In part, they serve administration,
domicile
and health care, and thus predominantly production.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
" The storm breaks loose.
The Reichstag, which is nationalist to the bones, receives the General.
The Reich president abdicates, the General receives unconditional power (Enabling Act, state of emergency).
The enemy troops of occupation are defeated everywhere.
In 1921, 10,000 copies of this book were already sold.
(Gumbel, Verschworer, pp.
80-81)
The fantasizers of 1920 will prove to be the realists of 1933. Major Solf s sce- nario contains the politics of murderous innocence in embryo. The deceitful,
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 429
crafty, and upright partisans of the Club of the Innocent project the spirit of simu- lation also onto everything surrounding them--particularly the political oppo- nent, even when it is already sitting in jail. From Niederschonenfeld, the notori- ous Bavarian fortress for "political prisoners" (Toller, Miihsam, etc. ), it is reported:
The Bavarian parliamentarian Hagemeister suffered unspeakably. He suffered from a very weak heart. The prison doctor adjudged him to be a malingerer who wanted to be transferred to a hospital so as to be able to escape. In mid- January 1922, a high fever set in. The prison doctor said, "Herr Hagemeister, you are so healthy that if you were my private patient, I would advise you to refrain from further treatment because I wanted to save you the cost. " The next Hay, Hagemeister was found dead in his cell. (Gumbel, Verschworer, p. 123)
Excursus 3. The Reasonable Bloodhound: A Social Democratic Elegy
Someone has to become a bloodhound;
I do not shrink from the responsibility.
4
On 9 November 1918, the head of government under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince Max of Baden, knew that the situation
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
for the Hohenzollern was hopeless. "We can no longer beat down the revolution, but only suffocate it. " Suffocate the revolution --that means: Grant it a fake vic- tory, let it occupy deserted, exposed positions in order to trap it in a position in reserve prepared for this purpose. Said concretely, the kai- ser had to abdicate, the half Social Democratic government had to be- come completely Social Democratic, and the chancellor had to be called Friedrich Ebert. It fell to Ebert then to send the apparently victorious revolution, startled and disconcerted at the ease of its own victory, home and to recreate order --in the words of Prince Max: to do on a macrolevel what Noske had already done on a microlevel in Kiel.
Ebert was thoroughly willing to do this, and Prince Max knew it. General Groener suspected it at least. All three men were, at the latest since the morning of 9 November (! ) tugging on the same rope. (Sebas- tian Haffner, Die verratene Revolution 1918/1919 [Bern, Vienna, Munich, 1969], p. 77)
The fateful days of the German revolution lasted from January 9 to 12, 1919. At Ebert's command, in these days and nights, the Berlin Revolution, which pointed the way for the development of Germany, was shot to pieces. After "Ebert's bloody Christmas" (there had already been heavy fighting on Christmas Eve, 1918, between reactionary officers from the Reichswehr and revolutionary
Gustav Noske
430 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
naval troops, which ended with the sailors' victory), it now came to a bloody deci- sion. Should the new order in Germany be created with the aid of forces that wanted something new, or should only a stalling "order" be created that amounted to a conservation of the old deplorable state of affairs? Ebert had decided to place the slogan Law and Order higher than the promising revolutionary reshaping of the German situation.
Legend has it that the fighting of January 9-12 was a "Communist uprising. " It has been recorded in history as the "Spartacus uprising. " However, neither the former nor the latter can be taken seriously. It was not the case that Ebert and Noske drew together the reactionary volunteer troops to fire on "Communists. " It was not groups of ultraleft conspirators on whom these units of right-wingers had to fire in the name of the Social Democratic chancellor. For the most part, it was Social Democratic masses of workers, for whom it seemed self-evident that after the bankruptcy of the feudal-bourgeois Hohenzollern state, a new democratic social order that served the interests of the people should arise. They had not the slightest understanding for the semiconservative tacking of the Ebert government. Ebert,
Scheidemann, Noske-in the eyes of the masses, they were no longer genuine Social Democrats. For the Social Democrats, as far as the popular and not the official basis was concerned, were for clear relations and for a revolutionary break with the old powers.
On January 11, the Maercker Gendarme Volunteer Corps ("at last, real sol- diers again") marched in a demonstration through the suburbs of bourgeois west- ern Berlin. At its fore a lanky and bespectacled civilian: Gustav Noske, "Social Democrat. " This is how he understood what he called "carrying responsibility": putting himself at the head of irresponsible, emotionally explosive, reactionary troops incapable of thinking politically. A few days later, the Social Democratic protege killers of the "Garde-Kavallerie-Schutzendivision" (Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division) murdered the best minds of the revolution: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The name Noske from then on became the trademark of Social Democratic il- lusory realism. The "Noske period" is a phrase that recalls innumerable murders for the sake of "law and order. " It designates the bloody months from January to May 1919 in which in Germany a Social Democratic government "suffocated" a principally Social Democratic mass movement with a clear tendency toward re- form, in the way in which Prince Max had predicted.
Through his role, Noske qualifies himself as a cynic of the coarsest kind. His concept of "responsibility" had the tone of a cynical disinhibition that strengthens itself by confessing to its own "unfortunately necessary" brutality. "Someone has to become a bloodhound . . . " This tragic password of the Social Democratic counterrevolution already breathes a Fascist spirit. The latter equates responsibil- ity with willingness to make decisions, which in turn disinhibits those responsible in a brutal direction, and the brutality is reflected once more in itself by express-
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 431
30 Pf. I, Jahrgang, Nr. 3 Der Malik-Verlag, Berlin-Leipzig Anfang April 1919 30 Pf.
Prost Noske! ? das Proletariat 1st entwaffnet!
The Bankruptcy: "Congratulations Noske! The proletariat has been disarmed! " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
? 432 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
ing not only that it is this way but also that it wants and "has" to be this way. The cynical tone now calls the Social Democratic tune. After Noske had gathered troops together, that is, held an executive organ of large caliber in his hand that all too willingly let fly at the local revolutionary councils and committees, he be- gan to triumph. Noske on January
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
21, 1919:
The government must gain authority for itself by shaping a factor of power. In the course of a week, a battalion of twenty-two thousand men was created. The intercourse with the solders' councils therefore changed somewhat in tone. Before, the solders' councils were the factor of power; we have now become this power factor. (Quoted after Haffner, Verratene Revolution, p. 170)
We, that is the Social Democrats, the bloodless ones, allied with their own deadly enemies. They provide an opportunity for the bloodhounds to get used to murder and manslaughter within a legal framework. The negligence with which Ebert and Noske came to terms with the existence of the corps of volunteers is incredible; of these, only sixty-eight were officially recognized (which according to estimates comprised almost half a million men). The minds of the commanders of the voluntary corps were thoroughly haunted by "political fantasies" (Gumbel) of the type cited earlier. One of them, a Captain Gengler, noted in his diary on the same January 21, 1919: "The day will come when I will settle accounts with this government and tear the mask off the entire wretched, pitiful pack" (quoted after Haffner, Verratene Revolution, p. 172). Here, a pre-Fascist speaks as en- lightener who wants to unmask the Social Democrats, whom he recognizes as dis- semblers. Even the populists saw through Ebert's philistine pseudorealism that, as a simultaneously restricted and disinhibited conviction of responsibility, wanted to "save" Germany in its hour of need. Ebert's complex about dignitaries misled him to believe that reason could only be something that lies between the extremes. He did not comprehend that there can only be a midpoint between right and left where the left principle had unfolded enough in order to be able to be balanced out. Ebert already set a middle course as preventive measure. Thus it happens that, lacking the left wing, the midpoint between the forces always comes
to lie pretty much to the right. Thus it can occur that what is "reasonable" in a cynically bright hour, will have occasion to confess to being a bloodhound. That is the tragic knot in German history of this century. With its false reasonableness, social democracy destroyed and hindered what was about to take place in Ger- many in those months: the Social Democratic revolution.
