Dämmerung: The Twilight of False Consciousness

Once again, we recall the year: 1981.  The echoes resound. We hear Nietzsche and Heidegger to be sure, also Adorno and Benjamin but above all perhaps we hear Marcuse.  We hear little Lyotard in Sloterdijk, though we might have done and the term postmodernism could be substituted for cynicism, Umberto Eco certainly did do just that.  

 Umberto Eco

But that is to make it too easy. We think we know what it is to be modern (Bruno Latour rightly disputes this as does indeed Foucault).  We do not know the cynics and yet all of us use the word, all of us are, indeed, cynics already and in advance.

So we speak of Diogenes in his barrel (and the well-educated translator gives us Diogenes in the tub, to catch the reference both to Athenian pottery and to Swift, references we now see as needful clarification):

In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured.       

        Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 3-4

The reference to the picture book is one small part Nietzsche, almost no part Kittler and an important concession to the culture of self-advertisement. 
To read the Critique of Cynical Reason is to read a book that uses its illustrations to make at least half its case. Like Horst Bredekamp but also like Theweleit, Sloterdijk offers a kind of web-page text, avant la lettre. An early exercise, some might say, of media archaeology.

Our definition comes early in the text: “Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness.” (2) This is a picture-book definition of cynicism, complete with emphasis.  Have your yellow highlighter ready.  And so we read, all sober scholarship, for Sloterdijk is sufficiently down with Nietzsche and critical theory to know all about the object contractions: “The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective validity… logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false?” (Ibid.) How indeed?

“In laughter, all; theory is anticipated.” (42)

Hence I have certain sympathy with the spirit of Sloterdijk’s bemused recommendation that one imagine what a society composed solely of Levinas scholars might look or feel like (Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark, 29), which does not mean that Sloterdijk has an excessive sympathy for animals or for nature — and it has rightly been observed that he is not quite up to the task of thinking about women even where, perhaps especially where he speaks of the body, masturbation, pornography.

Like most of us, Sloterdijk too has his blind spots just because he is limited, qua male, to his own perspective and only women have to learn, this is the singular philosophic advantage of oppressed consciousness, to take the viewpoint of others. 

What makes Sloterdijk elusive here is both his insistence on maleness or virility, a Falstaff-style modus that is hard to refuse because it simply insists upon itself — like a man sitting in a New York Subway car with his legs spread as wide as possible in order to take up two or three or four seats, he’s a man, you see, and he needs those seats.  

But there is also far more than this at work: Sloterdijk seems to know this too, or at least you can content yourself with supposing that he does.  Here he borrows a leaf from Nietzsche (his translator misses the allusion but it’s not a direct one anyway), where Nietzsche talks about his stupidities “down deep” (relevant after Sloterdijk’s Critique of Transparency in psychoanalysis, contra Freud’s self-serving insistence on patenting the technique solely and only in his own name by naming himself the discoverer of the unconscious despite antecedents), Sloterdijk goes in for Mesmerism, but and of course the unconscious is already in Kant, and this is the point of the allusion to the “dear little self,” and why, for Kant, subjective intentions fail to suffice as proof of conformity moral law as they offer no assurance that some other self-interest may have been in play). Natural Illusion (Rousseau’s nostalgia that some convert to the green nostalgia for the underdeveloped or natural world), we read, in his Critique of the Illusions of Privacy of “artful stupefaction” or I would say, as stupefaction is far too kind: it is “stupidification” [Verdummung].  Thus Sloterdijk writes that such deliberate or “artful” stupidification “manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism and egoism.” (CCR, 59) 

Reprise: Sloterdijk and Adorno

The previous post entails, then, that Sloterdijk must be taken as rather more nuanced than the “Heidegger? Can’t be a good philosopher. Wasn’t a good man”* school of philosophical valuation. 

*This is Gilbert Ryle’s apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher’s ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1 (1991): 1-23, here, p. 4. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega” in Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 243-264. 

Indeed, Sloterdijk’s reflections, at least in his Critique of Cynical Reason, appear to continue, even when it comes to Heidegger, the contextual hermeneutic and historical spirit of Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s surprisingly straightforward highlighting of Hegel’s polemical and thus Aristotelian approach to the history of philosophy.

Note by contrast that Jaspers in his essay on Anaximander highlights the achievement that it is to conceive a cosmological conception of theory without tacking it against an opponent: “And he effected all these innovations of human consciousness quietly, without polemics against anyone.” Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Laotzu, Nagarjuna (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 3.

If it has to be noted that the Ryle-Blackburn approach continues apace in the ongoing fisticuffs that characterize the so-called analytic-continental divide, Sloterdijk’s thinking in his Critique of Cynical Reason ironizes our extraordinary ignorance of the history of philosophy, a history that is not only the story of Plato and not only the story of Aristotle but also the story of the cynics, about whom today, and increasingly so, we barely know anything at all. Indeed, although some will argue that this is changing, it may  be countered that the seeming change is only by contrast with an otherwise fairly continuous oblivion.

