No More Learning

I even made the suggestion in my Spheres book to drop the term ‘revolution’ and replace it with ‘explication’. Making a revolution is more an episodic political gesture that is important in specific situa- tions, for example, when it is necessary to clear repressive secretive persons out of the way – monarchs and other manipulators of the Arcanum. They are regarded, with some justification, as figures that block the way to the basic work of the modern age, which consists, as we have said, in continuing to explain things further.
1 A reference to Heidegger: ‘Der Tod birgt als der Schrein des Nichts das Gebirg des Seins’ [‘As the shrine of the Nothing death is the shelter of Being’], in Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann), 2005, p. 18.
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ROTH: I have a suspicion in relation to this outfolding. You describe the machinists’ statement about the human body as encap- sulated in La Mettrie’s dictum, ‘Voilà une machine bien éclairée’,2 in two ways, the first time as a blow for liberation and the second time as a loss of spheres. Meanwhile, haven’t we had to realize that the body is still a very mysterious machine, not least because of the com- plexity that genomics has revealed on the very lowest cellular level?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the irony of research: by discovering complexity it generates another mystery. Maybe there is a law that says the mass of enigmas stays constant.
ROTH: Wouldn’t you say this enigmatic characteristic gives the human self-image a kind of spherical quality?
SLOTERDIJK: We could look at it like that. As we have noted, the euphoric movement of revelation ranging from the anatomists of the sixteenth century to the physicists and mechanics of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries followed the goal of making visible everything that was previously unseen – up to the sonic vibrations that were visually depicted in the nineteenth century by means of cumbersome phonographs on carbon paper made with the aid of a swan’s quill. Then, on the threshold of the twentieth century, came X-rays, a fantastic tool for satisfying the desire for transparency. Recently the trails of atoms were visualized in the cloud chamber – and this kind of research is still continuing. All these contributions to making visible things that were formerly invisible begin, in sub- stance, with the early anatomists’ intervention into the interior of the human body, and with the European captains and geographers sailing out into the oceans. We have to understand that the internal and external cartography express the same cognitive attitude. They can both be used to extend the field of view and operations.
Anatomical and geographical maps also have an important common characteristic: they make the attractive qualities of the body, its aura, disappear – not the cultural and metaphorical qualities that Walter Benjamin spoke of, but the energetic and real aura, the delicate casing in which bodies swim. Remember that ‘atmosphere’ in Greek simply means ‘vapour ball’, and all living bodies live in specific vapour balls that can’t be easily represented. To emphasize it, Dasein means having an atmosphere. Our whole image policy until now has been based on stripping the body of
2 Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51) was a French philosopher and physician best known for his work L’homme machine (The Machine Man), 1747. Sloterdijk is referring to his famous dictum, ‘Here is a well- enlightened machine! ’
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its atmosphere. Removing the atmosphere makes it possible in the first place to unfold the body and expose levels of visibility that never existed in that form, and could never exist. The cost of pushing through the surface is that we have to imagine the delicate shell is gone. We can see this particularly clearly from conventional maps. For centuries, they have produced a picture of the world without a climate because they could always depict only a terrain without any atmosphere. The geographer’s eye looks down on the site from above, as if there were no air and no clouds overhead. True, we can use graphical symbols to denote special fauna, flora and ground formations, and political colours to signify that Polish is spoken in the green and Czech in the yellow country, but that doesn’t change anything about the primary finding: the geographi- cal atmosphere is always deprived of atmosphere. The atmosphere was always the big loser in all traditional pictorial processes, start- ing with the maps colonialists made in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ending with the present-day mag- netic resonance system. What these processes visibly present to us is a body segment without the auratic shell. Meanwhile, everything that can’t be treated with this type of technique gets lost. Still, we shouldn’t claim that auratic or atmospheric quantities had no advocates in theory at all. I would like to remind you that in his construction of the cosmos, Plato took care – you can read about this in Timaios – to give the world body a soul, the world soul, in fact, that not only pervades it from all sides but also surrounds it like a shell. We could see this as an admission of the atmospheric imperative, as if Plato had wanted to express that even the largest body, the cosmos, cannot do without its shell. The situational rela- tionships between body and soul have to be precisely established. The body should be in the soul, not the soul in the body – and the Platonic world body fulfils this condition. If it were not the case, we would land up directly in a metaphysics of death, as the soul would then regard itself as the body’s prisoner and would have to imagine post-mortal liberation. This position is unfortunately fairly widespread in the history of ideas – as a result of false read- ings of Platonic motifs. But in Plato’s work itself the world soul pervades the whole cosmos in such a way that it also shines over and beyond the edge, like an aura or a corona. The body swims in its atmospheric surplus. We should take note of that, because we are now going to discuss the drama in progress in today’s pictorial worlds. There are many indications that the reduction in the atmospheric sphere is being increasingly reversed. Due to a wide variety of motives, the shells that were formerly made to vanish are reappearing from extremely diverse technological and
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psychological sources. What was once an expendable surplus in traditional cartography is resurfacing as an issue of personal rights and becoming respected as an entity to be explicitly represented. I think this is a very important, joyful moment in the history of visibility: what was previously invisible, the atmospheric sphere, has come so far today that we make it the subject of very explicit visualization and theatrical presentation.
