My
teachers
are not my real teachers.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
But in fact, that’s just what people want.
The really unpleasant thing is school.
KAHL: There are some school soaps on television nowadays. But their equivalent of the operating theatre in hospital series would be lessons and exams, and you don’t see them in school series.
SLOTERDIJK: School exams are so unpleasant because they
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Reinhard Kahl appeared under the title ‘Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbst’, in Pädagogik 53 (2001): 40–5 (Beltz, Weinheim).
Reinhard Kahl is a journalist and film-maker.
66 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
remind many people of birth. In schools, people are not interned for nine months but incubated for at least nine years. Then they have to fight their way out in written exams, in other words, closed situa- tions. Modern people don’t want to be reminded that they were ever incarcerated.
KAHL: School isn’t seen as a prenatal paradise – that would be asking too much – but it isn’t seen as the joyful event of com- ing-into-the-world either. Can we think of school as pressure in the birth canal?
SLOTERDIJK: School is what people always want to leave behind them. People rarely look back at school with affection.
KAHL: It wasn’t always as clear-cut as that.
SLOTERDIJK: Romanticism about school, as expressed in the famous film Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl],1 evokes mem- ories of situations that were not yet emergencies. Today the school has become a necessity of its own.
KAHL: A curious necessity, like a military exercise that uses live ammunition. On the other hand, there is a lack of resonance for taking any action that might have a serious effect. The school wryly adopts an attitude of necessity and claims, ‘all this is required later in life’.
SLOTERDIJK: The famous saying that we don’t learn for school, but for life, was an attempt at justification from the very beginning. The original school allowed pupils to learn for school because the Graeco-Roman view was that there was no need to learn for life. Life is its own teacher; it is self-explanatory. School, however, meant leisure for the Greeks, and leisure was regarded as the quintessence of life. Funnily enough, the Greeks formed their word for ‘to work’ or ‘to do business’ from the negation of the word ‘to be idle’. Anybody learning for leisure was engaging in free activity.
KAHL: How did the intrinsic value of a leisure education become a means to other ends?
SLOTERDIJK: When the modern nation-state took over the school service, the necessity principle was transferred to learning in school. It became pre-professional: school is preparation for employ- ment. The German concept of education was shaped by Prussian neo-humanism around 1800 and still tries to find a balance between
1 Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl] was a popular German film released in 1944. Set in a school in Germany, it was famous for its praise of schooldays as the best days of life, and for its light-hearted escapism during the grim last year of the Second World War.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 67
the classical and the modern concept: we learn for school and for life. The society of work is already at the door, but the school still holds its own as an autonomous life form. Die Feuerzangenbowle symbolizes this compromise. Meanwhile the migration of necessity into the classroom has advanced considerably. We’re not going to see any new punch bowls.
KAHL: School means something traumatic for most people. What is it? You mentioned the birth analogy. Does school make people feel unwelcome?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. For most children today, school is the initiation into a situation that they feel is not about them person- ally. It’s an inoculation programme that administers grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate. The message is: ‘Whatever you may think of yourself, you’re not that important. ’ People don’t like being reminded of such exams.
KAHL: In the old school where people supposedly learned for life, they experienced being a small cog in a big machine. The oppo- sitional movement, ‘do whatever you want’, didn’t get far either. Today we have school students who end up without any idea of what they want.
SLOTERDIJK: That is undoubtedly related to the fact that today’s educationists don’t know themselves what they are educat- ing children for. Modern society’s confusion about its own goals is more clearly reflected in the confusing school system than anywhere else – except, perhaps, the area of visual arts, which is also a great world stage for mental disturbance. The school and the art business are nervous systems of sensitive issues in society in which the con- fusion about what will happen next is very clearly articulated. On average, teachers can’t be different from the society they come from.
KAHL: Twenty or thirty years ago many people said they wanted to affect things by playing a key part in social change, and they became teachers. By now there are many other options for people with ideas. The teaching profession has become a second choice. How are refugees from life supposed to represent the world to the next generation?
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers are people who often believe it is better to explain something than do something. The cowardly and the the- oretical decisions about life don’t necessarily converge, but often do. The result is schools as socio-psychological biotopes with an atypi- cal concentration of timid, under-motivated people concerned with private issues. The only answer is to de-professionalize schools. We have to enhance their social skills and leave them free on the factual side. It is increasingly clear that you don’t get to the core of learning
68 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
with classic schooling methods. All the people who turned out to be special in school didn’t do it because of the school but because the school left them alone. When things went well it offered protection under which intensive learning processes, which have always been intrinsically autodidactic, could flourish. Sometimes the autodi- dactic element was able to evolve under cover of didactics. But I think this particular constellation has passed its optimal point. New optimal situations have to be created for autodidactics. The school is probably no longer part of these optimal conditions.
KAHL: Aren’t didactic teachers – there are other kinds as well, of course – representatives of an ailing priestly class nowadays? Who else still believes knowledge can be passed down from above?
SLOTERDIJK: Priesthood: that’s a convincing analogy. Today, armies of world clerics appear before their flock and appeal to the good in human beings. Meanwhile they have discovered that their appeals result in evil developing all the more. Then people pretend to naivety and ask what’s going wrong.
KAHL: Teachers don’t encourage new knowledge ‘from below’. They lack the combination of action and experience.
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers live with false descriptions – more so, in fact, than any other group in society, aside from nihilists, who know what they’re doing and still keep on doing it. Nihilists are always on target with any possible enlightenment. They are already on the baseline of total lack of illusions about themselves and others. They think and act on the damaging assumption that entropy always wins. This is precisely what we people on the creative side have been fighting against with the methods of art and philosophy since way back when. The point is to inspire people to enthusiasm and get them involved.
KAHL: So let’s give school one more chance! How could it become a venue, or even a hothouse, for autodidactic experiments? After all, people learning of their own accord are not autistic. They need other people to inspire them, people who are curious but don’t lecture them or ‘mediate’ the lessons in a boring way.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we need schools that emphasize young people’s pertinacity and don’t colonize them for the sake of ‘neces- sity’. We must shut the school doors to business, fashion and other such terrifying menaces, and reconstruct a living space for people to engage in a libidinous relationship with their own intelligence. What is clear to see in a small child usually gets lost in the school pupil. The rescue of the cognitive libido must become the school’s core project.
KAHL: School as a space of dense atmospheres swelling with possibilities? You have been occupied for years with understanding
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 69
what spheres are and not getting stuck with congealed substances like knowledge.
