It is about occupying the position of the leading
monotheist
people.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
After all, the crazy illusion of a Führer is nothing but the political interpretation of a fallacy that our culture has blithely fostered for centuries, namely, that there is a place where it could be completely itself.
This realization is the entrance charge we have to pay if we want to attain the second wave of sociological enlighten- ment.
We must understand that societies use atmospheres to control and climatize themselves.
The topics we are talking about form a semantic air-conditioning system.
Right now, all the signs are that we are programming it wrongly.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen . . .
SLOTERDIJK: There’s enough tinder for it. Then, after the abreaction phase in which people have collectively got over the duty and the tendency to complain, we could start a productive discus- sion and try to design a school that fits the level of our knowledge and experience. Given the amount of accumulated discontent, the time is ripe. As far as positive forces are concerned, we will first have to reorganize what little we have left to see if it is enough for an offensive.
KAHL: How shall we start? Isn’t it important first of all to bring other adults into schools instead of only lifelong teachers? This could evolve into a kind of co-evolution. If teachers work as people gatherers, bringing ‘third parties’ into schools, they will become more adult themselves. It will be good for them and for the school.
SLOTERDIJK: That would be a first step. At the same time, a new viewpoint on people has to be constructed in the media. I don’t think it would be too difficult to show that interesting people are more fascinating than the average entertainment. If the fascina- tion value of being involved with a living person who has become an adult can’t compete with regression programmes offered by sex, crime and co. , we have lost the game. Windows should be opened in the media . . .
KAHL: And ‘third parties’ should be brought in everywhere.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We don’t know the interesting people in our own society. That means our society doesn’t know itself and doesn’t know that it doesn’t know itself. If the media can success- fully convey this enthusiasm for interesting people, they will also trigger a new learning process in schools of bringing in remarkable people with interesting jobs. That would be a broad move to de- professionalize curricula.
KAHL: Parents would worry that their children wouldn’t learn anything any more.
SLOTERDIJK: You can deal with the panic aroused by the
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 75
suspicion that competency is being compromised by emphasizing that nothing is more educational than the opportunity to see suc- cessful people at close quarters. By the way, concerning universities of the arts, that is also my response to the outdated master-class principle. If we want to preserve anything of the idea of the master, we have to translate it into the form of watching successful crea- tors of art at work and observing their success curve. That is highly instructive under any circumstances, regardless of whether students react by positive association or by rejection. Both are equally informative, provided that students have an authentic opportunity to see a creative person fully in action. This is precisely the concept of our art school in Karlsruhe.
KAHL: Dialogues worthy of the name consist of finely tuned agreements and refusals.
SLOTERDIJK: Allowing scope for productive scepticism in relation to a successful position is never a waste of time. Even people who react by turning away have learned a great deal from it. Perhaps we live in a period in which people learn more by rejec- tion than by borrowing. The cowardly teacher is the bad teacher. The good teacher is the person who is open to rejection. The same applies to good writers, who must always risk enough that they are worth reading even if we reject them.
KAHL: That brings us to the well-known Sloterdijkian concept of ‘de-idiotizing’: expending our own stupidity, for how can we get rid of it otherwise?
SLOTERDIJK: How can we get rid of it, if not in dealing with potential imitators who are smart enough to refuse to imitate at the last minute?
11
POSTMEN AND FALLEN TOWERS
Interview with Arno Frank*2
FRANK: Mr Sloterdijk, what mandate do you have for breaking into television?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely not the mandate of the world spirit. It’s more about my feeling that, given the decadence of the universi- ties, philosophy should link up with other media.
FRANK: TV philosopher – is that your mission?
SLOTERDIJK: We can describe every activity a person engages in from two different viewpoints. We can portray it from one side as a mission and from another as a need. If we describe it as a mission, then we believe that the individual has an idea or a master behind him that sends him ahead. In my case it is not as easy. I don’t have a master or an obsessive idea that decides for me what I should do. If I did, I would feel much more comfortable at the moment.
FRANK: Why?
SLOTERDIJK: Because then I could say: whether or not it works out, the idea or the sender is responsible. I would only be the mes- senger, the postman, and could deliver my message without being responsible for its success.
FRANK: What about the other version . . . ?
SLOTERDIJK: We must interpret it as an expressive action – in other words, I don’t have to trace the sequence of themes back beyond the author. It can start with the author. That means the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Arno Frank appeared in the taz newspaper under the title ‘Ich bin nicht der Postbote’ [‘I am not the Postman’] (19 January 2002): 3f. Arno Frank is an editor at the taz.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 77
author expresses himself or herself. He or she is an energy field that wants to discharge in that direction and no other.
FRANK: A medium within the medium, so to speak. But phi- losophers don’t usually frequent the footlights . . .
SLOTERDIJK: The studio has no ramp. In conventional theatre there is a border between the stage and the auditorium. On the TV podium you are surrounded by spectators – the TV situation is like being encircled. The question is: what can motivate people to let themselves be surrounded by spectators?
FRANK: Exhibitionists love situations like that. SLOTERDIJK: Maybe. But that’s really not my concern. FRANK: Not a trace of vanity?
SLOTERDIJK: I am a person who likes keeping one side hidden,
even when I appear in public. I have a mysterious aversion to the idea of people looking at me from the right-hand side.
FRANK: In a metaphorical, political sense?
SLOTERDIJK: No, spatially. In television you can’t stand with your back to a pillar like a figure in a Gothic cathedral and imagine that you’re drawing strength out of the stone. Television is a can- nibalistic medium that devours people optically. We are going to experiment with being eaten.
FRANK: You recently suggested interpreting nations as insti- tutions that maintain concentrated postal and communications systems – with telecommunications firms as secular churches. What do you mean by that?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern media societies have no brain, no central organ, only dense concentrations in the nervous system. How is such a complex and brainless system supposed to control itself? If modern societies were organized like churches, for example, Telekom would be the provider of both the network and the content of democracy. That is a lovely ecclesiological illusion: if we were like churches we could avoid the impression that no genuine internal connection exists in society. We would be limbs of a large commu- nitarian body. I am thinking about a map Dietmar Kamper1 once showed me. It was drawn by a medieval monk who had projected the body of Christ in the crucifix position on to the map of Europe, so that altogether the points representing the monasteries of Europe formed something like a visualization of the Corpus Christi spectre. A mystical EU.
1 Dietmar Kamper (1936–2001) was a German writer, philosopher and sociologist. He was professor of sociology at the Free University Berlin from 1979.
78 Postmen and Fallen Towers
FRANK: What is a society today when it isn’t a society?
SLOTERDIJK: The question is: how can we envisage social rela- tionships at all if we describe society as a whole as a body without a central organ?
FRANK: And the answer?
SLOTERDIJK: The answer would be a media theory for our times, and a number of people in the contemporary scene are working on that. Think of the work of Norbert Bolz, or Friedrich Kittler, or Jochen Hörisch, to mention only the older ones. 2 Those three men are intellectuals of my generation I feel related to because I am doing analogous work. Each of the three, in his own way, has experienced similar kinds of trouble with their former comrades.
FRANK: The same academic allergy against new approaches?
SLOTERDIJK: These three authors are like litmus tests for the resentment of the social environment. They are cheerful theo- reticians who see their intellectual practice additionally as leisure practice. I regard them as partners in crime. We are atmospheric felons in a cultural society that continues to claim a monopoly when it comes to defining moralist smog. In that context such enlighteners or clarifiers are not welcome at first. But I am convinced that within a generation their work will be canonical. It may sound strange, but I believe we have an avant-garde impact even today. Yet the inhabit- ants of the intellectual field aren’t amused when you tell them you are ahead in some way – you get sent to purgatory like a backward pupil.
FRANK: In your major work, Sphären [Spheres], you develop a theory of ‘ensouled spaces’, from bubbles to globes to foam . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I think foam is the defining metaphor for mul- tiple spaces for which the phrase ‘dreams are foam’ no longer holds. The substantialist aversion against anything fleeting and fragile – against foam – is also only lack of thought. If you think about multi-chambered systems under the premises of spatial logic, you quickly stop wanting to use foam, or scum, as a metaphor for something despicable. Quite the opposite: we realize that foam is a cosmogonic principle without which life and environmental effects would simply be impossible. But that is a theme I will develop calmly, like the plot of a stage play. If all goes well, we can talk about it again in eighteen months’ time.
