No More Learning

2 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Am Anfang war kein Unrecht’, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie, vol. 3. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1989, pp. 11–65.
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SLOTERDIJK: To understand that, aside from the timeless psychology of resentment, it is useful to look back at the histori- cal semantics. Sometimes the history of words is great politics in itself. At the beginning of the modern hatred of elites we find the anti-aristocratic sentiments among the plebeian layer in the French Revolution. At that time, citizens and plebs began with a common understanding that the conventional treatment of the people by a parasitic aristocracy and a clergy in the same mould couldn’t go on. This verdict was put into practice in 1789. From then on, people in Europe used the word ‘exploitation’ until 1917, and in some regions until 1968, whenever they wanted to interpret widely disparate income relations. The term was unambiguous for the period before 1789: the aristocracy and its clerical counterpart really existed and appropriated the French nation’s surplus product to lead their lordly life without doing anything themselves – and, moreover, there was a hyper-parasitic royal court that made the stupid mistake of showing off its extravagance to the nation. A situation like that creates – to put it mildly – various kinds of intolerance, and those fitted the description of bourgeois morality. In that regime, proletarians and citizens defined themselves quite logically as the exploited and the old ruling class as exploiters. When the citizens and proletariat mutually disentangled themselves after the revolution the exploiter title was passed on to entrepreneurs, and along with a grain of truth this involved a misnomer with serious and widespread effects. Now 200 years have passed and we still haven’t really understood that a completely new figure has appeared on the stage of world history, that of the rich person who works, often more than anybody else. This type has still not found its rightful place in the collective wisdom and linguistic vocabulary of contemporary culture. The reason, perhaps, is that it was God’s last thought. It is so improb- able that even with the best will we only understand it reluctantly. To be rich, but to do more than anybody else: for many people, if not the majority, this still seems totally absurd. Nonetheless, quan- titively and qualitatively, it is an impressive phenomenon. Without the working rich there would be no modern welfare state. The ominous high earners who constitute barely 10 per cent of the popu- lation generate more than 50 per cent of the national tax revenue.
POSCHARDT: The personal responsibility of the socially weak is still a taboo subject for discussion.
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t believe in taboos, only in difficult topics. The most difficult topic is that a large number of poorer people are absolutely not exploited; they are people who nobody has deprived of anything, but who have consciously not used their opportunities, mainly because they probably found no incentives to rise above
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their situation. Of course, many people are in need through no fault of their own, and we help them, as we obviously must. But given the present facts, we can talk about a changed perspective even on the left wing. It is no longer a question of starting from accusations of exploitation and corresponding class solidarity, but of going back to seemingly old-fashioned concepts like empathy and shared respon- sibility for the weaker members of society.
POSCHARDT: Compassionate conservatives – a success model of the Republicans in the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: The European way will be different because we don’t appreciate the political exploitation of religious feeling. But let me say a word about the situation of exploitation: the ‘exploitation of man by man’, to recall the Count of Saint-Simon’s phrase, has largely been shifted to the exploitation of nature by human beings. We live in a situation where even the poorest believe they have the right to a share in this new exploitation of nature. Your earlier mention of the cosy, warm cabin fits this trend perfectly. High room temperatures today are almost always a theft from nature or, more precisely, from the history of the earth. We forget too easily that fossil energy carriers, the real benign geniuses of our time, have done more for the transformation of human living conditions in the past 200 years than all the cultural factors together. We have to think about this provocative statement to understand the extent to which most people today live from unfinanced ideas. We say ‘culture’, and have no idea where it comes from.
POSCHARDT: Let’s look at the problem of roots. Who is conservative today? Who is progressive? The trade unions or the middle-class parties? Or have these terms become obsolete?
SLOTERDIJK: The trade unions are doubtless the crux of today’s conservatism – compared to them, parties like the German Christian Social Union (CSU) are pure soviets. But there is no cul- tural success without conservatives.
POSCHARDT: And the Christian Democratic Party (CDU)?
SLOTERDIJK: Like every major party, it contains both elements, the preserving and the progressive. The old form of social democ- racy was another wonderfully conservative institute, populated by achievement conservatives. In contrast to that, the Schröder line of the new Social Democratic Party (SPD) expresses how the party’s present internal learning processes work. We can generally say that unrest always arises from learning, and people can and must learn only when they are in power. The SPD’s malaise comes from the fact that it contains a few people who really want to govern. If the party didn’t have such people it could declare itself satisfied with cosy illusionary opposition, and spare itself the trouble of learning
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for today’s world. As we have said, we only learn after leaving the safe reservation of irresponsibility.
POSCHARDT: The will to freedom is gaining a voice in the East of Europe and in the mosques of fundamentalism. Are we learning from the Ukrainians what we should be, and from the Islamists in Germany what we shouldn’t be?
