No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: Its wretched end is part of the same wave of declarations of death. Yet the subject is still around, haunting, very much alive, just like the ghostly ‘author’. Take my own specific case: how can a dead man write thirty books? At which desk could he have done that?
BOPP: Anyway, you coined the phrase ‘thinker on stage’ for Nietzsche.
SLOTERDIJK: That expression contains part of my author theory. I described Nietzsche as a thinker who not only performed like an actor on stage but actually also saw his psyche as a stage on which rival ‘artistic drives’ duelled with each other. He offered his own self to these drives as a theatrum belli and let the conflicting energies fight each other. This is an image I was able to adapt for household use. We shouldn’t envisage the author as a river flowing calmly and untroubled from source to estuary. True, there are states of fluidity, but the clashes are more important for production. The author is actually a moderator of the partial energies at work inside him, and his writing oversees the collisions.
BOPP: Does he describe them like an accident reporter?
SLOTERDIJK: He looks into his inner self and reports which corpses are lying on the street again today.
BOPP: In your book, Rage and Time, whose title alludes to Heidegger’s Being and Time, you casually remarked that Heidegger was not the kind of author who – to quote Nietzsche again – would have been able to deal with such ‘dangerous truths’. Do you mean Heidegger would have sidestepped such clashes or avoided them?
SLOTERDIJK: To avert any possible misunderstanding: Heidegger made an enormous contribution to contemporary phi- losophy. I was a follower of Critical Theory, however, and that means I was only able to concentrate on Heidegger after my return from India, after 1980. He had previously been regarded as a non- person in our circles and was buried under an obscure taboo. That’s why I only discovered later what he had to offer – for example, a very inspiring theory of moods [Stimmungen]. This involves pre- logical shades of Dasein that precede all individual cognitions. Such gains in the scope of philosophical discourse are significant because they help to correct the over-exaggerated rationalism of tradition. They allow philosophy to connect up with a large variety
220 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
of life experiences that were previously inaccessible to philosophical discourse.
BOPP: But aren’t you very critical of Heidegger in Rage and Time?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, I try to show that the founding of histori- cal time – in fact, ‘historicity’ is one of the pathos-imbued words Heidegger used in his youth and middle period – didn’t occur in the way he imagined it. We do not receive either a ‘call of Being’ or a ‘call of care’. Instead, great history arises through the memory of injustice and the process of resentment. When the sediment of unprocessed and unrequited experience of suffering forms in human memories, a history-making mechanism goes into motion, a sort of ‘causality of fate’, as the early observers of tragic events described it. The effect is that the consequences of an evil deed reappear at a later time in another place.
BOPP: The timespan stretches from the suffered and remembered injustice to its retribution.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. We can’t comprehend the original process of the founding of time at all without investigating those feelings of setback and the transactions for reparation. At this point a gap opens up in Heidegger’s studies, and I tried to close it in Rage and Time. In doing so, I couldn’t avoid moving Heidegger closer to Nietzsche again. The latter broached the major moral topic of the epoch in the twentieth century with his theory of resentments. But aside from Max Scheler’s contributions,1 there was hardly any advance in the area of resentment analysis after Nietzsche’s great intervention. It was high time to take a new approach to the phe- nomenon in the light of our experiences with the gigantic conflicts in the twentieth century. If we don’t show how resentment could become the primary historical power in it, the whole epoch remains obscure.
BOPP: That seems to me not just a type of analysis, but also a totally different perspective on history. It means no longer looking at it as development, as an unfolding process. We can’t explain any more how something became but, rather, in retrospect, we can see stages and events happen that become realized to some extent and become, in turn, the seeds for further realizations.
SLOTERDIJK: We should be mindful here of the synergy between involuntary and voluntary memory. The phenomenon of
1 Max Scheler (1874–1928) was a German philosopher, psychologist, soci- ologist and anthropologist. He is known as the founder of philosophical anthropology.
