No More Learning

The "And" is the morality of journalists. They have to swear, so to speak, a professional oath that when they report on something, they will not object to the placement of this thing and this report among other things and other reports with the use of an "And. " One thing is one thing, and the medium permits no more. To produce connections between "things"--that, after all, would be the same as to disseminate ideology. Therefore, whoever produces connections gets chucked out. Whoever thinks has to get out. Whoever counts to three is a fantasizer. The media's empiricism tolerates only isolated reports, and this isolation is more effective than any censorship because it guarantees that what belongs together does not get together and can be found only with difficulty in people's minds. A journalist is someone who is forced by occupation to forget what the number is called that comes after one and two. Whoever still knows it is probably not a democrat--or is a cynic.
To look at this "And" critically should be worth the effort. Viewed in isolation, is it already "cynical" in some way? How can a logical particle be cynical? A man and a woman; knife and fork; pepper and salt. What could be objectionable about that? Let us try other combinations: Lady and whore; love thy neighbor and shoot him dead; starvation and caviar for breakfast. Here, the "And" seems to have been caught up between antagonisms that it renders by way of a sort of shortcut as neighbors so that the contrasts scream out at one another.
But what can the "And" do about it? It does not create the antagonisms; it sim- ply couples the unequal pairs. In fact, in the media, the "And" does nothing other than place things next to one another, founding neighborhoods, coupling, contrasting -- no more and no less. The "And" has the capacity of building a linear series or chain whose individual links touch solely through the logical coupler. The latter, in turn, says nothing about the essence of the elements it brings into a row. In this indifference of the "And" vis-a-vis the things it places beside one another lies the germ of a cynical development. For through the mere placing in a row and the external syntactic relation between everything, it produces a unifor- mity that does not do justice to the things that have been set in a row. The "And," therefore, does not remain a "pure" "And" but rather develops the tendency of eliding into an Is-equal-to. From this moment on, a cynical tendency can propa- gate itself. For when the "And" that can stand between everything also means an
314 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
Is-equal-to, everything becomes the same as everything else, and each is just as valid as the other. Out of the sameness of form of the "And" series comes, imper- ceptibly, a factual sameness of value and a subjective sameness of validity. Thus, when I go down the street in the morning and the newspapers scream at me from the mute vendor, I have to choose, for all practical purposes, only the favored indifference of the day. Is my choice for this murder or that rape, this earthquake or that kidnapping? Every day we must make renewed use of the natural right not to learn of millions of things. That I must exercise this right is guaranteed by the media, which, at the same time, guarantee that those millions of things are already on their way to me and that I only have to look at a headline for a split second and already another inconsequentiality has managed to leap into my conscious- ness. Once it has made that leap, it also induces me to make a protocol of a cynical indifference toward whatever has reached me as "news. " I register, as a hyperin- formed person, that I live in a newsworld that is a thousandfold too big and that I can only shrug my shoulders at most of it because my capacities for empathy, outrage, and thinking-through are tiny in comparison to that which offers itself and makes an appeal for my attention.
Without noticing it, we have worked our way up to a point at which it becomes possible to take up the best of the Marxist tradition and rethink it. Those who speak of uniformity, equivalence, and indifference have secretly already arrived on the soil of Marx's classical achievements in thinking and stand in the middle of its reflection on the puzzle of equivalence relations between goods and things. Should there be connections and transitions here? Has not Marx, in his com- modity analysis, provided a fulminating and logically very subtle description of how a same-valuedness produces a sameness in validity (indifference) that precipitates in the relation of commodity and price? The best prep school for Capital-- would it not consist in watching television several hours a day, looking through several newspapers and magazines the remaining hours, and continu- ously listening to the radio? For basically, we can read Capital as often as we like and we will never understand the decisive point if we do not learn it from our own experience and if we have
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
not sucked it into our own structure of thinking and way of feeling: We live in a world that brings things into false equations, produces false samenesses of form and false samenesses of values (pseudoequiva- lences) between everything and everyone, and thereby also achieves an intellec- tual disintegration and indifference in which people lose the ability to distinguish correct from false, important from unimportant, productive from destructive -- because they are used to taking the one for the other.
