Anthony Mastromatteo, "Art and Fear: On Peter Sloterdijk's "Stress and Freedom," Coronavirus, and the Media's Production of Panic"
Last week, I opened the link to my subscription to the NY Times online to the headline of the rising panic across countries and financial markets at the viral progress of the latest manifestation of coronavirus. The headline made my mind jump to an amazing short book that I found almost a year ago by one of my favorite thinkers, Peter Sloterdijk. The title: Stress and Freedom. In it Sloterdijk argues the following:"We therefore have every reason to prepare ourselves for some rethinking about that real-life fabulous creature 'society.' Social theory is now only plausible as a theory of improbably large-scale bodies or, if one prefers, as a social physics of networked agencies. The theory of large-scale bodies is a composite of stress theory, media theory, credit theory, organization theory and network theory. In the present context, I intend to draw particular attention to the outstanding significance of a stress concept. In my view, the large-scale political bodies we call societies should be understood primarily as stress-integrated force fields, or more precisely as self-stressing care systems constantly hurtling ahead. These only endure to the extent that they succeed in maintaining their specific tonicity of restlessness throughout the changes of daily and annual issues. From this perspective, a nation is a collective that succeeds in jointly keeping uncalm."The political and cultural bodies under the guidance of the few and the elite control incalculably large masses through the maintenance of constant stress on that mass. The constancy is achieved through a micro and macro level approach to stress inducement. Stress is refreshed at all levels by the constant introduction of new inducements to discontent. Using the proliferation of media and information stress moves at micro and macro levels. Each person lives in macro level stress…coronavirus replaced fires in Australia which replaced fires in the Amazon all of which is going on simultaneously with the madness of current political climates nationally and globally. In the background (for us…and in the foreground for others) is the unending violence of "necessary" interventions. And so on and so on and so on. At the micro level and concurrent with the macro level, panic is the circumstance of each person embedded in the circumstance of each family in regards to economics, education, health (and so on). Even pleasure becomes a source of stress.
And all of these issues, at both the micro level and the macro level are of infinite significance. They are all important. Vital. Worthy of profound attention. And because of this profound importance, naturally and understandably the nexus for a stress experience.
Sloterdijk argues in the book that the stress experience has now become a mechanism of control and manipulation of populations that are otherwise incontrollable. The manipulation of these stress bubbles and the inducement to constant and distracted panic is a grave threat to freedom. What is the mechanism to maintaining psychological freedom in both a manipulated and a legitimate setting of uncertainty and stress. The answer rests in a concept that he introduces at the beginning of the book: thaumazein (θαυμάζειν), the Greek concept of the "astonished pause for reflection before an unheard-of object." Running along a parallel track to the very real existential experience of uncertainty and the accompanying dread, there needs to be a track wherein the mind can pause…can step outside of itself. Or, better yet, can be forcefully pulled outside itself in a way that gives it pause…that arrests it…that allows it to rest and reflect. Art is one such mechanism. Art puts before the mind an object that induces wonder and desire…that arrests the mind from its normal function…bathes it in perspective unknown to its own perspective. And in this experience there is rest and reflection and relief. It is not that art applies the salve that cures coronavirus. It is not that art lowers temperatures around the world or bails encroaching seawater from island shores. It is not that art throws water on burning expanses of rain forest. It does none of these. But what art does for all (at least potentially, as do other mechanisms of reflection) is remove the mind, in the moment, from constant panic and, as a state of being, from the control that panic can create by teaching it of the experience of a psychological space it once tasted outside the state of fear. And once tasted, one has the echo of that taste in one's being. One knows existentially that there are other mental states beyond fear and trembling.
And once one knows that there is more to experience than fear, one can potentially be free. One can think with a certain amount of clarity. One has the potential of not being controlled.
Art is a tool of and for provoking wonder and, therefore, freedom. This being so, it is a necessary tool in the human experience. Then, and only then, can these very real problems be properly addressed.
