No More Learning

INFINITE MOBILIZATION
In memory of Jacob Taubes 1923–1987
Peter Sloterdijk
Infinite Mobilization Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics
Translated by Sandra Berjan
polity
First published in German as Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989
This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
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Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author. | Berjan, Sandra, translator.
Title: Infinite mobilization / Peter Sloterdijk ; translated by Sandra Berjan.
Other titles: Eurotaoismus. English
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | “First
published in German as Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1989. ” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “One of the world’s leading philosophers shows how our preoccupation with motion and change is a defining feature of our modern, Western way of thinking”-- Provided by publisher.
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Subjects: LCSH: Political psychology--History--20th century. | Political sociology. | Europe--Politics and government--20th century. | Europe--Civilization--History.
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Contents
Premises vii
1 The Modern Age as Mobilization 1 The Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification 5
Sketches towards an Outline of a Critique of Political Kinetics The Prospect of an Asian Renaissance: Towards a Theory of the
Ancient
2 The Other Change: On the Philosophical Situation of Alternative Movements
Panicked Culture – or: How Much Catastrophe Does a Person
Need?
The First Alternative: Metaphysics The Second Alternative: Poeisis
3 Eurotaoism?
Nothingness and Historical Consciousness: A Note on the World
History of Life Fatigue
The Miscarried Animal and the Self-Birth of the Subject Eurotaoism
4 The Fundamental and the Urgent – or: The Tao of Politics Also a contribution to the answer as to why a credible policy
currently does not exist
Dimensions of the Credibility Gap
The Voting Voice and the Body – or: How Politics Participates in
the Crisis of Embodiment Metaphysics
From an Ethics of Principle to an Ethos of the Urgent
14 23
30
32 42 50
59
59 66 86
87
87 92
97 102
vi 5
Contents
Paris Aphorisms on Rationality 107 All That is Right 107 Diplomats as Thinkers in Destitute Times 109 Low Theory 111 La chose la mieux partagée du monde 113 Geometry as Finesse 116 Unconcealment and Tolerability 117 Of the Foolishness to Not be an Animal 119 Invent Yourself! 120
After Modernity 122 The Age of the Epilogue 122 The Interim – or: The Birth of History from the Spirit of
Postponement 127 Truth and Symbiosis: On the Geological Sublation of World
History 133 For an Ontology of Still-Being 148
6
Notes 154
Premises
The original German title of this book used the cumbersome and speculative word “Eurotaoism. ”1 Why was this necessary?
There are three possible answers to this question. First, this could be an instance of those involuntary and nonsensical turns of phrase that I have been shown to let slip rather frequently; if this is true, we might as well assume that the book has already died of its own title as though from an overdose of profundity. Second, what we could have here is an example of combinatorial wit in the style of Friedrich Schlegel’s shotgun weddings of two vastly differing terms; but should such wit truly be in play, we had better leave it unexplained – wit that supplies its own discussion is no longer witty. However, since combinatorics is a tried and true early romanticist method for the discovery of structural analogues, a request for patience may be permitted in order to await the result. Third, “Eurotaoism” could be the heading above a missed opportunity. Such a title lends itself so easily to saying something groundbreaking about the play of polarities, the reunification of spirit and nature, and the opening of the heart chakra. All these things are of concern to us. I admit that it is a shame when an opportunity is missed to assure readers that they, too, have the divine within them. But denying the facts leads nowhere; there is nothing uplifting in what follows. This book and its title linger solely in problematic terrains – its appeal is exclusively aimed at the need to understand what drives the current course of the world in the direction it is going. Addressing the needs of intel- ligence in this way is still valid, even if we have to admit that the proposed exercises in comprehension seem like the gesticulations of a streetlamp lighter who wants to make himself useful in a city that has switched to neon lighting.
viii Premises
These answers will no doubt disappoint. Clearly, this is not so much about precise inquiries as an evasive maneuver in the face of embarrassment. But was an affirmative answer really to be expected? The Tao in the mouths of Western writers . . . is it not just a Joker card one plays when it comes to promising more than can be delivered? Oh, Taoism! Magic formula for immediate wholeness and lab-made safety, courtesy of atomic physics! The enigmatic syllable “Tao” has recently fallen into the category of kitsch, and those who henceforth commit themselves to its bright magic will be suspected of having joined the New Age choir singing holistic couplets. But I consider it a priori the very center of my work to make myself available for suspicion. After all, philosophers have previously only questioned the interpretation of the world made by other people – it is necessary to engage in it.
“Eurotaoism” – to hint at a more serious answer – is also a title for the attempt to call attention to the peculiarity of the history-making continent in such an urgent way that a merely superficial critique of it can no longer become plausible. Even if we recognize Eastern wisdom as an impressive and singular greatness, Asian imports alone will not save the Western-mobilized world. The initiative of “Americotaoism” is just that – a response to the “crisis of the West” by importing holistic fast food from the Far East. Of course, this fast food sells itself as Nouvelle Cuisine; it relies on innovation as if it were an irresistible recipe, serves up planetary paradigm shifts like courses on a traditional menu, and earnestly promises that the raw fish course will be followed by a tender Aquarian chop-suey. But as one might fear, the scope of New Thinking amounts to nothing more than suggesting that we eat our ideas with chopsticks from now on – “you are what you eat. ”
The present response concedes the validity of such Californian suggestions where they have their place. It serves to remind, however, as humbly as possible and as defiantly as necessary, that there are dishes – to stay with the metaphor – that would leave us hungry with chopsticks in our hand. And these are – literally speaking now – the large-scale phenomena which emerged from the Old European epistemic-messianic substance and became effective on a planetary scale: history, science, industry, mass communication, speed. Even if these are not a constant topic of discussion, the essays in this field constantly gravitate around them. They form the criteria for thought capable of thinking the present. In the face of such thorny phenomena, it may seem like mockery to quote the round world of ancient Chinese polarities. If the title of this book nevertheless does so, it is to recall the ironic scope of self-generated problems at the place where the launching pads of the modernizing expeditions
Premises ix
were mounted. From there on out, one would have to be a Taoist to endure the insight that even Taoism can’t help us anymore.
