No More Learning

Complexity increases the burden for problem-solvers and this, in turn, gives a new boost to relief techniques. This connection is the core of the so-called ‘knowledge society’. Knowledge that really interests us is always empowering knowledge that makes complex- ity amenable to handling. ‘Amenable to handling’ means things are processed so that we can make a profitable decision on the computer with our fingertips.
The concept of density also helps to explain why, despite the tremendous relief in which our life is embedded, we have the impres- sion that things aren’t getting easier, but on balance more difficult. For all the undeniable ‘progress’, why isn’t the world more trans- parent and more user-friendly? The increasing complexity is really unreasonable – and people will rebel against it sooner or later if they have expected something else. The most embittered critics of progress are disillusioned believers in progress. But if we start from a false concept, can we really complain when we realize it doesn’t work? Aren’t we responsible ourselves for the disappointment that comes from choosing the confusing word ‘progress’ to guide us? If we don’t want to fall into a semantic trap, we should drop the term ‘progress’. We realize that we’re caught in such a trap partly because we become aware that using specific words puts us into defensive situations and depressive states. In that case it is better to look for a different kind of language.
NAKSCHBANDI: Can Western culture learn something about these questions from other cultures?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people in the Western world assume that the rest of the world has to learn from them, and not vice versa. In fact, we could learn a great deal from non-Western cultures: a different attitude to happiness, to death, to simple, elementary things. I think it is a serious symptom that in our society the simple things are being reintroduced as a second-order luxury. Though it may sound odd, there is a kind of homesickness for poverty and it is actually for the elementary things that may be associated with poorer circumstances. Our society displays a surfeit of wealth and of the multiple options we constantly have to think about. That’s why many Western people now are interested in the lifestyle of cultures that are on the verge of the transition to affluence. However, I think
174 On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
it is doubtful that we can really learn from this. In the end, learning something from other people means wanting an exchange with them and seeing them as a model. Western interests usually don’t go that far. Westerners are more likely to want something the others have in addition to their own advantages.
20
A TEAM OF HERMAPHRODITES
Interview with Dirk Kurbjuweit and Lothar Gorris*
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Mr Sloterdijk, how are you watch- ing the football World Cup championship – as a fan or as a philosopher? 1
SLOTERDIJK: I am actually more interested in the archaeology of masculinity. Football matches are atavistic; they are experimen- tal anthropological designs. For thousands of years, male human beings have tried to answer the question: what do we do with hunters nobody needs any more? In anthropological terms, men are constructed to take part in hunting. But hunters have undergone a huge sedation programme for nearly 7,000 years, since the begin- ning of arable farming. The higher the religion, the stronger the attempt was to convince the inner hunter that it is basically shame- ful to be a man, and that men as men will never partake of salvation.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Unless they play football and substi- tute the hunt for game animals with the hunt for goals?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. Hardly any other game so clearly imitates our ancient proto-artillerist feelings of successful hunting. When we have completely paralysed the inner hunter and killed him off, we reach the inevitable conclusion that the stupidest thing in the world is how footballers react after scoring a goal. It is a
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Dirk Kurbjuweit and Lothar Gorris appeared under the title ‘Ein Team von Hermaphroditen’, in Der Spiegel news magazine (3 June 2006): 70ff.
At the time of the interview Dirk Kurbjuweit was a journalist at Der Spiegel, and Lothar Gorris was a departmental head at Der Spiegel.
1 The interview took place shortly before the World Cup football champi- onship held in Germany from 9 June to 9 July 2006.
176 A Team of Hermaphrodites
really obscene sight. The remarkable goal-shot orgasms the foot- ball players put on for the paying spectators are enough to make a female porn actor feel ashamed by comparison. But as soon as we stop murdering our inner hunter and let those ancient hunting feel- ings come out, we immediately feel what those players on the pitch are dealing with. The oldest human feelings of success are being played out again, the act of hitting a hunting target with a ballistic object, a target that tries to protect itself by every possible means. I think this is the point to introduce the concept of ‘deep play’. It describes the kind of games that enthral everybody.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: In other words, the prehistoric man within the man of today is mostly redundant, and only useful for playing games. Are women better off?