Partial English Transcript (~21 minutes) of above video:
Ladies and gentlemen, ministers, excellencies, eminences. Ladies and gentlemen. A remark attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus which I like to quote at the beginning of lectures. He says, "Whoever speaks to people should remember that a short speech and a long speech amount to the same thing." In my meditation on the meaning of this phrase, I came to the conclusion that I should therefore prefer the long speech today.I talk about "Stress and Freedom" in five steps: First, about Political Bodies as Stress Communes, then talk about Lucretia's Revolt and Rousseau's Retreat afterwards, about Stress and Freedom, afterwards about The Reaction of the Real and finally, On The Source of Committed Freedom.
1. Large-Scale Political Bodies as Stress Communes
It is a time-honoured commonplace that philosophy and science originated from wonder. Thus Plato has his Socrates that the one and only origin of philosophy is a sense of wonder or amazement. Aristotle responds to this by claiming in an eminent passage: "For it was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophise." I admit that there has always been something slightly suspicious to me about these sonorous lines. Despite dealing with philosophical and academic literature for almost fifty years and becoming acquainted with a substantial number of authors in various fields of knowledge—be it as a reader or through personal encounters—I have never met anyone, perhaps with one exception, of whom one could seriously claim that the origin of their intellectual activities had been a sense of wonder. On the contrary, it seems as though organised scholarship and institutionalised philosophy has assumed the form of a campaign against amazement. The knowing personnel, the actors in the campaign, have long hidden behind the mask of unimpressability—this has occasionally been termed "resistance to astonishment". On the whole, the current culture of knowledge has entirely appropriated the stance of the Stoics' nihil admirari: though ancient wisdom teaching impressed upon its adepts the rule of no longer being amazed by anything, the maxim only reached its goal in modern times.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes characterised entonnement as a thoroughly negative affectation of the mind, a highly unpleasant and unwelcome confusion to be overcome through intellectual effort. The development of our cultures of rationality agreed with its co-founder on this point. If there is still any traces in our time of that supposedly original thaumazein, the astonished pause for reflection before an unheard-of-object, one can be sure that it is attributable to an outside voice or the words of a layperson; the experts shrug and return to business as usual.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the social sciences. According to their own internal standards they can be described as a resolutely wonder-free zone. If one gives it some thought, this is a bizarre finding; for if there is anything that could unconditionally demand the amazement of laypersons and the astonishment of scholars, it is the existence of those large political bodies that were formerly known as "peoples" and are now, thanks to a questionable semantic convention, termed "societies". Usually the word calls to mind large or very large political entities with a demographic volume of between several million and over a billion members. Nothing should be more amazing than the ability of these ensembles of millions an billions of humans to exist in their national-cultural shells with their manifold internal divisions. We should be astonished by these standing armies of political groups which—one does not know how— succeed time and time again in convincing their members that their shared situation and history tied their destinies to one another as shareholders and thus legal comrades and participants in local surviving projects.
The astonishing nature of these objects crosses the boundary to the inconceivable as soon as we consider that more than a few of the large-scale political bodies in recent history —since the beginnings of the liberal Western cultures in the seventeenth century, shall we say— are formed by populations with growing individualistic tendencies. What I mean here by individualism is the life form that loosens the embeddedness of individuals in collectives, and questions the seemingly immemorial absolutism of the shared by assigning to every single human the dignity of being absolutely sui generis. Nothing is more amazing than the survival of civilisations whose members predominantly hold the conviction that their own existence is one dimension realer than everything surrounding them on the side of the collective.
In the following, I would like to carry out—against the mainstream current of non-wondering political science and sociology— an exercise in amazement that will be concerned with doing slightly more justice to the unfathomably astonishing nature of contemporary life forms.
A civilisation such as ours, which rests on the integration of individualistic populations in gigantic large-scale political bodies, is an actually existing maximum improbability. We consign the existence of unicorns to the realm of fables, but accept the notion of an actually existing million-headed fantasy creature "society" as if it were a self-evident reality. It is, however, understood that the stability of these great constructs is not guaranteed. The shareholders themselves increasingly view the tenability of their current life forms as problematic. Were this not the case, the elites in the social subsystems would not have been for some time incessantly discussing the sustainability of their modus vivendi.
The word "sustainability" is undoubtedly the central semantic symptom of the current cultural crisis: it crops up everywhere in the speeches of the responsible parties like a neurotic tic pointing to unresolved tensions in their drive systems. It is a reaction to an unease that undermines our existence in a technological civilisation with an increasingly feeling of untenability. This feeling is inseparable from the realisation that our "society" —to use the dubious term without any further interrogation— is now finding itself in a struggle for self-preservation that will demand unusual achievements of us. We therefore have every reason to prepare ourselves for some rethinking about that real-life fabulous creature "society".