2 Norbert Bolz (b. 1953) is a German philosopher, media theorist and design theorist. Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was a media theorist and philosopher known as ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. Jochen Hörisch (b. 1951) is a German literary and media theorist.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 79
FRANK: In Spheres II you wrote that a city shows in the vertical what it plans to do in the horizontal. Following your theory, wasn’t the attack on the World Trade Center in New York also an annihi- lating attack on a semantic level?
SLOTERDIJK: Islamist terror dealt a blow at the level of real existing symbolism, which is why the Americans’ counter-attack has been so remarkably flat and helpless. The reason is that the attacker can’t be hit symmetrically. The Americans don’t dare to attack the strong symbol that belongs to the perpetrators. We simply have to consider what the equivalent, in the Islamists’ worldview, is to what they think the World Trade Center means to us. It involves a very small number of objects. The list would be headed by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, followed by the Ka’aba in Mecca. Who could justify military assaults on those two objectives?
FRANK: But a war is already being fought on the symbolic level.
SLOTERDIJK: What the Americans and their friends in the Western world find very difficult to grasp is that they have lost – lost at the first shot. This is about a war that consisted of a single battle and led to a pure defeat that can never be compensated for. The twin towers fell. Everybody saw it and that means, however odd it may sound, that the show is already over, and everything you might want to write as a sequel is playing out on another level. The sight of collapsing tower blocks is doubly painful in a culture whose sources prepare it for such a process. On the one hand, we have the myth of David and Goliath, which has been subverted in the most unpleas- ant fashion here in Germany. We are used to pitting the small good person against the big bad one, and are suddenly forced to let the big good one enter the ring against the small bad one. That stiffens all the remaining moral feathers on our already well-plucked con- science. Only the fully plucked can unreservedly come to terms with this new situation. The great good against the small bad – will that be the new battle line-up of the twenty-first century? That’s really a joke.
FRANK: And the second myth?
SLOTERDIJK: That, on the other hand, concerns the Tower of Babel, which represents the first time theological resentment against a tall building was articulated – in fact, against the Others’ tall building. This myth expresses the enslaved Jews’ discontent with Babylonian arrogance. It is a lustful destruction fantasy about the text: ‘God reduces heathen towers to rubble and ashes. ’ This is a constitutive theme for our culture. The trauma of September 11 is so big because it concerns an attack on the dominant illusion- ary system of world power. The people of the United States don’t know how to keep on dreaming their neo-Babylonian dream of total
80 Postmen and Fallen Towers
security of the inner world by total control of the external world without destroying themselves. An evil virus has indeed infiltrated into the hegemony of the United States. We should realize that it is in our own interests that this virus doesn’t cause too much aliena- tion in the American mentality. At the moment I see the greatest danger in terms of global politics of resentment. Thank God, American democracy has a degree of resilience, and American civil society in particular has miraculous moral resources. But it is a severe infection.
FRANK: Because there is no way to compensate for it any longer?
SLOTERDIJK: The message of the towers has already become imprinted in historical memory because in our culture the sym- bolism of the tower is very deeply imbued with theological and ethno-narcissistic elements. A fallen tower signifies a divine judge- ment beyond which there is no possibility of return.
FRANK: As the author of spherological theory, do you welcome the introduction of a single currency in Europe as an affluent sphere? SLOTERDIJK: I see the euro as an admission that the Europeans don’t have a unified concept at the moment. The question is: why don’t they have it? Are they so united and content with their European existence that they don’t demand anything else? Or are they in a condition of malignant weakness whose outcome doesn’t look good – a kind of weakness that expresses the extinction of this civilization’s power to solve problems? I tend to think the first case is the answer. I think something very unique is emerging in Europe, namely a great structure whose internal constitution no longer has an imperial agenda. That’s something we have never seen before in history: the great power that appears imperial without a
programme.
FRANK: In contrast to American greatness?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, American greatness still follows an imperial code. The European structure is post-imperial, and in that respect the far more interesting structure. It gives more scope for thought and is more worthy of imitation. It inspires fewer jealousy conflicts. In fact, at the moment world history has a hot centre, which is the internal monotheistic athletic contest of megalomanias. That is the reason why we are seeing an American–Islamic world war front, at least at the semantic level. A war of jealousy is being fought here.
It is about occupying the position of the leading monotheist people. And anybody who is a loyal follower of Mohammed and positions himself or herself like that obviously has a problem with America. The USA is the triumphant ruling theocracy at the moment.
FRANK: A religious state? In which sense?
Postmen and Fallen Towers 81
SLOTERDIJK: America occupies the exact place at God’s right hand that can only be occupied once. We could say this results in a Jacob and Esau problem on the global political level, the purest form of a theodrama. We are watching two interconnected crusades – an oriental and a Western crusade are intertwined in astounding symmetry. René Girard, the great analyst of triangular conflicts, tried to show this in an article for Le Monde. 3 The struggle of imita- tive jealousies relates to a property that is first constituted within this competition, namely the privilege of being the culture on which the hand of the One God rests most visibly.
FRANK: How do you recognize this?
SLOTERDIJK: On the one hand, Bush says, ‘God is not neutral in the battle between America and its enemies. ’ The twenty-first century will be an experimental set-up to process the manic content of that statement. On the other hand, Bin Laden’s key phrase is, ‘What happened in New York is good terror. ’ The sooner people grasp the symmetry between these statements, the better for us.
FRANK: And in Europe?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe will only thrive if it understands where its advantage and its strengths lie in this situation.
FRANK: What might they be?
SLOTERDIJK: It is an advantage to have no interests in this affair beyond fully conditional, or rather, ironical support of the United States. Europe is already immersed in a post-monotheistic situation. Perhaps that would be the most positive definition we could offer for the introduction of the euro. If we want to venture very far ahead in the beautiful art of positive thinking, we can describe the procedure on 1 January 2002 in these terms: the monetary union is the final step in recognizing that we are already living in a post-imperialist structure in which the idea of cultural or quantitative greatness has become totally decoupled from the manic propulsion programmes of imperial culture. From a long-term per- spective, when the situation has stabilized, Europe will outstrip the United States as the homeland of the art of living.
3 René Girard is a French-born American literary critic, historian and philosopher specializing in social sciences. He is particularly known for his work on mimicry and scapegoats.
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
12
RAISING OUR HEADS Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts
Conversation with Thomas Macho*4
MACHO: I would like to begin with the idea that the possible improvement, perfection and optimizing of human beings is a project that has been conceived and planned for just a little over 200 years. Time – whether past or present – was not actually a theme in pre-industrial agrarian cultures. Those cultures doubtless had their stories of origin, more or less detailed chronicles and – usually apocalyptic – ideas of the future. But the horizons of remem- brance are just as limited as the horizons of planning. Even in the eighteenth century, a scholar could still work with creation dates calculated from biblical texts, such as 7 October 3761 BC. And we learn from the story of Joseph the Egyptian that in a great empire, a high culture of the ancient world based on writing, a man able to plan ahead for a timespan of twice seven years could rise to become the Pharaoh’s chief adviser. For agrarian cultures, time is simply a function of destiny. The history of the earth and of life and, most of all, the history of humankind, first became visible in the nineteenth century as a timespan to be calculated in millions of years. Perhaps it was only in the twentieth century that – with the aid of new sci- ences such as statistics and prognosis – the future could appear spread out as an incalculable open continuum. Politics, economics
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas Macho appeared under the title ‘Den Kopf heben: Über Räume der Verwöhnung und das Driften in der Zeit’, in Petra Lutz, Thomas Macho and Gisela Staupe (eds), Der (im)perfekte Mensch: Metamorphosen von Normalität und Abweichung (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag), 2003, pp. 379–405.
Thomas Macho is a cultural scholar and philosopher. He has been a pro- fessor of cultural history at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1993.
