By now, images are omnipresent but their
rebellious
presence doesn’t automatically mean dictatorship.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
When that is violated, human lives go round; large numbers of mad and degenerate people start appearing and the ‘society’ collapses from within.
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The second most fragile thing is, of course, the great totality itself, which is constructed like foam. That is what I try to show in Spheres III. If we want an adequate description of the system of cohabita- tion, we shouldn’t continue talking about a ‘steel-hard shell’, as Max Weber did, but about fragile constructs. The images of hard- ness are outdated; we finally have to change metaphors. Medieval cities added an outer wall that was removed at the beginning of the modern era because it was dysfunctional. The big comfortable hothouse in which we people in the West live today no longer has city walls. It is incredibly open, with soft borders, which is why it constantly has to be prepared for harm without losing its essential serenity, which is its working atmosphere. Now, however, a factor that we hardly noticed before comes into play. The great vulner- ability of modern foam goes together with an astonishing elasticity, which ensures that destruction, losses, fallen buildings and collapsed passages are replaced within a very short time. The real lesson of September 11, 2001, is that shortly after the disaster we were told that something new would be built quickly on the same spot. That is the crucial information we receive from 9/11.
The hysterical military reaction that was called the ‘war on terror’ was politically opportunist and systemically confusing. The real story lies in the process as a whole: if a building like that collapses, we immediately build a better one. If Daniel Libeskind has his way, the new one will be even taller than its predecessor. In other words, we shouldn’t underestimate the elasticity of the system! Fragility, and the impossibility of perfect protection, are consistent features of modern comfort foams. But because ‘society’ is actually not monolithic, because social aggregates are formations constructed from the bottom upwards out of single cells and foam bubbles, they have enormous elasticity. The false semantics of combating terror suggest lofty images of the entire system collapsing. Nothing could be further from the truth. When two big foam bubbles burst, the whole system may continue vibrating for a while, but a rupture like that has astonishingly little effect on the remaining cells. Elasticity is the primary feature of the foamy system. If we want to talk about the hothouse system of affluence, we must talk about two things: first, fragility, and, second, elasticity. It remains to investigate whether catastrophism and the tendency to inflate the new terrorism with fantastic over-interpretations merely represent the flip side of the common tendency towards fictional narratives about shortages.
18
IMAGE AND PERSPECTIVE An Experiment in Atmospheric Seeing
Interview with Tim Otto Roth*5
ROTH: Mr Sloterdijk, I would like to talk to you about your experience in dealing with images. I would also like to stray a little to look at the subject of imachination – a neologism I use to describe the alliance between imago and machina. Let’s speculate about possible spherological implications of the interplay of human imagination and the machine. What role do images play in your professional environment?
SLOTERDIJK: We can divide philosophers into the kind that are involved in expelling images from thought, and those who believe that thought as such is dependent on images, metaphors and figures. Obviously, I see myself as part of the latter group, although so far it has only occupied a minority position and has been partly ignored in the academic establishment. It is easy to forget that the foundation of the general concept of the image, whether as icon or as eidos, belongs to the field of early philosophy. Philosophers can claim to have been the original image theoreticians in the sense of having discovered the images as images in the first place, and taking them seriously. To understand this, we have to remember a rare fact: before philosophy emerged, the Greeks, and everybody else, had a way of seeing that was dominated by the absolutism of the natural perspective. To put it very broadly, the eye looks outwards into the situation and finds a holistically composed continuum of
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Tim Otto Roth appeared under the title ‘Bild und Anblick: Versuch über atmosphärisches Sehen’ (15 February 2005). Available at: <http://www. imachination. net/next100/reac tive/sloterdijk/index. htm>.
Tim Otto Roth lives and works in Oppenau and Cologne.
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visual presences. We don’t perceive the sums of these presences as images that can be isolated, but as aspects of the ‘condition’ or the ‘surroundings’ as a whole, of what we traditionally call ‘nature’ or, more recently, ‘environment’.
Philosophy is now coming to grips with analysis of this total environment, always in relation to the first sciences, geometry, arith- metic and semantics. Philosophers can really claim to have been the first to develop something like a tracker that can project sections into the holistically structured continuum of visible conditions. If you like, philosophers have invented eidetic cutting machines with which we can cut shapes out of the rolled-out dough of the present and give definitive explanations: this is the shape of a horse; this is the shape of a person; this is the shape of a star; this is the shape of a righteous man. The original process of seeing images is brought round to itself in philosophy. ‘Image’ in this context doesn’t yet mean a segment of the world in a frame, but the outline of a thing that, by virtue of its contours, gives itself its own frame in a way. It is not just by chance that the ‘ideas’ Plato discovered are closely related on a linguistic level to the Greek word for the concrete, that is, the outlines of beings, alias eidoi, defined in terms of species. This is why we talk about ‘ideas’, or eidetic constants. The word eidos means the stabilized expectation of seeing in relation to a thing. The eidetic original image and contour image corresponds to the cut-out shape with which we cut recognizable forms out of reality. In other words, in the history of things that are visible generally, we can iden- tify Plato as the founding father of the image principle.
Behind Plato’s discovery, incidentally, is an experience that put the Greeks ahead of other peoples of their time – the experience of the written alphabet, a graphic image that conveys information about a phonetic reality. A person who can read writing trains the ability to select similarities from the mass of dissimilarities. If we write down the name of a thing, obviously the name doesn’t resem- ble the thing at all. But the name of the thing raises the idea of the thing that resembles the thing. Writing turns out to be a tool for vis- ualizing ideas by phonetic representation. In this sense, philosophy made the practice of writing possible in the first place. That led to the most momentous innovation of European intellectual history: Greek cursive writing that included the vowels allowed people to understand texts almost without reference to their context. This, in turn, created a revolutionary figure – a reader who could read a book on his own. He was followed by the researcher, the historian and the autodidact. A mental process of image-making evolved through the culture of reading, and connected up over the cen- turies with visual and real image-making – particularly in artistic
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professions. In this respect, philosophers, writers and illustrators belong together.
ROTH: In your Spheres trilogy you repeatedly refer to an image that was already shaped in antiquity: the sphere. In all three volumes of the work, Bubbles, Globes and Foam, you describe people as atmospherically sensitive political animals whose being- in-the-world hinges on the effort to live in something well-rounded. Your trilogy contains a remarkable number of illustrations for a philosophical project. Some of the illustrations you use are mimetic or illustrative. But most of the images don’t directly relate to pas- sages in the text. What function do pictures have in your trilogy?
SLOTERDIJK: The images in Spheres aren’t generally used as illustrations but as autonomous visual presences. Of course, there are instances when they only act as evidence or examples, especially in the second volume. When I talk of globes or macrospheres in that book it makes sense to show those kinds of objects. The resonance between image and text is very close and figurative there, and in such cases the tension between the two levels tends towards zero. Usually, however, the images I have chosen are not simple optical additions to the written text. Where they work as intended, their nature is largely evocative. What these images evoke is not duplica- tion of the text’s content, but idiosyncratic extensions of the text into the realm of imagination. The image sequences in my books express that my text as a whole is not written on the traditional white pages of the old European book – even if the Spheres book may look like any other book. That would be a wrong conclu- sion. I may seem to be a conventional author satisfied with the monologic, the one-track logic of philosophical discourse. Such monologues are written black on white. Yet the white of the book page in Spheres is actually a reference to the grey of the monitor. My claim is that the monitor is radically different from the good old white page of a book, particularly because of its enlarged functional capacity, which never remains at the point of what is put into it. Somehow the printed page always cites the inscriptions chiselled in stone on ancient monuments. Roman Antiqua, the prototype for European letterpress culture, is an elegantly constructed monu- mental script. This made it especially appropriate for conveying TRUTH. Everything changes the moment we switch into the realm of digital monitors. Today’s average computer offers such a com- prehensive font program that writers will not be able to use all of it in their whole life. This makes authors into graphic designers who have to create their own scriptural image. The script itself becomes a fashion medium and a matter for the user to define. We no longer use the old, elegant European monumental script to express truth.
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The given forms of the new technology condemn us to a new form of freedom. Authorial freedom today means doing our own graphic design. The relationship between text and footnote, text and quo- tation, and text and image also changes in the same realm of the monitor. The way I insert images into the text expresses that I am already working in the electronic white cube that faces me as a flat screen. For this reason, the composition of Spheres can rather be compared to an installation. The images are placed in the book like exhibits in an installation. Because they are usually rather crazy in relation to the text, they induce a slightly trance-like effect. They address the reader’s brain on a different wavelength than the text.
