By INGO NIERMANN

Dietmar Dath, former editor-in-chief of the German music magazine Spex, and current culture editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has written an epistolary novel. Die salzweißen Augen (The Salt-White Eyes) consists of fourteen letters from a frustrated culture editor to the unrequited love of his youth, Sonja. In these letters, he tries to explain to her, as a synonym of bourgeois order, why he is drawn to drastic art – pornography, horror movies, heavy metal. But the novel swerves toward a revelation of a drastic incident involving the two of them. In the following interview, Dietmar Dath elaborates on how the drastic can not only serve to clean out the system but can also be a starting point towards a new enlightenment.

INGO NIERMANN: A quote from your novel, The Salt-White Eyes: “You never read anywhere what fans of horror movies or collectors of pornographic comics actually do with their materials.” How’s that?
DIETMAR DATH: What you read and hear, I have to say right off, are stories of unbelievable banality. For example, the discussion of computer games really is about whether they encourage a penchant for violence. Now, to me, it’s far too silly to discuss whether or not that’s true, because we all know there are all sorts of things that not only encourage a penchant for violence but also lead to real violent scenarios – for example, alcohol, soccer, even voting. How many freely elected governments have had some country or another bombed? We all know that pornography is sexually stimulating and that horror stories give people a fright. Above and beyond this stimulus-response level, an actual intellectual engagement is taking place – from the moment of presentation, when the thing begins playing. There are numerous corresponding aesthetic themes: overload; when is something exhausted; at what degree of exactitude is something shown; is a role played on a level that reaches beyond the public opinion of acceptance and rejection in its complexity. I think Fulci reacts a lot faster than Sophocles. The range of data and the degree of heat that’s processed there is simply higher.

On the other hand, the level of reduction is higher as well.
I don’t know whether it can be called reduction. I’d call it clarity and precision.

If one goes for that sort of thing.
If the train’s moving that fast, it either moves off on down the line or you’re inside. Sure.

Or I’m simply not interested in it. I’m not particularly interested in representations of violence and I have no affinity for heavy metal. Because it doesn’t do anything for me.
Sure, but no one’s writing articles about people who aren’t interested in it. Instead everyone’s writing articles about people who are interested in it, and they’re depicted as socially and ethically disoriented. Based on the premise that representation means approval. The art theory of social realism has actually been subsumed. I have to show workers if I want to make worker-friendly art. If I show violence, it’s a violence-friendly art. And of course, that’s not true.

It does make sense to me, seeing the consumption of the drastic as a means of self-empowerment. Horror movies are a test of courage, pornography encourages self-gratification …
Or not. It’s not only driven on the Internet but also, before that, on a level of fanzines from the world’s interior. They give themselves awards, for example, that are sort of organized like the Oscars. Ever since Theresa Orlowski put out the magazine Lovers, there’s been a large section devoted to reviews. All towards: one takes part in porno culture whenever you’ve got more than two magazines or you’ve seen more than two films, and what happens very quickly – I wouldn’t want to call it a reflection – but one becomes aware that all these mounting judgments somehow enrich or are simply a part of how one approaches the drastic. You realize this is an art that deals with judgment head on: yes or no, excites me or doesn’t excite me, disgusts me or doesn’t disgust me. The institutionalization process sets in very quickly. The best examples are the GGG films. Not a single one doesn’t have a long interview in the middle where questions are asked like: “Do you think five men are better than nine? Or are nine better than five?” There’s a company called Testosterone Productions and the trend is toward adding more bonus material and extras and they’re actually a lot more effective than those for, say, War of the Worlds. Because we already know that Tom Cruise wasn’t injured during the shoot. But not only is it not clear, it cannot be made clear that they didn’t actually fuck. Which means that the incorporation of the means of production, the incorporation of audience reception right there on the set – that is, that people are standing around there and that that’s interesting, too: the physiological things that happen with them there is something that has a far greater effect in this art. And then, finally, the short circuit when you take hold of a naïve notion of enlightenment: speak the truth, that’s what you have to do if you’re looking for the truth about art, to find where the means and conditions of production and reception play the strongest roles. That is where T.S. Eliot had it hardest, and where it is most interesting. There are arts in which this is all encouraged to be a part of it – so, as far as I’m concerned, existential. Why ramble away in the distance? That’d be like saying, “We’re looking into the distribution of work in the three-field farming, but we’ve got a microchip factory around the corner.”