Why, then, Eurotaoism? In this strange word we hear the remaining echoes of the history-making discontent that drove the great revolu- tions of modernity. We also hear it chime astonishment that nothing better came out of the European uprisings into the new than the all too current drift towards catastrophe. As a picaresque term, it has something of that “jaded bitterness” from which the guiding intellectual forces of earlier times wanted to distill the knowledge of revolution. But wearing a jester’s hat, the word now heralds an alternative critique of modernity – a critique of planetary mobili- zation as a false permanent revolution. Coupled with the subtitle – “Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics” – the term gradually becomes reasonable in a rather crazy way. This is also evident by the fact that it will no longer play a role in what is to follow. The word appears only once more – the reader will have to guess to what purpose.
Like all that I have previously published, these texts are subversive exercises against the absolutism of history and socialization. Instead of orienting ourselves by the progressive norm that so quickly degenerates to a forward crawl, I recommend being attentive to sideways mobility. That is what the recourse to the ancient cynical intervention and the allusion to the utopian sharp wit of the man in the barrel were about, only in a more indirect and ambiguous way. In the meantime, the amusement over the critique of cynicism has dissipated; among those capable of judgment, nothing remains of the misunderstanding that critique would thus be reduced to mere pantomime. The thing that always emerges from the discovery of pantomime – the understanding of gesture, gesticulation, and movement – has crossed over into suggestions for a theory of civilizing movement; a theory in which the life-or-death difference between mobility and mobilization presents itself as criterion of an alternative “ethics. ” Thus, the following pages contain a new version of critical theory in its embryonic form – not of “society” but of the Western type of progressive process that is played out by modern societies. In the current world process, which exhibits an accelerated movement towards catastrophe, people – as the perpetrators and victims of mobilization – experience their predominant life form as something that leads the wrong way. In their characteristics as perpetrators, they at the same time learn of their ability to be so completely in agreement with the trend towards the wrong thing that they identify with it. Thus, a critical theory of mobilization is not just a translation of the critique of alienation into a language
x Premises
of kinetics. One has to assume that within the most hazardous accelerations of the present, something is executed that stems from what is our own, what is closest to us – in other words, something self-intended. If this is the case, then a critical theory of society is no longer possible, since there is no actual difference between the critique itself and the object of that critique – unless the critique would first turn its thinking against itself and then also examine what is of one’s own, nearest and self-intended, as well.
This kind of critique has so far only existed in the form of theology. Theologians have enjoyed the prerogative to critique the world as such in the name of an Other that is superior to the world, so that that which is one’s own was also subject to criticism. In this book, I attempt to repeat a critique of this kind in a non-theological way. This presupposes that the critical spirit can break away from the world to distance and transform what is one’s own, nearest and self-intended, too. Such a critique explodes the cynical-melancholy notion of a fallen world, one that nowadays sells itself everywhere as post-modern acceptance. It also eschews masochistic total contemplation, which leads to a metaphysical “drop-out-ism. ” Neither escapist nor in agreement, the goal of alternative critique is to advance a critical theory of being-in-the- world. It would become plausible in the moment it successfully indicated a non-theological space for distance from the world – opened up a transcendence for the purpose of methodology, if you will. I am of the opinion that we are at the beginning stages of such a theory. Its center forms an analytics of coming-into-the-world2 where the position of philosophical anthropology that humans are “here” loses its validity – we may no longer carelessly assume that “existence” and “being-in-the-world” can be attributed to humans. The presumption that “human beings” are already “in the world” and “exist” becomes corrected by a Socratic maieutic method that deals with arriving on earth and generating worlds, as well as the risk of failure associated with both efforts. What was previously considered to be existential philosophy becomes transformed into a cosmology of the individual – each birth is a chance for a world to sprout up. Maieutic philosophy speaks of the exertion that actually emerging individuals must generate in order to be there. What is thus brought into discussion follows the movement of the life that comes into the world. In this way, the maieutic method once again speaks a serious language – a dramatic world language about the commonly inevitable.
As we will see, only trace elements of these kinds of reflections have previously been available to us in an explicit way – elements that inhabit the space between Heidegger and Bloch, Cioran and
Premises xi
Lao Tzu (a space that is barely still surveyed or even perceived). Nevertheless it must be said – to avoid creating confusion – that the explicit elements of the following will appear obscure without the implicit. The reflections steer towards the thesis that the idea of critique without reserves against the unreasonable demands of the world will remain hollow. The question of whether a critical theory is still possible depends on resolving the problem of whether an enlightened a-cosmism may not be a necessary mode of lucid life. 3
It is no wonder that serious tones predominate in this book. Other tones have joined the amoral cabaret that wanted to save itself from tragedy. The Teutonic vein in particular stands out more noticeably, weighing down the carefree cheer of the otherwise preferred Southern tone. Thin vibrations of Chinese elements add themselves to the mix and a fatal music of the spheres is barely perceptible against the death march of hardness, strength, skill. It would also be wrong to deny that, here and there, a Jewish cantor’s world lament can be heard, for whom every man-made wall becomes a Wailing one. The dedication to Jacob Taubes – one of the last great repre- sentatives of the Jewish spirit in the German language – who died in March 1987, holds a commitment to the memory of apocalypticism as a Jewish alternative to the optimism of the moderns and the tragicism of neo-heroics. It is in Taubes’ work that I experienced an unforgettable enlightenment about that which Manés Sperber calls the religion of good memory.
