No More Learning

HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Doesn’t that undermine the authority of the philosopher?
SLOTERDIJK: I would find it more difficult if a philosopher confused himself with the author of his writings. As soon as phi- losophers try to be authorities they turn into what they would dearly like to have been in the twentieth century: literary figures with a worldview. If they act as ideologues and leaders in the crisis, they release harmful emissions into society and produce illusory certain- ties with which people have identified, often in a naive and violent way. If there has been a learning process in philosophy in the past
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Frank Hartmann and Klaus Taschwer appeared under the title ‘Gute Theorie lamentiert nicht’ [‘Good Theory Doesn’t Complain’], in Telepolis (8 June 2004). Available at: <http://www. heise. de/tp/artikel/17/17554/1. html>.
Frank Hartmann has been a professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar since 2009. Klaus Taschwer is a freelance social scientist and schol- arly journalist. He lives and works in Vienna.
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fifty years, it is probably that we have to stop this kind of ideological emission, if possible.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: You use particularly soft concepts for your theory, such as bubbles and foam. Aren’t you making it too easy for your critics?
SLOTERDIJK: Critics want to have it easy, and a kind author respects that. Unfortunately, I don’t always succeed in being kind, which means I sometimes tie the choice of concepts to a character test for the reader. If we talk about foaming, for example, the verbal association of ‘whipping up foam’ is awfully close. I’m watching the critics to see if they can resist being tempted by the cheapest way to use ideas. Good readers understand it’s a matter of letting the images and concepts do their work.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Sociologists have recently used the concept of the network to describe contemporary society. Does that make sense to you?
SLOTERDIJK: A great deal, in fact. I am fond of quoting Bruno Latour, who has proposed replacing the concept of society with that of agent networks. The term stands for a post-sociological form of reflection that has much to offer. It allows us to respect the rela- tive autonomy of the individual nodes in relation to the rest of the network far more than if we start with a concept of society defined from above.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Why do you use the metaphor of foam?
SLOTERDIJK: I want to correct the reduced character of network metaphors. When talking about nets we are using starkly reductive geometry, that is, simply the one- or two-dimensional forms of the point and the line. The term ‘foam’, on the other hand, brings a three-dimensional construct into play from the very beginning. Whereas in network models the individual points have no volume, and therefore do not live, the image of foam offers the perspective on a theory of household diversity. A household is a successful structure of life. What I am searching for is a theory of humans as beings living in homes, and a theory of agglomera- tion of those beings in their diverse forms of living and gathering together.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What is your own judgement on your book?
SLOTERDIJK: It is worth something on a scale that doesn’t exist yet. Because this type of book is new, we can’t judge its value. It would already have to be canonical to have a value, but if it were canonical it would not have any innovative power. You can’t have value and novelty at the same time. This is clear in the dynamic
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of de-valorization that surrounds new approaches. As soon as the owners of shares in older theories notice that a new value has ventured the launch on the stock exchange, they are faced with the question: to buy or not to buy? Anyone who wants to keep the old values appreciates the new ones less.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What kind of target audience do you envisage for your theory?
SLOTERDIJK: The spheres project is aimed at members of professions that evolve fundamental reflections out of their own activity. I am thinking particularly of architects, climatologists, sociologists and macro-historians, anthropologists, doctors, teach- ers and theologians. But I’m not only reaching out to professionals – I’m also very interested in the independent readers we used to call dilettantes. Generally, I’m addressing a group of people interested in therapeutic issues in the widest sense, because the real purpose of my book is to reformulate metaphysical problems as immunological problems. In my opinion, philosophy is only meaningful today as general immunology, which aims at knowing how successes in life can be secured in posterity. This makes Spheres generally a book for people who want to get fit with the aid of thinking.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: And how will academic philoso- phy react to that?
SLOTERDIJK: Such a heterodox book is probably beyond the scope of established philosophical positions.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Would you agree with associating your spherology positions with A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, or Empire by Hardt and Negri?
SLOTERDIJK: These books would fit nicely together on the shelves. It is true, my book relates better to this system of thought than to any other. In its own way it is a theory of a world liquefied with money, and in that sense it is close to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Incidentally, my editor, who begged me not to write a fourth volume, is horrified because there will be a topical appendix to Spheres, a little dinghy of 400 pages titled Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [In the World Interior of Capital]. It contains my counter-proposal to Negri and Hardt.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What does that look like?
