Flight Forward: The World of Ernst Jünger's Worker
Bullock, Paul. "Flight Forward: The World of Ernst Jünger's Worker." Utopian Studies 23.2 (2002): [450]-71.
On Jünger's Der Arbeiter, which see at internal link, with useful references to A.E. Poe, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and others.
Notes general reception of the book "as an enraptured manifesto of a new cult, that of technology," including by no less than Martin Heidegger in "his critique of technological power, The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik, 1953)"[1] (p. 451). Bullock sees Der Arbeiter "as an alternative utopia" offering "an alternative conception of freedom and an alternative to bourgeois utopianism" (p. 453).
After mentioning the arrest of one of Jünger's friends by the Gestapo — Jünger's son will be picked up later and dispatched to disappear in the war — Bullock notes,
Jünger's speculations on the complete suspension of all conventional political relations and their displacement in favor of another kind of social organization — what Jünger calls in his book organische Kinstruktion, or "organic construction" — are interpreted in terms of those later critiques correctly as dangerously anti-Enlightenment, antibourgeois, even antihuman, but incorrectly as complicit with fascism.
What sets Der Arbeiter apart from bourgeois utopianism lies in its willingness to contemplate the fascinations exerted by struggle and danger. [...] Bloch acknowledges a lasting reality in the attachments represented here [in Jünger's book], identifying Jünger with the most ancient, most archaic impulses that lure young men toward danger and death, for what lures here is [... quoting Bloch's The Principle of Hope] "a merging of battle and life." [Bullock 455-56] * * *
This perspective from a persistent archaic past provides the only viewpoint from which we can begin to weave a single cloth from the many different strands of Jünger's exceptionally long and varied writing career. The primary conception of Der Arbeiter interprets the phenomena of industrial production within this vision of archaic return. The fascination of heroic labor [Hoover Dam built 1932-36, autobahn: 1933 f., Empire State Building: 1930-31 — RDE] that casts its spell over "the worker" in the new world about which Jünger speculates has nothing to do with the production of useful commodities, and the new figure he imagines titanic tasks of this extreme technological organizing has nothing to do with the historical division of classes. It transfers everything from the rituals of heroic sacrice that occur in the realms of combat and destruction and reproduces it in the complementary sphere of industrial construction. (pp. 457-58) * * *
And this identity of the new worker incorporates the completely different concept of work pursued for the sake of its "flight forward" in Bloch's phrase, by which the industrial machine becomes the enframer (to speak with Heidegger in his essay on technology [see above —RDE]) of a world we enter through the gateway of a historically new Heroism. [...]
His experiences in World War I taught him that men will, as he did, volunteer with enthusiasm to fight and undergo heroic deprivations without concern for the necessity or purpose of the conflict. From this he concludes that they will also undertake similar titanic efforts in the dark satanic mills of industry without any interest in the economic necessity or purpose of those projects. War is hell, we know, and so is this peace. Yet, as Christopher Marlowe's Lucifer observed, in hell is all manner of delight.[2] (p. 464).
For the purposes of this wiki, note that such Romanticism on steroids and uppers (with a trace of masochism) traces back to at least Thomas Carlyle and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1840/41), if not Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine,[3][4] plus F. Nietzsche, down to D.H. Lawrence in places and, relevant here, Yevgeny Zamiatin in We and other works, and, in more familiar form, the questing/potentially-sacrificial ending of THINGS TO COME.
Rich, finishing, 26Mar23
