Max Stirner: Sowing the Seeds of Authentic Rebellion

In order to find a way to coherently articulate my belief that it can be otherwise in these days of acquiescence and resignation, an acquiescence which for many is a consequence of a crippling malaise born of the doubt about being able to voice an effective critique of our current situation, I wish to look back. This backward glance, focusing on a milieu that is now so distant, the German intellectual circles of the 1840s, has all the earmarks of an envelopment in the velvet caress of a lulling nostalgia. But there is much more to discover in this epochal turn of events. In a very real sense we as purveyors of early twenty-first century culture have not passed beyond the polemics which the so-called Young Hegelians brought into focus so long ago. Here, I wish to argue, are precious glimmers of a completely new way of life, part of which has already come to pass in our demimonde of divided loyalties, which even then had the appearance of a wildly jolting progression of thought. The episodes that make up its history challenge the most earnest and energetic attempts to impart some semblance of intelligibility to their recondite and somewhat ragged meanderings, and makes it extremely difficult to find a basic coherence in its impassioned call to action that might still have the power to infuse an attitude of refusal and of affirmation with a real sense of grounding. Our new sense of danger deriving from the experiences of living in a world spiralling out of our control has been building for a long time. It appears that two resolutely opposed forces, the will to authoritarianism and the drive for individual autonomy have developed themselves in such a way as to precipitate a culminating crisis, which seems to be nothing less than a final resolution of this perennial opposition that has gripped the human race since it first organized itself into societies. The outcome of the epic battle among the Young Hegelians is an unusually clear one in the history of ideas. This was in keeping with its overall history. Those who were seeking a way beyond the status quo of their day scored victory after victory against the reactionary forces of old Prussia. I trace these victories thusly: first there was D. F. Strauss, who focused on what he took to be inconsistencies in Hegels conception of eschatology, which seemed long on transcendence and short on immanence. Christ must be brought into the already existing world; but this meant that

he functioned more as a myth than as a historical reality, and this the old guard could not accept. The historicity of Christ had been the feature of Christianity that separated it from all other religions, which by Christianitys standards, never rose above the level of the fairy tale. The meaning of Christ, then, in Strauss view, was above all the expression of the mythic aspirations of a culture at a specific stage in its development. The question of his historicity was thus left open. Bruno Bauer took this a step further with his criticism of the Synoptic gospels, demonstrating that none of the texts had any historical value. Atheism was only a step away, and Bauer proceeded across this line with little hesitation. Religion began to appear as a positive obstacle to the spirit of rational inquiry, and Karl Marx summed up the Young Hegelian project as it existed in the early forties with the pithy phrasing the critique of society begins with the critique of religion. Feuerbach provided his own picture of the meaning of Chrtistianity, positing a model of projection which transformed anthropology into theology. The great philosophical task, Feuerbach thought, would be to reverse this process. Unmask the meaning of this projection of human qualities onto an abstract locus known as God, and it would immediately be clear that what was attributed to God was in reality embodied in the collective soul of humanity. Man is to man the true Supreme Being, Feuerbach famously wrote, and his view energized the Left intelligentsia for some years after its introduction in his book, The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841. This changed radically with the appearance of Stirners breviary of destruction (as the art critic James Hunecker called it), The Ego and Its Own, in late 1844. For the Young Hegelians had already determined that the problem, in its most basic form, was religion; wasnt Feuerbach merely introducing a new religion, a religion of Man, in the guise of a communistic atheism? Stirner demolished Feuerbachs argument, and at the same time forced consideration of the implications which appeared as a result of taking Feuerbachs and Bauers ideas to their logical conclusions. How do we undermine religion at its roots? Stirner answered this question most unsettlingly; we must extend Feuerbachs concept of projection into that of the fixed idea. God is only one of the ideas that give birth to the religious impulse. Any idea that subjects the individual to itself has the same purpose. To say that he implications of this thesis are far-reaching would be putting it mildly. And so the first immoralist, or, to put it more accurately, the first amoralist, came into being.

For a long time, these incendiary ideas smoldered underground. The revolutions of 1848 had turned attention away from individualist concerns to collective ones, and then the reaction to the revolutions followed. Nevertheless, by the 1860s, in the work of writers such as Dostoevsky, the disturbing questions resurfaced. What is it that I am authorized to do? Stirners answer, anything that it is in my power to do, seemed to Dostoevsky the ultimate horror. If God didnt exist, everything would be permitted. The twentieth century seemed to bear Dostoevskys apprehensions out.

