Sachlichkeit, Temperance, and Objectivity

1In the sphere of knowledge, the truth or empirical adequacy of theoretical claims is supposed to be decidable without reference to the origins of the knowledge concerned1. What to endorse or believe depends on how well a claim is justified, and not on the subjective or historical contingencies in the context of discovery. This is especially evident in scientific practice where a measurement, the outcome of an experiment, a trained observation are just so many facts, not questioned in the course of normal science but only in times of suspicion and crisis. The key here is to cultivate an epistemic attitude by which the knowing subject can perceive itself and its object as something simply given and not as something culturally conditioned.2 This attitude is characterized as “objective”; and what it must on no account ever admit to itself is that objectivity itself has a history.3 Nonetheless, an essential component of this epistemic attitude is that it conceives of knowledge as being produced in the course of a process of Enlightenment which is in principle open-ended, and that it holds all posited knowledge to be open to revision.

2It is not scientific knowledge, however, that will be considered here, and not psychological, historical, metaphysical, or axiological knowledge either, but rather something that might be called “working knowledge” (Werkwissen), the acquisition of which requires an epistemic attitude of temperance (Sachlichkeit).4 The term is familiar as one of the four cardinal virtues, along with prudence, justice, and fortitude. Just like prudence as a kind of practical wisdom, or like justice as a way or being cognizant of things and to do justice also to the requirements of a situation, temperance has an epistemic dimension in that it corresponds to a mode of perceiving or beholding things in an even-tempered manner. If temperance here appears as the artist’s and artisan’s, engineer’s and technoscientist’s anologue to scientific objectivity, this derives from the need to find in the English language a pair of terms that corresponds to Objektivität and Sachlichkeit in German. The problem becomes compounded by the fact that in German, as well, Sachlichkeit never attained the status of a well-defined theoretical concept. Moreover, presumably for lack of a better term, translations usually render Sachlichkeit as “objectivity”. Most notably, the German artists of the 1920s who adopted the program of Neue Sachlichkeit are known in English as New Objectivity. This led some art historians to ascribe to these artists a cold, detached, forbiddingly harsh and uncompromising view of reality5 —which misses the point of Neue Sachlichkeit altogether and thereby misses out also on the profound difference in the moral economies of epistemic attitudes between temperance (Sachlichkeit) and objectivity.6

Fig. 1. Fridel Dethleffs-Edelmann, Selbstbildnis [Self-portrait], 1932, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen

3Take the self-portrait by Fridel Dethleffs-Edelmann which perfectly exemplifies the stance of Neue Sachlichkeit—she shows how one needs to look at the world in order to create this kind of painting. This is an open, probing, attentive way of looking in the sense of attending carefully to the order of things. There is no coldness in her eyes and her treatment of the subject, there is no coolness either or warmth but sympathy—here is one who is seeking attunement, sympathetically, to what she sees. Rather than surveying the world detached, from a distance, she is readying herself to partake in the lively back and forth of action and reaction, of making a move and stepping back. She readies herself by adopting the virtue of temperance, by becoming even-tempered: indeed, her way of beholding things is not beholden to any of the four temperaments, it is neither phlegmatic, nor choleric, melancholic, sanguine.

4A well-tempered piano admits of major and minor keys and therefore needs to be carefully tuned in a very special way. To be sure, there is in German wohl-temperiert which, upon these reflections, might prove akin to sachlich, without however rendering Sachlichkeit synonymous with Temperiertheit or Mäßigung. If in epistemic terms, “temperance” is nevertheless offered as a best translation of Sachlichkeit, this contributes already to the process of articulating an epistemic virtue analogous to, but profoundly different from scientific objectivity.