The analytic-continental divide (and everyone disputes the idea that there is any such thing as either analytic philosophy, per se, or continental philosophy. per se, which has nothing to do with issue or the stakes at hand) refers to a conceptual display of aggression that seems only to have escalated with the triumph of analytic philosophy in terms of jobs and the professional of philosophy as a trade. To discuss this we need the psychoanalytic exigence of a Lacan or in his incarnation as a one-time Lacanian theorist of Žižek or else Badiou, though not, perhaps for reasons that have a great deal to do with Comte, Irigaray or else Kristeva. I discuss this in political terms with reference to academia itself (and not many scholars do) in Babich, “On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy” in C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003), pp. 63-103 but see also Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science” in: Alan Schrift and Keith Ansell-Pearson, eds., The New Century Volume Three: History of Continental Philosophy [Link is to Michael Kelly's review] (Chesham, UK: Acumen Press, 2010), pp. 263-286 as well as Babich, “Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and Waterbears: Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science,” International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 25 (2011). 

Thus it will do to review the cynic Diogenes once again as it may tell us how Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger and we should be able in the process to manage a pitstop on the woman question, by which I mean to say that we may be able to ask where in Sloterdijk’s text one might place or find women? 

I note already that it will not do to say in the context of the current review that there were no women cynics — there were, which is among other things, the most disconcerting aspect of the doctrine, as women do indeed tend to profit and to suffer, but these are the same things, most from convention. Thus Hipparchia of Maroneia had to put up with rather more of the course of a lifetime than Kierkegaard’s child-bride intended, Regina, but the difference between Hipparchia and Regina was one of practical askesis, which at least for some readers would make Regina the feminist hero. Kierkegaard did not simply break with Regina but presented impossible terms which, as Kierkegaard ironically presented these to her, would have had her living in a cupboard, another kind of nordic dollhouse. 

The same difference makes Hipparchia a cynic philosopher, or kynic philosopher, just to use Sloterdijk’s distinction.  It is in meaning and doing as you say that distinguishes the cynic from the kynic, male or female. And it is for the same reason that, like the Cathar Perfecti, the ancients held cynic philosophy in high regard as beyond reproach (and Diogenes’ manifestation as sober-minded  rather than as foil for mockery in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead would attest to this as well). 

As we saw at the start, Sloterdijk not only knows a lot about the cynics he also knows a good deal about many others, some of whom have gone to the heights of fashionable discourse and some for whom fortune has gone quite the other way.   
But with Sloterdijk — as was also the case with Marcuse and especially Adorno — there is something more at work than merely the matter of having done one’s homework.  Indeed the great majority of scholars who work on the cynics can be (or least have traditionally been) all too conventional.  And if this covers over, as in the case of classics traditionally, a certain prurient fascination with topics that are traditionally regarded as taboo — and this is neither a great revelation for us today and nothing like a rarity after the enormous success of Foucault’s History of Sexuality — it is still the case that such motivations, as Nietzsche would uncover them, make a difference, and sometimes even all the difference. 
Thus we have noted that Sloterdijk shocks us and he shocks us, often enough, in the most conventionally sexist of ways. Hence it seemingly does not occur to Sloterdijk to wonder about the woman who might be reading the text or the desires that she might (or might not) have for her own part.  Women are present in Sloterdijk’s text but only as objects of fairly conventional, if rather Groszian desire.

Thus even as restrained a scholar as Andreas Huyssen — and one as friendly to Sloterdijk, Huyssen writes, after all, the introduction to the English edition of The Critique of Cynical Reason — is moved (no matter how mildly he is moved), to observe that Sloterdijk 

clearly has the rational, reified, male subject in mind. The question of women’s subjectivity and its relationship to the cynicism-kynicism constellation is never really explored and the presentation of Phyllis and Xanthippe as female kynics is (just to put it mildly) disappointing. What are women to do while Diogenes “pisses against the idealist wind,” and how do they participate in or counteract the cynicism of domination?*

*Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 169.  See more generally, Derek Krueger,  “The Bawdy and Society The Shamelessness of Diogenes in Roman Imperial Culture,” in R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics.

Yet where Huyssen suggests that Sloterdijk might well have strengthened his own case “by focusing more thoroughly on the problem of gender and by asking himself to what extent his critique of male identity pathology might be indebted to feminist perspectives”(ibid.), Huyssen raises an important ideological point, intriguingly one that Sloterdijk seems not quite to wish to avail himself of. The reason may simply be that Sloterdijk’s sexism is fairly good-natured or ordinary.  The question of how his views on women may come across to others is not his concern.  And this too is fairly common among male academics.
 

We have noted that Sloterdijk begins by characterizing Nietzsche as a cynic, and one can do this, provided one ignores Nietzsche’s other self-characterizing tropes and Sloterdijk — as it can be supposed — has no problem with such a device.  After all, Sloterdijk borrows Foucault’s thunder, without naming him, as he also sets him along with Marx as a “modified approach to ‘saying the truth.’” (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxix) Along the way, Sloterdijk does not spare himself his own cyncism (somewhat, somewhat).