It is meteorology, a field whose significance is not easy to imagine, that furnishes the paradigm for this. Around 200 years ago, in Goethe’s time, people first began the great discussion about air, the discussion that has kept humankind in suspense ever since. Goethe himself, incidentally, was very interested in the morphology of clouds. For some decades now, thanks to satellite optics, we have had a completely new form of illustrated weather news on televi- sion. Indeed, this media genre merits a discussion of its own at some point. The daily report on the climatic situation represents one of the most extensive forms of theatrical presentation of the realm of the invisible ever seen in human history. It is significant that weather forecasts have the best audience figures almost everywhere that television is watched. Despite their guaranteed banality, they are the only successful programmes right across the board. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from this. Contemporary culture has developed to the extent that people recognize current climatic conditions as a political issue. Anybody talking about the weather is talking about the general issues of the day. Everybody knows, nostra res agitur. If there is a report on the Chancellor’s speech, or a train crash, the conversation at the table carries on as normal. When the weather report begins, silence reigns and people watch and listen – here is the real issue. Looking up at the sky ourselves is not enough any more. We want official confirmation before we believe what we see with our own eyes. We want to see from above how the cloud formation is bearing down on us. The new development is that deep down we have become strategists for judging the macro weather situation. A demand for a new outlook has grown up. I consider it momentous, and interpret it as a symptom of an all-embracing twilight of the atmospheres. It all points to the fact that the age of reductionism is dying out. Iconic primitivism is putting an end to itself. By now, images are omnipresent but their rebellious presence doesn’t automatically mean dictatorship. Images today are much less dominant than they used to be, for two main reasons: first, there is a broad division of powers in the image space that prevents indi- vidual icons from taking power; and, second, the law of complexity increasingly applies to images as well as other things. Conventional over-simplifications have reached a dead end.
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ROTH: However, I see the twilight of the spheres more in the area of image production. I think imachination is covertly about a change in pictorial policy. Given the complex image production process, nobody today can still claim that they alone have an overview of this technical production process and can see the consequences in this highly specialized process. This is the question: isn’t it much more a matter of image production having become a communica- tive act, with a chain of image-processing from the mathematician up to post-production workers working together on images – in other words, communication as the technical Communion song in the machine?
SLOTERDIJK: That is certainly the case. But I think we should no longer ask the question about the collective fabrication of images as we did in 1960 or 1970, when suspicion as a form of thought had become all the rage once again. I admit I am increasingly irritated by the neo-Marxist attitude of methodical paranoia that was dominant back then, and which slides so easily into existential paranoia. The conventional logic of distrust, that heavy legacy of the failed French Revolution, is out of date today, particularly because the special- ized process you just highlighted has its own laws that even an evil lord couldn’t control. The Romans had a proverb: Caesar non super grammaticos – the emperor may command everything, but not the rules of grammar. This is less clear in relation to the rules of produc- tion of images, but the same tendency applies. Of course, in terms of media policy, there are notable, sometimes dangerous clusters of power. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that even a media mogul can’t change the syntax and grammar of imagery at will. The visual world as a whole is still a polycentric field that can’t be controlled from a single centre. The figure of the malignant lord is more of an illusion than a verifiable experience.
ROTH: My question was actually in a different direction. Vilém Flusser3 claimed that it is not the politicians who govern today, but the computer scientists who write the programs. I’m not happy with this assertion because it presupposes that the people who program have an overview of the whole process. I tend to think that the self-image of the image producer has changed. When Peter Galison4 quotes a physicist who specializes in elementary particles as saying, ‘The experimenter is not a single person, but a composite,’
3 Vilém Flusser (1920–91) was a Czech-born philosopher, writer and jour- nalist who later specialized in media studies.
4 Peter Galison is a historian of the history of science and a professor at Harvard University.
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I think this corresponds in a sense to your concept of atmospheric realities.