To live with pseudoequivalences, to think in pseudoequivalences: When you can do that, you are a full citizen in this cynical civilization, and when you are conscious of it, you have found the Archimedean point from which this civiliza- tion can be critically unhinged. Marx circled around this point in his powerful movements of thought on the critique of economy, in order to unfold the central
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS D 315
inequality of our form of economy --that between wage and labor value--from ever new angles. However, the simplest path to an understanding of Capital leads not via a reading of Capital. We do not have to say, along with the unhappy Althusser, Lire le Capital, but rather Lire le Stern, Lire la Bild newspaper, Lire le Spiegel, Lire Brigitte. There we can study the logic of pseudoequivalences much more clearly and much more openly. In the last instance, cynicism leads back to the amoral equating of different things. Those who do not see the cynicism evident when press reports on torture in South America are placed between per- fume ads will also not perceive it in the theory of surplus-value, even if they have read it a hundred times.
Exchange Cynicism, or: The Hardships of Life
Who ever said life was fair?
Money is abstraction in action. To hell with value, business is business. For money, nothing matters. It is the medium in which the equating of what is differ- ent is realized in practical terms. Like nothing else, it has the power to bring different things to a common denominator. Just as newspaper print and television screens are indifferent to the contents they transmit, money preserves its unshaka- ble indifference with respect to all goods for which it can be exchanged, no matter how different. The Roman emperor Vespasian sniffed a coin as if he suspected that it must stink and remarked ironically: non olet. Modern bourgeois economic sciences are basically nothing other than a higher-level non olet. In the song of praise to the free-market economy, modernized money, as capital, has found an appropriately modern form to declare its physical and moral odorlessness. For as long as nothing other than purely economic acts of exchange stood to debate, scarcely a single philosopher, still less an economist, thought of checking out the phenomenon of money with regard to its cynical valences. In its theory, the capi- talist commodity economy unrelentingly confirms its good reputation. Is it not based on the best possible of all morals --the just price and the free contract? Wherever private wealth emerges, there is always someone around who assures us that he has "earned" it in the most moral way, by "his own sweat. " Only out of resentment could anyone want to find fault with good businessmen.
Of course, the non olet party, in its intelligent representatives, has accepted responsibility for certain moral complications of the commodity and money econ- omy. With regard to spending money, some dubious manifestations must be obvi- ous even to the defender of the existing relations. Georg Simmel was probably the first to investigate explicitly the problem of cynicism that arises with money. For if money, as we say, has "buying power," how far can this buying power ex- tend itself? If money confronts a commodity that has been produced for the mar- ket, it is naturally the price that determines whether the commodity changes hands
316 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
to the money possessor. This remains a purely economic calculation of value.
Simmel then came to speak of exchange procedures in which money exchanges
against "values" not known to count as commodities. The Philosophy of Money
reveals the phenomenon of cynicism in the fact that it seems to be an inherent
power of money to entangle in exchange deals goods that are not commodities
as if they were such. It is the obvious venality of everything and everybody that,
in capitalist society, instigates a gradual but continually deepening process of
cynical corruption. "Here the more money becomes the sole center of interests,
the more we see honor and conviction, talent and virtue, beauty and the health
of the soul mobilized on its behalf, all the more will a mocking and frivolous
mood arise regarding these higher goods of life, which are offered for sale for
5the same kind of value (Wertquale) as goods on the weekly market. The concept of market price for values, which in their essence refuse every valuation except that in their own categories and ideals, is the completed objectification of what
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
cynicism represents as subjective reflex" (Philosophie des Geldes, 4th ed.
6The cynical function of money reveals itself in its power to entangle higher values in dirty deals. One rightly hesitates to treat this under the concept of buying power. Wherever economic money value shows itself to be in a position to draw extra economic values --honor, virtue, beauty --says Simmel, into "business," there, in addition to the power of buying, a second power of money comes to the fore that is only analogous, not identical, with the first. It is the power of seduc- tion. It exercises its power on those whose wishes, needs, and life plans have as- sumed the form of venalities -- and, in capitalist culture, that is more or less every- one. Only in a situation of universal seduction (in which, moreover, those who were seduced have long regarded the word "corruption" as morally overstrained) can Simmel's "frivolous mood" regarding the higher goods of life (from now on, so-called higher goods of life) become a cultural climate. This climate is nothing other than what we described at the beginning as "universal diffuse cynicism. "
Caricatures: "Everything has its price, particularly that which is priceless. " The speech balloon rises out of the mouth of a big financier of the fin de siecle who dines in his private compartment, his coat unbuttoned, cigar in his hand, on his knees two naked ladies from good society. Counterpart: American billionaire on a tour of Europe as intimidated Europeans may have imagined him during the twenties: "Well, boys, I'll be blowed if, for a couple of dollars, we couldn't pack up the Old Continent into our suitcases. An extra check for what these deep Ger- man ecstatic thinkers call 'cooltoor. ' And to top if off, we'll sign up the Pope as well. " Such buy-up phrases caricature the breaking through of the material sphere of values into the "ideal" sphere of values. Capital irresistibly corrupts all values bound to the older forms of living --whether by buying them up as decorations and means of enjoyment, or by causing them to disappear as obstacles. (This con- stitutes the dialectic of "antiquities": Old stuff survives if it can be capitalized, and
[Munich, 1912], p. 264).