Sloterdijk reflects on Musil’s description of the existential frustration that can be an encounter with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (provided one is affected at all, and as we recall Nietzsche was fairly persuaded that there were scarcely any such).

See for a extended discussion in the context of Jacobi, Fichte, and Kleist, Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Special Issue on Nietzsche. 84-2. (Spring 2010): 231-256.

And Sloterdijk goes on to add a reflection on the dullness of the professors (referring to the 1981 Kant Congress in Mainz he had already conceded a certain underwhelming aura but and to be fair, who has not been to a conference and taken stock of the sort of “luminaries” presented by one’s peers or higher-ups --- or one’s younger-ups, noting the accelerated professionalization of the student) esteemed as the “very best” and who has not experienced something of the same feeling? Here Sloterdijk intends to go beyond not merely Kant but Adorno, which already tells us that he knows what he is doing, but to offer “a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).” (CCR, xxxi)
Sloterdijk’s inspiration is without doubt the impotence of the Frankfurt School, by which we should not think of Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcuse but just and only the Frankfurt School-as-it-has-been-standing without advance or perturbation under the aegis of Habermas (and those who stand in his place today). Even in 1981.  Perhaps most of all in 1981 where one might have expected something more (and the Frankfurt School was given every possible break to fulfill this expectation, of that there is no doubt).

But it is with Adorno (not Habermas) that Sloterdijk’s sympathies are free to find expression, out the open.  “Critical Theory,” so we read, categorically rejects “the masculine world.” (xxxiv) Exceeding Lacan, it “is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers.” (Ibid.)
 

And Sloterdijk is not done: “The masochistic element has outdone the creative element,” (xxxv) adds the condemnation of the “sensitive,” expressed as “paralyzing resentment” nourished upon “an archaic rage against ‘masculinity,’ that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific ‘positivists’.” (Ibid.) And we are then hardly surprised to read that it “took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings.” (Ibid.) Oh, can we add deconstruction too?  Why ever not? 

“With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his father’s name, W.” (Ibid.)

Of course we get to hear about Adorno’s sex life but not in detail just the gossip.  The year is 1981 and we have already been there and done that.  Adorno we are told is reduced, done to ground by nakedness, not just nakedness, naked breasts. (xxxvii) And Sloterdijk recalls these words in the body of the text (nothing like self-reference):

Does the reader remember the episode in the lecture hall described in the Preface? The disturbance of the lecture and the female student’s naked breasts?  Now their baring was no run-of-the-mill erotic-cheeky argument with female skin. They were, almost in the ancient sense, cynically bared bodies, bodies as arguments, bodies as weapons. (109)

Fascinating: so that is where the women were and are.

The author has spent some time for her own part in German university lecture halls, both as student and visiting professor, and recalls wondering how the female students in the room were able to take notes especially as they were (and this was 1984, decades after Sloterdijk’s “cynical” moment of encounter with Adorno) assiduously knitting. 

NB: See however for what might be accounted a kind of cynicism of the sort that might not appeal Sloterdijk and likely not at all to the majority of feminists, who have also and to be sure their problems with Simone de Beauvoir and any woman who practices a kind of truth telling against the conventionality that argues that women choose traditional roles in a kind of magically liberating way, see per contra, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1987) and Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: A Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston 1978: Beacon Press).

And yet, it is hard to protest too much, for that would be to pretend that one knows nothing of American style academic feminism. Even more that, it would be to ignore the circumstances of today’s media connectedness, male and female. Thus I too have students like these today, male and female, although in place of knitting they use computers or just text, using the like Thumbelina-sized zither that is their cell-phones.   

Kynic or cynic?

Sloterdijk who moves between analyzing the claims of objectivity and analysis and claiming the same for himself concludes his introduction: “A mixture of cynicism, sexism, ‘matter-of-factness,” and psychologism constitutes the mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and philosophy.” (xxxviii) 

The self-styledly masculine Sloterdijk quotes his grandmother (no mamma’s boy he) (or maybe not: he’s not writing Dutch after all, this we know) “a teacher’s daughter, from an idealistic home,” who “often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation.”  (Ibid.)  
Sloterdijk seems to know that these were for his grandmother “magical books which we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must admire from the outside like something from someone very great.” (Ibid.)   That would be anyone who knows the true disenchanted magic of such books at all, that is, again, as Nietzsche once spoke of it “those who really know how to use such valuable books, probably those who themselves write or could write such books, as Nietzsche once put it speaking “in usum delphinorum.”*

*Nietzsche, GS §102. See for a discussion in the context of philology and today’s scholarship, Babich, “Nietzsche’s Philology and Nietzsche’s Science: On The ‘Problem of Science’ and ‘fröhliche Wissenschaft’ in: Pascale Hummel, ed., Metaphilology: Histories and Languages of Philology (Paris: Philologicum, 2009), pp. 155-201.  Here it is worth noting that Swift, noted in a previous post, expressly characterized his own Tale of Tub in a similar fashion as for the "use" of the dauphin.

