[Nettime-bold] Stockhausen/beauty/terror

Stockhausen's (mis)quote underlines that like courage, 'creativity' is a morally neutral (re Susan Sontag, who in this week's New Yorker states that whatever they were, the terrorists were not cowards). Ok, so it turns out that Stockhausen was speaking of Lucifer as an artist of terror -- Lucifer the fallen angel. But "Every angel is terrible" (Rilke). One thought after the events of last week was how incredibly, skillfully ingenious -- how creative in destruction -- the masterminds of what happened were. Also in the NYer is a line by Jonathan Franzen: "Somewhere -- you can be absolutely sure of this -- the death artists who planned this attack were rejoicing over the terrible beauty of the towers' collapse." Death artists. Benjamin states that there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. The technology propelling those civilian jet airplanes turned into terror weapons was first developed in its early form under the impetus of the need to protect the Third Reich from air-raids (the first production jet was the Messerschmitt 262). Leonardo spent a good part of his time designing weapons systems. One source of the fascination of fascism (described by Sontag among others), lay of course in its aestheticization of terrible power, its appropriation of the morally neutral means of artistic expression. In the 80's Ljubljana's NSK group went a long way in exploring this aestheticized fascination. Rilke spoke of beauty being "but the start of terror, which is beautiful because it serenely disdains to destroy us." (Another translation has it like this: "For the beautiful/ Is nothing but a terrible beginning that we continue to endure./And we cherish it, its calm refusal/ To destroy us. /A single beautiful idea fills us with terror.") In his book Inside The Third Reich, Albert Speer recalls writing a book called "A Theory of Ruin Value" (1938), which argued that Third Reich structures should be built in such a way as to look good when they lay in ruins (by which he meant to look like Roman ruins). Speer thought that modern materials and methods of construction wouldn't make aesthetically pleasing ruins. Instead of considering Speer's depictions of Third Reich monuments like the wrecked, ivy-covered reviewing stands at the Zeppelin Field to be blasphemous, Speer writes, Hitler "accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins.'" (Speer, Inside the Third Reich, quoted by V. A. Podoroga in his essay Machines of Disorder).