SLOTERDIJK: My theory of enthusiasms, that is, of public spirits, tries to reduce overblown romantic-nationalist concepts to the level of specific groups. Schools must become boarding schools! Not literally, of course, but rather in the sense of emphasizing the intrinsic character of school life. I’m seeing that with my daughter, who is lucky to be in an excellent schooling situation. In her case, you can see clearly what it means to spend time in an environment for encouraging enthusiasm.
KAHL: What grade is she in?
SLOTERDIJK: She is in the second year at the Montessori branch of an ordinary elementary school. You can see how a dif- ferent climatic policy in the school encourages a different way of speaking to the pupils and a different language among the pupils themselves. This school begins by assuming that the learning libido is the real capital. The children bring their curiosity, their enthusi- asm, that priceless medium of happy anticipation of their own self, into the learning process. What matters is expectation of the next state to be reached. A form of didactics that respects this operates quite differently and with better results than a school where teachers have the attitude: you’re going to be astonished, and I’m the one who is going to show you how things are.
KAHL: That’s what nourishes the evil eye, which is probably related to the frustration of teaching staff. They basically remain like school pupils from the ages of six to sixty-five, and that’s really mortifying.
SLOTERDIJK: I think it’s time for teachers to carry on the work Nietzsche did for priests. Teachers are an authority that is under-criticized and deserves to be given liberating and destructive criticism. In fact, people mostly accuse teachers of the wrong things.
KAHL: The accusation of laziness, for example.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s lazy itself.
KAHL: It may apply to some people who are already practically
retired from the job, usually due to mental overload. But isn’t the teaching profession a case of overload in structural terms?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s why teachers should be helped with adequate criticism. The analysis of job-specific mortification and experiences of failure is needed just as much as the analysis of resentment against the profession. That would be the most valu- able kind of enlightenment. We must link up with teachers to revitalize the school starting from its strongest position. Where is its renewable, enthusiastic source point? Schools must come forward energetically and say: we offer opportunities, here is our knowledge,
70 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
here is our art of living – we are inviting you to all that. The gesture of invitation is perhaps the most important thing. It turns schools into guesthouses of knowledge and places for the intelligence to go on outings, so to speak.
KAHL: You mean the end of compulsory school, which insists, like a surreal restaurant, on forced feeding and pupils being com- pelled to eat everything on their plate?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to break with the most harmful of all ancient European concepts: the idea of knowledge transfer. This idea of instilling is wrong in terms of system theory, it is morally wrong . . .
KAHL: Unsustainable in terms of cognitive psychology . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And despite that, the school is built around that idea, around the truly accursed and harmful idea of transfer.
KAHL: They are still distributing Communion wafers.
SLOTERDIJK: The institution of school is based on the perverse communion that says: ‘We have and we share out. ’ But learning just doesn’t function that way. We have to respect that we’re always dealing with people who are accomplished in their own personal way. Up until now they have been complete and without any real deficiency. The next state or condition can only be constructed on the basis of the work the person has already done. Teachers can only disturb the process, unless they become something like a host, a coach or – in a good sense – a seducer who is already at the place the child’s next step leads to. In such ‘guesthouses’ the principle of happy anticipation could seal the pedagogical pact. Watching my daughter, I am fascinated by this. At the age of two, she already strikes me as a person who has something I have never seen properly described, either in psychoanalysis or any other kind of psychologi- cal description. I discovered from her that the libido of wakefulness is shown by the fact she is excited about her next state. She is happy about her own becoming. It is as if she were wearing a safety lamp on her head that lights up the next chapter of life for her discreetly and always auspiciously. She always sees light at the end of the tunnel. It is the light from her own inbuilt projector.
KAHL: What a drama it would be if the safety lamp were blown out and only the gaffer on set switched the lights on and off! Maybe blowing out one’s own light was a systemic compulsion of old industrial capitalism, against which it was futile to rebel. Enterprises today are also increasingly unable to cope with burned-out cases. They can deal with them as consumers, but not in the role of ‘staff members’.
SLOTERDIJK: Professional teaching must forge the link again with the dynamic libido that illuminates one’s own ability to
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 71
become. Instead of that, I have heard that teachers of German- language classes invited staff from the Employment Office in Karlsruhe to visit schools to teach school students how to fill in unemployment benefit forms. I know it’s an extreme example, but it illustrates where the problem lies. Many teachers, when they operate as creators of the bad climate, practise the didactics of discourage- ment. They often do it, even without wanting to, when they secretly project their own failure or their self-pity on to their young clients.
KAHL: That provokes running battles and power struggles.
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, the latent message comes through: ‘You’ll be astonished. I myself stopped being astonished a long time ago. ’ These two pieces of lethal information turn people into first- class climate polluters. Children should be protected against adult pessimism with their own special anti-pollution law. To refer to my daughter again, she has the advantage of an exceptional situation: she has a teacher with an amazing way of tapping the source that generates happiness. Like a good demon, he links into the children’s love of learning. He lights up when he sees the children’s faces light- ing up. This is awesome, and sets a standard. But along come the parents with their concept of realism, their pessimism and their fearful projections, and try to curtail this space of didactic miracles and to colonize it from outside.
KAHL: What do the parents say?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Aren’t you giving the children the wrong picture of life? ’ ‘Can’t you make things more structured? ’ ‘Can’t you be a bit stricter? ’ Statements like that show how ‘realists’ try to impose their climatic monopoly. We have to create a counter-climate to oppose this. Basically, in my work as a university teacher and as a writer, I see myself mainly as a creator of spheres and a didactic proponent of atmospheres. What people learn is not all that important in the first place; far more important is for them to enter a climate that makes them aware that being able to learn is, in itself, the best opportunity of their life. In my opinion, this work of climate creation that some people attack as unjustified shamanism is indispensable for the moral regeneration of our community.
KAHL: If using productive atmospheres works, something could develop that we never experience when only standard results are presented and the special atmospheres are sacrificed to the require- ments of rigid purity rules.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s when the poison of boredom starts to spread. The school is an epicentre of boredom and is run by profes- sional bores who daub, gum up and insult children’s intelligence. Many people never recover. That is the real educational disaster. In the end, atmospheres must be seen as the most real things of all.
72 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
Today, we create situations for young people in which they have everything to hand and no desire for anything. We lose more than ten years in the elementary education process, and the best students need another ten years after the first educational experience to find their own second chance. By then, if all goes well, we have an original thirty-year-old who, after the process of school and regen- eration, can start his or her own career as a creative person attuned to atmospheres.
KAHL: Most people in Germany would think it is a strange idea that everything else depends on atmospheres in institutions and around people.
SLOTERDIJK: The problem is more acute in Germany. The catastrophe of National Socialism with its monstrous perversion of collective enthusiasm has resulted in a super-abstinence of com- munal energy in this country. In French and Anglo-Saxon culture, and in the USA, the school system is governed by different climatic factors. There is much more emphasis on the relation between the institution and the public spirit that animates people. In Germany, we have a very bureaucratic school atmosphere, always combined with resignation and dogmatic scepticism.
