References for Theme: The Worker: Dominion and Form [1932]
- Jünger, Ernst
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.10) It is therefore from a bourgeois point of view that labour is interpreted as an estate, and underlying this interpretation is an unconscious cunning which seeks to harness the new claims in an old frame in order to enable the negotiation to continue. Because where [23] the bourgeois is able to entertain himself, where he is able to bargain, there he is safe. The uprising of labour (Arbeitertums) will, however, not be a second-hand, less colourful infusion prepared according to outdated recipes. The essential difference between the bourgeois and the worker lies not in the temporal succession of dominion, not...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.102) Let us repeat here that ‘race’ within the landscape of work has nothing to do with biological concepts of race. The form of the worker mobilises the entire population without distinction.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.103) The World War, to the extent that it belongs to the Twentieth Century, does not represent anything like a sum-total of national wars. It ought rather to be considered as a comprehensive work process in which the nation appears only in the role of a work factor.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.105) Technology is the manner in which the form of the worker mobilizes the world. The extent to which man stands in a decisive relationship to it, the extent to which he is not destroyed but furthered by it, depends upon the degree to which he represents the form of the worker.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.107) All this changes in the age of the worker who is endowed with an elemental relationship to war and who is thus able to represent himself militarily by his own means.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.108) Technology – in other words, the mobilization of the world by the form of the worker – is, as the destroyer of all faiths in general, also the most resolute anti-Christian power to have made its appearance so far.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.112) The famous difference between city and countryside survives today only in the romantic imagination; it is just as untenable as the difference between the organic and mechanical world. The freedom of the peasant is no different from that of any one of us – it consists in the recognition that, except for the lifestyle of the worker, for him any other kind of life has come to an end. This can be proven in all respects, not just economic ones, and here lies the core of that battle which has been already decided, in its essence, long ago.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.124) We live in conditions in which neither work, nor possession, nor fortune are still profitable and profit itself is reduced to the same measure to which turnover increases. The degradation {176} of the living standard of the worker, the ever shorter period in which fortunes remain in the same hand, the questionableness of property, particularly land property, and the variability of means of production bear witness to this. Production lacks stability and thus any predictability in the long term. Every profit is therefore destroyed by the incessantly renewed necessity of a higher acceleration. Excessive competition burdens producers and consumers alike –...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.129) Technology is the mobilization of the world by the form of the worker; the first chapter of this mobilization is necessarily of a destructive nature. After the completion of this process, the form of the worker will appear, with respect to constructive activity, as the chief architect.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.13) But it is important to consider this: that this ‘society’ is not a form in itself, but only one of the basic formulae of the bourgeois imagination. This is demonstrated by the fact that there is no dimension in bourgeois politics which is not conceived of as ‘society’.‘Society’ is the total population of the globe presenting itself as the concept of an ideal picture of a unified humanity whose division into states, nations, or races is nothing other {21} than a shortcoming of thinking. This shortcoming, however, is corrected in the course of time through [27] contracts, through education, through...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.130) Technology is not, however, as we saw, in any way an instrument of progress, but a means for the mobilization of the world by the form of the worker, and, as long as this process is under way, it can be predicted with certainty that none of its devastating qualities will be relinquished.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.134) today there is only one truly revolutionary space: it is determined through the form of the worker.[Es gibt aber heute nur einen wirklich revolutionären Raum: er wird durch die Gestalt des Arbeiters bestimmt.]