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resentment itself is composed of moments of voluntary and invol- untary memory. Europeans were able to observe this recently in the remarkable process of the break-up of Yugoslavia. At that time Miloševic preached the myth of lordly defeat to the Serbs. In his infamous speech at the Gazemistan memorial on the 600th anniver- sary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, he said that the more the Serbs had lost back then, the more they had won since. That was a sort of admission of failure of all histories fuelled by resentment: ‘We’ – whoever he actually meant by that, but in any case ‘a collective of chosen losers’ –
BOPP: ‘We’ have entered history . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I have speculatively deduced far-reaching con- sequences from those kinds of ‘entries’. I proposed describing the historical collective that is generally called ‘peoples’ or, more recently, ‘nations’, as groups processing resentment that put them- selves under stress by remembrance of collectively experienced traumata. For most people, those traumata are something inherited from far away, something they could certainly not have suffered themselves. As an individual, I can’t remember humiliation inflicted 600 years ago, but somehow I acquire joint ownership of this trauma.
BOPP: Identities that already carry the seed of violence within them to some extent. . . .
SLOTERDIJK: After the Second World War the Germans showed in an exemplary fashion that there is an alternative way out of humiliation. They have worked on their trauma so intensively that they have completely broken out of the repetition compulsion. In the truest sense of the expression, they have become a different nation.
BOPP: You spoke earlier of ‘ownership of a trauma’, and you also work with economic metaphors in Rage and Time. The book features ‘rage banks’ where people can deposit their savings. That makes rage into ‘capital’ that can be invested. And investments are made to increase the capital. But if we talk about ‘banks’ there have to be ‘bankers’ who manage the resentment capital. Who would these ‘historical subjects’ be? Great figures? Lenin or Hitler?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, it is the political parties that use the function of resentment banks. The best way to describe the differ- ences between parties is this: the more they move towards the edge of the spectrum, the more we can justly suspect them of making deposits in the collection of ‘dirty energies’. In this context, what distinguishes the extreme left and the extreme right is that the left takes up the dirty energies to refine them whereas the right expresses them more or less unfiltered. The political pathologist’s findings
222 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
show that the left tends to dream and be hypocritical while the right tends to brawl and stink. That doesn’t say anything about the criminal energies at work on both sides. Historical experi- ence reveals that, in the twentieth century, for every murder in the name of race there were two or three murders in the name of class.
BOPP: Can you explain once again how this bank scheme functions?
SLOTERDIJK: To begin with, not only money can be accu- mulated but also affects such as rage. Moreover, knowledge or art collections have functions analogous to capitalism. Similarly, the Church collects the treasures of salvation. We can always talk of capital when values are accumulated at a collection point to be transferred from the form of treasures to the form of capital. A treasure lies passively on a pile, as in Scrooge McDuck’s storehouse, or in the legendary gold cellars under Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Capital, on the other hand, is always travelling, always on invest- ment tours.
BOPP: Does this imply that knowledge, too, is not inherently ‘value free’?
SLOTERDIJK: As research it is structured in the form of knowl- edge capital. Accumulated knowledge is used as capital to create more knowledge.
BOPP: The crises are the essence of capitalism.
SLOTERDIJK: Valorization crises can also be seen in the non- monetary banking system. Knowledge loses value when what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm shift’ occurs, when new basic assumptions for the organization of realizations are established. In art history the crisis appears as a modernization boost that leads to a new relationship between the existing and the new. I am trying to show that an accumulation process and the related capital forma- tion have also existed in the area of political affects. Above all, the classical internationalist left has positioned itself as the ‘world bank of rage’. It has tried to operate a kind of emancipatory politics on a transnational scale with the outrage assets and rage assets of mil- lions of small owners.
BOPP: With the promise that ordinary people will also have a share in the privileges of the rich.
SLOTERDIJK: Bank transactions are not the only context in which we can talk about yields and dividends. Interest should also accrue when the rage and anger account is in credit. That occurs when appropriate political practice leads customers’ deposits to be converted into enhanced self-esteem. If my outrage credit is deposited in an efficiently managed rage bank, which means a party
Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 223
that works determinedly towards its goals, I am not just abstractly participating in an enterprise to improve the world, I also become part of a project that I am proud of and that improves my affec- tive position. My rage is transformed into enhanced self-esteem. Unfortunately, the left-wing parties have often failed to achieve this. Then the clients withdraw their deposits. They either become apolitical or take their savings to a right-wing bank, which then practises direct revenge politics and chooses the uncensored form of expressing rage. The right-wing bank directors appear relatively uncensored as rowdies, populists, provocateurs and rabble-rousers, drawing in the frustrated voters and rabble sympathizers. At any rate, a person who identifies with the party boss’s rabble-rousing gets gratification very directly. My rage will no longer be idealisti- cally ennobled but at least I will be able to express it openly as part of my life. It’s obvious that such scenarios must end in disappoint- ment. For every slap in the face the populist gives he gets one and a half slaps back – a classic loss-making business. Generally speaking, the problem of political parties seen as rage banks is the mismanage- ment of affects. That can go as far as open investment fraud.