SLOTERDIJK: Empire is an interesting, radical book, but it is based on a confusing concept because talking about empire actu- ally blurs the difference the authors wanted to discuss. If the present world is treated as ‘empire’ in the singular, we miss the point that the present world of capital and comfort is a highly exclusive structure. Instead, I adopt Dostoyevsky’s image of the Crystal Palace that he used as early as the 1860s to describe the consumerist Western
Good Theory Doesn’t Complain 109
world. Notes from the Underground should be reread today – it is the Magna Carta of the resistance to globalization and of anti- modern resentment. From Dostoyevsky we get to both Attac and the Islamists. The great advantage of the Crystal Palace metaphor is that the name describes the key thing: we are dealing here with a building that creates an enormous inside/outside difference. This emphasis is missing in the term ‘empire’ because it suggests every- thing has already been covered by the system. That is totally wrong. The effective capital zone is a larger but strictly exclusive space – borrowing from Rilke, I use the term ‘the world interior of capital’. If you look closely you can see that Negri uses a Gnostic concept of system opposition. He cultivates a mysticism of being oppositional that needs the whole as an opponent, just as Christ once used the world as a foil for escape from the world. I read that book as a requiem mass for left-wing radicalism.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: You use concepts like ‘affluence bubble’ or ‘pampering groups’ in your book. Is that appropriate in the face of rising unemployment and shrinking social services?
SLOTERDIJK: You can recognize good theory by the fact that it doesn’t complain. The present crisis offers us a better view of our affluence bubble from the outside. Since the time the exclusion dynamic became more acute internally, the inclusions have also become more conspicuous for theory. The pampering theory of Spheres III has a precise date: it reacts to the crisis of the therapy and nanny state. In the present twilight of prosperity, the differences between the pampering classes in the population are tangible. In other words, I am presenting a crisis theory – but, unlike classical Marxism, it does not derive a tendency towards impoverishment from this. It uses a break in pampering to develop a general theory of human luxury and constitutive pampering.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: How far will the twilight of afflu- ence go?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think Germany will witness a dismantling of the welfare state on the model of the United States. The posi- tions of social democracy in Europe are too firmly consolidated, at least on the continental mainland. By social democracy, I mean the structure of welfare policy as a whole rather than the parties of that name.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What does that mean?
SLOTERDIJK: I am convinced there can be no democratic party in the parliaments of continental Europe that does not have a social agenda. The CSU [German Christian Social Union] in its Bavarian form, for example, is much more social democratic than the SPD [German Social Democratic Party] under Schröder on the
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national level. 1 Social democracy describes the understanding of the dynamic of the economy driven by mass purchasing power – and that is at the basis of every kind of modern party democracy. Since the 1980s boom, most people know that economic growth can’t occur without a degree of mass frivolity. That’s why all politicians have lately settled down to the mix of security and frivolity that fits the system. It would simply be impossible to communicate a policy of mass impoverishment, particularly from the viewpoint of capital interests, which people in system-critical circles often continue to identify with conservative interests, which is increasingly absurd. The present problem involves the public getting accustomed to leaving out a bottom section of the total state benefits . . .
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: . . . in the sense of a two-thirds society?
SLOTERDIJK: To begin with, more of a nine-tenths society or, at worst, a four-fifths society. In this context I’m quoting subver- sive literature such as the Poverty Report of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides quite astonishing data: if we look at poverty as a dynamic problem, only 1. 7 per cent of the population in the entire area surveyed appears as permanently poor.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What should we do with the bottom segment?
SLOTERDIJK: The traditional left would have claimed that our moral attitude of direct solidarity should be enough to carry those who are cut off from the system. Today, even on the left, nobody dares to say we must go back to forms of direct solidarity. And that is wrong, because without regeneration of direct solidarity social coherence as a whole will be an illusion. In this sense, the Spheres project is also an attempt to treat the total sclerosis of left-wing dis- course with therapy.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Is your spherology a left-wing project, then?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely, to a great extent. It would be too hasty to read the way I move between various disciplines and tradi- tions as an indicator of right-wing sympathies. The Spheres project examines where the sources of real acts of solidarity come from. I would like to use atmospheric analysis to help formulate a language of participation that the left has mistakenly vacated to traditional- ists or right-wingers. People on the left will have to learn the ethics
1 Gerhard Schröder (b. 1944) is a politician and a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005.
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of generosity. In any case, we have to find a completely new descrip- tion for the ability of people who are not immediate neighbours to be mutually interdependent. It’s impossible to achieve this with the tired old vocabularies of class struggle that wore out a long time ago.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Interdependence among strangers is a question posed by the new twenty-five-member European Union as well. Ten years ago you published a book with the title Falls Europa erwacht [If Europe Awakes]. 2 Austria’s Federal Chancellor quoted it just recently. Has Europe become more wide-awake in the meantime?