SLOTERDIJK: Two frontiers are becoming discernible – not frontiers of geopolitics but of political mentalities. The one is defined by hate and resentment, both in vehement, almost incurable forms, and the other by idealization and anticipation of rescue. Two of the strongest affects that humans are capable of are working right now on the frontiers of Europe. The Europeans have every reason to see this as an incredible opportunity. These facts should make us realize the real situation of Europe. Without exception, Europe’s leading nations are the constructs that followed humbled empires. If we look at the history of mentalities in the past fifty years, we recognize the transitional pathologies of the vanished world powers. But those phenomena have had their day, and that is why a new European affirmation is emerging. In this situation we must narrate the European myth again, in such a way that the people listening to the story understand that it is about something magnificent, some- thing we are proud to be part of. This presupposes that we demand our most beautiful myth back from the Americans, who took it with them over the ocean.
POSCHARDT: Which myth?
SLOTERDIJK: The story of the refugee Aeneas as told by Virgil. Anyone who hears it immediately understands where Europe is located: Europe is a place on the map of hope where defeated people have a second chance. What used to characterize the verve of American escapism must now become the core of European con- sciousness. The story begins, inevitably, with the burning of Troy, from which Aeneas, the greatest loser of all, flees with his father on his back and the Penates in his bags, to embark on a second attempt at life in Italy – and you know how the story goes on.
I think we should make this initial, non-imperial opening section of the Aeneid the founding myth of present-day Europe, and finally stop repeating those meaningless, lascivious stories of the bull and the maiden. Our main narrative says very clearly that Europe is a country where vanquished people can find their feet again. The Americans hijacked the story with their brilliant, unerring instinct, and the Europeans will have to get it back, whether they want to or not. Otherwise they will become boring collective nationalists and will be unable to solve the problem of the countless new citizens without whom they can’t survive. We are looking for a new formula
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for European hospitality and integration, and Virgil delivered it in advance.
POSCHARDT: What will happen to the Americans if we take away their myth?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans are putting their own dream at risk without the Europeans having to take anything away from them. They give the impression of being psychologically and politi- cally blocked, and seem defenceless against the spirit of revenge that has gripped them. They can’t get over the fact that people don’t love them as they think they deserve. No good can come of this narcissistic touchiness. The Europeans may be lethargic but they have enormous potential, especially with the unique relationship between a culture of freedom and savoir-vivre. That is something that only exists in this particular way in the Old World. Europe is a big matrix of the art of living. I have just returned from Korea, very impressed by the country, which is experiencing something like the German economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s on today’s technological level. It is a country intoxicated with performance. You notice there that a collective capitalism exists in East Asia that is hugely different from our very individualized lifestyle. This brings us back to our European culture. I told myself we should be grateful for every minute we are able to live in this part of the world – unless our modernizers destroy culture and education with their disastrous economism. The danger signals are clear to see.
POSCHARDT: Has gratitude got lost with freedom? Have we lost the feeling that we should count ourselves lucky?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Sich glücklich schätzen’ [‘Count yourself lucky’] – isn’t that one of the most beautiful expressions in the German language? I suspect you may be the first person for years to use it in a meaningful context again. It is a fantastic, suggestive phrase, basically very un-German. The best German for identifying a very un-German feeling.
POSCHARDT: We say people ‘shrink away’ from happiness. That describes a very typically German type of movement, I think.
SLOTERDIJK: I wonder whether it isn’t actually part of the mood in Western culture as a whole. Coaching is on offer everywhere to teach us to present our own life in the light of discrimination we have suffered. People think they make more of an impression if they portray themselves as victims of an attack. We are constantly filling out invisible forms for compensation and submitting them to an obscure authority. I think this illustrates the Germans’ well-known tendency to complain. Although the feature pages in the German press have picked up the complaining habit, ‘complaining’ isn’t the right word because it actually belongs to a musical category or a
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biblical one, if we think of the threnodic prophet Jeremiah. What we are talking about has no relation to the musical mode of lamento. In fact, our complaining involves filling out misery forms. If we sign and stamp them, we can be sure we will get something for it from somewhere.
POSCHARDT: That sounds more like filling in an order form, whereas the de facto lament is enough in itself.