BOPP: Could you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: From the perspective of the philosophy of history, the biggest emotional fraud in twentieth-century history occurred in August 1914. This triggered the implosion of left-wing interna- tionalism, following which the parliamentary left in Germany and elsewhere granted the war credits, falling into step with the policy of waging nationalist warfare. This meant that the left wing’s transna- tional and progressively invested emotional credit was misused for a nationalist-imperialist war. The left-wing system has basically never recovered from that disaster. It also partly explains the pathological radicalization that occurred in Russia after 1917 and the daydream- ing on the extreme flanks of politics.
BOPP: The thymotic impulses seem to have died down to some extent in Western Europe today. We have accepted that the capital- ist system satisfies our needs adequately and we can safely leave it to shape the future. There are still conflicts now and then, but they are ritualized and occur periodically between labour unions and the state. Labour-union bosses have to be credible and convince their clientele that they have fought and haven’t let themselves be cheated.
SLOTERDIJK: But these negotiating rituals are much more important than people generally think because they are about a thy- motic yield. Conflicts between social partners are never just about percentages. Wrangling for recognition and satisfying frustrated expectations is always important as well.
224 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
BOPP: We really have it so good. After all, we’ve got everything. Everything is always available. Consumerism instead of commu- nism. . . . (A woman’s voice over the loudspeaker says, ‘Would you like breakfast? We’re happy to serve you. ’)
SLOTERDIJK: There’s the answer to your question! A voice from above tells you your needs. That’s consumerism personified. For sure you would like breakfast? Yes? Then it’s your damned duty to enjoy it. And if you can’t enjoy it, our job is to show you ways and possibilities to enjoy things anyway. This is the new categorical imperative: do your duty to enjoy!
BOPP: Can this imperative be generalized?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. All it needs is for us to recognize that we are being called on to metabolize. There’s not much to object to in that. People used to see it as a mortal curse that human beings – as metabolic beings – are bound to the material sphere. The spirit, however, knows no hunger and is driven at most by a longing to see the higher things. Today, things are shown in reverse. Now you are supposed to forget everything that could release you from needs. Avoid the temptation of not needing anything at all costs. Don’t get the idea you can cheat your way out of the permanent cycle of consumption. Your body has to do its consumer duty.
BOPP: Only the body?
SLOTERDIJK: No, the senses were also recruited for duty a long time ago. The eye is on image duty day and night. The ear is on music and sound duty and, since the wellness wave started rolling, the skin is permanently on feeling duty as well. The modern angel of prosperity floats above everything. It no longer says, ‘Fear not! ’ as it did to the shepherds way back then, but instead, ‘Enjoy it! ’
BOPP: Is it a monotheistic angel?
[Peter Sloterdijk’s latest book has the title Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen. 2]
SLOTERDIJK: Consumerism is a kind of behaviour with a high capacity for anthropological connectivity. I suspect that all cul- tures that have involved a high degree of superego formation can veer towards consumerism relatively easily. People who are used to thinking in terms of service and performance can extend these principles to consumption as well. First you achieve something, and then you can afford something.
BOPP: But isn’t the capitalist the ascetic and the aristocrat the epicure?
2 English edition: Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms (Cambridge: Polity), 2009.
Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 225
SLOTERDIJK: That was Max Weber’s opinion, but his view was one-sided. At the very least, capitalism was driven just as much by the luxury of the epicurean classes. We still get instructive illus- trations of this today: a psycho-historical phenomenon has spread in Africa and the Arabian oil states – an overabundance of epicu- rean uselessness. Overnight, the pride of Arabian manhood was swamped with unexpected wealth, and this created the oil sheikhs, the newcomers to extreme consumerism who can be compared with the Russian nouveau riche that emerged recently. These people have never had work experience. This shows how easily consumer- ism penetrates into the psyche: people are evidently beings attuned to luxury by nature. Accession to wealth is possible from all sides. Whether Shintoist, Calvinist, Catholic or animist – people react very similarly once they get rich: they finally feel understood and accepted!
BOPP: Is luxury capable of globalization? Could it bring eternal peace?