These special readers, very like Sloterdijk’s good grandmother, correspond to the majority of today’s scholars.  It is a necessary corollary to add that this kind of ranking (grandmothers and dauphins), whereby we take ourselves to know whose references are impotent, de-virilized, and whose not, extends fairly broadly.  Thus we continue to read commentaries by those who inform us that there is no evidence, no “proof”  that Nietzsche ever read Kant’s first critique (though fond as many are of the third critique, one sometimes makes an exception for this one critique out of a possible three). It does not occur to these commentators that there is, apart from their own convictions, to use Nietzsche’s word for prejudice, no proof, not a shred of “evidence” (of the kind they themselves would identify as such) that they themselves have read the text they speak of (and with today’s search engine the need to have read anything at all is an optimism of a kinder, perhaps more rigorous, but certainly foregone era). 

What does one mean when one speaks of those books one can have read? 
What is reading? 
Proof, a metaphor borrowed from a certain tradition of geometrical demonstration or construction and further from the security of a test against injury, is similarly in need of question.

Sloterdijk’s initial discussion of what fascinates philosophers who remain captivated by Marxist-Hegelian-Freudian language with a certain resentment of Adorno and Marcuse but an odd fondness for Lühmann, Marquard, and Habermas (note the pigeon-holing here), of unhappy false conciousness — the comparison to Marcuse requires that one pay attention to repressive desublimation precisely in its desublimation as indulgent liberation, and think of the more or less happily unabated consumption of porn and the trafficking in prostitutes which makes a weary appearance either in the tabloids with politicians (as if that were the essence of scandal, and indeed in order to distract from what might otherwise occupy our concern) or else with the trade in children for sex, whereby one engages in the dissociative moralization that allows one to condemn men who flock to Thailand (or to Hamburg or San Francisco) for child prostitutes while at the same time celebrating the prowess (mostly monetary of course and this is why we praise them) of men who date younger women or presidents who marry supermodels, of the kind that another generation called starlets in order to emphasize precisely what counts as charm: and that is their youth. But as a date for the evening, one person’s 17 or 16 year old starlet (13 years old, if one is Roman Polanski) is another person’s “child.” 

Think of the scandal of the by-now nearly forgotten New York governor Eliot Spitzer whose fall from grace had mostly to do with the legal embarrassment less of procurement than transporting across state lines (this is still with a rakish charm called “white slavery” but it is all about sex for money and this is the desublimation that comes with power (it matters indeed that Spitzer’s replacement after his fall from grace, his lieutenant governor and associates would accede to the same proximity to libertarian indulgence assured by political power with an instantaneity that so far from outraging simply bored the press.

Minima Amoralia and the Sloterdijk Affair or Technology and Fascism

Our moral-ethical objections to Heidegger (for most readers, if not all) and the parallel Sloterdijk Affair (for some readers) confirms the rule that the classicist, Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting makes with his allusion to our fealty to Hegel just when it comes to telling the history of philosophy, counting some as philosophers and excluding others­ and thereby gaining the right to speak of good and bad (we are all so many footnotes not to Plato but to Aristotle or indeed Heraclitus as we do this) and, in Heidegger’s case, of the pernicious or dangerous. For some, to be sure, Heidegger can be an objection to Sloterdijk who undertakes to read Heidegger somewhat more generously than Adorno (which latter edginess may have endeared him to Habermas) — nevertheless and at the same time our instruction in classical philosophy continues to repeat Hegel’s expression vis-à-vis the ancients in terms of what is and what is not philosophy. For some the same objection can be applied to Sloterdijk himself. 

Still Sloterdijk later shifts some of the blame even here as he locates it on the side of a certain lack of not of philology but manliness: 

I wasn’t unaware, either, that this “materialist” terminology was going to create definite unease among Heideggerians of a neo-pietist persuasion. Having proposed an iconoclastic — and “Left-wing” — reading of Heidegger’s work in Critique of Cynical Reason, I didn’t at any cost wish to be confused with that de-virilized, conservative Heideggerianism.” (Sloterdijk with Éric Alliez, “Living Hot,Thinking Coldly,” 320)

Sloterdijk here recommends Gotthard Günther --- already noted in connection with the cybernetician Warren McCulloch --- as “the author of an amazing book and more than the title of it, The Consciousness of Machines. A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (1963), ought to be translated.” (Ibid, 319)

NB: Sloterdijk may be correct to urge this but it is perhaps more significant to note that Günther’s Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen (Krefeld-Baden Baden: Agis Verlag, 1957) work is well known and influential in English. Günther was employed by several US government agencies, e.g. and do note the science fiction locus, “Can Mechanical Consciousness Exist,” Startling Stories, Vol. 29, No.1 (1953): 110-116) it will be more because of a hoped for resonance with Simondon than anything else) or, and this would be more apropos, an interest in Ray Kurzweil’s mystical vision of technology in his The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Hassocks: Penguin, 2006), than because of a genuine interest in a man who by all accounts would have escaped most classifications, but exemplified Nietzsche’s valuation of perspectives and point of view. A product in a consummate fashion of the last century, born in the same year’s but dying in the Orwellian year of 1984 (Günther, an enthusiastically pro-American German could not have been less Orwellian) but worth considering as a useful guide to what might have been hoped for as a result of possible logics in the wake of Gödel’s challenge to the same and Gödel was interested in Günther’s Idee und Grundriss einer nicht-Aristotelischen Logik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959).   But see already in a French context, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 