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts 83
and new technologies whose impact it may only be possible to evalu- ate after thousands of years impose a kind of thinking in the future without any historical models to rely on. Since the twentieth century we have known in more detail what it means to project the educa- tion or improvement of the human race.
SLOTERDIJK: This approach to consciousness of time raises a controversial point right away. In working on the third volume of my Spheres project I have developed a new approach in philosophi- cal anthropology with a stronger spatial emphasis. It was surprising, even for me, to see how much this theory of the contemporary age – for that is essentially what Spheres III is intended to be – had to delve into anthropology. I would actually go as far as to say that the forms of philosophical anthropology until then had been defined too hastily. At least, as I see it, the shotgun wedding between the concepts ‘philosophy’ and ‘anthropology’ didn’t result in a lasting alliance, either in the Heideggerian form or in the form of Plessner’s or Gehlen’s philosophy. I am aware, of course, that Heidegger would be appalled at anybody making such associations with his works – he saw himself as a resolute anti-anthropologist – but at the same time he wouldn’t really be able to deny the connections to what Plessner did on the one hand and Gehlen on the other. Spheres III has evolved into a book that proposes reshaping philosophical anthropology as topology. My aim was mainly to explain to people by starting from the place where human beings are formed – the surreal place that determines anthropogenesis. I am thinking of Homo sapiens’ characteristic tendency to premature births, and the permanent incubator situation in which the young grow up. I am also thinking of the extraordinary bonding between mothers and their young that flows into the human condition from the ancient primate legacy. All that gives us the right to speak of an exceptional neurological situation in relation to sapiens. Added to that is the exceptional phonotopic situation, life in ‘the house of language’, to cite Heidegger’s great phrase. We realize all too rarely that the house of language is firstly, and usually, a house of nonsense. It is the refuge of redundancy and self-arousal. Its residents live eo ipso in the house of self-referentiality, perhaps even in the house of proto- music. In other words, it is the home of a kind of tonality or sound closer to music than to communication. In this case, Dasein means something like being heard.
MACHO: The ‘house of language’ is a mysterious place. Neither linguists nor palaeo-anthropologists know when and how lan- guage developed in the first place, and the possible preconditions under which it had to develop. The word ‘house’ suggests that people first developed grammatically differentiated languages, with
84 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
subject-predicate relations for example, during the ‘Neolithic revo- lution’ when houses and cities were built. We have examples of many different kinds of symbol formation from the period 40,000 to 30,000 BC (in the Spanish and French cave paintings, for example); but if we think about the anatomy of the vocal apparatus among Neanderthals it is still completely unclear whether these images and symbols indicate a sort of language (and it is probably unlikely). Nonetheless, and despite all his criticism of anthropology, Heidegger insisted on the house of language: he argued that humans only became conclusively and unmistakably distinguished from animals through entry into the house of language. On the contrary, I think humans and animals entered the house of language together, and the first things they probably heard – according to Julian Jaynes’s thesis – were commands and imperatives.
SLOTERDIJK: According to the latest information from geneti- cists, Homo sapiens shares 99. 4 per cent of his genetic make-up with chimpanzees. This is horrifying for anthropocentric people. It follows that the whole anthropological difference induced by the break with animality resides in this tiny remainder – provided it can be biologi- cally located. This fact makes it immediately clear that genetics is not adequate as a basis for the human phenomenon. Rather, we have to take account of a topological difference to explain what actually happened when great apes became human beings. ‘Topological dif- ference’ means we are dealing with an essential displacement, and that is what leads to culture. As I see it, humanization is a side effect of exceptional pampering. The ‘pampering’ of humans enables them to move into the house of language. Of course I am aware that the term ‘pampering’ sounds outrageous to most people – especially those who are generally regarded as poor wretches anyway. Since the eighteenth century, if not before, ‘pampering’ has been seen as one of the worst statements people can make about other people. Nothing has struck fear into educators and moralists as much as the phenomenon of pampering – and sometimes for good reason, because this fear conceals an insight of great significance. I am actu- ally saying that pampering is the conditio humana as such, and those who don’t want to talk about pampering should keep silent about human beings. In fact, the anthropologists of the eighteenth century spoke of pampering, although not from a theoretical perspective but in a moralizing, admonitory tone: do anything you want, as long as you never admit to the tendency to pamper! That was almost the categorical imperative of bourgeois educational theory. I am arguing that anthropologists have seen humans as being so seri- ously at risk from pampering that they can’t talk about the human constitution except in terms of admonitions. Once again, in this case
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts 85
the alarm was quicker than the theory. After 200 years of aversive discourse about pampering we have reached the moment when we can neutralize the concept and transform it into a descriptive term. What happens when the block behind which the phenomenology of pampering was hidden up to now collapses? What happens when the scene is no longer dominated by educationalists who want to turn people into diligent citizens, soldiers and subjects? When the tradi- tions of education for toughening people up don’t work any more, and militarist alchemy no longer sets the tone? For the first time, we can calmly survey the immense mass of facts about pampering – and we have reached the moment when philosophy really meets anthro- pology. This is where the encounter between the two happens first, and all the previous attempts of so-called philosophical anthropol- ogy were over-hasty and based on false concepts because the core concept, pampering, was either missing or only effective in a dis- torted way. Gehlen’s reference to human abandonment of instincts is still too vague and too negatively formulated. The trend may be right but there is still too much of the teacher calling for the heavy hand of institutions to take charge of this mollycoddled, biologically impossible being and give it support. Plessner’s case is very similar, although seen through the lens of liberalism and just as inadequate. It is not enough to say that Homo sapiens is his own spectator – however deeply meaningful such a diagnosis may be. Basically, this statement is about transcendental philosophy distilled into anthropology: if humans are their own spectators it means they are always simultaneously agents of their lives and observers of those same lives. They live their life and stand beside themselves. This is all that the formula of eccentric positioning that Plessner propounded means. Because, we are told, life in human form is something that cannot simply be lived, but must be led, one can say of Homo sapiens that he represents the union between the leaders and the led. So far, so good. But that’s not enough because it doesn’t tackle the basic problem – the dynamic of pampering that catapults humans out of nature. Occasionally I use an image of Homo sapiens as a space trav- eller, sitting in a pampering rocket and being catapulted into outer space. We have always lived in a space station of pampering, but usually we don’t notice because part of the character of pampering is that it naturalizes itself at every stage and declares itself to be self- evident. Pampering is relegated to the background as self-evident and becomes irrelevant. As a theoretician, you have to be very cold- blooded and try to think in a way that is methodically asocial before you are able to articulate such theses at all.
Incidentally, there is another reason why this is the only way things can be: ancient European influences have accustomed us to
86 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
describing humans in terms of their misery – we usually see them as animals that lack something. The tradition of the conditio humana focuses unequivocally on human beings as broken creatures. We could rename the species Homo patiens. This reminds me of the basic text of European miserabilism with the telling title de humanae conditionis miseria, written by Lotario de Segni, later Pope Innocent III, around the year 1200. It is quite a remarkable and illuminating text, a veritable litany of misery based on the decision to weigh up human existence completely on the negative side and to fuel argu- ments about the weariness of life – presumably to eulogize taking refuge with God as the sole alternative to normal existence.
MACHO: Raising the spectre of the misery of human existence is, of course, an essential element of talking about death and mor- tality that was important for the old cultures – before the advent of humanism – because people believed that ‘memento mori’ was a mark of the specific human condition. Notwithstanding all the idealization of perfection and beauty of human beings, often with reference to Greek art, we should never forget the fleeting nature of humans, the transience of their existence. The cruellest discussion on the miserable condition of humans that I know of – aside from the text by Innocent III you have just mentioned – is in the medieval dialogue between Death and the Bohemian ploughman, where man is described as a mass of refuse, a churn of filth, a dish for worms, a stink house, a repulsive washtub, a rancid carcass and a reeking flagon of urine, whose cavities exude ‘disgusting filth’. This dialogue about death allows us to locate humans in a kind of middle position: on the one hand they are distinguished from animals, on the other from God and the angels. Humans stand in the middle between animals and God: we can also glean that from the Porphyrian tree, the scale of being that gave rise to Neoplatonism, a philosophy full of overflows and emanations. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind – even though it argues in terms of uni- versal history – is quite obsessed by the idea that humans are the beings in the middle, not just the ‘deficient beings’ but the ‘beings liberated in the creation’ that can develop downwards (towards the animals) or upwards (towards spiritual beings). The principles of ‘domestication’ are unified in this middle. These principles lit- erally mean the connections between living in the house of being, habituation and pampering. 1 Habituation – along with pampering
1 Sloterdijk is playing with the German nouns das Gewöhnen [habituation] and das Verwöhnen [pampering], both of which have their roots in the verb wohnen [to live in, or to inhabit].