ROTH: In relation to the monitor, on the visual level the second and third images in your first volume, Bubbles, struck me immedi- ately. In terms of media, those photographs of the Sun’s surface and of a galaxy from the SOHO and Hubble satellites create a contrast to the other illustrations. Do you see a difference between these digital photographs and other, more classical pictorial examples such as drawings, paintings, photographs or pictures of archaeo- logical objects?
SLOTERDIJK: A very great difference, actually, although the eye can’t recognize it at first. But the hermeneutic apparatus attached to the eye registers the difference easily. I wanted to suggest just now that the images as images only constitute a subset in the history and amount of what is visible. Taken by itself, the visible – the realm of views – is an immense reservoir structured as a surprise space for acts of seeing. Whatever else I do as a visual being, I navigate in this space. Let’s assume I am a prehistoric man looking at the horizon: the leopard wasn’t there a minute ago, and now it’s standing in front of me. Its presence changes the meaning of my situation. By nature I am incapable of ignoring the leopard’s presence. To me, its presence means the coming-to-visibility of a formerly invisible being. The point is that in this case the new visibility is something that appears of its own accord and forces me to react. The sight of the leopard that is present signifies danger. By contrast, if I only see its image it would be an all-clear signal – it would even suggest to me I were capable of manipulating the leopard. The modern age’s relations of seeing are structured totally differently from a world in which leopards appear at the camp. In the first place they depend on a major event called ‘research’. It was, above all, Heidegger in his later work who made it clear what that meant. Research is a measure for organized clearing away of hidden things, which is the same as saying that things that were not yet within the range of visibility are brought into visibility, indeed, more or less violently. Artists and natural scientists are allies in the major offensive against
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concealment. We could say we live in a kind of mine where the extraction of new visibilities is done. In recent decades the ordinary collieries in Germany were closed due to unprofitability but the mines that exploit the lethe, the ‘shelter of being’,1 concealment, are working to full capacity more than ever. Their production exceeds anything known beforehand. Think of the new pictures of the earth from space taken with cameras on board satellites: they offer one of the most popular and most spectacular contributions to the attack of research on the realm of hidden things.
Paradoxically, before the modern age, the earth as a whole was the epitome of a shrouded object – it was the underlying factor no natural view could comprehend. Today it seems have the least secrets of anything. If I understand correctly what you mean by the hybrid word ‘imachination’, the term says that mechanical optics revolutionizes our relationships of seeing, and indicates how it does this. As soon as we discarded the term ‘revolution’, because it is the wrong description for a process that should have been understood much more technically and precisely, we were confronted with an alternative expression for the basic events of our epoch, namely, unfolding. Taking this metaphor literally is enough to get to the heart of the matter. Something that was concealed up until now, that was self-enclosed, enfolded and not illuminated, is dismantled and manipulated to form an enlarged surface – the folded object is unfolded, bringing the former interior to the surface until the light falls on it. This formal representation of the general procedure of rendering visible touches on the modus operandi of enlighten- ment in general. Enlighteners negate the conventional boundaries between light surfaces and dark interiors and bring formerly hidden things to light. That’s why I say we are not living so much in a revolution as in a process of folding outward, an ‘outfolding’. I even made the suggestion in my Spheres book to drop the term ‘revolution’ and replace it with ‘explication’. Making a revolution is more an episodic political gesture that is important in specific situa- tions, for example, when it is necessary to clear repressive secretive persons out of the way – monarchs and other manipulators of the Arcanum. They are regarded, with some justification, as figures that block the way to the basic work of the modern age, which consists, as we have said, in continuing to explain things further.
1 A reference to Heidegger: ‘Der Tod birgt als der Schrein des Nichts das Gebirg des Seins’ [‘As the shrine of the Nothing death is the shelter of Being’], in Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann), 2005, p. 18.
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ROTH: I have a suspicion in relation to this outfolding. You describe the machinists’ statement about the human body as encap- sulated in La Mettrie’s dictum, ‘Voilà une machine bien éclairée’,2 in two ways, the first time as a blow for liberation and the second time as a loss of spheres. Meanwhile, haven’t we had to realize that the body is still a very mysterious machine, not least because of the com- plexity that genomics has revealed on the very lowest cellular level?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the irony of research: by discovering complexity it generates another mystery. Maybe there is a law that says the mass of enigmas stays constant.
ROTH: Wouldn’t you say this enigmatic characteristic gives the human self-image a kind of spherical quality?
SLOTERDIJK: We could look at it like that. As we have noted, the euphoric movement of revelation ranging from the anatomists of the sixteenth century to the physicists and mechanics of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries followed the goal of making visible everything that was previously unseen – up to the sonic vibrations that were visually depicted in the nineteenth century by means of cumbersome phonographs on carbon paper made with the aid of a swan’s quill. Then, on the threshold of the twentieth century, came X-rays, a fantastic tool for satisfying the desire for transparency. Recently the trails of atoms were visualized in the cloud chamber – and this kind of research is still continuing. All these contributions to making visible things that were formerly invisible begin, in sub- stance, with the early anatomists’ intervention into the interior of the human body, and with the European captains and geographers sailing out into the oceans. We have to understand that the internal and external cartography express the same cognitive attitude. They can both be used to extend the field of view and operations.
Anatomical and geographical maps also have an important common characteristic: they make the attractive qualities of the body, its aura, disappear – not the cultural and metaphorical qualities that Walter Benjamin spoke of, but the energetic and real aura, the delicate casing in which bodies swim. Remember that ‘atmosphere’ in Greek simply means ‘vapour ball’, and all living bodies live in specific vapour balls that can’t be easily represented. To emphasize it, Dasein means having an atmosphere. Our whole image policy until now has been based on stripping the body of
2 Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51) was a French philosopher and physician best known for his work L’homme machine (The Machine Man), 1747. Sloterdijk is referring to his famous dictum, ‘Here is a well- enlightened machine! ’
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its atmosphere. Removing the atmosphere makes it possible in the first place to unfold the body and expose levels of visibility that never existed in that form, and could never exist. The cost of pushing through the surface is that we have to imagine the delicate shell is gone. We can see this particularly clearly from conventional maps. For centuries, they have produced a picture of the world without a climate because they could always depict only a terrain without any atmosphere. The geographer’s eye looks down on the site from above, as if there were no air and no clouds overhead. True, we can use graphical symbols to denote special fauna, flora and ground formations, and political colours to signify that Polish is spoken in the green and Czech in the yellow country, but that doesn’t change anything about the primary finding: the geographi- cal atmosphere is always deprived of atmosphere. The atmosphere was always the big loser in all traditional pictorial processes, start- ing with the maps colonialists made in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ending with the present-day mag- netic resonance system. What these processes visibly present to us is a body segment without the auratic shell. Meanwhile, everything that can’t be treated with this type of technique gets lost. Still, we shouldn’t claim that auratic or atmospheric quantities had no advocates in theory at all. I would like to remind you that in his construction of the cosmos, Plato took care – you can read about this in Timaios – to give the world body a soul, the world soul, in fact, that not only pervades it from all sides but also surrounds it like a shell. We could see this as an admission of the atmospheric imperative, as if Plato had wanted to express that even the largest body, the cosmos, cannot do without its shell. The situational rela- tionships between body and soul have to be precisely established. The body should be in the soul, not the soul in the body – and the Platonic world body fulfils this condition. If it were not the case, we would land up directly in a metaphysics of death, as the soul would then regard itself as the body’s prisoner and would have to imagine post-mortal liberation. This position is unfortunately fairly widespread in the history of ideas – as a result of false read- ings of Platonic motifs. But in Plato’s work itself the world soul pervades the whole cosmos in such a way that it also shines over and beyond the edge, like an aura or a corona. The body swims in its atmospheric surplus. We should take note of that, because we are now going to discuss the drama in progress in today’s pictorial worlds. There are many indications that the reduction in the atmospheric sphere is being increasingly reversed. Due to a wide variety of motives, the shells that were formerly made to vanish are reappearing from extremely diverse technological and
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psychological sources. What was once an expendable surplus in traditional cartography is resurfacing as an issue of personal rights and becoming respected as an entity to be explicitly represented. I think this is a very important, joyful moment in the history of visibility: what was previously invisible, the atmospheric sphere, has come so far today that we make it the subject of very explicit visualization and theatrical presentation.