SLOTERDIJK: That is psychologically and economically impos- sible. Part of the nature of luxury is that it creates strong paradoxes. Satisfaction with life can never be derived from net luxury. It lives chiefly from comparison: most people would gladly do without absolute advantages as long as they are relatively better off than others. Not everybody can take first place. This paradox is insur- mountable, and no kind of egalitarianism can get around it. There will always be a group of people that are more ‘equal’ than all the others.
27
EVEN A GOD CAN’T SAVE US Interview with Julia Encke*
ENCKE: Mr Sloterdijk, why must we change our life?
SLOTERDIJK: The global crisis dictates change. We must change our life decisively because otherwise we are participating in an economic and ecological programme of self-annihilation. In the ancient history of humankind there also were stern authori- ties, gods, gurus and teachers who troubled their followers with enormous demands. Nowadays, we have to deal with an ungodly goddess called ‘crisis’ who demands that we evolve new forms of life. Human groups usually have a long-term project, a will to continued existence. But that project of permanence is completely incompat- ible with the present modus vivendi. Incredible things are happening in this context.
ENCKE: What exactly do you mean?
SLOTERDIJK: For example, the state has reached such a peak of helplessness that it is openly considering whether to give its citi- zens money to go shopping. Unbelievable! We have to be publicly reminded to maintain at all costs the level of extravagance we once achieved.
I can still remember how Edmund Stoiber1 told the people of Munich during an earlier crisis, ‘Go on, give your wife a fur coat
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Julia Encke appeared under the title ‘Uns hilft kein Gott’ [‘No God will Help Us’], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (22 March 2009): 21.
At the time of the interview Julia Encke was a member of the FAZ news- paper’s editorial team in Berlin.
1 The southern German politician Edmund Stoiber was Minister President of the Federal State of Bavaria from 1993 to 2007 and head of the German Christian Democratic Party from 1999 to 2007.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 227
now! ’ The reason was that Rieger Pelze, a leading fur goods store in Munich, had a financial crisis, and Minister President Stoiber, who was a stalwart supporter of the Bavarian system of nepotism and a personal friend of the firm, thought almost like an old comrade from 1968 that ‘the personal is political’. The present procedures for rescuing the extravagant society aren’t any less incredible. Overnight we have been catapulted into a giant seminar on econom- ics and anthropology where people reflect on how global and real expenditure can continue.
ENCKE: Who is supposed to change their life? Do you really mean everybody? Or do you mean a specific ‘elite’?
SLOTERDIJK: My book makes the first ever attempt at a literal interpretation of the generic subtitle of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘A Book for Everyone and No One’. It is ‘for no one’ because the elites to whom the book could be addressed do not exist yet. At the same time, it is ‘for everyone’ because a new selection process has begun which will determine who lets the crisis speak to them. Humankind will divide, and is already dividing as we watch, into those who carry on as always and those who are prepared to make changes.
ENCKE: Let’s take an example: Peer Steinbrück. 2 What should he change?
SLOTERDIJK: The first thing he has to understand is that his mission can’t be to secure jobs on board the Titanic. He should study icebergs a little more carefully. Jobs on board the Titanic only existed as long as the ship was afloat. Incidentally, nobody would gladly step into Steinbrück’s shoes. He is in a position whose occupants are bound to become unhappy. He knows better than anybody else that the right things can’t be financed.
ENCKE: What is your advice to him?
SLOTERDIJK: To reflect that, from now on, everything that lacks a sufficient vision for the future will be seen one day as a contribution to the collision with the ultimate iceberg. He has to persuade himself and his colleagues all over the world to create joint advisory boards that make politics capable of pursuing clear long-term projects again. Politics has to be emancipated from election-period panic.
ENCKE: What can I do personally as a journalist?
SLOTERDIJK: You can react against the pressure to talk about irrelevant things. Journalists are called up to the distraction front
2 The politician Peer Steinbrück was Federal German Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2009 and deputy head of the German Social Democratic Party in the same period.
228 Even a God Can’t Save Us
every day. Austria has just gone through an astonishingly short ‘Fritzl week’ and we can’t thank the Austrian justice system enough for succeeding in closing the trial in three and a half days with a suc- cinct judgement. 3
ENCKE: You mean you’re actually not complaining about Austria!