Social theory is now only plausible as a theory of improbably large-scale bodies or, if one prefers, as a social physics of networked agencies. The theory of large-scale bodies is a composite of stress theory, media theory, credit theory, organisation theory and network theory. In the present context, I intend to draw particular attention to the outstanding significance of a stress concept.
In my view, the large-scale political bodies we call societies should be understood primarily as stress-integrated force fields; more precisely, as self-stressing care systems constantly hurtling ahead. These only endure to the extent that they succeed in maintaining their specific tonicity of restlessness throughout the changes of daily and annual issues.
From this perspective, a nation is a collective that succeeds in jointly keeping uncalm. Within it, a constant, varyingly intense flow of stress topics must ensure the synchronisation of consciousness in order to integrate the respective population into a community of concern and excitation that regenerates day to day. That is why modern information media are simply indispensable for the creation of coherence in national and continental stress communes. They alone are capable of binding together the diverging collectives with counter-tensions using a constant flow of irritant topics.
The function of media in stress-integrated multi-milieu society lies in evoking and provoking the collectives as such by making new excitation suggestions to them on a daily and hourly basis [*Applause by audience*] —suggestions of outrage, envy or presumption, a wealth of offers directed at the sentimentality, willingness for fear [Angst] and indiscretion of the shareholders. Every day, the recipients choose from these.
The nation is a daily plebiscite—but about the priority of concerns, not about constitution. By selecting the best possibilities for synchronous excitations, the large-scale groups vibrating in constant nervousness reproduce the ether of commonality without which social cohesion —or even the mere semblance thereof—cannot arise in extensive territorial states. Certainly, every social system needs a foundation of institutions, organisations and transport means; it must ensure the exchange of goods and services. The maintenance of the feeling of social cohesion among the shareholders, however, can only follow through chronic, symbolically produced stress.
The larger the collective, the stronger the stress forces need to be that counteract the disintegration of the uncollectible collective into a patchwork of introverted clans and enclaves. As long as a collective can work itself up into a rage over the notion of doing away with itself, it has passed its vitality test. *audience applause and lols* It does what healthy collective do best, namely getting worked up; and in doing so, it proves what it wants to prove: that it reaches its optimum under stress. Here the question of whether the collective is monoculturally unified or multiculturally constituted has long ceased to be a significant factor.
I now speak about "Lucretia's Revolt and Rousseau's Retreat".
2. Lucretia's Revolt, Rousseau's Retreat
It is in the nature of the matter that when thinking about social synthesis through group stress, one will come up against the problem of freedom sooner or later. In the following, the concept of freedom will be addressed first of all in its ancient meaning, which should by no means be confused with modern interpretations of the word.
I will begin by calling to mind a primal scene from the Old European political tradition that demonstrates the original connection between stress and freedom with archetypal clarity. After that, I will introduce a contrasting modern scene that presents the same connection in an entirely different light.
Titus Livius (Livy), in the first book of "Ab urbe condita," recounts how it came to pass that the Romans one day shook off the yoke of Etruscan-Tarquinian rule and founded the res publica, which, together with certain borrowings from Classical Greek urban culture, supplies the historical model for solidarity civil societies to this day.
The scene took place around 509 BC. A small Roman-Etruscan army is besieging the city of Ardea, some thirty-five kilometres south of Rome. One evening, officers gather in a tenet and do what men afield cannot help doing: they speak about women, specifically their own wives, with eager sideways glances at one another. Collantinus stands out for his endless effusion about the beauty and virtue of his wife Lucretia. The other officers are more inclined to take the primal Etruscan view that La donna è mobile.
The group decides to leave for Rome in order to observe the behaviour of the matrons in the absence of their husbands. And indeed: they find their wives engaged in rather un-lady like amusements, while Lucretia alone is sitting among her handmaidens spinning flax. She wins the prize of virtue, but also that of desirability.
