Saturday 31 August 2019

Six new reviews and an Interview with Leyland James Kirby

Been busy with getting/starting a new job and training for a sports event, so I've been limited to music journalism only over the last few months. Very happy to have interviewed Leyland James Kirby (the Caretaker, the Stranger, VVM) as his music has been an inspiration ever since I first heard Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom back in 2001. Was also delighted to review Roger Doyle's new record, which coincided with his election to Saoi in Aosdána, the highest award open to an Irish artist. And I've also started a series of reviews of music roughly grouped under "post-Vaporwave", starting with releases from 2814, Wuso 命 and a collaboration between 猫 シ Corp. & Telepath.


From Out of the Past - An Interview with Leyland James Kirby (The Caretaker)


David Rothenberg - Nightingale Cities

Vallmo - Ruin Walls

Roger Doyle - The Electrification of Night

2814 - Pillar / New Sun

Wuso 命 - Lonely Streets

猫 シ Corp. & T e l e p a t h - Building a Better World

Thursday 30 May 2019

Article in The Battleground and Six New Reviews at Musique Machine


Croatian Amor

Very pleased to have my first piece of writing up at The Battleground. A great collection of writers from across the continent focussing on European news seen though a global lens.

My first submission is an obituary for the soon to ex Prime Minister Theresa May with a little New Testament twist.
A Political Obituary - Theresa May as Katechon



I also had a pretty bumper few weeks on the review front. I covered Leyland Kirby's suitably maudlin swansong with The Caretaker and hopefully will have an interview with him to share in the next few weeks. I also got stuck into a couple of the latest releases from exciting Danish label Posh Isolation, in the shape of Varg and Croatian Amor. The latter has produced one the records of the year so far for me. Also nice to reacquaint with old favourites Deaf Center and Leafcutter John. Rounding things off is a compilation of radical modern classical and electro-acoustic works by Young Lithuanian composers.


The Caretaker - Everywhere at the End of Time: Stage 6
Deaf Center - Low Distance
Croatian Amor - ISA
Varg - Evanescence (A Love Letter)
Leafcutter John - Yes! Come Parade with Us
Various Artists - Far Away But Ever Closer: Young Lithuanian Composers Abroad

Varg (Jonas Rönnberg)

Monday 22 April 2019

In the Belly of Neoliberalism: Notes on Transparency and the Crystal Palace



“You believe in the Crystal Palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away.” DostoyevskyNotes From Underground, Pt 1 Ch X (1864)

“The Crystal Palace is perhaps the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is perceivable by a spectator situated either at the west or east extremity of the gallery…where the most distant parts of the building appear wrapped in a light blue halo. The first triumph of the commodity takes place under the sign of both transparency and phantasmagoria”. Giorgio Agamben – Means Without Ends (1996)

"Transparency is not produced by friendly light that allows the particular to appear in its particularity, the arbitrary in its lovely arbitrariness, that is the other in its incommensurable otherness. Instead, the general politics of transparency makes otherness disappear by eliminating what is other. The violence of transparency ultimately expresses itself as the reduction of the other to the same, as the elimination of otherness. It draws on re-semblance. The politics of transparency is a dictatorship of the same". Byung-Chul Han - Topology of Violence (2011)


♗ A hundred and fifty years after Dostoyevsky published his Notes from Underground and over eighty after the real building in London burnt down, the West is threatening to bring its global Crystal Palace to completion. This utopia under the sign of transparency represents for the authors cited above a kind of perversion, a noble idea taken to grotesque extremes. The concept of a transparent building, illuminated solely by natural light, penetrating through clear glass walls, allegorizes the idea of a transparent society which was bequeathed to us from the 18th century Enlightenment; in particular, via the French revolution. For the Jacobin revolutionaries there was a dream of a free and equal society, where no dark corners remained and where Man and Truth would be definitively revealed. There were to be no secret societies of aristocrats plotting the restoration of the monarchy; no clergyman undermining the “age of reason” with their Popish propaganda. No zones of disorder or privileged bastions of the Ancien Régime; a society visible in all its parts.

