THE TRANSVALUATION OF ALL VALUES: THE PRINCIPLE OF EXCESS

If one wanted to learn more of the general premisses of exoneration in the age of its technical intensification, the best place to look would be among the early French socialists, namely Saint-Simon and his school, in whose journalism – not for nothing was their newspaper named Le Globe – the first features of an explicit policy of pampering [Verwöhnung]⁷ from a species-theoretical standpoint are to be found.

The formula, the era of exoneration, which is still current in theory and practice today, goes back to Saint-Simonianism.⁸ According to that formula, with the advent of large-scale industry in the eighteenth century, the hour had come to end “the exploitation of man by man”

and to introduce, rather, the methodical exploitation of the earth by human beings. In the given context the epochal content of this turn can be appreciated: with it, the human race, represented by its vanguard, the various strata of industriels, was identified as the beneficiary of a comprehensive movement of exoneration or, in the terminology of the day, as the subject of an emancipation, whose goal was set out in the age-old, evangelical expression of the resurrection of the flesh within one’s time on earth.

Such a thing could be conceived on only one condition: that the typical distribution of the burden in agro-imperial class societies, the exoneration and liberation of the ruling few by the exploitation of the serving many, had to be revisable on the basis of an exoneration of all classes by a new general servant, the earth, considered as a resource brought under control by large-scale technology. What the key Saint-Simonian term “exploitation” means from a process-logic perspective could not be explicitly articulated until the philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century – particularly as a result of Arnold Gehlen’s efforts – developed a sufficiently abstract concept of exoneration.⁹ Since this concept has been available to cultural studies, it has been possible to formulate some general comments

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on the trends within high-technological social complexes that have somewhat more purchase systemically and psychologically than the palpably naïve nineteenth-century theses on emancipation and progress. If we link the phenomenon and concept of exoneration back to Saint-Simonian exploitation, it becomes clear that the effect described is not to be achieved by the many without a shifting of exploitation on to a new bottom stratum [Unten].

Against this background, we may advance the thesis that all narratives of the metamorphoses of the conditio humana are narratives of the changing exploitation of energy sources – or descriptions of metabolic regimes (Sieferle 2002). This proposition is not only one dimension more general than Marx and Engels’s dogma that all history is the history of class struggles; it is also far more in keeping with the empirical evidence. Its generality extends further insofar as it encompasses both natural and human (“labor power”) energies; it squares better with the facts in that it rejects the bad historicism of the doctrine that all states of human culture are linked together in a single evolutionary sequence by reason of (allegedly creative or dynamic) conflicts. Moreover, in spite of its high level of abstraction, it involves no deformation of the data that have come down to us from history. There was such a deformation in the polemical and didactic Communist Manifesto, which passed over in silence the reality of class compromises, in order normatively to generalize the comparatively rare phenomenon of open class struggles, at the risk of ascribing exemplary significance for the redistributive battles of wage-earners to the slave and peasant up-risings of past history, with their desperate, aconceptual, and often vandalistic tendencies.

The narrative of the exploitation of energy sources reaches its current hot spot¹⁰ as soon as it approaches the event complex that long-standing and recent social history together term the “Industrial Revolution” – a false designation, as we know today, since what is involved here is, in no sense, a process of “overthrow” in which above and below change places, but the explicit recognition of product manufacture through mechanical substitution for human movements. The key to the transition from human labor to machine labor (and to new human–machine cooperation) lies in the coupling of power systems with execution systems. In the age of physical labor, such couplings remained latent, insofar as the worker himself, as biological energy-converter, formed a unity of power and execution systems. However, after a seriously significant innovative leap in mechanical power systems had taken place, they could pass to the stage of explicit elaboration.

This is the beginning of the epic of engines: with their construction, a new generation of heroic agents bestrides the stage of civilization, and as a result of their emergence, the rules of the energy game for traditional cultures change radically. Since engines have been among us, even physical and philosophical concepts like power,

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energy, expression, action, and freedom have assumed radically new meanings. Although we are normally concerned with domesticated forces here, the mythology of the bourgeoisie has never totally lost sight of their unfettered, potentially catastrophic side, alluding to this by drawing parallels with the pre-Olympian race of violent titanic deities. Hence the deep fascination exerted by exploding machines and, indeed, explosions in general.

Since the neo-Titans made their appearance in our modern lifeworlds, the nations have transformed themselves into host-countries for power machines. An engine is, to a certain extent, a headless energy-subject brought into existence out of interest in the use of its power. It has, however, nothing of the actor about it, being unencumbered with thoughts or explanations and possessing only the qualities associated with propulsion. As decapitated subject, the engine does not move from theory to praxis, but from standstill to operation. What in human subjects who move into action has to be performed by disinhibition, is performed in engines by the starter mechanism. Engines are perfect slaves, untroubled by any thought of human rights, even when they are made to operate night and day.