SLOTERDIJK: Shakespeare says somewhere: ‘I will not praise that purposes not to sell. ’3 In our case the analogy should be: ‘Who would complain if he couldn’t fill in a form? ’
2 Sloterdijk’s original German quote, ‘Wer würde preisen, wenn er nicht verkaufen wollte? ’, could be a paraphrased reference to William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXI. Or perhaps Sloterdijk is thinking of the proverb ‘He praises who wishes to sell. ’
17
COMPARATISTS OF HAPPINESS
Interview with Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel*4
PANTEL: Mr Sloterdijk, we have done interviews on the topic of work and unemployment, and poverty and wealth, with economic and social experts and with futurists and literary figures. They include, for example, Peter Glotz, Alexander Kluge and Hans-Olaf Henkel – all rather independent people from a variety of disciplines. The interviewees do not meet in person, only through their state- ments in the minds of readers who will then, ideally, continue the conversation themselves. To round off the interview series we would like to have the topic reviewed from a philosophical standpoint. We thought of you because there are exciting connections with our kinds of questions in your new book, Sphären III. Schäume [Spheres III. Foam], notably in the chapter titled ‘Stimulus and Pampering. A Critique of Pure Mood’.
SLOTERDIJK: It sounds like a sort of ‘colloquium of the absent’. If you are naming names, Glotz has persistently asked the fundamental questions from the left-wing perspective about the production of social relations through work, and about the divi- sion and redistribution of the results. Kluge, too, has never tired of investigating the cunning of reason in its more or less microscopic form – not the very grand type of divine reason, but the cunning of
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel appeared under the title ‘Komparatisten des Glücks. Über Mangelfunktionen, Reichtumsmärchen und die Politik der Großzügigkeit’, in Manfred Keuler and Paul Pantel (eds), Absturz oder Neubeginn. Arbeitswelt in der Globalisierung: Interviews mit Hans-Olaf Henkel, Peter Glotz, Oona Horx-Strathern, Frithjof Bergmann, Rolf Hochhuth, Alexander Kluge und Peter Sloterdijk (Munich: GIB Verlag), 2004, pp. 66–75.
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ordinary people and their life strategies. He augments the Marxist concept of the base in an extraordinary way, making the whole social underground swarm with cunning Odysseus figures.
The gender issue comes into play here as well, because the German word List [cunning] is not just grammatically feminine. As far as Henkel is concerned, I see him generally as an edgy figure whose position is influenced by a degree of anarchism, as he starts with the entrepreneur and not with the bourgeois. Incidentally, our problem in the Federal Republic is actually the return of the bour- geois, of the person of private means, of the unproductive glutton as a mass event, a phenomenon we are seeing everywhere, including in the form of small savers and people who play the stock exchange. We have to take this class of apolitical gold diggers seriously. They include all the people who worship the economic utopia of the modern age and accept being dominated by a dangerous and irre- sistible fairy-tale theme, the dream of income without performance. I would gladly discuss this topic in an interview with Alexander Kluge: to what extent so-called society represents a collective for telling fairy tales whose key economic fairy tale is Fortunatus’1 dream of a free income personally handed out to you by the goddess Fortuna or her modern successor, the lottery fairy. Lucky wins like these are supposed to be a shortcut by magical methods on the long road from wishing to success to great freedom: ‘I woke up this morning and discovered I was rich! ’
PANTEL: But that’s really a subject for the popular press – in fact, we’re miles away from that!
SLOTERDIJK: Quite the opposite! At the level of dreams – and dreams are something very real – we have never been in the grip of these fairy-tale themes as much as we are now. Looking at the subject superficially, the collective as such (or whatever we want to call ‘society’) is suffering at present from all the experiences related to the production of the feeling of shortage. But we shouldn’t forget for a moment that shortage is an interpreted feeling. We shouldn’t forget that today we live in the richest society of all time, and are tyrannized by the feeling of shortages more than almost any other group ever before. This is investigated far too rarely. Today’s pervading feelings of shortage are generated, hallucinated and organized feelings of shortage, created in a kind of social
1 Fortunatus is a German folk tale that was popular in the sixteenth century, about a legendary hero who lived on money from the never-empty purse of the goddess Fortuna. The story first appeared in the Volksbuch, a book of folk tales from 1509.
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democratic-neoconservative dream factory of shortage. The main agents in this ‘Hollywood of poverty’ are the media, trade unions, employers’ associations, health insurance bureaucrats and creative artists – in other words, everybody involved in evoking and inter- preting collective feelings of wealth and poverty. They are busy all the time agitating us with a new genre of poverty films. Almost all our contemporaries, whether they publish or not, are riding on this roundabout of shortage theory while the real dropouts, the hard core of the Tuscany faction, so to speak, or the people who simply stayed on in Crete, or never came home from their holiday in Spain, take care not to intervene in such topics. Only a few well-known interventionists who commute between the dolce vita and the misery at home get flown in from Italy now and then to give finger-wagging lectures in Germany. Whereas people used to talk about a jeunesse dorée, today we could talk about a critique dorée, a type of golden criticism expressed by the spokespeople for federations for the wealthy.