SLOTERDIJK: I really don’t know if social systems can sleep and whether nations are collectives that can be woken up. But it is a fact that since the debacle of 1945 the Europeans have fallen victim to a lethargocracy, the rule of lethargy. Throughout all the hectic activity, paralysis has held sway almost everywhere. What we need now is for the Europeans to develop positive concepts from their achievements. In future, they should talk more self-confidently about their post-heroic and post-imperialist way of life and political style. There are signs that a new European self-affirmation is taking root, expressing those tendencies, and in that sense, perhaps, we can speak of awakening.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Is this possible awakening related to the present nightmares of the USA in Iraq?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely. The Bush era has already had an irre- versible historical effect. The Atlantic alliance of the Cold War era has collapsed under it. The Atlantic is seen as frontier waters again, and no longer as the new Mediterranean. Europe has a Western border again for the first time in many years.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What about the border to the East? I’m thinking of the European Union enlargement.
SLOTERDIJK: I seriously believe the EU enlargement on 2 May marks the end of the post-war era. August 1914 and May 2004 are key dates in the history seen as a whole. Europe is occupying its historically evolved borders once again. It has reached its territo- rial optimum – further expansion would probably be disastrous. We have decades ahead of consistent transfer benefits to support the new EU states. That will bring tensions, of course, but they will be very meaningful. We have seen that such injections of funds
2 Peter Sloterdijk, Falls Europa erwacht: Gedanken zum Programm einer Weltmacht am Ende des Zeitalters ihrer politischen Absence (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 1994.
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can function in relation to the Spanish or Irish economic miracles. Nobody knows whether the same thing can work with 40 million Poles and their national economy, which is very backward.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What are the prospects of Turkey joining the EU?
SLOTERDIJK: The answer is self-evident, considering the hap- hazard catch-up dynamic of the new EU states. With twenty-five members we shall never reach the requisite agreements on these issues in Brussels: why should the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs and the Lithuanians want to include voracious, unstable Turkey in the EU as long as they themselves need every euro available for distribution? But even if Turkey were allowed to join – which is practically impossible – it would be there as a second-class member because it would have to wait a long time before being allowed to enjoy subsidies from Brussels.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What will happen if the integra- tion process fails?
SLOTERDIJK: Then vocal movements about disadvantage on the Carinthian model will spread across the whole of Europe. 3 In the case of the former East Germany a small, rather unpleasant neo- nationalist scene became vocal shortly after German reunification. We can expect something similar in the new EU member states as soon as the process of sorting out winners and losers is over. In five years people all over Europe will probably be talking continually about these angry provincials, and looking back nostalgically to the days when we regarded a dashing populist showman like Jörg Haider as a menace.
3 This refers to the Austrian regionalist-nationalist movement led by the controversial politician Jörg Haider (1950–2008), Governor of the Austrian Federal State of Carinthia and leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ).
14
THERE ARE NO INDIVIDUALS
Interview with Sven Gächter*
4
GÄCHTER: Mr Sloterdijk, this is admittedly a frivolous hypo- thetical idea: suppose Anke Engelke invited you to her late-night show and asked you to give a reasonable synopsis of your new book, Sphären III [Spheres III], for the ordinary couch potato. How would you wriggle out of that?
SLOTERDIJK: The only frivolous thing seems to me the assump- tion that Ms Engelke would be in her job long enough to hit upon the idea.
GÄCHTER: Good. Now let’s assume Harald Schmidt still mod- erated a late-night TV show. As a talk-show guest in the latter-day version of his show, with its appeal to the educated middle class, Peter Sloterdijk would be in good hands.
SLOTERDIJK: I have great respect for Harald Schmidt since the time he was a young cabaret artist back in Dusseldorf, when he larded his programmes with quotations from my book Critique of Cynical Reason.