KAHL: The German preference for being victims – or any- thing rather than active players because that could make them perpetrators – is particularly widespread in teachers’ staff rooms.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not only victim passion that exists, but also victim didactics and victim simulation. At our university we recently experienced the problem of individual students having to put up with restrictions and inconveniences because of reorganization in some subjects.
KAHL: You are referring to the School of Design in Karlsruhe, to which you were appointed rector this year.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. And what happened? We had 120 students applying for credits for two semesters of their course because they feel they are victims of the move to the new centre, which offers them access to one of Europe’s most impressive uni- versity buildings, not to mention one of the best teaching bodies and fabulous teacher–student ratios. The temptation to describe our own life in the light of discrimination has become so strong that even young people have now developed this resigned, senior- citizen-type attitude, combined with an aggressive kind of moralist demanding, as if it were perfectly natural. To counter this, we must try to interest them in the idea of entrepreneurial life so that they don’t already behave like social security clients at the age of twelve. In any case, victim hysteria relates back to childish patterns – to over-dramatization of minor injuries.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 73
KAHL: The foundling, exposed, all alone in the world.
SLOTERDIJK: Betrayed by all – and besides, my parents are not my real parents.
My teachers are not my real teachers. Everyone abandoned me. I’m only looking for the mailbox where I can post my complaints letter . . .
KAHL: The agony column . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . the world’s agony column. This attitude can only be corrected by activating a conspiracy of knowing better. Philosophy, literature and art must be the starting point for putting an end to the era we have lived in for fifty, sixty years now, handing in our homework as a model nation with collective depression. We are at the beginning of a generational change. It should be inter- preted openly and energetically.
KAHL: Couldn’t a new education debate be a medium for that? We must transpose to society as a whole the image of ‘joyful antici- pation of oneself’ as the heart and soul of the learning process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we should have this debate, because soci- eties have no centre and no ego, they only have the public as a medium for giving wake-up calls and creating disturbances. We must finally abandon the dangerous spectres that have driven the twentieth century into disasters, the idea that society is totally itself at some point. After all, the crazy illusion of a Führer is nothing but the political interpretation of a fallacy that our culture has blithely fostered for centuries, namely, that there is a place where it could be completely itself. This realization is the entrance charge we have to pay if we want to attain the second wave of sociological enlighten- ment. We must understand that societies use atmospheres to control and climatize themselves. The topics we are talking about form a semantic air-conditioning system. Right now, all the signs are that we are programming it wrongly.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen . . .
SLOTERDIJK: There’s enough tinder for it. Then, after the abreaction phase in which people have collectively got over the duty and the tendency to complain, we could start a productive discus- sion and try to design a school that fits the level of our knowledge and experience. Given the amount of accumulated discontent, the time is ripe. As far as positive forces are concerned, we will first have to reorganize what little we have left to see if it is enough for an offensive.
KAHL: How shall we start? Isn’t it important first of all to bring other adults into schools instead of only lifelong teachers? This could evolve into a kind of co-evolution. If teachers work as people gatherers, bringing ‘third parties’ into schools, they will become more adult themselves. It will be good for them and for the school.
SLOTERDIJK: That would be a first step. At the same time, a new viewpoint on people has to be constructed in the media. I don’t think it would be too difficult to show that interesting people are more fascinating than the average entertainment. If the fascina- tion value of being involved with a living person who has become an adult can’t compete with regression programmes offered by sex, crime and co. , we have lost the game. Windows should be opened in the media . . .
KAHL: And ‘third parties’ should be brought in everywhere.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We don’t know the interesting people in our own society. That means our society doesn’t know itself and doesn’t know that it doesn’t know itself. If the media can success- fully convey this enthusiasm for interesting people, they will also trigger a new learning process in schools of bringing in remarkable people with interesting jobs. That would be a broad move to de- professionalize curricula.
KAHL: Parents would worry that their children wouldn’t learn anything any more.
SLOTERDIJK: You can deal with the panic aroused by the
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 75
suspicion that competency is being compromised by emphasizing that nothing is more educational than the opportunity to see suc- cessful people at close quarters. By the way, concerning universities of the arts, that is also my response to the outdated master-class principle. If we want to preserve anything of the idea of the master, we have to translate it into the form of watching successful crea- tors of art at work and observing their success curve. That is highly instructive under any circumstances, regardless of whether students react by positive association or by rejection. Both are equally informative, provided that students have an authentic opportunity to see a creative person fully in action. This is precisely the concept of our art school in Karlsruhe.
KAHL: Dialogues worthy of the name consist of finely tuned agreements and refusals.
SLOTERDIJK: Allowing scope for productive scepticism in relation to a successful position is never a waste of time. Even people who react by turning away have learned a great deal from it. Perhaps we live in a period in which people learn more by rejec- tion than by borrowing. The cowardly teacher is the bad teacher. The good teacher is the person who is open to rejection. The same applies to good writers, who must always risk enough that they are worth reading even if we reject them.
KAHL: That brings us to the well-known Sloterdijkian concept of ‘de-idiotizing’: expending our own stupidity, for how can we get rid of it otherwise?
SLOTERDIJK: How can we get rid of it, if not in dealing with potential imitators who are smart enough to refuse to imitate at the last minute?
11
POSTMEN AND FALLEN TOWERS
Interview with Arno Frank*2
FRANK: Mr Sloterdijk, what mandate do you have for breaking into television?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely not the mandate of the world spirit. It’s more about my feeling that, given the decadence of the universi- ties, philosophy should link up with other media.
FRANK: TV philosopher – is that your mission?
SLOTERDIJK: We can describe every activity a person engages in from two different viewpoints. We can portray it from one side as a mission and from another as a need. If we describe it as a mission, then we believe that the individual has an idea or a master behind him that sends him ahead. In my case it is not as easy. I don’t have a master or an obsessive idea that decides for me what I should do. If I did, I would feel much more comfortable at the moment.
FRANK: Why?
SLOTERDIJK: Because then I could say: whether or not it works out, the idea or the sender is responsible. I would only be the mes- senger, the postman, and could deliver my message without being responsible for its success.
FRANK: What about the other version . . . ?
SLOTERDIJK: We must interpret it as an expressive action – in other words, I don’t have to trace the sequence of themes back beyond the author. It can start with the author. That means the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Arno Frank appeared in the taz newspaper under the title ‘Ich bin nicht der Postbote’ [‘I am not the Postman’] (19 January 2002): 3f. Arno Frank is an editor at the taz.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 77
author expresses himself or herself. He or she is an energy field that wants to discharge in that direction and no other.