But a new sensibility, meanwhile, was being born. By 1880, belief in the old rationalism was assaulted on many fronts. Europe seemed to be hiding a ghastly secret behind its glittering faade, one that must be divulged to be gotten rid of. We knowers are unknown to ourselves. This was how Friedrich Nietzsche put the problem in 1887. All that energy put into inquiring into the outside worldwas it just an elaborate ruse to avoid deep examination of what was within the human psyche? This focus on the disparity between the outer world and the inner one revealed much. It was possible from this perspective to see that the old culture was sick, possessed of a sickness unto death, but what seemed to be on its heels was anything but a beneficent transformation of the self and society. Without finding that elusive quality, a deep connection to life on its own terms, not in piecemeal fashion, but in a global sense, which somehow was in very short supply, wanton destruction would inevitably ensue. In this climate an important faction of Modernism was born; its practitioners perceived the pitfalls of this new existence with its mechanization of seemingly everything, up to and including the human soul; its possible to read their output as part of a strategy to counter the effects of this drive to oblivion. Cassandra warns us once again! We speak of these luminaries now as a vanguard, but what exactly is the significance and direction of this vanguard, if any? I believe it is possible now to answer this question in a much more satisfactory fashion by considering such relationships as I sketch below. Max Stirner and Marcel Duchamp

Here at last the domination of the law is for the first time complete. Not I live, but the law lives in me. Thus I have really come so far as to be only the vessel of its glory. Every officer carries his gendarme in his breast, says a high Prussian officer. (Stirner 1995, 50)

The path must suddenly have seemed clear to those who saw the synthetic possibilities of this new way of approaching existence. Paradoxically perhaps, art was reaffirmed, an art that treated aesthetics with a good deal of skepticism, as the only means by which the individual might arrive at a clearing, a place to make a new evaluation of the so-called Progress of Civilization, to unmask for oneself the monster of habit, of submission to ones own ideas of the Immutable, and to do this not in the spirit of Science but of Poetry. Robert Motherwell said that Picasso and Duchamp viewed each other as merely playing a game. I wonder. Sifting through the Mary Reynolds Collection, for example, the unparallelled Surrealist repository of books and other artifacts now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, makes one believe that a tacit consensus on the part of many of these major players existed, that Duchamp was indeed the one who best embodied that ineffable quality of unencumbrance, of avoiding being saddled with any debt to the everyday machinations of the world, without, moreover, succumbing to asceticism or other priestly afflictions. This sentiment is beautifully expressed in Andr Bretons seminal essay The Lighthouse of the Bride: Whoever has once caught himself in the act of believing the doctrinal affirmations from which this movement [cubism] draws its authority, of giving it credit for its scientific aspirations, of praising its constructive value, must in fact agree that the sum of research thus designated has been but a plaything for the tidal wave which soon came and put and end to it, not without upsetting from base to summit, far and wide, the artistic and moral landscapeFrom the strictly historical point of view, it is very important, in order to bring this study to a proper conclusion, to consider attentively the place where the very first characteristic vibrations of the phenomenon chose to be recorded, in this instance the general disposition of this or that artist who has proven himself on this occasion to be the most sensitive recording instrument. The unique position of Marcel Duchamp at the spearhead of all modern movementswas, until quite recently, such as to make us deplore that the externally most important part of this work, from 1911 to 1918, rather jealously guarded its secret. If the tidal wave, which was later to be so vastly disrupting, could have once begun to swell, one had certainly come to think that Duchamp must, from the start, have known much about its resources, and one suspected him rather of having opened for it some mysterious valve. (Lebel 1959, 88)