It is meteorology, a field whose significance is not easy to imagine, that furnishes the paradigm for this. Around 200 years ago, in Goethe’s time, people first began the great discussion about air, the discussion that has kept humankind in suspense ever since. Goethe himself, incidentally, was very interested in the morphology of clouds. For some decades now, thanks to satellite optics, we have had a completely new form of illustrated weather news on televi- sion. Indeed, this media genre merits a discussion of its own at some point. The daily report on the climatic situation represents one of the most extensive forms of theatrical presentation of the realm of the invisible ever seen in human history. It is significant that weather forecasts have the best audience figures almost everywhere that television is watched. Despite their guaranteed banality, they are the only successful programmes right across the board. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from this. Contemporary culture has developed to the extent that people recognize current climatic conditions as a political issue. Anybody talking about the weather is talking about the general issues of the day. Everybody knows, nostra res agitur. If there is a report on the Chancellor’s speech, or a train crash, the conversation at the table carries on as normal. When the weather report begins, silence reigns and people watch and listen – here is the real issue. Looking up at the sky ourselves is not enough any more. We want official confirmation before we believe what we see with our own eyes. We want to see from above how the cloud formation is bearing down on us. The new development is that deep down we have become strategists for judging the macro weather situation. A demand for a new outlook has grown up. I consider it momentous, and interpret it as a symptom of an all-embracing twilight of the atmospheres. It all points to the fact that the age of reductionism is dying out. Iconic primitivism is putting an end to itself.
By now, images are omnipresent but their rebellious presence doesn’t automatically mean dictatorship. Images today are much less dominant than they used to be, for two main reasons: first, there is a broad division of powers in the image space that prevents indi- vidual icons from taking power; and, second, the law of complexity increasingly applies to images as well as other things. Conventional over-simplifications have reached a dead end.
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ROTH: However, I see the twilight of the spheres more in the area of image production. I think imachination is covertly about a change in pictorial policy. Given the complex image production process, nobody today can still claim that they alone have an overview of this technical production process and can see the consequences in this highly specialized process. This is the question: isn’t it much more a matter of image production having become a communica- tive act, with a chain of image-processing from the mathematician up to post-production workers working together on images – in other words, communication as the technical Communion song in the machine?
SLOTERDIJK: That is certainly the case. But I think we should no longer ask the question about the collective fabrication of images as we did in 1960 or 1970, when suspicion as a form of thought had become all the rage once again. I admit I am increasingly irritated by the neo-Marxist attitude of methodical paranoia that was dominant back then, and which slides so easily into existential paranoia. The conventional logic of distrust, that heavy legacy of the failed French Revolution, is out of date today, particularly because the special- ized process you just highlighted has its own laws that even an evil lord couldn’t control. The Romans had a proverb: Caesar non super grammaticos – the emperor may command everything, but not the rules of grammar. This is less clear in relation to the rules of produc- tion of images, but the same tendency applies. Of course, in terms of media policy, there are notable, sometimes dangerous clusters of power. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that even a media mogul can’t change the syntax and grammar of imagery at will. The visual world as a whole is still a polycentric field that can’t be controlled from a single centre. The figure of the malignant lord is more of an illusion than a verifiable experience.
ROTH: My question was actually in a different direction. Vilém Flusser3 claimed that it is not the politicians who govern today, but the computer scientists who write the programs. I’m not happy with this assertion because it presupposes that the people who program have an overview of the whole process. I tend to think that the self-image of the image producer has changed. When Peter Galison4 quotes a physicist who specializes in elementary particles as saying, ‘The experimenter is not a single person, but a composite,’
3 Vilém Flusser (1920–91) was a Czech-born philosopher, writer and jour- nalist who later specialized in media studies.
4 Peter Galison is a historian of the history of science and a professor at Harvard University.
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I think this corresponds in a sense to your concept of atmospheric realities.
SLOTERDIJK: That may well be. But the fact that today’s image-makers are teams mastering sophisticated techniques is one reason that an exaggerated theory of suspicion can’t take us any further. Paranoia sees only a small segment of the world. Of course we know that atmospheres can be poisoned, and we also know that the lie holds sway sometimes. Nonetheless, teamwork, high-tech and complex actor networks are increasingly limiting the parameters of fraud and the corresponding suspicion. Rather, we are doomed more and more to trust under complex conditions, which means that whatever we do ourselves must presuppose that other parts of the system are functioning. In a universe of justified mistrust, we would be compelled to react to Galison’s thesis with panic. It would mean everyone is busy faking and lying. But I think mistrust can only be partially justified, and in most things it is better to work with trust. When I hear the experimenters themselves are now only elements in a complex situation that is watching itself, I feel I can relax. It means that things are operating generally in the right way, within the scope of what is normal and possible. If that weren’t the case we would be in a state of constant fear. We would have to be suspicious about everything, and rattle the bars of the matrix, shouting ‘I want to get out! ’, like the imprisoned souls in the world dungeon in the Gnostic legend. In modern terms, it would mean Luddism and the curse on the sciences. But as soon as the reality of the atmospheric factor becomes explicit we have an instrument for moderating the transi- tion from suspicion to trust. This can involve a Leninist remnant: ‘Trust is good; control is better’ – and why not? Trust is the result of secure expectations, and control is one securing mode among others. But it doesn’t have the last word. Lenin is only one voice in the con- flict between the basic moods of suspicion and trust.
ROTH: Aren’t you talking about a blind Gehlen-type trust that takes the form of simply abandoning trust? I meant a completely different kind of consciousness that doesn’t actually fulfil this func- tion of relief in Gehlen’s sense. 5
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t underestimate Gehlen’s great eco- nomic discovery, which he called ‘relief’. Without it we wouldn’t be able to cope with the simplest situation. If you don’t want to go mad from obsessive total control you always have to start from an atmosphere of original trust. Nobody can spend a long time asking
5 Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) was a German philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist and a leading proponent of philosophical anthropology.
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whether the air in a room is breathable or not. We simply have to start from the assumption that it is breathable and see how far we get. This basic diagnosis, that we are condemned to trust, can be confirmed in many different ways. We can see a persistent connec- tion with the emergence of the atmospheric sphere. Oddly enough, we only become aware of the atmosphere through its destruction. It is the environment of original trust, but we usually only realize that when it is destroyed by deliberate attacks. In that case, ideas about protecting the atmosphere have to become concrete. When we have grasped how vulnerable the subtle, atmospheric premises of life are, we will be in a position to achieve the right configuration of trust and caution. Remembrance of the worst things benefits the most fragile. We know what happened in Auschwitz, we know what happened at Hiroshima – those were mass killings perpetrated by forcibly placing people in unlivable environments. Atmospherocide is the typical modern form of a war of extermination. Today, pre- cisely because of everything that has happened, we have to combine trust with alarm systems. In other words, humans are dependent more than ever on cohabitation with machines.
ROTH: But this cohabitation is not about an individual person, and not about the classical ‘I and the world’ relation. That would be too easy. We are dealing with many subjects that are amalgamated via machines into a great complex.
SLOTERDIJK: It would be better to call those subjects ‘agents’. Of course, right now we don’t want to talk about their ontological characteristics or their epistemological privileges. As Schopenhauer said, ‘That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. ’ That’s far too pathetic as a construct in the context of our practical concerns. We’re thinking more in terms of agents who are competent with regard to their actions and statements. From such a perspective the world seems to be populated by the kind of active figures that can’t do anything but react to each other with statements and actions. This immediately begs the question: which role do the images produced by the agents play in the attempt to coordinate their operations?
ROTH: The status of imagery has changed in the huge scientific image complexes. It is no longer about the conventional fixed visual concept, but about the image as a medium of communication. This performative entity is perpetually moving. Because its way of being is still in data form, the entity tends towards intangibility. Boundaries between media, such as those between text and image, dissolve. The machine is constituted from this process of individual subjects and becomes an amalgam.
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SLOTERDIJK: I think Deleuze6 had a similar idea when he introduced the new ontological figure of ‘assemblage’. Such agence- ments are initially quite indifferent to the human–object difference. They form dynamic units beyond humans, machines and the envi- ronment. Bruno Latour’s7 sociology of epistemological fields also assumes precisely such larger units. The researcher is no longer privileged in relation to the environment, the laboratory in which he is presently sitting, the computer he is writing with or the apparatus he serves. He appears as an agent among agents. In agent ensem- bles of this kind, it turns out that the human–object opposition does not continue any further. But what certainly does continue further is any contribution that helps us to understand the com- municative fluid better – and this brings us back to the dimension of atmospherology, the study of atmospheres. There is fairly strong resonance between the atmospheres theory and the theory of agent ensembles. The first seems closer to humans; the second rather remote from humans. Both together give a more realistic picture of the hyper-complex situation.
ROTH: One final question: what is your favourite picture at home?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think I have a favourite picture at home. But I do have a favourite view. You see, I can’t get away from the difference between image and view. I used to appreciate the aesthetics of pure art. Now I’m becoming something of a nature aesthete and have come to the conclusion that I often prefer views to pictures. That’s not very unusual: Bazon Brock8 once remarked that he would rather see a bosom than a black square, and I admit I generally feel the same way. I read Brock’s statement as a plea for the view. For example, what I love most of all is the view of my library, especially in the evening when I come home late. Usually I leave the light on to get the feeling I’m being waited for. I like the sense of being surrounded by good spirits, many thousands of silent advisers who offer me their services and leave me in peace otherwise.