Notes
1. This probably refers to Eduard Stadtler's well-known ideological foundation of this name. For more details see Joachim Petzold, Wegbereiter ties deutschen Fascismus. Die Jungkonservativen in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1978), pp. 52ff.
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 433
2. Erich Fromm provides a psychogram of Kern in his book Anatomic der menschlishen Destruk- tivitat, chapter 11.
3. These details become significant in connection with chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors. "
4. The German revolution of 1918-19 has coined scarcely any frequently quoted phrases. This
is one of the few and it is cynical like scarcely any other. Noske related it on assuming command
of the troops who were to beat down the revolution in Berlin. That was on January 9, 1919. On Janu-
ne ave
ary 10. S orders to attack revolutionary Berlin.
Chapter 18
Depersonalization and Alienation. Functionalist Cynicisms I
Stop! Don't do anything because of your name. A name is something shaky. You cannot build on it!
B. Brecht, Mann ist Mann
The First World War had undermined the thinking of the ideologues who wanted to glorify the warrior. Its proper subject showed itself to be not the battle- stained hero but the massive military machinery. The survivors expressed this ex- perience a thousandfold. It forms the hard core of the modern dissatisfaction with subject-object ways of thinking. The individual subject now appears unmistaka- bly as registered, drafted, uniformed, engaged, disposable --subject in the origi- nal sense of the word as "subjugated. " War spits out the new subject of the times: the "front," the people at arms; this becomes the megasubject of thinking marked by war. A little later, it will be called "community of the people"; in it, the mem- bers of the nation will be forced together in an illusorily homogeneous fighting unit. As a historical alternative to this community-of-the-people-unto-death, parts of the workers' movement, which conjured up the megasubject "working class," presented itself back then and came to think about its real interests in life. The time seemed to belong to the great collectivities; the individualist veil of bour- geois culture disintegrated.
The war had consumed the "warriors" physically as well as psychologically- The "man" sank into the mud trenches, was torn to pieces by shells or mutilated. Here, a bourgeois dream of "wholeness" and personality came to a horrible end. Those who recollect frequently mention castration by shells on the front. Un- countably many experienced the defeat as a social-psychological emasculation. The war had already reduced heroism to a matter-of-factness in fighting. Now, the defeat made one more facticity out of it. In this way, I think, the oft-cited Wei-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
434
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 435
? C. van Eestern and L. G. Pineau, City of Traffic, 1926.
mar "matter-of-factness" touches in the first place on a military-psychological state of affairs. In the following years, this seeps into the cultural style: the war- rior as the coolly functioning engineer. The attacks by storm become the heroic deeds of matter-"Storm of Steel. " Finally, in the modern war of artillery, the last connection between heroism and survival slackens. The bond between the soldiers and the weapon systems now is "matter-of-fact. " The man in uniform has to learn to regard himself as the "human factor" in the war of machines and to act accordingly. The general staff phrase "human material" increasingly stamps the modern form of self-experience and way of treating oneself. Those who sur- vive must have learned to regard themselves, their bodies, their morality, their will, as things. The soldier's physical condition and moral attitudes provide only aspects of armament and battle equipment. In this point, war gave all modern
436 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
moral philosophies a drastic, graphic lesson: Morality is called the psychic factor of the war machine.
Military matter-of-factness, so much of which will be inherited in an indirect way by Weimar culture, is for its part, however, woven into an encompassing process for which Walter Rathenau, who was murdered in 1922, had found a striking formula: the mechanization of the world. The book that develops this thought is still worth reading today, and not only because the author displays a style that is almost sensationally brilliant for a politician. Rathenau's On the Cri- tique of the Times (1912) is the outstanding attempt of a bourgeois politican, who was also a successful entrepreneur and philosopher of respectable status, to ana- lyze the essence of modern society for himself and his contemporaries. His start- ing point in describing the mechanization of the world, however, is not the army but the metropolis.
In their structure and mechanics, all larger cities of the white world are identical. Situated at the midpoint of a web of rails, they shoot their petrified street-threads over the countryside. Visible and invisible net- works of rolling traffic crisscross and undermine the vehicular ravines and twice daily pump human bodies from the limbs to the heart. A sec- ond, third, fourth network distributes water, heat and power, an electri- cal bundle of nerves carries the resonances of the spirit. . . . Honey- comb cells, fitted out with silky fabrics, paper, timber, leather, tapestries, are ordered into rows; outwardly supported by iron, stone, glass cement. . . . Only in the old centers of the cities . . . residues of physiognomical peculiarities are still maintained as almost extinct showpieces, while in the surrounding districts, no matter whether in the direction of the factories, residential or recreational areas, the interna- tional world warehouse extends (W. Rathenau, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2 [1977], p. 22)
At first, Rathenau devotes his attention to the process of construction --the out- standing form of piling up of goods in the modern world. The circulation of goods, he says, is negligible beside the petrified results of production of goods. Humanity
builds houses, palaces and towns; it builds factories and storehouses. It builds highways, bridges, railways, tramlines, ships and canals: water, gas and electricity works, telegraph lines, high voltage power lines and cables; machines and furnaces. . . .
The new buildings in German cities would, in the course of about every five years, probably reach a value that in mechanical expenditure would equal the construction value of imperial Rome.
What then is the purpose of these unheard-of constructions? In large part, they directly serve production. In part, they serve transport and trade, and thus indirectly production.
In part, they serve administration, domicile and health care, and thus predominantly production. In part,
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I D 437
? Georg Scholz, Flesh and Iron, 1923.
they serve science, art, technology, education, recreation, and thus in- directly . . . once again production, (p. 51) Mechanical production has long since overshot the elementary goals of food, othing, self-preservation, and the protection of life. In continually expanding circles of production and consumption, it creates new "desires," a measureless "hunger for commodities" that is increasingly directed at artificialities. Mechani- zation thus incorporates even wishes themselves "in the irreality, lifelessness and shadowiness of its products and fashions" (p. 50). Rathenau's conclusions hit un- erringly the quintessence of sociological theories of alienation: "Mechanical
production has elevated itself to an aim in itself. " (p. 52).
This is the mental scenario in which the situation of humanity is determined.
Rathenau seeks it at the productive center itself, in the world of labor.