PANTEL: If reality looks so different from the general assump- tion, that is, if there is much less scarcity than most people think – and, indeed, you have written that the ‘major event of the 20th century consisted in the affluent society breaking out of the reality definitions of the ontology of poverty’ – why does this major event get so little attention?
SLOTERDIJK: Because the standpoint from which we can see what really happened and will happen is not very easy to find. We can probably get to it only through psychological training that helps to remove us from the permanent agitation about shortage and its interpreters. In the past, people went to India for a year, perhaps, or to other parts of the world where they could observe authentic conditions of shortage. Incidentally, at the moment there are very active groups in Europe trying to articulate specifically European responsibility for Africa. I think that makes sense, partly because we can only re-establish criteria for ourselves by understanding the real contrast. The collective feeling of loss of criteria is especially typical for Germany. There is an all-pervasive climate in this country of false self-congratulation and false complaints, with the two systems meshing smoothly. People say, ‘Maybe things aren’t that bad here, but still, the conditions are incomparably awful. ’
PANTEL: Yet the German Institute for Economic Research has just published a ‘poverty report’. It says that one German person in eight lives below the poverty line, which is defined as ‘less than 60 per cent of the average income’. Compared with many people in India or Africa, they are doing well, of course. They don’t have to suffer hunger. But they are badly off in relation to the majority in
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Germany. In other words, poverty and shortage can be defined in very different ways.
SLOTERDIJK: Certainly; and the relativity of this definition is exactly what we systematically obscure in our styles of speech. As I have said, we are usually only reminded of our own affluence when we are faced directly with absolute poverty. But I think we have to try to find the criterion again inside our system and, in fact, in the place where we live. We can’t advise everybody to be dropouts just to get an outside view of their own world. We can’t expect everybody to see their living conditions as if they came from Mars. People are always embedded in their own habits and things they take for granted, and feel naturally entitled to be naïve. But we can find a starting point for becoming properly aware of the situation even under those conditions – for Dasein inevitably means self-comparison as well. Thanks to the modern media, we have all become comparatists of good and bad luck. The existential com- parative study has become completely natural to us. Human beings always tend to look on the brighter side and then on the darker side, and then try to capture the middle – unless they have a reason for seeing themselves as an exception and having the right to be happier than others, or they have a reason for being more closely tied to the darker side than usual, for example, if they belong to a religion of redemption which internalizes the figure of the Samaritan, or if they believe in a religion of socialist solidarity. We saw some- thing like that in the worker-priest movement in twentieth-century Catholicism: young men from prosperous families discarded their cassocks and moved into working-class districts to share the lives of the poorest and more oppressed. Except for such extremists, average people are comparatists who commute in the middle between mis- fortune and good fortune.
PANTEL: But we have 5 million unemployed in Germany. Surely you wouldn’t go to them and say, ‘You’re not that badly off com- pared to a carpet maker in Bangladesh, so be satisfied with your lot! ’ Isn’t it a matter of unemployed people changing their perspective on their own situation, and the new viewpoint giving them opportuni- ties for a different life?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an old debate. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker2 said more than a quarter of a century ago that the way we interpret unemployment is a result of our inability to see an achievement in a positive light. And we are really talking about an
2 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist and philosopher.
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achievement if we manage to reduce work. The fairy-tale theme of abolition of work has existed as long as work itself. Note that I’m not talking about the abolition of the active life!
Hard work, in the sense of labor improbus, as the Romans called it, drudgery, slogging, the physical alienation caused by humans being used as machines alongside horses and oxen for ploughing: across the millennia, that has been the dark spot on the conditio humana. Modern civilization, with its machine culture and modern forms of division of labour, has almost wholly emancipated itself from that. The only people who flex their muscles nowadays are body artists, or sports people as they are called. If muscles are flexed at all, this is done under the banner of acrobatics or artistry, simply because sport, if practised at a specific level, is done for show, just like a work of art. Sports people are actors doing body performance.
PANTEL: Why haven’t we managed to interpret and use the free time gained through machine culture, that is, ‘unemployment in the positive sense’, in a different way, both in terms of society and the individual? On the contrary, as you say, there is the ‘terror of unemployment that is expressed as having-nothing-to-do’. Why isn’t there a more sensible solution?
SLOTERDIJK: There is no solution because the unemployed are seen as deficient entities. The jobless do not see themselves as liberated from work; their unemployment doesn’t make them lords, but slaves, recipients of alms, bereft, basically like sick patients, in fact. Unemployment, as we interpret it, is a sociopathic situation in which people are deprived of the most important aspect of their human dignity as seen in economic terms. They are deprived of the satisfaction of ensuring their survival themselves on the basis of their own work. The unemployed are really in an unenviable situation, surrounded by a culture that defines autonomous life as wage-dependent. If the job is lacking, everything seems to be lacking.
Incidentally, you can find the toughest statements on this topic very early on, from Hannah Arendt.