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 317
it can be capitalized only by virtue of the dynamics of modernization and aging specific to capitalism. ) Here capitalist society inevitably comes up against its fun- damental cynical dynamic regarding values. It is in its nature to continually ex- pand the zone of venalities. In this way, it produces not only an abundance of cynicisms but also, as moral encore to these, its own outrage against them. In ac- cordance with its ideological optics, it can only conceive of money cynicism as a market phenomenon. Without effort, neomoralistic and neoconservative phraseologies find here their accusing examples. The capitalist form of economy is compatible with nothing quite so much as the humanistic lamentations about the corrupting effect of "almighty" money on ethics and customs. Money makes the world go round. Isn't that terrible?
The non olet party must, therefore, also concede a certain odor of disreputabil- ity. However, it does everything it can to trace cynicism in the use of money back to the seducibility of individuals. The flesh is weak where money is willing. Things can always be presented as if the disreputable actors were responsible for shady acts of exchange. Once their principal accountability is assured, it is not hard to concede certain "marginal moral problems"; these are, unfortunately, in- herent to the market. Seduction in the sense of the "channeling of needs," indeed, belongs to its fundamental principles. Insofar as a cynical function of money is noticed, it remains strictly limited to the domain of exchange and consumption in which, as they say, secondary disreputabilities "cannot always be avoided. " However, who would want to deny the advantages of the system? In order not to have to speak of cynicism, sociologists like to tinker with theories of moderni- zation that jovially enter the "change of values" in the progress account.
If we listen closely, we cannot avoid noticing that Simmel has a particular form of venality of higher values in mind. Naturally, here we are talking about the honor, virtue, beauty, and spiritual welfare of "woman. " Such things can also be "bought. " Prostitution --in the narrower and broader sense --is the core of ex- change cynicisms in which money, in its brutal indifference, also drags "higher- order" goods down to its level. In no other area does the cynical potency of money come so glaringly to the fore as there, where it bursts sheltered regions -- feelings, love, self-esteem--and induces people to sell "themselves" to an alien interest. Wherever "hussies" carry their genitals to market, there capital is confronted from the outside with something about which deep inside it does not want to know anything.
In a certain respect it is a shame that Marx, in his famous commodity analysis, did not proceed from prostitution and its particular form of exchange. Such an approach would certainly have offered theoretical advantages. As head of the olet Party, he would have to be interested in every opportunity to demonstrate the cynicism of money. The woman as commodity would have been a truly irrefuta- ble argument. But a book that intends to become the Bible of the worker's move- ment cannot begin with a theory of prostitution. Marx thus initially tries to explain
318 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
the secret of equivalent exchange with completely irreproachable products such as wheat and iron, coats and linen, silk and shoe polish. We follow his subtle anal- ysis in its decisive steps: commodity and commodity; commodity and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
money; money and commodity; transition from money as money to money as capital. Here, in the middle of these idyllic, formal considerations of equivalence, those dull tensions reveal themselves for the first time that hint at a source of "contradic- tion" at the core of the entire system of exchange: All at once, money, by way of the detour through commodity and back to the money form, now becomes more money. Where does it come from? According to the assumptions, equal value is exchanged for equal value, and it augments itself this way! Is the economy a magi- cal variety show? Marx, however, and this much is certain, has described nothing other than the basic form (Grundform) of all circuits of capital that, without ex- ception, rest on the expectations of augmentation. The common people too know
8that money only begets money.
that "money works. " In observing this wondrous augmentation of capital on the commodity market, Marx behaves like a total spoilsport. He does not rest until he has explained the augmentation mechanism from first principles. To the pres- ent day, capitalist society has not forgiven him for this. But it does not do the moral, and even more, the intellectual integrity of a society any good when it has to live chronically against the truths that have long since been formulated about it without being allowed to accept them.
I think that Marx's reticence regarding the phenomenon of prostitution has a deeper ground. As a genuine theoretical fundamentalist, he is interested not so much in the easily detectable olet on the market as in the ideologically concealed olet in the sphere of labor. His power of thinking is stimulated not by the cynical stench of circulation but by the mode of production itself. The latter stimulates the theoretical organ in a way quite different from the former, which directs itself more to the senses. (For this reason, the socially critical modern arts have turned toward the colorfully corrupt manifestations of circulation cynicism. ) Marx, by contrast, breaks into the innermost positions of the non olet party and smells on capital itself the unmistakable odor of surplus-value robbery. The contested the- ory of surplus value never would have been able to achieve the key strategic posi- tion it has won in the Marxist attack on the capitalist social order if it were merely one arbitrary economic formula among others. In fact, it constitutes not only an analytic description of the mechanism of capital augmentation but, at the same time--in a politically explosive way-- a diagnosis of the moral relationship of the laboring class to the profiteering class.
