"Karl Kraus
was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's
famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited
and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch);
from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would
probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that everybody who
mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter
Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was
especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, "Psychoanalysis is
that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure" –
and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.
The thing
about Kraus is that he's is very hard to follow on a first reading –
deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his
cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable
barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the
playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: "If he understands one
sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing." If you
read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say
to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted
historical moment.
Here, for
example, is the first paragraph of his essay "Heine and the
Consequences".
"Two
strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and
defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of
art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials
artistically. It is of Romance origin. [Romance meaning Romance-language —
French or Italian.] To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an
ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He'd surely still
rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the
Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and
this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the
barren windowframes. Just spare me the pretty ribbons! Spare me this good taste
that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination.
Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its
own only in the roaring of the German workday. Spare me this universal higher
level of refinement from which it's so easy to observe that the newspaper
seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher."
First
footnote: Kraus's suspicion of the "melody of life" in France and
Italy still has merit. His contention here – that walking down a street in
Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself – is confirmed by the
ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the
"envy me" tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing
their travel plans. If you say you're taking a trip to Germany, you'd
better be able to explain what specifically you're planning to do there, or
else people will wonder why you're not going someplace where life is beautiful.
Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had
existed in Kraus's time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.
This
suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus's dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn't
the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of
owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your Mac Air. Simply
using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software,
is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris.
Whereas, when you're working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to
enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life,
the PC "sobers" what you're doing; it allows you to see it unadorned.
This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows.
One of the
developments that Kraus will decry in this essay – the Viennese dolling-up of
German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance
language and culture – has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows,
which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can't conceal their
essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they
betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don't work as
well as Macs do, and they're ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards.
And yet, to
echo Kraus, I'd still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have
switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple
ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument was eminently
reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor
Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries
of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn't want to read a novel
about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy?
Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the
Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to
defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered,
like a human being. (There were local versions of the ad around the world, with
comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb as the PC and Mac in the UK)."
"Jonathan
Franzen: what's wrong with the modern world". The Guardian, Friday 13 September 2013