 Günther a certain German-American systems thinker on cybernetics to the French, as a translation opportunity, echoes an audaciously technical optimism. As Sloterdijk here explains 

in Günther’s work the concept of a “formless matter” embodies, in my view, all that’s been thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of “things” to “mind.” It tests out a trivalent — or multivalent — logic that’s so potent it could rid us of the impotent, brutal binarism of the mind/thing, subject/object, idea/matter type… (Ibid., 318)

NB: Sloterdijk also discusses thinking on the philosophy of technology in Rathaus, Freyer, Turel, Jünger, Dessauer, etc., in the latter pages of Critique of Cynical Reason.

 

There is nothing like cybernetics and systems theory and its allure has animated the military industrial world, especially but not only in the US for quite some now.

With such references, formulaically placing himself on the other side of any kind of Heideggerianism and making it plain that he reads his Nietzsche with the right thinkers and in the right tonality, not analytic but not gelded either. 

This Nietzsche, which he also names a “hard Nietzsche” will be the systems Nietzsche or the rhizomatic or the biopower Nietzsche (Sloterdijk means to keep the ecologist’s word, bioculture, for himself), this is the Nietzsche of “Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Luhmann.” (ibid.)  Thus Sloterdijk rewrites the materialism of his earlier title, Thinker on Stage, here restaged alongside what some perhaps captivated by the language of gravitational singularity in cosmological physics (think of black holes) have called the technological singularity.

The term as applied to technology was arguably used for the first time by the computer scientist and science fiction author, Vernor Vinge who himself attributes it to John von Neumann.  But by far the greatest attention has been drawn by Kurzweil. 

Reading Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason it is clear throughout, but especially at the end, that futurists like Vinge but also Toffler and McLuhan, and the name buzzing about today, Ray Kurzweil, are all of them only late comers, following not only Friedrich Dessauer and Adrien Turel but others in a decidedly uncanny context that turns out to be nothing less than the crucible for the particular fascism that grew out of the Weimar Republic as Sloterdijk discuses it. Thus it is not too surprising that some will find it hard not to think of Kurzweil’s (or should one say Vinge’s)  technological singularity or machine-human mind-meld, when Sloterdijk highlights his Regeln für den Menschenpark (link to English translation here) in his interview with Erik Alliez and 

its strong epistemological linkage between concepts like ‘Dionysian materialism’ and ‘vitalism, a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and life technics have just passed into a new phase of their development. (Ibid)

Thus here Sloterdijk, who understands Habermas’ role in the “Sloterdijk Affair” as an opponent appreciates a judo master, and that is to say and no matter who wins (and if Sloterdijk wins on one level, he chooses to know better on another)[1] because the judo play in question took place by means of a resentment already given over, in two senses as Nietzsche reminds us that resentment is always a sentiment of perpetual return, to a substitute provided by Habermas himself (that would be Thomas Assheuer),[2] describing Sloterdijk’s own Elmau lecture as articulating “an integral” and so indispensable “part of a reflection on the foundations of a biocultural discourse of the clearing,”[3] this would be Heidegger improved via Sloterdijk but not only Sloterdijk, “Nietzsche and Plato have invited themselves to the ‘symposium’ to comment on the ideas of Heidegger, to put forward their opinions on the drama played out in the clearing. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How human beings produce themselves. And suddenly everyone wants to be invited, everyone — dramatically — wants to be part of the debate, to take part in it.”[4]

Anthropotechnics. 

 This is of course the message of Kurzweil’s singularity as it has been embraced by popular cutlure, when it is not the message of the genome project or stem cells. And it may be because the biological business of genetic engineering has not been going as well as anticipated (owing to pesky technical details like the organism and the small fact that cloning adult organisms seems to produce young organisms that senesce and die markedly faster than young organisms usually do, whether they are sheep or Korean saluki-like dogs or mice, seemingly to catch up with their origins) that the new enthusiasm for the coming technological rapture is as fascinating as it is.  Here we note the very specific (and very Nietzschean) “faith” in science and especially industrial, corporate, capitalist technology that has, if we read Sloterdijk aright, been with us since the interregnum between the two wars which is also to say that such a vision is fascist through and through.  Yet another reason to prepare for the coming singularity: as with other raptures, one does not expect to have a choice.

But along with the idealized expectation of technological rapture goes a vision of technological oversimplification that Sloterdijk suggests is not quite a result of our being closer and closer to a future we once imagined. Hence talk of 2045 was once unimaginably distant, like talk of 2012. Or like 1998, the supposed time period of the 1968 American television series Lost in Space.

