On Background Radiation (in a Cultural-Philosophical Sense)

The Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

Readers may recall the big hoo-ha created by physicists Sokal and Bricmont back in the late '90s when they criticised (and indeed mocked) philosophers and postmodern theorists for their misuse - as they saw it - of very precise scientific and mathematical concepts. 

 

Their book - first published in French as Impostures intellectuelles (1997) - polarized opinion, with those in the scientific community largely supportive, whilst opponents in the humanities argued that Sokal and Bricmont lacked understanding of the work they subjected to analysis and of how concepts are malleable and can thus be subtly (and sometimes playfully) reworked within different contexts and that doing so isn't necessarily a sign of charlatanism, ignorance, or pretension on behalf of thinkers such Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Irigaray. 

 

Nor is this reworking simply a sign of cognitive relativism and anti-scientific prejudice within European philosophy (though that's not to deny that such may exist). Using scientific terminology within a non-scientific context doesn't deny the original technical meaning, it expands the meaning and/or transfers it into a new environment (the terms are revealed as having a metaphorical component and capacity). 

 

Sokal and Bricmont may find this peculiarly offensive for a number of reasons, but then, on the other hand, some of us may find their linguistic puritanism and Francophobia equally objectionable. As Derrida rightly pointed out at the time, science and philosophy have long discussed their differences, but never with such an ugly emphasis placed on the nationality of individuals. 

 

(Derrida also stated, for the record, that there was neither relativism nor a naive rejection of reason in his work and hoped that in the future the debate might be pursued more seriously and with greater dignity: "at the level of the issues involved" [1].) 

 

 

II.                  

 

So why did I bring all this up once again? Well, because I have just been reading an interview with Peter Sloterdijk in which he mentions his fondness for the concept of background radiation ... 

 

Now, as Sokal and Bricmont would be quick to point out, this is a scientific term which refers to a measure of the ionising radiation present in the environment at a particular location originating from a variety of sources, both natural and artificial.

 

And as I'm sure they'd be equally quick to point out, Sloterdijk is a philosopher and cultural theorist - not a physicist - and, worse, he's a German thinker in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, so really shouldn't be allowed to use the concept of background radiation at all. 

 

Nevertheless, use it he does and in his own unique way which, hopefully, illustrates what I was saying above:

"I really like the concept of 'background radiation', especially applied to cultural structures. Astrophysicists may rack their brains about what background radiation means in cosmological terms. However, that there is something like cultural radiation from a darkened background - patterns of order that are so deeply hidden in the oldest things, so strongly embedded in the sediment of what we think is self-evident that they seem to escape any reflection [...]" [2]

 

As an interesting example of this cultural background radiation, Sloterdijk points to the fact we still use a technique of temporal ordering that was first developed in ancient Babylon:

 

"We live in the Babylonian week apparently naturally, without thinking that it was predicated on a theology of the Heavenly Seven, that is, on a kind of septemtheism, which means the worship of seven deities. The seven day week is a cultural creation because, unlike the day, the month and the year, it has no cosmic basis, but represents a freely made decision that fixes the arrangement of social time." [3] 

 

In sum: Sloterdijk nicely demonstrates how you can borrow a term from one discipline and redefine it within another - without in any way harming the original meaning or preventing its continued usage by others.

 

Notes 

[1] See Jacques Derrida, 'Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious', originally published in Le Monde, this short text can be found in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 70-72. It can also be found on Reddit by clicking here. 

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'With the Babble of Babylon in the Background', interview with Manfred Osten, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 313-14.

       

[3] Ibid., p. 314.  

Aujourd’hui, Juliette Gréco est morte

Juliette Gréco by Erwin Blumenfeld (1951)

 

 

Juliette Gréco - the face (and voice) of chic postwar Paris and muse to numerous Left-Bank poets and philosophers, including Jacques Prévert and Jean-Paul Sartre - died today, aged 93, and, despite the fact she refused to collaborate on Malcolm's Paris project (I only sing in French), that's still sad news for all of us who loved everything about her; from her style to the fact she was an Aquarian.