SLOTERDIJK: That may well be. But the fact that today’s image-makers are teams mastering sophisticated techniques is one reason that an exaggerated theory of suspicion can’t take us any further. Paranoia sees only a small segment of the world. Of course we know that atmospheres can be poisoned, and we also know that the lie holds sway sometimes. Nonetheless, teamwork, high-tech and complex actor networks are increasingly limiting the parameters of fraud and the corresponding suspicion. Rather, we are doomed more and more to trust under complex conditions, which means that whatever we do ourselves must presuppose that other parts of the system are functioning. In a universe of justified mistrust, we would be compelled to react to Galison’s thesis with panic. It would mean everyone is busy faking and lying. But I think mistrust can only be partially justified, and in most things it is better to work with trust. When I hear the experimenters themselves are now only elements in a complex situation that is watching itself, I feel I can relax. It means that things are operating generally in the right way, within the scope of what is normal and possible. If that weren’t the case we would be in a state of constant fear. We would have to be suspicious about everything, and rattle the bars of the matrix, shouting ‘I want to get out! ’, like the imprisoned souls in the world dungeon in the Gnostic legend. In modern terms, it would mean Luddism and the curse on the sciences. But as soon as the reality of the atmospheric factor becomes explicit we have an instrument for moderating the transi- tion from suspicion to trust. This can involve a Leninist remnant: ‘Trust is good; control is better’ – and why not? Trust is the result of secure expectations, and control is one securing mode among others. But it doesn’t have the last word. Lenin is only one voice in the con- flict between the basic moods of suspicion and trust.
ROTH: Aren’t you talking about a blind Gehlen-type trust that takes the form of simply abandoning trust? I meant a completely different kind of consciousness that doesn’t actually fulfil this func- tion of relief in Gehlen’s sense. 5
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t underestimate Gehlen’s great eco- nomic discovery, which he called ‘relief’. Without it we wouldn’t be able to cope with the simplest situation. If you don’t want to go mad from obsessive total control you always have to start from an atmosphere of original trust. Nobody can spend a long time asking
5 Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) was a German philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist and a leading proponent of philosophical anthropology.
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whether the air in a room is breathable or not. We simply have to start from the assumption that it is breathable and see how far we get. This basic diagnosis, that we are condemned to trust, can be confirmed in many different ways. We can see a persistent connec- tion with the emergence of the atmospheric sphere. Oddly enough, we only become aware of the atmosphere through its destruction. It is the environment of original trust, but we usually only realize that when it is destroyed by deliberate attacks. In that case, ideas about protecting the atmosphere have to become concrete. When we have grasped how vulnerable the subtle, atmospheric premises of life are, we will be in a position to achieve the right configuration of trust and caution. Remembrance of the worst things benefits the most fragile. We know what happened in Auschwitz, we know what happened at Hiroshima – those were mass killings perpetrated by forcibly placing people in unlivable environments. Atmospherocide is the typical modern form of a war of extermination. Today, pre- cisely because of everything that has happened, we have to combine trust with alarm systems. In other words, humans are dependent more than ever on cohabitation with machines.
ROTH: But this cohabitation is not about an individual person, and not about the classical ‘I and the world’ relation. That would be too easy. We are dealing with many subjects that are amalgamated via machines into a great complex.
SLOTERDIJK: It would be better to call those subjects ‘agents’. Of course, right now we don’t want to talk about their ontological characteristics or their epistemological privileges. As Schopenhauer said, ‘That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. ’ That’s far too pathetic as a construct in the context of our practical concerns. We’re thinking more in terms of agents who are competent with regard to their actions and statements. From such a perspective the world seems to be populated by the kind of active figures that can’t do anything but react to each other with statements and actions. This immediately begs the question: which role do the images produced by the agents play in the attempt to coordinate their operations?
ROTH: The status of imagery has changed in the huge scientific image complexes. It is no longer about the conventional fixed visual concept, but about the image as a medium of communication. This performative entity is perpetually moving. Because its way of being is still in data form, the entity tends towards intangibility. Boundaries between media, such as those between text and image, dissolve. The machine is constituted from this process of individual subjects and becomes an amalgam.