5Fridel Dethleffs-Edelmann portrays a carefully cultivated or habituated attitude that is socialized by intercourse with the tools of her trade and the things of the world. In common parlance, for a judgement or a person to be sachlich means simply that the judgement or the person is not clouded, driven, or possessed by emotions or prejudicial opinions, but that instead they attend to the logic of things and their arrangements (Sachen, les choses, stuff). In contrast, scientific objectivity demands that the scientists take themselves out of the picture entirely to create the basis for dis-interested adjudication of truth or falsity and this for the non-coercive power of the better evidentiary argument for forging intersubjective agreement among the scientific community. But it is the epistemic attitude of temperance, and not that of scientific objectivity, by way of which knowledge of a technical working order is acquired, demonstrated and conveyed—knowledge for attending to clockworks, needlework, steelworks or any technical as well as socio-technical system. Here, then, the question will finally reappear whether and in what ways the achievement of working knowledge is related to its contingent, time-bound origins.

6From the elevated standpoint of the metaphysics of history or the sociology of knowledge there is nothing momentous or significant in the seemingly fine-grained distinction between scientific knowledge of facts and technical knowledge of how things work, or between an objective and a well-tempered epistemic attitude.7 In either case all one has to do is unmask the pretension of timeless truth and the ideal of a kind of knowledge that can be dissociated from its historical context. The distinction becomes momentous and significant, however, when the production of objective factual knowledge is valorized as a model for the public acquisition of knowledge and thus as belonging to the Enlightenment tradition and a fundamental commitment to the general advancement of human knowledge. In view of this, it would be of considerable interest and importance if this ideal were to be superseded by a well-tempered attitude that “merely” seeks to acquire working knowledge.8 Notwithstanding the various historicizing or constructivist critiques of timeless scientific objectivity and of the ways in which agreement between theory and reality can be achieved, a different picture emerges for technoscientific temperance and the way in which attunement to a working order can be achieved. Since the advance of working knowledge does not follow an autonomous or internal logic of development, the formation of working knowledge is fundamentally open to societal demands and developments; and since it is much easier to ascertain attunement than agreement, the achievements of working knowledge do not involve an unending process of inquiry, and there is no need to orient oneself to truth as an elusive goal.

7Beyond the immediate interest in agreement between theory and reality, scientific factual knowledge and the attitude of objectivity have always been taken normatively as models for inquiry, deliberation, democracy. Similarly, the analogous question for technoscientific working knowledge moves beyond the immediate interest in technical functionality or a desired performance: what kind of normative force comes with the attitude of temperance and its achievements of attunement to a working order of things? Since this question has so far been posed neither in the philosophy of technology nor in epistemology, I address it here through the lense of two texts that initially appear to have little in common, except for living in the shadows of philosophy. Like the epistemic virtue of temperance, they are marginal or hidden, nearly invisible so far.9

On the organisation of feelings

8The first of these two texts is a film, or rather the script of a film by Alexander Kluge. Having once described himself as the “court poet of the Frankfurt School”, Kluge locates himself firmly in the tradition of historical materialism, expanding it to include the obstinacy or recalcitrance of things which assume historical agency through inertia, that is, by the demands they make through their very existence as ossified contingencies that structure human habits and actions.10 Accordingly, it may seem odd at first that he should be called upon as a key witness in matters concerning an apparently ahistorical working knowledge of how things can act together in works. Rather than subject Kluge’s writings to meticulous examination and seek out his systematic interest in working knowledge, I turn for my starting point to an emblematic moment or decisive juncture in his writing and thinking, a moment at which the wry chronicler and restrained analyst of events is touched by a sense of pathos. What leads him to this point can be found in his 1983 film entitled “The Power of Emotions (Die Macht der Gefühle)”, one of his last films for cinema and often regarded as a follow-up to his first film, “Farewell to Yesterday (Abschied von Gestern)” (1966).