FRANK: A medium within the medium, so to speak. But phi- losophers don’t usually frequent the footlights . . .
SLOTERDIJK: The studio has no ramp. In conventional theatre there is a border between the stage and the auditorium. On the TV podium you are surrounded by spectators – the TV situation is like being encircled. The question is: what can motivate people to let themselves be surrounded by spectators?
FRANK: Exhibitionists love situations like that. SLOTERDIJK: Maybe. But that’s really not my concern. FRANK: Not a trace of vanity?
SLOTERDIJK: I am a person who likes keeping one side hidden,
even when I appear in public. I have a mysterious aversion to the idea of people looking at me from the right-hand side.
FRANK: In a metaphorical, political sense?
SLOTERDIJK: No, spatially. In television you can’t stand with your back to a pillar like a figure in a Gothic cathedral and imagine that you’re drawing strength out of the stone. Television is a can- nibalistic medium that devours people optically. We are going to experiment with being eaten.
FRANK: You recently suggested interpreting nations as insti- tutions that maintain concentrated postal and communications systems – with telecommunications firms as secular churches. What do you mean by that?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern media societies have no brain, no central organ, only dense concentrations in the nervous system. How is such a complex and brainless system supposed to control itself? If modern societies were organized like churches, for example, Telekom would be the provider of both the network and the content of democracy. That is a lovely ecclesiological illusion: if we were like churches we could avoid the impression that no genuine internal connection exists in society. We would be limbs of a large commu- nitarian body. I am thinking about a map Dietmar Kamper1 once showed me. It was drawn by a medieval monk who had projected the body of Christ in the crucifix position on to the map of Europe, so that altogether the points representing the monasteries of Europe formed something like a visualization of the Corpus Christi spectre. A mystical EU.
1 Dietmar Kamper (1936–2001) was a German writer, philosopher and sociologist. He was professor of sociology at the Free University Berlin from 1979.
78 Postmen and Fallen Towers
FRANK: What is a society today when it isn’t a society?
SLOTERDIJK: The question is: how can we envisage social rela- tionships at all if we describe society as a whole as a body without a central organ?
FRANK: And the answer?
SLOTERDIJK: The answer would be a media theory for our times, and a number of people in the contemporary scene are working on that. Think of the work of Norbert Bolz, or Friedrich Kittler, or Jochen Hörisch, to mention only the older ones. 2 Those three men are intellectuals of my generation I feel related to because I am doing analogous work. Each of the three, in his own way, has experienced similar kinds of trouble with their former comrades.
FRANK: The same academic allergy against new approaches?
SLOTERDIJK: These three authors are like litmus tests for the resentment of the social environment. They are cheerful theo- reticians who see their intellectual practice additionally as leisure practice. I regard them as partners in crime. We are atmospheric felons in a cultural society that continues to claim a monopoly when it comes to defining moralist smog. In that context such enlighteners or clarifiers are not welcome at first. But I am convinced that within a generation their work will be canonical. It may sound strange, but I believe we have an avant-garde impact even today. Yet the inhabit- ants of the intellectual field aren’t amused when you tell them you are ahead in some way – you get sent to purgatory like a backward pupil.
FRANK: In your major work, Sphären [Spheres], you develop a theory of ‘ensouled spaces’, from bubbles to globes to foam . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I think foam is the defining metaphor for mul- tiple spaces for which the phrase ‘dreams are foam’ no longer holds. The substantialist aversion against anything fleeting and fragile – against foam – is also only lack of thought. If you think about multi-chambered systems under the premises of spatial logic, you quickly stop wanting to use foam, or scum, as a metaphor for something despicable. Quite the opposite: we realize that foam is a cosmogonic principle without which life and environmental effects would simply be impossible. But that is a theme I will develop calmly, like the plot of a stage play. If all goes well, we can talk about it again in eighteen months’ time.
2 Norbert Bolz (b. 1953) is a German philosopher, media theorist and design theorist. Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was a media theorist and philosopher known as ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. Jochen Hörisch (b. 1951) is a German literary and media theorist.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 79
FRANK: In Spheres II you wrote that a city shows in the vertical what it plans to do in the horizontal. Following your theory, wasn’t the attack on the World Trade Center in New York also an annihi- lating attack on a semantic level?
SLOTERDIJK: Islamist terror dealt a blow at the level of real existing symbolism, which is why the Americans’ counter-attack has been so remarkably flat and helpless. The reason is that the attacker can’t be hit symmetrically. The Americans don’t dare to attack the strong symbol that belongs to the perpetrators. We simply have to consider what the equivalent, in the Islamists’ worldview, is to what they think the World Trade Center means to us. It involves a very small number of objects. The list would be headed by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, followed by the Ka’aba in Mecca. Who could justify military assaults on those two objectives?
FRANK: But a war is already being fought on the symbolic level.
SLOTERDIJK: What the Americans and their friends in the Western world find very difficult to grasp is that they have lost – lost at the first shot. This is about a war that consisted of a single battle and led to a pure defeat that can never be compensated for. The twin towers fell. Everybody saw it and that means, however odd it may sound, that the show is already over, and everything you might want to write as a sequel is playing out on another level. The sight of collapsing tower blocks is doubly painful in a culture whose sources prepare it for such a process. On the one hand, we have the myth of David and Goliath, which has been subverted in the most unpleas- ant fashion here in Germany. We are used to pitting the small good person against the big bad one, and are suddenly forced to let the big good one enter the ring against the small bad one. That stiffens all the remaining moral feathers on our already well-plucked con- science. Only the fully plucked can unreservedly come to terms with this new situation. The great good against the small bad – will that be the new battle line-up of the twenty-first century? That’s really a joke.
FRANK: And the second myth?
SLOTERDIJK: That, on the other hand, concerns the Tower of Babel, which represents the first time theological resentment against a tall building was articulated – in fact, against the Others’ tall building. This myth expresses the enslaved Jews’ discontent with Babylonian arrogance. It is a lustful destruction fantasy about the text: ‘God reduces heathen towers to rubble and ashes. ’ This is a constitutive theme for our culture. The trauma of September 11 is so big because it concerns an attack on the dominant illusion- ary system of world power. The people of the United States don’t know how to keep on dreaming their neo-Babylonian dream of total
80 Postmen and Fallen Towers
security of the inner world by total control of the external world without destroying themselves. An evil virus has indeed infiltrated into the hegemony of the United States. We should realize that it is in our own interests that this virus doesn’t cause too much aliena- tion in the American mentality. At the moment I see the greatest danger in terms of global politics of resentment. Thank God, American democracy has a degree of resilience, and American civil society in particular has miraculous moral resources. But it is a severe infection.