SLOTERDIJK: Women were originally gatherers and we need them more than ever today because a gatherer is only one step away from becoming a consumer. In this respect, women are much more compatible with capitalism than men. The female consumer still shows us traces of the quiet, triumphal satisfaction of the gatherer bringing something home in her basket. This has led to that mysteri- ous universal female object, the handbag. A man without a spear or a ball is acceptable, but a woman without a handbag – that’s against nature.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Does football excite you personally?
SLOTERDIJK: I found a passable relationship to football at the second attempt. But to become a normal human being I had to make a digression by way of anthropology. As an anthropologist I can allow myself to be human, so to speak. The basic characteristics of a human involve being willing to go crazy with other people to some extent. I allow myself to do that now and then in my old age.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Have you bought a Goleo? 2 SLOTERDIJK: I’m not the type for mascots. KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Do you sing along with the national
anthem?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m physiologically incapable of that. Sometimes
I watch the players during the anthem and see how they purse their lips, only moving them slightly. Some lapse into a deep German silence. That’s what I would probably do. I usually like singing, but only in an artistic form. Singing national anthems is not part of my basic education.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: The ‘national team’ is one of the
2 Goleo was a stuffed animal toy that became a media mascot of the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany.
A Team of Hermaphrodites 177
few terms that allows us to use the word ‘nation’. What does the national team represent for us Germans in particular?
SLOTERDIJK: First, it means the same as it does for every other modern nation that appoints its team to represent it. This results in representational rituals that the majority of the population want to participate in. We Germans are a special case in this respect – as in most others – because of our history. After 1918 and the Versailles Treaty, if not before, we became a wounded collective, and in need of revenge in some respects. After 1945, on the other hand, we became a collective that is afraid of our own revenge impulses and blanks them out. We are a bizarre group that can only experience internal cohesion in the regret mode.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: You have written that nations are communities of excitability. What can arouse a nation more than the World Cup in its own country? Lots of people still get queasy at the idea of Germany being excited.
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. If you have experienced collective excitement as ‘demonic territory’, to quote Thomas Mann, you are wary of everything that stimulates people. We have been like people who have burnt their fingers since the time we realized that collective arousal could actually be a product of specific political orchestration.
Such emotional liturgies are created by defined rules and, by nature, can be instrumentalized. The Saturday entertainment and the will to war are psychologically related. Enthusiasm proves to be a phenomenon that can be misused. That means we shouldn’t just see the German tendency to caution as a neurosis. It should be enough to point out that caution can also be morally misused. If, as a German, you have ever watched the English celebrate and sing anthems, you might automatically think fascism had made a diver- sion to the British Isles. We Germans have a teacher inside us that would like to propose a sobering-up programme made in Germany for other nations as well.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Excitement in Germany quickly gets ugly, as the controversy about Jürgen Klinsmann showed. 3 Why aren’t we able to trust the national coach and his team?
SLOTERDIJK: Trust is not a German option. We know what Lenin said: ‘Trust is good. Control is better. ’ The Germans reinter- pret that as: ‘Trust is good. Grumbling is better. ’ Our dear fellow citizens are incredibly keen to be disparaging. That’s why the
3 Former football player Jürgen Klinsmann was manager of the German national team for the 2006 World Cup championship.
178 A Team of Hermaphrodites
position of national coach in this country is even more uncomfort- able than in other countries. But it’s generally true that the national coach resembles a hunting-group leader and his successes affect the mood of the collective.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Do we grumble our last heroes into the ground?
SLOTERDIJK: We have no more heroes anyway. We’ve replaced them with stars.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: What distinguishes the star from the hero?
SLOTERDIJK: The hero dies early and the star outlives himself. That formulation gives us an overview of the field. Both are actu- ally destined for an early end – the hero on the battlefield where he falls and the star through his return to civilian life, which is equivalent to being released from service, and is consequently like a symbolic death. An early death wouldn’t be a bad thing for most sports people because they almost all become unpleasant after their careers. Even the most interesting athletes turn into dimwits if they carry on as sports functionaries. For the rest of their lives they do nothing but contradict the reasons why they became famous. They start brilliantly – and end in self-demolition. Achilles escaped that because he had a real showdown.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: It’s hard to detect the hunter in David Beckham or Ronaldinho, the stars of modern football.
