Unworldliness: A Pathology of Humankind (On Günther Anders’s Negative Anthropology)

The real object of production has always been the world.

—Giorgio Cesarano, Manual of Survival

0. Symbolizing Nothingness

Günther Anders—poet, tireless antinuclear activist, anti-fascist in exile, wandering Jew, among many other things—wrote a series of screeds that place him more in league with the tradition of heretics and agitators than with any philosopher or university professor. So while many of his early publications explicitly engaged with philosophy, he ultimately left the discipline behind to chronicle tectonic historical changes in the human condition—and what he understood as the profound deterioration in the capacity to even cognize such changes. In his multivolume opus The Obsolescence of Mankind, Anders offers a parable to limn the condition of humankind blinded by a world that had become, as he called it, a “phantom and matrix”: “There is a Molussian tale1 about an evil gnome who cures a blind man; not by removing the scales from his eyes, however, but by blinding him with another kind of blindness: the gnome had also made him blind to the fact that he was blind.”2 With this, Anders gives a surprisingly succinct formulation of what Jacques Lacan calls “foreclosure” (Freud’s Verwerfung), an aggrandized defense mechanism at work in psychosis which distinguishes it from neurosis. According to Lacan, repression (the neurotic’s defense mechanism) involves some sort of symbolization of what has been repressed; in other words, someone being aware of the fact that they are blind might say, “I can’t see.” Conversely, the defense mechanism which characterizes psychosis—foreclosure—is much more austere: it rejects even the symbolization of that which is being warded off. The subject can’t see that it can’t see; in other words, it is “deprived precisely of the feeling of being deprived and, in this way, … apparently free.”3 As in Anders’s “Molussian” tale, the primary metaphor here remains linked to visuality, and Freud will at times use the term “scotomization”—from the Greek skotos, referring to the darkness one sees before death in Homer—to describe something similar. This failure to symbolize a traumatic rupture explains why Lacan will characterize psychosis in terms of a hole in the symbolic.

It can be difficult to see what is lost when loss is experienced. Freud described melancholia as a condition in which what is lost, beyond any particular object, is ultimately the subject’s relation to the world, which he then describes as a topographical withdrawal back into the self and narcissism, a state he called melancholia. In the process, the relation to the external world is severely compromised. But, Anders asked, could it be possible to start from the opposite premise—that the relationship to the world is never guaranteed a priori and then subsequently disturbed, but rather that in certain historical epochs, such as our own, the world itself begins to take on the meaning of a pseudo-concept? Do we still live in-the-world, or do we live in many worlds, or in no world at all? Could it be that the protracted disintegration of the “Western world” as we know it, taking place at an accelerated pace today through the bombs dropping in Gaza, or in Ukraine, are testaments to the haste with which the world we knew just yesterday is vanishing into the fog of war, into smoke and mirrors? Historical amnesia may delude us into seeing this destruction as novel, exceptional, or sudden, but in reality it is just a further step in the process Anders identified as taking place across a century. We struggle to see in these moments of crisis, and the powers of imagination we rely on for knowledge tend to get conditioned into deceiving us more than informing us. And if we lack the ability to fully recognize the failure of perception and comprehension, even of language, do foreclosure, and psychosis, inevitably follow? To say that everybody is delusional or a bit mad, or that madness is ordinary today, is already to dabble in cliches. But it is precisely these questions—of whether the severe gap, or deficit, in humankind’s relationship to the world is evidence of a severe pathology—that Günther Anders asked, and especially in response to the work of his former mentor, Martin Heidegger, in one of the most potent critiques of Heidegger ever committed to writing. Because contrary to Heidegger’s emphasis on being-in-the-world, Anders’s early paradigm for human existence begins from being un-worlded