 

 

Play: La Javanaise - a song originally written and composed by Serge Gainsbourg for Juliette Gréco in 1962, after they had spent the evening together listening to records and drinking champagne. It was released as a single in March 1963 (with Gainsbourg's own interpretation of the song as the B-side). Click here to listen, or here to watch her performing the song on French TV in 1972.      

On the Backs of Tigers

Henri Rousseau: Traumgarten

 

 

The above work by French post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau, reminds me of something Nietzsche wrote in one of his early essays on man as a being who clings on the back of a tiger [1]. 

 

In other words, contrary to idealists for whom "there is no dark underbelly that empowers and sometimes devours us" [2], Nietzsche rejects the idea that man stands exclusively on the firm ground of moral rationalism and is fully responsible for his actions.      

 

It's an interesting metaphor. And I agree that most people know very little of their own nature, prefering to remain within the fantasies of a pristine consciousness; "aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibres" [3].  

 

Having said that, I don't think the unconscious is home only to wild beasts, monsters, and heaps of excrement. Like D. H. Lawrence, I'm sure there are also plenty of "lovely spirits in the anterior regions of our being" [4]. 

 

Nevertheless, push comes to shove and "man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him" and a tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, mein herr ...[5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 80.

 

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought', conversation with Ulrich Raulff, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 279. 

 

[3] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', Philosophy and Truth, p. 80.    

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 9. 

[5] See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ('The Convalescent') and then go listen to the brilliant Kander and Ebb song 'Mein Herr', from the musical Cabaret (1966): click here for Liza Minnelli's unbeatable performance of the song in the film version, dir. Bob Fosse (1972). 

Amechania

Reworked image from

A Guide on Greek Mythology 

by chubbyeol_jones on wattpad.com

I. Help!

 

In an interview with Playboy in 1980, John Lennon confessed that far from being simply a commercially upbeat number, the song that served as the title track for both a 1965 feature film and album was, in fact, a genuine (if subconscious) cri de couer from someone who felt he was no longer in control of events following the Beatles' rise to global superstardom: 'I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.'*

 

Funnily enough, after 1,634 days in Essex exile caring for my mother (who is in her 90s and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's) - that's 1,634 days continuously, without a break, and without any professional assistance, training, or experience - I understand exactly how Lennon felt ...

When I was younger, so much younger than today

I never needed anybody's help in any way

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self-assured ...

 

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways

My independence seems to vanish in the haze ...

 

Yep, that's about it - you nailed it John!

 

And although I do appreciate the Little Greek being 'round (most of the time), I'm increasingly obliged to turn to the Ancient Greeks for extra support when I'm feeling down ...

II. Aμηχανία

 

When I say the Ancient Greeks, I mean in particular the Sophists; i.e. those teachers in the fifth and fourth centuries BC who specialised in subjects including rhetoric, music, and mathematics and instructed young men in the art of virtue and how to live to their full potential.

 

The Sophists were particularly interested in providing philosophical protection against the feeling of helplessness; i.e., a dreadful feeling of being overwhelmed by events outside of one's control: 

 

"Suddenly all the trappings of competence [and agency] we have built up against the blows of fate seem useless, and from one moment to the next people sink back into a state of almost archaic helplessness."**

Naturally, the Sophists had a name for this feeling of powerlessness - amechania - and, whilst little discussed today within philosophy, it was one of the most important concepts within ancient ethics: "It literally describes the lack of mechané, which means the cunning or the device [...] we can use to get out of a situation of existential difficulties ..." [266]  

 

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whom I'm quoting here, goes on to explain:

 

"Amechania describes the situation in which human beings are denied what the Greeks believed made them wholly human, that is, the ability to retaliate against attacks, being equipped with options for action or, as we would say today, being in full control of their agency. As soon as people sink into amechania, they land in a situation that just doesn't seem appropriate for human beings. Ancient Sophism thought more profoundly on this point than the Academy. According to Sophism, the meaning of all training, both spiritual and physical, is that people react against the extreme situation of amechania [...]" [266-67] 

 

Sloterdijk concludes:

"The legacy of Sophism became part of Stoical ethics that wanted to develop human beings as creatures that would never be helpless. This ethics is based on the postulate that humans should always be able to do something, even in situations in which the only possible thing they can do is to remain calm and composed." [267]

- Or break up the band ...