SLOTERDIJK: Stars today have to live in a state of permanent over-exposure. They enjoy a passive privilege in relation to atten- tion: they are seen very often – and almost never see themselves. The answer to that is to become a model. The players who cope best with their roles as stars are those like Beckham who deliberately transfer to the fashion world. Somebody like that shows that the player has understood his own de-heroizing. It follows that it’s better to appear as a hermaphrodite than a male hero nowadays. The soccer models are following an evolutionary trend that has been observable since the 1960s: the trend towards hermaphrodization. This is a long-term movement in which men disarm and are discovered as clientele for cosmetic products.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Is the German national football team a team of hermaphrodites?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, although Klinsmann is resisting this. I think he didn’t throw Kuranyi out for his weak performance but because he was angry that he needed half an hour to shave his little beard. That’s an anti-hermaphroditic vote by Klinsmann, an anti-model protest.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Your colleague, the Berlin
A Team of Hermaphrodites 179
philosopher Gunter Gebauer, says: the game with the feet has always been a mute protest against scholarly culture.
SLOTERDIJK: I agree with that. One of the most fascinating questions of recent cultural history for me was this: why have we always regarded the Renaissance from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries only as the return of the literature and arts of antiquity? Any child knows that there was already a fascinating mass culture in antiquity, that of the original sports. But our classical Renaissance only recapitulated the things that catered to the pleasures of the upper class. There was a long delay until the most fascinating figures of antiquity, the athletes, were reinstated again alongside the artists, philosophers and scientists. The athletes only reappeared a hundred years ago, and since then they have dominated the scene. Their reappearance brings people’s thymotic impulses into full use once again. According to the basic psychological teachings of the ancient Greeks we not only have the eros, which makes us desire things, but also the thymos, which means our efforts to assert our own merits.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Do we show our merits today with skilful dribbling?
SLOTERDIJK: Among other things. We have finally dared really to quote ancient mass culture – which means the production of new competitive games. That’s why we have recently started building competition venues as in neo-antiquity – the Greek stadium and the Roman arena.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Why was the athlete rediscovered so late?
SLOTERDIJK: People probably felt it would be dangerous to play with that kind of energy. If the nation is allowed to gather in arenas it could easily become politically volatile. The new enclo- sures of mass culture were only erected when it became clear that those kinds of mass sporting events wouldn’t develop into revolu- tions. Antiquity bequeathed a perfect archetype for that – the arena with its rising steps. If we look at the most modern stadiums such as the Allianz arena in Munich, we realize immediately: this is the Coliseum again.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: In the modern arenas with their lounges and business areas, the sponsors and VIPs edge out the traditional fans.
SLOTERDIJK: This transformation follows a basic trend of developed capitalism: the transformation of the workers into players, into stock-exchange speculators. Typically, they are prepared to sever the link between performance and fee. We know approxi- mately what wages are because they are connected to performance. But today, wages are no longer enough. People want bonuses. The
180 A Team of Hermaphrodites
demand for bonuses is the current form of anticipated profit. This society naturally meets up in the stadium as well. They are among their own kind there. The people on the pitch are best buddies with those in the lounge. Everybody knows that it’s only about bonuses. We’re only gradually beginning to understand how dangerous that is, because we’re slowly being confronted with the demoralizing effects of the system. Incidentally, the postmodern stadium is a tough truth machine. Unlike in modern-day theatre, where only losers appear from the start and talk about their problems, getting more and more entangled, in the modern arena it’s always only about the desire for the primal verdict: victory or defeat.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Football is an extreme example of globalization. In some Bundesliga clubs hardly any of the players are German. In the Champions League final, Arsenal London fielded two English players and Barcelona three Spanish ones.
SLOTERDIJK: That final showed the game of two world-class selections that simulate local clubs. In other words, the football club and its city are transformed into locations in the same way as the cities as such are transformed into locations. In the era of globaliza- tion – that is, since 1492 – hometown has become location.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: If the Champions League is a contest of locations, what does that make the World Cup?
SLOTERDIJK: A restorative enterprise, actually. In a situation in which nations are swimming with the tide of post-nationalization, nations reposition themselves as nations for the sake of the champi- onship. It is rather regressive.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Why?
SLOTERDIJK: National teams hardly exist in reality beyond championships. In championships something like national simu- lators are represented. They remind a population that it can also identify in a national sense if it wants to.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Does it work?