That scathing critique, along with the bulk of his work, has long been unavailable for English-language readers, and, given its sporadic translation, his work awaits a more thorough critical appraisal and engagement. This essay seeks to contribute to this still-nascent English reception of Anders’s work (whose The Obsolescence of Mankind will soon appear in an official and complete English translation) by reading him as a thinker of some of our most pressing global pathologies. He was a prophet for a world whose natural environment has been plundered by industrial capitalism, resulting in a vast industrial wasteland ratcheting onwards at increasing speed. Crucially, he was also a strident and prescient thinker of the centrality of war and war-making within that world, and of societies ruled by the demands of weapons manufacturers—and perhaps by weapons themselves. That is, Anders warned that the productive faculty of mankind—what might be called Prometheanism4—was quickly trespassing its own internal limits and that there was a kind of automatism to the development of technical forms, including military technologies. The fantasy of the mastery of technology had blinded mankind to how it could be itself mastered by technology, and to the destruction, even annihilation, that the world was at risk of. For Anders, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are the defining events of the twentieth century. They led him to ask: What kind of human could have created these catastrophes? What are that human’s symptoms? To answer these questions, he will turn to anthropology and delineate that specific form of alienation which he calls the “unworldliness” (Weltfremdheit) of humankind.

1. Materialism as a Theory of the Invisible

To understand the stakes of Anders’s account, it will help to gain a clearer sense of the method that drives his argumentation. We can turn again here to one of his “Molussian” fables that appear in his anti-fascist novel The Molussian Catacombs. This fable, titled “The Positive Is Invisible: Materialism as a Theory of the Invisible,” takes place, like the rest of the novel, in the total darkness of an underground prison located beneath Molussia, an imaginary totalitarian country (and an allegory for the Third Reich). One prisoner, Olo, relates to the other, Yegussa, one of the novel’s characteristic Lehrgeschichte (learning-stories) about an incident when Molussian silver workers sent a spokesperson to their boss, Prem, to inform him that they had decided to go on strike. Prem grows incensed upon receiving this notice and accosts the spokesperson: “You are nothing but air to me. You saboteurs! You negative elements!” In short, they are negative elements, burdens that inconvenience him, and whose demands he would rather not have to address. Moreover, as saboteurs, they represent a limit that contravenes what the boss thinks the world ought to be: namely, something entirely at his disposal. Yet if they are negative elements to the bourgeois world of Prem, his telling remarks reveal that the workers, as “air,” are an essential condition of his world, a sine qua non. In this way, they are also positive elements for the revolutionary consciousness relayed in Molussian Catacombs; the worker is the air that the boss does not detect in his complete reliance upon it. As the two prisoners discuss this tale, Olo explains what it means for materialism to be a theory of the invisible:

Olo asked: “What does your health feel like?”

Yegussa examined his body and was surprised to realize that he had not felt his body before. He had forgotten it entirely. “Like nothing at all,” he answered slowly.

“But the negative: sickness?”

“Is perceptible.”

“Peace?”

“Unremarkable.”

“But war is obvious. Work—invisible. But a strike?”

“Makes us visible.”5

Agitated workers face the factory owner in Robert Koehler’s The Strike, 1886. License: Public domain.

This short dialogue can be understood as a sort of ars poetica for Anders, demonstrating that no consideration of reality is complete without accounting for its disruptions, or the negation inherent within it. The world constructed under the aegis of industrialism must conceal the invisible—both internal and external, both workers and the environment—to uphold its own integrity. Those “invisible” elements are treated as negative in a double sense: they lack positivity, being merely background or expected resource; and they can only appear in a negative sense as a problem, burden, breakdown, or failure that interrupts the process they are expected to enable and support. Anders’s conception of materialism as a theory of the invisible therefore draws out these negative elements and lays them bare by positivizing them, and so exposes as one-sided any viewpoint that would gloss over them. In this, Anders follows a path set out by Hegel, who insisted in The Science of Logic that reality contains negation. Despite Anders’s move away from philosophy as a discipline, his materialism, following Marx, is premised on a critique of possessive individualism, directly following from the critique of property relations he makes in The Obsolescence of Mankind.