Labor is no longer an activity of life, no longer an accommodation of the body and the soul to the forces of nature, but a thoroughly alien ac- tivity for the purpose of life, an accommodation of the body and the soul to the mechanism. . . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Labor is no longer solely a struggle with nature, it is a struggle with people. The struggle, however, is a struggle of private politics; the
most risky business, practiced and nurtured less than two hundred years ago by a handful of statesmen, the art of divining others' interests and using them for one's own ends, to have an overview of global situa- tions, to interpret the will of the times, to negotiate, to make alliances, to isolate and to strike: this art is today not only indispensable for the man of finance alone, but, in an appropriate measure, is indispensable
438 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
to every shopkeeper. The mechanized profession educates one to be- come a politician, (pp. 67-68)
Rathenau's anthropology of the laboring human being accordingly possesses two aspects: On the one hand, the laboring ego becomes an epiphenomenon of the apparatus of production; on the other hand, they who "egoistically" pursue their "own interest" become ineluctably entangled in a kind of war, in diplomatic, polemical, and political business. Where an ego appears in the modern economic world, there it must appear as politician, strategist, deceiver, calculator, and diplomat. For every contemporary, political tactics go to the head; at the same time, this "risky business" of tactics descends to the last shopkeeper. The matter has probably never been presented so disarmingly clearly in such a compact space. Where the ego does not want to become only a cog in an alienated over- sized machine, it must stretch itself in the other direction and learn the art that earlier was the sole province of the great figures of politics. It must go through years of apprenticeship in political cynicism.
It is scarcely any better for our intellectual and psychical powers.
The intellect, still shaking from the excitements of the day, insists on staying in motion and on experiencing a new contest of impressions, with the proviso that these impressions should be more burning and acidic than those that have been gone through. . . . Entertainments of a sensational kind arise, hasty, banal, pompous, fake and poisoned. These joys border on despair. . . . The devouring of kilometers by the automobile is a graphic image of the deformed way of viewing na-
ture. . . .
But even in these insanities and overstimulations there is something mechanical. The human, simultaneously supervisor of the machine and machine in the global mechanism, under growing tension and heating, has surrendered his or her quantum of energy to the flywheel of the world's activity, (p. 69)
With great physiognomic power, Rathenau sketches the psychology of the productive-consumptive human being. He discovers the puzzling banality of "ab- stract ambition" that forms a unity of drives with the equally free-floating hunger for commodities.
Abstract ambition is puzzling because all admiration is directed at the mask, and from the mask to its wearer, there is no inner band of iden- tity, (p. 74)
Between greedy masks, a network woven of acts of purchase is spun in which surrogates and surrogates of surrogates wander through the hands of con- sumers. In bourgeois households, it comes to an excess of objects in whose con- sumption existence seems to exhaust itself.
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 439
Ten years later, Henry Ford answers this thought in the book about his suc- cess, My Life and Work (published in German in Leipzig, 1923) in which he, too, confuses the view of the captain of the economy with that of the ethnologist and, like a pseudonaive observer of capitalism, remarks:
The advances of the world to date were accompanied by a strong in- crease in the objects of daily use. In the backyard of an American suburban home, there are on the average more appliances . . . than in the entire territory of an African ruler. An American schoolboy is in general surrounded by more things than are in an entire Eskimo com- munity. The inventory of kitchen, dining room, bedroom and cellar represents a list that would have astounded the most luxurious potentate of 500 years ago. (p. 313)
The wasting away of traditional beliefs can only be countered reactively by the consumptive personality. It wants to cling to beliefs and values without being able to be the person for whom they still really hold.
Now he strives with cunning to regain what has been lost and plants lit- tle shrines in his mechanized world, just as roof gardens are laid out on factory buildings. From the inventory of the times, here a cult of nature is searched out, there a superstition, a communal life, an artificial nai- vete, a false serenity, an ideal of power, an art of the future, a purified Christianity, a nostalgic preoccupation with the past, a stylization. Half 1
believing, half dissembled, devotion is given for a while, until fashion and boredom kill the idol. (Rathenau, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, p. 93)
This structure of modern credulity regarding values, which is a feigned belief in capricious and desperately restored values, brilliantly describes the mentality of those populist-activist groups, propelled by nihilistic antinihilism, which,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
shortly after the failure of the German revolution, did all the talking. From one of these groups came Kern, Rathenau's murderer. The first encounter between the future murderer and his victim took place in October 1921 during a public lecture in Berlin. Ernst von Salomon has recorded this scene in his novel, Die Geachteten (The outlaws; Gutersloh, 1930). While Rathenau is speaking, Kern pushes forward to a column near the speaker's rostrum and forces the minister into the spell of his eyes, cold with hatred:
I saw in his dark eyes the metallic green shine, I saw the whiteness of his forehead. The minister, however, turned hesitatingly, looked at first fleetingly, then confusedly at that column, froze, sought laboriously, then gained composure and inattentively wiped from his forehead what had been projected onto him. But from now on he spoke to Kern alone. Almost entreatingly, he directed his words to the man by the column and slowly became tired as the latter did not change his stance. . . .
As we pushed through the exit, Kern managed to get close to the
440 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
minister. Rathenau . . . looked at him questioningly. But Kern shoved hesitatingly past him and his face seemed eyeless. (Die Gedchteten, p. 315)
Something of the spirit of the whole epoch is contained in this confrontation. The gaze of the nihilist perpetrator of the deed does not want to see what his oppo- nent had in terms of intellect, goodwill, and readiness to accept responsibility. Rathenau is supposed to feel that Kern does not want to listen.
Hermann Rauschning, too, links up with insights such as those already presented by Rathenau in his book Masken und Metamorphosen des Nihilismus (Masks and metamorphoses of nihilism [Vienna, 1954]) in which Hitler's erst- while dialogue partner sketches outlines of a philosophical theory of fascism. The intellects that are worked up against modernity, Rauschning shows, are inclined during a crisis to cling precisely to that which nihilism had taken as its starting point: to the great social institutions, the state, the economy, and the armed forces. They, the great promisors of meaning, are the principal agents who "broadcast unconscious nihilism behind a facade of apparent order and forced dis- cipline. " (p. 121).
What those who are unstable call to for salvation is, in fact, the source of the evil. The institutions to which the conservative antinihilists cling with gloomy sympathies are the real "agents of nihilism. "
According to Rauschning, nihilism advances in two ways: Values and truths are subjected to a "progressive unmasking," they become transparent as sur- rogates, and they are, as the functional lies of the great institutions, stripped of all higher validity. At the same time, however, the social institutions free them- selves from human control as means and elevate themselves to ends in themselves to which individual as well as collective human existence has to subjugate itself.