Breton, in this 1934 essay, goes on to laud the recent appearance of Duchamps Green Box, a lexical accompaniment to his enigmatic work The Large Glass, as a key to the understanding of this tidal wave, a wave that Breton thinks has more to do with the spirit of negation than with the creative urge. And yet, this important key is itself only suggestive of the rich substrate of ideas which lie at an even deeper level. In light of such tracings, does this artistic Modernism really look so incoherent, as many today maintain? Breton has located the key event of the entire modernist project in the moment of transformation between Cubism and what came after, and baldly asserting that this what came after was principally precipitated by Duchamp. His insight concerning this matter is now widely accepted, as is his opinion on the relevance of the Green Box to the Glass. Before the appearance of the Green Box, was there any way to apprehend the obscure ideas that Duchamp embedded in the Glass mysterious forms? They were veiled in the barest suggestion, in the visceral forms of the Bride and her Bachelors. Yes, its the notes to the Large Glass that provide the key, itself in a kind of more or less obscure code, to the whole enterprise of Modernism as it transformed itself from cubism towhatever it became as a result of the explosion Duchamp had so much to do with. Surrealism was only a partial harnessing of the potential unleashed by the Glass. So many vital issuesthe futurist love affair with technology vs. the Surrealist view of the machine as great enslaver, the need for collective action vs. individual prerogatives, the cult of the Retinal vs. the penetrating power of the Idea, not to mention the artwork as anti-masterpiecefound their highest articulation in what one might be able to tease out of Duchamps oeuvre from the Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912 through the Large Glass and its lexical companion, the 1934 Green Box. Twenty-two years that shook the world! Since it has come to light that Stirner was a major influence on Duchamp, a happenstance brought to light by Francis Naumanns article Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites which appeared in 1987, we who wish to unlock the code veiling Duchamps work have an incomparably better tool with which to do so. Naumanns article focuses on Duchamps Trois Stoppages Etalon (Three Standard Stoppages) of 1913-14, which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Duchamp was asked by the Museum to respond to a questionnaire concerning the work, and in it, he cited Stirner as its principal influence. (In addition, Naumann also cites documentation to the effect that Duchamp reportedly told Serge Stauffer, a close friend and colleague, that Stirner was the principal influence on his entire

output.) Robert Lebel did mention Stirner briefly in his seminal monograph Marcel Duchamp, originally published 28 years before Naumanns article appeared. To be sure, by the irony with which he stamps them Duchamp criticizes his own pretensions; he thus clears them of any hint of megalomania, just as he blurs the slightly embarassing recollection of Stirners imperatives. (Lebel 1959, 36) Certainly, one does not wish to oversimplify his philosophical viewpoint, but in looking at these sources one must admit the likelihood that by the end of his life, Duchamp was willing to downplay his need for self-contradiction, replacing it with such unequivocal statements as the one he uttered about Andr Breton soon after his death in 1966: Breton loved like a heart beats. He was the lover of love in a world that believes in prostitution, and that Surrealism was the most beautiful youthful dream of a moment in the world. (dHarnoncourt and McShine 1973, 140) Altogether, this irony was scarcely in evidence as Duchamp prepared his works presentation for posterity, perhaps most notably articulated in the extensive interviews he gave to Pierre Cabanne in 1966 that were published in English as Interviews with Marcel Duchamp in 1971. The Trois Stoppages Etalon is a piece that deserves special consideration in the examination of Duchamps work. This work is one of the earliest crystallizations of the radical break Duchamp effected with the art world of his time by rejecting conventionally aesthetic modes of expression for a quasi-scientific one. He reports taking three pieces of string each one meter in length and dropping them from a height of one meter onto a surface coated with fixative to record the random shapes produced. (Recently, there have been questions raised as to the veracity of Duchamps account of his method for producing this work, but this is for all intents and purposes a moot point.) By extending the examples to three, one obviates both the received standards of a given phenomenon, represented by a single unit of measurement, and its antithesis, represented by the second. With three, one might as well have three billion. In his book, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, Jerrold Siegel writes: The standard stoppages operate in just this [individualistic] spirit, depriving the meter, and by implication all standard units of measure, of the quality that makes them a way for different individuals to develop a common account of the world, namely universal applicability. (Siegel 1995, 165) This common account of the world, of course, is principally if not entirely constituted by our dependency on language. The meter as a result appears as a hypostatization of our deeply cherished belief in the legitimacy of this method of common accounting. To scuttle it, as Duchamp has surely succeeded in doing in the