In her book, The Human Condition, she propounded a radical and snobbish interpretation of unemployment. It is a very ambitious, very nostalgic and rather dif- ficult theory of humans as active living beings. What she describes as the vita activa is an attempt to say that humans know the world by three methods of casting off their shackles: action, work and labour. I can’t go into detail here, but the main point is easy to explain: if the modern age tends towards eliminating action, which means politics, and towards transferring work to machines, for the great majority of people that leaves only working as the main purpose of life. And if a working society, which is essentially a philistine society, runs
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out of work, a human remnant is created, a political cave dweller without art, without education and finally without a job. That is Hannah Arendt’s conclusion from the 1950s: modern ‘society’ as a conglomerate of tragic philistines. We have had half a century to watch this prophetic formula of the working society that runs out of work becoming concrete reality. But I believe we are at a turning point today. The difference between not having work and having work, between the unemployed and others, is becoming increas- ingly blurred, due to the phenomenon of the so-called leisure society in which people are increasingly working in part-time jobs or in a shorter working week, and large numbers of people are condemned to seeing leisure as an immense asset. (For the moment I’m ignoring the high-achievement class for whom a seventy- or eighty-hour week is typical. ) This raises the question of which means those people use to structure their luxuriant free time.
PANTEL: To repeat the basic question: what is responsible for the unemployed being seen as ‘deficient entities’? What is the mecha- nism, the principle, the force – what are the people, the interests behind this idea? Or is it simply lack of ideas?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t really believe it is ideas that are lacking. There is a lack of attitudes. We have enough ideas, but the attitudes with which we could pursue those ideas resolutely are not available. We have a kind of Sunday socialism that can be trotted out for rhe- torical quotation now and again, but not an ideology of solidarity that functions on weekdays as well. We are familiar with a Sunday- type relationship to asceticism and a weekday consumerism. We are familiar with a sentimental state of emergency in which we show solidarity with people in acute distress (remember the events of the Elbe floods),3 but we don’t have a principled attitude to sharing or inclusion.
In addition, there is definitely the conviction inherited from Calvinism, a conviction more widespread in countries such as the United Kingdom and the USA than in Germany, that everybody gets the destiny he or she deserves. This implies that an active redis- tribution policy in the sense of eliminating severe poverty would be interfering with God’s work.
PANTEL: But don’t you think economic interests or forces exist that say that nothing should change, that the wage-labour principle
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the enormous nationwide support for the regions devastated by exceptional flooding of the River Elbe in central Germany in 2002.
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should be maintained, otherwise the system would fall apart com- pletely, and we don’t want that.
SLOTERDIJK: The argument has a grain of truth in it. We shouldn’t forget that modern society, the system as a whole, has gone through a change of emphasis from a paternalist state that was capable of being strict to a maternalist state doomed to pam- pering. This touches on the great socio-psychological adventure of the twentieth century: the maternalization of the state system. It is embodied in the system of solidarity funds that, as we know, can only run on the basis of wage labour plus compulsory levy. This reveals the postmodern social nexus: everybody is involved in pampering everybody. It will obviously lead to paradoxes in the second or third generation at the latest. This is why there is pres- ently a mood of public withdrawal of solidarity. We realize that the people now paying contributions can’t be supported any longer by those coming up behind. We are realizing that the social contract always had elements of a chain-letter problem – which is despised and prohibited in other areas of life, of course. This insurance chain letter runs through the generations; the later we take our place in the recipients’ line the more certain we are to be losers. That’s one reason why we won’t be able to abandon the principle of wage labour for a long time to come. The relationship between wage labour and social security contributions will remain the nerve of social linkage for the foreseeable future. This would apply even if we adopted the Swiss system of a total levy of social security contributions in which freelance professions, civil servants, employers and workers were all treated the same way and everybody paid for each other and for everything. All the same, it is an interesting alternative to the models so far. Firstly, it would lead to a strong reduction in contri- butions at the same time as an increase in insurance fund holdings. It’s an inspiring model, but I really don’t know if it is applicable to Germany and how it can be calculated in the long term.
PANTEL: What does pampering by the ‘nanny state’, the ‘other mother’ [Allomutter], as you call it, do to individuals? How does it change them? Does it raise them to be juvenile and to lack independence?
