The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

274 The experience of space and timetremendous number of different interests in a single soul,' means thatindividuals must now be 'very strong and protean.' It is in such acircumstance that the will to power - 'an attempt at a revolution ofall values' - must assert itself as a guiding force in the quest for anew morality:And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show it toyou in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, withoutbeginning, without end; ... enclosed by 'nothingness' as by aboundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlesslyextended, but set in a definite space as a definite force,and not a space that might be 'empty' here or there, but ratheras force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, atthe same time one and many, increasing here, and at the sametime decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together,eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendousyears of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of itsforms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the mostcomplex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towardthe hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and thenagain returning home to the simple out of this abundance, outof the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, stillaffirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years,blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becomingthat knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysianworld of the eternally self-creating, the eternally selfdestroying,this mystery world of the twofold voluptuousdelight, my 'beyond good and evil,' without goal, unless thejoy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feelsgood will toward itself - do you want a name for this world?A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you bestconcealed,strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? -This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And youyourselves are also this will to power - and nothing besides!The extraordinary imagery of space and time, of successive waves ofcompression and implosion, in passages such as this suggests thatNietzsche's powerful intervention in the modernity debate (see above,pp. 15-20) had an experiential basis in the world of late nineteenthcenturytime- space transformation.The search for this new morality of power and the charisma of'very strong and protean' individuals lay at the heart of the newscience of geopolitics. Kern pays close attention to the rising signi-The rise of modernism as a cultural force 275ficance of such theories at the turn of the century. Friedrich Ratzelin Germany, Camille Vallaux in France, Halford Mackinder in Britain,and Admiral Mahan in the United States all recognized the significanceof command over space as a fundamental source of military,economic, and political power. Were there, they asked, strategicspaces within the new globalism of trade and politics, the commandof which would confer favoured status upon particular peoples? Ifthere -was some Darwinian struggle for survival of the differentpeoples and nations of the earth, then what principles governed thatstruggle and what would its outcome probably be? Each tilted hisanswer towards a national interest, and in so doing conceded theright of a particular people to command its own particular place and,if survival, necessity, or moral certitudes impelled it, to expand in thename of 'manifest destiny' (USA), the 'white man's burden' (Britain),the 'mission civilisatrice' (France) or the need for 'Lebensraum'(Germany). In Ratzel's case in particular, we find a philosophicalpredisposition to insist upon a unity between a people and its land asthe basis of cultural sophistication and political power, a union thatcan be dissolved only through violence and dispossession. This unionformed the basis of a national culture and civilizing influence, whosesources were radically different from those given by the universals ofEnlightenment thinking or of the confused but universalist modernismthat formed the other major current in late nineteenth-centurythought.It would be wrong to consider these two wings of thought - theuniversalism and the particularism - as separate from each other.They should be regarded, rather, as two currents of sensibility thatflowed along side by side, often within the same person, even whenone or other sensibility became dominant in a particular place andtime. Le Corbusier started his life paying close attention to vernacularstyles even while recognizing the importance of rationalizing ahomogeneous space in ways proposed by utopian planners. Thefascination of cultural movements in Vienna, particularly beforeWorld War I, derives, I suspect, precisely from the confused waysin which the two currents I have identified mixed in time, place, andperson almost without restraint. The free-flowing sensuality ofKlimt, the agonized expressionism of Egon Schiele, the rigorousrejection of ornament and the rational shaping of space of AdolfLoos ... all clinging together in the midst of a crisis of bourgeoisculture, caught in its own rigidities but faced with whirlwind shiftsin the experience of space and time.While modernism always ostensibly asserted the values of internationalismand universalism, it could never properly settle its account