That’s exactly what’s going on with Big Brother or Pop stars. Because they, too, are drastic?
Not just that. For me, things like Big Brother are the result of a learning process rooted in pornography. I think that, in the arts that aim more quickly for a positive or negative response, forms are the first things to be experimented with. An example is the fluffer – the woman, or sometimes the man, responsible for maintaining the male porn star’s erection. They suck on people, basically. It’s been a job ever since the ’50s, and I think that the basic model of the job persists in varied forms today on music television or wherever – caterers, even. I mean, this idea that we need extra people to ensure that the machinery of the stars, on a very direct, physiological level, keeps on working. Not: “That was great, Bob” – but instead: “Get marshmallows.” I think that in the laboratory of drastic art, new forms of work are being tried out.

The road to Big Brother passes telephone, and eventually, webcam sex.
First there was telephone sex, and now, there are 60 people sitting around in a big office, saying, “I can get you that insurance, just hang on.” So, okay, for pornography, it’s true. As for horror, I don’t want to hem and haw any longer, but just come right out and say it: without the experience of shock and gore, the wars in Kosovo and Iraq would have been considerably more difficult to carry out. Rudolf Scharping, standing there with these satellite photos on which no one can actually see anything, and then leaning into the microphone and saying, “You think these people are eating grass because they want to?”

You’re referring to the press conference in April 1999 when former German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping argued that the Serbs were committing war crimes in order to legitimize German participation in the war.
I’m saying this scene is only even thinkable because there was a George Romero. The approach to war propaganda is that agitation is necessary to reorient a society. If you think of yourselves as a liberal society, then what’s the media accompaniment for “We don’t bomb children” going to look like? As far as I’m concerned, it works on the basis of experience ever since the Expressionist silent films. How much do you show? What do you show? For how long? And of course, there are different schools of thought.

You also trace the reverse: porn comes from an art of provocation.
I think saying that porn comes from an art of provocation is the same as saying that drug abuse comes from gastronomy. It’s true to the extent that skills are transferable. The decisive turning point is Deep Throat. When censorship in America had loosened up enough that a movie like that could be shown in a movie theater, a moment not unlike ours, suddenly a huge market, primarily run by the mafia, came into being and its aim was to find people who could make the goods. A German example is Harry S. Morgan, who was pretty much responsible for the Happy Weekend films in the ’90s. “Maximum Perversum” was one of his series. Here was someone who had a classic academic background in film, on the level of “Buñuel-is-good” and so on. And if you look at what’s going on in terms of editing or camera placement, then I don’t think it’s possible to dismiss this GG guy, John Thompson, who at the moment is making the most extreme movies coming out of Germany. These are niche performances. People are bound to crucifixes and the lighting is worthy of Otto Mühl. If you want to classify that as corruption, I think you’re doing away with a lot of opportunities. For me, it’s always been the same with Stephen King, though one has to say, “You’ve got to believe that if it were forbidden, this man would do it in the bathroom, would pull it out of the sink and read it to himself or to his wife.”