SLOTERDIJK: That description goes too far. Looking at today’s young people, we can see immediately that they are not really dependent; they are demanding. And they take offence exception- ally easily. They also give up very easily, with a sour attitude that there’s enough for all the other wretches, but they are the ones who get too little. This outlook produces the German weather, the coun- try’s regular grey. All the same, it’s possible to carry on dreaming the dream of the land flowing with milk and honey. I note that the
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fairy-tale motif of the modern age that we have already mentioned, the popular dream of income without performance, has reached the stock exchange now. The famous ‘securities’ express nothing but the idea that people can easily get an income with venture capital defined as a risk premium. It’s a field day for Fortunatus and idlers. However, this idea of risk is absent from the typical get-rich fairy tales of the modern age. The poor child in the ‘Star Money’ story by the Brothers Grimm is suddenly rewarded for being a good lad – all he has to do is to stand on the spot where gold rains down and lift up his shirt. Fortunatus, the honest German, is rewarded for getting lost in the right woods at the right moment to meet the virgin of luck, who tells him, ‘I offer you six choices and you are free to choose one. Do you want wisdom, strength, righteousness, moderation – the classical virtues – or would you prefer health or riches? ’ Fortunatus, whose story was first written down in the Volksbuch from 1509 and has since been retold countless times, is important for the history of ideas because he was the first, when offered these options, to declare: ‘Leave me in peace with your noble virtues, I want riches! ’ He was granted his wish in the form of a magic purse that, when he opened it, contained forty gold pieces in the currency of whichever country he was in. It was a perfect anticipation of the euro, in fact. It is worth noting that the owner of the purse didn’t have to ask how the money got there. Fortunatus, the economic good-for-nothing, enjoyed the privilege of not having to ask any questions. He didn’t have to be interested in the origin of wealth. He didn’t have to refer to produc- tion or the tax system. He opened the magic purse and found what he was looking for. The fantasy of lasting abundance is situated directly at the level of fairy-tale themes and the dynamics of wishes, and declared valid – and that’s it. In short, it economizes on think- ing about production. This savings programme for thinking creates a type of person that doesn’t have to deal with declining production any longer.
This is one reason, by the way, why the Marxist producer-person has a greater dimension of complexity than today’s consumer. Today’s affluent people tend to be located at the consumer end and don’t know the answer to the question of whether they earn what they earn. They don’t know how wealth is really created and they don’t want to know any more either, because, as the last humans, they are equally indifferent to production and reproduction. It is true that people today know more about products – Marx would probably collapse if he were given a menu in a hotel that required him to choose between the ten kinds of dressing that come with salad nowadays. But don’t worry; he would learn quickly, just as today’s consumers learn to cope with the abundant options. Those
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well versed in shopping lore today can distinguish between Prada and not-Prada at a glance. That doesn’t alter the fact that they are one dimension worse off than people who have learned how to ask the question in the classical tradition of political economy: where does value come from? That question has vanished from collective consciousness – the magicians have outstripped the producers.
PANTEL: The ‘demanding young people’ you just mentioned want – rightly – to share in the ‘wealth’. But many people, or the majority, don’t want wealth handed to them as a gift; they’re quite prepared to work for it. Isn’t it a tragedy for young people that they lack opportunities?
SLOTERDIJK: Which opportunities are lacking? Well, mostly those that guarantee security from the start. Young people have always had the freedom to define themselves as entrepreneurs. But we shouldn’t forget that freedom is an attribute inherent to the individual! It can’t be detached from the individual, and it can’t be generalized in the abstract. And if for every person who makes use of creative freedom there are ninety-nine who don’t, that doesn’t contradict the promise of freedom.
PANTEL: The French Christian philosopher Simone Weil – you cite her in your work – believed that accepting the law that it is essential to work to stay alive is the most perfect act of obedience a person can perform, comparable only to acceptance of death. How is it possible that people sometimes give more thought to buying a DVD player than choosing a profession?
SLOTERDIJK: I cited that statement because it is exagger- ated and outdated. It seems to me Simone Weil was postulating a metaphysics of the proletariat as if the heavy burden of life and the alienated grind were eternal constants. But this fails to under- stand the major event of the twentieth century, the victory over the workload. The labour-saving forces of modern technology have fun- damentally changed the conditio humana. We are no longer beasts of burden; the era of heavy work is over, and so is the era of servitude. Simone Weil didn’t consider relief from the load. Instead, she anachronistically composed a Christian metaphysics of the worker and misguidedly sanctified the ‘voluntary daily death of factory work’ as if Christ were standing at the workbench until the end of the world. These ideas are certainly noble, but they are confused and, above all, out of date. Automation, relief from the workload, social security – she didn’t consider any of that. Nowadays we have workers who tend to be overweight and are under-challenged. They have a large amount of surplus leisure time and ponder how to conceal their unproductiveness. Astonishingly big unfilled gaps are still to be found at the core of so-called productive labour. Consider
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how the working day was constructed in real existing socialism: in the morning people had to be at work on time, and after that they did whatever they wanted to. Even in the Western working world there are huge segments in which the situation is similar, not just in the public service sector. In general, we can say that work is always tied to a factor of pretending to work, including the pretence of pro- ductivity, utility and indispensability. Such pretences, incidentally, are part of every product our economic system brings to the market, because every product is aimed at persuading buyers to take it, although it is clear that it is the sellers who always get the better deal – precisely because of the successful illusion of utility. Given this, the young people who think seriously when buying a digital camera or a DVD player are the men and women of the moment. They are showing they have learned one thing: as customers they don’t want to be taken for idiots, at least not for total idiots. In the first place, a product is always a proposal for exploitation that the producer makes to the customers: ‘Buy me! I’m using you a little, it’s true, but just between us, I’m always getting the better deal. ’ That’s what the products would say if they could be honest. In this context, let me quote Walter Benjamin, who imagined products as a whole talking the language of whores. When a potential customer goes past, the product whispers to him: ‘Come on, little fellow, I’ll give you a blow job! ’ – at which the poor customer grabs the offer. The customer probably realizes that we’ll have to wait until the coming of the Messiah to escape from the system of unequal exchange.