In the first volume of The Obsolescence of Mankind, Anders comes out swinging against the idealism of thinkers like Fichte, for whom, according to Anders, the world is the product of the activity of the “I.” He elaborates: “I call ‘idealistic’ in the broadest sense any attitude that transforms the world into mine, into ours, into something at my disposal, in short into a possessive: precisely into my ‘imagination’ or into a product of my (Fichtean) ‘positing.’”6 Anders’s materialism, in contrast, punctures such fanciful conceits, showing their pitfalls. He gives several examples. One is that mask known in English as the ego (Ich) that, in trying to establish an autonomous identity for itself, finds itself at the behest of an id (Es), which leads it to do things that the ego can’t entirely comprehend or control. This can cause shame, a key affect in Anders’s thought, which prompts a disruption in the circuit of identification in which I=I. Another idealist conceit Anders undermines is the promise of being a freely choosing individual, which is central to development of capitalist subjectivity: in claiming to be a free subject, the human finds themself to be not bound to anything specific, astonished at the arbitrariness of their indeterminate (unbestimmt) existence, obsolete, free to die or even to be exterminated. In other words, when we are thrown “into the world” (as Heidegger has it), there may not be any world there to catch us.

Throughout his work, then, Anders’s method is to unmask the one-sided nature of any claims that seek to ground the integrity of human beings by describing them as self-positing, as being an autonomous “I,” as being free, or as being “in-the-world.” Instead, he insists on taking privation—being without, lacking what is fundamentally needed as support—as his starting point. It is this insistence upon the negative that will justify Anders’s choice to name his early philosophical anthropological work a “negative anthropology.” It isn’t the case that humans live in the world peacefully and are only alienated once capitalism comes along (though the latter certainly exacerbates the situation); rather, there is a primordial form of alienation—an “unworldliness”—that defines the essence of mankind.

2. Negative Anthropology

Anders began his philosophical trajectory studying phenomenology with Husserl and Heidegger, before turning to philosophical anthropology. Anthropology had the appeal of being much closer to an empirical science than the “pseudo-concreteness” which Anders claimed characterized Heidegger’s ontology of being. In other words, unlike Being and Time—a book Anders describes as “pre-capitalist”—philosophical anthropology prioritized an investigation into real artifacts of human culture, such as the vast network of technological apparatuses developed through ever-accelerating industrialization. However, the downside of this anthropological approach was that Anders believed it had become a tool for those who wished to fix the human species as something definite so as to better control it. Here Anders was likely attempting to distance himself from what became known as Völkerkunde (ethnology). At its worst, philosophical anthropology and the question concerning the essence of man risked becoming indispensable to the ruling class, by functioning as Platonic ideals or forms of instrumental reason that could be used to govern, or to produce a specific kind of man, one which Anders will come to identify as the “mass hermit.” More specifically, he was wary of a certain “pragmatic image of the world,” which functions as an “apparatus [Gerät] that aims to shape our actions, our endurance, our behavior, our omissions, our taste, and thus our entire praxis in general.”7 For Anders, this “image” was hardly neutral, because what was developed in a series of industrial revolutions were not just machines, commodities, and atomic weapons, but first and foremost a type of human, one whose vital needs could be modified and who would even eventually be led “blindly” to manufacture its own self-destruction. The way images were used to mold human beings even led Anders to describe the latter half of the twentieth century as the second era of Platonism.8

Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer, 3100–3000 BCE, Late Prehistoric period, clay. © Trustees of the British Museum. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Therefore, in order to explain the way in which the power of capitalism had taken on a total anthropological force, Anders pursues his negative anthropology, which insists that the reason human beings are susceptible to such drastic manipulations of their very essence is that the human lacks a fixed essence in the first place. Unlike animals, the human lacks a stable relationship to the world; its needs aren’t satisfied in the a priori world, and so it builds a world over the world. In short, the nature of humankind is its artificiality, rather than such artificiality suggesting a deviation from, or loss of, an original essence. As Anders writes, “Mankind has no determined lifestyle, no specific world that befits him. His ‘nature’ consists in the very fact that he makes his world himself, and can always change this world and invent it anew.”9 From this initial starting point, capitalism and its concomitant industrial revolutions apply successive operations of negation. Christian Dries has cogently characterized Anders’s description of the advent of the industrial revolution as a sort of negation of an existing negative anthropology.10 The negation of something that is a priori negative results in something positive, and this manifests itself in the delirium of what Anders refers to as the “World as Phantom and Matrix.” We can here connect this back to the question of psychosis and self-awareness. In his account of the function of delirium, Freud notes that “a fair number of analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world.”11 In Anders’s thought, the constitutive lack that defines humankind is patched over by the creation of a sprawling productive apparatus. What is lost in the melee is the symbolization of that constitutive lack—evident in the incontinence of capital and its civilization.