KAHL: There are some school soaps on television nowadays. But their equivalent of the operating theatre in hospital series would be lessons and exams, and you don’t see them in school series.
SLOTERDIJK: School exams are so unpleasant because they
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Reinhard Kahl appeared under the title ‘Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbst’, in Pädagogik 53 (2001): 40–5 (Beltz, Weinheim).
Reinhard Kahl is a journalist and film-maker.
66 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
remind many people of birth. In schools, people are not interned for nine months but incubated for at least nine years. Then they have to fight their way out in written exams, in other words, closed situa- tions. Modern people don’t want to be reminded that they were ever incarcerated.
KAHL: School isn’t seen as a prenatal paradise – that would be asking too much – but it isn’t seen as the joyful event of com- ing-into-the-world either. Can we think of school as pressure in the birth canal?
SLOTERDIJK: School is what people always want to leave behind them. People rarely look back at school with affection.
KAHL: It wasn’t always as clear-cut as that.
SLOTERDIJK: Romanticism about school, as expressed in the famous film Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl],1 evokes mem- ories of situations that were not yet emergencies. Today the school has become a necessity of its own.
KAHL: A curious necessity, like a military exercise that uses live ammunition. On the other hand, there is a lack of resonance for taking any action that might have a serious effect. The school wryly adopts an attitude of necessity and claims, ‘all this is required later in life’.
SLOTERDIJK: The famous saying that we don’t learn for school, but for life, was an attempt at justification from the very beginning. The original school allowed pupils to learn for school because the Graeco-Roman view was that there was no need to learn for life. Life is its own teacher; it is self-explanatory. School, however, meant leisure for the Greeks, and leisure was regarded as the quintessence of life. Funnily enough, the Greeks formed their word for ‘to work’ or ‘to do business’ from the negation of the word ‘to be idle’. Anybody learning for leisure was engaging in free activity.
KAHL: How did the intrinsic value of a leisure education become a means to other ends?
SLOTERDIJK: When the modern nation-state took over the school service, the necessity principle was transferred to learning in school. It became pre-professional: school is preparation for employ- ment. The German concept of education was shaped by Prussian neo-humanism around 1800 and still tries to find a balance between
1 Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl] was a popular German film released in 1944. Set in a school in Germany, it was famous for its praise of schooldays as the best days of life, and for its light-hearted escapism during the grim last year of the Second World War.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 67
the classical and the modern concept: we learn for school and for life. The society of work is already at the door, but the school still holds its own as an autonomous life form. Die Feuerzangenbowle symbolizes this compromise. Meanwhile the migration of necessity into the classroom has advanced considerably. We’re not going to see any new punch bowls.
KAHL: School means something traumatic for most people. What is it? You mentioned the birth analogy. Does school make people feel unwelcome?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. For most children today, school is the initiation into a situation that they feel is not about them person- ally. It’s an inoculation programme that administers grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate. The message is: ‘Whatever you may think of yourself, you’re not that important. ’ People don’t like being reminded of such exams.
KAHL: In the old school where people supposedly learned for life, they experienced being a small cog in a big machine. The oppo- sitional movement, ‘do whatever you want’, didn’t get far either. Today we have school students who end up without any idea of what they want.
SLOTERDIJK: That is undoubtedly related to the fact that today’s educationists don’t know themselves what they are educat- ing children for. Modern society’s confusion about its own goals is more clearly reflected in the confusing school system than anywhere else – except, perhaps, the area of visual arts, which is also a great world stage for mental disturbance. The school and the art business are nervous systems of sensitive issues in society in which the con- fusion about what will happen next is very clearly articulated. On average, teachers can’t be different from the society they come from.
KAHL: Twenty or thirty years ago many people said they wanted to affect things by playing a key part in social change, and they became teachers. By now there are many other options for people with ideas. The teaching profession has become a second choice. How are refugees from life supposed to represent the world to the next generation?
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers are people who often believe it is better to explain something than do something. The cowardly and the the- oretical decisions about life don’t necessarily converge, but often do. The result is schools as socio-psychological biotopes with an atypi- cal concentration of timid, under-motivated people concerned with private issues. The only answer is to de-professionalize schools. We have to enhance their social skills and leave them free on the factual side. It is increasingly clear that you don’t get to the core of learning
68 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
with classic schooling methods. All the people who turned out to be special in school didn’t do it because of the school but because the school left them alone. When things went well it offered protection under which intensive learning processes, which have always been intrinsically autodidactic, could flourish. Sometimes the autodi- dactic element was able to evolve under cover of didactics. But I think this particular constellation has passed its optimal point. New optimal situations have to be created for autodidactics. The school is probably no longer part of these optimal conditions.
KAHL: Aren’t didactic teachers – there are other kinds as well, of course – representatives of an ailing priestly class nowadays? Who else still believes knowledge can be passed down from above?
SLOTERDIJK: Priesthood: that’s a convincing analogy. Today, armies of world clerics appear before their flock and appeal to the good in human beings. Meanwhile they have discovered that their appeals result in evil developing all the more. Then people pretend to naivety and ask what’s going wrong.
KAHL: Teachers don’t encourage new knowledge ‘from below’. They lack the combination of action and experience.
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers live with false descriptions – more so, in fact, than any other group in society, aside from nihilists, who know what they’re doing and still keep on doing it. Nihilists are always on target with any possible enlightenment. They are already on the baseline of total lack of illusions about themselves and others. They think and act on the damaging assumption that entropy always wins. This is precisely what we people on the creative side have been fighting against with the methods of art and philosophy since way back when. The point is to inspire people to enthusiasm and get them involved.
KAHL: So let’s give school one more chance! How could it become a venue, or even a hothouse, for autodidactic experiments? After all, people learning of their own accord are not autistic. They need other people to inspire them, people who are curious but don’t lecture them or ‘mediate’ the lessons in a boring way.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we need schools that emphasize young people’s pertinacity and don’t colonize them for the sake of ‘neces- sity’. We must shut the school doors to business, fashion and other such terrifying menaces, and reconstruct a living space for people to engage in a libidinous relationship with their own intelligence. What is clear to see in a small child usually gets lost in the school pupil. The rescue of the cognitive libido must become the school’s core project.
KAHL: School as a space of dense atmospheres swelling with possibilities? You have been occupied for years with understanding
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 69
what spheres are and not getting stuck with congealed substances like knowledge.
SLOTERDIJK: My theory of enthusiasms, that is, of public spirits, tries to reduce overblown romantic-nationalist concepts to the level of specific groups. Schools must become boarding schools! Not literally, of course, but rather in the sense of emphasizing the intrinsic character of school life. I’m seeing that with my daughter, who is lucky to be in an excellent schooling situation. In her case, you can see clearly what it means to spend time in an environment for encouraging enthusiasm.
