In the World Interior of Capital

Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization

Peter Sloterdijk, Wieland Hoban

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Displaying the distinctive combination of narration and philosophy for which he is well known, this new book by Peter Sloterdijk develops a radically new account of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author takes seriously the historical and philosophical consequences of the notion of the earth as a globe, arriving at the thesis that what is praised or decried as globalization is actually the end phase in a process that began with the first circumnavigation of the earth Ð and that one can already discern elements of a new era beyond globalization. In the end phase of globalization, the world system completed its development and, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions of life. Sloterdijk takes the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851, as the most expressive metaphor for this situation. The palace demonstrates the inevitable exclusivity of globalization as the construction of a comfort structure Ð that is, the establishment and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door.

First Part
On the Emergence of the World System

… and the pirate globe drifts

in the stormy ether.

Henri Michaux, Inexpressible Places

1
Of Grand Narratives

The present essay is devoted to an undertaking of which it is unclear whether one should call it untimely or impossible. In recapitulating the history of terrestrial globalization, it seeks to provide outlines for a theory of the present using the means of a philosophically inspired grand narrative. Whoever finds this ambition outlandish should consider that while it is certainly provocative to assert it, it would be an act of intellectual defeatism to abandon it. Philosophical thought has always tried to tell us who we are and what we should do; for over two hundred years, this has also included information about how to date ourselves in ‘history’. The penetration of the philosophical thought of Old Europe by time, however, has so far caused only a partial revision of the body of tradition. Now that the era of one-sided time-idolization seems to have ended, however, the lived space is also demanding its due. Kant, at least, already knew that reason itself had its model in spatial orientation.¹ Whoever follows this clue far enough should logically arrive at a changed view of the task of philosophical activity: philosophy is its place comprehended in thoughts. In the moments when it knows what it does, it shows the characteristics of a conference in which many disciplines all have their own bit to say. To elucidate the situation, grand narratives are necessary.

Such an attempt appears untimely in the light of the consensus that has been predominant among intellectuals for a generation, namely that precisely such narratives, the ‘grand’ ones, have had their day once and for all. This opinion certainly does not come from nowhere. It is supported by the plausible conviction that the known narratives of this type, despite seeking to construct the course of ‘history’ on a large and general scale, had irredeemably provincial aspects; that, controlled by deterministic prejudices, they smuggled projected goals of shameless linearity into the course of events; that, because of their incorrigible Eurocentrism, they were in conspiracy with the colonialist looting of the world; that they, because they taught salvation history openly or covertly, helped bring down profane disaster on a grand scale; and that now, a very different form of thought would have to emerge – a way of speaking about historical matters that would be discreet, polyvalent, non-totalizing, and, above all, aware of its own perspectival conditionality.

Everything about this view is correct – except for the conclusion, which is almost always pulled in the wrong direction, that of resignation. It is true that the historian of ideas, looking back on the master texts of philosophical narration and the classical exegeses of the historically animated world with the sensibility of today, must have the impression of dealing with a bundle of rhapsodic exaggerations. What was previously called philosophy of history amounted without exception to delusional systems of prematurity. They always led to hasty montages of their material onto violently drawn straight lines, as if the thinkers had been seized by an overactivity syndrome that chased them towards the wrong goals. Fortunately, the times have passed in which doctrines could appear attractive while promising their adepts access to the engine room of world history – or even the administrative floor of the Tower of Babel – with the help of a handful of simplifying concepts. Today, the vanitas of all past historico-philosophical constructs is obvious even to the layperson; every first-year student or gallery owner meanwhile understands enough about these fabrications to show a faint smile at such terms as ‘world spirit’, ‘historical goal’ or ‘general progress’.

Satisfaction over these clarifications does not last long, for the customary talk of the end of the grand narratives overshoots the mark as soon as it is no longer content to reject their intolerable simplifications. Has it not already hardened into a comfortable meta-grand narrative itself? Is this new intellectual myth not allied unmistakably with an acerbic sluggishness that sees in the extensive only the burdensome, and in the great only the suggestion of mania? Were the post-dialectical and post-structuralist scepticisms not followed, in fact, by a partial paralysis in thought of which the idea-hostile focus on detailed histories from obscure archives that is currently making the rounds in the humanities constitutes the mildest form?