3. The Unworldliness of Mankind

Anders developed the prototype for this modern image of humankind in a volume of early essays collected under the title On the Unworldliness of Mankind. In the titular essay of the collection, Anders compares humans and animals to substantiate his claims about unworldliness in what must be understood as a clear challenge to Heidegger, who in 1927 had described human existence as “being-in-the-world.” Anders frames his argument by listing what he sees as the specific features that constitute the differentia specifica of humankind: the human is distinguished by its abilities to separate existence from essence, to negate, to imagine (especially to imagine absence or lack), and finally to lie. If, as considered earlier, Anders placed consistent emphasis on the role of negativity in defining humankind, here we see that for Anders humankind is not to be conceived of as the addition of any specific positive capacity, but as a set of abilities that stem from, and modulate, that constitutive lack.

More specifically, Anders distinguishes organic, animal, and human life through what he calls “coefficients of embeddedness.” In doing so, he questions the guarantee that humans have a fixed or stable relationship to the world at all. If anything, plants and animals tend to have stable relations with their world, while mankind tends towards alienation from the world. In the organic model, a plant is rooted in place, but already the animal can wander or stray from its location (its Setzung). For the human, this capacity will be extrapolated into that of abstracting from its a priori world altogether. Mankind is free from the world. Far from a boon, Anders considers such freedom to be a pathology, and it is the primary indication of the constitutive unworldliness of mankind: “To be free means to be bound to nothing specific.”12 The human being’s existence is not determinate (bestimmt) but indeterminate (unbestimmt); the human lacks a fixed relation of embeddedness in the world; it is a Mangelwesen (being of lack), lacking a proper vocation (Bestimmung). Contrary to migratory birds, for example, whose knowledge of their route is congenital, humans have relatively weak instincts and suffer a “specific prematurity of birth,” being thrown into the world in a state of complete dependence on caregivers.13 This debilitating weakness in terms of instincts implies that human beings only come to the world after the fact (nachträglich)—and importantly, not a priori—by learning through experience. Thus, Anders’s first definition of unworldliness: “As a postivization of the indeterminateness of the human—that mankind was not predetermined for a specific world, and this unspecificness is their specificness.”14 Anders insists that the fact that there is such a thing as experience (Erfahrung) for humankind—namely, that I only make sense of what happens to me a posteriori, after it happens, through recollection—indicates something specific about human beings’ relationship to the world: that it is in fact a non-relation—that humankind is unworldly. We are in the world at a distance, and the possibility of expulsion from that world always abides: the threat of death, or even extermination, looms.

In this account, the animal has no experience, as it lives in a situation which Anders designates as “need congruence”—which is to say it does not need anything it cannot find already in the world. The human, on the other hand, is that creature for whom there is no nature, whose nature is artificiality, and whose needs come to be artificially produced by capitalism and the market. Paraphrasing Anders, we can say that while what humans need from the world is always contingent and subject to change, the animal has all its needs met by its a priori world, and thus has a secure relation with the world. By the same token, the animal is also blockaded, incapable of registering anything which it does not already anticipate from the world. The animal perceives what is in the world, but it cannot imagine what is not there. Not so for mankind: the imagination of something absent is another positivization of a negative, as suggested by the way that one of the German verbs for imagine (vorstellen) means literally “a placing” (stellen) “in front” (vor) of us, a bringing of nonbeing into being.

The linguist Jean-Claude Milner, writing on Ferdinand de Saussure, describes this negative capacity inherent in language, suggesting that “what is proper to the word is its ability to designate a thing that is not there.”15 When we speak, we generally address things that are not there in front of us. Our insufficient embeddedness in the world necessitates an ability to imagine lack, which will in turn enable the use of symbols and language. But Anders will go so far as to insist that “production and language are one and the same complex.”16 In terms of human evolution, it was the development of the hands which made speech possible.17 Unlike animals, most of whom must carry things in their mouths, for humans the advent of upright posture and the work of the hands freed up the jaws for speech. Language and tool-bearing go hand in hand, and the pen has its pedigree in the spear.