9The film is composed of roughly 26 episodes, and three figures stand out for their very matter-of-fact attitudes and grounded or pragmatic ways, simultaneously as harbingers of hope. The first of these three is the marriage broker, tie-binder, that is, matchmaker Frau Bärlamm, played by Hannelore Hoger. Her work is that of a precision engineer, as she seeks to match people to one another so as to accomplish, ideally, a simple clarity of feeling for one another. Clarity and simplicity signify that things have been arranged properly, working out “just right” with perhaps a technical “sweetness”. Kluge introduces this epistemic ideal in a consultation conducted by his matchmaker with a client named Frau Gertie:

B: Frau Gertie, I’ll just sum up again what we’ve discussed. Upon no account, you feel, can you split up with your boyfriend Karl, and upon no account can you stay together with your boyfriend Karl.
G: I have to make a decision.
B: What kind of decision?
G: It has to be a clear-cut decision.
B: But it is impossible for you to stay with him, and it is impossible for you to split up with him?
G: Both are impossible.
B: So, what is the decision going to look like?
G: Clear-cut. It has to be clear-cut.11

10If we were dealing here with a logical problem in the field of theory, then of course any attempt to resolve it would be a lost cause and the epistemic ideal of clarity simply ridiculous. But a commentary spoken by Kluge elucidates that we are actually dealing with a problem of precision engineering, one that needs to be managed with delicacy or fine-motoric artistic skill: “Every person, Frau Bärlamm says, has every type of feeling. If every person had only one type, it would be easier from the point of view of match-making.”12 And only someone like the matchmaker who takes seriously the notion that everyone has all types of feeling will be patient with Frau Gertie’s insistence, hoping that she might achieve her clear-cut decision.

11It is the tenacious persistence and attentive precision of Frau Bärlamm’s work that enables her to represent the promise of better circumstances that are more precisely matched to the needs of people and thus get things “right”. The second figure who in this sense serves as a harbinger of hope is a machine operator who appears very briefly and about whom Kluge said this in an interview:

In the film, for example, a man holding a screw is the starting point, he’s screwing in the screw. He says you definitely need a lot of feeling to screw in this screw. If you screw it in too firmly it’ll be subjected to too much tension, if you make it too loose it’ll come adrift and you’ll lose the nut. … So now you can imagine the parallels to this: If you try to dance or to engage with music and you do it using your intellect, you won’t get very far. If you apply this image of the screw to erotic matters, then a woman or a man might say: I’d like myself with my body-parts to be treated with at least as much care as that screw, I don’t want to be treated roughly, I don’t want to be treated clumsily; so there’s for those simple feelings the distinction: the right time, the right firmness, the right looseness. So now you might as well just forget all the other tangled-up stuff around jealousy, passion, and blood and thunder.13

12Representing the right time, the right firmness and the right looseness at the ‘happy end’ of the film is Knautsch-Betty, played by Suzanne von Borsody. She is a prostitute who teams up with her pimp to literally undo a crime of passion by very patiently re-constructing the victim of the crime who was assumed to be dead, literally restoring him to his previous life. The story “The sabotaged crime” or “Undoing a crime by cooperation” originated in 1973, if not earlier. The prostitute’s professional secret—as “engineer of evening hours” or “machinist of love”—is spelled out in a slightly amended draft version in 1975 and then in the later film. This secret consists in an attitude that quite obviously regulates not just Knautsch-Betty’s relationship to her clients: it underwrites the undoing of the crime as well as Kluge’s own telling of this story. It provides the basis of cooperation, with her pimp as their truly professional relation grows into a loving partnership: “Betty’s professional secret: 1. gentleness; 2. know-how; 3. no special feeling. But one needs a lot of feeling to join all these together.”14

13Knautsch-Betty needs a lot of a feeling to reach and maintain a certain even-tempered state, one that defines the professionalism not only of prostitutes but also of undertakers, police officers, nurses, plumbers, engineers, technoscientists. She needs to join and hold together gentleness in the sense of attending carefully and caringly, tenderly and tactfully to the particulars of a situation; know-how in the sense of proficiency, expertise, or skill, that is, knowledge of how to effect things; no special feeling of love or hate, attraction or disgust, pity or passion that might obstruct attentive engagement with a delicate situation, and that would distort professional judgment regarding causal dependencies and the efficacy of interventions. But it is not easy to take a dispassionate interest, or to be gentle as well as coolly professional, to achieve sympathetic attunement to a situation altogether independently of what one likes or dislikes. Like the machinist with his screw, the professional prostitute or undertaker needs to assume a measured, well-tempered stance, acknowledging the recalcitrance of people and things, while pursuing the technical ideal of their felicitous interplay. They need to do things “with feeling” but without desiring, fearing, or willing too much, too desperately—with feeling and without.