They do not listen to abolitionist preachers who dream dreams of a day not far off when engines and their owners will enjoy equal rights and the children of human beings and machines will play together.

In order to integrate engines systematically as cultural agents, fuels of a quite different nature are needed from the food that kept alive the human and animal vectors of muscular labor in the agro-imperial world. Hence, in the epic of the engines, the most dramatic sections are the cantos on energy. One may go so far as to ask whether the formulation of the abstract, homogeneous concept of energy, of energy sans phrase, by modern physics is not merely the scientific reflection of the normalization principle by which the nonspecific coupling between food and organism has been replaced by the precise relationship between fuel and motorized machine.

With the evacuation of power from the organism begins a passage in the grand narrative of the processes and stages of the exploitation of energy sources that has all the prerequisites for dictating a still ongoing last chapter.

The grand narrative of exoneration among the moderns begins, as is well-known, with the story of the massive invasion of the first generation of mechanical slaves which, from the eighteenth century onward, became naturalized in the emerging industrial landscapes of North West Europe under the name of “steam engines.” These new agents were particularly evocative of mythological associations, as the operating principle of these machines, the expansive pressure of locked-in water vapor, was redolent of the Titans of Greek theogony, condemned as they were to remain prisoners beneath the earth.

Since water vapor is produced in the first instance by the burning of coal (not until the nuclear power stations of the twentieth century is an entirely new agent introduced), that fossil fuel could not but

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become the heroic energy vector of the early years of the industrial age. It is one of the numerous “dialectics” of modernity that the powerful pampering-agent [Verwöhnungsagens] coal had generally to be unearthed through the infernal efforts of underground mining.

The miners of the coal-hungry nineteenth and twentieth centuries could then be called on as living witnesses to the Marxist thesis that the wage contract is merely the juridical mask of a new slavery.

Promethean coal was joined from the end of the nineteenth century by those further fossil-energy vectors, oil and natural gas – both of them agents of exoneration and pampering of the highest order. In their extraction, forms of resistance of a quite other type than those involved in mining had to be overcome. It was at times possible to observe an effect that might be described as an accommodation on the part of nature, as though this latter herself wanted to make her contribution to putting an end to the age of scarcity – and its reflection in ontologies of lack and miserabilisms.

The primal scene in this acceding of natural resources to human demand was played out in 1859 in Pennsylvania when, during drilling near Titusville, the first oil well – and with it the first oil field in the New World – was opened up, in a very shallow deposit scarcely more than 20 meters deep. Since then, the image of the erupting oil well, which the specialists call a “gusher,” has been among the archetypes not only of the American dream, but also of the modern way of life, as made possible by easily accessible energies. A soaking in oil is the baptism of contemporary man – and Hollywood would not be the broadcasting hub of our current mythology had it not shown one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, James Dean, a leading character in Giant (1956), bathing in his own oil well. The continually swelling stream of energy from as yet unexhausted fossil reserves not only enabled constant “growth” to take place – that is to say the positive feedback between labor, science, technology, and consumption, over a period lasting more than 250 years, including the repercussions we describe as the psychosemantic conversion of populations on the basis of lasting exoneration- and pampering-effects – it also drew such respectable categories of the ontology of old Europe as Being, Reality, and Freedom, into an abrupt change of meaning.

The activist connotation of the “always-also-being-able-to-be-otherwise” meanwhile lodged itself in the concept of the real (a connotation of which, up to then, only artists, as guardians of the sense of the possible, had had an inkling), by contrast with the findings of the tradition, in which the reference to real-ity was always shot through with the pathos of the “being-that-way-and-no-other,”

and hence required that we bow before the power of finitude, severity, and lack. For example, an expression like “bad harvest” was, for an entire age, fraught with the admonitory seriousness of the classical doctrine of the real. In its way, it was a reminder that the prince of this world could be none other than death – supported by his usual

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escort, the horsemen of the apocalypse. In a world like today’s, shaped by the basic experience of a superabundance of energy, the ancient and medieval dogma of resignation has lost its validity – there are now new degrees of freedom that reach right to the level of the profoundest sense of existence. No wonder, then, that Catholic theology, which thinks in essentially premodern and miserabilist terms, has entirely lost its connection with the facts of the present, even more than the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines, which have at least a semimodern approach. Logically, in the course of the last hundred years, the concept of freedom also had to free itself from its traditional meanings. Against its current harmonics, it sounds out dimensions of meaning of a new kind, particularly the definition of freedom as the right to an unrestricted mobility and to a festive wastage of energy (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2001: 321–2). With this, two former seigneurial rights receive a democratic generalization:

wilful freedom of movement and capricious expenditure, at the expense of a subject nature, though naturally only where the climatic conditions of the great greenhouse are already in force. Because modernity overall is a figure standing out against a ground of the primary color of excess, its citizens face the challenge posed by the sense of permanent abolition of boundaries [Entgrenzung]. They can and must be aware that their lives are unfolding in an age in which there is no normality. Thrownness into the world of excess is paid for with the sense that the horizon is slipping.