In this drive to produce, Anders will claim that the fundamental disposition of humankind is a utopian one. “Man’s freedom is evidenced in the changing of the world, namely, in the fact that he can make something (which is not yet there) from something (which exists).”18 Finding no place within the given world, humans build a world over the world and treat the world as raw material (Stoff), something at their disposal. For humans, being is being raw material (“Sein ist Rohstoffsein”).19 Anders uses the example of hunting to schematize a primal scene of world-building: “The world is for the living being a. possible prey, b. possible danger (sacer, taboo), c. that is, negative: protection. Protection is 1. pure concealment = escape, 2. a hiding place. Constitution of the world (as world): In escape, the superiority, i.e. the existence of what I am not, is recognized.”20

Here Anders points out that the human intention behind its world-building is conditioned by fear and the need for protection. In other words, the world built by humankind, which is a world over the world, is a defense against the fundamental unembededness of the human in the a priori world. Anders thereby deflates the human capacity for production into a coping mechanism. For the Promethean, the world maintains nothing of what it is in-itself. Instead, it is reduced to what it is for-mankind. Humankind makes the world into the “cosmic proletariat.”21 The world is processed—nature is transformed into culture—then devoured.

Jan Cossiers after Peter Paul Rubens, oil on canvas, 1637, Musei del Prado. License: Public domain.

This undermining of the productive aspect of the human is best exemplified by one of Anders’s signature Denkbilder (thought-images): “Promethean Shame.” For Anders, shame is less an emotion than a symptom, and the fact that we feel shame says something about our specific relation to action and productive activity altogether. Namely, every attempt of the human to escape the a priori world by creating a world of its own is threatened by the risk that this world it fashions on its own is neither hospitable nor desirable. As Jacob Blumenfeld has correctly pointed out, this aspect of Anders’s thought can best be understood by considering it in the context of climate change, a problem wherein the distinction between human omnipotence and human impotence collapses: we are “omnipotent because some humans now have the all-powerful ability to destroy the world with technological means, and impotent because most humans have no power to do anything about it.”22 In this way, the danger that humans seek to ward off by making themselves at home in the world returns. What is foreclosed in the symbolic returns in the real. Promethean Shame is both a limit and a memento mori.

Above all, Anders’s conception of the unworldliness of humankind is a critique of the categories that philosophers have used to secure the human’s relationship to the world. While his primary target in this endeavor is Heidegger, Anders is equally concerned with taking on certain dogmatic aspects of Kant’s thought where he sees fit. Around the same time Anders was developing his early ideas on unworldliness, Heidegger was giving a seminar called “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,” which Anders cites.23 As is well known, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a bid to enthrone a form of human knowledge that was a priori, i.e., prior to all experience. For Kant, concepts structure possible experience by making knowledge of objects possible in the first place. In this way, what we can know are things which are ultimately other from us; they are objects, Gegenstände, that which “stands-opposed.” Heidegger’s compelling reading of Kant’s transcendental schematism in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics hinges on the claim that ontological knowledge—the use of categories to determine the total structure of beings-to-be-known—could not be restricted to merely conceptual knowledge. This is because both intuition (the passive aspect of cognition) and the active force of judgment, which transforms intuitions into objects that can be known, are derivative functions of a more essential, higher faculty which was the common root of both. This is what Kant called “transcendental imagination” (Einbildungskraft). By synthesizing pure intuition and pure thought, the transcendental imagination was a grounding power for what Heidegger calls “ontological knowledge,” setting the I into relation with that which was other than it, and thereby creating the conditions for something like a relationship to a world. How does imagination function in this account? Kant defines it as “the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.”24 The imagination is a discriminating power that is not as keen as conceptual judgment, but it nonetheless entails bringing nonbeing into being by representing possible forms of unity.25