14The temperance required to achieve and maintain this equilibrium, to join and hold dispassionate gentleness and know-how together, is an attitude, a mood, or emotional state that organizes feelings in the ‘right’ way. In contrast, feelings are wrongly organized by passion, such as fervent nationalism or a burning love that is modeled on the dramatic storyline of an opera. Accordingly, Kluge draws a distinction between the two couples that appear in his story of the undoing of a crime. There are the lovers who become amateur criminals because they want to possess each other utterly. In the end, they have to flee the scene of their crime and are now tangled up and chained to each other by guilt. By contrast, there are the business partners Knautsch-Betty and her pimp Kurt Schleich who restore the crime’s victim to his previous life by way of their circumspect cooperation involving a clear head and a clear heart, only to discover that they are performing a labor of love. The filmmaker comments:

The murderous couple are holed up in a hotel room in Barcelona, a situation much like Ibsen’s classical drama of incest. They have at their disposal an abundance of hot feeling or burning emotion [heißes Gefühl]. […] What’s lacking, when it comes to organizing these feelings is temperance [Sachlichkeit]. I could launch into pathos when it comes to making the case for the unity of love and temperance. Knautsch-Betty and Kurt Schleich, our two professional criminals, know all about temperance.15

15“I could launch into pathos”, writes Kluge, when he is making the case for the unity of love and temperance, the lovingly maintained equilibrium of loving gentleness and dispassionate know-how. That he does not actually launch into pathos (and is probably not even capable of doing so) owes to the fact that Kluge’s own professional secret is fully aligned with the principle of temperance which he attributes to Knautsch-Betty, who has no propensity for pathos either. Kluge’s gentle voice, his knowledgeable curiosity and dispersed attentiveness are the tools of his literary trade, of his films, his work as a lawyer and media activist, social theorist and philosopher of technology16.

On the organisation of things

16Dispersed attentiveness and no special feeling, and a well-tempered general attitude that prepares for attunement even to seemingly incidental things—all this leads to the second text, a brief and initially quite puzzling passage in the notebook in which Wittgenstein drafted much of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

17The issue here is not the organisation of feelings and not temperance as such, but initially just the organisation of things in a work or a world: “As things among things, all things are equally insignificant, as world they are all equally significant.”17 In order to understand this remark, it may be helpful to illustrate it by considering a clockwork with all its various components. When all the cogs and wheels, springs and screws interact in a clockwork, they are equally significant because they are equally necessary in an interactive whole that constitutes a world. Outside the world of the work or of this interactive whole, all things are equally insignificant—a mere collection or jumble of cogs, wheels, springs and screws lying about on a table or in drawers. And while things obviously include natural things along with humanly created artifacts, all works owe their existence to the activity of human beings—be they clockworks, artworks, steelworks, networks, or indeed a life’s work. By definition, in a work people make things work together to perform work, whether it be an experimental system or an institutional arrangement, a waterworks or a computer game, a ritual, a business model or—particularly important for Wittgenstein—a musical composition.

