Review by Wim Nijenhuis

Peter Sloterdijk: Medien-Zeit

In the Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) Sloterdijk connected the modern 'cynic' Nietzsche to the asocial Diogenes, who replied to Plato's subtle theory of Eros by masturbating in plain public. Sloterdijk dubbed this active polemic with Reason 'kynicism'.
In Eurotaoïsmus (1989) he entered into a new showdown, this time with the philosophy of Heidegger, whose theory of Gelassenheit he praised as a third alternative to dissatisfaction with the world, in opposition to the other two: Marxism and critical theory.

For Sloterdijk such resignation is a step toward the positivisation of cynicism. It can be positive on the condition that the current social situation is described in terms other than those of class struggle and progress. He introduces the post-modern condition as a sort of addiction to process. The end of history and the death of utopias have left us in a process of furious automatic development driven by technological innovations and a permanently perverted desire to improve the world.

In this world process we cannot identify ourselves as heroes of history (i.e. avant-garde), but only as 'fools of process', carried along willy-nilly. In the wake of Ernst Jüngers' Totale Mobilmachung, progress is (cynically) described as mobilisation: that is, acceleration, influenced by the capitalisation of time-gain; escalation of the former, through the raising of the bid of competition; and increased capabilities, influenced by organisational rationalisation and technological innovation. Sloterdijk finds critical theory and Marxism complicit with all this, and argues for a third path: a 'criticism of political kinetics'.

The fault is to be found not in the goal, but in mobilisation and speed themselves. By crossing the philosophy of Heidegger with the language of the Tao, he hopes to strip Freiburg Theory of its nationalist and fascist fallacies. He sees an Asian-tinged stoicism as the way to bring this furious movement to a pause, so that we may speak 'the language of demobilisation'.

It is not surprising that a philosopher who wishes to dissociate himself from the Enlightenment and move beyond Kant (source of inspiration for the engineering system), who declares Hegel and his dialectical history of the development of consciousness bankrupt, and who accuses Marxism and critical theory of complicity with a hopeless system which generates catastrophe after catastrophe without prospect of a solution in its own terms, should rethink the metaphysical tradition which has led to technological mobilisation all the way down to its religious roots.

Nor is it surprising that in this quest he seeks a structural (metaphysical) dissidence in the past that would be practicable in the present. He seeks the answer in Gnosis. This is a path followed by many philosophers and artists before him: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cioran, Beckett and Baudrillard. Without exaggerating, we may say that a discussion is underway regarding the dissidence potential of the language of Gnosis in the post-historical media age. Within this debate Sloterdijk's position is that a new 'epoch-making' revolution is possible, and that, analogous to Gnosis in the past, it must come from an individual revolution of the soul. His study of Gnosis resulted in a massive work published in 1993 with T. H. Macho, entitled Weltrevolution der Seele, Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis. The book is not an attempt at a religious-historic consideration of a phenomenon of the past, but rather a collection of texts from past and present which offer a sense of what Gnosis could mean today. This meaning is more closely explained in a book published shortly afterward, Weltfremdheit. Sloterdijk's thesis on unworldliness is that, for the first time in history, Gnosis has formulated a dualistic principle which makes it possible to live in this world without being of this world.

The Gnosis investigation provides Sloterdijk with a set of instruments for making a diagnosis of our age which demonstrates that our culture displays signs of a sort of neo-Gnostic turn. After two hundred years of attachment to the world, many people are now turning away from it and thereby spontaneously following the second path of Gnosis. We may read these signs in cynicism, indifference, drug use, the renaissance of Eastern religions, neo-shamanism, the popularity of the Santo Domingo de Silos monks' choir, raves and Ecstasy.

Sloterdijk's Medien-Zeit must be read against this background. The summarising catchphrase for this book is: a politics of time. In its nineteenth-century definition, politics is bound in the first place to a territorial condition, namely the nation state. This implies a community which is determined by establishment on a circumscribed terrain, relationships of blood and proximity, conflict regulation by means of territorially-bound administration of law, political representation, and the medial circulation of the words of power from an administrative centre. With respect to the last, only the Christian church, or religion in general, has succeeded over the centuries in circulating words of power not reducible to the territory of the nation state. The modern global media have taken over this characteristic of religious communicative systems. Why a politics of time? In the nation states, indeed in the form of sedentary settlement, humans' fundamentally nomadic condition has given way to timeliness. The spatially-fixed community of blood relations and proximity saved the anthropological not-yet, or not-anymore, character of humanity by means of evolution over time, which led in the 18th century to the hypothesis of history as linear progression. Proceeding from the nomadic condition, the current debate about the end of history thus introduces a problem for Sloterdijk.

In this forcefield of world, time and religion Sloterdijk situates his first essay, which deals with the metaphysics of the action film and the films Terminator I and II in particular. He sees the modern action film as a sort of experimental repetition of prehistoric times, which shows through advanced filmic means how humanity has freed itself from nature via pursuit, flight, turning and shooting back. These are all forms of the distancing which makes it possible for the social inner space of a group to exist. The space between followers and leaders and the throwing distance of stones and spears determined the length of distance. These films ultimately show the primary mechanisms which nation states are heir to.

The second characteristic of the action film has to do with the rush of the strike, which has to do with termination, which comes down to making a hole where there was previously something full, obstinate and wrong. What distinguishes the terminator syndrome from everyday artillery nihilism, however, is the metaphysical addition that a couple of direct hits can be responsible for the salvation of humanity, read: the salvation of the future. Sloterdijk reads a violent-messianistic structure in the Terminator films: the one who successfully shoots at the one who threatens to shoot at everything becomes a Saviour, with the firearm as signifier of Salvation. Here a general text from the Gospels is crossed with the most brazen literature of violence. But what gospel is propagated by the author, James Cameron?