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts 87
– is probably an equally interesting process of early human history. Constructing houses, learning to speak, and commanding and obeying, presupposes habituation; without habituation we would be totally incapable of perceiving our pampering – including where it is thwarted by death, hunger and illness. The ‘first liberated being in the creation’ can habituate himself or herself beyond destiny and coercion. Habituation and pampering, those beginnings of living, can, as you suggest, only be conceived adequately as themes of topology. Actually, time is always presented topologically – even as a miserabilist epitome of an experience of vanitas, of the transi- ence of life. Until recently, we never imagined time in any other way except topologically, in concepts of distance or measurable stretches. From the start, time was an epiphenomenon of space, just like memory. Somebody who remembers (or plans) builds spaces, interior palaces we know from the ars memoriae. But to get back to pampering: in your view it precedes inhabiting, or even habituation. When and where was the ‘pampering rocket’ you refer to actually launched?
SLOTERDIJK: The special human variation of pampering arises from the fusion of a favourable situation, in which the early hominoid type of savannah walker emerged, with an old animalist advantage of warmth, already fully developed in hominoids, which is evident in the mother–child relationship among great apes. The formula says: Savannah security effect plus hominoid cosy room. The moment these two factors coincide the special incubator effect occurs, resulting in the emergence of Homo sapiens. There is a natural history of pampering that goes back far beyond the human field. Since the time it was defined by Julius Kollmann, a biologist of the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon of retaining juvenile morphologies has been described as neoteny. The neo-characteristics of children and young adults are projected through neoteny, or juve- nilization, into the morphology of adults. In other words, a general protraction of juvenile forms occurs – a phenomenon that biologists have noted in numerous animal species. As we know, it is heavily topologically conditioned because, as far as I can see, it can be observed exclusively in nest-building, cave-dwelling or other animal species that have particular technical skills for creating niches. We can see immediately that nest-building animals start a process of enormous security transfer for the benefit of their own brood that will show up sooner or later in the biological appearance of their offspring. This transfer is unknown to flight animals living out in the open, which means they cannot afford such extensive juvenilization of their offspring. Nest-builders, however, generate a spontaneous incubation effect for the benefit of their young. I can see it in cats,
88 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
I can see it in dogs, I can see it in countless other mammals, not to mention the famous axolotl. Where the nest security effect occurs, the offspring can be born in a shockingly immature state. The same thing can be observed in marsupials, which have the most interest- ing life form in terms of developmental history because they seem to embody the compromise solution between live birth and laying eggs. This touches on the topological puzzle of neoteny. As soon as the work of the uterus can be transferred from the maternal body to a nest, nature treats itself to an additional pampering luxury: the children are born much less matured than those in more exposed life forms, without nests. This is where it gets interesting philosophi- cally, because to be born prematurely generally means exposing the nervous system to the venture of postnatal maturing. If the wiring of the nerves occurs largely a priori or prenatally, the result is an animal that learns relatively little because it doesn’t need to learn much – a relatively ready animal in a relatively ready environment. Premature babies, however, start with the adventure of not being ready and leave room for a great deal a posteriori. The result is something like a natural history of the a posteriori principle. It could be written as the natural history of openness to experience, of open-mindedness. This is connected with the luxury of pampering, or with the level of unreadiness at which a nervous system becomes fit for the world or open-minded.
But all that is still animal history. It must be narrated in the context of biology – it is not yet human history. The biological extension of the juvenile phase creates animals that play and experiment more, that are essayists by nature and have a prolonged phase of mental maturation. In any case, the relationship between a priori and a posteriori can be described neurologically. This sums up the outline of the first half of my topological argument. In the second half, the anthropological space question is refined using the following idea: as we know, we are descendants of a species of tree-dwelling apes that developed into savannah apes. But how did the tree-dwelling ape arrive in the savannah? And how does a climber become a walker? How did walking upright evolve? How were all these exodus phenomena possible? There are plenty of fairly controversial topics – and, at the same time, something like the thema probandum for anthropologists, because somebody who has nothing to say about walking upright hasn’t really grasped the issue of human beings. But for the moment we are less interested in the vertical apes problem than in characteristics of the place at which apes can become men. Once again we establish the primacy of topology and we also offer an explanation for why, in the beginning, time could actually appear as integrated into space.
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts 89
Savannah apes live in a world with a wide horizon – a huge dif- ference to the world of the treetop, which consists of a world of leaf caverns. This cannot be emphasized enough. Before human beings came the apes, and they had a horizon. This situation creates a cognitive pattern that belongs to our a priori equipment as human beings. I am thinking of an inborn schema of alertness that antici- pates something like the transcendental unity of mental perception. In Kantian terms, we humans have a red alert that must be able to keep up with everything we imagine. We note first that the savan- nah ape is comparatively untroubled to begin with, and for most of the time. He sees possible danger coming from afar, so he can relax much more than the tree ape that can’t see the danger coming from so far away. His long-sightedness gives him a safety buffer that affects his whole behaviour. Equanimity is a biological attain- ment from the savannahs. Like some other savannah inhabitants, Homo sapiens is a sleepy creature dependent on alerts. His natural behaviour is to hang around and do nothing most of the time. This automatically brings to mind male lions that spend twenty-three hours of the day dozing. These types of idleness and relaxation are typical of the savannah. The safety buffer provided by the wide view enables this. But then time and the event come into play. Homo sapiens is not only a sleepy creature ready for alert but also a curious creature driven by appetite. Let’s imagine the basic situation of life modified into a wide horizon: what has to happen to raise the level of alertness in a pampered ape? Evidently it is triggered when a stress factor appears on the horizon. Whether aggressor or prey, something has to interrupt the situation – and, in fact, the inter- ruption appears on the horizon. Then the ape raises its head and is immediately ‘right there’ with its eyes. Raising the head, inciden- tally, is a metaphor Heidegger used to describe the way a person stands in a clearing. The new event comes in the form of a break in the line of the horizon. The event that fixes the time appears in the space as a disturbance on the horizon. In my view, this provides a further argument to confirm that the time problem could be largely neutralized in the earliest periods of prehistory. The animal with this observational advantage sees things approaching – as eventful interruptions on the horizon. When the alarm is over, peace returns to the horizon. To sum up the two arguments: adding together these two functions, the nest privilege of the neotenized animal and the horizon privilege of the savannah apes, brings into view what I have just described as the launching pad for the pampering process.
MACHO: Savannah apes learned to deal flexibly with the point on the horizon, the disruption on the horizon, the feared or desired appearance on the horizon. It did not always signal danger – more
90 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
often it meant food. The latest studies show that prehistoric people in the East African savannah lived in blissful harmony with the animals, because they fulfilled their protein needs exclusively with dead animals. They were not ‘killer apes’ but carrion eaters. Yet how could they find dead animals quickly before they were inedible or devoured by beasts of prey? Only through specific ‘signs from heaven’ – namely, the circular plummeting of vultures that appeared on the horizon.
SLOTERDIJK: There is a neurobiological argument that illus- trates the connection you mention quite well. It recalls the familiar station effect: we are sitting in a train and the train beside us departs. We usually have the impression we are the ones who are moving. Maybe this can be seen as a sign of an inborn expectation that makes us think the horizon is fixed, whereas movement can only be movement within a horizon. On the other hand, if the horizon as a whole moves, our nervous system interprets this as if we ourselves are moving. Given our basic biological make-up, it is inconceivable that the horizon is moving. That is why the station illusion occurs so persistently and makes such an impression. Even if you are aware of the effect, it doesn’t change anything in the way you perceive it.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen . . .
SLOTERDIJK: There’s enough tinder for it. Then, after the abreaction phase in which people have collectively got over the duty and the tendency to complain, we could start a productive discus- sion and try to design a school that fits the level of our knowledge and experience. Given the amount of accumulated discontent, the time is ripe. As far as positive forces are concerned, we will first have to reorganize what little we have left to see if it is enough for an offensive.
KAHL: How shall we start? Isn’t it important first of all to bring other adults into schools instead of only lifelong teachers? This could evolve into a kind of co-evolution. If teachers work as people gatherers, bringing ‘third parties’ into schools, they will become more adult themselves. It will be good for them and for the school.
SLOTERDIJK: That would be a first step. At the same time, a new viewpoint on people has to be constructed in the media. I don’t think it would be too difficult to show that interesting people are more fascinating than the average entertainment. If the fascina- tion value of being involved with a living person who has become an adult can’t compete with regression programmes offered by sex, crime and co. , we have lost the game. Windows should be opened in the media . . .
KAHL: And ‘third parties’ should be brought in everywhere.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We don’t know the interesting people in our own society. That means our society doesn’t know itself and doesn’t know that it doesn’t know itself. If the media can success- fully convey this enthusiasm for interesting people, they will also trigger a new learning process in schools of bringing in remarkable people with interesting jobs. That would be a broad move to de- professionalize curricula.
KAHL: Parents would worry that their children wouldn’t learn anything any more.
SLOTERDIJK: You can deal with the panic aroused by the
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 75
suspicion that competency is being compromised by emphasizing that nothing is more educational than the opportunity to see suc- cessful people at close quarters. By the way, concerning universities of the arts, that is also my response to the outdated master-class principle. If we want to preserve anything of the idea of the master, we have to translate it into the form of watching successful crea- tors of art at work and observing their success curve. That is highly instructive under any circumstances, regardless of whether students react by positive association or by rejection. Both are equally informative, provided that students have an authentic opportunity to see a creative person fully in action. This is precisely the concept of our art school in Karlsruhe.
KAHL: Dialogues worthy of the name consist of finely tuned agreements and refusals.
SLOTERDIJK: Allowing scope for productive scepticism in relation to a successful position is never a waste of time. Even people who react by turning away have learned a great deal from it. Perhaps we live in a period in which people learn more by rejec- tion than by borrowing. The cowardly teacher is the bad teacher. The good teacher is the person who is open to rejection. The same applies to good writers, who must always risk enough that they are worth reading even if we reject them.
KAHL: That brings us to the well-known Sloterdijkian concept of ‘de-idiotizing’: expending our own stupidity, for how can we get rid of it otherwise?
SLOTERDIJK: How can we get rid of it, if not in dealing with potential imitators who are smart enough to refuse to imitate at the last minute?
11
POSTMEN AND FALLEN TOWERS
Interview with Arno Frank*2
FRANK: Mr Sloterdijk, what mandate do you have for breaking into television?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely not the mandate of the world spirit. It’s more about my feeling that, given the decadence of the universi- ties, philosophy should link up with other media.
FRANK: TV philosopher – is that your mission?
SLOTERDIJK: We can describe every activity a person engages in from two different viewpoints. We can portray it from one side as a mission and from another as a need. If we describe it as a mission, then we believe that the individual has an idea or a master behind him that sends him ahead. In my case it is not as easy. I don’t have a master or an obsessive idea that decides for me what I should do. If I did, I would feel much more comfortable at the moment.
FRANK: Why?
SLOTERDIJK: Because then I could say: whether or not it works out, the idea or the sender is responsible. I would only be the mes- senger, the postman, and could deliver my message without being responsible for its success.
FRANK: What about the other version . . . ?
SLOTERDIJK: We must interpret it as an expressive action – in other words, I don’t have to trace the sequence of themes back beyond the author. It can start with the author. That means the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Arno Frank appeared in the taz newspaper under the title ‘Ich bin nicht der Postbote’ [‘I am not the Postman’] (19 January 2002): 3f. Arno Frank is an editor at the taz.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 77
author expresses himself or herself. He or she is an energy field that wants to discharge in that direction and no other.
FRANK: A medium within the medium, so to speak. But phi- losophers don’t usually frequent the footlights . . .
SLOTERDIJK: The studio has no ramp. In conventional theatre there is a border between the stage and the auditorium. On the TV podium you are surrounded by spectators – the TV situation is like being encircled. The question is: what can motivate people to let themselves be surrounded by spectators?
FRANK: Exhibitionists love situations like that. SLOTERDIJK: Maybe. But that’s really not my concern. FRANK: Not a trace of vanity?
SLOTERDIJK: I am a person who likes keeping one side hidden,
even when I appear in public. I have a mysterious aversion to the idea of people looking at me from the right-hand side.
FRANK: In a metaphorical, political sense?
SLOTERDIJK: No, spatially. In television you can’t stand with your back to a pillar like a figure in a Gothic cathedral and imagine that you’re drawing strength out of the stone. Television is a can- nibalistic medium that devours people optically. We are going to experiment with being eaten.
FRANK: You recently suggested interpreting nations as insti- tutions that maintain concentrated postal and communications systems – with telecommunications firms as secular churches. What do you mean by that?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern media societies have no brain, no central organ, only dense concentrations in the nervous system. How is such a complex and brainless system supposed to control itself? If modern societies were organized like churches, for example, Telekom would be the provider of both the network and the content of democracy. That is a lovely ecclesiological illusion: if we were like churches we could avoid the impression that no genuine internal connection exists in society. We would be limbs of a large commu- nitarian body. I am thinking about a map Dietmar Kamper1 once showed me. It was drawn by a medieval monk who had projected the body of Christ in the crucifix position on to the map of Europe, so that altogether the points representing the monasteries of Europe formed something like a visualization of the Corpus Christi spectre. A mystical EU.
1 Dietmar Kamper (1936–2001) was a German writer, philosopher and sociologist. He was professor of sociology at the Free University Berlin from 1979.
78 Postmen and Fallen Towers
FRANK: What is a society today when it isn’t a society?
SLOTERDIJK: The question is: how can we envisage social rela- tionships at all if we describe society as a whole as a body without a central organ?
FRANK: And the answer?
SLOTERDIJK: The answer would be a media theory for our times, and a number of people in the contemporary scene are working on that. Think of the work of Norbert Bolz, or Friedrich Kittler, or Jochen Hörisch, to mention only the older ones. 2 Those three men are intellectuals of my generation I feel related to because I am doing analogous work. Each of the three, in his own way, has experienced similar kinds of trouble with their former comrades.
FRANK: The same academic allergy against new approaches?
SLOTERDIJK: These three authors are like litmus tests for the resentment of the social environment. They are cheerful theo- reticians who see their intellectual practice additionally as leisure practice. I regard them as partners in crime. We are atmospheric felons in a cultural society that continues to claim a monopoly when it comes to defining moralist smog. In that context such enlighteners or clarifiers are not welcome at first. But I am convinced that within a generation their work will be canonical. It may sound strange, but I believe we have an avant-garde impact even today. Yet the inhabit- ants of the intellectual field aren’t amused when you tell them you are ahead in some way – you get sent to purgatory like a backward pupil.
FRANK: In your major work, Sphären [Spheres], you develop a theory of ‘ensouled spaces’, from bubbles to globes to foam . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I think foam is the defining metaphor for mul- tiple spaces for which the phrase ‘dreams are foam’ no longer holds. The substantialist aversion against anything fleeting and fragile – against foam – is also only lack of thought. If you think about multi-chambered systems under the premises of spatial logic, you quickly stop wanting to use foam, or scum, as a metaphor for something despicable. Quite the opposite: we realize that foam is a cosmogonic principle without which life and environmental effects would simply be impossible. But that is a theme I will develop calmly, like the plot of a stage play. If all goes well, we can talk about it again in eighteen months’ time.
