Art and Fear: On Peter Sloterdijk's "Stress and Freedom," Coronavirus, and the Media's Production of Panic
Peter Sloterdijk | Stress and Freedom | Polity | 2011 | 80 Pages
Last week, I opened the link to my subscription to the NYTimes online to the headline of the rising panic across countries and financial markets at the viral progress of the latest manifestation of coronavirus. The headline made my mind jump to an amazing short book that I found almost a year ago by one of my favorite thinkers, Peter Sloterdijk. The title: Stress and Freedom. In it Sloterdijk argues the following:
"We therefore have every reason to prepare ourselves for some rethinking about that real-life fabulous creature 'society.' Social theory is now only plausible as a theory of improbably large-scale bodies or, if one prefers, as a social physics of networked agencies. The theory of large-scale bodies is a composite of stress theory, media theory, credit theory, organization theory and network theory. In the present context, I intend to draw particular attention to the outstanding significance of a stress concept. In my view, the large-scale political bodies we call societies should be understood primarily as stress-integrated force fields, or more precisely as self-stressing care systems constantly hurtling ahead. These only endure to the extent that they succeed in maintaining their specific tonicity of restlessness throughout the changes of daily and annual issues. From this perspective, a nation is a collective that succeeds in jointly keeping uncalm."
The political and cultural bodies under the guidance of the few and the elite control incalculably large masses through the maintenance of constant stress on that mass. The constancy is achieved through a micro and macro level approach to stress inducement. Stress is refreshed at all levels by the constant introduction of new inducements to discontent. Using the proliferation of media and information stress moves at micro and macro levels. Each person lives in macro level stress…coronavirus replaced fires in Australia which replaced fires in the Amazon all of which is going on simultaneously with the madness of current political climates nationally and globally. In the background (for us…and in the foreground for others) is the unending violence of "necessary" interventions. And so on and so on and so on. At the micro level and concurrent with the macro level, panic is the circumstance of each person embedded in the circumstance of each family in regards to economics, education, health (and so on). Even pleasure becomes a source of stress.
And all of these issues, at both the micro level and the macro level are of infinite significance. They are all important. Vital. Worthy of profound attention. And because of this profound importance, naturally and understandably the nexus for a stress experience.
Sloterdijk argues in the book that the stress experience has now become a mechanism of control and manipulation of populations that are otherwise incontrollable. The manipulation of these stress bubbles and the inducement to constant and distracted panic is a grave threat to freedom. What is the mechanism to maintaining psychological freedom in both a manipulated and a legitimate setting of uncertainty and stress. The answer rests in a concept that he introduces at the beginning of the book: thaumazein (θαυμάζειν), the Greek concept of the "astonished pause for reflection before an unheard-of object." Running along a parallel track to the very real existential experience of uncertainty and the accompanying dread, there needs to be a track wherein the mind can pause…can step outside of itself. Or, better yet, can be forcefully pulled outside itself in a way that gives it pause…that arrests it…that allows it to rest and reflect. Art is one such mechanism. Art puts before the mind an object that induces wonder and desire…that arrests the mind from its normal function…bathes it in perspective unknown to its own perspective. And in this experience there is rest and reflection and relief. It is not that art applies the salve that cures coronavirus. It is not that art lowers temperatures around the world or bails encroaching seawater from island shores. It is not that art throws water on burning expanses of rain forest. It does none of these. But what art does for all (at least potentially, as do other mechanisms of reflection) is remove the mind, in the moment, from constant panic and, as a state of being, from the control that panic can create by teaching it of the experience of a psychological space it once tasted outside the state of fear. And once tasted, one has the echo of that taste in one's being. One knows existentially that there are other mental states beyond fear and trembling.
And once one knows that there is more to experience than fear, one can potentially be free. One can think with a certain amount of clarity. One has the potential of not being controlled.
Art is a tool of and for provoking wonder and, therefore, freedom. This being so, it is a necessary tool in the human experience. Then, and only then, can these very real problems be properly addressed.
This review is part of our Theory and Society Series. The Theory and Society Series is meant to bridge the gap between academic critical theory’s mode of social analysis and everyday social criticism, creating a totally new discourse in the process.