6 Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was an influential twentieth-century French philosopher who worked in the field of pure philosophy and history of philosophy and in many other disciplines, including anthropology, geology and psychoanalysis.
7 Bruno Latour (b. 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and soci- ologist of science, and one of the main developers of actor-network theory. 8 Bazon Brock is a German artist, art critic and theorist, specializing in multimedia studies. He is a professor emeritus at universities in Hamburg, Vienna and Wuppertal.
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
19
ON PROGRESS The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
Interview with M. Walid Nakschbandi*9
NAKSCHBANDI: Mr Sloterdijk, the proverb says: ‘Progress sits in the saddle and rides humankind. ’ Has progress got human beings under control now?
SLOTERDIJK: People who are crazy about horses may like that proverb, but we should beware of skewed images. Progress is about moving forward, not about control. Still, it’s good to start in an offbeat way. It is true that the disastrous concept of progress has become rather like a modern form of holiness. We find references to progressive things all over the place, including the decorations on banknotes and the logos of major companies. It’s almost as if the curious word ‘progress’ represented a universal concept of movement, and without it the world’s modernists would lose their sense of direction. Not many expressions of that type exist. The only concept that would be equally powerful in terms of generality and importance is, perhaps, circulation, the cycle. The traditional awe of cyclical processes – beginning with the self-reflection of God and going right up to recycling of ecological waste – relates to the metaphysical thesis that the good and the cyclic are ultimately the same thing.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and M. Walid Nakschbandi appeared under the title ‘Das heilige Feuer der Unzufriedenheit: Peter Sloterdijk über den Fortschritt’, in Utz Claassen and Jürgen Hogrefe (eds), Das neue Denken – Das Neue denken (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag), 2005, pp. 69–77.
M. Walid Nakschbandi is a journalist, television producer and manager of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
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NAKSCHBANDI: So it was a nicely rounded issue to begin with. But then something got in the way?
SLOTERDIJK: You could say that. From the nineteenth century on, the bourgeois world began trying to find the good in the line. That is a remarkable process because the line didn’t have a high reputation in traditional geometry. In the past, people had always seen linear processes as final movements, movements that could wear down and basically lead nowhere except to decay. Circular processes, however, lead back to themselves, and that qualifies them for the good infinity. The greatest break made by the modern era is that human beings conceived an absolute movement of a new type that constantly moved upwards from a less valuable to a more valuable state. That means something like upgrading of being as a whole. It is a rather heretical idea because if we assume God created the world, such a process is pure sacrilege. After all, God can’t have created anything except the best.
But why is it that we don’t all feel we are under the curse of heresy? The answer is that since around the sixteenth century our society has been experiencing a mental shift that contemporary people still can’t evaluate completely: the shift from a metaphysics of the complete world to a metaphysics of the incomplete world. This means we have shifted from the concept of creation, that is, of the finished work, to the concept of gradual development – from completed being to relative becoming. And that made us capable of participating in movements that go from the less good to the better without being suspected of blasphemy.
NAKSCHBANDI: How should we imagine that transformation?
SLOTERDIJK: Moving directly from God to the world, we seem to go from the very best to second best. This is how Plato classically articulated it in Timaios, his dialogue on natural philosophy. He said that because God is good, perfectly good in fact, anything he produced in his capacity as the world artisan or demiurge must be as excellent as possible within the limits of reality. That is, the work of a perfect author will be slightly less perfect than the author himself. But if the author has to be one degree better than his statement, the work of the best author remains the best possible. This means that the perfection of God implies that of the world, with the said limitation.
In other words, the deeper the insight of a philosopher, the more optimistic his manner of expression was. Optimism is the last word of classical philosophy because a long time ago thinking meant nothing but the celebration of being. The most appropriate form of being-celebration is superlative speech: we must only say the best about God and the world. This is the exact point at which we feel the
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break between antiquity and modernity most powerfully, because nobody today would be willing to celebrate everything in existence as the best, the highest, the cleverest, the most perfect, etc. Those superlatives are only possible in satire now. The modern world sub- stitutes the rhetoric of superlatives with a comparatist one. Today, we always want to compare conditions so that the earlier come out worse and the later come out better. This puts us in contradic- tion to all the established theories in antiquity: when the ancients talked about changing conditions they nearly always told stories of decay. According to them, once, in the Golden Age, everything was perfect, and then the first deficits appeared. Finally, everything was rather bad and, in the end, quite devastating. The third deteriora- tion brings us to the narrator’s present day, the Iron Age in which humans are found. A narrative that follows a downward line like that could serve as a popular explanation for why people feel miser- able: they are in bad shape because they are at the murky end of a decline from the perfect to the corrupt.
In the ancient world, however, there was also secret knowl- edge that taught its adepts to see the general unhappiness as only apparent. The real sages of the past thought they had discovered a secret reason to rejoice that released an inner reserve of happiness. According to them, a person who was unhappy with the world was only deceived by the semblance of unhappiness. This deep irony defines the relationship between the sage and the masses in the ancient world. The sage pretended to have discovered a deep-seated reason for happiness that normal unhappy people were not capable of perceiving. The sage alone saw the great cycles of order from an esoteric perspective, whereas profane people remained trapped without vision in their preoccupation with unhappiness.
That is exactly what has changed in the modern age. A great reversal of auspices has taken place, and it has been achieved by the powerful idea of progress we referred to earlier. We must admit, however, that we generally know only a very trite form of this. All the same, even we normal people make our comparisons in a semi-optimistic light because we are used to putting the less good together with the better. We remain as optimizing logi- cians or idealists who want to improve the world, and at the very least we try to improve things. Today, this logic still lies behind every pragmatic programme we have to carry out. The duty to improve relates to all spheres of existence – the daily environment, machines, production processes, medicines, teaching methods, living conditions, etc. Consequently, what is essential for us is no longer the perfect archetype but a series of improvements. Plato’s original images have been transformed into models that can be
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optimized. Models are blueprints for construction that aspire to further perfection.
NAKSCHBANDI: Give us an example.
SLOTERDIJK: Modern design is full of striking examples. Let’s take a typical design object like a ballpoint pen. First it had to be invented: it began with a refill with a tiny ball at the top, and the whole thing was encased in a stabilizing sheath. The writing move- ment triggered the rotation of the ball, drawing the ink flow out of the refill. In a Platonic world, the original ballpoint pen would also be the ultimate ballpoint pen because nothing better could follow. Things look different from a modern perspective, and it is no sur- prise to us that the world is awash with thousands of variations of the ballpoint pen idea. Some of those variations can be more than mere modifications of the archetype, and sometimes represent genuine optimization or further development. Such improvements relate, for example, to the pen’s ‘click’ mechanism, which is self-retractable in some models to prevent damage to our best suit even if we forget to shut off the refill. Or the pen may be made more comfortable to hold, or the ink flow improved, etc. Countless luxury and cheap ver- sions of the ballpoint pen have been developed and customers can choose from a price range of 20 cents to €20,000. Immense design energy is being expended on this all the time. A product that was invented years ago is rethought over and over again as thoroughly as if it were supposed to be reinvented.
Does it really make sense to talk about progress in this context? The ballpoint is a good example of how it is impossible to repeat the initial progress, that is, the conceptual and technical leap that happened when that type of pen was first invented, with the whole impact of the first-time-ever. It is impossible really to invent the object a second time. On the other hand, the basic idea can be varied ingeniously and endlessly – and that’s usually enough to give us the feeling that the horizon is open. We attach importance to the fact that micro-optimizations always remain possible. Perhaps that is the actual stance of progress.
All optimizing tendencies in individual developments have a cul- mination area like an estuary, of course. I would argue that today, in a large number of areas of technical and social evolution, for example, we are already in the culmination area of primary innova- tions. Many inventions from the past are approaching their final saturation phase. Where the models have largely been perfected, things come to a standstill that can only be superseded aesthetically – think of the automobile industry, with a product that has cer- tainly been thought through to the end in most respects. Additional micro-innovations such as the retractable outside mirror can be
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accumulated and hailed as a revolution, but we all know there can’t be any real improvement beyond the ‘very good’ marker.
Let me make it clear: at most, the points I have just made are a prelude to what I want to say on the topic of progress and inno- vation from a philosophical perspective. By now we should have realized that the concept of progress is a naïve metaphor of move- ment that was only partially useful in the initial stages of industrial society. The idea of progress was a useful, nearly indispensable pilot metaphor for the transitional period because it helped those who made the transition to believe they were going in the right direction with their progressive vehicle. Conservatives, incidentally, never shared this belief and mocked the concept of progress from the very beginning.