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SLOTERDIJK: I think Deleuze6 had a similar idea when he introduced the new ontological figure of ‘assemblage’. Such agence- ments are initially quite indifferent to the human–object difference. They form dynamic units beyond humans, machines and the envi- ronment. Bruno Latour’s7 sociology of epistemological fields also assumes precisely such larger units. The researcher is no longer privileged in relation to the environment, the laboratory in which he is presently sitting, the computer he is writing with or the apparatus he serves. He appears as an agent among agents. In agent ensem- bles of this kind, it turns out that the human–object opposition does not continue any further. But what certainly does continue further is any contribution that helps us to understand the com- municative fluid better – and this brings us back to the dimension of atmospherology, the study of atmospheres. There is fairly strong resonance between the atmospheres theory and the theory of agent ensembles. The first seems closer to humans; the second rather remote from humans. Both together give a more realistic picture of the hyper-complex situation.
ROTH: One final question: what is your favourite picture at home?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think I have a favourite picture at home. But I do have a favourite view. You see, I can’t get away from the difference between image and view. I used to appreciate the aesthetics of pure art. Now I’m becoming something of a nature aesthete and have come to the conclusion that I often prefer views to pictures. That’s not very unusual: Bazon Brock8 once remarked that he would rather see a bosom than a black square, and I admit I generally feel the same way. I read Brock’s statement as a plea for the view. For example, what I love most of all is the view of my library, especially in the evening when I come home late. Usually I leave the light on to get the feeling I’m being waited for. I like the sense of being surrounded by good spirits, many thousands of silent advisers who offer me their services and leave me in peace otherwise.
6 Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was an influential twentieth-century French philosopher who worked in the field of pure philosophy and history of philosophy and in many other disciplines, including anthropology, geology and psychoanalysis.
7 Bruno Latour (b. 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and soci- ologist of science, and one of the main developers of actor-network theory. 8 Bazon Brock is a German artist, art critic and theorist, specializing in multimedia studies. He is a professor emeritus at universities in Hamburg, Vienna and Wuppertal.
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
19
ON PROGRESS The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
Interview with M. Walid Nakschbandi*9
NAKSCHBANDI: Mr Sloterdijk, the proverb says: ‘Progress sits in the saddle and rides humankind. ’ Has progress got human beings under control now?
SLOTERDIJK: People who are crazy about horses may like that proverb, but we should beware of skewed images. Progress is about moving forward, not about control. Still, it’s good to start in an offbeat way. It is true that the disastrous concept of progress has become rather like a modern form of holiness. We find references to progressive things all over the place, including the decorations on banknotes and the logos of major companies. It’s almost as if the curious word ‘progress’ represented a universal concept of movement, and without it the world’s modernists would lose their sense of direction. Not many expressions of that type exist. The only concept that would be equally powerful in terms of generality and importance is, perhaps, circulation, the cycle. The traditional awe of cyclical processes – beginning with the self-reflection of God and going right up to recycling of ecological waste – relates to the metaphysical thesis that the good and the cyclic are ultimately the same thing.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and M. Walid Nakschbandi appeared under the title ‘Das heilige Feuer der Unzufriedenheit: Peter Sloterdijk über den Fortschritt’, in Utz Claassen and Jürgen Hogrefe (eds), Das neue Denken – Das Neue denken (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag), 2005, pp. 69–77.
M. Walid Nakschbandi is a journalist, television producer and manager of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 165
NAKSCHBANDI: So it was a nicely rounded issue to begin with. But then something got in the way?
SLOTERDIJK: You could say that. From the nineteenth century on, the bourgeois world began trying to find the good in the line. That is a remarkable process because the line didn’t have a high reputation in traditional geometry. In the past, people had always seen linear processes as final movements, movements that could wear down and basically lead nowhere except to decay. Circular processes, however, lead back to themselves, and that qualifies them for the good infinity.
The greatest break made by the modern era is that human beings conceived an absolute movement of a new type that constantly moved upwards from a less valuable to a more valuable state. That means something like upgrading of being as a whole. It is a rather heretical idea because if we assume God created the world, such a process is pure sacrilege. After all, God can’t have created anything except the best.
But why is it that we don’t all feel we are under the curse of heresy? The answer is that since around the sixteenth century our society has been experiencing a mental shift that contemporary people still can’t evaluate completely: the shift from a metaphysics of the complete world to a metaphysics of the incomplete world. This means we have shifted from the concept of creation, that is, of the finished work, to the concept of gradual development – from completed being to relative becoming. And that made us capable of participating in movements that go from the less good to the better without being suspected of blasphemy.