GÄCHTER: Schmidt would be the perfect leading actor if the Critique of Cynical Reason were ever filmed.
SLOTERDIJK: Not many people in the German scene can make sense out of the intellectual plasma I described in Critique of Cynical Reason. I can think of two or three names at most: first of all, Bazon Brock, an entertainer and philosopher who can boast an authentic
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Sven Gächter appeared under the title ‘Es gibt lediglich Dividuen’ [‘There are Only Dividuals’], in Weltwoche magazine (14 July 2004). Available at: <http://www. weltwoche. ch/ausgaben/2004-29/artikel-2004-29-es-gibt-lediglic. html>.
Sven Gächter is editor-in-chief of the Austrian news magazine Profil.
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oeuvre as a qualified trickster of the late twentieth century, if you like. The younger ones would include Christoph Schlingensief and Harald Schmidt, whom we just mentioned. After that we can forget the list because things get rather dull. The humour industry is flour- ishing but it lacks the necessary edge.
GÄCHTER: You still owe us the Spheres synopsis for people in a hurry or for beginners.
SLOTERDIJK: The foam theory I develop in Spheres III is useful for people who don’t want anything to do with their neighbours but need a good explanation as to why they can’t get rid of them. To put it another way: I am trying to give an answer to the riddles of simultaneity of very different life phenomena that are clustered in a tight space without having much to do with each other. Foam is a metaphor that helps to describe this great accumulation of human life forms – while avoiding the concept of ‘society’.
GÄCHTER: It’s a concept that belongs more to sociology than to philosophy. What worries you about this? Is it the descrip- tive vagueness? Or is ‘society’ too macro-theoretical for your approach?
SLOTERDIJK: I would prefer to use the term ‘household’ rather than ‘society’. A household is a monadic factor with the potential for world-making at a single place. And a world naturally includes several co-players. Just as Robinson Crusoe had his Man Friday, the modern single has his or her media for simulating real communi- cation. Today’s single person is the successful version of the multiple personality that, regrettably, is usually described with a vocabulary strongly influenced by psychiatry. That doesn’t seem justified to me, because many multiple personalities develop particular strengths precisely because of their elasticity, including that of not getting too bored with themselves. Anyway, according to my definition there are no individuals, there are only dividuals, which means parts of couples or of households, while a person who lives alone is generally someone who has learned through appropriate training to form a couple or a household with himself or herself.
GÄCHTER: A quotation from Spheres III: ‘There is no doubt that philosophy as an ancient European form of thought and life is exhausted. ’ What is the connection between this sentence and your dictum of the death of Critical Theory?
SLOTERDIJK: There is no direct connection. Critical Theory is dead for other reasons than exhaustion of philosophy as a form of life. Critical Theory is dead because it is no longer able convinc- ingly to carry out its mission as Germany’s civil theology. Even if it’s true that modern societies need something like a framework that can be used for civil theology, Critical Theory alone can’t offer that
There Are No Individuals 115
any longer. If it still tries to, it becomes suspect as a sect, and that is exactly what we have seen for a long time now.
GÄCHTER: Does the rejection you have received from protago- nists of Critical Theory such as Jürgen Habermas, sometimes in a very public way, stem from your refusal to join that ‘sect’?
SLOTERDIJK: When it comes to members of a sect we can always presume one thing – a highly developed instinct for compat- ibility. I have always said that if we have to be creatures bound to sects, I would rather belong to a more entertaining sect.
GÄCHTER: Could we describe your Spheres project as a univer- salist theory of thought that is spatially modelled?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, although I define ‘spaces’ not in the sense of physics but of a resonance community. Intervals exist between people that can be filled or bridged communicatively and, in a certain way, morally. My spheres theory concerns the moral inter- vals between people, starting with the basic assumption that, to begin with, all living beings can only exist within the closed confines of their immune system.
In future we will probably have to make much greater use of the terminology of general immunology in order to reach an understanding of what people could have in common with each other at all. I reject the term ‘society’ because it assumes far too boldly that people build up common immune systems in the same way in all situations and at all times. This implies that ‘society’ is constituted as a bloc of immune systems and leads to false unifi- cation. All the old social immunologies were mainly controlled by means of a logic of belonging. Today, however, the outlines of a new, totally different social immunology are visible. They clearly tend towards individual immunology, that is, to world formation and self-protection at a local level. I think network theory and foam theory are more realistic than old-fashioned ‘sociology’. Continuing to talk about ‘society’ today is a form of conceptual pretension.