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.14) It must be left to a special, subsequent investigation to uncover the extent to which bourgeois thinking succeeded in falsifying the image of ‘society’ by feigning its self-negation in the first exertions of the worker. One would discover in this thinking the worker’s freedom as a mere repetition of the pattern of bourgeois freedom, in which fate is, from now on, completely openly interpreted as a revocable contractual relation, and the greatest triumph of life consists in an amendment of the current contract. One would recognize in this thinking the worker as direct successor of the rational-virtuous ‘individual’, and as...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.140) On the one hand, we live in a world which thoroughly resembles a workshop; on the other, it resembles, equally thoroughly, a museum. The difference between the claims made by these two settings is that, whilst nobody is forced to see in a workshop more than a mere workshop, in a museal landscape prevails an edifying mood, which has taken on grotesque forms. We have reached a kind of historical fetishism, which stands in a direct relationship to the lack of productive force.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.155) The natural space to which the dominion and form of the worker relate, has a planetary dimension. It is the globe that grasps a new blossoming feeling of the earth as unity – a feeling of the earth which is bold enough for major constructions and deep enough to envelop its organic tensions. The offensive has already begun, and although its revolutionary phases are still running their course, its systematic planetary reach must nevertheless not be overlooked here. World revolutionary is technology as the means by which the form of the worker mobilizes the world, world revolutionary is the typus...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.16) how important it is to distinguish between the worker as a nascent power on which the fate of the {25} country is based, and the garbs in which the bourgeois disguised this power in order that it would serve him as a puppet in his artificial game. This is a distinction between rise and fall. And this is our belief: that the rise of the worker is equivalent to a new ascent for Germany.To the extent that the worker brought his portion of bourgeois legacy to rule, he simultaneously divested himself visibly of it like a doll filled with dry...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.17) In third and final place, it remains to dispel the legend that the fundamental quality of the worker is an economic quality.In everything that has been thought and said about this, the endeavour of the art of calculation reveals itself as the attempt to transform fate into a quantity which can be dissolved with calculative means.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.178) Leisure time and work time are two modes of one and the same technical occupation by which one is claimed. The strange result of modern revolutions consists in the fact that the number of factories increases and that one calls for more, better and cheaper labour. From the socialist theoreticians and men of letters has developed a special, and incidentally no less boring kind of official, statistician and engineer of the state, and a socialist of {248} the 1900s would notice with astonishment that the argument no longer operates with wages, but with production numbers. There are countries in which...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.184) From this point of view, the democracy of work is more closely related to the absolute state than to the liberal democracy from which it seems to emerge. It is however different from the absolute state insofar as it has at its disposal forces which are mobilised and unlocked only through the enactment of the general principles. {256}The absolute state grew [273] in the midst of a highly developed world of forms, and the population of this world continued to live on in the form of privileged categories. The democracy of work encounters the broken orders of the mass and...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.186) It should be noted here that the condition of unemployment in relation to the typus does not obtain at all insofar as work does not possess, for him, an empirical, but rather an intelligible character. At the moment when the typus withdraws from the production process, the total work character manifests itself by appearing under a different specialised form, for example that of armament. Thus a group of unemployed people in which the typus is represented, such as can be observed for instance in a forest camp, in sport, or in a political group, differs from the image of an...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.19) For this reason, it becomes so important for the worker to refuse every explanation which seeks to interpret his appearance as an [35] economic phenomenon, even as a product of economic processes, thus, basically, as a kind of industrial product, and for him to see through the bourgeois origin of these explanations. No action can cut more effectively through these ominous bonds than the declaration of independence of the worker from the economic world. This does not mean the renunciation of this world, but rather its subordination under a claim to power of a more comprehensive kind. This means that...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.194) It would be a mistake to assume that the means of destruction corresponding to the worker are to be sought in the great social and economic theories. On the contrary, we have already explained that what is to be glimpsed in them is only a continuation of the work of bourgeois reason. These theories are much less comparable with the rediscovery of ‘man’ in the Eighteenth Century than they are with that aristocratic rationalism through which the very social category towards which this discovery is directed, subverts itself at the very same time.However, this self-subversion of the old society benefits...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.201) Very soon, one will probably experience as an astounding prejudice the fact that it is possible to speak of unemployment even in sparsely populated continents such as Australia.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.206) It is worth stating now that this is a question of discussing those instruments of power characterised by the hallmarks of specialised work character. It is therefore wrong to believe that so-called ‘total disarmament’ is somehow able to reduce the danger of war. It is rather entirely possible that it increases this danger, to the extent that the energies which are no longer counted in the specialised work character do not disappear without trace, but flow into the total work character as a highest and creative potentiality. Here we find the explanation for the fact that the demand for total...