In the exchange of labor power for wages, the harmony of the equivalence principle appears to be destroyed once and for all. At the innermost core of the capitalist paradise of equivalence, Marx finds the snake wrapped around the tree of knowledge, hissing: When you comprehend how one can systematically take more than one gives, you will become like capital and forget what good and evil
In expressions of non olet rhetoric it is even said
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 319
are. Since labor creates much more value than is given "back" to the laborers in the form of wages (the wage level always moves along the line of the historically relative existence minima), significant surpluses accumulate in the hands of the possessor of capital. The term "exploitation" poignantly designates the scandal of unfair advantage included in surplus-value production. It contains an epistemo- logical peculiarity; namely, it is simultaneously an analytic and a moral- agitational expression. As such, it has played a significant role in the historical workers' movements. That the side of capital rejected this battle concept from the start because of its "subversive" undertones is self-evident. The ideological strug- gles in the conversations between "labor" and "capital" have, in fact, concentrated on the question of how the phenomena of entrepreneurial profit and exploitation (or rather, so-called exploitation) should be interpreted: oletistically or nonoletistically. Whereas the oletists talk of "problems" such as poverty, proletar- ian misery, oppression, and immiseration, nonoletists draw attention to economic "aggregate interests," reinvestments, social achievements of the economy, secur- ing of jobs, and the like. Thus, modern nonoletism is a single great ideological
9effort at "decriminalizing surplus-value robbery. "
The Marxian thrust into the moral-economic complications of surplus value
thus shifts the point of attack to the mode of production itself. In this way, it out- does every possible verdict on cynical "outgrowths" of the use of money on the market. The real problem is not that, as one says, "women of honor" and "men of their word" can be made weak with money. Rather, the scandal begins where money as capital systematically presupposes for its functioning the weakness of men and women who have to carry themselves to market. This is the functional- immoral basis of the industrial exchange economy. It always reckons with the needy position of the weaker in its calculations. It erects its continual profit circuit on the existence of large groups that have scarcely any other choice than to like it or lump it. The capitalist economic order rests on the extortability of those who always live in actual or virtual exceptional circumstances, that is, of people who will go hungry tomorrow if they do not work today and who will get no work tomorrow if they do not accept what is exacted of them today.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Marx does not seek the cynicism of unequal exchange where it can be trivial- ized as an "outgrowth," but rather where, as principle, it bears the entire structure of production. After Marx, therefore, money in capitalism can never stop stink- ing of the laborers' misery. In comparison to this, turning the cultural superstruc- ture into a brothel is only a secondary process. The "decadence" theories of the Left describe this pointedly. The great discovery of Marxian political economy, however, consists in the fact that it deciphers the moral-political element in the economic element; domination establishes itself through the wage exchange. Marx exposes how the "free labor contract" between the laborer and the en- trepreneur includes elements of coercion, extortion, and exploitation. (It is funny that since the labor force has become syndicated, entrepreneurs complain that
320 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
they are really the ones being extorted. ) In the interest of self-preservation, those who have nothing to offer but labor power subject themselves to the profit interest of the "other side. " With this archrealistic expansion of the field of view, Marx's analysis raises itself from a merely positive theory of the economic domain of ob-
jects to a critical theory of society.
Whereas with regard to the circulation and consumption sphere, the cynicism
of capital presents itself as a form of seduction, in the production sphere, it ap- 10
pears as a form of rape. Just as money as a means of payment lures the higher values into prostitution, money as capital rapes labor power in the production of goods. In all these transactions, the demand for a real equivalence of the goods exchanged proves itself to be illusory. Acts of exchange that come about under the pressure of seduction and rape make futile every attempt to construct equal values between the goods. The capitalist system of exchange remains more a sys- tem of pressure than a value system. Extortion and rape --even in the noncoercive form of coercion in which contracts are accepted for lack of alternatives -- write the real history of the economy.
