From the imperative that we have to become lighter (i.e. enlightened), Sloterdijk draws political consequences. Strategies that favor heaviness over lightness in terms of resignation (Gelassenheit) and recycling, and ideologies that still define human relations in terms of oppression are declared “miserabilistic.” Scapegoats are the Green parties and “the Old Left.” But is it enough to affirm the antigravitational flows and criticize “gravitational conservatism”?
Does Sloterdijk’s “jovial” perspective suffice to “convert” radical mediocrity? What kind of politics does he propose? Is resistance still an option?
There was an implicit acknowledgement of resistance in Critique of Cynical Reason – albeit romantic – but in Die Sonne und der Tod it is no longer defined as resistance to oppression and injustice in the political sense (ST: 262, 284, 287). After criticizing Lacan, resistance to the effort of the analyst to unlock the fixated reality principle of his patient is no option either. Perhaps the deconstructionist’s résistance or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognized in “the refusal to follow the rules of one’s own game” (ST: 285).
Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. Within his general science of revolution, this is understood as explicitation.
Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.
Inhabiting the Greenhouse – a thermotope (SIII: 396) – means we are still haunted by scarcity. “In the absence of a convincing
CULTURAL POLITICS375 RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY
thermic socialism, for the time being we have to be content with a thermic aesthetics” (SIII: 405). His affinity with the avant-garde not only explains Sloterdijk’s aversion to the mediocre They; it also sheds light on the political premise of his exaggerative reasoning:
revising definite options and deciding against exclusion. The approving remarks on Joseph Beuys’s artistic practice give us a clue.26 Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuys’s concept of the “social sculpture” (Sozial Plastik) (SIII: 661, 811). Every generous citizen has to become an artist, as Joseph Beuys once proposed (SIII:
811). Like Foucault, Sloterdijk favors creativity over autonomy. If aestheticization is needed for enduring monstrosity, is Foucault’s proposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can we recognize Sloterdijk’s exaggerative reasoning in Foucault’s attempt to connect truth games with spirituality beyond religious interpretations as “the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject” (Foucault 2004: 17)?
In our comfortable Greenhouse the great divide between life and art, art and nonart, high and low culture is superseded. The super-installation – as an “inclusive concept of artificiality [Künstlichkeit]”
(SIII: 813) that “‘integrates’ all subcultures” – demands an aesthetic attitude: “one transfers the form of the museum to the system as a whole and moves around in it as a visitor” (SIII: 818). Cruising public space demands museological sensibility. But how is this stimulated?
Does society become a Gesamtkunstwerk? Sloterdijk has already excluded this option. The Crystal Palace is beyond a total work of art, because the risk has to be avoided that “a culture that organizes a total middle” becomes “totalitarian” (VM: 95). Reflecting the inter is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. Bazon Brock qualified this as “an inclination [Hang] towards the total work of art” (see Szeemann et al. 1983).
A genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk – starting with German idealism via Wagner and Wiener Werkstätte, Arts & Crafts, Merzbau, Bauhaus, and Surrealism27 – shows that it never realized itself to a full extent without becoming totalitarian. However, in its constant failure to totalize art as life, it fully explored the space in between disciplines, media, and in between the artist and his audience. The inter is the “cement” of a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is articulated in interdisciplinary, multimedia, and interactive art practices. To borrow Adorno’s phrase, the totalization (das ganz Große) is the false. The truth is in its failure. In failing it shows us its truth: the inter.
Sloterdijk favors art practices that relate precisely by resisting their own rules. That explains his emphasis on surrealism in his Tate lecture. More than any other art “style,” surrealism – and especially Dalì – is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive.
In the past fifteen years these elements have been conceptualized in art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a, 2003b, 2004a).28 Concepts such as “relational architecture” (Rafael
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Lozano-Hemmer) have been invented to express the binding force of installations in public space. More than dropping an art object in open space, intermedial art practices reflect upon and intend to transform the way people relate to each other via art. It is no longer art in public space, but art as public space.
The consequences for the acceptance of a mediological condition based on generosity “are far reaching in the moral domain” (SIII:
807) because freedom and a sense of justice can no longer be understood “without the phantasm of equality of all with regard to luxury in material terms” (SIII: 820). Ex negative, this phantasm focuses Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy. “We are entering an era of new games of enlightenment” (VM: 63). Their target is aesthetic reflectivity. In a Deleuzean turn, this means that being rooted in media (i.e. radical mediocrity) has to be enlightened to the point of becoming an enlightened rhizomatic inter. No roots, just routes. This “conversion” has far-reaching anthropological implications. Against the background of the intended megalopsychia, creativity no longer resides in, but in-between individuals. Creativity is first and foremost relational. Cooperation, participation, and interaction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to the fore in creativity.