PANTEL: You have written that the Biedermeier period4 was the last time that the defenders of past events fell for the illusion that one could safely escape from the disintegrating force of progress. If we consider globalization as progress, do you think we are living in a postmodern Biedermeier era?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely. Seen from a socio-psychological angle, globalization, wherever it has been successful, or rather, where it can look back on a long accumulation of means of comfort, has given rise to a paradoxical human type: the dissatisfied satisfied person. And that is precisely the Biedermeier person, and eo ipso the person of the present in the metropolises of comfortable life. Nietzsche once criticized the writer and former theologian David Friedrich Strauss as a regular satisfait. The term is useful because
4 The Biedermeier era in Germany covers the years between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the European revolutions of 1848, a period of middle-class expansion associated with specific styles of interior decor, art and literature.
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today’s Germans are essentially satisfaits, but actually dissatisfied satisfaits. They are dissatisfied with their own satisfaction because they sense that they live below the standards of their own lives to some extent. Existentially they are under-challenged and over- challenged at the same time. That is the socio-psychological result of the successful establishment of the comfort system in the Western or Westernized world. Incidentally, we can only get closer to the exact meaning of the term ‘globalization’ in this context: in princi- ple it describes exclusively the great sphere of comfort in which the Western welfare states and the nouveau riche from the young capi- talist countries live. Everybody knows that this sphere is surrounded by a desolate outer zone, planetary suburbia.
Using the term ‘globalization’ as if it were an inclusive global system or even a global society can cause dreadful confusion. I suggest restricting the term ‘globalization’ to the history of produc- tion of the great comfort system to which probably not more than a quarter of humankind belongs. Beside it is a huge periphery whose inhabitants have no chance of ever getting in, and a semi-periphery consisting of people within reach of entry to the comfort system, perhaps not in the present generation but in the next one or the one after. Interestingly, these are the zones with the highest dynamic of ambition. We can see this at the moment with the new EU member states: typically for semi-peripheral countries, they display genuine dynamics of ambition comparable to those that today’s ‘satisfait Europeans’ experienced from the 1950s on, in the happy days of the optimal relationship between appetite and the possibilities of satisfying it. People had great ambition, they knew they only had to work hard for a while and then they could start placing their orders. Those were golden times; they will not return.
PANTEL: You say we should have a positive attitude towards people showing their own prosperity openly, but there must be something else as well. We can see it in the USA, where wealth is quite closely tied to the duty to be charitable, the willingness to give something away. Is that an ideal for you? Should we demand it more insistently from European businesses as well? Do we have an under- developed attitude to generosity?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely! But by its nature we can’t demand generosity; at most we should encourage it. I think this is the biggest socio-psychological mission of the next generation. We too have to work to prepare a climate of public generosity in which people aren’t always waiting for the state. We are waiting for a practice of generosity by quite normal heroes, who are convinced they have something to spare and think it is normal to give more than the tax office takes from them. They would be people whose self-esteem
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demands they give away a great deal – beyond the highest taxation rate. In addition, it is high time to ensure, by further developing the law on foundations and donations, that an increasingly bigger share of redistribution funds becomes intelligent money. Taxes, in fact, are stupid, blind, anonymous money, no man’s money. Gigantic sums flow into the coffers of some minister or administrator or other, and are poured out over rightful and wrongful recipients in more or less transparent but indiscriminate ways. Foundation money, on the other hand, would have the power to transform these sums into intelligent money because they would be paid as precise allocations to a specific address. Nebulous aid would become clever investment. Intelligent use of money – that’s the categorical imperative of redis- tribution, and it is chronically contravened in the existing system. We must develop a mood of public generosity so that it’s not just the wealthy who reach the position of being compelled to say, ‘We already gave! We’re not giving anything! ’ Everybody should be able to say, ‘We already gave but we can still give more. ’ That would be the key to a kind of redistribution converted from duty and compul- sion to voluntariness and generosity. Of course, this is only possible if there is a kind of euphoria of affluence, and it is impossible for that to develop in the general climate of fictitious stories about scarcity. That is the subject of the third chapter of Spheres III, in which I talk about stimulation and pampering. Some stuffy reviewers have inter- preted it as a conservative rejection of the classical welfare state. In fact, it is a reflection on how we can outdo the welfare state through the community of the generous.