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The second most fragile thing is, of course, the great totality itself, which is constructed like foam. That is what I try to show in Spheres III. If we want an adequate description of the system of cohabita- tion, we shouldn’t continue talking about a ‘steel-hard shell’, as Max Weber did, but about fragile constructs. The images of hard- ness are outdated; we finally have to change metaphors. Medieval cities added an outer wall that was removed at the beginning of the modern era because it was dysfunctional. The big comfortable hothouse in which we people in the West live today no longer has city walls. It is incredibly open, with soft borders, which is why it constantly has to be prepared for harm without losing its essential serenity, which is its working atmosphere. Now, however, a factor that we hardly noticed before comes into play. The great vulner- ability of modern foam goes together with an astonishing elasticity, which ensures that destruction, losses, fallen buildings and collapsed passages are replaced within a very short time. The real lesson of September 11, 2001, is that shortly after the disaster we were told that something new would be built quickly on the same spot. That is the crucial information we receive from 9/11.
The hysterical military reaction that was called the ‘war on terror’ was politically opportunist and systemically confusing. The real story lies in the process as a whole: if a building like that collapses, we immediately build a better one. If Daniel Libeskind has his way, the new one will be even taller than its predecessor. In other words, we shouldn’t underestimate the elasticity of the system! Fragility, and the impossibility of perfect protection, are consistent features of modern comfort foams. But because ‘society’ is actually not monolithic, because social aggregates are formations constructed from the bottom upwards out of single cells and foam bubbles, they have enormous elasticity. The false semantics of combating terror suggest lofty images of the entire system collapsing. Nothing could be further from the truth. When two big foam bubbles burst, the whole system may continue vibrating for a while, but a rupture like that has astonishingly little effect on the remaining cells. Elasticity is the primary feature of the foamy system. If we want to talk about the hothouse system of affluence, we must talk about two things: first, fragility, and, second, elasticity. It remains to investigate whether catastrophism and the tendency to inflate the new terrorism with fantastic over-interpretations merely represent the flip side of the common tendency towards fictional narratives about shortages.
18
IMAGE AND PERSPECTIVE An Experiment in Atmospheric Seeing
Interview with Tim Otto Roth*5
ROTH: Mr Sloterdijk, I would like to talk to you about your experience in dealing with images. I would also like to stray a little to look at the subject of imachination – a neologism I use to describe the alliance between imago and machina. Let’s speculate about possible spherological implications of the interplay of human imagination and the machine. What role do images play in your professional environment?
SLOTERDIJK: We can divide philosophers into the kind that are involved in expelling images from thought, and those who believe that thought as such is dependent on images, metaphors and figures. Obviously, I see myself as part of the latter group, although so far it has only occupied a minority position and has been partly ignored in the academic establishment. It is easy to forget that the foundation of the general concept of the image, whether as icon or as eidos, belongs to the field of early philosophy. Philosophers can claim to have been the original image theoreticians in the sense of having discovered the images as images in the first place, and taking them seriously. To understand this, we have to remember a rare fact: before philosophy emerged, the Greeks, and everybody else, had a way of seeing that was dominated by the absolutism of the natural perspective. To put it very broadly, the eye looks outwards into the situation and finds a holistically composed continuum of
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Tim Otto Roth appeared under the title ‘Bild und Anblick: Versuch über atmosphärisches Sehen’ (15 February 2005). Available at: <http://www. imachination. net/next100/reac tive/sloterdijk/index. htm>.
Tim Otto Roth lives and works in Oppenau and Cologne.
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visual presences. We don’t perceive the sums of these presences as images that can be isolated, but as aspects of the ‘condition’ or the ‘surroundings’ as a whole, of what we traditionally call ‘nature’ or, more recently, ‘environment’.
Philosophy is now coming to grips with analysis of this total environment, always in relation to the first sciences, geometry, arith- metic and semantics. Philosophers can really claim to have been the first to develop something like a tracker that can project sections into the holistically structured continuum of visible conditions. If you like, philosophers have invented eidetic cutting machines with which we can cut shapes out of the rolled-out dough of the present and give definitive explanations: this is the shape of a horse; this is the shape of a person; this is the shape of a star; this is the shape of a righteous man. The original process of seeing images is brought round to itself in philosophy. ‘Image’ in this context doesn’t yet mean a segment of the world in a frame, but the outline of a thing that, by virtue of its contours, gives itself its own frame in a way. It is not just by chance that the ‘ideas’ Plato discovered are closely related on a linguistic level to the Greek word for the concrete, that is, the outlines of beings, alias eidoi, defined in terms of species. This is why we talk about ‘ideas’, or eidetic constants. The word eidos means the stabilized expectation of seeing in relation to a thing. The eidetic original image and contour image corresponds to the cut-out shape with which we cut recognizable forms out of reality. In other words, in the history of things that are visible generally, we can iden- tify Plato as the founding father of the image principle.
Behind Plato’s discovery, incidentally, is an experience that put the Greeks ahead of other peoples of their time – the experience of the written alphabet, a graphic image that conveys information about a phonetic reality. A person who can read writing trains the ability to select similarities from the mass of dissimilarities. If we write down the name of a thing, obviously the name doesn’t resem- ble the thing at all. But the name of the thing raises the idea of the thing that resembles the thing. Writing turns out to be a tool for vis- ualizing ideas by phonetic representation. In this sense, philosophy made the practice of writing possible in the first place. That led to the most momentous innovation of European intellectual history: Greek cursive writing that included the vowels allowed people to understand texts almost without reference to their context. This, in turn, created a revolutionary figure – a reader who could read a book on his own. He was followed by the researcher, the historian and the autodidact. A mental process of image-making evolved through the culture of reading, and connected up over the cen- turies with visual and real image-making – particularly in artistic
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professions. In this respect, philosophers, writers and illustrators belong together.
ROTH: In your Spheres trilogy you repeatedly refer to an image that was already shaped in antiquity: the sphere. In all three volumes of the work, Bubbles, Globes and Foam, you describe people as atmospherically sensitive political animals whose being- in-the-world hinges on the effort to live in something well-rounded. Your trilogy contains a remarkable number of illustrations for a philosophical project. Some of the illustrations you use are mimetic or illustrative. But most of the images don’t directly relate to pas- sages in the text. What function do pictures have in your trilogy?
SLOTERDIJK: The images in Spheres aren’t generally used as illustrations but as autonomous visual presences. Of course, there are instances when they only act as evidence or examples, especially in the second volume. When I talk of globes or macrospheres in that book it makes sense to show those kinds of objects. The resonance between image and text is very close and figurative there, and in such cases the tension between the two levels tends towards zero. Usually, however, the images I have chosen are not simple optical additions to the written text. Where they work as intended, their nature is largely evocative. What these images evoke is not duplica- tion of the text’s content, but idiosyncratic extensions of the text into the realm of imagination. The image sequences in my books express that my text as a whole is not written on the traditional white pages of the old European book – even if the Spheres book may look like any other book. That would be a wrong conclu- sion. I may seem to be a conventional author satisfied with the monologic, the one-track logic of philosophical discourse. Such monologues are written black on white. Yet the white of the book page in Spheres is actually a reference to the grey of the monitor. My claim is that the monitor is radically different from the good old white page of a book, particularly because of its enlarged functional capacity, which never remains at the point of what is put into it. Somehow the printed page always cites the inscriptions chiselled in stone on ancient monuments. Roman Antiqua, the prototype for European letterpress culture, is an elegantly constructed monu- mental script. This made it especially appropriate for conveying TRUTH. Everything changes the moment we switch into the realm of digital monitors. Today’s average computer offers such a com- prehensive font program that writers will not be able to use all of it in their whole life. This makes authors into graphic designers who have to create their own scriptural image. The script itself becomes a fashion medium and a matter for the user to define. We no longer use the old, elegant European monumental script to express truth.
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The given forms of the new technology condemn us to a new form of freedom. Authorial freedom today means doing our own graphic design. The relationship between text and footnote, text and quo- tation, and text and image also changes in the same realm of the monitor. The way I insert images into the text expresses that I am already working in the electronic white cube that faces me as a flat screen. For this reason, the composition of Spheres can rather be compared to an installation. The images are placed in the book like exhibits in an installation. Because they are usually rather crazy in relation to the text, they induce a slightly trance-like effect. They address the reader’s brain on a different wavelength than the text.
ROTH: In relation to the monitor, on the visual level the second and third images in your first volume, Bubbles, struck me immedi- ately. In terms of media, those photographs of the Sun’s surface and of a galaxy from the SOHO and Hubble satellites create a contrast to the other illustrations. Do you see a difference between these digital photographs and other, more classical pictorial examples such as drawings, paintings, photographs or pictures of archaeo- logical objects?