 

 

Notes 

* To read David Sheff's September 1980 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (published in the January 1981 issue of Playboy), click here. The section in which he discusses writing 'Help!' is on page 3.

 

** Peter Sloterdijk, 'Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought', a conversation with Ulrich Raulff, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 266. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. 

 

Play: The Beatles, 'Help!', single released (July 1965) from the album of the same name (Parlophone, August 1965). The song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded 13 April, 1965. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing. A black and white promotional film, dir. Joseph McGrath, was made in November 1965 for use on a Top of the Pops end of the year special: click here. 

 

News in the Age of Coronavirus

 

 

My mother - though not so much my father, who was really only interested in sports - loved to watch news and discussion programmes and I grew up in the company of political journalists and broadcasters such as Brian Walden and Robin Day.

 

And even until just a few years ago, I would regularly watch the Channel 4 News or Newsnight. But then something changed. I'm not sure exactly what, or when, but something definitely changed and I began to increasingly sigh and roll my eyes when watching. Now I just don't bother, I simply switch over or switch off - the ultimate act of disconnect and something which, as a lover of TV, I am loath to do.

 

Something similar has also happened between myself and the world of printed news. There was a time, for example, when I would actually buy (and read) The Guardian. But that's no longer possible, despite the fact that they still, even now, employ some excellent columnists, such as Marina Hyde.  

       

The sad fact is that almost all of the entire mainstream media has become viscerally objectionable in the last decade. Not least in their coverage of the coronavirus pandemic which has been a constant stream of government propaganda and scare-mongering. If and when this (so-called) Covid crisis is over, it won't just be our politicians who will be obliged to hang their heads in shame and resign, but every journalist and news reporter who has been an active participant in the incitement system. 

 

What Peter Sloterdijk once said in an interview about the global media's complicity with terror, can now be paraphrased about their collusion with governments vis-à-vis the Covid-19 conspiracy (i.e., the attempt to manipulate and exploit a disease and people's fear of falling ill and dying): 

As soon as there is news about coronavirus - the rate of infection has increased, for example - journalists have to be clearly aware of their responsibility. Should they simply pass on the information, should they enhance it in some manner, or should they decide to play down the story and effectively put it in quarantine (an excellent method formerly used to avoid mass panic). Perhaps the viral nature of our contemporary media is more dangerous than Covid-19 itself, because it can create chaos in the social, political, and economic systems of a society and rapidly spread hysteria in entire populations. Unfortunately, the complicity between global media and this pandemic has now become so well hamonised over the last eight months or so that we have to speak of genuine collusion and effective co-dependency. At some point we have to say openly: you, the journalists, are the dealers in this game.*

 

 

* See: Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Marglois, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 192-201. The paragraph I'm part-quoting, part-paraphrasing is on pp. 196-97 and begins "A thought experiment could be useful here."

 

For a related post to this one, click here.           

In Praise of Fighters: At the Gym and on the Battlefield with D. H. Lawrence

George Rodger's famous photo taken in Southern Sudan (1949) 

of a Nuba wrestling champion being carried victorious upon 

the shoulders of a friend - just the kind of young fighters 

D. H. Lawrence (and Leni Riefenstahl) swooned over  

georgerodgerphotographs.com

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence has a rather romantic understanding of combat in the heroic age before it became an affair entirely of machines and abstraction; when men still fought up close and personal with their enemy and didn't kill from a distance by simply pulling a trigger or pressing a button, devoid of all emotion; when men still had "all the old natural courage" [a] and were individual fighters, not mechanical-units.