But just as the abolition of distance does not bring everything close, so too has this regime of permanent visibility failed to bring a "New Man" into the open. As it did during the French Revolution, the clamor for transparency and the concomitant atmosphere of tension and paranoia manifests in an increasingly securitized and anxiety ridden response. During the Terror, Robespierre spoke repeatedly in the National Convention of treachery and plots being hidden behind masks and veils. The prevalence of denunciations and the bypassing of all but the minimum of due process transformed the Enlightenment dream into a killing machine of nightmarish proportions. In the minds of today's conspiracy theorists and an increasingly broad spectrum of the public, all forms of political power are viewed as a kind of veiling or covering up, and thus they cannot but see shadowy elites and grand plots even in the midst of the most chaotic and  uncertain times. Today in all areas of governance and social life, the will toward transparency manifests itself, from CCTV surveillance and the monitoring of online activity, to endless auditing and the amassing of ever larger quantities of data about citizens by both public and private powers. All this is routinely justified by reference to concepts such as security, confidence and visibility; which is little more than a self-referential circle. Similarly there are ever greater demands for transparency from public institutions, reflecting the collapse of boundaries around individuals, whose lives are rendered ever more transparent and available for monetization through social media and mass data collecting. Only in the last year or so have questions finally begun to be asked about the power of social media and the disparity that exists between the openness demanded of users and the opaque workings of multi-billion dollar businesses like Facebook and Google. As with so much in the lives of the modern Western subject: from who or what we are meant to be protected is less certain.

♞ On multiple levels the drive towards transparency has becomes an end in itself quite apart from any obvious benefit. The now ubiquitous exposure by individuals, to online public scrutiny, of what used to be considered private life, is sufficient to confirm the thesis that the neoliberal subject coincides with the transparent subject. Much of the public discourse on these issues take as its object the question of limits. For example where the boundary is between public and private property when using internet resources like Facebook or Twitter; to what degree governments should be permitted to access our personal data or use technology to monitor and record our daily movements; or what safeguards should be in place to protect individuals from press intrusion or having their personal data stolen by criminals or sold to third parties. However, framing the problem as a uniquely contemporary one, or leaving it at the level of legislation, misses the deeper significance of the concept of transparency for the development of globalization and the enclosure of the world into a single system of governance enabling the free unhindered flow of capital.


At the foundation of the entire undertaking, remarkably enough, rests the principle that such a work must be backed not by the state but by the free activity of its citizens ... The great new thought found a great new form. The engineer Paxton built the Crystal Palace ... It is in the highest degree remarkable and significant that this Great Exhibition of London - born of modern conceptions of steam power, electricity, and photography, and modern conceptions of free trade - should at the same time have afforded the decisive impetus, within this period as a whole, for the revolution in artistic forms ... We see now that it was the first great advance on the road to a wholly new world of forms ...When did this idea make its triumphal entry into the world? In the year 1851 , with the Crystal Palace in London“. Julius Lessing, Das halbe Jahrhundert der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 1900) pp. 6-10. As quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

This reign of opinion, so often invoked at this time, represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people being seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze. A form of power whose main instance is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of darkness”. Michel Foucault – Power/Knowledge (1980)

♖ Despite long running concerns about possible misuse of the massive hordes of data culled from European and American internet users, the revelations about possible interference in elections by UK based Cambridge Analytica and their proxies, by utilizing Facebook's technology,  have seemingly come as a shock. This latest 'big data' controversy came at the same time as the now completed Mueller investigation into possible Russian influence in the election of Donald Trump. Only now, when it appears that "democracy is under threat", are questions about the role of data collecting by social media companies and the whole nature of a transparent big data driven economy, finally being raised. In fact security breaches and large scale loss of data have been commonplace for years, usually being perpetrated by criminals seeking access to bank details and other sensitive information. It's only the scale and the ultimate motive of the perpetrators that has shifted in the case of Russia and Cambridge Analytica. In a development analogous to that identified by Carl Schmitt, the full scale assumption by states of the possibilities of big data for nefarious activities is comparable to the shift during the early modern period from piracy to "corsair capitalism". 