PANTEL: You argue that it is particularly important to protect fragile things. In connection with what we have discussed here, what would be worthy of protection?
SLOTERDIJK: This concerns two opposite extremes: the first, and most fragile, is the dyad, that is, the area of interpersonal rela- tions, paradigmatically embodied in the mother–child relationship. In our society it is generally well protected. It is extraordinarily well embedded in our legal system, and we could regard its guarantee of maternalization without borders as the last father function of the state. We shouldn’t forget that, in evolutionary terms, the father is the one who protects the mother–child sphere. This original pact between the male and the female world must be reproduced in the appropriate form, even in the modern world. The most fragile thing in every known society is the mother–child sphere. It is the utopian centre of the collective and at the same time it is its centre of heat, the anthropogenous radiation field per se. When that is violated, human lives go round; large numbers of mad and degenerate people start appearing and the ‘society’ collapses from within.
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The second most fragile thing is, of course, the great totality itself, which is constructed like foam. That is what I try to show in Spheres III. If we want an adequate description of the system of cohabita- tion, we shouldn’t continue talking about a ‘steel-hard shell’, as Max Weber did, but about fragile constructs. The images of hard- ness are outdated; we finally have to change metaphors. Medieval cities added an outer wall that was removed at the beginning of the modern era because it was dysfunctional. The big comfortable hothouse in which we people in the West live today no longer has city walls. It is incredibly open, with soft borders, which is why it constantly has to be prepared for harm without losing its essential serenity, which is its working atmosphere. Now, however, a factor that we hardly noticed before comes into play. The great vulner- ability of modern foam goes together with an astonishing elasticity, which ensures that destruction, losses, fallen buildings and collapsed passages are replaced within a very short time. The real lesson of September 11, 2001, is that shortly after the disaster we were told that something new would be built quickly on the same spot. That is the crucial information we receive from 9/11.
The hysterical military reaction that was called the ‘war on terror’ was politically opportunist and systemically confusing. The real story lies in the process as a whole: if a building like that collapses, we immediately build a better one. If Daniel Libeskind has his way, the new one will be even taller than its predecessor. In other words, we shouldn’t underestimate the elasticity of the system! Fragility, and the impossibility of perfect protection, are consistent features of modern comfort foams. But because ‘society’ is actually not monolithic, because social aggregates are formations constructed from the bottom upwards out of single cells and foam bubbles, they have enormous elasticity. The false semantics of combating terror suggest lofty images of the entire system collapsing. Nothing could be further from the truth. When two big foam bubbles burst, the whole system may continue vibrating for a while, but a rupture like that has astonishingly little effect on the remaining cells. Elasticity is the primary feature of the foamy system. If we want to talk about the hothouse system of affluence, we must talk about two things: first, fragility, and, second, elasticity. It remains to investigate whether catastrophism and the tendency to inflate the new terrorism with fantastic over-interpretations merely represent the flip side of the common tendency towards fictional narratives about shortages.
18
IMAGE AND PERSPECTIVE An Experiment in Atmospheric Seeing
Interview with Tim Otto Roth*5
ROTH: Mr Sloterdijk, I would like to talk to you about your experience in dealing with images. I would also like to stray a little to look at the subject of imachination – a neologism I use to describe the alliance between imago and machina. Let’s speculate about possible spherological implications of the interplay of human imagination and the machine. What role do images play in your professional environment?
SLOTERDIJK: We can divide philosophers into the kind that are involved in expelling images from thought, and those who believe that thought as such is dependent on images, metaphors and figures. Obviously, I see myself as part of the latter group, although so far it has only occupied a minority position and has been partly ignored in the academic establishment. It is easy to forget that the foundation of the general concept of the image, whether as icon or as eidos, belongs to the field of early philosophy. Philosophers can claim to have been the original image theoreticians in the sense of having discovered the images as images in the first place, and taking them seriously. To understand this, we have to remember a rare fact: before philosophy emerged, the Greeks, and everybody else, had a way of seeing that was dominated by the absolutism of the natural perspective. To put it very broadly, the eye looks outwards into the situation and finds a holistically composed continuum of
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Tim Otto Roth appeared under the title ‘Bild und Anblick: Versuch über atmosphärisches Sehen’ (15 February 2005). Available at: <http://www. imachination.