2 Norbert Bolz (b. 1953) is a German philosopher, media theorist and design theorist. Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) was a media theorist and philosopher known as ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. Jochen Hörisch (b. 1951) is a German literary and media theorist.
Postmen and Fallen Towers 79
FRANK: In Spheres II you wrote that a city shows in the vertical what it plans to do in the horizontal. Following your theory, wasn’t the attack on the World Trade Center in New York also an annihi- lating attack on a semantic level?
SLOTERDIJK: Islamist terror dealt a blow at the level of real existing symbolism, which is why the Americans’ counter-attack has been so remarkably flat and helpless. The reason is that the attacker can’t be hit symmetrically. The Americans don’t dare to attack the strong symbol that belongs to the perpetrators. We simply have to consider what the equivalent, in the Islamists’ worldview, is to what they think the World Trade Center means to us. It involves a very small number of objects. The list would be headed by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, followed by the Ka’aba in Mecca. Who could justify military assaults on those two objectives?
FRANK: But a war is already being fought on the symbolic level.
SLOTERDIJK: What the Americans and their friends in the Western world find very difficult to grasp is that they have lost – lost at the first shot. This is about a war that consisted of a single battle and led to a pure defeat that can never be compensated for. The twin towers fell. Everybody saw it and that means, however odd it may sound, that the show is already over, and everything you might want to write as a sequel is playing out on another level. The sight of collapsing tower blocks is doubly painful in a culture whose sources prepare it for such a process. On the one hand, we have the myth of David and Goliath, which has been subverted in the most unpleas- ant fashion here in Germany. We are used to pitting the small good person against the big bad one, and are suddenly forced to let the big good one enter the ring against the small bad one. That stiffens all the remaining moral feathers on our already well-plucked con- science. Only the fully plucked can unreservedly come to terms with this new situation. The great good against the small bad – will that be the new battle line-up of the twenty-first century? That’s really a joke.
FRANK: And the second myth?
SLOTERDIJK: That, on the other hand, concerns the Tower of Babel, which represents the first time theological resentment against a tall building was articulated – in fact, against the Others’ tall building. This myth expresses the enslaved Jews’ discontent with Babylonian arrogance. It is a lustful destruction fantasy about the text: ‘God reduces heathen towers to rubble and ashes. ’ This is a constitutive theme for our culture. The trauma of September 11 is so big because it concerns an attack on the dominant illusion- ary system of world power. The people of the United States don’t know how to keep on dreaming their neo-Babylonian dream of total
80 Postmen and Fallen Towers
security of the inner world by total control of the external world without destroying themselves. An evil virus has indeed infiltrated into the hegemony of the United States. We should realize that it is in our own interests that this virus doesn’t cause too much aliena- tion in the American mentality. At the moment I see the greatest danger in terms of global politics of resentment. Thank God, American democracy has a degree of resilience, and American civil society in particular has miraculous moral resources. But it is a severe infection.
FRANK: Because there is no way to compensate for it any longer?
SLOTERDIJK: The message of the towers has already become imprinted in historical memory because in our culture the sym- bolism of the tower is very deeply imbued with theological and ethno-narcissistic elements. A fallen tower signifies a divine judge- ment beyond which there is no possibility of return.
FRANK: As the author of spherological theory, do you welcome the introduction of a single currency in Europe as an affluent sphere? SLOTERDIJK: I see the euro as an admission that the Europeans don’t have a unified concept at the moment. The question is: why don’t they have it? Are they so united and content with their European existence that they don’t demand anything else? Or are they in a condition of malignant weakness whose outcome doesn’t look good – a kind of weakness that expresses the extinction of this civilization’s power to solve problems? I tend to think the first case is the answer. I think something very unique is emerging in Europe, namely a great structure whose internal constitution no longer has an imperial agenda. That’s something we have never seen before in history: the great power that appears imperial without a
programme.
FRANK: In contrast to American greatness?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, American greatness still follows an imperial code. The European structure is post-imperial, and in that respect the far more interesting structure. It gives more scope for thought and is more worthy of imitation. It inspires fewer jealousy conflicts. In fact, at the moment world history has a hot centre, which is the internal monotheistic athletic contest of megalomanias. That is the reason why we are seeing an American–Islamic world war front, at least at the semantic level. A war of jealousy is being fought here.
It is about occupying the position of the leading monotheist people. And anybody who is a loyal follower of Mohammed and positions himself or herself like that obviously has a problem with America. The USA is the triumphant ruling theocracy at the moment.
FRANK: A religious state? In which sense?
Postmen and Fallen Towers 81
SLOTERDIJK: America occupies the exact place at God’s right hand that can only be occupied once. We could say this results in a Jacob and Esau problem on the global political level, the purest form of a theodrama. We are watching two interconnected crusades – an oriental and a Western crusade are intertwined in astounding symmetry. René Girard, the great analyst of triangular conflicts, tried to show this in an article for Le Monde. 3 The struggle of imita- tive jealousies relates to a property that is first constituted within this competition, namely the privilege of being the culture on which the hand of the One God rests most visibly.
FRANK: How do you recognize this?
SLOTERDIJK: On the one hand, Bush says, ‘God is not neutral in the battle between America and its enemies. ’ The twenty-first century will be an experimental set-up to process the manic content of that statement. On the other hand, Bin Laden’s key phrase is, ‘What happened in New York is good terror. ’ The sooner people grasp the symmetry between these statements, the better for us.
FRANK: And in Europe?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe will only thrive if it understands where its advantage and its strengths lie in this situation.
FRANK: What might they be?
SLOTERDIJK: It is an advantage to have no interests in this affair beyond fully conditional, or rather, ironical support of the United States. Europe is already immersed in a post-monotheistic situation. Perhaps that would be the most positive definition we could offer for the introduction of the euro. If we want to venture very far ahead in the beautiful art of positive thinking, we can describe the procedure on 1 January 2002 in these terms: the monetary union is the final step in recognizing that we are already living in a post-imperialist structure in which the idea of cultural or quantitative greatness has become totally decoupled from the manic propulsion programmes of imperial culture. From a long-term per- spective, when the situation has stabilized, Europe will outstrip the United States as the homeland of the art of living.
3 René Girard is a French-born American literary critic, historian and philosopher specializing in social sciences. He is particularly known for his work on mimicry and scapegoats.
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts
12
RAISING OUR HEADS Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts
Conversation with Thomas Macho*4
MACHO: I would like to begin with the idea that the possible improvement, perfection and optimizing of human beings is a project that has been conceived and planned for just a little over 200 years. Time – whether past or present – was not actually a theme in pre-industrial agrarian cultures. Those cultures doubtless had their stories of origin, more or less detailed chronicles and – usually apocalyptic – ideas of the future. But the horizons of remem- brance are just as limited as the horizons of planning. Even in the eighteenth century, a scholar could still work with creation dates calculated from biblical texts, such as 7 October 3761 BC. And we learn from the story of Joseph the Egyptian that in a great empire, a high culture of the ancient world based on writing, a man able to plan ahead for a timespan of twice seven years could rise to become the Pharaoh’s chief adviser. For agrarian cultures, time is simply a function of destiny. The history of the earth and of life and, most of all, the history of humankind, first became visible in the nineteenth century as a timespan to be calculated in millions of years. Perhaps it was only in the twentieth century that – with the aid of new sci- ences such as statistics and prognosis – the future could appear spread out as an incalculable open continuum. Politics, economics
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas Macho appeared under the title ‘Den Kopf heben: Über Räume der Verwöhnung und das Driften in der Zeit’, in Petra Lutz, Thomas Macho and Gisela Staupe (eds), Der (im)perfekte Mensch: Metamorphosen von Normalität und Abweichung (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag), 2003, pp. 379–405.
Thomas Macho is a cultural scholar and philosopher. He has been a pro- fessor of cultural history at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1993.
Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces/Time Drifts 83
and new technologies whose impact it may only be possible to evalu- ate after thousands of years impose a kind of thinking in the future without any historical models to rely on. Since the twentieth century we have known in more detail what it means to project the educa- tion or improvement of the human race.