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.209) Last but not least, it can also be expected that a foolish arrogance which has led to seeing manual work as a pitiable condition, is flushed out. This arrogance is the natural result of an abstract concept of work, such as the purely economic one; to it corresponds the unfortunate figure of the “educated man”, who never had the luck of working his way up in service. Every manual activity, even the mucking out of horse stables, has rank insofar as it is not experienced as abstract work, but is carried out within a large and meaningful order.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.211) To take part and to serve: that is the task that is expected of us.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.26) Rather, the act through which the worker can shake off this space consists precisely in recognizing himself as a form within a hierarchy of forms. The most profound justification for his battle for the state is anchored in this, a justification that no longer has to call merely for a new interpretation of a contract, but calls for an immediate mission, for a destiny.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.27) A consideration of the worker from the perspective of form could build on both phenomena from which bourgeois thinking had already derived its concept of ‘worker’, namely on ‘community’ and ‘individual’, whose common denominator resided in the idea of man characterising the Nineteenth Century. Both these phenomena change their meaning if a new image of man is deployed.It would thus be worthwhile to pursue how the ‘individual’, in his heroic aspects, appears, on the one hand, as the unknown soldier obliterated on the battlefields of work, and, on the other, as master and steward of the world, as the commanding...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.28) It is thus not a matter of connecting ‘community’ and ‘individual’, although both are to be interpreted through form too. However, the content of these words is changing and we will see how much ‘individual’ and ‘community’ within the world of work {42} differ from the ‘individual’ and ‘mass’ of the Nineteenth Century. Our epoch has exhausted itself in this opposition, like in every other opposition, of matter and idea, blood and spirit, power and right, which yield partial interpretations as to whether this or that particular claim is clarified. It is far more important to seek out the form...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.38) Let some regard this as relapse into a modern barbarism, and others welcome it as a baptism of steel – it is more important to see that a new and yet untamed supply of elemental forces of our world has been empowered. Under the deceptive security of obsolete orders, which are only possible as long as fatigue exists, these [63] forces are too near, too destructive, to escape even a coarse eye. Their form is that of anarchy, which, throughout the years of a so-called peace, erupts volcanically through the surface in glowing lava flows.Whoever still believes that this process...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.41) Thus, the spirit is perhaps nowhere more clearly touched by the meaning of work than at the sight of ruins left behind for us as testimonies of lost unities of life. It is not just a matter of destruction whose triumph raises the question of the indestructible – but also of the secret content of these long abandoned workshops whose meaning, as we well know, can nonetheless never be lost.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.43) The position of the individual is made rather more complicated by the fact that [70] he himself is a contradiction, that is: he finds himself on the most advanced frontlines of both battle and work. To hold on to this position and yet not to disappear in it, to be not only the material, but also the bearer of destiny, to understand life not only as the field of necessity, but also of freedom – this is a capacity which has already been characterised as heroic realism. This ability, this real luxury of an extremely threatened species is the basis...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.44) The cunning catchers of votes, the shopkeepers of freedom, the tomfools of power, able to understand meaning only as goal and unity only as number, are worried by an obscure inkling of a new dimension: freedom, such as the one that must arise in the world of work. Since they are completely dependent, however, on the moral scheme of a corrupt Christianity in which work itself appears as evil and the original sin is translated into the material relationship between exploiters and exploited, they can only see freedom as negation, not as redemption from all evil.But there is nothing more...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.45) In order to be able to understand this, however, one must be capable of another view of work from the conventional one. One must {65} know that in an age of the worker, if he bears his name properly and not in the way in which all parties today call themselves labour parties, there can be nothing which is not understood as work. Work is the rhythm of the fist, of thoughts, of the heart, of life by day and night, of science, love, art, faith, religion, war; work is the oscillation of the atom and the gravity which moves stars...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.46) The proof for the universal validity of the will to power emerged early on – in a work which managed, at once, to undermine the most unfathomable routes of morality in the old style, and to outwit each of its ruses.This work shows two faces: on the one hand, it belonged to a time which still valued the discovery of universal truths; on the other, however, it recognised, above and beyond such truths, truth itself as an expression of the will to power. Here the decisive explosion occurs: but how would it be possible for life to linger longer than...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.48) In this sense, for a real workers’ movement, the substantial power inherent in it is much more important than the struggle for an abstract power whose possession or non-possession is just as insignificant as an abstract freedom. {70}That the worker really occupies a decisive position can already be concluded from the fact that, today, every dimension which possesses will to power seeks to relate itself to him. Thus there are labour parties, labour movements, and labour governments of various kinds. More than once, one has experienced in our time the worker “conquering the state”. This spectacle is inconsequential if its...