In his essay 'Education of the People', for example, he riffs on what he terms the "profound motive of battle" [b], recalling its Latin etymology, battualia, meaning the physical exercise undertaken by those training to be soldiers or gladiators. You shouldn't go to the gym simply to keep fit - Lawrence regards this as a semi-pathological form of masturbation - but to reawaken the centres of volition located in the spine and prepare for battle:

 

"Not Mons or Ypres of course. Ah, the horror of machine explosions! But living, naked battle, flesh to flesh contest. Fierce, tense struggle of man with man, struggle to the death. That is the spirit of the gymnasium. " [158] 

 

That might sound terribly appealing to some people, but it's hard to imagine modern gyms promoting fierce, unrelenting, honourable contest, when they pride themselves on offering fun, community and fitness in a safe and friendly environment. And it's even more difficult to imagine modern parents sending their sons off to the gym so that they can be set against one another like young bantam cocks:

"Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight with gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on, let it be fine balanced contest in skill and fierce pride. Egg them on, and look on the black eye and the bloody nose as insignia of honour [...]

      Bring out the foils and teach fencing. Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest. And praise the wounds. And praise the valour that will be killed rather than yield. Better fierce and unyielding death than our degraded creeping life." [158-59]  

 

And the purpose of this rousing of the old male spirit in the young is, of course, to produce men who are superb and godlike fighters who, in their willingness to strip naked and fight to the death, can experience a great crisis of being. To quote Lawrence at length once more:

 

"What does death matter, if a man die in a flame of passionate conflict. He goes to heaven as the ancients said: somehow, somewhere his soul is at rest, for death is to him a passional consummation. But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a sardine: horrible and monstrous abnormality. The soul should leap fiery into death, a consummation. Then nothing is lost." [159]

 

For Lawrence, then, war can be justified - and, indeed, glorified - providing it's an actual fight and not a mechanical slaughter or virtual game; "a sheer immediate conflict of physical men" [159]. That is to say, so long as it's a primal form of passion, rather than idealism or a sordid commercial-industrial consideration. What we should do - being master of our own inventions - is "blow all guns and explosives and poison gases sky-high" [160].     

But such a radical form of disarmament isn't tied to pacifism, obviously: Lawrence doesn't pretend you can (or should wish to) abolish war; he's still happy to send young men off to fight "armed with swords and shields" so that they may enjoy "a rare old lively scrap, such as the heart can rejoice in" [161]. 

 

And Lawrence is convinced that if the British set a lead here, the rest of the world will follow; that they too will destroy all their mechanical weapons in an act of reckless defiant sanity and agree to meet their enemy face to face and in their own skin. The whole world would at once give a great sigh of relief, says Lawrence; for there's "nothing which every man would be so glad to think had vanished out of the world as guns, explosives, and poison gases" [160].

II. 

If Lawrence's essay received very little serious consideration in 1920 (in fact, it wasn't even published until 1936), it's now inconceivable that our politicians and military commanders would give his work any thought whatsoever. 

 

For the fact is, casualties in war have become increasingly unacceptable to the Western powers and the aim today is to exterminate the enemy as quickly, cleanly, and as clinically as possible without suffering any undue losses from amongst one's own forces. War is now conceived as not only a non-contact sport, but a bloodless one as well, to be fought with the most sophisticated and smartest of technology. It's become, essentially, a computerised form of pest control.      

And whilst Saddam Hussein was right to taunt the Americans on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War that they were a people unable to bear the loss of 10,000 soldiers in one battle, there's a practical reason for this beyond squeamishness, cowardice, or an inability to cope with loss, and it's to do with bio-politics. As Peter Sloterdijk notes, the contemporary method of waging war "suits societies with low biological reproductivity because on our side nowadays we have no sons to squander" [c].   

Thus, whilst Lawrence likes to blame moral idealism for the fact that we in the West have lost our desire to fight in the old sense of the word and turned into madmen and monsters who, in the name of Love, drop bombs on an unseen enemy "hoping to scatter a million bits of indiscriminate flesh" [162], it probably has as much to do with a sharply declining fertility rate.       

Notes

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'With the Guns', Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 83.

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 158. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the text. 

[c] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Marglois, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 196.

For a related post to this one, click here. 

In Memory of Mascha Kaléko

Google Doodle of Mascha Kaléko by Ramona Ring

I. 