With a realism unpardonable from a bourgeois perspective, Marx describes capitalism in a way that takes the ground from under the feet of all mere economic theories. One cannot speak seriously about labor if one is not prepared to speak about extortion, domination, polemic, and war. In investigating surplus-value
11
productions, we find ourselves already in the domain of the Universal Polemic. In order to take the polemical realism of his analysis to the limit, Marx could have even spoken of the struggle value of a commodity instead of its exchange value. This is revealed in particular, of course, with the commodity-producing commodities --the means of production in the narrower sense, which always also represent means of struggle and pressure for their possessor. Moreover, it is also shown with the strategic main goods of economies such as wheat, iron, etc. (one only has to think of the apparently harmless examples in the commodity analysis in volume 1 of Capital), to say nothing of the military weapon commodities and commodity weapons. Due to their functional relatedness, weapons and commodi- ties are frequently interchangeable.
So, seduction and rape are supposed to be the two modi of capitalist cynicism? Circulation cynicism here, production cynicism there? Here the selling out of values; there the arbitrary pulping of the living time and labor power of the masses for the sake of blind accumulations? A moral overstraining is noticeable in these formulations, no matter how deftly aimed they may be. Whoever stresses the importance of encountering reality with as few illusions as possible may not cite it before an idealistic court even when it is amoral. The moral paradox of capitalism is, in addition, the peculiar tolerability of the "intolerable," comfort in devastation, and high life in permanent catastrophe. Capitalism has long since swallowed up its critics, especially since it can be certain of the failure of all alter- natives initiated by revolutions. "Whenever it has to be pointed out to capitalism
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 321
that it cannot help the world, it in turn can point out that communism cannot even help itself. " (Martin Walser, Biichner Prize speech, 1981).
Does what has been described here as capital cynicism in the last analysis mean nothing other than the final historical pupation of the experience that, since time immemorial, human life has been exposed to a lot of hardship and cruelties? Is the existence of human beings on a bloody globe at all subject to moral criteria?
Does not this cynicism possibly present to us the most recent form of what the friendly pessimist, Sigmund Freud, called the reality principle ? And accordingly, would an explicitly cynical consciousness not be simply the form of "adulthood" complying with a modern world torn more than ever by power struggles, which undisheartedly hardens itself enough to cope with the given relations?
Those who speak of the hardships of life land almost automatically in a realm beyond moral and economic reason. What in the physical world is the law of gravity appears in the moral world as the law that the survival of societies always demands its sacrifices. Every survival demands to be paid for, and it exacts a price that no merely moral consciousness
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
can approve of and no merely economic cal- culation can compute. The laboring and struggling groups in human society must experience the price of survival as such a bitter tribute to the reality principle be- cause they pay it with their own blood, sweat, and tears. They scrape it together in the form of subjugations to "higher" forces and facticities; they bear it in the form of pains, accommodations, privations, and hardening self-limitations. They continually pay this price in living currency that cuts into the flesh. In the struggle for survival, calluses, wounds, and losses are well-known phenomena. Indeed, where a struggle is waged, the strugglers cannot help but make themselves, with their own existence, into a means and weapon of survival. The price of survival is always paid with life itself. Life sacrifices itself everywhere to the conditions of its preservation. Everywhere we look, it bends to the coercion to toil; in class societies, it subjugates itself to the given relations of domination and exploitation; in militarized societies, it hardens under the compulsion of armament and war. What common sense calls the hardships of life is deciphered by philosophical analysis as self-reification. In obedience to the reality principle, the living being internalizes the external harshness. Thus, it itself becomes the tool of tools and the weapon of weapons.
Those who are lucky enough, in a generally hard world, to live in a niche in which even self-dehardenings are possible must of necessity look with horror out- side at the worlds of reification and objective cruelty. The perception of these de- velops most sensitively in those who stand between social worlds of varying degrees of hardness and who want to work their way out of the more strongly reified and alienated world into the milder zone. These people come ineluctably into conflict with a reality principle that requires greater self-hardenings from them than would be necessary in the mild zone. They get caught in a front against the versions of the reality principle that demand nothing but sacrifice and harden-
322 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
ing from individuals. That is the dialectic of privilege. The privileged person who does not become cynical must wish for a world in which the advantages of soften- ing can be enjoyed by the greatest possible number of people. To bring the reality principle itself into movement is the deepest characteristic of progressivity. Those who know the douceur de vivre become witnesses against the necessity of the hardships in life that always reproduce the hardened ones anew. Thus, real conservatives can be recognized, above all, by the fact that they have a horror of the dehardening of people and their conditions of life. The neo conservatives of today fear that we could become too delicate for a nuclear war. They seek a "dialogue with the young," whom they suspect of being possibly already too flabby for the distribution brawls of tomorrow.
