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Abstract
This essay discusses Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnical framework as it relates to recent contributions that deal with the inherent opacities of digital technology and processes of blackboxing. I argue that Sloterdijk’s philosophy is a precious case of affirmative, non-nihilistic technophilic thinking that espouses the technogenic provenance of mankind, and leaves space for technologically engendered incomprehensibility while tracing a horizon for human beings’ resoluteness. In the first section of my essay I tackle Sloterdijk’s reflections on the philosophical transition from wonder to horror in the twentieth century, and I put it in dialogue with his concept of the monstrous as defined by boundlessness, complexity, and excess. Here, I discuss how the human being shows both monster-slayer and monstrous tendencies. Secondly, after having revisited the question “what happened in the twentieth century” from this perspective, I discuss how Sloterdijk’s analysis of the monstrous provides a coherent genealogy for an assessment of the individual’s relation to current “monstrous” technologies, as they are tied to algorithmic processing. I conclude by arguing that Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics and onto-anthropology allow for an acrobatic confrontation with the possibility of untethering technological advancement from illusory promises of absolute clarity, and promote the immunological value of darkness.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Sloterdijk’s writings on Cioran in Not Saved 251–56 and You Must Change 73–82.
2 As Sloterdijk writes in You Must Change Your Life on the nature–culture caesura, “[i]n the natural history of artificiality, the nature–culture threshold does not constitute any particularly notable caesura […] The only privilege of culture in relation to nature is its ability to speed up evolution as climbing tour on Mount Improbable” (119).
3 The topic of world-secessionism is addressed from a religious and individual perspective in Sloterdijk, Weltfremdheit. See also Sloterdijk, You Must Change 217–42.
4 On the topic, with specific emphasis on Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger, see Llewelyn.
5 “Many things are monstrous, but nothing is so monstrous as man” (my translation).
6 For a study on Sloterdijk’s concept of modernity, see Van Tuinen.
7 As Sloterdijk puts it in Not Saved 166, “Humans are the beings that have abandoned their houses.”
8 Sloterdijk discusses the “three faces of man-made monstrousness of the Modern Age” (i.e., the monstrous in man-made space, time, and thing) in his essay “The Time of the Crime of the Monstrous: On the Philosophical Justification of the Artificial,” in Not Saved 237–50.
9 As Sloterdijk puts it: “The globalized world is the synchronized world; its form is produced simultaneity, and it finds convergence in things that are current” (The World Interior of the Capital 141).
10 Heidegger, “The Thing” 165–66.
11 On metanoia and call to action, see the following passage from You Must Change Your Life: “Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon; in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end” (303).
12 On the topic, see Lucci 171–224.
13 On the topic, see Withy 107–08.
14 For the presence of Lovecraft in recent philosophical production, see Harman.
15 Sloterdijk voices this concern and distinguishes between the outcomes of allotechnology (technologies aimed at outwitting nature) and homeotechnology (aimed at imitating nature) in Not Saved 146. He returns to this distinction in What Happened? 20.
16 “Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats” (Sloterdijk, You Must Change 13).
17 On the topic, see Sloterdijk’s essay “Rules for the Human Park,” in Not Saved 193–216. In particular, “The latent theme of humanism is thus the de-bestialization of the human being, and its latent thesis runs: right readings tames” (197).
18 See Appadurai 7–11.
19 On the topic, and in particular on the novelty constituted by new media in the age of networked computation, see Hansen.
20 Gardels 13.
21 On the topic, with particular reference to Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, see Hörl.
22 On the topic of networks, see Galloway; Galloway and Thacker.
23 Bruno Latour defines blackboxing as
the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. (304)
24 We owe to Linda J. Skitka and Kathleen L. Mosier some of the first contributions on the topic, as in Mosier and Skitka, “Automation Use and Automation Bias.” See also Cummings.
25 The genealogy of a dialectics between known/unknown, light/darkness is vast, and cannot be fully addressed here. The fundamental starting point for the post-World War II period is Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The works of Élisabeth Roudinesco are a useful reference too: see Roudinesco, Our Dark Side and “Freud.” Recently, the notion of “Dark Enlightenment” has been reframed by the philosopher Nick Land in the context of his Neoreactionary manifesto “The Dark Enlightenment.”
26 Elizabeth R. Petrick’s essay on the history and the use of the concept of the black box by cyberneticians reads as an eloquent document of the seemingly paradoxical task of bringing together darkness and possibility.
27 The topic is discussed by Bernard Stiegler, in terms of calculability, incalculability, disruption, despair, and madness. For a discussion of similarities and divergences of Sloterdijk and Stiegler, with particular emphasis on Heidegger’s reflections on technology, see Lemmens and Hui.
28 Bridle’s case study of the problems that this tendency created in medical and pharmacological research due to data drenching, Eroom’s law, and the replication’s crisis shows the shortcomings of this predicament. See Bridle 83–102.
29 On the illusion of transparency and control as it is related to surveillance, see Bridle 161–86.
30 Sloterdijk has been accused of eugenicist tendencies after his talk “Rules of the Human Zoo,” which led to his controversy with Habermas. For an account of this controversy, see Couture 74–84.
31 On the topic in relation to Heidegger’s conception of authentic and inauthentic (eigentlich and uneigentlich) life, with reference to Sloterdijk, see Campbell.
32 See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” 28.
33 Nick Land’s philosophy of accelerationism is perhaps the most spectacular example of a nihilistic technophilic attitude: see Land, Fanged Noumena. For a very recent inquiry on how these technophilic nihilistic tendencies have been embraced by the Neo-reactionary Movement (NRx), which finds its radiating core in the Silicon Valley, see Pinto.
34 This topic has been taken up by a number of cultural critics, from Fredric Jameson (1991) to Mark Fisher (2009) and Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2017).
35 For a recent analysis of Sloterdijk’s reflections on the Anthropocene, see Lemmens and Hui, in particular 36–39.