NAKSCHBANDI: How should we imagine that transformation?
SLOTERDIJK: Moving directly from God to the world, we seem to go from the very best to second best. This is how Plato classically articulated it in Timaios, his dialogue on natural philosophy. He said that because God is good, perfectly good in fact, anything he produced in his capacity as the world artisan or demiurge must be as excellent as possible within the limits of reality. That is, the work of a perfect author will be slightly less perfect than the author himself. But if the author has to be one degree better than his statement, the work of the best author remains the best possible. This means that the perfection of God implies that of the world, with the said limitation.
In other words, the deeper the insight of a philosopher, the more optimistic his manner of expression was. Optimism is the last word of classical philosophy because a long time ago thinking meant nothing but the celebration of being. The most appropriate form of being-celebration is superlative speech: we must only say the best about God and the world. This is the exact point at which we feel the
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break between antiquity and modernity most powerfully, because nobody today would be willing to celebrate everything in existence as the best, the highest, the cleverest, the most perfect, etc. Those superlatives are only possible in satire now. The modern world sub- stitutes the rhetoric of superlatives with a comparatist one. Today, we always want to compare conditions so that the earlier come out worse and the later come out better. This puts us in contradic- tion to all the established theories in antiquity: when the ancients talked about changing conditions they nearly always told stories of decay. According to them, once, in the Golden Age, everything was perfect, and then the first deficits appeared. Finally, everything was rather bad and, in the end, quite devastating. The third deteriora- tion brings us to the narrator’s present day, the Iron Age in which humans are found. A narrative that follows a downward line like that could serve as a popular explanation for why people feel miser- able: they are in bad shape because they are at the murky end of a decline from the perfect to the corrupt.
In the ancient world, however, there was also secret knowl- edge that taught its adepts to see the general unhappiness as only apparent. The real sages of the past thought they had discovered a secret reason to rejoice that released an inner reserve of happiness. According to them, a person who was unhappy with the world was only deceived by the semblance of unhappiness. This deep irony defines the relationship between the sage and the masses in the ancient world. The sage pretended to have discovered a deep-seated reason for happiness that normal unhappy people were not capable of perceiving. The sage alone saw the great cycles of order from an esoteric perspective, whereas profane people remained trapped without vision in their preoccupation with unhappiness.
That is exactly what has changed in the modern age. A great reversal of auspices has taken place, and it has been achieved by the powerful idea of progress we referred to earlier. We must admit, however, that we generally know only a very trite form of this. All the same, even we normal people make our comparisons in a semi-optimistic light because we are used to putting the less good together with the better. We remain as optimizing logi- cians or idealists who want to improve the world, and at the very least we try to improve things. Today, this logic still lies behind every pragmatic programme we have to carry out. The duty to improve relates to all spheres of existence – the daily environment, machines, production processes, medicines, teaching methods, living conditions, etc. Consequently, what is essential for us is no longer the perfect archetype but a series of improvements. Plato’s original images have been transformed into models that can be
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 167
optimized. Models are blueprints for construction that aspire to further perfection.
NAKSCHBANDI: Give us an example.
SLOTERDIJK: Modern design is full of striking examples. Let’s take a typical design object like a ballpoint pen. First it had to be invented: it began with a refill with a tiny ball at the top, and the whole thing was encased in a stabilizing sheath. The writing move- ment triggered the rotation of the ball, drawing the ink flow out of the refill. In a Platonic world, the original ballpoint pen would also be the ultimate ballpoint pen because nothing better could follow. Things look different from a modern perspective, and it is no sur- prise to us that the world is awash with thousands of variations of the ballpoint pen idea. Some of those variations can be more than mere modifications of the archetype, and sometimes represent genuine optimization or further development. Such improvements relate, for example, to the pen’s ‘click’ mechanism, which is self-retractable in some models to prevent damage to our best suit even if we forget to shut off the refill. Or the pen may be made more comfortable to hold, or the ink flow improved, etc. Countless luxury and cheap ver- sions of the ballpoint pen have been developed and customers can choose from a price range of 20 cents to €20,000. Immense design energy is being expended on this all the time. A product that was invented years ago is rethought over and over again as thoroughly as if it were supposed to be reinvented.