A nuance will surely elude a reader who is unfamiliar with the landscape where these texts largely came into being. In them, at least to my perception, some of that ahistorical calm of a Provençal summer has been stored. They assume a refutation of city neuroses through heat and light; you may sense the spirit of that place in the way that thoughts at the end of a given paragraph do not always continue on logically – there are frequent imperceptible interrup- tions between one sentence and the next. The warmth of the land seeps into these gaps – a land that rests upon itself in a burning euphoria. In such a climate, one’s very physiological functions change. Thinking automatically becomes a measure against the heat even though it cannot entirely help but become a symptom of it as well – cruelly rested, it glints at the reader mischievously, as if offering an invitation to a long siesta; it seems to be joviality itself at play. Sitting at Northern desks, one might not be able to immedi- ately pick up on these conditions because different requirements apply to them. Nevertheless, to understand the matters at hand, one must go to the countryside from time to time. The task of discov- ering a slower pace applies to philosophy as well.
The more horses you hitch up, the faster it goes – I mean, not tearing the block out of the foundations, which is impossible, but tearing the reins and so travelling empty and joyful.
Franz Kafka4
1
THE MODERN AGE AS MOBILIZATION
May your fate be to live in interesting times.
Ancient Chinese curse
Can humans still comprehend the general development of the modern world that they have set in motion? A growing list of contemporaries denies that it is possible – their answers are based on arguments and not just instinctual reactions. For this reason, there is much talk of a post-modern condition at the end of this interesting century. 1 But the inscrutable aspects of our times are so uniquely new that we must not equate our current confusions of the mind with pre-modern surrenders of human reason when confronted with the mysteries of the world.
One idea has rooted itself in pre-modern ways of thinking more deeply than any other: nothing turns out the way it was planned. For even though man may propose, it is still the gods who dispose, whatever the case may be. The a priori of any Old World practical life experience is: if it happens as it should, it happens differently than it was planned. This experience cannot rid itself of the constant awareness that human plans and actions always move in the recesses of an insurmountable passivity. But with the advent of modernity, things happen in a new way – just as humans have planned. They do so because people in the West, monks, merchants, physicians, architects, painters, and cannon-makers – in summa geniuses and engineers – have begun to organize their way of thinking in an entirely new way; and (one would like to say, suddenly) a new kind of “praxis” joins this reorganization of thought as the technological
2 The Modern Age as Mobilization
counterpart of thinking and intervenes in the events of the world with a revolutionary impact. Modernity as a techno-political composite has unhinged the old familiar equilibrium between human power and powerlessness. Spurred on by a history-making amalgam of aggression and optimism, modernity promises us a world in which things turn out as planned because people are able to accomplish what they want – and if not, they are able and willing to learn. In modern times, it is the will to power of the can-do spirit that makes the world go around.
It is for one reason only that we call our epoch modern: people of the West have been so captivated and impressed by their own great deeds that they found the courage to proclaim that they had created the world on their own. This and nothing else constitutes the very core of what we (often defensively) refer to as the project of modernity. This project nature of the modern era stems from the grand assumption that we will soon be able to control the world to such an extent that nothing continues to develop unless we wisely choose to maintain it with our own actions. The modern project is thus established on the basis of a kinetic utopia – something that has never been explicitly articulated: the total movement of the world is to be the implementation of our plans for it. The movements of our day-to-day lives become progressively identical with the movement of the world itself; the process of the world as a whole increasingly resembles an expression of our lives – things occur as planned because that which occurs is increasingly an event of our making. It would not suffice to say that modernity set out to make history from this point forward. At its innermost core, modernity wants to create nature in addition to history. As this evil century draws to a close, it dawns on us that making history was just a pretext. The crucial issue of the modern era is the nature that is to be made.
As soon as modernity’s kinetic utopia is revealed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems come to light – what we have learned in the good old modern age no longer applies to anything. The paradoxes displayed by the very developments of the modern era constitute the thus newly formed and unusual problem world: a post-history superimposes itself onto history, an epinature onto nature, and a post-modernity onto modernity. Meanwhile, the inevitable transformation of modernity into post-modernity becomes obvious to any onlooker. It results from the observation that even modern events occur differently than planned – but not because man proposes and god disposes; rather, this notion that “it must occur differently” is both inherent in and not quite understood by our thoughts and actions, and it pushes right through our venture with an unstoppable irony. Things do not happen according to plan
The Modern Age as Mobilization 3
because we have left movement out of the calculation. Things unfail- ingly do not happen according to plan because as we think through and bring forth what is supposed to occur, we automatically set in motion something else as a by-product – something we did not think about, did not want, and failed to consider. Once set in motion, it propels itself forward with a dangerous tenacity. It seems that we have surrounded ourselves with an epinature of consequences that slip away from the grasp of our “history-making” praxis like a secondary physis. With mounting unease, we watch as the self- perpetuating side-effects of modern progress spill over into the controlled projects; a fatally foreign movement breaks off from this very core of the modern enterprise, from within the consciousness of a spontaneous independence that is guided by reason – and it slips away from us in every direction. What looked like a controlled uprising towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrol- lable and catastrophic hetero-mobility. Precisely because so much comes about through our actions, just as we have planned, develop- ments as a whole turn out explosively and affect us quite differently.
This is the post-modern status quo, and it is actually a lapsus – a regressive step. A philosophical post-modernism made up of insights and not merely nostalgic posturing or bad moods can only be possible today because, given the actual course of events, powerful arguments make it clear that the bubble of modernity’s kinetic utopia has burst. Unforeseen processes have gained momentum, and it is doubtful whether humans can ever rein them back in and divert them to a trajectory that will not prove fatal.