In the descent to the deepest layers of the reality principle, we discover com- pulsions to subjugate oneself, to labor, to exchange, and to arm that have imposed themselves on societies in various historical forms. Even exchange, which bour- geois thinking imagines as one of its models of freedom, is rooted more deeply in coercion than in freedom, and this since ages past. Long before we can properly speak of cynicism, we encounter in archaic, exogamous groups the "use" of women of childbearing age as a living "means of circulation. " The principle of equivalence inserts itself in human cultural history in a way that shocks us: as childbearing means of production, women are traded "like cattle" for goods and cattle. However, this exchange does not so much serve the acquisition of herds and riches by the group that exchanges the women. Mostly, the establishment of kinship relations among the dispersed tribes retains its functional priority. Al- ready in the first "economy," a "politics" of survival and pacification manifests itself. The transformation of women into exchange objects contains an embryonic
political "economy" --if you like, a tribal foreign politics. Well before any value calculation, archaic groups in this way pay the price for the conditions of survival.
Modernity distinguishes itself from a macrohistorical perspective, among other things, by the way in which it becomes increasingly unclear how societies can sensibly scrape together the price of survival. The "hardships" they subject themselves to today in the interest of self-preservation in the meantime possess such a fatal inner dynamic that they work toward self-annihilation rather than to- ward security. How can that be? A degradation of the reality principle in the mod- ern world has to be diagnosed. As yet, no new modus has been worked out for societies under today's conditions to sensibly secure an economy of survival. For not only is the era of the exchange of women long past, but the succeeding sur- vival economy is also approaching an absolute limit. I call it the economy of the militaristic age. (This corresponds to the "class societies" of Marxist historiogra- phy, but the perspective is different. ) This age is characterized by the fact that in it, by means of enormous amounts of surplus value from the labor of slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, or from taxes, military-aristocratic strata (or standing ar-
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 323
mies) are supported that, in the classical sense of the word "parasitic," represent nonlaboring groups; they have instead the task of securing the living space of their aggregate group. The last millennia belong to the interactions of competing mili- tary parasitisms. In this economy, a new price for survival is established: The sur- vival of the whole is paid for
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
with the subjugation of the masses under political- military structures and with the readiness of the peoples to read surplus-value robbery and tax extortion as the handwriting in which "harsh reality" communi- cates its intentions to them. The violence of wars translated itself into a realism that acknowledges the fact of war as a "higher power. " The necessity of "thinking in terms of war," in the last millennia, constituted the indissoluble core of a tragic positivism. The latter knows, before any philosophy, that we do not primarily have to interpret or change the world, but endure it. War is the backbone of the conventional reality principle. With all its burdening consequences for the con- struction of social institutions, it represents the innermost, most bitter core of ex- perience of life in class societies. During the age of feudalism and nation-states, a society that could not defend itself was doomed to perish or to be conquered. Without a military "protective blanket," none of the groups that have been power- ful in history could have survived.
The direct transmission of surplus values to military-aristocratic strata ("ruling class") is characteristic of feudal societies. But nowhere to date has the modern world that developed out of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism been able to decisively overcome this transmission process. Everything it has achieved in this point exhausts itself in the transformation of direct surplus-value transmis- sion into an indirect transmission. Instead of the direct exploitation of the people by a stratum of nobles and a soldiery maintained by them, we now have modern peoples' armies, run by professional soldiers and financed with the aid of taxes. But it is precisely here that the modern state, as bearer of society's military "pro- tective blanket," increasingly conducts its task ad absurdum. For in the age of the total war, of universal "military service" and nuclear strategy, the military ap- paratuses of the major states are no longer protective shells for social life but de- velop day by day more clearly into the greatest source of danger for survival in any form. Because it has become possible to annihilate without a trace whole soci- eties through blanket bombardments and the effacement of every difference be- tween combatants and noncombatants (i. e. , between troops and the "civilian" population), the modern states, which call themselves democratic or socialist, play with the lives of their populations in a way that not even the most brutal of feudal systems would have been able to do.
If, in fact, the transfer of surplus value from the working populations to the political military apparatus were the price we had to pay for our survival, then even today, in the last instance, it would still have to be scraped together with a gnashing of teeth. In reality, this does not work. Vast sums of surplus value are pumped into political-military structures that incessantly entangle themselves in
324 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
more and more risky mutual threatening. Today, therefore, working means, whether we like it or not, supporting a system that in the long run can by no means be the system of our survival. For a long time now we have not been paying a price for our survival but rather creating surplus value for a suicide machine. In this I see a disaster for our traditional concept of reality and rationality. With a thousand voices, this disaster is answered by the rampant irrationalism in the Western superstructure. Total social irrationality has reached a level that not only leaves the explanatory power of individual intellects behind but even conjures up the question whether the world's centers of action can at all still muster enough rational energy to overcome the irrationality that is active within them. Every- thing that today would have the power to loosen the knot is itself part of the knot. What today is called rationality is comprised down to its deepest layers by the fact that it reveals itself to be the form of thinking of the principle of self-preservation gone wild.