KAHL: What grade is she in?
SLOTERDIJK: She is in the second year at the Montessori branch of an ordinary elementary school. You can see how a dif- ferent climatic policy in the school encourages a different way of speaking to the pupils and a different language among the pupils themselves. This school begins by assuming that the learning libido is the real capital. The children bring their curiosity, their enthusi- asm, that priceless medium of happy anticipation of their own self, into the learning process. What matters is expectation of the next state to be reached. A form of didactics that respects this operates quite differently and with better results than a school where teachers have the attitude: you’re going to be astonished, and I’m the one who is going to show you how things are.
KAHL: That’s what nourishes the evil eye, which is probably related to the frustration of teaching staff. They basically remain like school pupils from the ages of six to sixty-five, and that’s really mortifying.
SLOTERDIJK: I think it’s time for teachers to carry on the work Nietzsche did for priests. Teachers are an authority that is under-criticized and deserves to be given liberating and destructive criticism. In fact, people mostly accuse teachers of the wrong things.
KAHL: The accusation of laziness, for example.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s lazy itself.
KAHL: It may apply to some people who are already practically
retired from the job, usually due to mental overload. But isn’t the teaching profession a case of overload in structural terms?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s why teachers should be helped with adequate criticism. The analysis of job-specific mortification and experiences of failure is needed just as much as the analysis of resentment against the profession. That would be the most valu- able kind of enlightenment. We must link up with teachers to revitalize the school starting from its strongest position. Where is its renewable, enthusiastic source point? Schools must come forward energetically and say: we offer opportunities, here is our knowledge,
70 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
here is our art of living – we are inviting you to all that. The gesture of invitation is perhaps the most important thing. It turns schools into guesthouses of knowledge and places for the intelligence to go on outings, so to speak.
KAHL: You mean the end of compulsory school, which insists, like a surreal restaurant, on forced feeding and pupils being com- pelled to eat everything on their plate?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to break with the most harmful of all ancient European concepts: the idea of knowledge transfer. This idea of instilling is wrong in terms of system theory, it is morally wrong . . .
KAHL: Unsustainable in terms of cognitive psychology . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And despite that, the school is built around that idea, around the truly accursed and harmful idea of transfer.
KAHL: They are still distributing Communion wafers.
SLOTERDIJK: The institution of school is based on the perverse communion that says: ‘We have and we share out. ’ But learning just doesn’t function that way. We have to respect that we’re always dealing with people who are accomplished in their own personal way. Up until now they have been complete and without any real deficiency. The next state or condition can only be constructed on the basis of the work the person has already done. Teachers can only disturb the process, unless they become something like a host, a coach or – in a good sense – a seducer who is already at the place the child’s next step leads to. In such ‘guesthouses’ the principle of happy anticipation could seal the pedagogical pact. Watching my daughter, I am fascinated by this. At the age of two, she already strikes me as a person who has something I have never seen properly described, either in psychoanalysis or any other kind of psychologi- cal description. I discovered from her that the libido of wakefulness is shown by the fact she is excited about her next state. She is happy about her own becoming. It is as if she were wearing a safety lamp on her head that lights up the next chapter of life for her discreetly and always auspiciously. She always sees light at the end of the tunnel. It is the light from her own inbuilt projector.
KAHL: What a drama it would be if the safety lamp were blown out and only the gaffer on set switched the lights on and off! Maybe blowing out one’s own light was a systemic compulsion of old industrial capitalism, against which it was futile to rebel. Enterprises today are also increasingly unable to cope with burned-out cases. They can deal with them as consumers, but not in the role of ‘staff members’.
SLOTERDIJK: Professional teaching must forge the link again with the dynamic libido that illuminates one’s own ability to
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 71
become. Instead of that, I have heard that teachers of German- language classes invited staff from the Employment Office in Karlsruhe to visit schools to teach school students how to fill in unemployment benefit forms. I know it’s an extreme example, but it illustrates where the problem lies. Many teachers, when they operate as creators of the bad climate, practise the didactics of discourage- ment. They often do it, even without wanting to, when they secretly project their own failure or their self-pity on to their young clients.
KAHL: That provokes running battles and power struggles.
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, the latent message comes through: ‘You’ll be astonished. I myself stopped being astonished a long time ago. ’ These two pieces of lethal information turn people into first- class climate polluters. Children should be protected against adult pessimism with their own special anti-pollution law. To refer to my daughter again, she has the advantage of an exceptional situation: she has a teacher with an amazing way of tapping the source that generates happiness. Like a good demon, he links into the children’s love of learning. He lights up when he sees the children’s faces light- ing up. This is awesome, and sets a standard. But along come the parents with their concept of realism, their pessimism and their fearful projections, and try to curtail this space of didactic miracles and to colonize it from outside.
KAHL: What do the parents say?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Aren’t you giving the children the wrong picture of life? ’ ‘Can’t you make things more structured? ’ ‘Can’t you be a bit stricter? ’ Statements like that show how ‘realists’ try to impose their climatic monopoly. We have to create a counter-climate to oppose this. Basically, in my work as a university teacher and as a writer, I see myself mainly as a creator of spheres and a didactic proponent of atmospheres. What people learn is not all that important in the first place; far more important is for them to enter a climate that makes them aware that being able to learn is, in itself, the best opportunity of their life. In my opinion, this work of climate creation that some people attack as unjustified shamanism is indispensable for the moral regeneration of our community.
KAHL: If using productive atmospheres works, something could develop that we never experience when only standard results are presented and the special atmospheres are sacrificed to the require- ments of rigid purity rules.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s when the poison of boredom starts to spread. The school is an epicentre of boredom and is run by profes- sional bores who daub, gum up and insult children’s intelligence. Many people never recover. That is the real educational disaster. In the end, atmospheres must be seen as the most real things of all.
72 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
Today, we create situations for young people in which they have everything to hand and no desire for anything. We lose more than ten years in the elementary education process, and the best students need another ten years after the first educational experience to find their own second chance. By then, if all goes well, we have an original thirty-year-old who, after the process of school and regen- eration, can start his or her own career as a creative person attuned to atmospheres.
KAHL: Most people in Germany would think it is a strange idea that everything else depends on atmospheres in institutions and around people.
SLOTERDIJK: The problem is more acute in Germany. The catastrophe of National Socialism with its monstrous perversion of collective enthusiasm has resulted in a super-abstinence of com- munal energy in this country. In French and Anglo-Saxon culture, and in the USA, the school system is governed by different climatic factors. There is much more emphasis on the relation between the institution and the public spirit that animates people. In Germany, we have a very bureaucratic school atmosphere, always combined with resignation and dogmatic scepticism.