If we were to give a philosophical name to the drift of the current “civilizing process” (a dreadful term that burns the tongue), we would have to say that it resembles a thinking avalanche. What is a thinking avalanche? We do not know, but it is certainly what we are. We were hardly predictable as such, but this astounding avalanche is nevertheless plunging towards the valley as we speak. The “civilizing process” (the tongue begins to ache) turns out to be a pressing ontological oddity. What becomes a given in this process is nothing other than a self-reflexive natural catastrophe. And like all that is calamitous, this, too, is philosophically very interesting. The thinking avalanche is the industrial post-Christian counterpart to Pascal’s thinking reed, which once upon a time trembled in the icy breath of the early modern era. Meanwhile, the most fragile of all creatures, the human, avalanche qui pense, is no longer endangered by the storm of life alone – he is himself setting off the landslides that can bury him alive.
Leaving these rather lyrical intimations behind, we will now turn to the analytical and feel our way forward through the no-man’s-land
4 The Modern Age as Mobilization
between old concepts and new circumstances. Now more than ever, a critique of the current times must begin with the admission that we do not know how things happen to us. We will begin by seeking that which is incomprehensible, unwritten, and overlooked in the current “civilizing process. ” At this point, it might only be possible to establish a few bridgeheads of articulation in the blind and murky vortex of events. I do not go so far as to claim that an alternative “critical theory” of the modern age could already take shape in these pages. What I do claim is merely this: first, that both of the well-known versions of critical theory (the Marxist and Frankfurt Schools primarily come to mind) have up to now remained irrelevant because either they do not grasp their object – the kinetic reality of modernity as mobilization – or they are unable to point out a critical difference to it because they are mobilizers themselves based on the effect they have; second, that diagnoses of present times must be brought into a kinetic and kinesthetic dimension because if they are not, all talk of modernity bypasses what is most real. The following diagnostic exercises are post-modern only insofar as they stem from a readiness to formulate the modern active voice into the passive voice. To think from a post-modern position is to explicitly own up to the congestion, vortices, vacuities, and depressions that come with the kind of spontaneity that the modern era has triggered. With respect to philosophy, the post-modern can perhaps best be recognized by its reformulation of modernity’s strong and proud sentences in the active voice into those in either passive or imper- sonal phrases. What is thereby revealed is not only a grammatical engagement but also an ontological one – what is at stake is nothing less than the possibility to include suffering, incidents, and processes in our contemporary idea of “being” alongside deeds, dates, and productions. Modernity has overfed us with theories of action – what it knew of suffering is only that it could be “used” as an engine for actions. But what if the necessity to develop a passionate consciousness of human mortality arose from today’s numerous cultural approaches to post-modernism; a consciousness of a second passivity that can only develop on the flipside of the project that is modernity? Seen from the point of view of a second passivity, what does the historically moved world mean? What meaning does the made and to-be-made history retain for us, of which leading modern philosophers have expected so much? If the modern era really was a revolt of the subject against its first passivity – some say it was a campaign to disrupt fate – what is to be made, then, of the second passivity that weighs on history as suffering, on our ability to make history as anxiety, and on this dubious enterprise called modern life as a compulsion to participate in it?
The Modern Age as Mobilization 5
At the margins of modernity, history and fate engage yet again in unforeseen duels. It is as if a quasi-karmic debit interrupts the deeds and doers in history to undermine their very projects and intentions. We will investigate this “karmic” irony in kinetic terms. For it is clear that neither the philosophy of history proper nor classical Eastern concepts of karma (i. e. moral causality of actions) can adequately interpret the fact that things occur differently than planned in modern times. Thus, it is neither the fault of the antag- onist in the most recent battle2 nor due to an unpaid karmic debt of the actors that a history planned with the best intentions does not succeed. The historical movement gets out of hand because of the inherent aspects of making history. Whoever moves always moves more than just themselves. Whoever makes history always makes more than just history. This “more” is the typo that distorts the neatly drawn-up text – it is the kinetic surplus which shoots beyond borders and past targets into a region not aimed for. The fatal “more” joins the momentum of the dead masses who have forgotten all about moral purposes once in motion. This kinetic capital blows up old worlds – it has nothing against them; it simply cannot be stopped on principle. It cannot help but make affairs dance to accelerated melodies.
In the meantime, the amusement over the critique of cynicism has dissipated; among those capable of judgment, nothing remains of the misunderstanding that critique would thus be reduced to mere pantomime. The thing that always emerges from the discovery of pantomime – the understanding of gesture, gesticulation, and movement – has crossed over into suggestions for a theory of civilizing movement; a theory in which the life-or-death difference between mobility and mobilization presents itself as criterion of an alternative “ethics. ” Thus, the following pages contain a new version of critical theory in its embryonic form – not of “society” but of the Western type of progressive process that is played out by modern societies. In the current world process, which exhibits an accelerated movement towards catastrophe, people – as the perpetrators and victims of mobilization – experience their predominant life form as something that leads the wrong way. In their characteristics as perpetrators, they at the same time learn of their ability to be so completely in agreement with the trend towards the wrong thing that they identify with it. Thus, a critical theory of mobilization is not just a translation of the critique of alienation into a language
x Premises
of kinetics. One has to assume that within the most hazardous accelerations of the present, something is executed that stems from what is our own, what is closest to us – in other words, something self-intended. If this is the case, then a critical theory of society is no longer possible, since there is no actual difference between the critique itself and the object of that critique – unless the critique would first turn its thinking against itself and then also examine what is of one’s own, nearest and self-intended, as well.