To see this it is worth thinking (just briefly) of Aubrey de Grey, a software developer or programmer who, having learnt sufficient biology for the purpose (as he supposes enough),[5] argues that we can resist aging if we avoid its causes, namely the oxidation of cells and the build-up of waste-products in those same cells. Having determined that it is the mitochondria that develop problems, getting gunked up or losing efficiency, de Gray proposes that we send in little nanobots to clean them out or as replacements. 

Nanobots are a better way to express what de Grey has in mind for what he is thinking of is rather closer to the miniaturized spaceships of Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 film not for fans of Gulliver’s travels on a microscopic level but of Raquel Welch and those who might have been watching Star Trek which also began as a television series in the same year, or who had otherwise been reading Fantastic Stories and watching the science fiction films of the 1950s. Du Brey is a hero of the tech-singularity movement and just because he straddles both sides of the biotech and computer tech industry.  For it is all about the tech aspect, precisely in the way we relate to technology as those who have, as fully vested heirs of a cargo cult, grown up with devices we know very well how to use, electric appliances, toilets (to be Illichian here), televisions and computers, cell-phones and coffee-makers, automobiles and airplane travel, but could not ourselves for a minute fabricate if our lives depended on it (this is the ominous subtext of the future-as-desert film genre, like Road Warrior or Mad Max). But assuming that someone else makes the tool or the technology, the gadgets are what it is all about. Critics object that like Kurzweil, de Grey does not seem to mind too much that the technology supposed by the theorizing (this would be de Grey’s theorizing) or futuristic speculation (this would be Kurzweil picking up after Walt Disney left off and telling us what life will be like in 2025 or 2045) does not in fact exist as yet.  But that will come, both assume. As Iphone commercials insist on proclaiming, without needing to ask what we might have in mind: there’s an app for that (or will be).

But there is little or nothing new under the sun, and Sloterdijk reminds us that this was already an issue, and already imagined as resolved for the crippled military victims after the first world war.  Thus he cites Brecht’s Interjection (from which we take only the line relevant for de Grey and Kurzweil “Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car / Without losing anything in the process”).[6] That Sloterdijk already anticipates the flaws of the current technological program of imagining that one’s soul can be “uploaded” via past or current or future technology is clear as he repeats Brecht’s uncanny line

To accommodate himself to the course of the world

And to let his private fish swim away

And no matter what he is remodeled into,

In doing so no mistake is made.[7]

Like Brecht, Nietzsche emphasized the usually unsung dangers of large-scale or grand “politics” as he reviews these on the terms of ordinary political or everyday social life. For Nietzsche, the most extensive consequence of war is in terms of everyday life (and this is no surprise) an economic one,[8] but what Nietzsche does not emphasize is the crass affair of sheer destruction nor indeed the subtle  stimulus such a negative impulse notoriously engenders for a depleted social system of jaded productivity and stale surplus but and the “capital” of the mind and the heart [Kopf- und Herz-Capitale] — such a legacy would correspond to Brecht’s “private fish,” — as the “cost involved in the extraction, year in, year out, of an extraordinary number of its efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations so that they become soldiers.”[9]

For his part, Sloterdijk invokes Brecht’s “remodeling of the civilian as a soldier”[10] as prelude to his chapter on “Artificial Limbs” now with a view to the reassembling (today we say rehabilitation or, even better, physical therapy) of the victims of war, in this case the first war, citing Erich Kästner’s 1931 Fabian, to remind the reader that “fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies.”[11] Sloterdijk’s reading is important for what he asks us to consider is the conceptual disconnect in the recommendations to the handicapped just as this same recommendation could serve both political and spiritual deployment without missing a beat.  “Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psychotechnical textbooks; a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs.”[12] And we know all about Post war physical therapy in America, or actually we know nothing of it although it all around us, as an array of statistics are there for the searching — which is to say that these same facts and their implications are only occasionally an open or overt theme for public discourse — to tell us that more grievously wounded soldiers have survived the still-ongoing wars in Afghanistan (and still Iraq).

In the textbooks on the maimed and the writings of the medical-technical industry, a highly apposite image of the human being emerges: Homo prostheticus,  who is supposed to say a wildy joyful Yes to everthing that says No to the “individuality” of “individuals.”[13]

This is the prosthesis that is still associated with fascism — we recognize Dr. Strangelove as German not by his Kissinger-like accent but by his obviously prosthetic hand (and seemingly programmed or automatic Hitler salute). For Sloterdijk the move is immediately and already made in the direction of the Kurzweilian singularity “Personality amputated? No problem — we have another for you in stock.”[14]  Essential here is the quiescence of any phobias as we might call them, an assurance that any talk of technological autonomy is just philosophical blather and Sloterdijk explains this as a logical consequence of its already consummate autonomy in the society of the machine, that is “the society of labor and war.”[15] In a patent alliance with humanism, the thought scheme works like this:

Technology takes the ‘upper hand’; it threatens to degrade human beings; it wants to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will happen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technology.[16]

Thus Sloterdijk goes on to cite Dessauer, “In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us,”[17] explaining that the Fourth Reich is that of inventions those things that have been brought into existence only human beings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized.”[18]  We are back to the world of Kurzweil’s anticipated techno-singularity.  But for Sloterdijk this world is already fully fleshed out in Dessauer: it is  “as if technology reached over into the  sphere of the Ding an sich … which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonexisting objects of experience, machines.”[19] It is this ontico-ontological consummation that intrigues Sloterdijk: “Inventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence — whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing.”[20] 

Thus if we would just include Dessauer’s philosophy of technology it truly need never occur to Kurzweil that the technology requisite for the machine-consciousness and machine-human-mind-meld transformation or rapture of which he speaks is not really close to existing. It hardly matters.  More pedestrianly regarded (and it is pedestrian) it turns out that Kurzweil is talking about Google and having a cell-phone and being able to text and thus we already are the singularity.  It’s like finding out that you are a cyborg because you wear … contact lenses.  How exciting. And for the rest of what does not exist or for predictions that have not panned out — these do not matter.  Like the drugstore magazine that tells us what event about to happen will confirm what Nostradamus prediction, suitably qualified and rightly interpreted, the passage of time and the failure of that event to transpire according to plan is irrelevant. One shrugs and updates the date. So, I was off by a year, says Kurzweil.  Like jam tomorrow, the future is always like a course that hasn’t yet been set or a lecture venue that hasn’t been located: to be arranged. The point is, rather like manifesting wealth or a life-partner, to believe. But the implications are not exactly as harmless as most new-age self-creation.  For technology thus “appears as the promise of a total solution to problems” and will, “one day” according to our man de Grey, Kurzweil and indeed Dessauer “have worked out all misery.”  The sophisticated move of Kurzweil (be the machines) is not one that would have been wasted on Dessauer or, in a different sense, Sloterdijk, who goes on to observe of Dessauer as might also be observed of Kurzweil: “In an astoundingly shortsighted way he overlooks the destructive aspect of ‘invention.’ … At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.”[21]

It is Heidegger, if it also Ellul with his reflections on technological autonomy, who remains to be read here just because for Sloterdijk Heidegger’s early so-called existential theory, his account of Das Man — the translator’s rendering Anyone is truly lamentable because truly misleading, despite the imagined resonance or matching up with Odysseus’ pun (a pun may work between one language and another, the third is not the charm). Thus the French has on, we speakers of English have One, and the translators of Being and Time opted for “the They,” and Anyone does not quite do. Heidegger also has fallenness (not quite ‘habituatedness’) and being unto death. Sloterdijk notes that “for Heidegger’s critics” this was “an excuse for the cheapest kind of outrage.”[22] And while Sloterdijk will not fault them completely he thinks that it is assessing the inspiration for what it can tell us just where we need it, here and now.  Thus it will do to read this theory historio-critically for if we do so what we find is that

No thought is so intimately embedded in its time as that of being-unto-death: it is the philosophical key word in the age of imperialist and Fascist world wars. Heidegger’s theory falls in the breathing space between the First and the Second World Wars, the first and the second modernization of mass death.[23]

But, and this point is the key for Sloterdijk’s media reflections: “It stands midway between the first triumvirate of the destruction industry Flanders, Tannenberg, Verdun, and the second Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.”[24] Note as we pass that the second array illuminates Heidegger’s  irritating identification of Germany  as caught in the “pincers” between America and its capitalism and Russia and its Bolsheviks which Heidegger expresses in the political exaggeration of the Germany of the times: “Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character and their relation to the spirit.”[25]  The cynic point here is that it will do to add that we also know where that center leaves Germany as Sloterdijk cites Gustav Regler’s awful ditty: “There was once a Communist / who didn’t know what a Nazi is, / he went into a brown house, / and without any bones, he came out! Hahahaha!”[26]

At this earlier juncture, reading Heidegger historio-critically, what is significant is that “without death industry, no distraction industry.”[27] Thus for Sloterdijk, “Heidegger’s theory of death harbors the greatest critique by this century of the last.” And Sloterdijk goes on to note that precisely in the conceptual accomplishments of the 19^th Century depends upon very

formal equivalences between the idea of evolution, the concept of revolution, the concept of selection, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, the idea of progress and the myth of race. In all these concepts, an optics is tested out that objectifies the downfall of others. … Viewed superficially only the personal pronoun is altered: “One dies” becomes “I die.”[28]