A contemporary writer who renounced for himself every organ of metaphysical speculation . . . has expressed this . . . process in a single excellent sentence: "When humanity emanicipated itself from God, it probably could not yet guess that one day logically the things will emancipate themselves from it. " (Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebo- gen [The questionnaire])
Human beings become the material of the economic process, the mere means of the state. (Rauschning, Masken, p. 123) The institutions, the regulations, the apparatuses of community or- der, the organs of European culture are not longer aids for humanity in establishing meaning for itself. They are means and tools of nihilism. They do not hang in the air; rather, the entirety of human existence floats without any supporting ground and clings to the means of exis- tence that have become ends in themselves as the only things that can be held onto in the whirlwinds of insubstantiality. (Ibid. , p. 130)
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 441
What is here put forward by philosophizing statesmen is confirmed in the works of contemporary writers. Among them, Bertolt Brecht claims a special sta- tus. For, like scarcely any other, he critically presented and experimentally thought through in his works the inversion of the bourgeois-individualist under- standing of the ego that had been decried as nihilism. He is the real virtuoso of the "cynical structure. " In fact, he grasps it as a procedural possibility and as a poetic opportunity. No matter how his share of subjective cynicism is estimated, he succeeded in making it into a means for representing reality. In his epoch, he became a master of the cynical tone of voice and, with almost every one of his plays, from Baal to Massnahme (Measure), he established his reputation as a poet who commanded a language that allowed the "times themselves" to speak.
With Brecht, too, the stance recurs that we found at first in Dadaist irony: let- ting oneself be thrown and pushed around by the given state of affairs, which is no longer counterposed by any flimsy ideas or upright poses. More important than self-composure is insight into what really confronts us. "Matter-of-factness" func- tions as a form of going along, of being-in-the-times: Don't fall behind, don't let any resentments grow, don't cherish any old values, but look to see what the state of affairs is now and what is to be done. We cannot live off the good old values, it is better to start with the bad
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
new reality.
Obviously, a new quality of irony and a nonaffirmative form of affirmation makes itself felt here. In this irony, it is not a subject that has "stayed clean" that reveals itself, who, distanced, above the fronts, the melee, and the tumult, tries to save its integrity. It is rather the irony of a bashed ego who has got caught up in the clockwork (rather like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) who makes its hands as dirty as the circumstances are and who, in the midst of the goings- on, only takes care to observe alertly what it encounters. With Brecht, too, the pugna- cious irony appropriate to modernity makes itself felt: kynical irony. It does not resist reality with "imagined fancies" but exercises resistance in the form of un- resisting accommodation.
This irony's model piece is provided by Brecht in the famous interjection from the comedy A Man Is a Man. The Transformation of the Packer Galy Gay in the Military Barracks of Kilkoa in Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Five. Interjection
Herr Bertolt Brecht maintains: a man is a man.
And that is something anyone can prove.
But then, Herr Bertolt Brecht also proves
That one can do as much as one likes with a person. Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car Without losing anything in the process.
The man will be approached humanely
He will be requested firmly, without vexation
442 D DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
To accommodate himself to the course of the world And to let his private fish swim away.
And no matter what he is remodeled into,
In doing so no mistake has been made.
One can, if we do not watch over him,
also make him overnight into our butcher.
Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes that you will see the ground On which you stand disappear like snow under your feet And that you will notice about the packer Galy Gay That life on earth is dangerous.
(Erste Stiicke, vol. 2, 1953, pp. 229-30)
For the kynical realist, the idea of human individuality in times in which war machines, metropolitan streams of traffic, and unleashed production apparatuses consume the individual as their "raw material," is no longer a "fruitful hypothe- sis. " Let us try from the other end, free of any metaphysics of individuality and without humanistic nostalgia. "A man is a man. " What scenic arrangement must be set up in order to examine this cynical-critical statement of identity? In his stage experiment, Brecht has the gentle family man become a bloodthirsty fighter, "incensed" by the "wish to sink my teeth" / Into the throat of the enemy, primitive drive, from the family / To butcher the breadwinner / To carry out the assign- ment" (ibid. p. 293). Besides being him-"self," everybody can also be functionally the other, who, with a few tricks, is refitted as a "human fighting machine. " Brecht outdoes the nostalgic lamentations about alienation with a hard commitment to psychological functionalism. The point here is that he does not want to present any reduction of the civilized human to a wild animal but a coolly presented remodeling of the civilian as soldier, thus no "regression" but a mere displacement in which "nothing is lost. " The sole concession to the individual occurs indirectly in that the playwright turns to the audience's intelligence and provokes it into swimming free of conservative inhibitions through the surrender of the cultivated bourgeois "private fish," and into immersing itself in an ugly but vitally seething present. Notes
1. Rathenau herewith stakes out the framework within which neoconservative ideological forma- tions move. They rest on a denial on two fronts: They deny modernity ideologically and the "new-old values practically.
Chapter 19
Artificial Limbs. Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology
Goethe intervenes.
At first it was uninjured survivors who began to sing the neohumanist lamenta- tion about modern alienation and the mutilation of the individual. On the opposed side, kynical vitalists (like the young Brecht, the Dada groups, and many others) tried through their sarcasm to outdo the degradation of the individual that had be- come apparent in the modern social order. They practiced the accusation or the affirmation of mechanized existence as a figure of thought.
To the physically alienated, the mutilated, and the reassembled, such forms
of expression remained in either direction rather alien. It makes a difference
whether one reflects on the loss of individuality as a critique of culture, or ex-
periences how a war (or labor) tears away pieces from one's own ("indivisible")
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
body. One source of war statistics says: "Thirteen million dead, eleven million crippled . . . six billion shells and fifty billion cubic meters of gas in four
1years. " How did the armies of cripples who streamed back to their native coun-
tries in 1918 fare? Some, in any case, could say nothing about the reassembling of humans in modernity; they no longer had mouths.
Men with frightening faces, without noses, without mouths; nurses who shrank back from nothing fed these disfigured creatures through thin glass tubes that they poked into the scarred holes of proud flesh where once a mouth had been. (Erich Kastner, Fabian [1931], p. 49)
What Kastner describes refers to the year 1931; fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies. These "creatures," however, were hidden far
443
444 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? National Socialist commentary to the "March of the Cripples" in an exhibition en- titled "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) Munich, 1937.
away in the provinces in lonely houses, away from the surrounding world that had long since begun to rearm.
For those who had been maimed in the war, the war could not really end --even when they did not belong to those disfigured ones who had to be fed through glass tubes. The organ of the mutilated was Der Reichsverband(The Reich Association. Organ of the Reich Association of German War-Injured and War-Bereaved), published in Berlin regularly from 1922 on. That in this periodical voices were also raised that pleaded for a war of revenge against France as soon as possible may appear to us today as a tragic curiosity. The injured and bereaved ex- perienced in a doubly bitter way how the economic crisis that began in 1929 reduced the (in any case meager) compensation from the state, or even threatened to cut it off altogether. The situation became especially acute in 1931 when the emergency decrees of Bruning led to radical cuts in state expenditures, which pro- voked the Reich Association to the most emphatic protests. One can ask oneself how many votes of mutilated survivors were among those Hitler's party was able to attract to its enormous crisis constituency in 1932.
Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psy- chotechnical textbooks: a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs. The optimism with which those teachers of the maimed imbued their charges with a positive attitude and a vital joy in their continued work seems today like a parody. With deadly earnest, grimly humorous, patriotic doctors turned to the cripples: The Fatherland requires your services in the fu- ture, too: one-armed, one-legged men and wearers of artificial limbs can fight again on the production front. The great machine does not ask whether it is ' in-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 445
? 446 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Wheelchair parade for the Fiihrer, 1934.