KAHL: The German preference for being victims – or any- thing rather than active players because that could make them perpetrators – is particularly widespread in teachers’ staff rooms.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not only victim passion that exists, but also victim didactics and victim simulation. At our university we recently experienced the problem of individual students having to put up with restrictions and inconveniences because of reorganization in some subjects.
KAHL: You are referring to the School of Design in Karlsruhe, to which you were appointed rector this year.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. And what happened? We had 120 students applying for credits for two semesters of their course because they feel they are victims of the move to the new centre, which offers them access to one of Europe’s most impressive uni- versity buildings, not to mention one of the best teaching bodies and fabulous teacher–student ratios. The temptation to describe our own life in the light of discrimination has become so strong that even young people have now developed this resigned, senior- citizen-type attitude, combined with an aggressive kind of moralist demanding, as if it were perfectly natural. To counter this, we must try to interest them in the idea of entrepreneurial life so that they don’t already behave like social security clients at the age of twelve. In any case, victim hysteria relates back to childish patterns – to over-dramatization of minor injuries.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 73
KAHL: The foundling, exposed, all alone in the world.
SLOTERDIJK: Betrayed by all – and besides, my parents are not my real parents.
My teachers are not my real teachers. Everyone abandoned me. I’m only looking for the mailbox where I can post my complaints letter . . .
KAHL: The agony column . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . the world’s agony column. This attitude can only be corrected by activating a conspiracy of knowing better. Philosophy, literature and art must be the starting point for putting an end to the era we have lived in for fifty, sixty years now, handing in our homework as a model nation with collective depression. We are at the beginning of a generational change. It should be inter- preted openly and energetically.
KAHL: Couldn’t a new education debate be a medium for that? We must transpose to society as a whole the image of ‘joyful antici- pation of oneself’ as the heart and soul of the learning process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we should have this debate, because soci- eties have no centre and no ego, they only have the public as a medium for giving wake-up calls and creating disturbances. We must finally abandon the dangerous spectres that have driven the twentieth century into disasters, the idea that society is totally itself at some point. After all, the crazy illusion of a Führer is nothing but the political interpretation of a fallacy that our culture has blithely fostered for centuries, namely, that there is a place where it could be completely itself. This realization is the entrance charge we have to pay if we want to attain the second wave of sociological enlighten- ment. We must understand that societies use atmospheres to control and climatize themselves. The topics we are talking about form a semantic air-conditioning system. Right now, all the signs are that we are programming it wrongly.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen . . .
SLOTERDIJK: There’s enough tinder for it. Then, after the abreaction phase in which people have collectively got over the duty and the tendency to complain, we could start a productive discus- sion and try to design a school that fits the level of our knowledge and experience. Given the amount of accumulated discontent, the time is ripe. As far as positive forces are concerned, we will first have to reorganize what little we have left to see if it is enough for an offensive.
KAHL: How shall we start? Isn’t it important first of all to bring other adults into schools instead of only lifelong teachers? This could evolve into a kind of co-evolution. If teachers work as people gatherers, bringing ‘third parties’ into schools, they will become more adult themselves. It will be good for them and for the school.
SLOTERDIJK: That would be a first step. At the same time, a new viewpoint on people has to be constructed in the media. I don’t think it would be too difficult to show that interesting people are more fascinating than the average entertainment. If the fascina- tion value of being involved with a living person who has become an adult can’t compete with regression programmes offered by sex, crime and co. , we have lost the game. Windows should be opened in the media . . .
KAHL: And ‘third parties’ should be brought in everywhere.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We don’t know the interesting people in our own society. That means our society doesn’t know itself and doesn’t know that it doesn’t know itself. If the media can success- fully convey this enthusiasm for interesting people, they will also trigger a new learning process in schools of bringing in remarkable people with interesting jobs. That would be a broad move to de- professionalize curricula.
KAHL: Parents would worry that their children wouldn’t learn anything any more.
SLOTERDIJK: You can deal with the panic aroused by the
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 75
suspicion that competency is being compromised by emphasizing that nothing is more educational than the opportunity to see suc- cessful people at close quarters. By the way, concerning universities of the arts, that is also my response to the outdated master-class principle. If we want to preserve anything of the idea of the master, we have to translate it into the form of watching successful crea- tors of art at work and observing their success curve. That is highly instructive under any circumstances, regardless of whether students react by positive association or by rejection. Both are equally informative, provided that students have an authentic opportunity to see a creative person fully in action. This is precisely the concept of our art school in Karlsruhe.
KAHL: Dialogues worthy of the name consist of finely tuned agreements and refusals.
SLOTERDIJK: Allowing scope for productive scepticism in relation to a successful position is never a waste of time. Even people who react by turning away have learned a great deal from it. Perhaps we live in a period in which people learn more by rejec- tion than by borrowing. The cowardly teacher is the bad teacher. The good teacher is the person who is open to rejection. The same applies to good writers, who must always risk enough that they are worth reading even if we reject them.
KAHL: That brings us to the well-known Sloterdijkian concept of ‘de-idiotizing’: expending our own stupidity, for how can we get rid of it otherwise?
SLOTERDIJK: How can we get rid of it, if not in dealing with potential imitators who are smart enough to refuse to imitate at the last minute?
11
POSTMEN AND FALLEN TOWERS
Interview with Arno Frank*2
FRANK: Mr Sloterdijk, what mandate do you have for breaking into television?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely not the mandate of the world spirit. It’s more about my feeling that, given the decadence of the universi- ties, philosophy should link up with other media.
FRANK: TV philosopher – is that your mission?
SLOTERDIJK: We can describe every activity a person engages in from two different viewpoints. We can portray it from one side as a mission and from another as a need. If we describe it as a mission, then we believe that the individual has an idea or a master behind him that sends him ahead. In my case it is not as easy. I don’t have a master or an obsessive idea that decides for me what I should do. If I did, I would feel much more comfortable at the moment.
FRANK: Why?
SLOTERDIJK: Because then I could say: whether or not it works out, the idea or the sender is responsible. I would only be the mes- senger, the postman, and could deliver my message without being responsible for its success.
FRANK: What about the other version . . . ?
SLOTERDIJK: We must interpret it as an expressive action – in other words, I don’t have to trace the sequence of themes back beyond the author. It can start with the author. That means the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Arno Frank appeared in the taz newspaper under the title ‘Ich bin nicht der Postbote’ [‘I am not the Postman’] (19 January 2002): 3f. Arno Frank is an editor at the taz.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 77
author expresses himself or herself. He or she is an energy field that wants to discharge in that direction and no other.
