The Aesthetic Imperative

Writings on Art

Peter Sloterdijk, Karen Margolis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780745699905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject.

Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture.

This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk's enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.

VII
ART SYSTEM

‘I TELL YOU: ONE MUST STILL HAVE CHAOS IN ONE’

Modernity means a change in the gospels. The bad and the good news are no longer safely in their appointed places. Decorum is so shaky that the obedient and disobedient swap places. From now on we have to keep trying over and over again to work out what can be a model. Imitation seeps into all the cracks, over-attentive, on the track of other people’s success. The business supplement, the sports section, cultural pages, society news – these are the social guides to jealousy. Society is the sum of its competitions.

From Zarathustra’s landmark speech to his followers: Submit to tests! Set up your file. Collect evidence that makes it clear you had to exist. Position yourself, get started on your topic! Don’t forget to set up your sign because the power of positioning is all-important. Take part in the experiment that will show what goes and stops; admit that many things fail by their very nature! The world has become an experiment – anybody who has not tried will not have come into the world. There is only one mistake, that of remaining latent. In future, cleverness means resisting temptation by leaving no traces.

Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ is the verbal expression of the new state of the world. The command to experiment, like the law and love in earlier times, desires proclamation. We should not let it confuse us that in this case temptation is called creation. Tightrope walkers are also experimenters and creators of daring acts. They take part in the new move towards risk. Their fall is like a signature under a work and Zarathustra acknowledges them as colleagues. As the prophet says in his new blessings that proclaim the temptations:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is loveable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.¹

Modernity: that means feeling the pressure to choose between keeping oneself going in stationary relationships and improving through trying. There is only as much modernity as there is willingness to experiment more ambitiously to follow on from the accepted state of art up to the present. The search for the actors of modernity is the consummation of the modern age. This is another thing Nietzsche announced through his prophet. It is a provocation that divides those who make a gambit from those who want to hear nothing more about trying. When the prophet of the people of the future throws his phrase ‘the last human being’ into the crowd, he is challenging those who are not last to declare themselves. When the last human beings strike up with the phrase ‘After us, ourselves!’, then those who are not last gather under an irrational banner: ‘After us, the star!’

Modernity: that means that the chaos inside people can become scarce. It is a bizarre definition of chaos: as if it were not an event around us that we find ourselves in or stumble into, but rather an internal resource that could be described as not yet used up. Nietzsche was the first to conceive chaos as a remnant. He envisaged it as potential that could be exhausted. He saw it as a magnitude that demands us taking a position: chaos is the authority of the monstrosity which creates conflict for people who usually exist in an ordered and finite situation. Sublime chaos tears subjects open – provided they can realize that they have chaos in them. The monstrous is a self-relation that human beings express variously as guardians of order, sleepwalkers, players and artists. Anyone who takes the liberty of reminding other people of their relationship with the monstrous is identified as a new type of disturbing element. ‘I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.’ Who talks like that? A mad person who wants to convince other people to share his madness? A metaphysical griper in search of an audience? An unredeemed soul that draws fellow sufferers into its self-therapy?

Modernity: that means asking about the conditions of production. ‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.’ This is the true voice of recent aesthetics – at its clinical and romantic extreme. Production is still unerringly regarded as birth; chaos still has to serve as a uterus in which the work is formed silently and incredibly; Nietzsche is still acting the role of the gynaecologist-philosopher of the arts. His creative insult is aimed at the fertile and the infertile. Advised by the old nurse Baubo, he knows that the creative being is a woman who has reasons not to show her reasons. Chaos’s favourite son is not the devil of denial but the daredevil. He is the means by which as yet untried things take their place in the work. The aesthetics of genius, gynaecology and belief in mediums: they are all part of the same matrix.

Modernity: that means finding the rule by exception. What do you actually possess when you have chaos in yourself? A gas, a yawn, a gape, a shapeless mass, a dark emptiness. The idea that this is the birthplace of stars is a sad kind of physics. When Nietzsche makes his dancing star emerge from chaos, he is merely admitting that the most fragile person comes from crude parents. However, chaos only contains stars as a Dionysian element – by Dionysian, we mean torn and divided, angry at itself, condemned to self-duplication. Being capable of giving birth means needing a world of expression for suffering. What saves the turbulent foundation of life from itself? Only the ascent into a glorifying form. Productive chaos is nothing but the suffering, dreaming god. Aren’t most people behaving very rationally in refusing to hear about creative human beings? The Superman, the star, the yearning? These are words from a life that still needs such things. A person who is one of the inventors of happiness is beyond that.