The sensitive zone in the reprogramming of the pitch of existence in modernity concerns, then, the experience of the ending of scarcity, which the inhabitants of the Crystal Palace come up against at an early stage – and which they hardly ever appreciate adequately. In the agro-imperial age, human beings’ reality-feelings were calibrated to the scarcity of goods and resources, because they were based on the experience that work, embodied in arduous agricultural labor, was just sufficient to create precarious islands of human artificiality within nature. The ancient theories of the successive ages of the world themselves say just this, in resignedly informing us that even the great empires collapse and the most arrogant towers are leveled by invincible nature within a few generations. Agrarian conservatism expressed the ecological-moral consequences of this in a categorical prohibition of waste. Because the product of labor could not normally be increased, but at best complemented by campaigns of pillage, it was always clear to the people of the ancient world that the value generated constituted a limited, relatively immutable quantity that was to be protected absolutely. In these conditions, the wastrel was inevitably regarded as a madman. For that reason, the narcissistic expenditures of great lords could be interpreted only as acts of hubris – their later reinterpretation as “culture” could not yet be foreseen.

These views have ceased to hold since, more than 200 years ago or so, with the breakthrough to a style of culture based on fossil

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energy, a sinister¹¹ liberalism came on the scene and began decisively to reverse all signs. Whereas, for the tradition, waste represented the ultimate sin against the spirit of subsistence, because it put at risk an always scarce reserve of survival resources, in the age of fossil energy a thoroughgoing change has occurred in the meaning of waste – and it may now calmly be said that it represents the primary civic duty. Not that reserves of goods and energy increased to infinity overnight; but the boundaries of the possible are constantly being pushed back: this gives a fundamentally different coloration to the

“sense of being.” Only Stoics now think in terms of reserves. For the common Epicureans in the great comfortable hothouse, “reserves”

are precisely what can be assumed capable of constant increase.

Collective readiness to consume more has succeeded, within a few generations, in rising to the rank of a premiss of the system:

mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. From its blossoming we can see how levity has acquired the fundamental position. The prohibition on waste has been supplanted by the prohibition on frugality – this finds expression in the constant appeals to stimulate internal demand. Modern civilization rests not so much on “the exit of humanity from the unproductivity for which it is itself responsible” (Bröckling2004: 275) as on the constant flow of an undeserved wealth of energy into the space of enterprise and experience.

In a genealogy of the theme of waste, we would have to stress how deeply the verdict of the tradition on the luxurious, the idle, and the superfluous was rooted in theological evaluations. In monotheistic doctrine, everything superfluous could not but be displeasing to God and nature – as though they too thought in terms of reserves.¹² It is remarkable that even the proto-liberal Adam Smith, ready as he was to sing the praises of the markets boosted by luxury, held to a highly negative concept of waste – which is why, throughout his Wealth of Nations, there runs the following refrain: waste is a giving in to “the passion for present enjoyment” (Smith 1979: 441). It is part of the habitus of “unproductive people”; that is to say of priests, aristocrats, and soldiers, who, by dint of a long-ingrained arrogance, subscribe to the belief that they are called upon to squander the wealth generated by the productive mass of the population.

Even Marx does not get away from the agro-imperial age’s concept of waste when, following Smith, he maintains the distinction between the laboring and the wasteful classes, though admittedly with the fine distinction that it is now the owners of capital far more than the feudal “parasites” who assume the role of malign wastrels. He does, however, concede with Smith that, as a result of the new economic ways, there is a surplus product in the world that far exceeds the small margins of surplus of agrarian times. The author of Capital stylizes his bourgeois as a vulgarized aristocrat, whose cupidity and turpitude know no bounds. In this portrait of the capitalist as rentier, no account is taken of the fact that, with the system of

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capital, the novel phenomenon of the “working rich” also begins its career – the working rich who balance out “present enjoyment”

with the creation of value. Equally neglected is the fact that, in the modern welfare and redistributive state, unproductivity shifts from the top of society to its base – bringing into being the virtually unprecedented phenomenon of the parasitic poor. Whereas, in the agro-imperial world, one could normally assume that those without means were exploited producers, the poor of the Crystal Palace – bearing the title “the unemployed” – live more or less outside the sphere of value creation (and their upkeep is not so much a matter of “justice” to be demanded, as of national and human solidarity).¹³ However, their functionaries are forever asserting that they are exploited individuals, who, on the basis of their privations, should properly be compensated.

Though Liberals and Marxists both made serious attempts to interpret the phenomenon of industrial society, the fossil-energy phenomenon was not perceived in either system; still less was it

Though Liberals and Marxists both made serious attempts to interpret the phenomenon of industrial society, the fossil-energy phenomenon was not perceived in either system; still less was it