SLOTERDIJK: It works very well, because people’s sense of participation is chronically under-used otherwise. We don’t live in a world that addresses needs for participation. On the contrary, people always belong to themselves, and at best to their own future. For good measure we have a few relationships or, as people so aptly say, we’re linked up. But linked-up people are in a post-national situation anyway. People generally don’t want to be owned by the community any more. Civilization is moving towards dissolving communities, and for good reason: because self-confident indi- viduals find it increasingly hard to tolerate permanent pestering by groups they belong to. We don’t want to be representatives of our own tribe, or to have to represent our country abroad. All the same,
A Team of Hermaphrodites 181
there are situations in which we identify on a national basis again for a few hours.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: If the national factor is shown in the national team, wouldn’t it be logical to add a question to the form for new immigrants, such as: ‘Who played for Germany in the 1974 World Cup final? ’ Wouldn’t it prove how much somebody is inter- ested in this country?
SLOTERDIJK: Why not? In turn, the person questioned would also have to be given the possibility of proving with the converse answer that he or she belongs here. Up until now, the bad Germans were the good Germans – we should allow foreigners to be the same as well. Immigrants should have the freedom to say, ‘I’m a bad patriot, that’s why I fit in here. I can do without the gang of Beckenbauer and Co. 4 I think the sport is idiotic and I’d prefer us to lose. That gives me the right to be a member of this nation. ’
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: But should immigrants know about the miracle of Bern?
SLOTERDIJK: There could be a question like: ‘What bores you most? ’ If somebody puts a cross by the miracle of Bern, he or she would be a case for the alien police department. Anybody who doubts the miracle of Bern is suspected of being associated with a terrorist organization.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: How do you explain the hysteri- cal glorification that the 1954 soccer world championship title unleashed here in Germany?
SLOTERDIJK: It is mainly related to the intellectualization of football. For as long as research on mass culture has existed, popular culture as a whole has been idealized. This research was, and still is, a refuge for those who survived neo-Marxism and looked for new fields of work after its demise. The topic of soccer provided a way to remain true to the interests of the proletariat. All it required was to formulate upscale interpretations of trivial events.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: What do you remember of those events in 1954?
SLOTERDIJK: I was a child in Munich at the time. One day my mother, who wasn’t interested in football at all, took me by the hand, and we rushed off to Prinzregentenstrasse, the place where the German team appeared to the fans after winning in Bern. That’s how I saw Fritz Walter with the cup. When my mother started
4 Franz Beckenbauer, a former German football player and national German team manager, is regarded as one of the greatest living football players.
182 A Team of Hermaphrodites
saying she wanted to leave, I felt something had upset her. Perhaps it reminded her of the days in the Nazi German Girls’ League when they were supposed to feel proud of the state. In every other respect she was the most apolitical person I have ever met. Of course, I didn’t understand anything at all. I only noticed all the grown-ups behaving very strangely and being enthusiastic for a reason that was completely obscure to me.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Were you more aware of the World Cup championship in 1974?
SLOTERDIJK: In those days people used to say, ‘What do I care about the Vietnam War if I have orgasm problems? ’ You could say that about almost anything, including soccer dramas.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: You’re probably never going to become a real fan.
SLOTERDIJK: I’m afraid not. The only thing about football that really impresses me deeply is the ability of young players to fall over and get up again. I find that inspiring.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: You mean you want to see tough fouls?
SLOTERDIJK: No, I only want to see men getting up again. It seems to me like a declaration of anti-gravitation. We know what usually happens when people get older and heavier. Sometimes I fall off my bike, and the struggle to get back on my feet again is a cruel affront to my dignity. That’s why I have great respect for players who get up quickly again after falling down. Those are moments when I’m completely emotionally involved. Falling down is part of the game, but it is the getting up again that makes it magnificent. That’s why I don’t like the new obligatory medical treatment on the pitch. An injured player who can still walk has to be carried on a stretcher. It’s awful.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: It doesn’t fit in with the hunter, does
it?
SLOTERDIJK: Players used to hobble off the pitch heroically on
their own. Now they are carried off compulsorily, and I think it’s a mistake.
KURBJUWEIT/GORRIS: Mr Sloterdijk, thank you for this interview.