SLOTERDIJK: This approach to consciousness of time raises a controversial point right away. In working on the third volume of my Spheres project I have developed a new approach in philosophi- cal anthropology with a stronger spatial emphasis. It was surprising, even for me, to see how much this theory of the contemporary age – for that is essentially what Spheres III is intended to be – had to delve into anthropology. I would actually go as far as to say that the forms of philosophical anthropology until then had been defined too hastily. At least, as I see it, the shotgun wedding between the concepts ‘philosophy’ and ‘anthropology’ didn’t result in a lasting alliance, either in the Heideggerian form or in the form of Plessner’s or Gehlen’s philosophy. I am aware, of course, that Heidegger would be appalled at anybody making such associations with his works – he saw himself as a resolute anti-anthropologist – but at the same time he wouldn’t really be able to deny the connections to what Plessner did on the one hand and Gehlen on the other. Spheres III has evolved into a book that proposes reshaping philosophical anthropology as topology. My aim was mainly to explain to people by starting from the place where human beings are formed – the surreal place that determines anthropogenesis. I am thinking of Homo sapiens’ characteristic tendency to premature births, and the permanent incubator situation in which the young grow up. I am also thinking of the extraordinary bonding between mothers and their young that flows into the human condition from the ancient primate legacy. All that gives us the right to speak of an exceptional neurological situation in relation to sapiens. Added to that is the exceptional phonotopic situation, life in ‘the house of language’, to cite Heidegger’s great phrase. We realize all too rarely that the house of language is firstly, and usually, a house of nonsense. It is the refuge of redundancy and self-arousal. Its residents live eo ipso in the house of self-referentiality, perhaps even in the house of proto- music. In other words, it is the home of a kind of tonality or sound closer to music than to communication. In this case, Dasein means something like being heard.
MACHO: The ‘house of language’ is a mysterious place. Neither linguists nor palaeo-anthropologists know when and how lan- guage developed in the first place, and the possible preconditions under which it had to develop. The word ‘house’ suggests that people first developed grammatically differentiated languages, with
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subject-predicate relations for example, during the ‘Neolithic revo- lution’ when houses and cities were built. We have examples of many different kinds of symbol formation from the period 40,000 to 30,000 BC (in the Spanish and French cave paintings, for example); but if we think about the anatomy of the vocal apparatus among Neanderthals it is still completely unclear whether these images and symbols indicate a sort of language (and it is probably unlikely). Nonetheless, and despite all his criticism of anthropology, Heidegger insisted on the house of language: he argued that humans only became conclusively and unmistakably distinguished from animals through entry into the house of language. On the contrary, I think humans and animals entered the house of language together, and the first things they probably heard – according to Julian Jaynes’s thesis – were commands and imperatives.
SLOTERDIJK: According to the latest information from geneti- cists, Homo sapiens shares 99. 4 per cent of his genetic make-up with chimpanzees. This is horrifying for anthropocentric people. It follows that the whole anthropological difference induced by the break with animality resides in this tiny remainder – provided it can be biologi- cally located. This fact makes it immediately clear that genetics is not adequate as a basis for the human phenomenon. Rather, we have to take account of a topological difference to explain what actually happened when great apes became human beings. ‘Topological dif- ference’ means we are dealing with an essential displacement, and that is what leads to culture. As I see it, humanization is a side effect of exceptional pampering. The ‘pampering’ of humans enables them to move into the house of language. Of course I am aware that the term ‘pampering’ sounds outrageous to most people – especially those who are generally regarded as poor wretches anyway. Since the eighteenth century, if not before, ‘pampering’ has been seen as one of the worst statements people can make about other people. Nothing has struck fear into educators and moralists as much as the phenomenon of pampering – and sometimes for good reason, because this fear conceals an insight of great significance. I am actu- ally saying that pampering is the conditio humana as such, and those who don’t want to talk about pampering should keep silent about human beings. In fact, the anthropologists of the eighteenth century spoke of pampering, although not from a theoretical perspective but in a moralizing, admonitory tone: do anything you want, as long as you never admit to the tendency to pamper! That was almost the categorical imperative of bourgeois educational theory. I am arguing that anthropologists have seen humans as being so seri- ously at risk from pampering that they can’t talk about the human constitution except in terms of admonitions. Once again, in this case
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the alarm was quicker than the theory. After 200 years of aversive discourse about pampering we have reached the moment when we can neutralize the concept and transform it into a descriptive term. What happens when the block behind which the phenomenology of pampering was hidden up to now collapses? What happens when the scene is no longer dominated by educationalists who want to turn people into diligent citizens, soldiers and subjects? When the tradi- tions of education for toughening people up don’t work any more, and militarist alchemy no longer sets the tone? For the first time, we can calmly survey the immense mass of facts about pampering – and we have reached the moment when philosophy really meets anthro- pology. This is where the encounter between the two happens first, and all the previous attempts of so-called philosophical anthropol- ogy were over-hasty and based on false concepts because the core concept, pampering, was either missing or only effective in a dis- torted way. Gehlen’s reference to human abandonment of instincts is still too vague and too negatively formulated. The trend may be right but there is still too much of the teacher calling for the heavy hand of institutions to take charge of this mollycoddled, biologically impossible being and give it support. Plessner’s case is very similar, although seen through the lens of liberalism and just as inadequate. It is not enough to say that Homo sapiens is his own spectator – however deeply meaningful such a diagnosis may be. Basically, this statement is about transcendental philosophy distilled into anthropology: if humans are their own spectators it means they are always simultaneously agents of their lives and observers of those same lives. They live their life and stand beside themselves. This is all that the formula of eccentric positioning that Plessner propounded means. Because, we are told, life in human form is something that cannot simply be lived, but must be led, one can say of Homo sapiens that he represents the union between the leaders and the led. So far, so good. But that’s not enough because it doesn’t tackle the basic problem – the dynamic of pampering that catapults humans out of nature. Occasionally I use an image of Homo sapiens as a space trav- eller, sitting in a pampering rocket and being catapulted into outer space. We have always lived in a space station of pampering, but usually we don’t notice because part of the character of pampering is that it naturalizes itself at every stage and declares itself to be self- evident. Pampering is relegated to the background as self-evident and becomes irrelevant. As a theoretician, you have to be very cold- blooded and try to think in a way that is methodically asocial before you are able to articulate such theses at all.
Incidentally, there is another reason why this is the only way things can be: ancient European influences have accustomed us to
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describing humans in terms of their misery – we usually see them as animals that lack something. The tradition of the conditio humana focuses unequivocally on human beings as broken creatures. We could rename the species Homo patiens. This reminds me of the basic text of European miserabilism with the telling title de humanae conditionis miseria, written by Lotario de Segni, later Pope Innocent III, around the year 1200. It is quite a remarkable and illuminating text, a veritable litany of misery based on the decision to weigh up human existence completely on the negative side and to fuel argu- ments about the weariness of life – presumably to eulogize taking refuge with God as the sole alternative to normal existence.
MACHO: Raising the spectre of the misery of human existence is, of course, an essential element of talking about death and mor- tality that was important for the old cultures – before the advent of humanism – because people believed that ‘memento mori’ was a mark of the specific human condition. Notwithstanding all the idealization of perfection and beauty of human beings, often with reference to Greek art, we should never forget the fleeting nature of humans, the transience of their existence. The cruellest discussion on the miserable condition of humans that I know of – aside from the text by Innocent III you have just mentioned – is in the medieval dialogue between Death and the Bohemian ploughman, where man is described as a mass of refuse, a churn of filth, a dish for worms, a stink house, a repulsive washtub, a rancid carcass and a reeking flagon of urine, whose cavities exude ‘disgusting filth’. This dialogue about death allows us to locate humans in a kind of middle position: on the one hand they are distinguished from animals, on the other from God and the angels. Humans stand in the middle between animals and God: we can also glean that from the Porphyrian tree, the scale of being that gave rise to Neoplatonism, a philosophy full of overflows and emanations. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind – even though it argues in terms of uni- versal history – is quite obsessed by the idea that humans are the beings in the middle, not just the ‘deficient beings’ but the ‘beings liberated in the creation’ that can develop downwards (towards the animals) or upwards (towards spiritual beings). The principles of ‘domestication’ are unified in this middle. These principles lit- erally mean the connections between living in the house of being, habituation and pampering. 1 Habituation – along with pampering
1 Sloterdijk is playing with the German nouns das Gewöhnen [habituation] and das Verwöhnen [pampering], both of which have their roots in the verb wohnen [to live in, or to inhabit].