This kind of critique has so far only existed in the form of theology. Theologians have enjoyed the prerogative to critique the world as such in the name of an Other that is superior to the world, so that that which is one’s own was also subject to criticism. In this book, I attempt to repeat a critique of this kind in a non-theological way. This presupposes that the critical spirit can break away from the world to distance and transform what is one’s own, nearest and self-intended, too. Such a critique explodes the cynical-melancholy notion of a fallen world, one that nowadays sells itself everywhere as post-modern acceptance. It also eschews masochistic total contemplation, which leads to a metaphysical “drop-out-ism. ” Neither escapist nor in agreement, the goal of alternative critique is to advance a critical theory of being-in-the- world. It would become plausible in the moment it successfully indicated a non-theological space for distance from the world – opened up a transcendence for the purpose of methodology, if you will. I am of the opinion that we are at the beginning stages of such a theory. Its center forms an analytics of coming-into-the-world2 where the position of philosophical anthropology that humans are “here” loses its validity – we may no longer carelessly assume that “existence” and “being-in-the-world” can be attributed to humans. The presumption that “human beings” are already “in the world” and “exist” becomes corrected by a Socratic maieutic method that deals with arriving on earth and generating worlds, as well as the risk of failure associated with both efforts. What was previously considered to be existential philosophy becomes transformed into a cosmology of the individual – each birth is a chance for a world to sprout up. Maieutic philosophy speaks of the exertion that actually emerging individuals must generate in order to be there. What is thus brought into discussion follows the movement of the life that comes into the world. In this way, the maieutic method once again speaks a serious language – a dramatic world language about the commonly inevitable.
As we will see, only trace elements of these kinds of reflections have previously been available to us in an explicit way – elements that inhabit the space between Heidegger and Bloch, Cioran and
Premises xi
Lao Tzu (a space that is barely still surveyed or even perceived). Nevertheless it must be said – to avoid creating confusion – that the explicit elements of the following will appear obscure without the implicit. The reflections steer towards the thesis that the idea of critique without reserves against the unreasonable demands of the world will remain hollow. The question of whether a critical theory is still possible depends on resolving the problem of whether an enlightened a-cosmism may not be a necessary mode of lucid life. 3
It is no wonder that serious tones predominate in this book. Other tones have joined the amoral cabaret that wanted to save itself from tragedy. The Teutonic vein in particular stands out more noticeably, weighing down the carefree cheer of the otherwise preferred Southern tone. Thin vibrations of Chinese elements add themselves to the mix and a fatal music of the spheres is barely perceptible against the death march of hardness, strength, skill. It would also be wrong to deny that, here and there, a Jewish cantor’s world lament can be heard, for whom every man-made wall becomes a Wailing one. The dedication to Jacob Taubes – one of the last great repre- sentatives of the Jewish spirit in the German language – who died in March 1987, holds a commitment to the memory of apocalypticism as a Jewish alternative to the optimism of the moderns and the tragicism of neo-heroics. It is in Taubes’ work that I experienced an unforgettable enlightenment about that which Manés Sperber calls the religion of good memory.
A nuance will surely elude a reader who is unfamiliar with the landscape where these texts largely came into being. In them, at least to my perception, some of that ahistorical calm of a Provençal summer has been stored. They assume a refutation of city neuroses through heat and light; you may sense the spirit of that place in the way that thoughts at the end of a given paragraph do not always continue on logically – there are frequent imperceptible interrup- tions between one sentence and the next. The warmth of the land seeps into these gaps – a land that rests upon itself in a burning euphoria. In such a climate, one’s very physiological functions change. Thinking automatically becomes a measure against the heat even though it cannot entirely help but become a symptom of it as well – cruelly rested, it glints at the reader mischievously, as if offering an invitation to a long siesta; it seems to be joviality itself at play. Sitting at Northern desks, one might not be able to immedi- ately pick up on these conditions because different requirements apply to them. Nevertheless, to understand the matters at hand, one must go to the countryside from time to time. The task of discov- ering a slower pace applies to philosophy as well.
The more horses you hitch up, the faster it goes – I mean, not tearing the block out of the foundations, which is impossible, but tearing the reins and so travelling empty and joyful.
Franz Kafka4
1
THE MODERN AGE AS MOBILIZATION
May your fate be to live in interesting times.
Ancient Chinese curse
Can humans still comprehend the general development of the modern world that they have set in motion? A growing list of contemporaries denies that it is possible – their answers are based on arguments and not just instinctual reactions. For this reason, there is much talk of a post-modern condition at the end of this interesting century. 1 But the inscrutable aspects of our times are so uniquely new that we must not equate our current confusions of the mind with pre-modern surrenders of human reason when confronted with the mysteries of the world.
One idea has rooted itself in pre-modern ways of thinking more deeply than any other: nothing turns out the way it was planned. For even though man may propose, it is still the gods who dispose, whatever the case may be. The a priori of any Old World practical life experience is: if it happens as it should, it happens differently than it was planned. This experience cannot rid itself of the constant awareness that human plans and actions always move in the recesses of an insurmountable passivity. But with the advent of modernity, things happen in a new way – just as humans have planned. They do so because people in the West, monks, merchants, physicians, architects, painters, and cannon-makers – in summa geniuses and engineers – have begun to organize their way of thinking in an entirely new way; and (one would like to say, suddenly) a new kind of “praxis” joins this reorganization of thought as the technological
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counterpart of thinking and intervenes in the events of the world with a revolutionary impact. Modernity as a techno-political composite has unhinged the old familiar equilibrium between human power and powerlessness. Spurred on by a history-making amalgam of aggression and optimism, modernity promises us a world in which things turn out as planned because people are able to accomplish what they want – and if not, they are able and willing to learn. In modern times, it is the will to power of the can-do spirit that makes the world go around.
It is for one reason only that we call our epoch modern: people of the West have been so captivated and impressed by their own great deeds that they found the courage to proclaim that they had created the world on their own. This and nothing else constitutes the very core of what we (often defensively) refer to as the project of modernity. This project nature of the modern era stems from the grand assumption that we will soon be able to control the world to such an extent that nothing continues to develop unless we wisely choose to maintain it with our own actions. The modern project is thus established on the basis of a kinetic utopia – something that has never been explicitly articulated: the total movement of the world is to be the implementation of our plans for it. The movements of our day-to-day lives become progressively identical with the movement of the world itself; the process of the world as a whole increasingly resembles an expression of our lives – things occur as planned because that which occurs is increasingly an event of our making. It would not suffice to say that modernity set out to make history from this point forward. At its innermost core, modernity wants to create nature in addition to history. As this evil century draws to a close, it dawns on us that making history was just a pretext. The crucial issue of the modern era is the nature that is to be made.