18If things become significant within the interactive whole of a world or a work, this is due to their being composed, that is, quite literally, due to things being put together by humans such that together they form the whole of the work. Adopting Schopenhauer’s distinction, while Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deals above all with scientific factual knowledge and the world as representation, the technical work is obviously a world-as-will, conceived not as the totality of facts but as an interactive whole that has been composed: “Things acquire ‘significance’ only by their relation to my will”.18

19“The world is independent of my will” according to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with its interest in the representation of a mind-independent external reality.19 All the facts and things of this world have the same value, namely no value20—and this is a predicament for the will21. In Wittgenstein’s notebook it becomes evident how difficult it is to accept and to leave the world as it is and not to wilfully influence the world. But on his account, whoever would be happy in a given world that is independent of one’s will, must be able to accept it, leaving it as it is. Wittgenstein repeatedly took up this challenge—and constantly failed to master it.22 Yet it is not just the challenge posed by ancient stoicism, quietist Christianity, or Eastern philosophies of equanimity: it is also the challenge faced by engineers. On the one hand, they do not leave the world as it is, and things acquire significance in relation to their will, that is, in an interactive whole or created technical working order of things. On the other hand, whatever engineers do, they must not be wilful in the sense of forcing things. Force gets you nowhere, as Kluge’s machinists would tell us.

20And thus Wittgenstein’s contemplation of things in a work leads again to Knautsch-Betty’s professional secret: for Wittgenstein, the engineer, the exercise of gentleness and know-how “without special feeling” becomes tantamount to “without willfulness” or without wishing one could forcibly bend the world to one’s own ideal image of it. This is echoed by Ernst Cassirer’s view of technology as a cultural form:

For the will, the object is just as much the guiding principle and thread that first gives it its determination and its solidity, as it is the limit of the will, its counterpart and its resistance. The strength of the will first grows and becomes stronger on the strength of its limit. […] Nature is not, as in magic, merely repressed by desiring and imagining. Rather, its own independent being is acknowledged. And the true victory of thought is only achieved in this self-modesty. ‘Natura … non nisi parendo vincitur’: victory over nature is only achieved through obedience to it.23

21With feeling, but without any special feeling—even-tempered. This defines temperance or Sachlichkeit but also the cunning of technology.24 Temperance is the precondition for triumphing over things while submitting to their recalcitrance, that is, for achieving attunement to the working order of things. A balancing act is required when it comes to producing and maintaining a work: it becomes necessary to perform the artistic feat of uncoerced coercion or unforced force, every work becoming a work of art. By the same token, the things in a work are not regarded in terms of wear and tear, fatigue or attrition but rather as composing a fully operational (geltend) and therefore already valid (gültig) whole, a composition of things which, as an eternally valid and immediately self-evident form of organisation, tells us something about successful outcomes, about happiness, about proper functioning—about the felicitous achievement of attunement to the working orders of things.

22The relation between work and world, then, would need to be understood thus: a work is always also a world, but not vice versa. For the world of all mind-independently given facts to be conceived as a work requires an act of appropriation. Another remark from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus puts it like this: “To contemplate the world sub specie aeterni is to contemplate it as a—limited—whole”, in other words: no longer as an endless list of facts but rather as a constellation of things that are interacting within a working order, such as a work of technology or art.25 Wittgenstein goes on to famously remark: “Feeling the world as a limited whole is the mystical [Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische]”26—and to this one might now add that it is the epistemic attitude of temperance which affords that “mystical” feeling of the world as a limited whole. It becomes clear from the following final remarks of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein’s “mystical” need not be understood theologically and that it could be replaced by “ethical” or “aesthetic”. And to the extent that “temperance” refers to the contemplation of unforced force in a well-composed set of things that are working together within the limited whole of a work, it too might be put in the sphere of the “mystical”—if only because it concerns how things attain significance and acquire value as they relate to the will in the work as a world of our making.27

The Value of Temperance

23Objectivity is a precondition for the scientific achievement of agreement between theory and reality and, by implication, for intersubjective agreement about the relation of theory and reality. Accordingly, objectivity itself needs to be cultivated as an epistemic attitude with normative implications, tied in with the moral economy of science as spelled out by Mertonian norms and other ideals of science as a vocation. As a normative conception, scientific objectivity informs procedural ideals of democratic discourse as formulated by Karl Popper, Jürgen Habermas, or Michael Friedman.