One of the ways that Heidegger follows Kant is indeed this fundamental emphasis on relation. In Being and Time, Heidegger aimed to abandon the language of the subject, since he claimed that efforts to consider humans to be some definable entity actually miss what is in fact most essential about humankind. In lieu of a subject as an entity or a thing, Heidegger turned instead toward a relational ontology where human existence is always already situated in-the-world, always in relation to. Yet it is precisely this relation of being-in that Anders wants to contest. For him, there is a fundamental disconnect (between Ego and Id, for instance), which means that any relational ontology ends up patching over this basic gap, even as it claims a fullness of connection within a world of relations. Like Heidegger, Anders also takes aim at the metaphysics of the subject. But in doing so, he does not—as Heidegger does—provide the solace of tucking that subject back into a world that presents itself as always already meaningful. Instead, we arrive at the total abjection of what Anders calls—writing of Alfred Döblin’s criminal antihero Franz Biberkopf—“subjectless life.” In this way, Anders can be read as implicitly accusing Heidegger of offering consolations and euphemisms for what is in reality the destitution of the subject. In fact, according to Anders, Heidegger renders it all anodyne, since despite denying any substantial or coherent I, he nevertheless guarantees a subsequent unity for human existence in a place—that is, in the world. In this way, Anders accuses Heidegger of peddling palliatives rather than giving humankind the means to come to terms with subjectless life, or unworldliness. Conversely, Anders’s “man without world” faces up to this directly as a Godless monad lost in the sauce of modern industrial life, one who struggles to make any sense of their life at all, and who cannot be said to have anything that may be called their own, aside from their name. Anders uses Döblin’s Biberkopf as an example of this figure for his paradigm of the wordless man, in a previously untranslated passage worth quoting in full:

Fed by society, rejected by society, instructed to be independent, punished for independence, relapsed and again entangled in the world, thrown off by the world—that is no longer life, that is just a mere event, a confluence of countless tributaries, a damming by a thousand dams. “Biberkopf” seems to be just the name tag that floats along to preserve a last semblance of identity; and just as Berlin is nothing, nothing but the name for countless different spaces, the name Biberkopf is the only thing that really endures. Reality itself brings this “nominalism” with it, it brings it forth from itself: the city, formerly a real thing itself, graspable by people as a whole, slowly “surpasses” (with Kant) the “limit of the power of imagination,” however much it seeks to “expand” itself. The only guarantee of its own reality remains its completely inclusive name. With this, it is not man who discredits reality, it disenchants itself, i.e., it merely retains the unified form of the name. This is also the case with Biberkopf. His name is the only constant in the flow of his life, which is different wherever you step into it. But even in his case, the name is still the last guarantee of the identity of the “individual.” He does not yet disintegrate into the mutually totally unchanging phases of caterpillar and butterfly, fatally separated by pupation. The events of its life still have a denominator. But even this denominator, the name, is already endangered, and in “Liberkopf, Ziberkopf” even the label begins to blur. Only where the all-too-strong congestion of the dams stops his life does it become somewhat his own; namely, in his illness, where everything that has flowed flows together once again and at the same time; even if only as a whirlpool of a thousand images, and not as the orderly series of his days.26

For Anders, Döblin’s realism consisted in taking the criminal world haunted by people like Biberkopf as his subject matter, and this underworld serves as an inversion or mirror image of bourgeois reality. Frequented by gangsters and ghosts, doppelgängers and infiltrators alike, this is not the world of the alienated worker, but of the unemployed cast adrift: “The unemployed are worldless in the potentiated sense of the word. When they lose their world, they lose a world that is not theirs.”27 Biberkopf is verpeilt (disorganized); he fails to play any steering role in his own life, which is already out of his hands:

He is not only a waste product of society, he is also disposed of by that bad society itself, since it throws him overboard. Excluded from the excluded, he lives against his will as a moral bohemian (free-floating … ) in a vacuum between the different realms of society. Thus, he is thrust upon himself, but he fails to prop himself up, since he is unaccustomed to standing on his own. He constantly finds himself among people and in the most random constellations. None of these encounters … are predestined: that this one goes with that one and the other with the other was never meant to be. Sheer opportunity determines love, coincidence, local patriotism, and murder.28

Here it is evident that what is at stake in Franz Biberkopf is a subject that is not its own cause—and more starkly even than that, it is a bare life which hardly has a grasp of any notion of causality to begin with.29 With his distinction between the alienated worker and the lumpenproletariat, Anders’s prescience consists in focusing not merely on the plight of the working class, but on the kinds of abjection that would come to characterize surplus populations in advanced industrial societies.