21
UNDER A BRIGHTER SKY Interview with Robert Misik*5
MISIK: In a speech about the generation of 1968 you once said, ‘We must risk more confusion to get more democracy. ’ Is confusion a productive force?
SLOTERDIJK: For over 200 years, every important revolution- ary movement has been associated with productive confusion in some way. When things are moving forward the semantics is always murky to begin with. We live in interesting times today because the historical semantics of the left and the right that we have used as orientation for the past 200 years is dissolving in a sort of confusion.
MISIK: If confusion is productive, does that mean the systematic approach is unproductive?
SLOTERDIJK: Not in every respect. But you are right: if the world could be completely tidied up it would turn into a museum in which everything would have its allotted place according to specific organizational principles. Everything would have been pacified for the last time and would have achieved what Hegel called satisfaction – a kind of positive Philistinism.
MISIK: The theoretician is always someone who tidies up the world. In your last book you presented a new theory of globalization – its hallmark is not acceleration, but density. What is so interesting about density?
SLOTERDIJK: This refers back again to my colleague Hegel and
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Robert Misik appeared under the title ‘Unter einem helleren Himmel’, in the taz newspaper (13 June 2006). Available at: <http://www. taz. de/1/archiv/? dig=2006/06/13/ a0226>.
Robert Misik is an Austrian journalist and author.
184 Under a Brighter Sky
his idea of the ‘condition of the world’. Conditions of the world are connected with the perception of epochal changes. Take the period from 1492 to 1900 – from the discovery of America to the end of the colonial division of the world. Until 1900, Europe experienced an over-production of people for expansion. Before then, Europeans had experienced the world as a non-dense space. Afterwards the world was occupied. The only thing to do was to expand in mutual opposition. The age of world wars remains as the first monument to this density.
MISIK: Did that change people?
SLOTERDIJK: Feelings about life altered. Today’s Europeans have largely understood that in a dense world the whole expansion- ist, heroic attitude aimed at conquest doesn’t work any more. The result is a more cautious, more calculating, politer, more civilized type of person.
MISIK: Does that mean globalization is congestion?
SLOTERDIJK: Wherever we go, someone is ahead of us. The discoverer is the person who arrives first. His epoch ended with a race for the poles – in which even the Austrians were involved, by the way – that culminated in the conquest of Franz Joseph Land.
MISIK: Did people occupy ice floes as the colonial era came to an end?
SLOTERDIJK: That shows how important it was back then to be the first somewhere, even if it was only an island full of glaciers.
MISIK: Isn’t the contemporary hero the entrepreneur who con- quers markets?
SLOTERDIJK: Whereas the world as a whole is tending to adjust to the co-operator type, the entrepreneur is still oriented towards conquest and expansion. The result is ersatz continents created for expansion. This explains the incredible rush on the capital markets – they are today’s colonies and Franz Joseph Lands. Space is already tight in the real economy. The law of mutual hindrance developed fully a long time ago. The imperial, expansive gesture only gets extra time on the capital markets.
MISIK: In your latest book you call this world ‘the world interior of capital’.
SLOTERDIJK: People live in capitalism as if they were staying in a hothouse. This makes the assumption that there must be an exterior occur all the more spontaneously. The interesting thing to note here is that people paint this exterior just like another interior where they can have exciting experiences under pleasant conditions.
MISIK: Must experiences remain consumable?
SLOTERDIJK: They should be paid into the account of one’s
Under a Brighter Sky 185
own personality, which wants to be enriched, not to collect trauma- tizing experiences.
MISIK: You almost insist that for the world interior, there is also a world exterior. That is your response to Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, whose book Empire assumes a capitalist orbit without a centre, but without an outside either. What is the outside you are talking about?
SLOTERDIJK: Negri has a strategic interest in reclaiming the worlds of poverty and the non-comfort zones for the empire because that’s where he finds recruits for his multitude, the people who are opposed, tomorrow’s revolutionaries.
MISIK: He finds them inside as well.
SLOTERDIJK: The dream of the coalition of the internal with the external opposition is the sequel to the dream of the communist gathering. I have devoted a forthcoming new book to this idea; the title is Zorn und Zeit [Rage and Time]. In this book I show that the classical left operated as a rage bank in which everybody who knew that helpless anger was not enough could deposit their rage. Rage banks in the form of left-wing parties are needed to make the anger of the disadvantaged operate on the political level. That is why the principle of the left doesn’t work any more today, because the left itself behaves more like part of the system of well-being and not as the agency for collecting and transforming rage.