SLOTERDIJK: A very great difference, actually, although the eye can’t recognize it at first. But the hermeneutic apparatus attached to the eye registers the difference easily. I wanted to suggest just now that the images as images only constitute a subset in the history and amount of what is visible. Taken by itself, the visible – the realm of views – is an immense reservoir structured as a surprise space for acts of seeing. Whatever else I do as a visual being, I navigate in this space. Let’s assume I am a prehistoric man looking at the horizon: the leopard wasn’t there a minute ago, and now it’s standing in front of me. Its presence changes the meaning of my situation. By nature I am incapable of ignoring the leopard’s presence. To me, its presence means the coming-to-visibility of a formerly invisible being. The point is that in this case the new visibility is something that appears of its own accord and forces me to react. The sight of the leopard that is present signifies danger. By contrast, if I only see its image it would be an all-clear signal – it would even suggest to me I were capable of manipulating the leopard. The modern age’s relations of seeing are structured totally differently from a world in which leopards appear at the camp. In the first place they depend on a major event called ‘research’. It was, above all, Heidegger in his later work who made it clear what that meant. Research is a measure for organized clearing away of hidden things, which is the same as saying that things that were not yet within the range of visibility are brought into visibility, indeed, more or less violently. Artists and natural scientists are allies in the major offensive against
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concealment. We could say we live in a kind of mine where the extraction of new visibilities is done. In recent decades the ordinary collieries in Germany were closed due to unprofitability but the mines that exploit the lethe, the ‘shelter of being’,1 concealment, are working to full capacity more than ever. Their production exceeds anything known beforehand. Think of the new pictures of the earth from space taken with cameras on board satellites: they offer one of the most popular and most spectacular contributions to the attack of research on the realm of hidden things.
Paradoxically, before the modern age, the earth as a whole was the epitome of a shrouded object – it was the underlying factor no natural view could comprehend. Today it seems have the least secrets of anything. If I understand correctly what you mean by the hybrid word ‘imachination’, the term says that mechanical optics revolutionizes our relationships of seeing, and indicates how it does this. As soon as we discarded the term ‘revolution’, because it is the wrong description for a process that should have been understood much more technically and precisely, we were confronted with an alternative expression for the basic events of our epoch, namely, unfolding. Taking this metaphor literally is enough to get to the heart of the matter. Something that was concealed up until now, that was self-enclosed, enfolded and not illuminated, is dismantled and manipulated to form an enlarged surface – the folded object is unfolded, bringing the former interior to the surface until the light falls on it. This formal representation of the general procedure of rendering visible touches on the modus operandi of enlighten- ment in general. Enlighteners negate the conventional boundaries between light surfaces and dark interiors and bring formerly hidden things to light. That’s why I say we are not living so much in a revolution as in a process of folding outward, an ‘outfolding’. I even made the suggestion in my Spheres book to drop the term ‘revolution’ and replace it with ‘explication’. Making a revolution is more an episodic political gesture that is important in specific situa- tions, for example, when it is necessary to clear repressive secretive persons out of the way – monarchs and other manipulators of the Arcanum. They are regarded, with some justification, as figures that block the way to the basic work of the modern age, which consists, as we have said, in continuing to explain things further.
1 A reference to Heidegger: ‘Der Tod birgt als der Schrein des Nichts das Gebirg des Seins’ [‘As the shrine of the Nothing death is the shelter of Being’], in Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann), 2005, p. 18.
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ROTH: I have a suspicion in relation to this outfolding. You describe the machinists’ statement about the human body as encap- sulated in La Mettrie’s dictum, ‘Voilà une machine bien éclairée’,2 in two ways, the first time as a blow for liberation and the second time as a loss of spheres. Meanwhile, haven’t we had to realize that the body is still a very mysterious machine, not least because of the com- plexity that genomics has revealed on the very lowest cellular level?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the irony of research: by discovering complexity it generates another mystery. Maybe there is a law that says the mass of enigmas stays constant.
ROTH: Wouldn’t you say this enigmatic characteristic gives the human self-image a kind of spherical quality?
SLOTERDIJK: We could look at it like that. As we have noted, the euphoric movement of revelation ranging from the anatomists of the sixteenth century to the physicists and mechanics of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries followed the goal of making visible everything that was previously unseen – up to the sonic vibrations that were visually depicted in the nineteenth century by means of cumbersome phonographs on carbon paper made with the aid of a swan’s quill. Then, on the threshold of the twentieth century, came X-rays, a fantastic tool for satisfying the desire for transparency. Recently the trails of atoms were visualized in the cloud chamber – and this kind of research is still continuing. All these contributions to making visible things that were formerly invisible begin, in sub- stance, with the early anatomists’ intervention into the interior of the human body, and with the European captains and geographers sailing out into the oceans. We have to understand that the internal and external cartography express the same cognitive attitude. They can both be used to extend the field of view and operations.
Anatomical and geographical maps also have an important common characteristic: they make the attractive qualities of the body, its aura, disappear – not the cultural and metaphorical qualities that Walter Benjamin spoke of, but the energetic and real aura, the delicate casing in which bodies swim. Remember that ‘atmosphere’ in Greek simply means ‘vapour ball’, and all living bodies live in specific vapour balls that can’t be easily represented. To emphasize it, Dasein means having an atmosphere. Our whole image policy until now has been based on stripping the body of
2 Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51) was a French philosopher and physician best known for his work L’homme machine (The Machine Man), 1747. Sloterdijk is referring to his famous dictum, ‘Here is a well- enlightened machine! ’
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its atmosphere. Removing the atmosphere makes it possible in the first place to unfold the body and expose levels of visibility that never existed in that form, and could never exist. The cost of pushing through the surface is that we have to imagine the delicate shell is gone. We can see this particularly clearly from conventional maps. For centuries, they have produced a picture of the world without a climate because they could always depict only a terrain without any atmosphere. The geographer’s eye looks down on the site from above, as if there were no air and no clouds overhead. True, we can use graphical symbols to denote special fauna, flora and ground formations, and political colours to signify that Polish is spoken in the green and Czech in the yellow country, but that doesn’t change anything about the primary finding: the geographi- cal atmosphere is always deprived of atmosphere. The atmosphere was always the big loser in all traditional pictorial processes, start- ing with the maps colonialists made in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ending with the present-day mag- netic resonance system. What these processes visibly present to us is a body segment without the auratic shell. Meanwhile, everything that can’t be treated with this type of technique gets lost. Still, we shouldn’t claim that auratic or atmospheric quantities had no advocates in theory at all. I would like to remind you that in his construction of the cosmos, Plato took care – you can read about this in Timaios – to give the world body a soul, the world soul, in fact, that not only pervades it from all sides but also surrounds it like a shell. We could see this as an admission of the atmospheric imperative, as if Plato had wanted to express that even the largest body, the cosmos, cannot do without its shell. The situational rela- tionships between body and soul have to be precisely established. The body should be in the soul, not the soul in the body – and the Platonic world body fulfils this condition. If it were not the case, we would land up directly in a metaphysics of death, as the soul would then regard itself as the body’s prisoner and would have to imagine post-mortal liberation. This position is unfortunately fairly widespread in the history of ideas – as a result of false read- ings of Platonic motifs. But in Plato’s work itself the world soul pervades the whole cosmos in such a way that it also shines over and beyond the edge, like an aura or a corona. The body swims in its atmospheric surplus. We should take note of that, because we are now going to discuss the drama in progress in today’s pictorial worlds. There are many indications that the reduction in the atmospheric sphere is being increasingly reversed. Due to a wide variety of motives, the shells that were formerly made to vanish are reappearing from extremely diverse technological and
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psychological sources. What was once an expendable surplus in traditional cartography is resurfacing as an issue of personal rights and becoming respected as an entity to be explicitly represented. I think this is a very important, joyful moment in the history of visibility: what was previously invisible, the atmospheric sphere, has come so far today that we make it the subject of very explicit visualization and theatrical presentation.