The fate of the last great attempt--publicly announced as rational-to break up the deep layers of social irrationality is cause for dismay. In the attempt to dis- entangle the contradictions of the capitalist system with the aid of the Marxist di- alectic, the knot not only did not loosen but became twisted to the point of total absurdity (see the section on the Grand Inquisitor, chapter 7; and the second sec- tions of chapters 8 and 11). In the wrangle of the great powers, the Marxist fac- tion, which had undertaken to solve the problems of capitalism, has possibly even become the more hopeless part of the problem. If we look for the reasons for this, it becomes clear how fatefully and illusionistically the moralizing aspect of the surplus-value theory has outflanked its analytic aspect. For what this theory works out as the "objective perfidy" of the capitalist robbery of time from the laboring masses is, at the same time, a description of what happens in all societies with political-military superstructures, even if they call themselves socialist a thousand times. The channeling of surplus-value into armaments is more likely to flourish even better with the complete state ownership of productive property --as the Russian example shows.
Do not the Marxist theories of revolution rest on a tragic misinterpretation of the theory of surplus value? The latter, according to its strategic intent, was essen- tially the attempt to formulate an objective (i. e. , quantitative) language in which a moral-social relation (exploitation) could be treated. It wants to develop the con- cept of exploitation in a computable way so as to show that this exploitation cannot go on forever. But the problem of exploitation basically cannot be located on the level of quantitative considerations. Who wants to "calculate" what people are prepared to put up with? There is no mathematics that can be used to calculate how long the thread of patience will hold out, and there also is no arithmetic of self-consciousness. For thousands of years, people in military and class societies
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 325
have been trained through toughening and education to allow surplus value to be squeezed out of them under the pressure of domination, and the people on the in- finite expanses of today's Russian agrarian archipelagoes are scarcely any differ- ent from the slaves and fellahin of antiquity. This demands not so much a theory of surplus value as an analysis of "voluntary servitude. " The problem of exploita- tion touches more on political psychology than on political economy. Resignation is stronger than revolution. What could be said about the damned of the Russian soil comes not from Lenin's quill but from Flaubert's: "Resignation is the worst of all virtues. "
Since, therefore, the military reality principle, and with it the entire rationality of previous calculi for self-preservation, is on the point of dissolving before our eyes in a shocking way, we can ask whether the spiritual resources of our civiliza- tion will suffice to erect a new transmilitary and postindustrial reality principle. Atomic, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as the entire system of hostile artillery, are nothing more than outgrowths of a world- historical process of indu- ration in which the imperial-polemical cultures have represented their essence technically. The overkill realism that lies at the bottom of today's interactions be- tween the great powers can, in the long run, only be the reality principle of
12
The age of military survival rationality, together with
politicking psychopaths.
all its corollaries, is gradually moving toward a fatal end.
But is what is dying here not already pregnant with a new reason? If survival as a whole in the future in no way can be subsumed under the law of warring and exploitative, callous systems, does this not foreshadow a new reality principle? The world situation itself puts our survival in the hands of another ratio. We can no longer pay the price for survival within the framework of the polemical reality principle. The principle of self-preservation is on the point of a world- historical overthrow that leads all induration and armaments ad absurdum. That is the twi- light of the idols of cynicism. The hour has come for hard subjects, hard facts, hard politics, and hard business. Cultures that have armed themselves with nu- clear weapons are being caught in the feedback of their arming. Those who con- trol the splitting of the atom can no longer afford not to control the splitting of humanity, the systematic self-hardening through making enemies. For this rea- son, I have designated the nuclear bomb as the Buddha machine of our civiliza- tion. It stands facing us imperturbably and sovereignly as a mute guarantor of negative illuminations. In it, the ontological maximum of our defensivity on a technical path has gained representation. It embodies the extreme to which the armed subjectivity of our rationality of induration was able to develop. If we do not learn from it to create soft facts by means of a new principle of reality and rationality, it could be that in the near future the hard facts will see to our downfall.
326 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
Notes
1. See on this also chapter 24, "Hey! Are we Alive? " as well as Excursus 9, '"Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness. "
2. Foucault has portrayed this age nicely in Les mots et les choses (1966; The order of things), chapter 2.
3. From this comes the accusation of "escapism" leveled against the nonrealistic arts.
4. That they nevertheless do not present "everything" is an effect of their still considerable selec- tivity. Lying through selection?