Standard Stoppages, deprives us of the Objective/Rationalist foundations of our picture of the world, something Stirner did on another plane. How many hits can the theory of objective reality take and still remain standing? We can only trot out our Tinkerbelles so many times before it all begins to seem empty. If Stirner is central to Duchamps way of approaching both art and life, Stirners little apothegm on the officer quoted above looks to be of singular importance to the world of the Bachelors depicted in the Large Glass, for the Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, a leading element in the Bachelor Domain, contains a Gendarme among its nine members. Moreover, these Bachelors are so constituted as to mirror a quintessentially Stirnerean dynamic they receive their vital animating force from without; they are all waiting to receive the Illuminating Gas which emanates from the Brides Domain, and derive their status from their station in society, and not from any qualities intrinsic to their inner life, for there is no inner life to draw on. They look to the Holy Abstraction to guide their every move, filtered through a sort of fun-house mirror of their warped desires, desires warped by the dependence on the fixed idea they cling to with such tragic desperation. A subjectivity without any grounding in the particulars of individual experience dooms these hapless drifters to remain unable to pass beyond the Mask, as Duchamp puts in in one of the notes of the Green Box. Nominalism appears as central to Duchamps way of thinking in a letter to the Surrealist Jean Mayoux dated 8 March 1956: I refuse to think about the philosophical clichs renovated by each generation since Adam and Eve in all corners of the planet. I refuse to think of it and to speak of it because I do not believe in language, which instead of expressing subconscious phenomena in reality creates thought by and after the word. (I willingly declare myself a nominalist, at least in that simplified form.) All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with winning or losing this game of chess. As a good nominalist, I propose the word patatautology, which, after frequent repetition, will create the concept of what I am trying to explain in this letter by these execrable means: subject, verb, object, etc. (Bonk 1989, 252)

Is it an exaggeration to assert that Duchamp has found a way to apply, in his own life, a radical nominalist viewpoint, a nominalism that owes as little to such figures as Quine or Wittgenstein as it does to Augustine? This is a direction that rejects the fashionable, structuralist-derived theories that do away with the subject. Instead, we find in this conception a layer underneath conventional identity that resists incorporation into the system of language, a space of uniqueness. The Man Beyond There is no evidence that Duchamp was aware of an early Stirner essay entitled Art and Religion. This essay was written two years earlier than his magnum opus Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum, at a time when he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of pamphleteers and journalists, and is still imbued with the Hegelian trust in the philosophical enterprise which he soon thereafter came to disown, but this essay can now be seen to function as an uncanny presaging of certain trends in artistic modernism. Stirner took the idea of the dissolution of the eschatological principle initated by D. F. Strauss and applied it to the realm of art. Now, as soon as man suspects that he has another side of himself within himself, and that he is not enough in his mere natural state, then he is driven on to divide himself into that which he actually is, and that which he should become. (Stepelevich 1983, 327) The artist is the one who can reach far into the depths of this morass to pull out a presentiment of this perfected icon of human aspiration, this idealized embodiment of all the millenial yearnings, in the form of an image. But the longed-for picturing of the Jenseitsmensch (The Man Beyond) comes at a high price: the ideal necessarily appears as an Other, beyond and above the self, an Object that is and is not itself at the same time. Here lie all the sufferings and struggles of the centuries, for it is fearful to be outside oneself, having yourself as an Object, without being able to unite with it, and as an Object set over and against oneself able to annihilate it and so oneself. (Stepelevich 1983, 328) Thus Art, which has functioned as a beacon to a beleaguered humankind, providing hope and direction amidst the chaos and pain of existence, at the same time both embodies and exposes the profound split the human soul has created for itself. What has been lacking, then, is a means by which this split might be obviated, and Stirner at this point finds post-Hegelian philosophy the only approach up to the task: But when the mystery is cleared up, and the otherness and strangeness removed, and established religion is