I must admit, I'm not a big fan of Google Doodles; i.e., the decorative changes made to the Google logo on their homepage in order to mark a wide range of anniversaries and events and memorialise the lives of dead artists, scientists, and other figures whom Google deem it appropriate that we should know (and presumably care) about.

Having said that, I was glad to see today's Doodle by the German illustrator Ramona Ring celebrating the life and work of the German-language poet Mascha Kaléko ...

II.

Kaléko quickly found success as a young poet in Berlin's avant-garde literary scene in the late-1920s and early-30s and her work captures something of the uniquely exhilarating - and uniquely monstrous - spirit of those times, as well as the daily life of ordinary citizens.

Her first collection - Das lyrische Stenogrammheft - was published in the same month that Hitler was appointed Chancellor (January 1933) and was soon subjected to Nazi censorship. Nevertheless, the following year, she published her second book, Kleines Lesebuch für Grosse.

Obviously, it would not have been wise as a Jewish woman to have stayed in her adopted homeland (Kaléko was born in what is now southern Poland) long after this date. For it was not only within her dreams that a storm was brewing. And so, in 1938, she fled Germany and emigrated to the US with her husband and child.

It wasn't until the end of the war, however, that Kaléko finally published her third volume of poetry, Verse für Zeitgenossen (1945). And it wasn't until 1956 that she could finally face visiting Berlin.

She returned to the city again in 1959, when she was awarded the Berliner Kunstpreis for literature, only to turn it down when she discovered that one of the judges - Hans Egon Holthusen, himself a poet and literary scholar - was also a former Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS.

That same year, she moved to Israel, where she continued to write poetry until her death in 1975. 

 

One of my favourite poems of hers is entitled Mein schönstes Gedicht and contains the following verse:

Mein schönstes Gedicht,
Ich schrieb es nicht.
Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es.
Ich schwieg es.

Which we might translate into English as:

My loveliest poem,
I didn't write it.
It rose from the deepest depths.
I silenced it.

 

 
Notes

Sadly, Mascha Kaléko remains little known in the English-speaking world and it wasn't until fairly recently that a representative selection of her poems became available in book form. See: No matter where I travel, I come to Nowhereland: the Poetry of Mascha Kaléko, trans. Andreas Nolte, (The University of Vermont, 2010). 
   

Photo of Mascha Kaléko (1933)    

Evolution as a Vaudeville of Forms: Notes on Genetic Drift and Ontological Seasickness

Peter Sloterdijk by Martin Sjardijn 

Oil on canvas (21.7 x 23.6 inches) 

saatchiart.com

  

 

I.

 

Say the word drift to me and, being a child of '68, I automatically think of Guy Debord's revolutionary theory of la dérive (1956) - defined by him as a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society. 

 

Basically, it's a random stroll through city streets, with no point or purpose and no fixed or final destination, leading to chance discoveries and encounters with strangers. The hope is that situations will arise from out of these encounters and from one's own disorientation and that one will also be able to slowly build up a new psychogeographical map of an otherwise alienating environment. 

 

For Debord and friends, the dérive was a necessary technique to combat the increasingly predetermined and boring experience of life lived within the world of capitalism and consumer culture, or what he termed the société du spectacle. 

 

But say the word drift to a biologist, however, and they think of something entirely different ...

 

 

II.

 

Genetic drift - in the simplest of all possible nutshells - is a change in the gene pool due to a random event (or series of events) rather than natural (non-random) selection. 

 

For some biologists, it plays a relatively minor role in evolution compared to the latter. But others, such as the Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura, argue that most evolutionary changes at the molecular level - and most of the variation within and between species - are due to genetic drift acting on neutral mutations.

 

I suppose the concept of genetic drift excites philosophically for much the same reason as punctuated equilibrium (contra phyletic gradualism) excites; namely, because it is about contingency and chance rather than a slowly unfolding form of deterministic logic. This may not make it true - but it makes it sexier and more seductive to people like me. 

 

 

III.