5. Wertquale, value of a definitive kind; here, of the economic kind, expressed in money and commodity.
6. Simmel designates as cynical only the domain of subjective, quasi-nihilistic, and frivolous atti- tudes. My work definitely wants to get away from such a subjective concept of cynicism. I try to un- derstand cynicism as rooted in the real and relatively-universal social-intellectual process, so that be- ing kynical or cynical does not come "out" of individuals-that would be psychologistic rubbish-but offers itself to individuals, grows in them, and develops itself through them, i. e. , by means of their energies, but above and beyond them.
7. Here the statement holds that money stinks in principle and not only when it is a matter of Vespasian's latrine tax. What is intended is a fundamental critique of private property (of the means of luxury and production), a critique that consolidates itself from the unwieldy slogan Property Is Theft to the subtleties of the theory of surplus value.
8. For this reason, the lottery is the greatest moral achievement of capitalist society. It shows the untold numbers of people who obviously do not achieve anything through labor that luck is the only thing that promises justice.
9. In the twentieth century, Marxist oletism has obtained protection from psychoanalysis, which conceives of money and shit as symbolic equivalents and subsumes the money complex under the anal sphere. It has not reaped a harvest of gratitude for this aid, especially since the Russian Revolution when a Marxistically disguised non oletism emerged overnight that proclaims that exploitation in Rus- sian is no longer exploitation. Socialist surplus value sails under the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
libidinous flag of construction lust.
10. When Baudrillard remarks that seduction is stronger than production, it sounds more surpris- ing than it really is. In its mass-consumption phase, capitalism can move much more smoothly with the aid of seductions (i. e. , pampering, stupefaction, brothelization of minds) than if it used naked force. Fascism was only a thunderstorm; seduction by the rapist. Consumerism is seduction by the pimp.
11. See chapter 11 (the second section). The systematic analysis of capital opens up three polemi- cal fronts: capital against wage labor, competition among the individual capitals, and war between national capitals.
12. See chapter 5 (the final section), chapter 8 (the first section), and chapter 10 (the final section).
III. Logical Main Text
Chapter 10
Black Empiricism: Enlightenment as Organization of Polemical Knowledge
Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons not to let her reasons be seen ?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft
A spy in the right place replaces twenty thousand men at the
front. Napoleon Bonaparte
Agents must be intellectuals; in the decisive moment, they must not shrink from making the ultimate sacrifice.
Directive No. 185796 of the Soviet intelligence service, quoted from B. Newman, Spione: Gestern, heute, morgen (Stuttgart, 1952)
Enlightenment? Good. Science? Research? Good, very good! But who enlightens about the enlightener? Who researches the research, who undertakes science about science? By posing such questions, are we demanding more enlightenment, science, research, or less, or of another type? Is it an appeal to philosophy? To metascience? To sound common sense? To morality? My plea is for a continua- tion of the phenomenological path. We ask, Who is interested in what? Which forms of knowledge or sciences arise through these interests? Who wants to know what? Why? What motivates his or her curiosity --and even assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural hunger for experience, desire to experiment, and an excess of curiosity, the question still remains, Why precisely this curiosity, this wanting to know? If, in ideology critique, it is always asked, Who is speaking? (in order to reduce the words to the speaker's social position), then, in the critique of en- lightenment, we ask, Who is seeking? Who is researching? Who is struggling?
Here a rather remarkable field of kinship relations emerges --a rare clan of cu- rious persons, of trackers of knowledge and curiosities. From this perspective, the philosopher and the spy, the policeofficer and the journalist, the detective and the psychologist, the historian and the moralist present themselves as the children of the same, although quarreling, family. All appear like the various lines in the spectrum of enlightenment knowledge. Curiosity seeks the reasons for curiosity --it too seeks! - f o r enlightenment about enlightenment, and must there- fore in turn let itself be interrogated as to the reasons for its own curiosity. Coun- terenlightenment inclinations? Reaction? Discontent within enlightenment? We want to know what the point is of this wanting to know. There is too much "knowl-
329
330 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
edge" about which we could wish, for the most diverse reasons, that we had not discovered it and had not gained "enlightenment" about it. All too many insights are fear inducing. If knowledge is power, then today, what was once eerie, in- scrutable power, confronts us in the form of insights, transparency, obvious con- nections . If at one time enlightenment -- in every sense of the word--lessened fear through the increase of knowledge, then today we have reached a point where en- lightenment turns into what it undertook to hinder: the increase of fear.