“I see myself as a human being who functions amid technical media as a medium in the second degree, if this is a plausible proposition”
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(ST: 15). If we want to understand the radical implications of a theory of constitutive luxury, we cannot neglect Sloterdijk’s media theory, based on McLuhan’s thesis that media are extensions of our senses, organs, and limbs. Media theory underpins his anthropology.
This “mediology” miniaturizes and literally ex-plains, i.e. extends megalopsychia – generosity and creativity – in man’s use of his media. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to res cogitans. Mediologically, both are reinvested in a relational condition.
Sloterdijk’s grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects of mediatization need a rescaling, because I think there is a blind spot in Sloterdijk’s media theory. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must be invested in micropolitical art practices. In order to expose this blind spot, a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reflectively affirms abundance. I will characterize this, emphasizing the interest of the in-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijk’s work, as “inter-esse.” Preliminary to this distinction is a further differentiation of the notion of Enlightenment.
a. Triple Enlightenment: “silent takeover” of the mind
”Mediological enlightenment” (WIK: 261) not only enlightens the mind; it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in the world. I call this Triple Enlightenment. Next to the conventional Enlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) – emancipation from our “selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit” (self-inflicted immaturity) – enlightenment explicitates itself through scientific knowledge, the explicitation of which in its turn is technology. Ever-accelerating means of transportation literally “enlighten” our bodies (2) as do means of telecommunication (3). Territorial distances are annihilated – a supernova right in front of our noses; intercontinental chatter – new virtual ones created – atomic universes; virtual public space. In this way speed of transportation and transparency of communication enlighten body and sight. The three aspects of enlightenment are fully dependent upon each other. The last two have always been part of Enlightenment, but only in retrospect can we acknowledge their constitutive value.
But the steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, television, pacemaker, computer, and Internet – to mention only the most obvious – have initially ruptured existing immune systems. Enlightenment has this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). Gradually, however, these mediations are internalized. Modern man’s life becomes more comfortable. Once the immunity of the system is restored or a new immune system installed, this comfort becomes part of normalization and subjectivation. Speeded up in capsular nodes (cars, trains, planes), communicating via interfaces (computers, cellphones, GPS), extending their potentialities, human beings feel less heavy, i.e. freer.
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Modern life has undergone a “silent takeover”: Technology has converted – explicitated – modern man’s soul without his realizing it.
As a result of this triple enlightenment, man and machine, mind and matter have integrated. Machine is no longer a metaphor. Man has become a “psycho-technological” and “techno-psychological” being.22 Media are incorporated to the point of becoming indispensable means of subsistence. As a result, our moral categories are transformed. Do modern subjects still nurture the idea that they have an instrumental relation to “their” media? They can abandon them when they have no more use-value. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionless immersion in a media environment. Enforcing your own rules – being auto-nomos – is transformed into a will to access and exposure.
Heteronomy is no problem. The “lightness of being” is no longer unbearable.23
b. Dasein is design: radical mediocrity as first nature If relational anthropology is in need of “an ontology of prosthetic realities” (NG: 361), mediatization explains how our souls are converted: by media. Being-in-the-world is now being-in-media, a medium being more than just an instrumental, kinetic connection between separate beings. The identity of the relata is constituted in and by the relation. Intention is articulated by its extensions, inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. Medical technology replaces and transforms vital functions of both body and mind. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life;
they actually constitute sociability. The proposed transformation of Aristotelian megalopsychia has to take into account the constitutive workings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG: 361).
How does second nature become first (SIII: 809)? After the initial
“illness” that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium, end-users consume the comfort, the abundance of “their” media. But once this mediological abundance constitutes the end-user’s milieu or immune system, the “incorporated” media will become as invisible as they are indispensable. Proximity without distance roots both body and soul in media. In retrospect this mediological relationality always has been an inextricable quality of man’s condition. Every medium becomes the message, i.e. man’s milieu. The medium becomes an experience in itself. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainment and even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). It is no longer a means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobility and interactivity feels like being crippled, blinded, or deafened. It is as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properly functioning eye or ear.