♟ These data scandals coincide with the recent publication in English of several volumes by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose short, almost manifesto like texts have caught the attention of some areas of the press. For Han, criticisms over privacy and democratic oversight miss the real significance of transparency and big data for our times. For Han, beneath the rubric of the society of transparency lies the society of exhibition, of acceleration, of pornography and ultimately a society of control, marked by what he has termed "Psychopolitics". This development, which hinges upon the concepts of big data and transparency, takes us - he argues - far beyond the notions of disciplinary and biopolitical power theorized by Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 80s. In effect, the ability of an agent - whether state or non-state - to harvest vast amounts of data and use it to micro-target individuals with tailored messages aimed at influencing preferences, marks a significant shift in the architecture of power in modern societies. The target is no longer the body or the will, but instead political power aims directly at our pre-reflective responses; at the psyche itself.

For Han, the advent of big data has had a radicalizing effect analogous to the development of statistics during the 18th century. Then as now grand claims to the predictive power of analysis have led some to prophesize the end of politics and the ascendency of an algorithmic technocracy. Where disciplinary power affects the soul by way of the body, and Biopolitics operates upon life at the level of the population, psychopolitics - expanded into every area of social life - intervenes directly at the level of the unreflective will. This is the mode by which big data coalesces with habits of consumption to "nudge" voters or customers, towards new content, or purchases. There is however an important distinction in the way in which this data is meant to be used. Unlike the promise of large scale statistical analysis - especially as it was applied to national economies in the early 20th century - big data is not a tool to be used for top-down planning. In complete contrast, its application is geared solely to the management of  individual preferences, whether those for products, for people (as in the case of online dating) or for political views.


"Great masses of industrialised peoples today still cling to a torpid religion of technology because they, like all masses, seek radical results and believe subconsciously that the absolute depoliticization sought after four centuries can be found here and that universal peace begins here. Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both. In this respect, nothing changes by speaking in the name of and employing the magic formula of peace. Today we see through the fog of names and words with which the psycho-technical machinery of mass suggestion works". Carl Schmitt, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929)

"Inasmuch as it expends a great deal of energy to force people into the straightjacket of commandments and prohibitions, disciplinary power proves inefficient. A significantly more efficient technology of power makes sure that people subordinate themselves to power relations on their own. Such a dynamic seeks to activate, motivate and optimize - not to inhibit or repress. It proves so effective because it does not operate by means of forbidding and depriving, but by pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent".
Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitics (2017)

♤ Joseph Paxton's designs for the Crystal Palace were originally rejected by the London Building Committee ahead of The Great Exhibition of 1851. Appropriately, it was by means of mobilizing public opinion that Paxton's vision of a vast structure of glass and steel came to be realized. Paxton - gardener to the Duke of Devonshire - published his designs in the London News. The public response was so favorable that the London Building Committee reversed its decision to reject them.

♣ The civil war,  in which - according to Martin Heidegger - we have already been defeated for centuries, is intensified under the regime of digital overload and mass communications technologies. This scientific/technical intensification is only the most recent step in a process with a long history. The connections between the development of the sciences and the multiplication of techniques of surveillance and discipline have been posited for some time. The link with security apparatuses was famously posed by Michel Foucault in his discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon; a prison design that subjected its inmates to a regime of permanent visibility, regardless of whether anyone was in fact watching. From the perspective of the French revolutionaries who made Bentham a citizen in 1791, the brightly lit structure of the Panopticon was a humane triumph over the tortuous darkness of the Bastille where prisoners were sent to suffer out of sight. The prospect of observation, categorization, even re-habilitation of prisoners was simultaneously the possibility of knowing and reforming the character of humanity itself. The expansion of industry, the reform and extension of education and rapid changes in the management of health led (so the thesis goes) to the general deployment of these techniques to a gamut of other institutions. Hospitals, schools and workplaces; all were placed under the regime of “power through transparency”, “subjection by illumination”. But it wasn’t the production of “docile bodies” that was the aim of these techniques for the age of Enlightenment. Instead, by removing the darkness that obscured humanity - the ignorance that clouded the mind - humanity would finally be able to speak its truth; this truth was public opinion.
The ruins of the Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba. Photo by Tod Seelie.
♡ In Bentham's designs we should recognize a prototype for the paradigm of the Crystal Palace, both of which mobilize transparency and visibility within an architectural form. Both of which, by means of enclosure, sought to render palpable a revolutionary change in the management of people and things. And both, of course, were the product of England's cult of utility and spectacle. The key difference was that in the case of the Panopticon there was no doubt about the ultimately oppressive nature of the idea. It was a prison, and it was first and foremost by the negativity of physical restriction and limitations to movement that the "soul" of the inmate would be made available for disciplinary refashioning. In contrast, The Crystal Palace - as Byung-Chul Han alludes to in his writing - is a space of compulsive positivity. It's architecture is characterized by unrestricted (or deterritorialized) flows. The building seems to float on air, its glass structure blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. From within it appears like a vast uninterrupted smooth space, lacking in clear demarcation. As the art historian Julius Lessing noted at the turn of the 20th century, the artistic form of the Crystal Palace instantiated an idea of global free trade, where each producer would sell their wares in an environment of clear air and light, free from the distortions of protectionism and tariff walls. From his perspective, half a century after the Great Exhibition of 1851, this noble idea had been buried beneath the rubble of rising nationalism. His vision of an enclosed, yet open and transparent space for trade, where capital and goods would move freely, unencumbered by the democratic architecture of nation states, would become a key motif for the group of economists (Including Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek) who emerged out of post-Imperial Vienna to lay the foundations for global neoliberal capitalism. 