GÄCHTER: Isn’t your spheres theory ultimately the attempt to cushion the existential-philosophical shock by bedding it in foam, so to speak?
SLOTERDIJK: The existential philosophers have greatly over- exaggerated homelessness. In fact, people sit in their apartments with their delusions and cushion themselves as best they can. Living means continuously updating the immune system – and that is pre- cisely what foam theory can help to show more clearly than before.
GÄCHTER: If we grant the media the function of a control system, that is, an immune system in a way, they have functioned extremely well recently. The widespread publication of photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad provoked unprecedented concern worldwide, more than all the pictures from the Balkan War,
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Rwanda or various suicide-bomber attacks. Why? Because people never expected the Americans to do something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: Since the first Gulf War, the Americans have changed the rules of warfare by starting to manipulate pictures from the war. What used to be called theatrum belli is identified today by a mental field: all the generals in the age of the American wars start from the assumption there are always two wars in one, and two superimposed battlefields, with the battlefield of images playing an increasingly bigger role. The American generals of the image are required to wipe everything that could publicly damage the morale of the American troops or the reputation of the USA.
GÄCHTER: That plan failed spectacularly in the recent case of the torture pictures from Baghdad. Anyway, it’s not about wartime pictures but post-war pictures.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but the scene of the pictures, the theatrum belli of the imagination, can no longer be clearly separated from material war events. The war of images has now become the actual, perpetual war. Realpolitik today must be constructed in the area of ideas, of fantasy. This is why the factions from the Pentagon and Hollywood, which have worked entirely separately so far, have converged through events during the Bush administration. The torture videos, in turn, were partly the revenge of auteur film on the Pentagon/Hollywood complex: a naïve, amateurish production that follows its own laws – and its own conscience. As for torture, traditionally an area of discretion behind closed doors, it has now entered the age of images – ‘Sex, Torture and Videotape’.
GÄCHTER: What is remarkable is that the torturers themselves are now part of the production, especially shooting star Lynndie England, the grim US reservist.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. Lynndie England, the illegitimate sister of Monica Lewinsky as it were, has become world famous overnight like an amateur porn star. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you flirt with the president or the enemy, under present media con- ditions you have similar shooting star potential.
GÄCHTER: Producer, accomplice or victim of the picture war?
SLOTERDIJK: First-hand reporting is losing importance in relation to the reporting on the reporting. According to the modern logic of the mass media, only reports that have already been made can document that anything at all has happened that is worth looking at twice. From this perspective, in functional terms the media world is moving ever closer to the stock exchange where, as we know, securities that are already high are especially popular. The same applies to pictures, and shocking pictures in particular: if they are already getting good bids this will tend to continue. In my life as
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a viewer of pictures, I have seen few photos with such high aesthetic ambitions and such a macabre sense of the amateur aesthetics of horror as those from Abu Ghraib.
GÄCHTER: The photo of the Iraqi prisoner with the three- cornered cap on his head, the black cowl and the hands attached to cables probably has its place in the iconography of cruelty. But why was the effect of those particular torture pictures so devastating? What do you think?
SLOTERDIJK: The world had probably waited for those pic- tures. Anybody who wasn’t totally wallowing in self-hypnotized solidarity with the Americans realized quite early on that the ostensible motives advanced for the Iraq War were a strange and unique case. You could guess that the war was a construct designed according to a particular logic of action whose beginnings preceded George W. Bush taking up office – I nearly said, ‘seizing power’ in the way Hitler did. The global public knows we are dealing with a distorted picture of the United States at the moment. The effect of the torture pictures fits into this scenario: they confirm the partly mindless, partly articulated background awareness that this war has involved a great deception.
