Sloterdijk From Cyncism to Life Changes

At the end of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk is able to argue that futurists (like Toffler and McLuhan, his references but also like today's Kurzweil), are dependent upon an earlier generation of thinkers, not even cold war, 50's and 60's thinkers and certainly not 70's thinkers like Vinge) but pre-World War II & WW I thinkers, like Friedrich Dessauer, but also Walter Rathaus, and Adrien Turel in an uncanny context that was the crucible for the particular fascism that grew out of the Weimar Republic on Sloterdijk’s account. 




Note too that Sloterdijk was somewhat younger when he wrote this book.  Does this make a difference? Perhaps but Sloterdijk was both more optimistic and less compromising at once.

Today we have a different set of concerns -- change your life, but heavens not the banking system, never fuss or muss with capitalism, don't question the lies you know the government told you, and why worry about those you don't know...

Some will find it hard not to think of Kurzweil’s (or better said, to respect the interest of copyright, Vernor Vinge’s?) “technological singularity” or others will purr about proactionary ventures for what I above have already opted to name, via Star Trek, the machine-human mind-meld, when Sloterdijk reflects upon his Rules for the Human Zoo noting that 

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. 

Here it should be noted that such references to the life sciences also point to the coming age of terror: in the name of transhumanism, in the hunt to jimmy the body with new replacement parts, there is an age of vivisection undreamt of --- and the university's biological sciences and psych buildings already drip red with the blood of their victims, almost as incarnadine as a medical or veterinary school.  A student learns one thing, the pain of the animal, the pain, always call it discomfort of the patient, only gets in the way.

Transhumanism is NOT ABOUT the peripherality of the human, or the non-centrality of the human. It is about expanding the human via technology and above all using animals and exploiting the earth ever more thoroughly, ever more completely for human purposes.

 

This monkey with baby is constantly hurt.  Hurt by science, by scientists and technicians for science' sake.  This is your tax dollars ar work. This is the work of the academics you admire, quoting their dicta the way medieval scholastics used to quote scripture, worse: because the scholastics raised questions -- and we don't.  

Most scholars could care less about animals. Even those who write on them.  Theory is theory: no fuss, no blood, please: we're writers. Most academics are even less concerned about nature: all they think matters is that everybody get together and agree (as if this were the key) that there "is" global warming. 

Those who call themselves Frankfurt school theorists assert that there is/can be no nature, because for one's purposes there is not: there is only us. There is human need, greed, caprice.


And this is true of the new theory, same as the old theory.

Beyond the debate internal to the politics of German public intellectuals, the theme for Sloterdijk is anthropotechnics: the technique of the manufacture of humanity, and it is not a German but a global concern:

 As Sloterdijk puts it:

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.

Sloterdijk’s point is increasingly relevant (though the Heidegger scandal will make all such references impolitc henceforward) and the message of Kurzweil’s vision of the ‘technological singularity’ as it has been embraced by (at least some elements of) popular culture, when it is not the message of the genome project or stem cells, is indeed anthropotechnics, which is all about not becoming the one you are but, and to be sure becoming the one you wish you were, the one you ‘should have’ been all along.  

Call this the Harry Potter effect, or everyone is a boy wizard, quidditch player, best in sports, all secret greatness and unfair discrimination, at least, in the germ, at least until after the singularity.  

Just as we have been transhuman all the time that we have, in Bruno Latour’s words “never been modern,” it can and has repeatedly been claimed that everything will be perfect after the revolution. For Marx, this was the revolution he famously failed to locate rightly, not in his industrial England or even in his Germany but and however disastrously and unsustainably where it did change the world in Russia and (still ongoing) in a China that is today increasingly indistinguishable from a capitalist regime, just ask the international financier Maurice Strong, or for the same answer from a different source, ask Žižek. 

Apart from Marx, and closer to home, the “revolution” that was promised to change everything, at least when I was eleven going on twelve, was a socio-cultural, leftist revolution, that was the revolution of the 1968 generation as it played itself into nothing but the idols of the market, lots of music, drugs, distractions of sex and the need to announce one’s erotic orientation to the world. So we ask, which revolution?  Ah, the technological one, of course. And who announces this but those who market the same? The technological singularity turns out to be not unlike a Coke commercial.  

We are the world.