SLOTERDIJK: That’s unusual for me. But the Austrian authori- ties have spared the rest of the world endless debates, and not least themselves. You can imagine what our press in Germany would have done in tandem with our justice system – we would have been treated to a festival of unnecessary news for months. The story would have been exploited to a much greater extent as legal drama and scandal journalism, with a full demonstration of the parasitic function of the press: to distract from the important issues, which has long since become its major function.
ENCKE: How do you see yourself? As a coach for improving the world, or as a postmodern guru?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, philosophers are persons with a strong monologue. On the one hand, there is somebody inside them who shares the common human confusion about the state of the world today. On the other hand, a part of their personality claims they have learned something and can give advice. The latter figure, who sits with me in the consultant’s seat, may have become a little more imposing at the moment. I have listened in to the world situation and related my present perceptions to the general knowledge about the evolution of high cultures in the past 3,000 years. This produces some urgent messages.
ENCKE: Not everybody wants to hear those urgent messages. In your book you accuse intellectuals of summarily dismissing people who give serious warnings as pompous idiots. You say that hardly anybody wants to face up to the extent of the threat. Do you think these people are cynics or are they simply too naïve?
SLOTERDIJK: In the present case there isn’t a complete alterna- tive between cynical and naïve. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote Critique of Cynical Reason, I tried to squeeze the whole typology of the intellectual field into these two alternatives: either people are naïve, in which case they are too close to the problems, or they are cynical, which means they are too indifferent to the problems.
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the case of Josef Fritzl, a man from Amstetten in Austria who imprisoned one of his daughters for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her. She bore seven children by him. The crime was dis- covered in 2008.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 229
Today we need a third position. I’m talking about people who are neither cynical nor naïve.
ENCKE: You mean people who deconstruct everything to keep the world at bay?
SLOTERDIJK: Deconstructivism has become plausible partly because modernism has produced too many embarrassingly naïve forms of world salvation. The social catastrophes of the twentieth century stemmed from ideologies formulated by certain semi-vision- ary people who solved the mystery of the world with grand prophetic gestures. Whether private property or subversive Judaism was blamed for all evils – the deconstructive attitude was always justified in opposition to seductive, primitive formulas.
ENCKE: But that isn’t enough any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Richard Rorty4 once described his colleagues in the philosophical and humanities departments somewhat bitterly as ‘detached cosmopolitan spectators’. What he meant is: you talk about the crisis as if it were an opera production. At most we stand on the periphery looking at the catastrophes through opera glasses, without understanding that many disasters that occur today not only contain their own inherent harmful aspect, but also have a sig- nifying quality for our future.
ENCKE: What do you mean by a ‘signifying quality’?
SLOTERDIJK: Hans Jonas and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had already raised the issue of ‘warning catastrophes’ back in the 1980s. 5 They meant that humankind receives warnings from the real world that have to be decoded and translated into the behaviour of individuals and institutions. That’s exactly what people who are satisfied with the role of detached cosmopolitan theatregoers can’t do.
ENCKE: Don’t we also use an opera glass for protection? If people are really confronted with that degree of real threat, it can make them incapable of acting, and can drive them to suicide in extreme cases. People are creatures that need protection.
SLOTERDIJK: For 3,000 years the avant-garde of humankind has lived in this situation: that they see something overpowering and the intelligentsia shivers. It seems to me the concept of ‘God’ was one of the strongest protective shields. For an aeon, humans
4 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and comparatist.
5 Hans Jonas (1903–93) was a German-born American philosopher who was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist, philosopher and expert on peace studies.
230 Even a God Can’t Save Us
retreated behind it to defend themselves from the monster. Anyone who saw the outer side of the shield would be frozen to a pillar of salt. Remember the shield of Perseus with the terrifying head of the gorgon as its centrepiece. But the hero is on the inner side of the shield and turns the terror outwards. This image is a very good description of the situation of the intelligentsia when it tries to protect itself in close combat with reality.
ENCKE: Do you mean we must shake off false security and live more dangerously?
SLOTERDIJK: Above all, we should think more consciously about danger. What lies ahead is a kind of gorgon-like enlighten- ment. We must decide to build a global immune system that opens up a common survival perspective. We have to work now on a pro- tective shield for the earth, for humankind and for its technological environment. That will require global ecological management. I call this co-immunism.
ENCKE: As at other points in your book, this is a word- play on communism. Is You Must Change Your Life a left-wing manifesto?