MISIK: What exactly is the reason for this rage?
SLOTERDIJK: The welfare state’s promise is that unemploy- ment doesn’t mean poverty but at worst the descent into the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie under conditions that may be sad, but aren’t miserable. The tension has grown since it has become clear that this guarantee can’t be honoured. But first of all, those in the interior who have been excluded sink into depression. At the moment there is no language of rage, no historical perspective for moving from depression to pride.
MISIK: One reflex reaction to globalization is particularism. Is the resistance of the local region the opposing truth to globalization? SLOTERDIJK: It applies at least for places that are not totally devastated, not completely turned into transit spaces, into places without a self – such as airports, hotels, etc. I distinguish between places without a self, the transit wastes – and the self without a place, that is, the groups deprived of territory, groups that people like to call nomads. In between are the middle zones where place and self are connected by shared cultivation. We can still see that very impressively in Central and Western Europe – pleasant, civilized communities where the arts of living are comfortably established. Incidentally, astonishing examples of cultivated activity emerge
186 Under a Brighter Sky
even in the area of transit life, particularly in upscale international hotel chains where numerous oases of luxury have been opened to offer a relatively good lifestyle for people who travel too much.
MISIK: Do you know people who are happy in places like that?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, happiness is a fleeting thing. Freud even suggested that evolution didn’t plan it for Homo sapiens. Humans should be quite happy when they live in a state of ordinary unhappi- ness rather than neurotic misery.
MISIK: As regards your controversy with the Frankfurt School, you once remarked that it is mainly about contrasting moods. Whereas one always has to approach Critical Theory prepared to be depressed, you are more of a philosopher of good cheer. So how can you say humans are destined for unhappiness?
SLOTERDIJK: Critical Theory was once my theoretical home- land. It was influenced by the experience of the Holocaust, by the universal dehumanization. This gave rise to the experiences that characterized the generations of the first half of the twenti- eth century. Incidentally, the mood of French existentialism was not much lighter either. The years after 1968 tested how far such definitions are still valid – and revealed that they aren’t really valid. At some point our changed experiences must be translated into a new attitude. That’s why the left wing after 1968 appeared as the hedonist left. They were sure that human happiness was achieved by unchaining a person’s own libido.
MISIK: At the end of the 1970s, you were a Sanyassin and spent some time living with the Bhagwan in Poona.
SLOTERDIJK: In my case, the Indian adventure was a product of that seventies atmosphere. Added to that was the conviction that a purely materialistic concept of revolution is not enough. In those days, we wanted to reverse base and superstructure and make the mental factor the central focus.
MISIK: There are metaphors for influences. Some people say: ‘Once a Trotskyist, always a Trotskyist. ’ Can we also say: ‘Once a Sanyassin, always a Sanyassin’?
SLOTERDIJK: Basically, yes. The experience of transposition that occurred then is irreversible. Having that experience made you immune to theories in which depression is always right. And you stop wanting to win the competition about who is the unhappiest person at all costs. You live under a brighter sky. What it means for me is that India has completely faded into the background, but the transposition I went through then still affects me today.
Making the Effort: The Reader
22
MAKING THE EFFORT The Reader
Interview with Torsten Casimir*1
CASIMIR: In neurobiological terms, reading books is closely related to reading traces in tribal history, which dates back much further. What does it mean when a society increasingly dismantles these abilities?
SLOTERDIJK: We are seeing a transformation in the system of finding things. The old system of reading traces has been replaced several times: first, the farmer forced out the hunter; then urban humans forced out the farmers; and now the finders and looters are forcing out the urban reader in monitor space.
CASIMIR: In the past century, books still gave the urban reader deep insights into the world. Today we guard against depth and are often exonerated from the need to understand. Times are hard for books.
SLOTERDIJK: I think the crisis of the bourgeois personality is the main explanation for the crisis of the book. In the humanist age there was a hidden but very effective equivalence between the individual and the book. Being educated meant having the ability to write the novel of one’s own life, or having done so. Educated people could present the sum of their experience in a literary form. But it means the people of the humanist age were people who had experiences in the first place. The basic idea is that people pay the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Torsten Casimir appeared under the title ‘Ein Freund der Mühe: Der Leser’, in the magazine Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels, 173/36 (2006): 10–13.