Therefore Sloterdijk can remind us that in “conscious being-unto-death Heideggerian existence revolts against the ‘constant reassurance about death’ on which an excessively destructive society necessarily depends.”[29] It should go without saying that the technological singularity is only one of the latest and hardly the best instantiation of this kind of thinking, a kind of thinking we are far from having abandoned despite the popularity of our ongoing anxiety about nihilism and our denunciation of thinkers like Heidegger and Nietzsche as nihilistic.  Space does not permit here, but it is well worth looking at the program of incorporating Heidegger into what Sloterdijk calls a new and alternative left: “an existential left, a neokynical Left.”[30] That this will not endear him to the inhabitants of “the land of Critical Theory,” Sloterdijk is well aware. But neither is he to be ranged with the Heideggerians, not of the usual stripe however we may paint them. And we remember that Sloterdijk means indeed what he says and goes on in this direction in his Regeln für den Menschenpark, which he anticipates as inevitably offputting to Heideggerians while still claiming a certain genesis in Heidegger’s spirit, as he tells us that his effort rendered “Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose benevolence is anything but ironic.”[31]

This post is from a longer,  illustrated version of a book chapter by Babette Babich, “Sloterdijk’s Cynicism: Diogenes in the Marketplace”  published in: Stuart Elden, ed., Sloterdijk Now  (Oxford: Polity, 2011), pp. 17-36; 186-189. 

See the entire collection -- for the sake of Stuart Elden's -- as ever -- magisterial introduction and for the sake of the other contributions.  

LINK: to read more here about this book on Sloterdijk as indeed about the editor, Stuart Elden, and the other chapters contributed to this book.

Notes

---

[1] The mechanism is well-known to Sloterdijk, who crystallizes it as the well-known opposition between the philosopher and the sophist, whereby the favored one is written into one corner of the constellation in question, with the nice coincidence of leaving only the space for the other on the other side, in a square of dupes, in his interview with Alliez with regard to the newspaper scandal that grew up in the wake of his Regeln für den Menschenpark lecture at Elmau: “To arrive at the effective exclusion of the sophist, the true philosopher of our age resorted to a clandestine stratagem that would doubtless have effected that delicate operation for him if it could have remained secret, but which was inevitably to produce a lethal effect if the public became aware of it.” Alliez, Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” p. 309.  The point of course is about crossing the opposed other, a procedure which cannot spare the dupe, in either sense of the word: “Habermas — who hasn’t neglected to read Carl Schmitt — never had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. Does one really need to fight a duel to make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can’t the true philosopher have himself represented by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes aware of his master’s cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth.” Ibid., 310.

[2] Thus Sloterdijk, who is well aware of his journalistic past, gives his own analysis of Habermas as “philosopher of truth” as having charged another sophist, a journalist associated with the confraternity of true discourse, a contributor to the Hamburg-based weekly, Die Zeit — that is to say, his faithful disciple Thomas Assheuer — with denouncing the sophist Sloterdijk. The charge sheet was to be read out loud and clear, the offenses being precisely those the philosopher did not dare to pronounce publicly.” Sloterdijk, interview with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 309. The problem is the bead game: Habermas remains in control. “But at that point the young sophist Assheuer, who no doubt aspired to be received and recognized among the true philosophers, had to face up to the cruel truth: Habermas — who hasn’t neglected to read Carl Schmitt — never had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. Does one really need to fight a duel to make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can’t the true philosopher have himself represented by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes aware of his master’s cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth.” Ibid.  And all would have been well, but sophists will be sophists, and if Assheuer took his revenge, as anyone not part of the guild can do, remember the dog’s teeth, and Habermas had to faced the facts, which did not quite mean that he lost any face or prestige. And not even for Sloterdijk who reflects: “We touch here on the political heart of the affair: for Habermas did not lie when he lied. He simply — one too many times perhaps — defended, by means that seemed justified to him, given the dictates of militant democracy, what he sees as the space of consensual truth against what he perceives as the irruption of the word of the sophist, of a discourse that’s polyvalent, essayistic, seductive, harmful, French, and irresponsible.” Ibid., 310. Sloterdijk, don’t you know where he is inscribed in the play of forces? has his own rhetoric down cold and he knows exactly who he is talking to.

[3] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.

[4] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.

[5] Cambridge University apparently concurs as they awarded him a doctorate for his The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (Austin: Landes Publishing, 1999). See also Denham Harman, “Aging: A Theory Based on Free Radical and Radiation Chemistry,” Journal of Gerontology, 11 (3) (1956): 298–300.

[6] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 441.

[7] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 442.  

[8] The section to be cited below is entitled Grosse Politik und Ihre Einbussen, and gives an important context to Nietzsche’s often misunderstood terminus: grand politics. Nietzsche also speaks of „Politik und Geldgier,“ KSA , Volume 9, 213).

[9] KSA 2, p. 315; HH I: §481. See for a further discussion and with reference to Habermas, Babich, ““Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Politics and Destiny,” in: Tracy B. Strong, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Ashgate, 2009), 282-296.

[10] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 442.

[11] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 443.

[12] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 444.

[13] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 446.

[14] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 449.

[15] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 448.

[16] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 448.

[17] Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung, cited in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 455.

[18] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 455.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 456.

[21] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 457.

[22] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University press, 1979), 45. Heidegger’s lectures date from 1935.   

[26] Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus, 1933, cited in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 530.

[27] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.

[28] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.

[29] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.

[30] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 209.

[31] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.