♦ The era of big data really began during the interwar period with the rise of statistical analysis of international economic data by institutions such as the League of Nations, the International Chamber of Commerce and the Vienna Institute.  Here too we find the demand for transparency - this time directed at the previously sacred world of the businessman. The collection of global economic data was itself a "globalizing" activity, producing a single "world picture",  which altered the mentality of the economists themselves, turning them more and more toward the idea of global interdependence and the world as a giant economic organism. What the neoliberals brought to the fore in the post-war period was the idea that no amount of data would ever provide the economists with a total picture of the global market sufficient to plan from above. Instead, as we have increasingly seen in the digital age, data was to be used solely to give an indication of the present preferences of market actors and to correlate those preferences with other similar market choices. This is the basic algorithm - the "if you like that, try this" - which has become the driving force of big data capitalism and psychopolitical manipulation.

♧ Fast forward from Bentham's Panopticon to the modern home - wired up for the internet of things - and the groundwork for today's unholy alliance between  corporate data monopolies and the State can clearly be seen in these early experiments in institutional surveillance. Today CCTV, already ubiquitous in towns and cities, is now able to deploy facial recognition software rather than bored human observers. Technologies of observation and security have become such an everyday part of life that people barely recognize let alone question their presence. Tap in, tap out, contactless records our movements and our purchases. Cash money is expected to vanish within a decade. With every new step down the big data hyper connected road we are required to hand over an ever greater quantity of personal information to governments and corporations just to go about our daily lives. Biometric data is incorporated into travel documents, online activity is monitored to an unprecedented degree and stored by ISPs, state agencies, and data monopolies like Google, Apple and Facebook. People are now willfully bringing surveillance devices such as smart speakers into their homes. We are encouraged not only to become our own jailors but to be our own informants too.  Transparency, security and economy have become synonymous. And yet despite this reign of transparency Western societies remain gripped by a creeping sense of paranoia and anxiety.

♠ There was a missing piece of the puzzle in Foucault’s early work on discipline. In the reformed character of the prisoner, in the productivity of the worker, the effects of discipline on the soul could only be approximated. What was missing was a direct avowal of the soul, a confession, repentance. The agent, the speaking subject, was absent, viewed by a strong reading to be a mere effect of the power relations in which they were situated. The transparency offered by big data technologies eliminates the necessity for an avowed preference in favor of mere correlations. Through the operationalized language of big data the "speaking subject" is overthrown and in its place comes the "clicking subject" whose motivations and inner world - like the ineffable world market itself - cease to be an object of politico-economic interest. Modern psychopolitics does not believe in a "soul of man" that needs redeeming.