The fantasizers of 1920 will prove to be the realists of 1933. Major Solf s sce- nario contains the politics of murderous innocence in embryo. The deceitful,
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 429
crafty, and upright partisans of the Club of the Innocent project the spirit of simu- lation also onto everything surrounding them--particularly the political oppo- nent, even when it is already sitting in jail. From Niederschonenfeld, the notori- ous Bavarian fortress for "political prisoners" (Toller, Miihsam, etc. ), it is reported:
The Bavarian parliamentarian Hagemeister suffered unspeakably. He suffered from a very weak heart. The prison doctor adjudged him to be a malingerer who wanted to be transferred to a hospital so as to be able to escape. In mid- January 1922, a high fever set in. The prison doctor said, "Herr Hagemeister, you are so healthy that if you were my private patient, I would advise you to refrain from further treatment because I wanted to save you the cost. " The next Hay, Hagemeister was found dead in his cell. (Gumbel, Verschworer, p. 123)
Excursus 3. The Reasonable Bloodhound: A Social Democratic Elegy
Someone has to become a bloodhound;
I do not shrink from the responsibility.
4
On 9 November 1918, the head of government under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince Max of Baden, knew that the situation
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
for the Hohenzollern was hopeless. "We can no longer beat down the revolution, but only suffocate it. " Suffocate the revolution --that means: Grant it a fake vic- tory, let it occupy deserted, exposed positions in order to trap it in a position in reserve prepared for this purpose. Said concretely, the kai- ser had to abdicate, the half Social Democratic government had to be- come completely Social Democratic, and the chancellor had to be called Friedrich Ebert. It fell to Ebert then to send the apparently victorious revolution, startled and disconcerted at the ease of its own victory, home and to recreate order --in the words of Prince Max: to do on a macrolevel what Noske had already done on a microlevel in Kiel.
Ebert was thoroughly willing to do this, and Prince Max knew it. General Groener suspected it at least. All three men were, at the latest since the morning of 9 November (! ) tugging on the same rope. (Sebas- tian Haffner, Die verratene Revolution 1918/1919 [Bern, Vienna, Munich, 1969], p. 77)
The fateful days of the German revolution lasted from January 9 to 12, 1919. At Ebert's command, in these days and nights, the Berlin Revolution, which pointed the way for the development of Germany, was shot to pieces. After "Ebert's bloody Christmas" (there had already been heavy fighting on Christmas Eve, 1918, between reactionary officers from the Reichswehr and revolutionary
Gustav Noske
430 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
naval troops, which ended with the sailors' victory), it now came to a bloody deci- sion. Should the new order in Germany be created with the aid of forces that wanted something new, or should only a stalling "order" be created that amounted to a conservation of the old deplorable state of affairs? Ebert had decided to place the slogan Law and Order higher than the promising revolutionary reshaping of the German situation.
Legend has it that the fighting of January 9-12 was a "Communist uprising. " It has been recorded in history as the "Spartacus uprising. " However, neither the former nor the latter can be taken seriously. It was not the case that Ebert and Noske drew together the reactionary volunteer troops to fire on "Communists. " It was not groups of ultraleft conspirators on whom these units of right-wingers had to fire in the name of the Social Democratic chancellor. For the most part, it was Social Democratic masses of workers, for whom it seemed self-evident that after the bankruptcy of the feudal-bourgeois Hohenzollern state, a new democratic social order that served the interests of the people should arise. They had not the slightest understanding for the semiconservative tacking of the Ebert government. Ebert,
Scheidemann, Noske-in the eyes of the masses, they were no longer genuine Social Democrats. For the Social Democrats, as far as the popular and not the official basis was concerned, were for clear relations and for a revolutionary break with the old powers.
On January 11, the Maercker Gendarme Volunteer Corps ("at last, real sol- diers again") marched in a demonstration through the suburbs of bourgeois west- ern Berlin. At its fore a lanky and bespectacled civilian: Gustav Noske, "Social Democrat. " This is how he understood what he called "carrying responsibility": putting himself at the head of irresponsible, emotionally explosive, reactionary troops incapable of thinking politically. A few days later, the Social Democratic protege killers of the "Garde-Kavallerie-Schutzendivision" (Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division) murdered the best minds of the revolution: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The name Noske from then on became the trademark of Social Democratic il- lusory realism. The "Noske period" is a phrase that recalls innumerable murders for the sake of "law and order. " It designates the bloody months from January to May 1919 in which in Germany a Social Democratic government "suffocated" a principally Social Democratic mass movement with a clear tendency toward re- form, in the way in which Prince Max had predicted.
Through his role, Noske qualifies himself as a cynic of the coarsest kind. His concept of "responsibility" had the tone of a cynical disinhibition that strengthens itself by confessing to its own "unfortunately necessary" brutality. "Someone has to become a bloodhound . . . " This tragic password of the Social Democratic counterrevolution already breathes a Fascist spirit. The latter equates responsibil- ity with willingness to make decisions, which in turn disinhibits those responsible in a brutal direction, and the brutality is reflected once more in itself by express-
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 431
30 Pf. I, Jahrgang, Nr. 3 Der Malik-Verlag, Berlin-Leipzig Anfang April 1919 30 Pf.
Prost Noske! ? das Proletariat 1st entwaffnet!
The Bankruptcy: "Congratulations Noske! The proletariat has been disarmed! " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
? 432 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
ing not only that it is this way but also that it wants and "has" to be this way. The cynical tone now calls the Social Democratic tune. After Noske had gathered troops together, that is, held an executive organ of large caliber in his hand that all too willingly let fly at the local revolutionary councils and committees, he be- gan to triumph. Noske on January
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
21, 1919:
The government must gain authority for itself by shaping a factor of power. In the course of a week, a battalion of twenty-two thousand men was created. The intercourse with the solders' councils therefore changed somewhat in tone. Before, the solders' councils were the factor of power; we have now become this power factor. (Quoted after Haffner, Verratene Revolution, p. 170)
We, that is the Social Democrats, the bloodless ones, allied with their own deadly enemies. They provide an opportunity for the bloodhounds to get used to murder and manslaughter within a legal framework. The negligence with which Ebert and Noske came to terms with the existence of the corps of volunteers is incredible; of these, only sixty-eight were officially recognized (which according to estimates comprised almost half a million men). The minds of the commanders of the voluntary corps were thoroughly haunted by "political fantasies" (Gumbel) of the type cited earlier. One of them, a Captain Gengler, noted in his diary on the same January 21, 1919: "The day will come when I will settle accounts with this government and tear the mask off the entire wretched, pitiful pack" (quoted after Haffner, Verratene Revolution, p. 172). Here, a pre-Fascist speaks as en- lightener who wants to unmask the Social Democrats, whom he recognizes as dis- semblers. Even the populists saw through Ebert's philistine pseudorealism that, as a simultaneously restricted and disinhibited conviction of responsibility, wanted to "save" Germany in its hour of need. Ebert's complex about dignitaries misled him to believe that reason could only be something that lies between the extremes. He did not comprehend that there can only be a midpoint between right and left where the left principle had unfolded enough in order to be able to be balanced out. Ebert already set a middle course as preventive measure. Thus it happens that, lacking the left wing, the midpoint between the forces always comes
to lie pretty much to the right. Thus it can occur that what is "reasonable" in a cynically bright hour, will have occasion to confess to being a bloodhound. That is the tragic knot in German history of this century. With its false reasonableness, social democracy destroyed and hindered what was about to take place in Ger- many in those months: the Social Democratic revolution.