The most widespread form of fear there, if there is such a thing, is cynical fear. If there is cynicism, it’s: I actually know it all better, but I’m too much of an asshole to say so. Then there might be something like cynical fear in as much as one can say, “You’re afraid of roughness or certain things even though you know you really can’t afford to be afraid if you simply play along with what was meant for you. I think that the road from that petty criminal, Malcolm X, to a significant political force is easier to travel than the one from the Gender Studies Malcolm X. Ultimately, that’s romantic, but I think that’s the way it is. You can learn wisdom but you can’t learn a sense of injustice; instead, you’ve been raised over many, many years to say, “That’s not fair, but it’s not all that bad in the end.” What you often see is that the most reflective people are involved in the most shit. And the second step is that you realize it’s actually a mistake to believe that they’re the reflective ones. It’s just that the form of their reflection is the one we damn well call reflection. By the end of the book, I can’t decide, and I absolutely do not want to decide whether or not the drastic – highly provocative, at times forbidden, clear, direct – has anything to do with honesty. I don’t know. Sometimes I think that you can’t look into anyone’s mind. But people who are probably frightfully honest, they’re not at all drastic or clear, but instead just boring. Where’s the honesty: “And then the button popped off my jacket?” Some boring thing like that, or: “I could kill them all.”

The probability that a statement is true rises when the punishment is greatest. There’s a correlation … but there’s no causal connection. The drastic, too, is a functioning market.
The really great thing about American Psycho is the drill next to Whitney Houston.

The idea that “the drastic is the honest” is connected in your book with the idea that the Enlightenment has failed. So, the drastic simply is an expression of how broken one is.
Enlightenment requires speaking the truth, but entailed in this enlightenment is also the political goal of making the world better. But if it doesn’t get better neither can an enlightened art; when the enlightenment has failed politically, so does an art that portrays those goals realistically. Calling for tolerance means showing tolerance in action. But when all that fails, calling for tolerance can only mean showing intolerance in action. Because otherwise, it’s just lying about the status quo.

Pornography is an image of real conditions?
What’s the image? The trick is not that the fucking scenes are the image of sexuality, because, after all, it’s being staged. That’s not the way people fuck. But in the way that the fucking scenes are tied up in the processes of production and reception, sexuality, too, is bound up in social processes. The image-making, the reproduction goes on. What’s the reproduction? The entire process, from manufacture to reception and beyond. The ordering of the elements of titillation, reaction, reflection, and ultimately the movement of money is a representation in pornography of the current state of sexuality. The way that porn in the shadow of AIDS is consumed and produced – if you read that as a commentary, and that’s what criticism, cultural criticism does – is a better comment on the state of sexuality than all the other films that address sexuality. It takes a long time with a Rob Reiner film and a reasonable conversation to get to the moment when the point is about what’s going on with heterosexuality. It doesn’t take as long, starting from Elfriede Jelinek, to get to the questions that hurt, that are interesting. And in my opinion, it’s even faster with John Thompson.

Who sees that? The consumers?
That’s this progression again, but in the opposite direction. The guy watching a Rob Reiner movie is the one who believes most sincerely that his watching it will get him thinking somehow about what it’s like among the heteros. The Jelinek person is more likely to believe he’s doing something for his culture and for his own standing among those he debates with. And the John Thompson guy, I think, doesn’t think at all. But that is the nature of the blind spot. Rather than say which arrangement is being reproduced, I’ve tried, on a linguistically pragmatic level, to describe: How far is the distance between the author and the art work to the interesting themes – because better understanding doesn’t necessarily occur via reception aesthetics. The John Thompson watcher counts as just one unit of measurement. But the calculation process is done by machine: A John Thompson film is made, is sold, is watched – this calculation process is close to one that leads to figuring out what’s going on here.

This sounds like an increasing process of simplification. On the other hand, when it comes to heavy metal in your book it’s not as simple as you think. It’s full of allusions, even for those who listen to it.
The criterion is full of references but nonetheless tough, hard edges. You could just as well do with John Thompson what I did earlier. Namely, say that there’s the Hermann Nitsch cross in it. That’s just as much an allusion. A second criterion is reduction. That goes for everything about metal, because the most reference-laden Dimmu Borgir piece is incredibly reduced compared to any pop song you hear on the radio in terms of the number of tracks. When Rick Rubin produces Shakira, he lays it on 35 times as thick.