24Sachlichkeit or temperance is a precondition for technical or technoscientific attunement to a working order of things. Even-temperedness also needs to be cultivated as an epistemic attitude. It consists in a certain organisation of feelings, one that affords beholding an organisation of things which constitute a world—an organisation of feelings set up to acquire a feeling of what things can do in an interactive whole of efficacious relations. As a normative conception, temperance can thus inform the criteria of rightness which underpin professional judgements of when to act, what to do, and how to create and maintain a system of interactions.

25Things in a work have been composed by humans so as to work together in a certain way. The knowledge that things can work together in this way is revealed in the work; it is demonstrated, proven and sufficiently justified by the sheer singular existence of the work. The validity of working knowledge is thus bound to its specific sites of demonstration: the achievement of a felicitous interplay of things speaks for itself, uniquely and directly, through the functioning of a device, the successful performance of a feat, the exercise of a skill, the proof of concept. If the availability of working knowledge coincides with the existence of the work, its acquisition demands attunement to the working order of things. The demonstration of acquired working knowledge and being attuned consists in being able to make or repair, to maintain and properly handle, to manage or use the work in question, be it a simple device or a complex socio-technical system. Working knowledge as attunement to working orders of people and things consists in a feeling for the organism, for the mechanism, for the algorithm, for the system and its manner of composition.28 There is nothing private about these feelings—nurses, undertakers, judges, precision engineers and other machinists of love demonstrate them in efficacious interactions and successful performances of skill. Indeed, even ordinary users of ordinary technical devices engage with them in a “dance of agency” that expresses a feeling for how these devices work and what they need—such as pulling the plug, rebooting and praying when one’s computer-screen freezes up.29 This is not a special feeling of rage or wilfulness, but a temperate, cultivated feeling for the work as a limited, interactive whole.

26Feelings, according to Alexander Kluge, are “theologians of happiness” that believe in the “happy end” of wishes fulfilled, needs met, trust restored. They are oriented towards the warmth and safety of shelter, the reassurance of food and drink, and they thereby serve as precision instruments that register pleasure and pain, hunger and satisfaction, coldness and heat.30 When social forces or human customs direct persons in certain ways, feelings of unease put up resistance, signal the violation of needs, or find a path of least resistance and accommodation. Pushing back on history they leave a mark on history. Having no goal other than a happy outcome, they do not set out on the long path toward the true and the just, but are fully absorbed in the immediacy of the wish and its fulfilment, of puzzlement and its resolution, of an experiment and its result.

27Temperance and an even-tempered attunement to the ways things work in the world probes whether everything is as it should be, whether the things are in their place, properly arranged; it explores the modes of felicitous interplay of people and things. Just as the arrangement of cogs in a clockwork, this is a matter not of truth but of rightness. Temperance affords us to distinguish in a working order whether it is one to rely on or one to be checked, whether things are going right or might be going wrong. According to Kluge it is precisely because of this kind of discrimination that feelings serve as a measure of reality.31

28In a work that has turned out well, things work together in such a way that their composition requires no further verification.32 Where to trust and when to cautiously probe is a matter of working knowledge. Unlike the justification of a theoretical statement, this requires no evidence of derivability from general principles, no accounting for the causal processes inside the black box of a device, no solution of a problem of induction. Instead, it involves judgements of the right firmness, the right looseness, the right arrangement of things, the right moment to intervene in the course of things. Indeed, having a feeling for the right moment is a sign of attunement achieved and of working knowledge acquired.33 Inversely, there is something profoundly wrong when a biographical or societal moment becomes subsumed into a prefabricated, stereotypical story-line or distorted by passions or obsessions. Kluge comments on this in The Power of Emotion using the example of opera and its intemperate, incongruous organisation of feelings: “An essential part of the plot in the opera Tannhäuser is the change of scenery that occurs between the first and the second act. In twenty minutes flat, a Christian castle is built into a heathen landscape. The opera doesn’t end well on account of the suddenness of this historical process.”34