GÄCHTER: In barely two and a half years the Bush administra- tion has managed to create unprecedented atmospheric damage. Do you see this as a fleeting episode or a historical break, in the sense that the damage will not be reparable for a long time?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans are in the position today of the Europeans in the High Middle Ages: that of the corrupt Crusader. The idea of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of the most powerfully motivating ideas ever. It was discharged in a series of bloody wars. In the end they were not very successful, but they did result in Jerusalem being captured by the Christians for a while. The Europeans were granted the satisfaction of feeling like liberators and owners of the ‘most important place in the world’ – the Holy Sepulchre. The burial place of Our Lord was the ‘ground zero’ of the Middle Ages. Incidentally, Hegel dated the secret core idea of the European, the idea of religiously enlightened spirit, back to disappointment with the Crusades: the spirit that tried to possess the absolute stood before the empty grave and realized there was really nothing inside, and God could no longer be sought in the form of external things, of materiality. This is what paved the way that led from the internalization of mysticism to the Reformation, and finally to modern subject philosophy. Hegel saw the disillu- sionment about Jerusalem as constitutive for the character of the West.
GÄCHTER: Do you mean the new hasn’t reached the Americans
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yet, that they are reviving the crusade idea the Europeans long since abandoned, and their ‘Jerusalem disillusionment’ is yet to come?
SLOTERDIJK: We are dealing with a rascals’ crusade that may possibly evoke earlier experiences in Europe’s collective memory. But we don’t have to descend into the historical subconscious – the facts of the present situation speak for themselves. A rhetoric of sal- vation that combines themes from the Old and the New Testament is being used to justify an extremely shabby and, perhaps even worse, a profoundly dilettantish version of so-called global politics.
GÄCHTER: Dilettantism is probably the most cutting insult towards a practitioner of realpolitik like Donald Rumsfeld.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of realpolitik was introduced in the late nineteenth century to establish professionalism in the craft of politics . . .
GÄCHTER: You are referring to Bismarck . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Who, in every critical situation, first asked his advisers to present around twelve alternatives that he studied carefully before choosing the most appropriate one. Realpolitik according to Bismarck means emancipating ourselves, for reasons that lie in the nature of the case, from the imperative of common- sense morality. By contrast, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their neo-conservative think tanks have succeeded in placing professionalism completely at the service of dilettantism. They assemble everything from the fields of military technology, media manipulation, administration and law that helps to give their basic dilettantish position a veneer of competence.
GÄCHTER: But where does the principle of dilettantism come from? Those people are by no means stupid in the accepted sense. Even George W. Bush can’t be as stupid as people like to portray him.
SLOTERDIJK: The core of dilettantism is the feeling of being chosen: that you don’t stand on stage because you are able to do something, but because you believe you have a vision that justi- fies everything. The vision is the working hypothesis of the chosen person. This seems all the more absurd in the case of the USA because the Bush administration didn’t come to power due to their vision but through a more or less obvious electoral fraud, which was amateurish at the time. The Bush government took office under premises that were democratically very ambiguous and in reality impossible, and that had already caused serious moral damage to the system. And it continued like that.
15
CONFUSED PEOPLE SPREAD CONFUSION
Interview with Matthias Matussek*1
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, the last essay in your new book that completes your major three-volume work, Sphären [Spheres], contains the provocative thesis that our society is ‘beyond need’. In the light of the new discussion about poverty, aren’t you afraid of getting attacked for this?
SLOTERDIJK: At worst, by over-zealous spokespersons for fed- erations. In fact, I am making a therapeutic proposal to the public: let’s examine the mechanisms that cause one of the materially and mentally richest nations of all time to sink into a state of permanent grumpiness and agitation. Let’s use the break in pampering that the present recession has brought to investigate distortions in con- sciousness in this civilization when the pressure is off.
MATUSSEK: Many intellectuals at the moment pride themselves on being economic experts, and debate about safeguarding pros- perity and returns. Do you think it’s wrong to prioritize economic issues?
SLOTERDIJK: Caring about material affairs is definitely not an unimportant matter for human beings. We live in a politico- economic system that plausibly promises affluence to four fifths of the population.
MATUSSEK: Which is unprecedented in human history. SLOTERDIJK: The present pampering culture no longer
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Matthias Matussek appeared under the title ‘Verwirrte geben Verwirrung Weiter’, in Der Spiegel maga- zine 35 (2004): 122–5.
Matthias Matussek is an author and a journalist at Der Spiegel.
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concerns just a tiny aristocratic group but the majority of the popu- lation. In anthropological terms, this is a world novelty. But one of the business secrets of this culture seems to be that we shouldn’t talk about this unprecedented collective luxury. Instead, fictitious news about shortages has to be published all the time. Incidentally, warnings about shortages used to be something for intellectuals, but federation officers have taken over from them now.