4. The World as Phantom and Matrix

Anders abandoned his writing on negative anthropology shortly after the Nazis came to power. His work took a distinctly political turn, which resulted in two volumes of his magnum opus The Obsolescence of Mankind, with the subtitle “On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution” for volume one, and “The Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution” for volume two. According to Susanne Fohler’s succinct summary, “The first industrial revolution is characterized by the mechanical production of machines; the second starts with the artificial production of needs; the third—which is the decisive one for Anders—has enabled mankind to produce its own downfall.”30 In this context, rather than comparing modern man to animals, as he had in the earlier anthropological writings, Anders uses machines as a foil for humans. Stranded in the United States in the 1940s, Anders was among the German intellectuals exiled from Nazi Germany in what has been called the “Weimar on the Pacific.” This was the same milieu frequented by Brecht, Feuchtwanger, and Marcuse, and the same one that produced Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they describe a “duplicate dialectic of instrumental reason at work in cultural forms in Nazi Germany and in the democratic USA.”31

In California, in exile from Nazi Germany, Anders too would develop a special fascination with Hollywood, where he would take up work doing cleaning duties at the Hollywood Costume Company. In Christopher Müller’s words, this time was for Anders “a time of hardship and indignation marked by the realities of unskilled work and ‘utter anonymity,’” with Anders later labeling himself as “an enemy alien.”32 Unlike Walter Benjamin, who maintained a degree of enthusiasm towards technology, Anders by and large despairs of the technological progress of the twentieth century. After all, by 1942 the United States had begun its covert work on the Manhattan Project in places like Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Chicago.

As already mentioned, Anders’s work in anthropology leads him to the question of production, which forms the bulk of the political content of his writing during this time. In the second volume of The Obsolescence of Mankind, in a chapter called “Metaphysics of the Industrial Revolution,” Anders gives one of the most succinct summaries of his work in The Obsolescence. I quote at length:

The idée fixe of the third industrial revolution, however, can be expressed in another way: not only is the non-utilization of a potential raw material considered to be scandalous, but so is the fact of failing to recognize something that is there, within reach, as a raw material and treating it as such. The world is viewed as a mine that must be exploited. Not only are we obliged to exploit everything that is exploitable, but we are also obliged to uncover anything and everything which is exploitable, which is supposedly concealed in each and every thing (even in man). The mission of modern science no longer consists, then, in attempting to hunt down the secret, that is, secret in the sense of the hidden, the essence, or the regularity of the world or of things, but in discovering their secret treasures that can be appropriated. The metaphysical assumption (usually also concealed) of modern research is therefore that there is nothing that cannot be put to use.

What the metaphysics of the industrial revolutions demands is that anything that can be exploited, must be. Some kind of compulsion is at play. An insatiability.

Stranded in a no-man’s-land in California, the very same place where Brecht, “contemplating Hell,” thought that it “must be … like Los Angeles,”33 Anders describes the bourgeois world as the false world. Key for Anders’s claims in this regard is a critique of property relations, since only those who own the means of production can be said to be in-the-world. Crucially, he does not parse this into a flat divide between the bourgeoise and everyone else, instead attending to different forms of proletarianization. For Anders, the worker is poor-in-the-world (Weltarm), while the unemployed are worldless (Weltlos).34 The proletariat only consumes the world, but the unemployed, like the underclasses described in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, aren’t even subject to the first form of alienation and exploitation, an exclusion that further bars them from being-in-the-world. In this frame, Anders gives a second definition of unworldliness: “‘People without a world’ are those that are forced to live within a world that is not their own. Even though they produce it with their own work, the world is ‘not built for them.’”35 Here Anders is explicitly hinting towards the Marxist sense of alienation, yet he means something ontological: only the ruling class is right in calling the world “our world” since, in doing so, it expresses not only an abstract form of belonging, but also concrete ownership over the world.

This critique of property relation allows Anders to uphold a distinction between the false world and a non-false world. For if the essence of man is artificiality, how could something like a non-false world even exist? Wouldn’t all worlds be false (falsch) in that case? However, he answers no: “The ‘false’ world is the one which consists exclusively of objects belonging to the world of others; that world which is ‘mine’ exclusively in the psychological sense, but not in the sense that it is available to me.”36 The fact that the world is not available to those subject to capitalist domination has to do with the obvious fact that the jobs they are forced to work, and the lives they are forced to lead, cease to be in any way meaningful to them. On this point, Anders pushes a Marxist critique of reification:

From the position that the dominated person occupies within the world of the rulers, he sees the things that make up the “world” of the other in a false perspective, in fact, so false that what is the “world” for the other is only “things” for him. It would be pure cynicism, for example, to claim that the foreign forced laborers sent to Germany by Hitler during the war still lived in a “world.”