SLOTERDIJK: I am not envisaging a neo-communist project. Communism, as we know, tried to be a religion of conquest, like an atheist Islam, and to pull all industrialized nations into its orbit in an aggressive expansionist movement. What did the communists really want? To seize political power so as to institute extreme edu- cational dictatorships for immature populations. You have been warned against repetition. The movement postulated in my book doesn’t aim at forced conversion. We have to achieve everything voluntarily on the basis of good advice – or ‘assisted willingness’, if you like. That’s why I talk throughout the book about the life of practice and about shaping oneself by self-improvement.
ENCKE: You have a fairly positive image of human beings.
SLOTERDIJK: I start from a strong ontological thesis: intel- ligence exists. This leads to a strong ethical thesis: there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the will to self-preservation. Since Adorno, we have known that this correlation can be ques- tioned – that was the most promising idea of older Critical Theory. It started from the observation that intelligence can go in the wrong direction and confuse self-destruction with self-preservation. That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the twentieth century. What is on the agenda now is an affirmative theory of global co-immunity. It is the foundation of, and orientation for, the many and varied practices of shared survival.
ENCKE: Have you designed a utopia?
SLOTERDIJK: If you called this utopian it would make my hair
Even a God Can’t Save Us 231
stand on end! If you were right, I would belong to the tradition of mad men who wanted to make the world better. On the contrary, I thought I had demonstrated pragmatism, though admittedly with a dash of prophetic agitation.
28
A PLUG FOR HIGHER ENERGIES
Interview with Mateo Kries*6
KRIES: Mr Sloterdijk, the title of your book, Du mußt Dein Leben ändern [You Must Change Your Life] refers to Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Steiner. You preface the book with a quo- tation from Nietzsche that also made a great impact on Steiner, in which Nietzsche advocated the practising existence. Is your interest in Steiner connected with the life-reform movements at the begin- ning of the twentieth century?
SLOTERDIJK: Life reform was the major topic in the period around 1900. It was the alternative to the concept of revolution that had structured people’s consciousness of the possibility of trans- forming the world since 1789. It put the idea of non-political or supra-political transformation on the agenda. Life reformers such as Nietzsche and Steiner held the common view that it was pointless to carry on repeating political phrases and founding a new party in the back room of a pub. They thought it was much more important to rebuild one’s whole life from the smallest elements, as it were. They posed the question: how can we maintain human existence in a vertical tension that still does justice to the human being as a meta- physical animal? How can we create a pull from above, although the ladder on which people climb up can’t be leaned against anything up there any more, because the other side no longer exists? The
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Ein Stecker für höhere Energien’, in Die Welt newspaper (25 October 2011); available at: <http://www. welt. de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article13679318/Ein-Stecker- fuer-die-hoeheren-Energien. html>.
At the time of the interview Mateo Kries was chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
A Plug for Higher Energies 233
twentieth century ended with the recognition that the revolutionar- ies were wrong and the life reformers right. Meanwhile, fear of the gurutocracy, rule by gurus, has receded to some extent and today people are more willing to see Steiner as a quite normal genius rather than a guru.
KRIES: Still, we have to realize that Steiner vanished off the map from his death in 1925 to the end of the twentieth century, and was dismissed as a spiritual crank. Anthroposophy became fossilized, and that led to the whole movement being isolated. Steiner was associated with Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but in the succeeding decades his students only developed his radical aesthetics in minor ways. Wasn’t there some justification for the criticism of Steiner and anthroposophy?
SLOTERDIJK: The few followers of anthroposophy I knew in the 1960s to 1970s made an unpleasant impression. They went around as if they were imitating an angel who was practising how to stride like a human. Moreover, pop culture had long since made its mark on us, and the anthroposophists were still talking about their eurhythmics. In those days anthroposophy followers were out of pace with their surrounding culture, but they are catching up now. We have new grounds for asking what makes the movement relevant to the present day. One possible answer is that on a broad level we were no longer able to agree with the answers given by classical and contemporary philosophy to the question of the character of sub- jectivity. To some extent, Steiner made it possible to access human subjectivity in an upward direction. He found the plug for accessing higher energies that were normally banned from the conversations of middle-class society. That can’t fail to have consequences because it creates intellectual dissonance. Think of Gottfried Benn’s dictum: ‘In Germany philosophers who aren’t linguistically capable of expressing their world view tend to be called seers. ’
KRIES: The concept of the seer is appropriate because Steiner actually demanded that people should try to imagine seeing abstract- philosophical associations in pictures ‘before their eyes’. He made the famous blackboard drawings during his lectures.