Notes
1. This probably refers to Eduard Stadtler's well-known ideological foundation of this name. For more details see Joachim Petzold, Wegbereiter ties deutschen Fascismus. Die Jungkonservativen in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1978), pp. 52ff.
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 433
2. Erich Fromm provides a psychogram of Kern in his book Anatomic der menschlishen Destruk- tivitat, chapter 11.
3. These details become significant in connection with chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors. "
4. The German revolution of 1918-19 has coined scarcely any frequently quoted phrases. This
is one of the few and it is cynical like scarcely any other. Noske related it on assuming command
of the troops who were to beat down the revolution in Berlin. That was on January 9, 1919. On Janu-
ne ave
ary 10. S orders to attack revolutionary Berlin.
Chapter 18
Depersonalization and Alienation. Functionalist Cynicisms I
Stop! Don't do anything because of your name. A name is something shaky. You cannot build on it!
B. Brecht, Mann ist Mann
The First World War had undermined the thinking of the ideologues who wanted to glorify the warrior. Its proper subject showed itself to be not the battle- stained hero but the massive military machinery. The survivors expressed this ex- perience a thousandfold. It forms the hard core of the modern dissatisfaction with subject-object ways of thinking. The individual subject now appears unmistaka- bly as registered, drafted, uniformed, engaged, disposable --subject in the origi- nal sense of the word as "subjugated. " War spits out the new subject of the times: the "front," the people at arms; this becomes the megasubject of thinking marked by war. A little later, it will be called "community of the people"; in it, the mem- bers of the nation will be forced together in an illusorily homogeneous fighting unit. As a historical alternative to this community-of-the-people-unto-death, parts of the workers' movement, which conjured up the megasubject "working class," presented itself back then and came to think about its real interests in life. The time seemed to belong to the great collectivities; the individualist veil of bour- geois culture disintegrated.
The war had consumed the "warriors" physically as well as psychologically- The "man" sank into the mud trenches, was torn to pieces by shells or mutilated. Here, a bourgeois dream of "wholeness" and personality came to a horrible end. Those who recollect frequently mention castration by shells on the front. Un- countably many experienced the defeat as a social-psychological emasculation. The war had already reduced heroism to a matter-of-factness in fighting. Now, the defeat made one more facticity out of it. In this way, I think, the oft-cited Wei-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
434
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 435
? C. van Eestern and L. G. Pineau, City of Traffic, 1926.
mar "matter-of-factness" touches in the first place on a military-psychological state of affairs. In the following years, this seeps into the cultural style: the war- rior as the coolly functioning engineer. The attacks by storm become the heroic deeds of matter-"Storm of Steel. " Finally, in the modern war of artillery, the last connection between heroism and survival slackens. The bond between the soldiers and the weapon systems now is "matter-of-fact. " The man in uniform has to learn to regard himself as the "human factor" in the war of machines and to act accordingly. The general staff phrase "human material" increasingly stamps the modern form of self-experience and way of treating oneself. Those who sur- vive must have learned to regard themselves, their bodies, their morality, their will, as things. The soldier's physical condition and moral attitudes provide only aspects of armament and battle equipment. In this point, war gave all modern
436 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
moral philosophies a drastic, graphic lesson: Morality is called the psychic factor of the war machine.
Military matter-of-factness, so much of which will be inherited in an indirect way by Weimar culture, is for its part, however, woven into an encompassing process for which Walter Rathenau, who was murdered in 1922, had found a striking formula: the mechanization of the world. The book that develops this thought is still worth reading today, and not only because the author displays a style that is almost sensationally brilliant for a politician. Rathenau's On the Cri- tique of the Times (1912) is the outstanding attempt of a bourgeois politican, who was also a successful entrepreneur and philosopher of respectable status, to ana- lyze the essence of modern society for himself and his contemporaries. His start- ing point in describing the mechanization of the world, however, is not the army but the metropolis.
In their structure and mechanics, all larger cities of the white world are identical. Situated at the midpoint of a web of rails, they shoot their petrified street-threads over the countryside. Visible and invisible net- works of rolling traffic crisscross and undermine the vehicular ravines and twice daily pump human bodies from the limbs to the heart. A sec- ond, third, fourth network distributes water, heat and power, an electri- cal bundle of nerves carries the resonances of the spirit. . . . Honey- comb cells, fitted out with silky fabrics, paper, timber, leather, tapestries, are ordered into rows; outwardly supported by iron, stone, glass cement. . . . Only in the old centers of the cities . . . residues of physiognomical peculiarities are still maintained as almost extinct showpieces, while in the surrounding districts, no matter whether in the direction of the factories, residential or recreational areas, the interna- tional world warehouse extends (W. Rathenau, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2 [1977], p. 22)
At first, Rathenau devotes his attention to the process of construction --the out- standing form of piling up of goods in the modern world. The circulation of goods, he says, is negligible beside the petrified results of production of goods. Humanity
builds houses, palaces and towns; it builds factories and storehouses. It builds highways, bridges, railways, tramlines, ships and canals: water, gas and electricity works, telegraph lines, high voltage power lines and cables; machines and furnaces. . . .
The new buildings in German cities would, in the course of about every five years, probably reach a value that in mechanical expenditure would equal the construction value of imperial Rome.
What then is the purpose of these unheard-of constructions? In large part, they directly serve production. In part, they serve transport and trade, and thus indirectly production.
In part, they serve administration, domicile and health care, and thus predominantly production. In part,
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I D 437
? Georg Scholz, Flesh and Iron, 1923.
they serve science, art, technology, education, recreation, and thus in- directly . . . once again production, (p. 51) Mechanical production has long since overshot the elementary goals of food, othing, self-preservation, and the protection of life. In continually expanding circles of production and consumption, it creates new "desires," a measureless "hunger for commodities" that is increasingly directed at artificialities. Mechani- zation thus incorporates even wishes themselves "in the irreality, lifelessness and shadowiness of its products and fashions" (p. 50). Rathenau's conclusions hit un- erringly the quintessence of sociological theories of alienation: "Mechanical
production has elevated itself to an aim in itself. " (p. 52).
This is the mental scenario in which the situation of humanity is determined.
Rathenau seeks it at the productive center itself, in the world of labor.