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.49) Power within the world of work can therefore be nothing other [78] than the representation of the form of the worker. Here lies the legitimation of a new and special will to power. One recognizes this will by the fact that it is the master of its means and weapons of attack, and in the fact that it does not possess a derivative, but a substantial relationship to them. Such weapons do not need to be new; an original force is characterised precisely by the fact that it discovers unsuspected reserves in what was thought to be well-known.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.5) The plan of this book is to render visible the form of the worker, beyond theories, beyond factions, beyond prejudices, as an effective dimension which has already intervened powerfully in history and which determines authoritatively the forms of a changed world. Because it is less a matter here of new thoughts or of a new system, than of a new reality, everything depends on the acuity of the description, which presupposes eyes to which full and impartial sight is granted.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.51) wherever the peasant uses the machine, it is no longer possible to speak of a peasantry
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.52) We find here confirmed once again that the ‘worker’ cannot be understood either as an estate in the old sense, or as a class in the sense of the revolutionary dialectic of the Nineteenth Century. The claims of the worker reach, on the contrary, beyond all demands possible for an ‘estate’. In particular, one will never arrive at unadulterated results if one simply identifies the worker with the class of industrial workers. This would mean that, instead of seeing the form, one would be content with one of its partial manifestations – the consequence is a perspective blind to the real...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.57) The process in which a new form, the form of the worker, comes to expression in a distinctive humanity, manifests itself in terms of mastery over the world as the arrival of a new principle which shall be categorized as work. Through this principle the forms of confrontation of our time take their only possible shape: it undergirds the platform on which anyone can meaningfully engage with any other, if we think to engage with others at all. In this lies the arsenal of means and methods through whose superior handling we will recognise the representatives of an incipient power....
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.58) So it follows that in order to see the word ‘work’ in its transformed meaning, we need new eyes. This word has nothing in common with any moral sense, as expressed in the saying ‘by the sweat of your brow’. It is perfectly possible to develop a morals of work; in that case, concepts of work would be applied to concepts of morality, but not the other way around. Just as little is work that kind of work sans phrase16 as it appears in the systems of the Nineteenth Century, as the basic standard of an economic world. That economic...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.59) The workplace is unlimited, just as the working day spans twenty-four hours. The counterpart to work is neither some kind of rest nor is it leisure; rather from this perspective there is no situation that cannot be grasped as work.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.62) We must appreciate that we are born into a landscape of ice and fire. That which has passed is so shaped, that we cannot adhere to it, and that which has not yet come to pass is such that we cannot accommodate ourselves to it. This landscape requires a stance of warrior-like scepticism in the highest degree.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.65) In it the language of work is intimated, a language as primitive as it is encompassing, which endeavours to translate into itself everything that can be thought, felt and willed.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.73) Here too, we observe how the total work-character, which in this case appears as total war-character, manifests itself in a whole host of special ways of fighting. On the chessboard of war new pieces have emerged, whilst the manner of moving them has become simpler. The measure of the ethics of battle, whose basic law remains the same at all times – namely to kill the enemy – is ever more unambiguously identical with the extent to which the total {107} work-character can be realised. [116]
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.8) Both freedom and order relate therefore not to society, but to the state, and the pattern of each structureis the organisation of an army, and not that of a social contract. Therefore the condition of our most extreme strength is achieved when there exists no doubt about leadership and allegiance.This must be recognised: that dominion and duty are one and the same. The age of the third estate never recognized the miraculous power of this unity, because it deemed worthwhile pleasures all too common and all too human. Therefore all ends which the German was able to reach in this age...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.83) The work costume is just as little the costume of a class as the worker himself is to be interpreted as representative of a class. Even less is it to be seen as class-distinctive, for instance as ‘costume of the proletariat’. The proletariat [130] in this sense is mass in the old style, just as its individual facial characteristic is that of the bourgeois without a starched collar. ‘Proletariat’ stands as a very flexible socio-economic concept, but is not an organic construction, hence a symbol of form itself – in the same way that we interpret the proletarian as suffering...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.9) No one can choose for himself the school desk at which his character is formed, because the school is decided by the fathers, but there comes a day when one feels oneself outgrow it and recognizes one’s own calling. This must be considered when examining the means of the worker’s clout, and it has to be taken into account that they developed in battle and that in battle every position is related to the action of the opposition. That is why it would be all too simplistic to object that the worker’s existence, like that of a metal yet to...
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
(p.98) Without doubt, a textbook has greater importance today than the latest unravelling of unique lived experience through the bourgeois novel. Whoever seeks to raise this kind of experience to the centre of a landscape of work or combat makes himself look ridiculous.
- The Worker: Dominion and Form (2017)
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