NOTES
1. See: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_
of_action/.
2. It is this concept of the “deinon” that Heidegger takes from Hölderlin’s work. He transformed it into das Unheimliche (uncanny).
See Heidegger (1982: 150).
3. Alongside the three volumes of Sphären – I. Blasen, II. Globen, III. Schäume [SI,SII,SIII] – he published Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and its aesthetico-political implications more specifically. Since there are no published translations available yet, all quotes are my translations.
4. See Sloterdijk [NG] (2001: 164–6); Sloterdijk and Heinrichs [ST]
(2001: 291).
5. In his Tate lecture Sloterdijk himself translates the German
“Explikation” as “explicitation”: to unfold in the sense of explicitly making things.
6. In Im selben Boot. Versuch über Hyperpolitik, Sloterdijk makes a distinction between megalomania and megalopathia. Aristotle transformed Alexandre the Great’s megalomania into megalopathia as a lived experience that engenders big questions. The polis has become part of global space. For two millennia megalopathia has been philosophy’s raison d’être. See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). See also SII: 303, n. 130. He refines this concept in later interviews by defining late modern philosophy as megalo-depressive, as
CULTURAL POLITICS377 RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY
an inter-pathology or inter-mania. See the Alliez article in this volume, pp. 307–26. It is this “inter” that I will explore in this article.
7. Nietzsche first came to the fore in Critique of Cynical Reason in which he has the highest reference index, followed by Diogenes, Marx, Freud, and Hitler. Thinker on Stage, Nietzsche’s Materialism (1989) is fully focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pages of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijk’s verbal avalanche is spiced with Nietzschean phrases updated by references to French neo-Nietzschean thinkers.
8. The word “Inter-esse” is German for “interest.” However, it also means “to be interested in.” In a philosophical context this connotation is used in a literal sense: being (esse) in between (inter).
9. Lyotard is mentioned only once in Sphären together with Badiou and other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for their
“political infinitism” (SII: 410). I come back to this point in the last paragraph of this section.
10. See the concluding remarks of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).
11. Neither is Negri and Hardt’s Empire, their name for the Crystal Palace. Their proposal is rejected by Sloterdijk as too totalitarian a project for “revolutionary” ends (SIII: 825).
12. See the interview with Éric Alliez, this volume, pp. 307–26.
13. Sloterdijk by the way does not join the debate. The three are waiting in vain at the end of the book.
14. He refers for this method to Günther Anders (1980). See also NG: 362.
15. The essay “What is solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall?” has as its subtitle “A notice on critical and exaggerated/hyperbolic (übertriebene) reason” (NG: 235).
16. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusively to Michel Foucault, with just an incidental remark on Derrida. But in Sphären Foucault is sidelined by Kristeva, and even more by Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then definitely Sloterdijk’s most favored traveling companions.
17. In this text Lyotard deals with different kinds of literary genres.
18. Here a parallel can be drawn with Fatal Strategies (1983) by Jean Baudrillard, published in the same year as Critique of Cynical Reason. The latter criticizes dialectical thinking too and replaces sublation with excess. At the very beginning of this text, the end of dialectics is proclaimed and the advent of an era envisaged, the dynamics of which will no longer be ruled by dialectical sublation. It is the logic of excess that rules.
19. For me the enigmatic expression “eine totale Mitte” is a synonym for “radical mediocrity” that will be explored in the next paragraph.
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20. See www.petersloterdijk.net/german/topoi/stadtenergetik.
html.
21. It is, however, surprising that he does not mention Kristeva’s nondiscursive “semiotikè” in order to stress the importance of the acoustic-tactile embedding of desire that subverts its discursive articulation.
22. See the writings of the present director of the McLuhan Institute:
Derrick de Kerckhove (1997: 4–6).
23. Sloterdijk understands spherology as a “delightenment”
(Abklärung), i.e. a dis-enlightenment of our burdened existence.
The delight of wine tasting – in which context the term Abklärung means “clarification” – is implied in this spherological
“decanting” (SV: 122–3).
24. This is the topic of another “trans-Heideggerian“ Nancy (2002).
See Oosterling (2005a).
25. In Heideggerian terms, the ephemeral interest as an indifferent attitude needs to be transformed to existential inter-esse. See (1978: 347). See also Being and Time, o.c., p. 124.
26. Utero-topically as a “community art” analogous to the group as utero-tope [Uterotop] (SIII: 392); thermo-topically in the guise of Beuys’s work of art The honeypump (SIII: 404) that reminds us of a “sweet life”; as an example for the “era of the uplifting”
that can be seen as “a critique of ‘heavy’ reason” (SIII: 733).
27. His lecture at the Tate focuses mainly on surrealism.
28. The outcome of this research can be found at www2.eur.nl/fw/
cfk (accessed 12/5/06).
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