♢ The hidden centre of the dream of a transparent society was the dream of a pure form of communication, one unsullied by the multitude of misunderstandings, irrationalities and everyday human failings that prevent the sharing of information and consequently the formation of preferences. There have been numerous attempts to realize this idea. Some, like the failed project of Esperanto had utopian aspirations of world peace and cooperation at their heart. But just as the dream of using data to effect wide scale top-down planning of the world economy fell into abeyance after WW2, so too did the teleological notion of a universal communication for a global community. Instead what has come about is the subordination of human language to the overload of mass data collection and algorithmic correlations. Alongside this development has been the slow leveling out of communication into forms which valorize the lowest common denominator. Corporate language, with its empty buzzwords signifying nothing but the mere presence of hierarchic power, is undoubtedly familiar to most Western subjects. Mass communications technologies have accelerated concision to the point where locution and grammar have all but been abandoned. In their place now stands the impoverished hieroglyphs of emojis and memes. A language of ideograms appropriate for globalised idiocy. 

 

"The world exhibitions have lost much of their original character. The enthusiasm that, in 1851, was felt in the most disparate circles has subsided, and in its place has come a kind of cool calculation. In 1851, we were living in the era of free trade... For some decades now, we have witnessed the spread of protectionism ... Participation in the exhibition becomes...a sort of representation...;and whereas in 1850 the ruling tenet was that the government need not concern itself in this affair, the situation today is so far advanced that the government of each country can be considered a veritable entrepreneur." Julius Lessing, Das halbe Jahrhundert der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 1900) pp. 29-30. As quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

"...it is the natural mechanism of the market and the formation of a natural price that enables us to falsify and verify governmental practice when, on the basis of these elements, we examine what government does, the measures it takes, and the rules it imposes. In this sense, inasmuch as it enables production, need, supply, demand, value and price, etcetera to be linked together through exchange, the market constitutes a site of veridiction, I mean a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice. Consequently, the market determines that good government is no longer simply government that functions according to justice. The market determines that a good government is no longer quite simply one that is just". Michel Foucault - The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)

"Culture has provided a great variety of cultural niches in which that great diversity of men's innate or acquired gifts can be used. And if we are to make use of the distinct factual knowledge of the individuals inhabiting different locations on this world, we must allow them to be told by the impersonal signals of the market how they had best use them in their own as well as in the general interest". F.A.Hayek - Law Legislation and Liberty Vol 3: The Political Order of a Free People (1979)

♔ Benjamin's arcades were already defunct by the time they caught on in Paris. Their architectural trick, rendering a consumerist hot-house as urban connective tissue between Haussmann's boulevards, did not aim at the cosmic level. Their internal logic still incorporates the basic dichotomy between inside and outside, whilst holding the consumerist spectacle captive within a hall of mirrors. The function of natural light in their case is solely so that those passing through might be granted enough illumination such that the phantasmagoria of commodities functions at a level above ground, thus obscuring their "metaphysical subtleties ". A nascent "global artistic form" must, even in such an inchoate state, reach for the skies which are its destiny.
The Passage des Princes, Paris (Built 1860)
♛ It would be a mistake to consider the advent of a global Crystal Palace to entail the elimination of hierarchic forms of organization. Undoubtedly this mistaken belief is linked to the predominant technophilia emanating from silicon valley and popularized by the likes of Facebook and Google. Sections of the Left have also fallen for this reasoning on occasion. What has in fact occurred is an intensification of complex legal and constitutional restraints at both the national and global level, representing a stratified order designed to guarantee the free flow of capital, while actively restricting the horizons of alternative forms of organization. Hierarchy too in the form of massive inequality abounds in the World Interior, permitting a tiny class of international super rich to bypass legal constraints for the supposed benefit of the "general economy". The paradigm for this form of exceptionalism (like hierarchy itself) originates in Christian theology. Today's financial scholastics however do not concern themselves with justifying God in the face of the existence of evil, but instead busy themselves justifying the global economic order  as "the only possible world", in the face of increasing hardship, corruption, and the near collapse of social mobility in the most developed economies. The "Greek lesson" which saw the spiritual heart of European culture reduced by the EU and their colleagues in global finance to the level of a debt colony, provides a salient lesson for those who still speak of the community of all nations. 

♕ Within the confines of the Crystal Palace of 1851 the ideal of world trade was staged in microcosm. Hayek's vision of a stratified system of economic constitutional constraints operating at the national, transnational and global level, is the clearest exposition of the fully realized 'World Interior'. This "global economic constitutionalism" which purports to act only negatively, by insulating markets from democratic "interference", in fact both encourages and legitimates today's big data dystopia. All social life dissolves into the endless accumulation of information.

