The phonophore guarantees what the Jacobins strove for as an ideal: the perpetual forum, “deliberation en permanence.”
Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
In Ernst Jünger’s landmark novel Eumeswil, we read of a piece of technology called the “phonophore,” which bears an eerie resemblance to the modern smartphone. It is described as an instrument used for communication and State surveillance that everyone carries around in their left breast pocket. In the novel, the main character Martin Venator tells us a few key things about the phonophore. One is the way in which it marks class:
The phonophore is generally carried in such a way that its edge sticks out of the left breast pocket. The classes are marked on it. If we can even speak of classes here, they are of a potential and dynamic nature. Equality and distinctions of the ahistorical masses are reduced to motion. The social function is mechanically encoded and integrated in the hierarchy. The Condor controls the monopoly on addressing the people and he doles out the opportunities as he sees fit. The phonophore guarantees what the Jacobins strove for as an ideal: the perpetual forum, “deliberation en permanence.”1
At one point, Martin tells us that the phonophore is used for locating citizens:
Should anyone be missed, the search begins with an appeal through the phonophore. If a response follows, then one knows the man is still alive, and also roughly where he is. So I will keep the phonophore off for a long time. Our social existence is exhausted in switching and being switched. Its ideal is the switch to conformity.2
The phonophore is also used for news and other informational purposes:
I do not intend to stir for another six months; my phonophore is switched on for reception only during the quarter hour of news. This measure, too, is prompted solely by caution, for I am not curious, since the politics in Eumeswil cannot possibly improve.”3
The phonophore in Eumeswil also contains Martin’s password for his bank account and allows for what we would consider online banking:
By their functions, the soldo could be likened to a checking account, the scudo to a savings account. In daily practice, as I have said, the distinction vanishes – not to mention that payments have reached a high degree of abstraction. Anyone in possession of a phonophore – in other words, nearly everyone – is always solvent. His account is kept up to date automatically. The arrangement is complicated, but the procedure simple; through the phonophore, I pay more quickly and more easily than with a check.4
The phonophore is rather user friendly too, for “any child knows how to use [it].”5
Finally, after just explaining how the phonophore is connected to banking, Martin states:
The leveling of society through automation – the way in which cardinal issues of wages and labor are revolutionized – that is a story unto itself.6
Though the concept of the phonophore does differ from modern smartphones in many ways, it clearly bears a resemblance, and offers us an oppourtunity to dwell on not only the smartphone and its level of influence and control on our lives, but also the “perpetual forum,” which I believe has been perfected by the internet and social media.
Like the citizens of Eumeswil, we are always “connected” to others and to the State via our smartphones. Our phones use geolocation services, they store our personal information, they send our communications to servers and store that as data, and they enable us to participate in the economy (try doing so without one). The government is, as in Jünger’s Eumeswil, capable of sending out “Amber Alerts” to everyone’s phone in a certain area. This capability is currently used for good, but one can imagine it being used for ill.
Additionally, if you think the phonophore’s distinguishing between classes only exists in Eumeswil, consider how one’s phone brand and pricetag is used as a way of communicating social and economic class today.
Our phones have become, in our atomized and automized society, our primary means of communicating with others and of receiving information, whether it be news of our cousin’s birthday or a bombing half-way around the world.
This leads into the idea of the “perpetual forum” that Jünger hints at.
When it comes to politics and public discourse, social media provides us with a 24/7 stream of spectacle. If the 24/7 news cycle was the hallmark of the early 2000s to the early 2010s, the 24/7 social media feed is the hallmark of the last decade or so. This, in turn, generates discussion, which everyone is able to participate in thanks to social media and the smartphone. We even have a phrase for this phenomenon: “the discourse.” What makes this such a radical shift from the past is that whereas before people were mere spectators, they are now actors and may interact with media in a new and more involved way.
Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of the “perpetual forum” is found on Twitter/X, a platform which has been the subject of scrutiny for the past two years and which serves as the “home base” for many political figures, both official and anonymous. It has always been a unique platform thanks to its character limits, hashtags, and inherently political character. It is where a world-famous journalist can get “ratioed” by a 3 follower anonymous user. It is where a person can interact with their favorite company, movie star, athlete, politician, or celebrity, and perhaps get a response. It is where politicians rant and rave and quote tweet one another ad infinitum. If one wants to see the madness at its worst, simply look at the replies and quote tweets to anything posted by the President of the United States; it is a frightening display of democratic insanity. The political bickering on X generates countless threads and there are accounts solely dedicated to engaging in some online debate topic or another. X is undeniably a hotbed of political discord, and its design lends itself to this purpose.
X lends itself to the development of an exclusively short-term memory as it fosters constantly shifting topics of discussion that form the “discourse.” One of the hallmarks of the “discourse” is that it is ever-changing, sometimes day-to-day. A video, post, or topic will go viral and then fade away in the span of 24 hours. How many times has X erupted into debate over some random TikTok video or political issue then forgotten about it by the end of the week? Everyone’s attention is constantly captured by some thing that is always changing.
This takes place within the broader context of the so-called “Culture War.” X is merely one theater of this war. X users are like little foot soldiers of any given political or ideological faction. They rally around ideological leaders, adorn their profiles with the appropriate symbols and catchphrases, form groups and alliances, and attack their ideological opponents one gotcha post, one reply, and one thread at a time.
Some may say this is to be expected and that I am making a big deal of nothing. Politics has always made use of the latest methods of communication, after all, and it should be no surprise that political debates feature heavily on social media platforms like X.
What is “new,” though, is that social media platforms like X have made everything a potential subject of political discourse, and everyone is empowered to participate in that discourse, all the time.
The smartphone and social media are liberal democratic bourgeois deliberation par exellence. Everything in democratic society is potentially political, as I will demonstrate shortly, and social media enables every citizen to access a 24/7 feed of sensational, potentially political material.
Every piece of content being potentially political is evidenced by how often an otherwise innocent or “random” video on TikTok goes viral and becomes fodder for the Culture War. A video of sorority girls? More like an opportunity to comment on the state of women in modernity and modest clothing. A video of a woman cooking a mediocre dinner for her kids? An opportunity to wax about the working class and the figure of the “tradwife.” Even the most banal and apolitical content is transformed and used as a launching pad for ideological tirades. This is not unique to social media or even the 21st century, though. It is, instead, a hallmark of modern liberal democracy. Social media and smartphones just take it to its natural conclusion.
In Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt observes that:
What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains —religion, culture, education, the economy—then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics. As a polemical concept against such neutralizations and depoliticalizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic.7
Nothing escapes the democratic State, since the democratic state is also, by its very nature, predicated upon the People. Everything they do must then be viewed through a democratic and political lens. The People are, in the democratic Total State, “the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns.”8 Anything the People do is made political, and so all is opened to political scrutiny.
Schmitt also understood how liberal bourgeois democracy encourages a perpetual forum and said as much in Concept of the Political:
Ethical or moral pathos and materialist economic reality combine in every typical liberal manifestation and give every political concept a double face. Thus the political concept of battle in liberal thought becomes competition in the domain of economics and discussion in the intellectual realm. Instead of a clear distinction between the two different states, that of war and that of peace, there appears the dynamic of perpetual competition and perpetual discussion.9
Through the smartphone and social media, the perpetual discussion of liberal democratic society has moved into an even more easily controllable and harmless context; the digital. When everyone is caught in perpetual debate and discussion on the internet, “real life” action becomes scarce. This is not to say action doesn’t occur (see the 2020 riots or the current university demonstrations), but it is tamed and limited to a great degree. I would even argue that the perpetual forum’s move to the digital has led to people having a negative attitude towards “real life” action which is now often viewed with scorn; how dare someone get off the phone or computer and do something? By doing this they have put themselves and everyone else at risk and disrupted the otherwise comfortable and stable political environment. Praxis is taboo.
The perpetual forum of social media is the perfect mechanism for liberal democratic society’s propensity to avoid conflict because it plays to the bourgeois primacy of comfort and security (something Jünger explains in The Worker). All conflict today will ideally be settled on the internet and not spill over into “reality,” as that may cause discomfort and threatens to actually disrupt the normal operation of society.