Torsten Casimir was editor-in-chief of Börsenblatt at the time of the interview.
188 Making the Effort: The Reader
high price of effort to turn their own life into art and thus become individuals to begin with.
CASIMIR: That sounds like sports.
SLOTERDIJK: In a way it is really about bringing sport into our existence. The idea of experience dates right back to the Greek concept of paideia, which concerns the translation of athleticism into the world of letters. Humans are taken in hand in the sense of athletics and made into all-round athletes of competence in writing. That works on the basis of a connection between pride and resil- ience. The Greek athletes, and the Greek teachers, had a term for this: ponos. Just as philosophers were called ‘friends of wisdom’, athletes were called ‘friends of effort’. In other words, the idea of the educated person is a form of glorification of suffering based on athleticism.
CASIMIR: But nobody today likes putting effort into things.
SLOTERDIJK: What we are seeing, above all in the computer world today, is the incursion of untrained people into culture. With computers, lack of fitness can pose as fitness, or inability as ability. This brings enormous relaxation and pampering. The modern situ- ation is characterized by the idea of education disappearing because nobody nowadays is prepared to pay the toll costs for education, that is, to suffer for experience.
CASIMIR: People suffer all the same. The strain of remaining stupid – is that a topic you share with Odo Marquard? 1
SLOTERDIJK: People today suffer from all kind of things, but not from education. They suffer, for instance, from not getting a job any more. But they aren’t prepared to go through the educa- tion system to get the qualifications they would need for a job. They prefer downloading. The word means that people in search of expe- rience no longer go to the source of knowledge but let knowledge come to them – the same way you order a pizza for home delivery.
CASIMIR: You are rather sceptical yourself in relation to overdoing educational efforts. But your advice is about being eco- nomical with the little lights we call intelligence.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s certainly true. We should note the change of metaphors: from the sun of enlightenment to the little control lamps of electronic systems. We don’t illuminate our lives with the floodlight of truth any more. We choose to rely on numerous little control lamps of everyday cleverness.
1 Odo Marquard (1928–2015) was a conservative German philosopher known for his work on philosophical anthropology and finiteness.
Making the Effort: The Reader 189
CASIMIR: Less light. Does that mean another big project for relief?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely! On the other hand, there’s a new form of education that I call hyper-alphabetization, which involves learning reading and writing all over again, as it were. The first time we did it as school pupils; the second time we do it as typographers. The fact is, with computers the ancient Homo orthographicus is overlaid by a new Homo typographicus that not only learns reading and writing but also acts as a designer of his or her symbolic image. This shows that the computer is certainly not a rejection of the Gutenberg tradition but quite the opposite, its enhancement. Nowadays everybody in the Western world learns reading, writing, printing and design.
CASIMIR: Is this a higher form of media competence?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. And that is one reason why we can definitely welcome the computer into a meaningful educational alliance with Gutenberg culture. The point is to re-combine media alliances intelligently. You can rot your brain very quickly with television, but no law dictates that. You can regress at the computer but nothing is forcing you to do that.
CASIMIR: Conservation-minded people would like to defend the good old book against the new, technically superior media. You have also remarked somewhat ironically that books are better than other media for killing flies. Is that enough?
SLOTERDIJK: It would be quite mistaken merely to defend the old media with irony. Many colleagues I have discussed this with have told me that while they approached the new media with open arms, they are far more sceptical today about what electronic media can achieve in terms of preserving knowledge. These techniques are proving much more fragile than was previously thought. The book, however, is a medium that simply leaves you in peace for the first 100 years. It stands the test as the reliable bearer of what is entrusted to it.
CASIMIR: Another line of defence is that books have to be tech- nologically updated as e-books. Is that a future prospect?
SLOTERDIJK: These are all ideas that may possibly work on the basis of data storage capacity, which has become terribly cheap. In the past, successful data storage media, such as marble tablets and paper, were the most rare and precious commodities. Today, data storage space is second only to Sahara Desert sand as the world’s cheapest and most plentiful commodity. That leads to an incred- ible inflation – and to universal conservation of things not worth conserving.