29Kluge’s marriage broker and matchmaker, his man with the screw, and his machinists of love represent cooperation, sensitivity, and an interest in felicitous arrangements. They do not give themselves over to smouldering emotions or destructive passions but rather heed the multitude of feelings that are theologians of happiness with their capacity to discriminate right from wrong. The epistemic virtue of temperance exhibited by these experts is a precondition for attaining a working knowledge that cannot be reduced to instrumental reason or expedient rationality. It enables us to judge world and work alike in terms of what we can rely on, what needs to be checked and verified, and whether things are as they should be. In regard to the example of knowing the right moment, Kluge elaborates on this in a lecture about Theodor Fontane and “the political as the intensity of everyday emotions”:

And when, in [Fontane’s novel] Stechlin, the son of Stechlin says: ‘Off to new horizons’, Pastor Lorenzen says […]: ‘No, hold on to the old, and do something new only if it is absolutely necessary’. And this is the whole point. If it’s absolutely necessary, do something new. In this country, though, we have a tradition, a whole unbroken tradition, of doing something new when it isn’t necessary. And vice versa, when it is necessary, it doesn’t get done but is violently suppressed. […] This principle of discontinuity in history is a specifically German recipe for devastating disasters. The point, by contrast, is to have an equanimous relation to the history of one’s country, that is, to accept history. If you’re progressive, you have to be conservative.35

30Even-tempered, without any special feeling but with a feeling for work and world as a limited whole—we need to know about things working together on their course from the past and throughout the present: this is how history can be accepted, free of the violence of surrender or suppression.

31From the point of view of “temperance”, working knowledge is valorised above and against “objectivity” of scientific knowledge. Attaining a feeling for how things behave in concert with other things counts for more than consensus in a deliberative process that revolves around evidence and argument for and against theories. If this upends our traditional understanding of science in society, it also upends the Enlightenment view of human progress in history. Kluge’s view of politics appears to suggest that national or global narratives of truth and goodness, autonomy and justice are a source of distortion and violence. The impassioned pursuit of these narratives denies rather than accepts history. The right moment can only be found in an even-tempered acknowledgment of a situation, making room for the immediate goal of the happy outcome as needs are met, wishes fulfilled, puzzles resolved, powers acquired.

32This appears to be a provocative conclusion, coming from a theorist and artist who is working in the Marxist tradition of Critical Theory. It fits all too well into the present age of the technosciences in which governance and management, innovation and sustainability are geared not towards ambitious ideas of progress but towards the avoidance of catastrophe and the maintenance of social and economic conditions.36 But to be sure, political history and Marxist analysis has not disappeared—they have just retreated into the materiality of resource problems, climate change, artefacts, and the experience of the felt-body. It is not driven by narratives of progress of destiny, but it listens to feelings as theologians of happiness, and finds in works proof of concept that things can be as they should be, in the right place at the right time, in a felicitous interplay with people and things.

Ending in the Midst of Things

33Like Schadenfreude or Wanderlust, Sachlichkeit would be a good addition to the English language as a necessary complement to “objectivity”. In the meantime, “temperance” must do. But even without using the terms at all, one all too obvious difference between objectivity and temperance can now be expressed. Concerned with securing agreement between mind and world, between theory and reality, objectivity maintains detachment, operates from a distance. In order to judge agreement, one needs to assume a vantage point from which to survey and deliberate evidentiary relations. In contrast, as it seeks attunement temperance is close to the things, participating haptically and imaginatively in the working order of interactive wholes. The different epistemic virtues of distance and closeness were contrasted in 1918 by philosopher of science Moritz Schlick. Advocating the distance and detachment of objective scientific knowledge, by contrast he nevertheless speaks eloquently about technical or technoscientific knowledge that can be gained in the midst of things. Inadvertently, perhaps, Schlick gives credence to the ambitions of this paper and the epistemology of technoscience:

By its very nature knowledge demands that the one who seeks knowledge assumes a distance and elevation above the things from which one can survey their relations to all other things. Whoever gets closer to them and participates in their agency and efficacy, partakes in life and not in knowledge; face to face with the things one beholds their value and not their nature.37