However, because modern man is more “tuned in” than ever, he cannot escape a feeling of dread and anxiety; this dread and anxiety creates a sort of feedback loop wherein his anxiety about national and world events causes him more and more to seek to restrict all conflict to the digital realm. He will happily vent his frustration online and will participate in a given conflict by proxy, but if pushed to action or inaction, he will almost always tend towards the latter. His ideology only manifests itself online, even if the ideology itself is one that claims to value action and decisiveness.
Ernst Jünger sums up the situation brilliantly in The Forest Passage:
Where the automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection—such as in America—the panic is even further intensified. There it finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end—they provoke demonic contacts. Of course, the East is not an exception in this. The West is afraid of the East, the East afraid of the West. Everywhere on the planet people live in daily expectation of terrifying attacks, and in many places there is also the fear of civil war. The crude political mechanism is not the only cause of this fear. There are countless other anxieties; they bring with them an uncertainty that constantly sets its hopes on doctors, saviors, and miracle workers. Everything can become an object of fear. The emergence of this condition is a clearer omen of downfall than any physical danger.10
This has only worsened since The Forest Passage was written in the 1950s, now that these “demonic contacts” reach into our pockets, as prophesied by the phonophores in Eumeswil. The American—and nearly all world inhabitants, since nowhere escapes American influence—is daily blasted with rage-inducing material, news of crisis, videos of violence and degenerate behavior, and ideologically charged content that is meant to provoke hatred and resentment. In short, whether he watches news or scrolls through social media, the American is met with content which keeps him perpetually angry, demoralized, and afraid. Moreover, through his smartphone, he encounters the “Other” in a way that has never before been possible, and is able to communicate with them (or attack them) instantly, or make a snap judgement about them through a “like” or “reaction.” This encounter with the Other—taking place in the context of the perpetual forum and Culture War—can lead to him proclaiming a Messiah, as Jünger predicted, since he longs for someone to deliver them from his fear and anxiety. At the very least, he desperately grasps for someone to praise and cling to; anything that resembles a “win” against his ideological opponents.
In modern technology-driven democracy, every social media post, every piece of news, every public statement, and every form piece of media is subject to the “democratic process” of deliberation and judgement; they are all handed over to the perpetual forum. The democratic citizen feels that everything surrounding him is political or at least potentially political, and thus is always looking for a way to exploit situations and people for his own agenda and ideology. The citizen’s identity is reduced to which side he takes in the Culture War, and his whole life is interpreted from this standpoint. His instinct is to translate information into useful propaganda for the Culture War. Even something as intimate as sex and romance become a matter of politics, with one’s preferences, circumstances, and aspirations taking on an ideological character. A man doesn’t want a good wife, rather, he wants a “based” one. He is filled with fear, anxiety, and rage. Yet, he cannot bring himself to act because of how much he prizes comfort and security; therefore, all is relegated to the digital, and the perpetual forum remains the sole outlet and political activity that is available to him.
This is democracy manifest. Coupled with technology, it is a nasty and all-consuming monster, sparing nothing.
So, what can we do about it?
I would suggest that we take a page from Jünger’s Eumeswil and learn from Martin Venator to either heavily regulate our time with the news/discourse, or to abandon it altogether and switch it off. We must become unconcerned and uncurious. To participate is to conform. Our first step in overcoming the perpetual forum is to leave it. Victory is impossible when playing on the enemy’s terms and fighting only within the area they have cordoned off.
Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, print, ed. Russell Berman, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Telos Press Publishing, 2015), pg. 97.
Ibid., 113-114.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid., 152-153
Ibid., 239.
Ibid., 153.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, print, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2007), pg. 22.
Ibid., pg. 71
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, print, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005), pg. 49.
Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Print, ed. Russell Berman, trans. Thomas Friese (Candor, New York, United States of America: Telos Press Publishing, 2013), pgs. 29 & 30.
The discourse is left-wing, the anti-discourse is right-wing.
I read a long article in the Sunday Times today, about war crimes in Afghanistan and the SAS, but apart from learning some details about investigations and leaks, the greatly illuminated broadsheet page, there was no conclusion and I didn’t learn anything worth learning. Though inferred was that various government ministers might get in trouble, the army is full of murderers, chaos is everywhere..! etc, etc.
More anxiety p*rn, made greater by the image of a rifle pointing from the page.