 

Peter Sloterdijk is also excited by the thought of genetic drift, as we can see in the following passage:

 

"We can't really imagine today how shocking the idea once was that God did not conceive the species, and that neither the archetypal content of a species nor its physical appearance are fixed once and for all. That is the real shock of the nineteenth century: the genetic drift, the idea that the original images of humans and beasts, of plants and everything that grows and blossoms, are not permanently fixed but drift in evolution, as we say today. That is worse than the worst seasickness because it affects ontological forms, as it were. When the species drift we become ontologically seasick - suddenly we have to watch fish becoming amphibians and the latter becming terrestrial animals; we witness a mammoth transforming into an elephant, and wolves turning into dogs - and all sorts of other monstrosities."

 

This is not just evolution as a kind of freak show, as Thomas Macho suggests, but as a vaudeville of forms, and evolutionary drift puts an end to all ontological security and comfort - God is dead, "because he is no longer any good as a guarantor of the species". 

 

Sloterdijk continues:  

 

"No Catholic defence front can change that, and humanism can only offer a weak alternative in this respect. We can see this quite clearly in the current genetics debate, with Catholics and old-fashioned humanists very heavily over-represented. They think it is a good idea to erect a corral round the human gene and shoot at everybody who tries to change it in some way. The unfortunate thing about this issue is that normal reproduction has long since been exposed for contributing to species drift, and every normal sexual act among humans infinitesimally advances this drifting. We must finally realise that the potential of the genus per se is monstrous. In fact, anthropology is only possibe now as a branch of general monstrology."    

 

This, it seems to me, is a vital issue, as we flow with the movement of our culture towards an age in which biology will have ever-greater importance; allowing us not only to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but prune and shape the Tree of Life itself. In future, evolutionary drift will increasingly be subject to bio-technology and human intervention, turning existence into an experimental field.

 

Of course, this will lead to endless ethical debates, but let's not give too much time to those reactionaries living in a hothouse of moral overexcitement. For it's difficult "to stay in such hyper-moral hothouses for long without getting breathless. If you're interested in a cultured style of living, you should protect the house of being from overheating" - if you catch my drift.  

 

 

Notes

 

Guy Debord, 'Theory of the Dérive' (1956): click here to read on Situationist International Online. 

 

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts', a conversation with Thomas Macho, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 82-105. Lines quoted are on pp. 97, 98, and 105. 

 

This post is for Andy Greenfield, who kindly advised me on it.  

Cars (Have You Ever Stopped to Think Who's the Slave and Who's the Master?)

Sleeve for the single 'Cars' by Gary Numan 
from the album The Pleasure Principle  (Beggars Banquet, 1979) 

Click here to play on YouTube

 

I. 

 

After a recent post, someone sent me the following email:

'I don't know who Peter Sloterdijk is, but, one thing's for sure, this so-called philosopher knows nothing about the history of horses, nor how they are still being exploited and abused by human beings even today - particularly those within the racing industry. His overly-fanciful observation on post-historical horses leading lives of leisure at their own pace may have been intended to be amusing, but it ultimately serves to distract from the continuing cruelty and hardship faced by many animals. I suspect this well-paid German professor spends more time riding around in a BMW than he does caring for horses, so should stick to speaking of what he knows - money and machines!'

 

Now, I don't know if my correspondent's suspicions are correct, but, funny enough, Sloterdijk does quite often speak about cars and their cultural and philosophical significance; as symbols, as commodities, as expressions of identity, etc.

 

II.

 

In a 1995 interview [1], for example, he argues that the driver and motor vehicle form a unity in much the same way as previously man and horse formed a unity, as symbolised by the figure of the centaur; that man is always imagining himself as faster and more powerful than he is. The car, in other words, is not simply a means of transport; it is also a means of intoxication. 

But it is also a means of regression, says Sloterdijk, for the car is also a kind of womb, or uterus on wheels and many drivers become aggressive on account of this. For regressed individuals often feel the need to childishly assert themselves; revving their engines, attacking the space, running red lights, dangerously overtaking others, etc., proving they are kings of the road. 

That's why perfectly reasonable people often become raging maniacs behind the wheel and why there will always be fatal traffic accidents; "cars are connected with a kind of archetypal violence" that is immune to all the road safety propaganda in the world. 