It is meteorology, a field whose significance is not easy to imagine, that furnishes the paradigm for this. Around 200 years ago, in Goethe’s time, people first began the great discussion about air, the discussion that has kept humankind in suspense ever since. Goethe himself, incidentally, was very interested in the morphology of clouds. For some decades now, thanks to satellite optics, we have had a completely new form of illustrated weather news on televi- sion. Indeed, this media genre merits a discussion of its own at some point. The daily report on the climatic situation represents one of the most extensive forms of theatrical presentation of the realm of the invisible ever seen in human history. It is significant that weather forecasts have the best audience figures almost everywhere that television is watched. Despite their guaranteed banality, they are the only successful programmes right across the board. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from this. Contemporary culture has developed to the extent that people recognize current climatic conditions as a political issue. Anybody talking about the weather is talking about the general issues of the day. Everybody knows, nostra res agitur. If there is a report on the Chancellor’s speech, or a train crash, the conversation at the table carries on as normal. When the weather report begins, silence reigns and people watch and listen – here is the real issue. Looking up at the sky ourselves is not enough any more. We want official confirmation before we believe what we see with our own eyes. We want to see from above how the cloud formation is bearing down on us. The new development is that deep down we have become strategists for judging the macro weather situation. A demand for a new outlook has grown up. I consider it momentous, and interpret it as a symptom of an all-embracing twilight of the atmospheres. It all points to the fact that the age of reductionism is dying out. Iconic primitivism is putting an end to itself.
By now, images are omnipresent but their rebellious presence doesn’t automatically mean dictatorship. Images today are much less dominant than they used to be, for two main reasons: first, there is a broad division of powers in the image space that prevents indi- vidual icons from taking power; and, second, the law of complexity increasingly applies to images as well as other things. Conventional over-simplifications have reached a dead end.
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ROTH: However, I see the twilight of the spheres more in the area of image production. I think imachination is covertly about a change in pictorial policy. Given the complex image production process, nobody today can still claim that they alone have an overview of this technical production process and can see the consequences in this highly specialized process. This is the question: isn’t it much more a matter of image production having become a communica- tive act, with a chain of image-processing from the mathematician up to post-production workers working together on images – in other words, communication as the technical Communion song in the machine?
SLOTERDIJK: That is certainly the case. But I think we should no longer ask the question about the collective fabrication of images as we did in 1960 or 1970, when suspicion as a form of thought had become all the rage once again. I admit I am increasingly irritated by the neo-Marxist attitude of methodical paranoia that was dominant back then, and which slides so easily into existential paranoia. The conventional logic of distrust, that heavy legacy of the failed French Revolution, is out of date today, particularly because the special- ized process you just highlighted has its own laws that even an evil lord couldn’t control. The Romans had a proverb: Caesar non super grammaticos – the emperor may command everything, but not the rules of grammar. This is less clear in relation to the rules of produc- tion of images, but the same tendency applies. Of course, in terms of media policy, there are notable, sometimes dangerous clusters of power. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that even a media mogul can’t change the syntax and grammar of imagery at will. The visual world as a whole is still a polycentric field that can’t be controlled from a single centre. The figure of the malignant lord is more of an illusion than a verifiable experience.
ROTH: My question was actually in a different direction. Vilém Flusser3 claimed that it is not the politicians who govern today, but the computer scientists who write the programs. I’m not happy with this assertion because it presupposes that the people who program have an overview of the whole process. I tend to think that the self-image of the image producer has changed. When Peter Galison4 quotes a physicist who specializes in elementary particles as saying, ‘The experimenter is not a single person, but a composite,’
3 Vilém Flusser (1920–91) was a Czech-born philosopher, writer and jour- nalist who later specialized in media studies.
4 Peter Galison is a historian of the history of science and a professor at Harvard University.
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I think this corresponds in a sense to your concept of atmospheric realities.
SLOTERDIJK: That may well be. But the fact that today’s image-makers are teams mastering sophisticated techniques is one reason that an exaggerated theory of suspicion can’t take us any further. Paranoia sees only a small segment of the world. Of course we know that atmospheres can be poisoned, and we also know that the lie holds sway sometimes. Nonetheless, teamwork, high-tech and complex actor networks are increasingly limiting the parameters of fraud and the corresponding suspicion. Rather, we are doomed more and more to trust under complex conditions, which means that whatever we do ourselves must presuppose that other parts of the system are functioning. In a universe of justified mistrust, we would be compelled to react to Galison’s thesis with panic. It would mean everyone is busy faking and lying. But I think mistrust can only be partially justified, and in most things it is better to work with trust. When I hear the experimenters themselves are now only elements in a complex situation that is watching itself, I feel I can relax. It means that things are operating generally in the right way, within the scope of what is normal and possible. If that weren’t the case we would be in a state of constant fear. We would have to be suspicious about everything, and rattle the bars of the matrix, shouting ‘I want to get out! ’, like the imprisoned souls in the world dungeon in the Gnostic legend. In modern terms, it would mean Luddism and the curse on the sciences. But as soon as the reality of the atmospheric factor becomes explicit we have an instrument for moderating the transi- tion from suspicion to trust. This can involve a Leninist remnant: ‘Trust is good; control is better’ – and why not? Trust is the result of secure expectations, and control is one securing mode among others. But it doesn’t have the last word. Lenin is only one voice in the con- flict between the basic moods of suspicion and trust.
ROTH: Aren’t you talking about a blind Gehlen-type trust that takes the form of simply abandoning trust? I meant a completely different kind of consciousness that doesn’t actually fulfil this func- tion of relief in Gehlen’s sense. 5
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t underestimate Gehlen’s great eco- nomic discovery, which he called ‘relief’. Without it we wouldn’t be able to cope with the simplest situation. If you don’t want to go mad from obsessive total control you always have to start from an atmosphere of original trust. Nobody can spend a long time asking
5 Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) was a German philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist and a leading proponent of philosophical anthropology.
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whether the air in a room is breathable or not. We simply have to start from the assumption that it is breathable and see how far we get. This basic diagnosis, that we are condemned to trust, can be confirmed in many different ways. We can see a persistent connec- tion with the emergence of the atmospheric sphere. Oddly enough, we only become aware of the atmosphere through its destruction. It is the environment of original trust, but we usually only realize that when it is destroyed by deliberate attacks. In that case, ideas about protecting the atmosphere have to become concrete. When we have grasped how vulnerable the subtle, atmospheric premises of life are, we will be in a position to achieve the right configuration of trust and caution. Remembrance of the worst things benefits the most fragile. We know what happened in Auschwitz, we know what happened at Hiroshima – those were mass killings perpetrated by forcibly placing people in unlivable environments. Atmospherocide is the typical modern form of a war of extermination. Today, pre- cisely because of everything that has happened, we have to combine trust with alarm systems. In other words, humans are dependent more than ever on cohabitation with machines.
ROTH: But this cohabitation is not about an individual person, and not about the classical ‘I and the world’ relation. That would be too easy. We are dealing with many subjects that are amalgamated via machines into a great complex.
SLOTERDIJK: It would be better to call those subjects ‘agents’. Of course, right now we don’t want to talk about their ontological characteristics or their epistemological privileges. As Schopenhauer said, ‘That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. ’ That’s far too pathetic as a construct in the context of our practical concerns. We’re thinking more in terms of agents who are competent with regard to their actions and statements. From such a perspective the world seems to be populated by the kind of active figures that can’t do anything but react to each other with statements and actions. This immediately begs the question: which role do the images produced by the agents play in the attempt to coordinate their operations?
ROTH: The status of imagery has changed in the huge scientific image complexes. It is no longer about the conventional fixed visual concept, but about the image as a medium of communication. This performative entity is perpetually moving. Because its way of being is still in data form, the entity tends towards intangibility. Boundaries between media, such as those between text and image, dissolve. The machine is constituted from this process of individual subjects and becomes an amalgam.
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SLOTERDIJK: I think Deleuze6 had a similar idea when he introduced the new ontological figure of ‘assemblage’. Such agence- ments are initially quite indifferent to the human–object difference. They form dynamic units beyond humans, machines and the envi- ronment. Bruno Latour’s7 sociology of epistemological fields also assumes precisely such larger units. The researcher is no longer privileged in relation to the environment, the laboratory in which he is presently sitting, the computer he is writing with or the apparatus he serves. He appears as an agent among agents. In agent ensem- bles of this kind, it turns out that the human–object opposition does not continue any further. But what certainly does continue further is any contribution that helps us to understand the com- municative fluid better – and this brings us back to the dimension of atmospherology, the study of atmospheres. There is fairly strong resonance between the atmospheres theory and the theory of agent ensembles. The first seems closer to humans; the second rather remote from humans. Both together give a more realistic picture of the hyper-complex situation.
ROTH: One final question: what is your favourite picture at home?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think I have a favourite picture at home. But I do have a favourite view. You see, I can’t get away from the difference between image and view. I used to appreciate the aesthetics of pure art. Now I’m becoming something of a nature aesthete and have come to the conclusion that I often prefer views to pictures. That’s not very unusual: Bazon Brock8 once remarked that he would rather see a bosom than a black square, and I admit I generally feel the same way. I read Brock’s statement as a plea for the view. For example, what I love most of all is the view of my library, especially in the evening when I come home late. Usually I leave the light on to get the feeling I’m being waited for. I like the sense of being surrounded by good spirits, many thousands of silent advisers who offer me their services and leave me in peace otherwise.