So a non-false world would require, at the very least, a transformation of property relations. But what then is the texture of this “false world”?

In his landmark essay “The World as Phantom and Matrix,” written during his stay in California in the 1940s, Anders tries to answer this. He presciently describes how, due to the uptick in a specific type of American consumerism made possible by the postwar boom in the economy, the world is “delivered to our homes.” We no longer have to fare (fahren) out into the world, which is how we gain experience (Erfahrung); instead, the world is delivered directly to us, as “phantoms,” Anders’s way of describing television and radio programs. Here an inversion has taken place in which the outside has been transposed onto the inside. By the time we receive bits and pieces of the world as a series of packaged products, that world has been stripped of those things that repel our capacity to consume and understand it; everything negative has been purged. As a result, we don’t so much inhabit the world, as Heidegger claims we do.37 We simply consume it. Nothing in the world, no matter how remote or distant, is unfamiliar to us. We can hop on a plane and go somewhere else. We “chum it up” (Verbiederung) with the world. Many seem convinced “that the world, as it is, is not a finished world, nor a real world: properly speaking, the world is not; that it will only truly be to the degree that … we complete it.”38 As with Anders’s critique of idealist philosophy, what is at stake here is that the concept of world has been reduced to what can be valorized within the schema of the capitalist economy, as the world is only that which is produced by humans, set into circulation as series of commodities for human consumption. The result is that the world retains little of what it is for itself, as it is only of concern insofar as it is for us. As Giorgio Cesarano says in his Manual of Survival, “The real object of production has always been the world.”39

The last figure of unworldliness is “the human in the age of cultural pluralism, the man who participates in several different worlds at once [and] thus has no determinate world at all. It is an interiorized pluralism, a polytheism. The inverse of mass man.”40 All values, religious or otherwise, become equal under the sign of the commodity. Some can afford to inhabit many worlds at once without there being any kind of overarching schema—save money—to unite those experiences. All action is transaction, and truth is reduced to doxa. How can we speak of a single, unifying world when the quest for truth leads to an infinite regress? In both the TV example and that of cultural pluralism, it is possible to read a certain kind of nostalgia in Anders (for the home and the family, for the rooted and local). But for Anders, it is not that there was once a true inside, an essence of the non-pluralist and authentic man. Instead, what lies behind these seeming processes of loss and atomization is what was already negative to begin with. Elsewhere, Anders riffs on the phenomenon of cultural pluralism by speaking of an artificially induced schizophrenia, produced by the apparatuses of industrial capitalism such as television and radio. Any unity of the human individual is divided into a series of partial functions which are incapable of being coordinated. To put it in contemporary terms, this is the figure of the multitasker.41 “The man who is sunbathing, for example, tanning his back while his eyes are poring over a magazine, his ears listen into a sports match, his jaws chew gum—this figure who is simultaneously a passive player while at the same time hyperactive, while in truth doing nothing is an everyday international phenomenon.”42 This perhaps brings us back to our starting point in this essay, because what Anders claims the hyperactive figure is trying to ward off with this busyness is a horror vacui: the fear of emptiness, of nothingness. That busyness serves the same function as Freud’s patch, covering over the meaninglessness of living without a world. Again, Anders is not fantasizing about a return to the once-coherent world (or to any refuge of an authentic self) but calling instead for a reckoning with the historical loss of world and with real conditions of bereftness. It’s fitting that in his translation of Anders’s Weltfremdheit (unworldliness), Enzo Traverso reached for the ancient Greek word acosmia, which means “disorderly” but, through its prefix a-, more fully suggests a negation of kosmos and the very promise of order itself.43 Because the results of such a reckoning like Anders proposes are far from certain. There are no guarantees for any life-form clawing its way from out of the soup and shambles of such an acosmia, and into an infinitely expanding universe.