FRANK: A medium within the medium, so to speak. But phi- losophers don’t usually frequent the footlights . . .
SLOTERDIJK: The studio has no ramp. In conventional theatre there is a border between the stage and the auditorium. On the TV podium you are surrounded by spectators – the TV situation is like being encircled. The question is: what can motivate people to let themselves be surrounded by spectators?
FRANK: Exhibitionists love situations like that. SLOTERDIJK: Maybe. But that’s really not my concern. FRANK: Not a trace of vanity?
SLOTERDIJK: I am a person who likes keeping one side hidden,
even when I appear in public. I have a mysterious aversion to the idea of people looking at me from the right-hand side.
FRANK: In a metaphorical, political sense?
SLOTERDIJK: No, spatially. In television you can’t stand with your back to a pillar like a figure in a Gothic cathedral and imagine that you’re drawing strength out of the stone. Television is a can- nibalistic medium that devours people optically. We are going to experiment with being eaten.
FRANK: You recently suggested interpreting nations as insti- tutions that maintain concentrated postal and communications systems – with telecommunications firms as secular churches. What do you mean by that?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern media societies have no brain, no central organ, only dense concentrations in the nervous system. How is such a complex and brainless system supposed to control itself? If modern societies were organized like churches, for example, Telekom would be the provider of both the network and the content of democracy. That is a lovely ecclesiological illusion: if we were like churches we could avoid the impression that no genuine internal connection exists in society. We would be limbs of a large commu- nitarian body. I am thinking about a map Dietmar Kamper1 once showed me. It was drawn by a medieval monk who had projected the body of Christ in the crucifix position on to the map of Europe, so that altogether the points representing the monasteries of Europe formed something like a visualization of the Corpus Christi spectre. A mystical EU.
1 Dietmar Kamper (1936–2001) was a German writer, philosopher and sociologist. He was professor of sociology at the Free University Berlin from 1979.
78 Postmen and Fallen Towers
FRANK: What is a society today when it isn’t a society?
SLOTERDIJK: The question is: how can we envisage social rela- tionships at all if we describe society as a whole as a body without a central organ?
FRANK: And the answer?
SLOTERDIJK: The answer would be a media theory for our times, and a number of people in the contemporary scene are working on that. Think of the work of Norbert Bolz, or Friedrich Kittler, or Jochen Hörisch, to mention only the older ones. 2 Those three men are intellectuals of my generation I feel related to because I am doing analogous work. Each of the three, in his own way, has experienced similar kinds of trouble with their former comrades.
FRANK: The same academic allergy against new approaches?
SLOTERDIJK: These three authors are like litmus tests for the resentment of the social environment. They are cheerful theo- reticians who see their intellectual practice additionally as leisure practice. I regard them as partners in crime. We are atmospheric felons in a cultural society that continues to claim a monopoly when it comes to defining moralist smog. In that context such enlighteners or clarifiers are not welcome at first. But I am convinced that within a generation their work will be canonical. It may sound strange, but I believe we have an avant-garde impact even today. Yet the inhabit- ants of the intellectual field aren’t amused when you tell them you are ahead in some way – you get sent to purgatory like a backward pupil.
FRANK: In your major work, Sphären [Spheres], you develop a theory of ‘ensouled spaces’, from bubbles to globes to foam . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I think foam is the defining metaphor for mul- tiple spaces for which the phrase ‘dreams are foam’ no longer holds. The substantialist aversion against anything fleeting and fragile – against foam – is also only lack of thought. If you think about multi-chambered systems under the premises of spatial logic, you quickly stop wanting to use foam, or scum, as a metaphor for something despicable. Quite the opposite: we realize that foam is a cosmogonic principle without which life and environmental effects would simply be impossible. But that is a theme I will develop calmly, like the plot of a stage play. If all goes well, we can talk about it again in eighteen months’ time.
2 Norbert Bolz (b. 1953) is a German philosopher, media theorist and design theorist. Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was a media theorist and philosopher known as ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. Jochen Hörisch (b. 1951) is a German literary and media theorist.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 79
FRANK: In Spheres II you wrote that a city shows in the vertical what it plans to do in the horizontal. Following your theory, wasn’t the attack on the World Trade Center in New York also an annihi- lating attack on a semantic level?
SLOTERDIJK: Islamist terror dealt a blow at the level of real existing symbolism, which is why the Americans’ counter-attack has been so remarkably flat and helpless. The reason is that the attacker can’t be hit symmetrically. The Americans don’t dare to attack the strong symbol that belongs to the perpetrators. We simply have to consider what the equivalent, in the Islamists’ worldview, is to what they think the World Trade Center means to us. It involves a very small number of objects. The list would be headed by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, followed by the Ka’aba in Mecca. Who could justify military assaults on those two objectives?
FRANK: But a war is already being fought on the symbolic level.
SLOTERDIJK: What the Americans and their friends in the Western world find very difficult to grasp is that they have lost – lost at the first shot. This is about a war that consisted of a single battle and led to a pure defeat that can never be compensated for. The twin towers fell. Everybody saw it and that means, however odd it may sound, that the show is already over, and everything you might want to write as a sequel is playing out on another level. The sight of collapsing tower blocks is doubly painful in a culture whose sources prepare it for such a process. On the one hand, we have the myth of David and Goliath, which has been subverted in the most unpleas- ant fashion here in Germany. We are used to pitting the small good person against the big bad one, and are suddenly forced to let the big good one enter the ring against the small bad one. That stiffens all the remaining moral feathers on our already well-plucked con- science. Only the fully plucked can unreservedly come to terms with this new situation. The great good against the small bad – will that be the new battle line-up of the twenty-first century? That’s really a joke.
FRANK: And the second myth?
SLOTERDIJK: That, on the other hand, concerns the Tower of Babel, which represents the first time theological resentment against a tall building was articulated – in fact, against the Others’ tall building. This myth expresses the enslaved Jews’ discontent with Babylonian arrogance. It is a lustful destruction fantasy about the text: ‘God reduces heathen towers to rubble and ashes. ’ This is a constitutive theme for our culture. The trauma of September 11 is so big because it concerns an attack on the dominant illusion- ary system of world power. The people of the United States don’t know how to keep on dreaming their neo-Babylonian dream of total
80 Postmen and Fallen Towers
security of the inner world by total control of the external world without destroying themselves. An evil virus has indeed infiltrated into the hegemony of the United States. We should realize that it is in our own interests that this virus doesn’t cause too much aliena- tion in the American mentality. At the moment I see the greatest danger in terms of global politics of resentment. Thank God, American democracy has a degree of resilience, and American civil society in particular has miraculous moral resources. But it is a severe infection.