Nowadays Dasein seems reduced to a rooted or “radical” medi-ocrity (see Oosterling 2004b, 2005a). The medimedi-ocrity of the masses expressing contemptuousness, so severely criticized by Sloterdijk, is an indication of a constitutive lack. Given their indifference, individuals nowadays no longer realize that their “first” nature
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was initially second nature. In medial performance, memory of this “first” nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggered by the second. “In comfort one does not ask where it comes from when it has become a habit” (SIII: 403). Unreflective being-in-media takes its users beyond history. It is at this crucial point that a medium becomes “a harmful routine.” Once the abundance of new mediological conditions is internalized, needs that were previously nonexistent are ontologized. They become primary needs. Autonomy has become automobility, freedom frictionless access, Dasein design.
As a result the unprecedented possibilities – or better, virtualities – of an internalized extension reproduce lack on another level.
Every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarc-ity through forgetfulness. In order to add a normative component to being-in-media, I make a distinction between a miserabilist and an affirmative mediological condition. As a result of forgetfulness the former prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only the second, which advocates openness, enhances the reflectivity which Sloterdijk’s museological attitude presupposes (SIII: 810). In part I of Sphären, for “living in each other in ecstatic immanence” it suffices to be “a male or female modern mass-media being” (SI: 640). But when he notices that “the mediocre, medial, and vulgar effaced the horizon” (SI: 642), it is evident that for Dasein to be “a passion in the face of the monstrous” (NG: 223) reflectivity has to be part of our “medio-crity.” This is acknowledged at the end of part III: “Actually reflectivity and ‘being spoilt’ (Verwöhnung) are inextricably linked.”
Once “imaginations concerning lack have become second nature, it is hard to see how they can perform this change of perspectives on their own” (SIII: 809).
c. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esse The lightness of being-in-media does not “naturally” make the experience of abundance reflective. As long as the in-betweenness of radical mediocrity does not reflect on itself, comfortable life can easily turn into an experience of lack. For Sloterdijk, mediocre people are part of the They (das Man), Heidegger’s qualification of inauthentic existence (SI: 643). Notwithstanding the collective productivity of addictions, the current level of addiction to all kinds of media – even oil – bears witness to the fact that autonomy is no longer adequate as a category with which to understand ourselves in terms other than indifference. Autonomy being sheer illusion – a Nietzschean fiction – for Sloterdijk, authenticity obviously is still an option. What is needed is a reflective attitude as an “existential” in which mediocrity is experienced in its affluent generosity. As Hegel argues: reflectivity sublates indifference.
Ontologically, radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between.
In foam city we, glued foam bubbles, share the in-between.24 An affirmative approach acknowledges that Homo sapiens is an “inter-esse” (Zwischenwesen). Although Sloterdijk criticizes “our efforts
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to make ourselves interesting,” which means to “make-oneself-better-than–the-others” (VM: 87), with reference to Heidegger’s They, an authentic human condition is at hand. Heidegger makes a distinction between an inauthentic condition of the interesting as shallow entertainment and a being-in-between (Zwischen-sein) as
“Inter-esse”: “Interest, inter-esse, means to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it. But today’s interest accepts as valid only what is interesting.”25
“Inter-esse” is the “cement” (Kit) of relationality or Being-with (Mit-sein). In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt took Heidegger’s distinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interests as “interesse”: “These interests constitute, in the words of the most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between . . .” (Arendt 1958: 182). This ontology of the in-between – this “esse” of the
“inter” – needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. In the final analysis, the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity – Aristotle’s megalopsychia – consist of this self-reflective in-between. Unreflected inter-esse asks for “the combination of ‘de-interesting and re-interesting’ in a nondual type of morality” (SIII: 411).
6. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THE