As soon as modernity’s kinetic utopia is revealed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems come to light – what we have learned in the good old modern age no longer applies to anything. The paradoxes displayed by the very developments of the modern era constitute the thus newly formed and unusual problem world: a post-history superimposes itself onto history, an epinature onto nature, and a post-modernity onto modernity. Meanwhile, the inevitable transformation of modernity into post-modernity becomes obvious to any onlooker. It results from the observation that even modern events occur differently than planned – but not because man proposes and god disposes; rather, this notion that “it must occur differently” is both inherent in and not quite understood by our thoughts and actions, and it pushes right through our venture with an unstoppable irony. Things do not happen according to plan
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because we have left movement out of the calculation. Things unfail- ingly do not happen according to plan because as we think through and bring forth what is supposed to occur, we automatically set in motion something else as a by-product – something we did not think about, did not want, and failed to consider. Once set in motion, it propels itself forward with a dangerous tenacity. It seems that we have surrounded ourselves with an epinature of consequences that slip away from the grasp of our “history-making” praxis like a secondary physis. With mounting unease, we watch as the self- perpetuating side-effects of modern progress spill over into the controlled projects; a fatally foreign movement breaks off from this very core of the modern enterprise, from within the consciousness of a spontaneous independence that is guided by reason – and it slips away from us in every direction. What looked like a controlled uprising towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrol- lable and catastrophic hetero-mobility. Precisely because so much comes about through our actions, just as we have planned, develop- ments as a whole turn out explosively and affect us quite differently.
This is the post-modern status quo, and it is actually a lapsus – a regressive step. A philosophical post-modernism made up of insights and not merely nostalgic posturing or bad moods can only be possible today because, given the actual course of events, powerful arguments make it clear that the bubble of modernity’s kinetic utopia has burst. Unforeseen processes have gained momentum, and it is doubtful whether humans can ever rein them back in and divert them to a trajectory that will not prove fatal.
If we were to give a philosophical name to the drift of the current “civilizing process” (a dreadful term that burns the tongue), we would have to say that it resembles a thinking avalanche. What is a thinking avalanche? We do not know, but it is certainly what we are. We were hardly predictable as such, but this astounding avalanche is nevertheless plunging towards the valley as we speak. The “civilizing process” (the tongue begins to ache) turns out to be a pressing ontological oddity. What becomes a given in this process is nothing other than a self-reflexive natural catastrophe. And like all that is calamitous, this, too, is philosophically very interesting. The thinking avalanche is the industrial post-Christian counterpart to Pascal’s thinking reed, which once upon a time trembled in the icy breath of the early modern era. Meanwhile, the most fragile of all creatures, the human, avalanche qui pense, is no longer endangered by the storm of life alone – he is himself setting off the landslides that can bury him alive.
Leaving these rather lyrical intimations behind, we will now turn to the analytical and feel our way forward through the no-man’s-land
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between old concepts and new circumstances. Now more than ever, a critique of the current times must begin with the admission that we do not know how things happen to us. We will begin by seeking that which is incomprehensible, unwritten, and overlooked in the current “civilizing process. ” At this point, it might only be possible to establish a few bridgeheads of articulation in the blind and murky vortex of events. I do not go so far as to claim that an alternative “critical theory” of the modern age could already take shape in these pages. What I do claim is merely this: first, that both of the well-known versions of critical theory (the Marxist and Frankfurt Schools primarily come to mind) have up to now remained irrelevant because either they do not grasp their object – the kinetic reality of modernity as mobilization – or they are unable to point out a critical difference to it because they are mobilizers themselves based on the effect they have; second, that diagnoses of present times must be brought into a kinetic and kinesthetic dimension because if they are not, all talk of modernity bypasses what is most real. The following diagnostic exercises are post-modern only insofar as they stem from a readiness to formulate the modern active voice into the passive voice. To think from a post-modern position is to explicitly own up to the congestion, vortices, vacuities, and depressions that come with the kind of spontaneity that the modern era has triggered. With respect to philosophy, the post-modern can perhaps best be recognized by its reformulation of modernity’s strong and proud sentences in the active voice into those in either passive or imper- sonal phrases. What is thereby revealed is not only a grammatical engagement but also an ontological one – what is at stake is nothing less than the possibility to include suffering, incidents, and processes in our contemporary idea of “being” alongside deeds, dates, and productions. Modernity has overfed us with theories of action – what it knew of suffering is only that it could be “used” as an engine for actions. But what if the necessity to develop a passionate consciousness of human mortality arose from today’s numerous cultural approaches to post-modernism; a consciousness of a second passivity that can only develop on the flipside of the project that is modernity? Seen from the point of view of a second passivity, what does the historically moved world mean? What meaning does the made and to-be-made history retain for us, of which leading modern philosophers have expected so much? If the modern era really was a revolt of the subject against its first passivity – some say it was a campaign to disrupt fate – what is to be made, then, of the second passivity that weighs on history as suffering, on our ability to make history as anxiety, and on this dubious enterprise called modern life as a compulsion to participate in it?
