Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit ...

 EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES

The Critique of Repetition

Damned to Distinguish Between Repetitions

The ethical distinction took effect from the moment in which repetition lost its innocence. The appearance of ascetics and asceticisms in the twilight of the advanced civilizations revealed a difference that had not been open to explicit development in earlier stages of civilization: in choosing to withdraw, the early practising ethicists broke with the conventional forms and attitudes of life. They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes – not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordinary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together – or not at all. ‘The whole man must move at once.’

The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philosophers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehensive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts restructured from the bottom up, and the spoken word overhauled. The whole of life rises up as a new construction on the foundation of favourable repetition.

A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as controlled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception – it is the eternal recurrence of the clichés that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce ‘characters’. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the negation of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: ‘La bêtise n’est pas mon fort.’ [Stupidity is not my strong suit.] They would be the human who had killed the marionette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental deautomatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliché depot – a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras supposedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: ‘Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus – you have to react, you follow every impulse.’144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.

This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the impure and immerse itself in the pure. That these binary oppositions entail costly simplifications is, for now, beside the point. All that matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discovery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground – the average mortals will cling nonetheless to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.

The Creature that Cannot Practise

In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of rendering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area – that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics’ experiments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spirituales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud – triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house – ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99.9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The only way to deal with this insult is to imagine that one is still more original than plenty of others. If one subjects oneself to more probing self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one’s own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.

In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athematic rhythms, rules and rituals – regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non-mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.

Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise – if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being’s disposition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the necessary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies – this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superfluous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: ‘A single winter relaxed Hannibal’s fibre.’145 Other states of weakening may follow years of neglecting-work.146From this it follows that even a simple maintenance of bodily – or rather neurophysical – form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the standard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status. The self-activations of organisms in sequences of undeclared practice programmes, sequences that constantly have to be run through anew, culminate in a mute autopoiesis: the element in live creatures that seems like mere self-identity is de facto the result of a perpetual self-reproduction by overcoming invisible training programmes. The nocturnal activities of the brain, part of which one experiences as dreams, are probably first and foremost back-up processes for the self-programme in its state prior to the last waking phase. The self is a storm of repetition sequences beneath the roof of the skull.

Personal identity, then, offers no indication of a mental essence or inert form; it rather shows the active overcoming of a probability of decline. Whoever remains identical to themselves thus confirms themselves as a functioning expert system specializing in constant self-renewal. For surprise-friendly creatures of the Homo sapiens type, even triviality is not futile. It can only be attained through a constant cultivation of identity whose most important aid is inward and outward self-re-trivialization. Re-trivialization is the operation that enables organisms capable of learning to treat something new as if they had never encountered it – whether by equating it mechanically with something familiar or by openly denying its didactic value. Thus the new, initially and mostly, has no chance of integration into the apparatus of operating gestures and ideas because it is assigned either to the familiar or to the insignificant.147If, in turn, the neolatric culture of modernity posits meaning in the new per se, this causes a brightening of the global learning climate; the price of this is a historically unprecedented will to be dazzled that gives unlimited credit to illusions of the new. Even manifest stupidity, incidentally, cannot be taken as a simple datum: it is acquired through long training in learning-avoidance operations. Only after a persistent series of self-knockouts by the intelligence can a habitus of reliable mindlessness become stable – and even this can be undone at any time through a relapse into non-stupidity. Conversely, every learning-theoretical romanticism should be viewed sceptically, even if it appears under classical names. Aristotle was speaking as a romantic when he stated in the first line of his Metaphysics: ‘All humans strive for knowledge by nature.’ In fact, every striving for knowledge – understood by Aristotle above all as primary visual enjoyment – encounters its limits as soon as something new appears that one does not want to see. Such things are usually sights that are irreconcilable with the imperative of preserving identity. Then the much-lauded thirst for knowledge among humans turns in a flash into the art of not having seen or heard anything.

The ethical distinction not only uncovers the hidden practice character of ordinary life; it also reveals the gulf between the previous existence in the accustomed and the metanoetic life forms that must be newly chosen. This distinction demands cruelty towards oneself and others; it leads to overload in its most naked state. We hear its original voice when Jesus says: ‘Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’148 ‘Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.’149 ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’150 The blade of distinction is the apocalypse that takes place now or never.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK

Translated by Wieland Hoban