Does it really make sense to talk about progress in this context? The ballpoint is a good example of how it is impossible to repeat the initial progress, that is, the conceptual and technical leap that happened when that type of pen was first invented, with the whole impact of the first-time-ever. It is impossible really to invent the object a second time. On the other hand, the basic idea can be varied ingeniously and endlessly – and that’s usually enough to give us the feeling that the horizon is open. We attach importance to the fact that micro-optimizations always remain possible. Perhaps that is the actual stance of progress.
All optimizing tendencies in individual developments have a cul- mination area like an estuary, of course. I would argue that today, in a large number of areas of technical and social evolution, for example, we are already in the culmination area of primary innova- tions. Many inventions from the past are approaching their final saturation phase. Where the models have largely been perfected, things come to a standstill that can only be superseded aesthetically – think of the automobile industry, with a product that has cer- tainly been thought through to the end in most respects. Additional micro-innovations such as the retractable outside mirror can be
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accumulated and hailed as a revolution, but we all know there can’t be any real improvement beyond the ‘very good’ marker.
Let me make it clear: at most, the points I have just made are a prelude to what I want to say on the topic of progress and inno- vation from a philosophical perspective. By now we should have realized that the concept of progress is a naïve metaphor of move- ment that was only partially useful in the initial stages of industrial society. The idea of progress was a useful, nearly indispensable pilot metaphor for the transitional period because it helped those who made the transition to believe they were going in the right direction with their progressive vehicle. Conservatives, incidentally, never shared this belief and mocked the concept of progress from the very beginning.
NAKSCHBANDI: Who are those conservatives?
SLOTERDIJK: Conservatives include, for example, anti-mod- ernists, religious fundamentalists, devotees of classical metaphysics and owners of choice libraries and wine cellars. In other words, everyone who adheres to the metaphysics of perfection and believes more in decline than in progress. In addition, there are the moral conservatives who are convinced that human beings are bad and should be controlled rather than let free.
NAKSCHBANDI: In your opinion, how does the breathlessness related to the concept of progress occur? Why are we never satisfied with what we have?
SLOTERDIJK: For centuries, we have only cultivated the move- ment of setting off and have neglected the culture of arriving. To use a river metaphor: we are strong at rising, but rather clumsy at debouching. We only rarely allow ourselves to regress into the feeling of completion, and that isn’t enough to develop a culture of debouchment. Everybody knows the related scenes. When several progressive gentlemen sit together in a really excellent haute cuisine restaurant for a few moments, they forget progress and realize that now is the time for perfection. They praise what is on their plates so lavishly that we understand: those people are not setting off; they have arrived. Otherwise, we avoid being at our destination almost everywhere. We live in an automatic mode of setting off as a matter of habit.
The few people today who admit to having arrived, the rare people who enjoy things, the people in the river estuary, may be heralds of a future civilization. We don’t understand such people very well yet because they don’t seem to feel the holy fire of dissatisfaction any longer, the fire from which progress originated. I think this will change in a matter of decades. By the beginning of the twenty-first century our experiences with the world’s dynamics of innovation
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have become so complex that the language of progress alone isn’t adequate for expressing our experiences any more. That is why we should place the rhetoric of debouchment beside the usual rhetoric of progress. Sooner or later people will understand that standstill at the highest level is an extremely valuable asset, although at first it may infuriate some entrepreneurs condemned to being dynamic. But even they are not completely immune to the subversive realiza- tion that in some respects, perhaps the most important ones, they have long since reached their goal.
NAKSCHBANDI: Is the state of having arrived a state of happiness?
SLOTERDIJK: It reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’ famous meta- phor about life as a race. He said that constantly being overtaken is misery, while constantly overtaking others is felicity. For those standing in the culmination area, however, overtaking and being overtaken cease because such movements are only meaningful at the beginning of an optimization series and lose their purpose when the solution has been found. If people carry on after that, they have merely fallen into a habit.
But let me finish off the thought I started: I wanted to explain why I think the concept of progress is no longer right for expressing our experiences with modernization. We should replace it with two or three other concepts that correspond better to the meanings of the old concept of progress that are worth preserving. For the moment, I shall mention two such expressions: relief and density. The first term refers to the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, and it is no exag- geration to say that, in my opinion, it represents the most important category of modern human science. It describes the basic direction of technical and social evolution in an astonishingly convincing way. Let’s suppose a supporter of progress had to explain where the progressive journey is going. Generally, we would hear the trivial but accurate response that we are moving towards a state in which things will be better than ever for human beings. What does ‘better’ mean? This comparative contains practically everything that can be described by the term ‘relief’. Where heavy weights once had to be carried, processes should be found to make things easier to handle. Of course, ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ are subjectively tinged expressions that don’t mean the same thing to everyone. Yet everyone understands what we mean by relief from the burdens of life.
