banalization.
But let us return to the case of “Socrates, the guy”: the epithet here is obviously based on the
great political principle formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, “All men are born
equal”, which has now been romantically extended into the assertion of the Equality of all
citizens of the Commonwealth of times past and present. Needless to say, such a romantic extension
of the principle of equality suggests not only a false historical proximity, but also a
misconception of the common denominator of all mankind—for, after all, the essence of
Socrates consists in the very thing that “our sort” is lacking. The method allegedly intended to
bring the object close to us, actually serves to veil the object, to alienate it, or simply to do
away with it altogether. Indeed, it does away with it, since the past, by being projected onto the
single plane of the world of pals and chums, has actually ceased to exist qua history—and this
is perhaps even more plausible than our general thesis, that when all the various and variously
distant regions of the world are brought equally close to us, the world as such vanishes.
Section 8
The Sources of Banalization: The Democratic Universe. Banalization and the Commodity Character.
Banalization and Science.
So just what lies behind this banalization?
Like every historical phenomenon on such a scale banalization is also over-determined, that is,
it owes its very existence to sources of diverse provenance, which had to converge and unite in
order to convert it into a historical reality.
Before we go in search of the principal root of this phenomenon, we would like to brie y
mention its three collateral roots. We have already addressed one of them in our discussion of
Socrates. We call it the democratization of the universe and by this term we mean to refer to:
1. When each and every thing, regardless of how far away or how close it is, is familiar to me;
when each and every thing can demand the same right to make its voice heard, which I accept
as something equally familiar; when the odium of privilege is attributed to every relative
advantage, one has as a matter of course—in an unconscious way, it is true—a structurally
democratic totum, a universe, to which certain principles are applied (which are morally and
politically accepted), the principles of equal rights and tolerance for all. Viewed historically,
such an extension of moral principles to the cosmic level is not at all extraordinary. Man has
always recreated the image of the universe in accordance with that of his own society. What
was extraordinary was the division, which has been dominant during the last few centuries in

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23/02/23, 12:57 Chapter 1 - The world delivered to your home | libcom.

The journey towards the spring

action, then we are transformed into eavesdroppers and voyeurs.

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