Modernity: that means mistrusting the illusory images of communication. Zarathustra may well feel that his provocation has already failed before the first word. Nobody among those whose pride he addresses would be prepared to harbour what the speaker says is still there. Those who imagine themselves in terms of the monstrous can have no illusions about the outcome of the sermon. Zarathustra, who has neglected to mention the pride of the last human being, will ask himself whether it would not have been better to address their sensitive point. The art of how to talk to nobody has been tried and tested. Is Zarathustra himself too proud to make a second attempt, this time for everybody? I tell you: you still have otherness in you. You are still different from yourselves and still a hope for your own future. A little bit evil and a little bit untidy, a little bit unpredictable – that is capital composed of chances that can lead to further chances. But I can see the time coming, the time when nobody will have anything left in them that is evil, messy and unpredictable. When the starting chances are no longer distinguishable from the subsequent chances the era of emptied human beings will herald. They will make more than ever before but the history of creation will be over, and with it everything that presupposed a difference between the interior and the exterior. The history of improvements will reach its conclusion. Its continuation will happen without you in storage systems, networks and processors.

Modernity: that means that prophecies turn against themselves. The forecasts are vectors that ensure things happen differently. They regenerate chaos in internal and external settings. The refutations develop in situations where the end of creation out of the chaos-inside-you is expressed as an open possibility. Unexpectedly for the star abolitionists, the evidence for chaos will be provided as soon as the star appears.

Notes

1. Translator’s note: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (selections from ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’). Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm.

ART IS FOLDING INTO ITSELF

Who is Paying for Art?

Is there anybody who loves the arts who has not dreamed of breaking into a museum to be alone with the work of his or her choice? Have you never been convinced, when looking at a work of art, that you are the only person who has understood the real meaning of the work? Are there any experts on aesthetic secrets who have not felt the temptation to ban other eyes from seeing the work?

The art business is a system of jealousies in which desire for the works results in them becoming objects of desire. If a work has attracted desire, its rivals appear beside it and want the longing bestowed on the other object for themselves. Every object glitters with the yearning for the yearning of the others. The market inspires sensuality, the hunger for desire makes things beautiful and the compulsive need for attention creates interesting things. This system functions as long as there is a taboo on the idea of the moment of fulfilment. Although the works appeal to our desire, they are prohibited from surrendering to the person who acquires them. Their value lies in the fact that they refuse their owners and wait for further offers.

The bourgeois development of greed has been in progress for two hundred years. Having offered the big bourgeoisie a new kind of sensuality, it is presently doing the same for the middle classes. By now the magnetism of value excites a perceptible section of the public. People who want to be somebody open an emotional account for art in their inner self. It does not matter whether there is little activity on the account. The important thing is that many eyes are watching the market from that moment on. The observer’s ego becomes a depot for values and meanings. Only an account-shaped self is fit to be paid into with art in the form of value. If I did not already have the first-person form of a possible owner of works and values, the works would have no value appeal for me. I have an account, I am an account, I put my credit on my own account. A work will only be important to me if I can book it to my own account.

This is the current state of value fetishism. Did art have this meaning from the beginning? Was it never an extravagant outpouring of forces that were too free to be possessed? What did Kandinsky mean when he wrote: ‘In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration’?¹ Were there never transfers to accounts by people who dreamed that their payment would give them another ‘whole life’? Meanwhile the art world has been overdrawn by private accounts. Can art withdraw itself from them?

The Art Exhibition as a Revelation of Creative Powers

Before the onset of modernity the entire stock of things in the world that could be described as the work of human beings was very small. Things produced by human beings were almost negligible compared with things that existed naturally. Moreover, works of art in the real sense of the word made up a very tiny share of produced and self-made things. Wherever the major forces of life are the natural and traditional forces, human beings have to see themselves mainly as receivers of being and as guardians of ancient holy orders. The most powerful early testimonies of the might of works of high culture, sacred buildings, were technical responses to the ideas of holiness and majesty. They marked the beginning of artistic processing of the numinous, the spiritual element.

Human self-perception became active from the time that the modern system of self-empowered production was set in motion. Subjectivity increasingly occupied the position of the originator of being and of that which exists. It developed the creator position for itself; it discovered that the world’s system of order was not really something that had to be preserved and repeated from the very beginning, but much more something to outdo and to produce on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• I WORLD OF SOUND
• II IN THE LIGHT
• III DESIGN
• IV CITY AND ARCHITECTURE
• V CONDITIO HUMANA
• VI MUSEUM
• VII ART SYSTEM
• Publication Sources
• End User License Agreement