In this edition of 032c, Matthew Barney has a piece on his film that’s an entry in the artistic porn film collection Destricted. More and more, porn starlets are being photographed for fashion magazines. What happens when the drastic is increasingly co-opted by high culture? Is it in danger of becoming less honest?
The drastic can’t be co-opted. It’s not just a catalogue of contents but a reduction of representational techniques (bright, clear, etc.), means of production (fast, cheap, etc.), and forms of reception geared to an audience. In the same way that high culture cannot be cheaply produced and is directed at an entirely different audience, the drastic can only be quoted. Duchamp’s Pissoir is art, but it’s not the co-opting of pissing by artists. The days when some sort of mainstream is afraid that some sort of underground is going to knock its teeth out are hopefully long gone because anything that can arouse such fears and worries is tedious line-drawing, and the attempt to find a few wimpy things that haven’t happened yet in the theater … What are they? People eating vomit? Sex with children?

Does the drastic lead to a new enlightenment? What might it look like?
It leads to a new enlightenment not in the sense of when Noah waited long enough, God saved him from the flood. Instead, it’s more, “Let’s build a boat.” Feuerbach, by way of Marx: the question of whether human thought approaches concrete truth is not a theoretical but a practical question. I think – and this is really the central question because it’s the political program – it’s crazy, it’s shitty and it’s bad and it’s evil and what all else one can say bad about it, if you write a book that says our society is being culturally militarized by military pants. That’s what happened with the war in Kosovo. We, as critical intellectuals – and so, automatically, pacifist Leftists – criticize this in utmost terms and will now prove how the fascistization and militarization of our society, from the planes that are actually taking off all the way down to the H&M ads, is agitating people and producing violence. The new enlightenment would, as in the days of the Enlightenment, look for commonalities between people who have nothing in common at first glance. The Enlightenment was the way out of the Middle Ages, and the current enlightenment would then be a way out of a new form of segregation. It addresses all levels equally, on an aesthetic level and an ideological level – for example, a critique of religion. Today it’s a tremendous mistake to go looking for a religion the dumb people have faith in so that one can take it apart and see the light and get reasonable.

The platform of the Enlightenment was that people shared one thing. We define ourselves now as citizens. And the new enlightenment would be confronted by the question: how in the world do we define ourselves? And: what forms are available? The form of the Enlightenment came from biblical criticism, which was not aimed against religion to begin with, but instead, there’s the bridge, which everyone knows, between Humanism and Enlightenment. Meaning, it begins when Erasmus says, “Why did the Holy Ghost write such bad Greek?” And it’s not far from all being nonsense. Our culture in Europe is held together by the New Testament, which is a premise made by a humanist in order to start writing. And then says, “Where, in all that’s given and accepted as a foundation for discussion, is a place where things get shaky?” In the same way I would say, “Where, in what we know and what we assume to be givens?” And the given is not disposition, or education, or anything else; it’s the culture industry. Every city has a church, and it reaches to every nook and cranny, or as Foucault would say, into the “very body.” Every city has a video rental outlet, every apartment a television. That means the new enlightenment would have to approach the givens of the culture industry in the same way that the old Enlightenment approached the givens of religion. Because what we always forget is that it wasn’t as if everything’s shit. Voltaire did not say, “We’re worshipping Satan now and down with religion.” Instead, it went along the lines of whether we want to be Christians. Then we have to realize we can’t go around burning Huguenots.

This means a plea for the imminence of culture in which those who want to bring about the new enlightenment find themselves. And against the assumption that it’s important first to pry oneself out of this culture in order to critique it.

As an analogue to humanism, what is the good at the center of the culture industry?
Well, the center is contentious. I don’t want to give the result of this process of enlightenment a name, because the mistake of the historical Enlightenment was indeed to place itself in a position of competition with the revealed truths of religion and to believe that they’ve got a text. And in this text, it predicts how things are going to be. We’ve got to make ourselves a text like that, and we’ll call it enlightenment and encyclopedia. That was a self-deception of the Enlightenment. The accomplishment is found in the critique, and the critique does not necessarily entail rejection. Beyond the self-deception of the Enlightenment and those who believed it was primarily about tearing something down, is the point: surf the shit. Use the global Anglo-American horror sauce in order to work up enough inertia to clarify the problems.