6 Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was an influential twentieth-century French philosopher who worked in the field of pure philosophy and history of philosophy and in many other disciplines, including anthropology, geology and psychoanalysis.
7 Bruno Latour (b. 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and soci- ologist of science, and one of the main developers of actor-network theory. 8 Bazon Brock is a German artist, art critic and theorist, specializing in multimedia studies. He is a professor emeritus at universities in Hamburg, Vienna and Wuppertal.
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
19
ON PROGRESS The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
Interview with M. Walid Nakschbandi*9
NAKSCHBANDI: Mr Sloterdijk, the proverb says: ‘Progress sits in the saddle and rides humankind. ’ Has progress got human beings under control now?
SLOTERDIJK: People who are crazy about horses may like that proverb, but we should beware of skewed images. Progress is about moving forward, not about control. Still, it’s good to start in an offbeat way. It is true that the disastrous concept of progress has become rather like a modern form of holiness. We find references to progressive things all over the place, including the decorations on banknotes and the logos of major companies. It’s almost as if the curious word ‘progress’ represented a universal concept of movement, and without it the world’s modernists would lose their sense of direction. Not many expressions of that type exist. The only concept that would be equally powerful in terms of generality and importance is, perhaps, circulation, the cycle. The traditional awe of cyclical processes – beginning with the self-reflection of God and going right up to recycling of ecological waste – relates to the metaphysical thesis that the good and the cyclic are ultimately the same thing.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and M. Walid Nakschbandi appeared under the title ‘Das heilige Feuer der Unzufriedenheit: Peter Sloterdijk über den Fortschritt’, in Utz Claassen and Jürgen Hogrefe (eds), Das neue Denken – Das Neue denken (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag), 2005, pp. 69–77.
M. Walid Nakschbandi is a journalist, television producer and manager of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 165
NAKSCHBANDI: So it was a nicely rounded issue to begin with. But then something got in the way?
SLOTERDIJK: You could say that. From the nineteenth century on, the bourgeois world began trying to find the good in the line. That is a remarkable process because the line didn’t have a high reputation in traditional geometry. In the past, people had always seen linear processes as final movements, movements that could wear down and basically lead nowhere except to decay. Circular processes, however, lead back to themselves, and that qualifies them for the good infinity. The greatest break made by the modern era is that human beings conceived an absolute movement of a new type that constantly moved upwards from a less valuable to a more valuable state. That means something like upgrading of being as a whole. It is a rather heretical idea because if we assume God created the world, such a process is pure sacrilege. After all, God can’t have created anything except the best.
But why is it that we don’t all feel we are under the curse of heresy? The answer is that since around the sixteenth century our society has been experiencing a mental shift that contemporary people still can’t evaluate completely: the shift from a metaphysics of the complete world to a metaphysics of the incomplete world. This means we have shifted from the concept of creation, that is, of the finished work, to the concept of gradual development – from completed being to relative becoming. And that made us capable of participating in movements that go from the less good to the better without being suspected of blasphemy.
NAKSCHBANDI: How should we imagine that transformation?
SLOTERDIJK: Moving directly from God to the world, we seem to go from the very best to second best. This is how Plato classically articulated it in Timaios, his dialogue on natural philosophy. He said that because God is good, perfectly good in fact, anything he produced in his capacity as the world artisan or demiurge must be as excellent as possible within the limits of reality. That is, the work of a perfect author will be slightly less perfect than the author himself. But if the author has to be one degree better than his statement, the work of the best author remains the best possible. This means that the perfection of God implies that of the world, with the said limitation.
In other words, the deeper the insight of a philosopher, the more optimistic his manner of expression was. Optimism is the last word of classical philosophy because a long time ago thinking meant nothing but the celebration of being. The most appropriate form of being-celebration is superlative speech: we must only say the best about God and the world. This is the exact point at which we feel the
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break between antiquity and modernity most powerfully, because nobody today would be willing to celebrate everything in existence as the best, the highest, the cleverest, the most perfect, etc. Those superlatives are only possible in satire now. The modern world sub- stitutes the rhetoric of superlatives with a comparatist one. Today, we always want to compare conditions so that the earlier come out worse and the later come out better. This puts us in contradic- tion to all the established theories in antiquity: when the ancients talked about changing conditions they nearly always told stories of decay. According to them, once, in the Golden Age, everything was perfect, and then the first deficits appeared. Finally, everything was rather bad and, in the end, quite devastating. The third deteriora- tion brings us to the narrator’s present day, the Iron Age in which humans are found. A narrative that follows a downward line like that could serve as a popular explanation for why people feel miser- able: they are in bad shape because they are at the murky end of a decline from the perfect to the corrupt.
In the ancient world, however, there was also secret knowl- edge that taught its adepts to see the general unhappiness as only apparent. The real sages of the past thought they had discovered a secret reason to rejoice that released an inner reserve of happiness. According to them, a person who was unhappy with the world was only deceived by the semblance of unhappiness. This deep irony defines the relationship between the sage and the masses in the ancient world. The sage pretended to have discovered a deep-seated reason for happiness that normal unhappy people were not capable of perceiving. The sage alone saw the great cycles of order from an esoteric perspective, whereas profane people remained trapped without vision in their preoccupation with unhappiness.
That is exactly what has changed in the modern age. A great reversal of auspices has taken place, and it has been achieved by the powerful idea of progress we referred to earlier. We must admit, however, that we generally know only a very trite form of this. All the same, even we normal people make our comparisons in a semi-optimistic light because we are used to putting the less good together with the better. We remain as optimizing logi- cians or idealists who want to improve the world, and at the very least we try to improve things. Today, this logic still lies behind every pragmatic programme we have to carry out. The duty to improve relates to all spheres of existence – the daily environment, machines, production processes, medicines, teaching methods, living conditions, etc. Consequently, what is essential for us is no longer the perfect archetype but a series of improvements. Plato’s original images have been transformed into models that can be
On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 167
optimized. Models are blueprints for construction that aspire to further perfection.
NAKSCHBANDI: Give us an example.
SLOTERDIJK: Modern design is full of striking examples. Let’s take a typical design object like a ballpoint pen. First it had to be invented: it began with a refill with a tiny ball at the top, and the whole thing was encased in a stabilizing sheath. The writing move- ment triggered the rotation of the ball, drawing the ink flow out of the refill. In a Platonic world, the original ballpoint pen would also be the ultimate ballpoint pen because nothing better could follow. Things look different from a modern perspective, and it is no sur- prise to us that the world is awash with thousands of variations of the ballpoint pen idea. Some of those variations can be more than mere modifications of the archetype, and sometimes represent genuine optimization or further development. Such improvements relate, for example, to the pen’s ‘click’ mechanism, which is self-retractable in some models to prevent damage to our best suit even if we forget to shut off the refill. Or the pen may be made more comfortable to hold, or the ink flow improved, etc. Countless luxury and cheap ver- sions of the ballpoint pen have been developed and customers can choose from a price range of 20 cents to €20,000. Immense design energy is being expended on this all the time. A product that was invented years ago is rethought over and over again as thoroughly as if it were supposed to be reinvented.
Does it really make sense to talk about progress in this context? The ballpoint is a good example of how it is impossible to repeat the initial progress, that is, the conceptual and technical leap that happened when that type of pen was first invented, with the whole impact of the first-time-ever. It is impossible really to invent the object a second time. On the other hand, the basic idea can be varied ingeniously and endlessly – and that’s usually enough to give us the feeling that the horizon is open. We attach importance to the fact that micro-optimizations always remain possible. Perhaps that is the actual stance of progress.
All optimizing tendencies in individual developments have a cul- mination area like an estuary, of course. I would argue that today, in a large number of areas of technical and social evolution, for example, we are already in the culmination area of primary innova- tions. Many inventions from the past are approaching their final saturation phase. Where the models have largely been perfected, things come to a standstill that can only be superseded aesthetically – think of the automobile industry, with a product that has cer- tainly been thought through to the end in most respects. Additional micro-innovations such as the retractable outside mirror can be
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accumulated and hailed as a revolution, but we all know there can’t be any real improvement beyond the ‘very good’ marker.
Let me make it clear: at most, the points I have just made are a prelude to what I want to say on the topic of progress and inno- vation from a philosophical perspective. By now we should have realized that the concept of progress is a naïve metaphor of move- ment that was only partially useful in the initial stages of industrial society. The idea of progress was a useful, nearly indispensable pilot metaphor for the transitional period because it helped those who made the transition to believe they were going in the right direction with their progressive vehicle. Conservatives, incidentally, never shared this belief and mocked the concept of progress from the very beginning.