To explain this from the technical angle, I am fond of quoting the history of touch-operated appliances. These are the everyday objects that most clearly demonstrate the technical change from heavy to light actions. In an earlier technical phase, ordinary tools usually had handles – as we know, a handle is a designated contact
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point between the hand and the instrument. Such tools were body extensions or organ extensions in the sense described by Marshall McLuhan, that is, they were direct continuations of the arm and the hand in a harder material. An axe with a helve was used to split wood for burning in the kitchen stove. In the world of tools with handles, actors still carried out most of the gestures useful for life with their own physical input – the angel of expulsion put it well when he spoke of the sweat of the brow without which one should not eat one’s bread. 1
Today we live in a world of touch-operated tools that are used completely differently – we press a button or flip a switch and the heat sources turn on by themselves. Another way to explain how technology brings relief is to point to the transition from gestures made with our whole hands to fingertip operations – a typical transi- tion for the present appliance scene. Now we move the world with a contact pressure of 5 to 10 grams, almost as little as we needed in the past to place the pick-up arm of a record player in the groove. Maybe that’s the most modest way to characterize the trend towards the technical way of handling reality, and the most dramatic at the same time. This is exactly where the concept of relief comes into play. Because it contains a description of a trend of transforming workers into users, it can borrow several meaningful aspects from the concept of progress, which has long since become too crude.
This is also where we should mention the history of analgesics. People today forget that up to the mid-nineteenth century surgical operations could not be performed without horribly maltreating the patient. The first effective anaesthetics came into use in the 1840s. If I remember rightly, the first successful operation under chloroform narcosis took place in a hospital in Massachusetts. One year later the new process had already become globalized. From then on the medicine sector in the Western world exploded, and surgery became a key focus of medicine. Doctors outdid priests in importance, not with the message ‘We’ll bring you enlightenment’, but with the offer: ‘We’ll anaesthetize you if necessary. We’ll relieve you of the burden of consciousness during operations, and while you are asleep we’ll repair what has to be repaired. ’ That’s what a progressive offer sounds like – and here ‘progressive’ is an exact synonym of ‘bring- ing relief’. This was followed by an important change in religious semantics during the last century: if life gets easier the demand for
1 The Bible, New International Version, Genesis 3:19: ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. ’
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redemption declines, and themes related to fulfilment and realiza- tion become more important.
The concept of relief has a second merit – it raises the question of who pays the costs of the relief, for the relief of one person must, by its nature, create a heavier burden for another, assuming one also calculates as an anthropologist using the principle of constancy in relation to the weight of the world. Such calculations are to be dis- closed and the shifts in pressure should be explained. If, for example, the majority of people in the Western world are no longer starving today, this is partly due to an unprecedented shifting of loads that occurred at the cost of farm animals. Mass animal farming has created an immense animal proletariat whose living conditions are scandalous, not only for conservatives.
NAKSCHBANDI: How is the concept of distribution of loads related to these transformations?
SLOTERDIJK: Distribution of the load is fundamental for the modern world because an intuitive and unconventional concept of justice depends on it. If we were to ask what real injustice is in the existential and non-juridical sense, a plausible answer could be: injustice means that some people have a very easy time and others a very hard time – and justice would describe the appro- priate equalizing measures. In this context, the concepts of load and relief show an internal relation to the theme of justice. One reason why the modern social system is attractive is that the state functions within it as a general guarantor of equalization. The seriously underestimated phenomenon of the tax state that was transformed into the welfare state during the twentieth century is related to this. Many people today are only vaguely aware that the state share of the gross national product amounts to 50 per cent and above in Germany and many other West European coun- tries. Hardly anybody can envisage what that means morally and psychologically. A good half of what the productive part of the population earns is absorbed by the fiscal authorities and put into a gigantic redistribution centrifuge, with the state and its servants not neglecting themselves, of course. In the year 2000, Germany’s gross national product amounted to 2 billion dollars, with over half of that going as booty to the public sector. Modern forms of life can evidently only be guaranteed by the state’s generalized kleptocracy. Just for once, we should look at things like this: if we looked at the welfare state’s redistribution performance merely from the quantitative angle we would be shocked and awed. The whole picture becomes almost incredible if we take into account the mirror distortions in the prevailing rhetorical systems. In popular commentaries, the relief systems are often described as if
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redistribution occurred upwards and as if our state increasingly leaves its ordinary citizens to die of hunger.