According to Sloterdijk, the cyborgs sent from the hereafter are nothing else than machine angels stuck in the anal phase: their passion is the reduction of the opponent to rubble and waste. In Terminator II, on the other hand, we see Media of God, angelic machines, archangels; who, like Gabriel, have a mission. But despite their power, these machine heroes, and also little John (saviour of the world), are ultimately subordinate to the central figure of the mother. In the structural respect she is the heroine of the story. In the form of the child and the missionary machine the man is notably absent, and all lines of force converge in the uterus and spirit of the mother, the model of the new autonomous American woman, who becomes the keeper of the future. Here Cameron proclaims a sort of bio-matriarchal neo-religion. This is ultimately the same gesture used in the past by the Roman Catholic Church to counter Gnosis, directed towards the father figure and the breakdown of blood relation by means of the figure of Mary, Mother of God. And in Mary's wake, subsequently, there appeared territory, the family, blood relation, race...

In his examination of essayism in the media age, Sloterdijk attempts to determine a new role for the essay. The essay is a cultivated way of dealing with the undetermined. It is not an intellectual performance, nor an attempt to propound anything. In the first place the essay has a parrying function. Its intention is thus fundamentally different from that of a metaphysical construction. Two tasks are reserved for the essay. The first has to do with the diagnostics of time, concerned with the assessment of a chance. The second has to do with the status of the essay in the light of multidimensional hypertext. With electronic media and the compression of information which is possible on cdrom, book-form rationality has had its day. The development of hypertext spells catastrophe for the linear story structure, which is no match for the new forms of branched and noded knowledge. Faith in argument and evidence thus decline; they are too long-winded. Essayism becomes the art of selection, decision, elimination, and making space within an oversaturated sphere of information. The essayist becomes a sort of lumberjack and navigator, an infonaut, who advises readers which path to follow by means of the cloudy spheres of the hyperessay, of which Walter Benjamin, Paul Valery and Borges were the pioneers.

The third and last essay in Medien-Zeit addresses the role of the information media within a synchronised world community. The most important condition of the social, according to Sloterdijk, is the communicative inner world of the group, which complements a violent distance towards the outside world.

Internally, groups were and are determined by the sonosphere, a space in which the voices of the group-mates can be heard and those of the ancestors can be remembered. The sphere of the natural voices is limited by hearing distance and memory time. Imperial world empires have only been possible on the condition that the acoustic limitation of the social sonosphere was lifted, through the conversion of direct communication into information at a distance through the medium of writing, which also disseminated the word of power.

This status of classical imperial writing was greedily taken advantage of, first by the Church and later by philosophy. The Bible and the book derive their power from the splendour of a Divine or Imperial voice whispering messages from the centre of the world. Within this structure religion followed wordly power and complemented the bond of authority with a message of redemption. It is this communicative double structure which has occupied the inner space of society for centuries. The circulating messages were the instrument of a demiurgic politics, because they provided the conceptual material with which a society could imagine itself a society. A society is the effect of the internalisation of the voices which have been put into writing, which guarantees a sonospheric coherence.

The United States, in particular, has succeeded in making use of the media so that this sonosphere is dissociated from territory, in order to create a world sound and a world imaginary by means of popular music. From this it may be inferred that the restrictions of nation states can be conquered through the media. If nationality has become an anachronism and world community a necessity, then according to Sloterdijk, the creation of the latter is possible solely via the mass media. Shaping a world society through mass media means combining regional and traditional cultures into a horizon of international time, through which currents from the past can be guided into a common current of the future. Thus the media become the fate-determining instrument of the global politics of the future. In this light, says Sloterdijk, to speak of the end of the future and the death of utopia is harmful and self-destructive, because hopelessness is only a peripheral phenomenon of the current transition phase.

The instantaneousness of global news reporting detaches the masses from tradition and places them in a world characterised by synchronicity. The power of instantaneous news is that all the media users on the planet can be virtually involved in it. The drawback is the news market's selective preference for accidents, scandals and catastrophe.

Writing was the medium of a social form which grouped a coherent sphere around a centre. The mass media, by contrast, do not work with centrally dictated sentences or a monopoly on the transmitters. In this respect they embody the loss of the centre of information, but this does not automatically mean that they have lost the capacity for missionary work along with it. Even empty messages still carry the admittedly broken truth of this, as is apparent in the capacity of (popular) music to occupy the interior of the global sonosphere. The power of this music to address everyone lies in its meaninglessness. A second group which is given its coherence by the media despite the absence of a centre is the culture of experts, which thanks to electronics takes part in an eternally lasting conference.

What is problematic about the media-dependent world community, however, is the urgent situation caused by instantaneousness. Sloterdijk argues that despite the media's capitalisation on accident, disaster and scandal, politics is being challenged to provide a surplus of good news, which he considers the task of political panic management. In his opinion the project of the modern world will depend upon this, because in the past too this project owed its success to the advertising value of good news and the aura of success. All challenges to information technology presently focus on the question of whether the world society will be able to produce good news in sufficient measure.

For Sloterdijk the politics of time is thus not only a question of stoicism and patience, as Florian Rötzer imputes to him in Kunstforum (#27(1994)), but also the forcing of a (proper) future in the field of representation. In this sense, then, against his own better judgement, Sloterdijk continues to believe in the salvation of the world by the acting subject.


Translation: Laura Marz


Peter Sloterdjik Medien-Zeit
Cantz-Verlag Stuttgart, 1993
ISBN 3 89322 586 2 German Text, 104 pp.