Labor is no longer an activity of life, no longer an accommodation of the body and the soul to the forces of nature, but a thoroughly alien ac- tivity for the purpose of life, an accommodation of the body and the soul to the mechanism. . . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Labor is no longer solely a struggle with nature, it is a struggle with people. The struggle, however, is a struggle of private politics; the
most risky business, practiced and nurtured less than two hundred years ago by a handful of statesmen, the art of divining others' interests and using them for one's own ends, to have an overview of global situa- tions, to interpret the will of the times, to negotiate, to make alliances, to isolate and to strike: this art is today not only indispensable for the man of finance alone, but, in an appropriate measure, is indispensable
438 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
to every shopkeeper. The mechanized profession educates one to be- come a politician, (pp. 67-68)
Rathenau's anthropology of the laboring human being accordingly possesses two aspects: On the one hand, the laboring ego becomes an epiphenomenon of the apparatus of production; on the other hand, they who "egoistically" pursue their "own interest" become ineluctably entangled in a kind of war, in diplomatic, polemical, and political business. Where an ego appears in the modern economic world, there it must appear as politician, strategist, deceiver, calculator, and diplomat. For every contemporary, political tactics go to the head; at the same time, this "risky business" of tactics descends to the last shopkeeper. The matter has probably never been presented so disarmingly clearly in such a compact space. Where the ego does not want to become only a cog in an alienated over- sized machine, it must stretch itself in the other direction and learn the art that earlier was the sole province of the great figures of politics. It must go through years of apprenticeship in political cynicism.
It is scarcely any better for our intellectual and psychical powers.
The intellect, still shaking from the excitements of the day, insists on staying in motion and on experiencing a new contest of impressions, with the proviso that these impressions should be more burning and acidic than those that have been gone through. . . . Entertainments of a sensational kind arise, hasty, banal, pompous, fake and poisoned. These joys border on despair. . . . The devouring of kilometers by the automobile is a graphic image of the deformed way of viewing na-
ture. . . .
But even in these insanities and overstimulations there is something mechanical. The human, simultaneously supervisor of the machine and machine in the global mechanism, under growing tension and heating, has surrendered his or her quantum of energy to the flywheel of the world's activity, (p. 69)
With great physiognomic power, Rathenau sketches the psychology of the productive-consumptive human being. He discovers the puzzling banality of "ab- stract ambition" that forms a unity of drives with the equally free-floating hunger for commodities.
Abstract ambition is puzzling because all admiration is directed at the mask, and from the mask to its wearer, there is no inner band of iden- tity, (p. 74)
Between greedy masks, a network woven of acts of purchase is spun in which surrogates and surrogates of surrogates wander through the hands of con- sumers. In bourgeois households, it comes to an excess of objects in whose con- sumption existence seems to exhaust itself.
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 439
Ten years later, Henry Ford answers this thought in the book about his suc- cess, My Life and Work (published in German in Leipzig, 1923) in which he, too, confuses the view of the captain of the economy with that of the ethnologist and, like a pseudonaive observer of capitalism, remarks:
The advances of the world to date were accompanied by a strong in- crease in the objects of daily use. In the backyard of an American suburban home, there are on the average more appliances . . . than in the entire territory of an African ruler. An American schoolboy is in general surrounded by more things than are in an entire Eskimo com- munity. The inventory of kitchen, dining room, bedroom and cellar represents a list that would have astounded the most luxurious potentate of 500 years ago. (p. 313)
The wasting away of traditional beliefs can only be countered reactively by the consumptive personality. It wants to cling to beliefs and values without being able to be the person for whom they still really hold.
Now he strives with cunning to regain what has been lost and plants lit- tle shrines in his mechanized world, just as roof gardens are laid out on factory buildings. From the inventory of the times, here a cult of nature is searched out, there a superstition, a communal life, an artificial nai- vete, a false serenity, an ideal of power, an art of the future, a purified Christianity, a nostalgic preoccupation with the past, a stylization. Half 1
believing, half dissembled, devotion is given for a while, until fashion and boredom kill the idol. (Rathenau, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, p. 93)
This structure of modern credulity regarding values, which is a feigned belief in capricious and desperately restored values, brilliantly describes the mentality of those populist-activist groups, propelled by nihilistic antinihilism, which,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
shortly after the failure of the German revolution, did all the talking. From one of these groups came Kern, Rathenau's murderer. The first encounter between the future murderer and his victim took place in October 1921 during a public lecture in Berlin. Ernst von Salomon has recorded this scene in his novel, Die Geachteten (The outlaws; Gutersloh, 1930). While Rathenau is speaking, Kern pushes forward to a column near the speaker's rostrum and forces the minister into the spell of his eyes, cold with hatred:
I saw in his dark eyes the metallic green shine, I saw the whiteness of his forehead. The minister, however, turned hesitatingly, looked at first fleetingly, then confusedly at that column, froze, sought laboriously, then gained composure and inattentively wiped from his forehead what had been projected onto him. But from now on he spoke to Kern alone. Almost entreatingly, he directed his words to the man by the column and slowly became tired as the latter did not change his stance. . . .
As we pushed through the exit, Kern managed to get close to the
440 ? DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
minister. Rathenau . . . looked at him questioningly. But Kern shoved hesitatingly past him and his face seemed eyeless. (Die Gedchteten, p. 315)
Something of the spirit of the whole epoch is contained in this confrontation. The gaze of the nihilist perpetrator of the deed does not want to see what his oppo- nent had in terms of intellect, goodwill, and readiness to accept responsibility. Rathenau is supposed to feel that Kern does not want to listen.
Hermann Rauschning, too, links up with insights such as those already presented by Rathenau in his book Masken und Metamorphosen des Nihilismus (Masks and metamorphoses of nihilism [Vienna, 1954]) in which Hitler's erst- while dialogue partner sketches outlines of a philosophical theory of fascism. The intellects that are worked up against modernity, Rauschning shows, are inclined during a crisis to cling precisely to that which nihilism had taken as its starting point: to the great social institutions, the state, the economy, and the armed forces. They, the great promisors of meaning, are the principal agents who "broadcast unconscious nihilism behind a facade of apparent order and forced dis- cipline. " (p. 121).
What those who are unstable call to for salvation is, in fact, the source of the evil. The institutions to which the conservative antinihilists cling with gloomy sympathies are the real "agents of nihilism. "
According to Rauschning, nihilism advances in two ways: Values and truths are subjected to a "progressive unmasking," they become transparent as sur- rogates, and they are, as the functional lies of the great institutions, stripped of all higher validity. At the same time, however, the social institutions free them- selves from human control as means and elevate themselves to ends in themselves to which individual as well as collective human existence has to subjugate itself.