destroyed, then comedy has its task to fulfill. Comedy, in openly displaying the emptiness, or better, the deflation of the Object, frees men from the old belief, and so their dependency upon this exhausted being. (Stepelevich 1983, 333) Art, then, must continue its development in diametric opposition to a key aspect of its own historic structure. But what is it that lies beyond this deflation of the Object? The contemplation of the answer to this question has perplexed those who would grapple with it ever since Stirners challenge first appeared. Perhaps the art critic Herbert Read put it best when he asserted that for modern culture, Max Stirner is stuck in the gizzard, neither digestible nor able to be regurgitated. Stirner seems, then, to be neither refutable nor acceptable, and this encourages silence. Even Nietzsches philosophy of the Superman seems palatable to many by comparison; at least one can discern a means of social organization, albeit a rather nightmarish one, in Nietzsches ethos of master and slave, where everyone falls into one of two classes, those who are obeyed, and those who are obedient. Stirner, however, posits no such dichotomy, at least with such ridgity as Nietzsche insists on. Yes, Stirner says, the vast majority of humanity is dull-witted and may always be, but obedience, as obedience, has no place in Stirners universe, as it arguably does in Nietzsches. Without obedience, it is hard to see how any society could function, and it seems that no known society ever has. Its evident that a radically new way of social interaction would have to be implemented to move away from reliance on the Law, our principal guarantor of obedience. But is this new way really wholly outside our ken? Have we not, as a culture, already discovered ways to get along without recourse to the Law? Its clear that excessive reliance on the spirit of the Law results in untold misery. Too little Law is seen to have the same outcome, but it seems to me that much of the confusion stems from concentrations of various forms of Law in the hands of those who have no insight into a gentler way. For Law has a scope that goes far beyond its use by governments; this approach to life is internalized by everyone to be used whenever force is invoked to yield assent. Immediately it becomes apparent that this is the paradigm of the patriarchally-based family, wherein obedience is guaranteed, and order maintained, through the Command of the Father. I deign to assert at this juncture that this is not the way of love. Love, if one can get beyond its conflation with Duty, achieves

assent by invitation, not edict. This point is obvious, but the network of implications of this fact is not. Let us not forget that this alternative to the Law has seen some important triumphs in the three centuries since it gained a foothold it had not heretofore enjoyed. I refer to something the historian Lawrence Stone calls affective individualism, an attitude that, according to his account, first became a force to be reckoned with in England in the early 1700s. The reasons for the rise of this new way of feeling are rather complex, but the lessening power of the old partriarchal ways was a necessary development. By simple extrapolation, I believe it is possible to trace out a continuation of this process to the point where Law recedes to its rightful place in the scope of human affairs, a place that is still significant, but distinctly subsidiary. It doesnt take much thought to realize that we are now, as a culture, heading in a direction opposite to this tendency, where the spirit of the Law multiplies itself, both in the existing government apparatus and in the spirits of those who shrink from the gentler ways of existence. One must keep in mind that the death impulse does not always present itself in a recognizable form. Our culture is like a machine that has gained a reason of its own for doing what it does, a reason that seems more and more divorced from human, organic concerns. What seems like a way to encourage security can be just the opposite. And vice versa. The laboratory of individualism If the new orders potential for greater equality and expanded productivity was to be realized, then new forms of responsibility and new forms of community would have to be worked out, compatible with a high degree of individual independence. How to accomplish this, indeed, whether it was possible at all, were questions that resounded in every corner of modern life. Bohemian life acquired its prominence in large part from its ability to frame and highlight these dilemmas, serving as a kind of social theatre where individualisms tensions and contradictions were acted out. (Siegel 1995, 216-17)

We speak of an artistic avant-garde, and are only dimly aware of what we are referring to. Nowadays it is commonly assumed to be dead. Jerrold Siegels notion of an avant-garde which spearheaded such dilemmas as were brought to the fore by the struggle for autonomy in the 18th century, what Immanuel Kant called the escape from tutelage, within a new kind of social theatre, where individualisms tensions and contradictions were acted out, points up the importance of the efforts of these pioneers which

reach far beyond their innovations in the realm of aesthetics. The salient point in this is that when the posturing and equivocation are stripped away, it is this new form of individualism that remains; the collective entitites which seemed so necessary in the past have no place here. The obstacles are formidable, but I believe there is evidence of enough successes to encourage us to press on in the continuing discovery of the autonomous self. The dangers of increasing collectivism are enough to inspire the taking of a different path.

List of works cited

Bonk, Ecke. 1989. Box in a valise. Rizzoli Press. Harnoncourt, Anne d and McShine, Kynaston, eds. 1973. Marcel Duchamp. Museum of Modern Art. Lebel, Robert. 1959. Marcel Duchamp. Grove Press. Siegel, Jerrold. 1995. The private worlds of Marcel Duchamp. University of California Press. Stepelevich, Lawrence. 1983. The Young Hegelians, an anthology. Cambridge University Press. Stirner, Max. 1995. The ego and its own. Cambridge University Press.