MATUSSEK: Despite the present demonstrations, recent system critique has been from the top downwards – numerous entre- preneurs who don’t agree with the nation, with society and with politicians sit in Sabine Christiansen’s talk show and moan. 1
SLOTERDIJK: Talking of the media system, Spheres III also tells us about that. The media system exploits the entertainment value of complaining in the comfort sphere.
MATUSSEK: At one time you annoyed the cultural press with your books or with an essay lecture about cloning. Today you moderate the TV programme Das philosophische Quartett [The Philosophical Quartet] in the position of a ‘national moderator’, as you once put it. Where do you see your role in the present discussion?
SLOTERDIJK: For two decades I fought quite a last-ditch battle after saying in my first book that enlightenment works by cheering people up. Some people wanted to set me up as the fool who doesn’t recognize the gravity of the situation. Meanwhile, many people have realized that in everything we do, we have to begin with the atmospheric facts. We can’t live in one-sided negativity all the time. In this respect we could use a bit of emission control for the intel- lectual climate.
MATUSSEK: The philosopher as expert for the positive approach?
SLOTERDIJK: As long as the media business lives from moaning and meta-moaning there is no danger of the positive approach gaining ground.
MATUSSEK: Critics pour cold water on everything by nature. It’s part of their profession.
SLOTERDIJK: But we should never forget that German criti- cism represents a late form of German idealism. In the latter, the soul is part of the base while the economy belongs to the superstruc- ture. It follows that we are surrounded here in Germany by noble
1 Television personality Sabine Christiansen (b. 1957) was moderator of Germany’s most famous political talk show on ARD, the first German public TV channel, from 1998 to 2007.
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depreciators who are convinced that one has to address the feeble base. People run things down because they themselves belong to the good. Being a German critic means being able to give an admoni- tory sermon off the cuff.
MATUSSEK: Does it worry you that Germany, the economic giant, is stumbling, and our European neighbours are watching with a mixture of concern and schadenfreude?
SLOTERDIJK: Actually, I’m relieved that people treat us with totally normal malice. It shows that the people from countries all around us have got used to their previously frightening neighbours. In the past, during the phase of German resocialization, it was thought better not to offend the former delinquents. People watched more or less nervously to see what would become of the bad child of the international family. Now we Germans, the notorious outliers of history, have finally been brought into the main field.
MATUSSEK: Do you mean the country has become normalized in the crisis?
SLOTERDIJK: Whatever the case, because the Germans have dropped down from the top, they have stopped being students of democracy with special needs that require the school psycholo- gists to be called in constantly. Even the vigilant admonishers who wanted to attribute recidivist tendencies and murderers’ genes to the Germans are finding it difficult now in many respects. No nation can be more ordinary than the Germans today.
MATUSSEK: In the 1980s, you described prevailing conditions as ‘unhappily enlightened’ – and contrasted that with cheerful, subversive protest. Today the left wing is in the doldrums. What happened to the great urge for change?
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t exaggerate in retrospect. At the time that my Critique of Critical Reason appeared in 1983, the radical left had been largely occupied with tragicomic repetition of scenarios from the 1930s. From 1967 until the Baader-Meinhof crisis of 1977, we acted out the People’s Front and bravely pre- vented the rise of Hitler. 2 All the same, we had a script – even if it was half a century behind the times. Today, however, we don’t have a repertoire for the left, whether moderate or radical. The age group
2 Andreas Baader (1943–77) and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76) were the leaders of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), an extreme left-wing political group formed in 1968 that was responsible for violent attacks in West Germany. Meinhof hanged herself in her prison cell in 1976. The 1977 ‘crisis’ refers to the violent political unrest in many West German cities after Baader and three other imprisoned members of the group were found hanged in their cells in October 1977.
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at the helm now is the most confused generation in German intel- lectual history.
MATUSSEK: The generation of 1968 has reached the top of society. Is that a lamentable situation?
SLOTERDIJK: The confused generation can only spread confu- sion. It does that successfully.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t Schröder introducing reforms right now that the ruling CDU [Christian Democratic Union] should really have carried through in the 1980s?
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe we should realize that for nearly twenty- five years the German party system has been offering voters the choice between four varieties of social democracy: the unity party of prosperity spreads across the whole so-called political spectrum.