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– is probably an equally interesting process of early human history. Constructing houses, learning to speak, and commanding and obeying, presupposes habituation; without habituation we would be totally incapable of perceiving our pampering – including where it is thwarted by death, hunger and illness. The ‘first liberated being in the creation’ can habituate himself or herself beyond destiny and coercion. Habituation and pampering, those beginnings of living, can, as you suggest, only be conceived adequately as themes of topology. Actually, time is always presented topologically – even as a miserabilist epitome of an experience of vanitas, of the transi- ence of life. Until recently, we never imagined time in any other way except topologically, in concepts of distance or measurable stretches. From the start, time was an epiphenomenon of space, just like memory. Somebody who remembers (or plans) builds spaces, interior palaces we know from the ars memoriae. But to get back to pampering: in your view it precedes inhabiting, or even habituation. When and where was the ‘pampering rocket’ you refer to actually launched?
SLOTERDIJK: The special human variation of pampering arises from the fusion of a favourable situation, in which the early hominoid type of savannah walker emerged, with an old animalist advantage of warmth, already fully developed in hominoids, which is evident in the mother–child relationship among great apes. The formula says: Savannah security effect plus hominoid cosy room. The moment these two factors coincide the special incubator effect occurs, resulting in the emergence of Homo sapiens. There is a natural history of pampering that goes back far beyond the human field. Since the time it was defined by Julius Kollmann, a biologist of the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon of retaining juvenile morphologies has been described as neoteny. The neo-characteristics of children and young adults are projected through neoteny, or juve- nilization, into the morphology of adults. In other words, a general protraction of juvenile forms occurs – a phenomenon that biologists have noted in numerous animal species. As we know, it is heavily topologically conditioned because, as far as I can see, it can be observed exclusively in nest-building, cave-dwelling or other animal species that have particular technical skills for creating niches. We can see immediately that nest-building animals start a process of enormous security transfer for the benefit of their own brood that will show up sooner or later in the biological appearance of their offspring. This transfer is unknown to flight animals living out in the open, which means they cannot afford such extensive juvenilization of their offspring. Nest-builders, however, generate a spontaneous incubation effect for the benefit of their young. I can see it in cats,
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I can see it in dogs, I can see it in countless other mammals, not to mention the famous axolotl. Where the nest security effect occurs, the offspring can be born in a shockingly immature state. The same thing can be observed in marsupials, which have the most interest- ing life form in terms of developmental history because they seem to embody the compromise solution between live birth and laying eggs. This touches on the topological puzzle of neoteny. As soon as the work of the uterus can be transferred from the maternal body to a nest, nature treats itself to an additional pampering luxury: the children are born much less matured than those in more exposed life forms, without nests. This is where it gets interesting philosophi- cally, because to be born prematurely generally means exposing the nervous system to the venture of postnatal maturing. If the wiring of the nerves occurs largely a priori or prenatally, the result is an animal that learns relatively little because it doesn’t need to learn much – a relatively ready animal in a relatively ready environment. Premature babies, however, start with the adventure of not being ready and leave room for a great deal a posteriori. The result is something like a natural history of the a posteriori principle. It could be written as the natural history of openness to experience, of open-mindedness. This is connected with the luxury of pampering, or with the level of unreadiness at which a nervous system becomes fit for the world or open-minded.
But all that is still animal history. It must be narrated in the context of biology – it is not yet human history. The biological extension of the juvenile phase creates animals that play and experiment more, that are essayists by nature and have a prolonged phase of mental maturation. In any case, the relationship between a priori and a posteriori can be described neurologically. This sums up the outline of the first half of my topological argument. In the second half, the anthropological space question is refined using the following idea: as we know, we are descendants of a species of tree-dwelling apes that developed into savannah apes. But how did the tree-dwelling ape arrive in the savannah? And how does a climber become a walker? How did walking upright evolve? How were all these exodus phenomena possible? There are plenty of fairly controversial topics – and, at the same time, something like the thema probandum for anthropologists, because somebody who has nothing to say about walking upright hasn’t really grasped the issue of human beings. But for the moment we are less interested in the vertical apes problem than in characteristics of the place at which apes can become men. Once again we establish the primacy of topology and we also offer an explanation for why, in the beginning, time could actually appear as integrated into space.
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Savannah apes live in a world with a wide horizon – a huge dif- ference to the world of the treetop, which consists of a world of leaf caverns. This cannot be emphasized enough. Before human beings came the apes, and they had a horizon. This situation creates a cognitive pattern that belongs to our a priori equipment as human beings. I am thinking of an inborn schema of alertness that antici- pates something like the transcendental unity of mental perception. In Kantian terms, we humans have a red alert that must be able to keep up with everything we imagine. We note first that the savan- nah ape is comparatively untroubled to begin with, and for most of the time. He sees possible danger coming from afar, so he can relax much more than the tree ape that can’t see the danger coming from so far away. His long-sightedness gives him a safety buffer that affects his whole behaviour. Equanimity is a biological attain- ment from the savannahs. Like some other savannah inhabitants, Homo sapiens is a sleepy creature dependent on alerts. His natural behaviour is to hang around and do nothing most of the time. This automatically brings to mind male lions that spend twenty-three hours of the day dozing. These types of idleness and relaxation are typical of the savannah. The safety buffer provided by the wide view enables this. But then time and the event come into play. Homo sapiens is not only a sleepy creature ready for alert but also a curious creature driven by appetite. Let’s imagine the basic situation of life modified into a wide horizon: what has to happen to raise the level of alertness in a pampered ape? Evidently it is triggered when a stress factor appears on the horizon. Whether aggressor or prey, something has to interrupt the situation – and, in fact, the inter- ruption appears on the horizon. Then the ape raises its head and is immediately ‘right there’ with its eyes. Raising the head, inciden- tally, is a metaphor Heidegger used to describe the way a person stands in a clearing. The new event comes in the form of a break in the line of the horizon. The event that fixes the time appears in the space as a disturbance on the horizon. In my view, this provides a further argument to confirm that the time problem could be largely neutralized in the earliest periods of prehistory. The animal with this observational advantage sees things approaching – as eventful interruptions on the horizon. When the alarm is over, peace returns to the horizon. To sum up the two arguments: adding together these two functions, the nest privilege of the neotenized animal and the horizon privilege of the savannah apes, brings into view what I have just described as the launching pad for the pampering process.
MACHO: Savannah apes learned to deal flexibly with the point on the horizon, the disruption on the horizon, the feared or desired appearance on the horizon. It did not always signal danger – more
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often it meant food. The latest studies show that prehistoric people in the East African savannah lived in blissful harmony with the animals, because they fulfilled their protein needs exclusively with dead animals. They were not ‘killer apes’ but carrion eaters. Yet how could they find dead animals quickly before they were inedible or devoured by beasts of prey? Only through specific ‘signs from heaven’ – namely, the circular plummeting of vultures that appeared on the horizon.
SLOTERDIJK: There is a neurobiological argument that illus- trates the connection you mention quite well. It recalls the familiar station effect: we are sitting in a train and the train beside us departs. We usually have the impression we are the ones who are moving. Maybe this can be seen as a sign of an inborn expectation that makes us think the horizon is fixed, whereas movement can only be movement within a horizon. On the other hand, if the horizon as a whole moves, our nervous system interprets this as if we ourselves are moving. Given our basic biological make-up, it is inconceivable that the horizon is moving. That is why the station illusion occurs so persistently and makes such an impression. Even if you are aware of the effect, it doesn’t change anything in the way you perceive it.