SLOTERDIJK: In a sense, those blackboard drawings are the precursors of PowerPoint presentations. When he was speaking Steiner relied on the idea embracing him at the right moment – a theme that can be traced back to the heights of German idealism. Fichte, for example, made it unmistakably clear in his instructions to his students that the lecturer has to be open to the flash of illu- mination that may come while he is speaking. The concept of the medium is central for understanding the Steiner phenomenon. It partly explains the fascination that still emanates from his work and
234 A Plug for Higher Energies
personality today. People are increasingly realizing that a defini- tion of mediality based solely on machines and apparatuses is not enough. We have to return to the concept of the medium established in the nineteenth century, which is intricately interwoven with ghost sightings.
KRIES: How does that relate to Steiner in a modern-day context?
SLOTERDIJK: Personal mediums are people with antennae. Hugo Ball, a co-founder of Dadaism who experienced a spiritual change after 1918, wrote in an important essay at the time that the whole world had become a medium. Steiner had already realized that two decades earlier. His life curve ended at the moment when the process of the masses becoming the medium with the aid of popular broadcasting began. The first radio test broadcasts took place in 1923. Steiner died in 1925. By 1930, probably one in five of all German households owned a radio receiver. A new form of social synthesis via the ear emerged. Steiner had put out his antennae much more sensitively than everybody else who had been engaging in what has been called ‘discourse’ since Michel Foucault founded discourse theory. ‘Discourse’ literally means running to and fro, but not receiving live at the moment.
KRIES: Looking at Steiner in those major historical contexts, his death also coincided with the end of the earlier phase of modernism, the phase that was charged with expressionism. This was followed by the triumph of rationalism from the second half of the twenti- eth century on, and in the post-war period there was a pervasive longing for a middle-class mainstream in which there was no place for Steiner anyway. Artists like Sigmar Polke, who said, ‘Higher beings commanded: paint the top right-hand corner black! ’ were loners. It is only today that the social constellations seem to offer the conditions again for Polke’s oeuvre, with all its ramifications, to be located within the intellectual history of the modern age, and not as the work of a weird outsider. 1 Why do you think it took so long?
SLOTERDIJK: It may be due to another factor that co-determined the cycles of readability of Steiner’s work. I’m thinking of a theme that Helmut Lethen2 had already put on the agenda of the humani- ties twenty-five years ago: the ‘Birth of the Cool’ in the 1920s from the perspective of the history of ideas. In the 1920s, there was a cold snap in the intellectual sphere with quite a different impact from
1 Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer known for his work in postmodernist realism.
2 Helmut Lethen is a Germanist and cultural scholar. He is director of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
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that which Paul Valéry meant, for example, when he remarked with rather paternalistic Cartesian overtones that good intellect is ‘dry’. From the 1920s on, the motto was ‘Good intellect is cold’. If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a do- gooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave.
KRIES: Has that changed today?
SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.
KRIES: Your view may be confirmed if we look at particular tendencies in fashion today. In periods of almost overwhelming progress, the things that are really fashionable are those that look rather uncool and contradict the accelerated tempo – at the moment, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and knitted ties. But there are also other parallels to the present. Think of the many objects and build- ings with a polygonal and crystalline form, like certain designs by Steiner’s circle. At first these designs even seem to draw aesthetic inspiration from the molecular world, yet their heaviness and occa- sional clumsiness are reminiscent of the yearning for stability and solidity in an increasingly fast-moving age. Paul Virilio interpreted Steiner’s Goetheanum in the sense of his own bunker thesis as a space for protection against the temptations and risks of acceler- ated modernism. As decelerated architecture, so to speak. Do you agree?
SLOTERDIJK: In the first place I understand houses as immune systems in spatial form. On this definition we can ask what happens if the form really follows the function. What is the way to build when the immunitary imperative is at the beginning of a spatial creation? A house would then be envisaged beginning with its most intimate rooms and not with the splendid entrance hall. Good architects conceive the house starting from the bedrooms, whereas the modernists, who have brought the cold trend of the modern age into the home, have come up with weird proposals such as folding the bed up against the wall in the daytime.
KRIES: Steiner, on the other hand, designed a bed for his Haus
236 A Plug for Higher Energies
Duldeck that looks like a gigantic ocean steamer. It almost seems to swallow you with its curves and bumps . . .