Sextus Tarquinius, already introduced this tasteless method by the Romans via the rescue garden, that the fathers simply counted their children in the order of birth. That was not why we meet almost all names from a Secundus the silent to a Decimus Junius Silanus. Sextus Tarquinius, a son of the tyrant Tarquin the Proud, immediately decides to take possession of the woman —undoubtedly spurred on by Collantinus's hymns of praise, and possibly inflamed by the provocative thought that a subordinate colleague, albeit from a noble house, should be better off erotically than he himself, a son of the royal family. The young woman's attractive appearance takes care of the rest. He gains entry to Lucretia's house and forces her to commit sexual acts, threatening that he will otherwise kill her, place a stabbed slave next to her and claim that he caught the two committing adultery. Once Sextus has left, Lucretia calls for her husband and her father to tell them what happened, makes them solemnly swear to avenger her, and kills herself with a dagger in order to remove her shame.
The rest belongs to the founding myth of the life form we call res publica. The news of the incident spreads through the city like wildfire, and a consensus reached with much pathos unites the assembly, which sees itself for the first time as a free and civil one. The hated system of royal rule is overturned and the tyrants are driven out; never again will a single arrogant man be at the head of the Roman body politic.
Let me highlight the point of this story in the context of these reflections: the account deals with no less than the birth of republican freedom from collective outrage. That sentiment transforms all those involved into an aggressive stress group [which in turn becomes a political commune]. The first great political affect with liberal and republican tendencies found its central issue in the rejection of a shameful act. When political freedom reached European soil, it did so in an outburst of rage shared by thousands. (The arrogance of power often manifests itself not only in the tyrants themselves, but also among the sons born into the same presumption— in antiquity as today, whether the noxious paternal role models were Tarquin the Proud of Muammar Gaddafi.)
The anti-monarchic affect that was a stable feature in the political psychology of the Romans from this primal scene us not surprising: the mere mention of the word "king" triggers the most intense aversions among the members of the stalwart patrician republic. Consequently, even the later Caesars had to avoid the title rex and conceal their autocracy behind the constant references to the authority of the senate and the Roman people.
A glance towards Greece shows how there too, it was an anti-tyrannical front that first established an awareness of freedom. What the Greeks called eleutheria —a word that is conventionally translated as "freedom", evoking numerous misunderstandings— initially meant no more than the longing to live in autochthonous (self-growing) fashion (following the patrioi nomoi, the laws of the fathers) among their own people and not being subject to the despotic (house-masterly) wilfulness of an individual who had become outsized —especially to the rule of the Persian Great Kings. *coughs* In this sense, the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Platea were freedom wars.
From a freedom-historical perspective, the Lucretia revolt and the victories of the Greeks are connected. Neither case should be associated with "freedom movements" in the modern sense. The Romans and the Greeks were equally uninterested in human rights and freedom of opinion —although the Greek praise of verbal candour between men, parrhesia, which literally means "saying everything", was an early shadowing of what would later be enshrined in law as freedom of expression.
But the Greek verbal courage is far more an aspect of the atonal cult and an extension of the athletic will to compete that has been transferred to the sphere of speech about truth than a political right or civil virtue. The subject of ancient freedom is the people —more precisely, the complex of demos and ethos that forms a polis.
To give the matter the appropriate emphasis, one should say that freedom here is nothing other than the right of a collective to ethnic self-closure. It refers to the prerogative of being guided by nothing but habits, customs and institutions that have shaped the members of the collective since youth. Thus freedom here means the spontaneous consent of an ethnic group to the beloved despotism of their traditions.
This formulation indicates the inner boundary of the ancient or ethnic understanding of freedom. For it freedom only means the option for the undisturbed possession of a collective by their own conventions, it is clear why such a view cannot persist once individuals appear who questions the commanding power of custom, indeed the "morality of custom" itself. (a phrase attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche in his Daybreak 1997, p. 10.). Peoples may view themselves as sovereign in the legal sense, and indeed they mostly do in post-imperial times. In the civilisation-theoretical sense, however, they are incapable of sovereignty because the ethnic element as such results in a narrow-minded insistence on the conventional. When a reflective individual appears on the scene, breaking away from the dominion of collective customs and making itself subject to a higher law —be it Nature, a faith illuminated by a holy text, or the individual law of the search for happiness— research into the meaning of freedom is set in motion. *Sloterdijk receives glass of water*
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