A contemporary writer who renounced for himself every organ of metaphysical speculation . . . has expressed this . . . process in a single excellent sentence: "When humanity emanicipated itself from God, it probably could not yet guess that one day logically the things will emancipate themselves from it. " (Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebo- gen [The questionnaire])
Human beings become the material of the economic process, the mere means of the state. (Rauschning, Masken, p. 123) The institutions, the regulations, the apparatuses of community or- der, the organs of European culture are not longer aids for humanity in establishing meaning for itself. They are means and tools of nihilism. They do not hang in the air; rather, the entirety of human existence floats without any supporting ground and clings to the means of exis- tence that have become ends in themselves as the only things that can be held onto in the whirlwinds of insubstantiality. (Ibid. , p. 130)
DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I ? 441
What is here put forward by philosophizing statesmen is confirmed in the works of contemporary writers. Among them, Bertolt Brecht claims a special sta- tus. For, like scarcely any other, he critically presented and experimentally thought through in his works the inversion of the bourgeois-individualist under- standing of the ego that had been decried as nihilism. He is the real virtuoso of the "cynical structure. " In fact, he grasps it as a procedural possibility and as a poetic opportunity. No matter how his share of subjective cynicism is estimated, he succeeded in making it into a means for representing reality. In his epoch, he became a master of the cynical tone of voice and, with almost every one of his plays, from Baal to Massnahme (Measure), he established his reputation as a poet who commanded a language that allowed the "times themselves" to speak.
With Brecht, too, the stance recurs that we found at first in Dadaist irony: let- ting oneself be thrown and pushed around by the given state of affairs, which is no longer counterposed by any flimsy ideas or upright poses. More important than self-composure is insight into what really confronts us. "Matter-of-factness" func- tions as a form of going along, of being-in-the-times: Don't fall behind, don't let any resentments grow, don't cherish any old values, but look to see what the state of affairs is now and what is to be done. We cannot live off the good old values, it is better to start with the bad
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
new reality.
Obviously, a new quality of irony and a nonaffirmative form of affirmation makes itself felt here. In this irony, it is not a subject that has "stayed clean" that reveals itself, who, distanced, above the fronts, the melee, and the tumult, tries to save its integrity. It is rather the irony of a bashed ego who has got caught up in the clockwork (rather like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) who makes its hands as dirty as the circumstances are and who, in the midst of the goings- on, only takes care to observe alertly what it encounters. With Brecht, too, the pugna- cious irony appropriate to modernity makes itself felt: kynical irony. It does not resist reality with "imagined fancies" but exercises resistance in the form of un- resisting accommodation.
This irony's model piece is provided by Brecht in the famous interjection from the comedy A Man Is a Man. The Transformation of the Packer Galy Gay in the Military Barracks of Kilkoa in Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Five. Interjection
Herr Bertolt Brecht maintains: a man is a man.
And that is something anyone can prove.
But then, Herr Bertolt Brecht also proves
That one can do as much as one likes with a person. Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car Without losing anything in the process.
The man will be approached humanely
He will be requested firmly, without vexation
442 D DEPERSONALIZATION AND ALIENATION. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS I
To accommodate himself to the course of the world And to let his private fish swim away.
And no matter what he is remodeled into,
In doing so no mistake has been made.
One can, if we do not watch over him,
also make him overnight into our butcher.
Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes that you will see the ground On which you stand disappear like snow under your feet And that you will notice about the packer Galy Gay That life on earth is dangerous.
(Erste Stiicke, vol. 2, 1953, pp. 229-30)
For the kynical realist, the idea of human individuality in times in which war machines, metropolitan streams of traffic, and unleashed production apparatuses consume the individual as their "raw material," is no longer a "fruitful hypothe- sis. " Let us try from the other end, free of any metaphysics of individuality and without humanistic nostalgia. "A man is a man. " What scenic arrangement must be set up in order to examine this cynical-critical statement of identity? In his stage experiment, Brecht has the gentle family man become a bloodthirsty fighter, "incensed" by the "wish to sink my teeth" / Into the throat of the enemy, primitive drive, from the family / To butcher the breadwinner / To carry out the assign- ment" (ibid. p. 293). Besides being him-"self," everybody can also be functionally the other, who, with a few tricks, is refitted as a "human fighting machine. " Brecht outdoes the nostalgic lamentations about alienation with a hard commitment to psychological functionalism. The point here is that he does not want to present any reduction of the civilized human to a wild animal but a coolly presented remodeling of the civilian as soldier, thus no "regression" but a mere displacement in which "nothing is lost. " The sole concession to the individual occurs indirectly in that the playwright turns to the audience's intelligence and provokes it into swimming free of conservative inhibitions through the surrender of the cultivated bourgeois "private fish," and into immersing itself in an ugly but vitally seething present. Notes
1. Rathenau herewith stakes out the framework within which neoconservative ideological forma- tions move. They rest on a denial on two fronts: They deny modernity ideologically and the "new-old values practically.
Chapter 19
Artificial Limbs. Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology
Goethe intervenes.
At first it was uninjured survivors who began to sing the neohumanist lamenta- tion about modern alienation and the mutilation of the individual. On the opposed side, kynical vitalists (like the young Brecht, the Dada groups, and many others) tried through their sarcasm to outdo the degradation of the individual that had be- come apparent in the modern social order. They practiced the accusation or the affirmation of mechanized existence as a figure of thought.
To the physically alienated, the mutilated, and the reassembled, such forms
of expression remained in either direction rather alien. It makes a difference
whether one reflects on the loss of individuality as a critique of culture, or ex-
periences how a war (or labor) tears away pieces from one's own ("indivisible")
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
body. One source of war statistics says: "Thirteen million dead, eleven million crippled . . . six billion shells and fifty billion cubic meters of gas in four
1years. " How did the armies of cripples who streamed back to their native coun-
tries in 1918 fare? Some, in any case, could say nothing about the reassembling of humans in modernity; they no longer had mouths.
Men with frightening faces, without noses, without mouths; nurses who shrank back from nothing fed these disfigured creatures through thin glass tubes that they poked into the scarred holes of proud flesh where once a mouth had been. (Erich Kastner, Fabian [1931], p. 49)
What Kastner describes refers to the year 1931; fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies. These "creatures," however, were hidden far
443
444 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? National Socialist commentary to the "March of the Cripples" in an exhibition en- titled "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) Munich, 1937.
away in the provinces in lonely houses, away from the surrounding world that had long since begun to rearm.
For those who had been maimed in the war, the war could not really end --even when they did not belong to those disfigured ones who had to be fed through glass tubes. The organ of the mutilated was Der Reichsverband(The Reich Association. Organ of the Reich Association of German War-Injured and War-Bereaved), published in Berlin regularly from 1922 on. That in this periodical voices were also raised that pleaded for a war of revenge against France as soon as possible may appear to us today as a tragic curiosity. The injured and bereaved ex- perienced in a doubly bitter way how the economic crisis that began in 1929 reduced the (in any case meager) compensation from the state, or even threatened to cut it off altogether. The situation became especially acute in 1931 when the emergency decrees of Bruning led to radical cuts in state expenditures, which pro- voked the Reich Association to the most emphatic protests. One can ask oneself how many votes of mutilated survivors were among those Hitler's party was able to attract to its enormous crisis constituency in 1932.
Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psy- chotechnical textbooks: a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs. The optimism with which those teachers of the maimed imbued their charges with a positive attitude and a vital joy in their continued work seems today like a parody. With deadly earnest, grimly humorous, patriotic doctors turned to the cripples: The Fatherland requires your services in the fu- ture, too: one-armed, one-legged men and wearers of artificial limbs can fight again on the production front. The great machine does not ask whether it is ' in-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 445
? 446 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Wheelchair parade for the Fiihrer, 1934.