♚ No building better summarizes the current iteration of the Crystal Palace than London's Shard of Glass. An outpost of the Qatari royal family, who hold a 95% stake, rising out of one of London's oldest and historically most deprived boroughs. The vertical palace encompasses hotels, offices, restaurants, luxury apartments for the superrich and a viewing gallery. It is equal parts corporate and military architecture. It's role is to "take the land" drawing everything within its locale into its unbounded interior. There is here an important correlate to the way creeping bureaucracy (itself reducible to the ancient idea of hierarchy) tends towards assimilation at the margins. Like a military watchtower standing in the Green Zone of an occupied territory, the 310 meter glass tower looms over the old Borough Market and Victorian streets of Southwark. And like a medieval Cathedral consecrated to the glory of international finance it rises from a wide base, tapering as it stretches for the heavens following the conventions of gothic architecture.  The development has coincided with "regeneration" of the surrounding area, which, like so many similar developments across London amounted to maximizing retail space while pushing out any semblance of community or individuality. The architecture of the Shard, radicalizing as it does the form of the Crystal Palace, has a dislocating effect on anyone within proximity of it. The anomic corporate space and identikit retail experience, the sense of being at the intersection of any number of anonymous capital flows. The tower's smooth glass exterior perfectly allegorizes the faceless world of price signals and an international class who are at home everywhere and no-where on the upper levels of the Crystal Palace, far above the captured city and its bewildered population, staring into the screens of their phones.

♘ A significant effect of the advent of big data is that public opinion no longer requires a will (let alone a general will) to express it. It is the immediate kneejerk reactions of the isolated clicking, swiping individual that shall collectively provide the political opinions of the future. And since the Political Will ceases to be an object for power,  we will not be able to say that the will is overthrown by repression or coercion, but instead it is merely pre-reflectively nudged towards the desired preference, be that democracy or dictatorship. 


♝ The life of the transparent subject in the World Interior is conditional upon maintaining as few borders around the self as possible. Permeability is expected of the precarious. In an era in which the separation between public and private, state and non-state, outside and inside are all but dissolved, the transparent subject becomes a node in the network of digital affects and constant micro-capital extraction. As Byung-Chul Han and the late Mark Fisher both saw, this dissolution of the self into the network of boundless digital possibilities results in a slate of very modern affective disorders. Anxiety and depression, narcissistic personality disorders and ADHD have exploded across populations of the most developed economies. It is now often heard that the UK faces a mental health crisis, that the impact of social media on the self esteem and self image of users is driving the rise. More than just social media, the entire nature of modern connectivity is driven - like the vampire capitalism described by Marx - to monetize every aspect of our existence; extracting ever more capital from our accelerating lives; from our preferences, our hopes and our desires. Fisher's desciption of the paradigmatic state of the modern subject as "depressive hedonia" rings ever more true.

♙ The neoliberal utopia of a perfectly transparent globe, allowing the free and instantaneous communication of price signals, has reached its apogee in the modern transparent subject; someone who, by means of being permanently plugged into the network, is always available as a feedback relay in the global cybernetic system; continuously sending out data on preferences while ready to receive the latest nudge towards the New. 


"The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others, it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when man has been transformed into subjectum and the world into picture". Martin Heidegger - The Age of the World Picture (1977)

"Where everyone is the other and no one themselves, humans are cheated of their ecstasy, their loneliness, their own decisions, and their own direct connection to the absolute outside, namely death. Mass culture, humanism and biologism are the cheerful masks that, according the insights of the philosopher, conceal the profound boredom of an existence devoid of challenge. The task of philosophy would then be to shatter the glass roof over one's own head and directly make the individual the monstrous once again". Peter Sloterdijk - In the World Interior of Capital (2005)

"How little pleasure men must nowadays take in themselves when such a tyranny of timidity prescribes to them their supreme moral law, when they so uncontradictingly allow themselves to be ordered to look away from themselves but to have lynx-eyes for all the distress and suffering that exists elsewhere! Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections?" Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Book III, Aphorism 174 (1881)

Image from Lawrence Lek's Shiva's Dreaming (2014)