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At the margins of modernity, history and fate engage yet again in unforeseen duels. It is as if a quasi-karmic debit interrupts the deeds and doers in history to undermine their very projects and intentions. We will investigate this “karmic” irony in kinetic terms. For it is clear that neither the philosophy of history proper nor classical Eastern concepts of karma (i. e. moral causality of actions) can adequately interpret the fact that things occur differently than planned in modern times. Thus, it is neither the fault of the antag- onist in the most recent battle2 nor due to an unpaid karmic debt of the actors that a history planned with the best intentions does not succeed. The historical movement gets out of hand because of the inherent aspects of making history. Whoever moves always moves more than just themselves. Whoever makes history always makes more than just history. This “more” is the typo that distorts the neatly drawn-up text – it is the kinetic surplus which shoots beyond borders and past targets into a region not aimed for. The fatal “more” joins the momentum of the dead masses who have forgotten all about moral purposes once in motion. This kinetic capital blows up old worlds – it has nothing against them; it simply cannot be stopped on principle. It cannot help but make affairs dance to accelerated melodies. It makes the flow of goods flow, fleets cruise, escalators glide, climates suddenly change, and faunas disappear. The naïve times in which humans could think that their movement was necessary for the world to move forward are over. Meanwhile, the movement goes on – the pure movement. While the gracious defenders of modern accomplishments bow down to theories of human actions and talk about the norms of the (latest) reasons for acting (they will certainly be promoted to directors of the future national parks of modernity), an ugly suspicion makes its rounds in the rest of the world: could kinetics and fate be one and the same?
The Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification
The following interpretation of the present is based on philo- sophical kinetics, which assumes three axioms: first, that we move in a world that is itself in motion; second, that the self-movement of the world both includes and surpasses our self-movement; third, that in modernity, the self-movements of the world emerge out of our self-movements, which are cumulatively added to world- movement. From these axioms, we can more or less completely develop the relationship between the Old World, the modern world, and the post-modern world.
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To show the modern world as one engaged in a catastrophe- bearing movement, we would have to assume that today’s world process received its dynamism from centuries of accumulated human initiatives. Thus, perceiving the modern age with an awareness of real events means accepting something that our intellectual conscience has resisted so far: a physics of freedom, a kinetics of moral initia- tives. Let us say it openly: this is the end of aestheticism in cultural theory. What seems emptiest, most external, most mechanical – movement (ungrudgingly left to the physicists and doctors of sports medicine to research) – intrudes into the humanities and immedi- ately proves to be the cardinal category of the moral and social spheres as well.
Marked by movement, the ethical-political adventures of the human mind become a branch of physics. While everywhere in the West ethics commissions hold meetings, while people of good will sacrifice their weekends in order to discuss the principles of a New Morality in idyllically located evangelical academies and political “study centers,” modernity’s best-kept secret seeps out of the studios of hermetic and philosophical fundamental research into the open. What nobody really wanted to know becomes increasingly evident. What nobody welcomed as an insight forces itself into our thoughts with a logical rigor that is altogether infuriating. Once spoken aloud, the revealed secret makes us wonder why something so obvious has not been brought to our attention long ago. Some urbanists and a few military people who liked to speculate knew it first; dodgy philosophers who mistrusted modernity adopted the matter; the wild eccentrics in the theory scenes of big cities jumped on the bandwagon; a few mundane feature articles in the culture and arts pages of newspapers and magazines took up the issue; soon many will claim that they have always known it. Known what, then? Well, the trivial fact that kinetics is the ethics of modernity.
The worrisome and even obscene nature of this emerging fact is only partially alleviated by relating it to well-known doctrines of progress. There, the liaison between kinetics and morality still seemed to be controlled morally. Indeed, modernity has also been defined in kinetic terms since the beginning, having had its manner of execution and realization determined to be progressive and forward-thinking. Progress is the concept of movement in which the ethical-kinetic self-awareness of modernity is both expressed and concealed to the highest degree. If we are talking about progress, what we really mean is the kinetic and kinesthetic ground motive of a modernity that only aims to remove the limits of human self-movement. Initially we assumed (both rightly and wrongly) that progress is a “moral” initiative which would not rest until
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it actualized its goals of improvement. The experience of a true progress entails that a worthwhile human initiative stems “from within itself,” burst the bounds of its previous mobility, widen its circle of influence, and bring itself to the fore in good conscience vis-à-vis both its inner inhibitions and outside resistance.
The current epoch has expressed its kinetic self-conception in doctrines of progress in the fields of politics, technology, and the philosophy of history. But it never revealed its secret tendency to take moral motives seriously only in their capacity as motors for external movement. Part of the essence of progressive processes is that they begin with ethical initiatives so that they can continue in their kinetic momentum alone. One of the great secrets of “progress” still remains: how could it at its onset fuse mores and physics, motives and movement into an effective unit? This secret leads us to the active center of what modern philosophy calls subjectivity. The essence of subjectivity is inseparable from the mysterious force that expresses itself as the ability to initiate new chains of movement which we label “actions. ” If something like progress really exists, then it does so because movements that originate in subjectivity undeniably occur. Kinetically, these are the very material from which modernity is built. Whenever the thought of “progress” goes through the mind of a subject, the self-igniting mechanism within that thought already initiates progress-like self- movements. The person who truly knows what progress is already moves within what has been conceptualized – they know it, because they have already progressed and continue to progress further. The person who grasps modernity can only grasp it on the basis of this self-igniting self-movement, without which modernity would not exist. Already in their self-creation, they must have taken a good step forward – the very step that continues to be the very kinetic element of further progress. Progress is initiated by this step into a second step, one that performs its own self-introduction in order to then surpass itself. This is why the notion of progress does not signify a mere change of location where an agent moves from point A to point B. A “step” is essentially only progressive if it leads to an increase in the “ability to take steps. ” This provides us with the formula of the modernizing process: progress is movement towards movement, movement towards greater movement, and movement towards an increased ability to move.