If the grand narratives known so far – the Christian, the liberal-progressive, the Hegelian, the Marxist, the fascist – have been seen through as unsuitable attempts to seize power over the world's complexity, this critical realization neither delegitimizes the narration of things past nor exempts thought from striving to cast an intense light on the comprehensible details of the elusive whole. Has thinking not always meant taking on the challenge that the excessive would appear concretely before us? And is this excessiveness that challenges us to act conceptually not inherently irreconcilable with the tranquillizing nature of the mediocre? The wretchedness of the conventional forms of grand narrative by no means lies in the fact that they were too great, but that they were not great enough. The meaning of ‘great’, of course, remains arguable. For us, ‘great enough’ means ‘closer to the pole of excess’. ‘[A]nd what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?’²

The sketches presented here form a side wing of the Sphären project, which constitutes a more extensive attempt to configure the narrative and the philosophical with each other in a partly neo-sceptical, partly neo-morphological fashion.³ In the process of carrying out my intentions – the final volume was published in 2004 – I discussed the development of the orb motif in the philosophical cosmology and theology of Old Europe, examining its psychodynamic implications in some detail and testing its powers of anthropological shaping. This brought to light, among other things, the high psychosemantic or religious utility value of the classical orb speculations. In the encompassing orbs, the ancients discovered a geometry of security; in this geometry there developed, as was to be shown, the strong motive of metaphysically or totalistically producing worldviews. The narrative of divine spheres and universe orbs laid out in Sphären II, Globen revealed why these sublime imaginary constructs of wholeness were doomed to vanish with the beginning of the Modern Age,⁴ while the human location, the planet Terra, took on increasingly explicit contours. In a dawn that took centuries, the earth rose as the only and true orb, the basis of all contexts of life, while almost everything that had previously been considered the partnered, meaning-filled sky was emptied. This fatalization of the earth, brought about by human practices and taking place at the same time as the loss of reality among the once-vital numinous spheres, does not merely provide the background to these events; it is itself the drama of globalization. Its core lies in the observation that the conditions of human immunity fundamentally change on the discovered, interconnected and singularized earth.

If the present characterization, unlike many other attempts to address the matter, emphasizes its philosophical aspect, this is based on the frequently overlooked fact that the historical object, the terrestrial globe, is a thing full of metaphysical quirks that like to hide beneath the veneer of the ordinary. It constitutes a geographical-philosophical bastard whose logical and physical peculiarities are not so simple to comprehend. On the one hand, the printed blue orb with the savannah-coloured patches initially seems no more than one thing among many things, a small body among many bodies, that statesmen and schoolchildren set in rotation with a single hand movement; at the same time, it is supposed to represent the singular totality or the geological monad that serves as the foundation for all life, thought and invention. It is this terrestrial question of location that becomes ever more binding in the course of modernization: while the ancient conception of the cosmos paradoxically made the earth the marginal centre of a universe that humans could only observe from within, the moderns perceived it as an eccentric orb whose roundness we could verify ourselves through external viewing. This would have unforeseeable consequences for the generations after Mercator. For us, monogeism – the conviction that this planet is unique – transpires as a fact that is rejuvenated daily, while monotheism can never again be more than an age-worn religious thesis that cannot really be brought up to date, not even with the aid of pious bombs from the Near East. The proofs of God's existence must bear the blemish of their failure, while those of the globe's existence have an unstoppable influx of evidence on their side. In the following, we shall concern ourselves with the circumstances under which such extensive proof of the unity of the equally massive and sublime object we inhabit was able to accumulate.

These intimations have taken us into the heartland of philosophy – assuming we accept the supposition that the pursuit of philosophy is not, as one has often heard in recent times, merely an activity with no object, a modus vivendi, but also possesses an objectivity in its own right, not to mention a focus of its own. Philosophy can and should be conducted artfully as a quasi-science of totalizations and their metaphors, as a narrative theory of the genesis of the general, and finally as a meditation on being-in-situations – also known as being-in-the-world; I call this the ‘theory of immersion’ or general theory of being together, and use it to explain the kinship between recent philosophy and the art of the installation.⁵

One of the main characteristics of conventional views about globalization is, to be frank, a discreet comic element. It manifests itself in a wild philosophical activity that clearly feels most at ease as long as members of the profession do not interfere in the discussion. As a result, the most philosophical of all the contemporary topoi of politics and cultural theory travels the world with virtually no perceptible involvement of the philosophical field. The most effective totalization, the unification of the world through money in all its transformations – as commodity, text, number, image and celebrity – took place through its own momentum, without the members of the faculty for world wisdom having, initially, more to say than any newspaper reader in a country with a vaguely free press. Where contemporary philosophers commented on the subject with the skills of their profession, this usually occurred in marginal publications, without any notable effects on the larger flow of words – with the possible ex­ception of Negri and Hardt's Empire, which received worldwide attention.

The irony of the situation is increased by the fact that one could believe this levelling-out of the philosophical vote into the general muddle of opinions to indicate a desirable state. One could convincingly argu...