This distortion of the picture of the immense capital flows rechan- nelled by the state is partly conditioned by the political system being lost for words – as it no longer has any possibility of expressing itself, it borrows its vocabulary mainly from the economy that is understandably doomed to reproduce dissatisfaction all the time. This borrowing is devastating for the state because a subsystem of modern society can’t function if it doesn’t cultivate its own values. Citizens see the speechless state as a pseudo-entrepreneur, always blathering on about innovation and reform, and why? Because it can’t, it doesn’t want to, and it dares not speak openly about its real business, the fiscal kleptocracy and its justification through redistribution.
A second dimension of the concept of progress that traditional rhetoric can’t deal with adequately is the phenomenon of increasing density. A considerable part of what we have always called progress until now can be much better described as density. If we have the impression things are progressing in social terms, this is generally linked to an increase in density of transactions. Increased density means that in a particle system the number of possibilities of contact and collision increases. Consequently, in situations where progres- sive relationships dominate, the probability of collisions increases.
NAKSCHBANDI: It sounds dangerous . . .
SLOTERDIJK: It is really dangerous, and growing danger pro- vides a precise criterion for the degree of progress of relationships. It is not very easy to explain such twists to people who have simply supported progress. They wanted progress and what they got is complexity. The concept of complexity is associated with the news that nothing at all is simple any more. The term ‘density’ helps us to grasp such effects: countless particles, countless institutions, count- less enterprises, countless individuals are moving towards each other with growing intensity and are doing so in continually higher frequencies. The number of their contacts or collisions is growing exponentially. I read somewhere recently that 10 million emails per minute are sent all over the world, mostly in the industrialized zone. That figure makes 10 million traffic accidents per year, and the same number of private court cases, seem tame.
NAKSCHBANDI: What does this complexity mean for our lives in practical terms?
SLOTERDIJK: It means there is a growing need to simulate simplicity. The people who can master things well are the ones who can make complicated relationships simple. That is why mastery is the greatest asset modern individuals demand. The
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most popular simplification technique, as we know, is to ignore problems. Ignoring means seeing unsolved issues as resolved – that makes ignorance as a practical equivalent for superiority irresist- ible. Generally speaking, there’s an immense need for techniques for dealing with complexity. Today the greatest market of all is open for people who can offer effective simplifications. Of course, this is closely linked to relief.
Complexity increases the burden for problem-solvers and this, in turn, gives a new boost to relief techniques. This connection is the core of the so-called ‘knowledge society’. Knowledge that really interests us is always empowering knowledge that makes complex- ity amenable to handling. ‘Amenable to handling’ means things are processed so that we can make a profitable decision on the computer with our fingertips.
The concept of density also helps to explain why, despite the tremendous relief in which our life is embedded, we have the impres- sion that things aren’t getting easier, but on balance more difficult. For all the undeniable ‘progress’, why isn’t the world more trans- parent and more user-friendly? The increasing complexity is really unreasonable – and people will rebel against it sooner or later if they have expected something else. The most embittered critics of progress are disillusioned believers in progress. But if we start from a false concept, can we really complain when we realize it doesn’t work? Aren’t we responsible ourselves for the disappointment that comes from choosing the confusing word ‘progress’ to guide us? If we don’t want to fall into a semantic trap, we should drop the term ‘progress’. We realize that we’re caught in such a trap partly because we become aware that using specific words puts us into defensive situations and depressive states. In that case it is better to look for a different kind of language.
NAKSCHBANDI: Can Western culture learn something about these questions from other cultures?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people in the Western world assume that the rest of the world has to learn from them, and not vice versa. In fact, we could learn a great deal from non-Western cultures: a different attitude to happiness, to death, to simple, elementary things. I think it is a serious symptom that in our society the simple things are being reintroduced as a second-order luxury. Though it may sound odd, there is a kind of homesickness for poverty and it is actually for the elementary things that may be associated with poorer circumstances. Our society displays a surfeit of wealth and of the multiple options we constantly have to think about. That’s why many Western people now are interested in the lifestyle of cultures that are on the verge of the transition to affluence. However, I think
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it is doubtful that we can really learn from this. In the end, learning something from other people means wanting an exchange with them and seeing them as a model.