In modernity, ethics can directly emerge from kinetics only due to the validity of this formula. Ethical imperatives of the modern kind no longer exist, unless they are also simultaneously kinetic impulses. The categorical impulse of modernity is: in order to continu- ously exert ourselves as progressive beings, we should overcome
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all situations in which humans are constricted in their movements, stuck within themselves, without freedom and pitiful. 3
To the extent that we as modern subjects understand freedom to be a priori the freedom of movement, we can only conceive of progress as a movement that leads to increased mobility. In their physical sense, free movements are always steps towards freedom of movement; even when we speak of self-determination, we really always mean self-movement. Prior to any difference between “is” and “ought,” “being” is determined in modernity as an “ought to be” and an “I want to be” of increased mobility. Ontologically, modernity is a pure being-towards-movement. This interpretation of “being” is valid for us because it becomes irresistibly real through us. It is irresistibly valid because it is immune to backlash and morally ruinous for any negation of it. It becomes real because it is carried out by us in the mode of a spontaneous and uncriticizable will. The motives that pulsate in the being-towards-movement seem to come from the inner core of what we want and have to want. If the fundamental process of modernity indeed advertises itself as the “self-freeing movement of humankind,” then it is a process that we do not utterly wish to reject and a movement that we absolutely cannot make. A moral-kinetic automatism seems to be at work here – one that makes us not only “condemned to be free”4 but also to be in constant free movement.
If we visualize the great revolutions of the modern world as occurring on the scale of our own lives, we notice a profound contradiction in our steps towards a higher degree of movement. To be sure, the thrusts towards movement of modern generations have provided us with enormous leeway in numerous fields – what members of the modern bourgeoisie have been able to attain within the span of hardly two centuries with respect to mobility in the field of politics, economy, language, information, traffic, expression, and sexuality borders on the miraculous; herein a kinetic “modern tradition” becomes evident, regardless of how questionable the possibility of its continuation may be. But instead of guiding the agents of modernity to spirited5 mobility, most of the steps of progress have immediately led to new kinds of forced movements which compete with the most stifling endings of pre-modern times in their depth of alienation and misery.
Modern “dynamism” helped preserve the spiritless rigor of super-mobile forms. Whoever wishes to know what this specifi- cally means must answer the following question correctly: what do machines, industrial companies, and management staff in politics and economics have in common? All three hold the exemplary kinetic lesson for citizens of modernity by efficiently demonstrating
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to them what self-movement wants and does: to switch itself on in order to stay on; to activate itself in order to stay running at any cost. This is the higher school of automation which sees no funda- mental difference between intelligent machines and human agents. If the kinetic self activates and takes the initiative, it turns into the central agency of the self-operating process via its “own” impetus.
The self-initiating subject is the miller of modernity’s “mill grinding itself” – this is what the poet Novalis in his 1799 essay “Christendom or Europe” called the principle of movement of the then activated human-nature factory that gained momentum through prosaic self-motivating entrepreneurial types: Protestants, Brits, Prussians, and professors. Novalis was also the first to concep- tualize the kinetic utopia of modernity by thinking the subject and the machine together in the same image: the “mill of itself” is the “true perpetuum mobile” that is “driven by the stream of chance and floating on it,”6 uniting two kinds of movement (endogenous self- movement and exogenous foreign movement) into a consolidated motion – a motion whose dynamism is admittedly also its bleakness – an ego-driven drift into vacuity, catastrophe, lack of inhibition, and deadliness.
The diagnostic power of Novalis’ formulations is only today becoming apparent to us in its full scope. Meanwhile, we now know (without the help of even a hint of romantic irony) what the self manages to do in “its” machine, even if this machine is not exactly a self-grinding mill. Modern society has realized at least one of its utopian plans, namely that of total automobilization – the state in which every self that is of age moves on its own at the wheel of its self-moving machine. It is because the modern self cannot be thought of at all without the notion of its movement that the I and the automobile belong together in a metaphysical way, like the body and soul of one and the same unit of motion. The automobile is the technological double of the principally active transcendental subject.
That is why the automobile is the sanctum of modernity; it is the cultish center of a kinetic world religion; it is the sacrament on wheels that lets us take part in something that moves faster than we do. A person who drives a car gets closer to the numinous and feels how their small self expands to a higher self that makes the total world of highways into a home for us and makes us aware that we are called to something more than a half-animal pedestrian life.
From an auto-motorist view, we lived in Messianic time for a little while, in the fulfilled time where two-cycle engine vehicles parked peacefully next to twelve-cylinder vehicles – the messiah ruled with low emissions in his kingdom; with electronic fuel injection and an
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anti-locking system, with a controlled catalyst and turbo charger, he brought his subjects into heavenly motion. But not all contem- poraries were convinced that this last kingdom of automobiles was also a paradise on earth. The devil had a part to play and made sure to occasionally turn general self-movement into general immobility. In such moments it becomes clear – even if no one wants to admit it to themselves – that we have long been exiled from the paradise of modernity and will have to learn the post-modern Stop-and-Go by the sweat of our brow from now on. The large-scale traffic jams on the summer highways of Central Europe (and the legendary power outages in New York that can make us feel nostalgic) are thus phenomena of historico-philosophical importance and even have a religio-historical significance. It is through them that a piece of false modernity fails and in them that we encounter the end of an illusion – they are the kinetic Good Friday when all hope for redemption through acceleration becomes lost. On those scorching afternoons in the funnel of Lyon, in the Rhine valley hell near Cologne, or wedged in at Irschenberg, Europe’s longest parking lot, where 1. 5 miles of unmoving hot steel stretches out in either direction, dark historico-philosophical insights rise up like exhaust fumes and people begin to speak in tongues, uttering something critical about contemporary culture; obituaries of modernity waft from the side windows and, regardless of their educational level, those trapped in their vehicles begin to suspect that it cannot go on like this for much longer. Another “era” looms on the horizon. Even those who have never heard the term “post-modernity” are already familiar with what it entails on those afternoons spent in traffic. And in fact, this can be reformulated in terms of cultural theory: wherever unleashed self-movements form congestions or vortices, they generate the beginnings of an experience where the modern active turns into the post-modern passive.