MATUSSEK: The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the first to understand that, by turning his politics towards social democracy. His era was marked by the lucky accident of German unification – and everything that wasn’t dealt with.
SLOTERDIJK: Kohl remains the undisputed lord of German lethargy. He led the Germans to the end of history. He turned the promise of post-history, general lethargy with a high level of afflu- ence, into reality, with visible success. Things have become decidedly more uncomfortable since slimmer men have been in government. We are even being threatened with history starting all over again.
MATUSSEK: The new men are getting fatter again as well.
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can beat Kohl on the scales. But now the new uncomfortable types have arrived and want to put the German lethargocracy back into competition with the best in the world. No wonder the great majority says, predictably: ‘Wait, that’s not what we signed up for! We haven’t trained for the top! ’ That’s why so many journalists and sociologists seriously consider German football as the oracle of the nation. On the football pitch we can see that simply praising ourselves isn’t always enough to get by.
MATUSSEK: It seems poverty is being officially tolerated for the first time in Germany – this was previously unheard-of in Germany’s centrist society of consensus.
SLOTERDIJK: Agenda 20103 contains nothing that Kohl shouldn’t have already introduced twenty years ago. Now his suc- cessor has to take over the other side’s operations. That is the usual SPD [Social Democratic Party] tragedy, by the way. As for the new
3 Agenda 2010 was a reform programme for the German welfare system and labour relations. It was launched in 2003 by the Social Democrat/ Green Party coalition led by the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
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visibility of poverty, it is related to the disappearance of the special German climate after 1945. Back then, when the whole country con- sisted of losers, the socio-psychological grip on the whole thing was much tighter than it is today. The post-war reconstruction was a collective effort. By now, being a loser is seen more as an individual issue again.
MATUSSEK: Is the thesis of the completed reconstruction actu- ally right? Berlin, for example, has not been recreated at all, and is a city of construction sites, strips overgrown with weeds, and wasteland, which local politicians are actually selling as a prime opportunity.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s always devastating when politicians talk like gallery owners. People in the special Berlin biotope have had half a century’s practice at being kettled as an attraction. After the border opened, along with all the impressive new buildings there was con- stant competition over the memorials that were supposed to make historical remembrance impressive as well.
MATUSSEK: Remorse, made in Germany.
SLOTERDIJK: German remorse used to be a brand-name article in the moral markets of the world. Meanwhile it is only rarely in demand.
MATUSSEK: What is much more visible is German self- confidence, at least in foreign policy, which has even taken the liberty of resisting American messianic ideology.
SLOTERDIJK: I made a lot of enemies before the Iraq War started by saying that Schröder’s vote against the US-British policy represented the voice of free and reasonable Europe – against the opportunists in the South, in the East, and in the German Parliament.
MATUSSEK: Is that the new German role, perhaps even a German identity: to push on with Europe as a kind of self- dissolution in the European project?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe’s nation-states, including Germany, do not have to liquidate themselves. But they should remember their great common script: this is the home of the anti-miserabilism project, which should bring humankind as a whole, or a large part of it, into a worldwide community of comfort. Let’s note that behind human rights are always rights to comfort that are wrongly described merely as ‘material interests’.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t that a rather harsh de-mystification of noble human rights?
SLOTERDIJK: Not at all. Human rights begin with the right to a lawyer; in the first place, they protect those who aren’t able to speak for themselves yet. Once people can speak for themselves, they
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immediately start making material demands. This is an unavoidable sequence. It’s impossible to imagine a majority that is full of human rights down to the tips of their toes but remains as poor as beggars. People who say and mean human rights are also affirming the trend towards opening up access to the affluence zone.
MATUSSEK: Is the new Federal German President on the right track in announcing that ‘The nation needs the courage to change’? SLOTERDIJK: He’s humming the right theme tune. However, even the best speeches about courage and rolling up our sleeves are fundamentally flawed. If our new president has a good relationship to courage then he has to do something courageous, maybe pardon somebody unexpectedly or visit a proscribed country. Just urging
courage on its own would be too German.
MATUSSEK: What can a German President do in this context? SLOTERDIJK: He has to stay on the beaten track. The fact is,
people in the affluence zone only accept changes that give them the security of knowing things will generally stay the same as they were.