Peter Weibel

5. Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic Peter Weibel Preliminary remarks In order to understand Peter Sloterdijk’s writings on aesthetics and their singular- ity, we must first at least outline the “setting”, the historical foil to the problems he addresses. Today, art is a “discourse”, as we know, a conceptual field in which the different types of images, objects, processes, activities, theories, ideas and institutions play a role. The dynamism of this field is characterized by instabil- ities, contradictions and conflicts that trigger disquiet among the one or other viewer. The one set learns from New Jersey (Land Artist Robert Smithson), the other from Las Vegas (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown). The one camp praizes autonomous formalism and the sublime (Clement Greenberg), the other the transfiguration of the commonplace.1 In his writings, J.M. Bernstein2 demands that aesthetic experience also offer a dimension infused by cognitive theory, ethics and politics. Aesthetic Modernism is the appropriate ethical and political response to capitalist Modernity, which is typified by rationalization, reification and disenchantment. True aesthetic Mod- ernism has to defend radicalism against universal and instrumental claims. He anchors aesthetics in ethics and politics, in a mix of Marx, Lucácz, Kant and Adorno. Over the last two decades, English and American art historians and the- orists have seen the need, given the pressure of a global media industry, to ex- pand the analysis of the image culture away from the specific objects of art to all forms of images in our culture, i.e., to include the mass media of film, TV, ani- mated images, etc. The field of art has therefore been extended under the concept of “visual culture”. W.J.T. Mitchell3 has emphasized that the visual field is con- structed socially and the social field visually. Stanley Cavell and Noel Carrall from an early date discussed the mass media of film as a matter of course in light of what Mitchell terms a “pictorial turn”.4 James Elkins extended Visual Studies (2003) and The Domain of Images (1999) to include the image of the natural sciences.5 In Adorno’s skeptical Aesthetic Theory (1970) art can still admittedly possess a truth content, but in a purely utopian function. In order to achieve this, art must reflect society and is therefore not fully autonomous. On the other hand, it must be autonomous if it is to adopt a critical function. Against the backdrop of the 83 “culture industry”, in which mass culture means deceiving the masses, the truth of art can consist solely in enlightening us on social illusions, i.e., to be percep- tive not deceptive, and to insist what society could and should be. Niklas Luh- mann describes art as a subsystem of the social system that observes itself and is organized according to its own rules. In this regard, Luhmann is not far off Ador- no’s concept of autonomy. However, as a discursive system, what Pierre Bourdieu terms the “rules of art” are mutable and as a consequence the art system, the “operating system” of art depends on the social context, on the institutional and discursive situation. Peter Weibel and George Dickie emphasized how art depends on, is defined by and given its mission by the institutions, a motif later adopted by A.C. Danto. Now, Sloterdijk’s writings on aesthetics enter this discursive field. In his ex- plorations, Sloterdijk touches on all classical and modern genres of art, from mu- sic to architecture, from the art of illumination to the art of movement, from de- sign to typography. He scans all fields of the visible and invisible, the audible and the inaudible, whereby the historical reach of his observations stretches from Classical Antiquity to Hollywood. In other words, he approaches the practice of “visual culture” while at the same time revealing an affinity to the institutional theory of art. He reflects on the conditions of current art production, from the world of sponsors to the museum system, from the development of the media to the metamorphoses of aesthetic subjectivity. He likewise addresses the classical problems of a philosophy of art, namely its reference to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, society, politics, and subject, from Aristotle to Adorno, from Kant to Kierkegaard. Familiar questions arise on the status of the autonomy of art, on its truth content and its social role. What is decisive is always the inimitable surprizing pace at which the author departs from the well-worn paths of art commentary. Seen through the prisms of Sloterdijk’s thought, we can experience art as a heterodox form of knowledge. Through the author’s elaborate language as well as his art of changing position and perspective, we are confronted by surprizing and convincing insights and vista. Sloterdijk expands his own method of creating an estranging discourse to include the observation of artworks and genres, and in this way the newly described objects appear in an abruptly changed light. The dividing lines between philosophy and literature, argumentation and narrative become fluid; the art objects themselves seem to be set in motion. Under Sloterdijk’s gaze, well-known aesthetic phenomena are transformed into sources of surprise. They gain a sec- ond lease of life by dint of their recontextualization. The objects of his theoretical prose appear before the reader like unknown beings; at the same time, they are presented close-up and with the familiarity only possible thanks to a new outlook. Sloterdijk’s key contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics probably consists in the fact that with his oeuvre he has made a key contribution to solving the problem of Modernism/Modernity. 84 in medias res Modernity – between disenchantment and re-enchantment The fate of modern art has evolved over the last 200 years between two poles, has stretched out between them. The two poles are disenchantment and re-enchantment. Aesthetic programs of disenchantment and re-enchantment permeate the 19th and 20th centuries, parallel and successively, with each other and against each other, as sequences or alternatives, mutually or in opposition, as a unipolar or bipolar structure. Following Hegel, who in 1800 already believed the world was devastated, Max Weber termed the impact of industrialization, of Enlightenment and the science in the 19th century the “disenchantment of the world”. The epoch of disenchantment sets in with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and it would be pleasant if we could add, as did the epoch of Modernity. However, that is not the case, as at an early date a counter-movement commenced that battled against the Enlightenment and the turn away from the absolute in politics and religion, against science and its consequences, industrialization, endeavouring instead to return the church and monarchy to their hegemonic positions. “The Romantics were the first to sound the battle-cry against the Enlightenment,” wrote Ernst Cassirer in his Der Mythus des Staates.6 With Romanticism and its command that, as Novalis put it, “the world be romanticized”, the programmes of re-enchantment of the world and the arts commenced. The problem is to show that Modern- ism/Modernity consists of both programmes, is a skein woven with both. With the French Revolution (1789-1804), which heralded the end of Absolutism and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which was machine-based, the path was set that defined the conflict between the aesthetic, philosophical and political parties and programs of Modernity and Anti-Modernity. The Revolution was followed by the Restoration. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 a “Holy Alliance” was formed between the five major powers, Russia, Austria, Prussia, France, and Great Britain, obliging the crowned heads of state to uphold the Christian religion as the highest maxim of their political actions and thus pre- serve the divinely blessed feudal structures and repeal the Enlightened reforms. Between 1816 and 1829 universities were placed under surveillance, censorship reigned, liberties and teaching were restricted, some were forced out of their jobs, kangaroo courts installed, etc.7 The years 1830-1848 again saw revolutions: the first models for Parliamentary systems or constitutional monarchies with all citizens as legal equals, with freedom of expression and the press arose. In 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, which described the state of ongoing global industrialization in such drastic terms that it reads like an account of globalization today: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” sloterdijk and the question of an aesthetic 85 The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its ex- ploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old- established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up in- digenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.

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