Andreas Spiegl
Vienna 2012
UNGROUNDED
One consequence of enlightened thinking is to assume that everything that happens has a reason. Nothing, it seems, happens without a reason. What becomes manifest would therefore always be an effect that is preceded by a cause. The mechanism of cause and effect is paradigmatic by nature: it applies to the laws of nature, as it does to the concept of time which always sees in the present the consequence of a past that foreran it as a cause. There is a reason for everything that happens—even if this reason is (yet) unknown. Hence any engagement with reality appears as an attempt of finding and defining a reason for a given reality. What emerges as reality reveals itself to be a result—a product, if you will. If one tried to define politics, it would be an attempt to name specific and ideologically different reasons for reality as a caused product and to variably derive measures which then function as new reasons that entail, in consequence and effect, a different reality. If one tried to define politics, it would also be an attempt to ascribe the reasons for economic, social, cultural and political dysfunctions always to the ideologically different as a cause while seeing oneself as the reason for those effects on society that correspond to the ideological image one has of it. What manifests itself as politics, then is a causality debate—an argument on cause and effect. This is a paradigm that creates fear if one only feels the effect without knowing the reason, and a sense of disempowerment if one has to endure an effect for whose causes one is not responsible. If one tried to define politics, it would also be an attempt to conceal some causes in order to move other causality patterns to the fore. What becomes apparent then is the paradoxical idea of a false cause: the ideas of a cause that is not one but allegedly has produced an effect. This discourse about false causes also is politics. The experience of this type of politics sometimes creates the impression of a groundless debate, which passes over real causes but nevertheless clings to the paradigm of cause and effect. Now the question arises about what means critics still have left to criticize this paradigm. Merely defining other causes and reasons would not be enough, as this would only bring one more variable into play and hence only reaffirm the mechanism of cause and effect. The question therefore is for a method beyond this dialectic which makes the paradox of this mechanism conceivable.
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