 

III. 

 

In a later interview [2], meanwhile, Sloterdijk develops his theory of the car and the reason for its irresistible (quasi-religious) attraction for so many people:

"The car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. [...] The car gives its driver additional power and reach. [...] I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. [...] Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use their car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness."   

Whilst I understand that, I tend to agree with D. H. Lawrence that, ultimately, the soul needs to travel naked and light and on her own two feet along the open road - not by car. I also agree with Deleuze who insists that the most important trips are measured in terms of intensity, not distance covered, and that the true nomad moves even when standing still.

Sloterdijk knows this, I think, which is why he acknowledges that people who belong to more magical cultures "achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that". However, Sloterdijk - himself a motorist - concedes that:

"The automobile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression [...] it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world. [...] If they were only a means to re-create a womb-like situation and return to an inner world, then they would merely be 'homecoming vehicles'."

But cars are not just that; they can also be a means for many people of making a great escape or exodus of some kind, though this undoubtedly requires more than a Sunday morning drive to Homebase. In fact, one might suggest - like Ballard - that what it requires is not so much a car ride as a car crash; i.e. something which "harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status" [3] into a single event. 

Commenting on the delirious, sacrificial aspect of driving, Sloterdijk notes that road deaths will never result in a call for the banning of cars; "because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of modernity". Thus, at present, there's not the slightest chance of restricting the desire to build still more roads and manufacture still more vehicles, no matter how many lives are lost, or how much damage is done to the natural environment. 

 

Having said that, even the age of the horse eventually passed ... 

 

Notes

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Uterus on Wheels', interview with Walter Saller, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 23-24. The line quoted from is on p. 24.

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries, in Selected Exaggerations, pp. 40-48. The lines quoted are on pp. 42, 43, and 47.  

[3] J. G. Ballard, 'Sci-Fi Seer', interview with Lynn Barber, in Penthouse, Vol 5, No. 5, (May 1970), pp. 26-30. Click here to read in full.

Readers interested in this topic might also like to read David Gartman's essay entitled 'Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of the Car', in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, Issue 4-5, (October 2004), pp. 169-195.   

Hold Your Post-Historical Horses! It's the D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2020

Detail from an original artwork by James Walker / Izaak Bosman (2018)

See D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage: click here

 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived" and in losing the horse - with the arrival of motor vehicles - we have lost ourselves. 

 

For horses - as real flesh-and-blood creatures and not merely as symbols that roam in the "dark underworld meadows of the soul" - give us lordship and link us directly to the surging potency of the living cosmos, or what Lawrence sometimes refers to as God [1]. 

 

But what Lawrence doesn't mention is the great horse manure crisis of the 1890s. By this date, London and other large cities around the world faced the very real prospect of being buried beneath huge piles of horseshit. 

 

On average, a horse will produce between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of faeces each day. So when you have tens of thousands of these animals transporting people and goods around a city the scale of the problem is significant. 

 

(I'll not even mention the two pints of urine that every horse pisses out each day; nor the fact that many working horses who died on the job were often left to rot in the street before eventually being carted away.)

So whilst Lawrence might abhor the motorised traffic that has crushed all the living adventure out of London and which now rolls on massively and overwhemingly, going nowhere [2], it's worth considering the excremental reality of horses.

Further, it might help horse lovers out there to also reflect upon something pointed out by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk:

"Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn't it an odd comment on today's society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were [...] but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then [...] All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of - horses are the only ones for whom historical philosophy's dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom  has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 101-02.   

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I Don't Like Living in London', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 121.

[3] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries (1999), in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 44. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced that what Sloterdijk says here is correct; for example, there were an estimated 3.3 million horses in late-Victorian Britain, whereas in 2019 there were, according to the British Equestrian Trade Association, around 847,000 horses in the UK (down from 946,000 in 2015). The fact is, with the coming of the automobile, most horses were put out to graze - or sent to the knacker's yard. 

 

For an equine journey through human history, see Susanna Forrest, The Age of the Horse, (Atlantic Books, 2016): for further details on both book and author, click here.